The Toils of Understanding: An Essay on the Present Age

Nine years before his death, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard published The Present Age (1846). It was his only and major tract in moral and political philosophy. In The Present Age Kierkegaard treated his age unkindly--no commentary on our own age could have been more uncomfortably accurate. Kierkegaard said his age was given to much talk and reflection, cleverness and calculation, but to publicity, an age of the public and the press, filled with envy and resentment. "I wonder," he said, "if there is a person anymore who ever makes just one big stupid blunder." Was there no hope?

In The Toils of Understanding, Husain Sarkar analyzes not only Kierkegaard's answer to that question but also offers a new theory of understanding which provides a framework in which to do so. Sarkar's theory proposes to place Kierkegaard's account of how an individual is destroyed: what forms of corruption society can wreak on him; what, if anything, society can do to save him; and what, if anything, he can do to save society; and finally, how what really saves the individual lies in the individual, for his being saved could not depend on the work of others--it could not be a secondhand gift from God.

The Toils of Understanding is wide-ranging. The central theme is that understanding is essential if the individual and society are to be saved. On the way to various conclusions, The Toils of Understanding argues with a host of interpreters of Kierkegaard. The result is a keen study, not only of the Present Age, but also of several issues central to Kierkegaard and central to contemporary philosophy.

Husain Sarkar teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He earned his M.A. at Bombay University (1970) and his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota (1976). Of the Toils of Understanding he says, "I hope…I have raised some questions we should have long asked of Kierkegaard--even if it…would have made that gentle Dane smile."