ABSTRACT
Michael Strawser's Both/And: Reading Soren Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification seeks, via a holistic reading of the authorship, to establish irony as the central component of Kierkegaard's methodology, thereby problematizing any interpretation that would claim that a monolithic and positive philosophy is being developed throughout the authorship. Strawser begins with a discussion of From the Papers of One Still Living, Kierkegaard's 1838 review of Hans Christian Andersen's only a Fiddler. Strawser notes that the main reason why From the Papers of One Still Living, along with The Concept of Irony, are seldom studied is because of Kierkegaard's exclusion of them in his discussion of his authorship in The Point of View. Kierkegaard's conception of irony finds its best illustration in Socrates, whose very existence, it is argued, was irony. Socrates' ironic methodology is thus characterized as the negativity which constituted his freedom from objectivity.
