It is relatively easy, if perhaps a bit crude, to draw a dividing line between two groups of great philosophers: those whose lives we pass over without comment, and those whose personal experiences continually whet our appetites for more. Does anyone know, or care, what Hegel ate for breakfast? Or find Kant’s walks around Königsberg essential to understanding the Critique of Pure Reason? Or give more than a passing prurient thought to Descartes’s giant mechanical doll? By contrast, Socrates has captivated readers for millennia not just as a thinker, but as a character—his mannerisms, tics, and experiences delight and enthrall as much as his points about virtue.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) has managed the rare feat of getting lumped into this second group of philosophers despite living a life more conducive to the first category. Unlike his heroes Socrates and Jesus, he did not lead a life that ended in state martyrdom. Nor did he witness world-historical events swirling around him; the protests of 1848 that shook Europe made only slight tremors in his homeland of Denmark. He did not even suffer the romantic fate of his near contemporary Nietzsche, who wound up in an asylum. Rather, he lived a rather bland life as the youngest son of a successful, pious Copenhagen merchant. He studied for ordination, read and wrote much, and had one sad, doomed engagement, after the dissolution of which he dedicated himself even more feverishly to his authorship. True, he frittered away his inheritance, but unlike glamorous contemporary failsons he spent his fortune not on exciting frivolities like cocaine and orgies, but on financing the publication of his books (though he did have a dandy’s taste in fine clothing).
So why does Kierkegaard persist in our collective memory as a figure of intensely personal interest? Why do readers who catch the Kierkegaard bug feel compelled not only to tear through his books, but to delve into his life details? For it has been ever thus, even in Kierkegaard’s own day, and certainly ever since his translation into English beginning in the 1930s. Furthermore—and more significantly—how can we approach Kierkegaard’s ideas, many of which feel like they are just coming into their own in our age, in such a way that connects those ideas to his life without dismissing them as mere byproducts of biography?
Clare Carlisle offers compelling answers to all these questions in her new book Philosopher of the Heart, a hybrid between a biography and an introduction to Kierkegaard’s works. Coming barely a decade after Joakim Garff’s magisterial (though controversial) doorstopper of a biography, Carlisle’s book artfully dodges the inevitable question of need—another Kierkegaard biography? in this economy?—by targeting not specialists but amateurs, or would-be amateurs, in the original sense of that word: Kierkegaard, according to Carlisle, is for lovers. As she ties together Kierkegaard’s passion for life and for wisdom, and her own fascination with the man, she presents to Kierkegaardian neophytes a book designed to seduce, and to hardened veterans of his work a call to remember their first love.
It makes sense, then, that Philosopher of the Heart centers on the words of Kierkegaard himself, for as Carlisle argues, writing became “The most vibrant love of his life—for all his other loves flowed into it.” Throughout the book Carlisle quotes assiduously from Kierkegaard’s writings; not only his published works, but his journals and papers and letters. In this Carlisle follows the example of Walter Lowrie, doyen of Anglophone Kierkegaard studies, whose 1938 book Kierkegaard drew two-thirds of its words from direct quotation. Carlisle wears her quotations more lightly than Lowrie, however, integrating them fairly seamlessly into the whole of her argument (Lowrie would think nothing of devoting whole pages to cement-block quotations). The result is compelling: readers receive high doses of Kierkegaard’s vibrant prose, but Carlisle acts as a steady guide through the thickets of his thought.
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