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From his Fear and Trembling,
People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men – they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.
What does he mean by that phrase? Is he talking about different ethnicities and races other than European/white?
they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.
This rather looks like an early critique of what much later Edward Said calls Orientalism. Said commented as someone born and brought up in the middle-East he couldn't see the texture of life he knew in the representations of such in art & literature; they're represented in their exoticness & foreignness as something to 'gape' at.
People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men
This rather looks like it is. Comments like this were common enough then. Similar remarks were made by Hegel and Kant for example. One might excuse them on the basis they hardly had first hand acquaintance of these peoples themselves and were going on second or third hand reports; but on the other hand one might say, of all people, we might have expected better of them.
It is simply an analogy, in the context of the discussion regarding Søren Kierkegaard's quest for the knight of faith :
People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, [...]. This does not interest me. But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely.
I think the judgment of the headline much outweighs the evidence of the quote, which is most naturally read as a satire on the tourist mentality. Kierkegaard is making fun of those who scour the globe in search of "exotic" entertainment, without ever gaining much of value from it. While it's quite possible he's talking about other races with the phrase "ridiculous breeds of men," it seems fair to read that as part and parcel of the parody, rather than intended as representative of Kierkegaard's own views.
