Genre: Philosophy/Biography
Page Count: 341
Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th century, Danish Philosopher, known to be the father of ‘existentialism’: a philosophy ‘which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.’
In this non-linear biography of Kierkegaard, Carlisle starts at 1843 when Kierkegaard is 30 years old, returning from Berlin to his hometown in Copenhagen, the Danish capital. It is in those years that Kierkegaard is at the start of his authorship, his writing career. And having had already published some of his works, he now holds a couple of new ones in his briefcase.
Although it starts at 1843 with ‘Return Journey’, the chapters in this part gives us the backstory of Kierkegaard’s earlier life – especially his recently broken engagement with Regine. It is this forsaken breakage of engagement that troubles deeply our delicate Kierkegaard for his whole life; never once would he be able to let go of this marking event. Yet there is another element – a single question – that initiates and drives his ‘inward’ philosophy: ‘how to be a human being in this world?’ This, at once, personal and universal question pushes him deep into this thoughts and forces him to ‘build’ everything up from the base. Like his favorite philosopher, Socrates, Kierkegaard also wants follow the path of ‘irony’, of questioning everything that otherwise is accepted without thoughtful effort.
In part two ‘Life understood Backwards’, we continue to learn more about the Kierkegaard in his thirties, while also look backwards on his childhood life. Soren was the seventh and last of Mr. and Mrs. Kierkegaard’s children, as well as one of the few that survives, against the expectations, to live up to their fortieth year. His being youngest, in ways, explains Kierkegaard’s incredibly delicate, anxious, and restless personality. Both physically ill with a few diseases of the 19th century (which caused the deaths of his siblings and mother) and emotionally distraught with public fear, overwhelming anxiety, and unending restlessness – a life of Kierkegaard was not an easy one to live. Add to that his nightmarish, eternally-troubling, failed engagement and you have a most difficult yet beautiful biography.
Nevertheless, being the naively adaptive creatures, humans always succeed to live even in the unlikeliest of situations; so too did Kierkegaard. How? With his love for writing. It is amazing how much Kierkegaard wrote in his-short lived life. We could’ve shelves dedicated only to what Kierkegaard wrote in his lifetime; it was as if he literally lived on ‘writing’. And he did. As Carlisle writes in the prologue ‘writing became the fabric of Kierkegaard’s existence; the most vibrant love of his life – for all his other loves flowed into it’.
However, much of his writing was in response to his contemporary philosophers and Christian thinkers. Like Regine, Christianity and the question ‘what is Christian about Christianity’ occupied most of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and were the theme of most of his books. Taking the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and Abraham’s sacrificial act of Isaac, Kierkegaard tries to resonate his own life in light to these stories. He deeds suffering, restlessness, and difficult life as the core elements of being a good Christian. Easy life, as preached by the contemporaries of his time, were misleading illusions for him.
Carlisle’s biography of Kierkegaard is quite simple (unlike Kierkegaard and his works) and also poignantly beautiful. It also shows that how Kierkegaard’s fighting his own inner demons resulted in the new philosophy of ‘existentialism’, which in the 20th and 21st century is on its rise. And it does justice to its title ‘philosopher of the heart’ by beautifully telling the dramatic, unlived, and troubling relationship between Kierkegaard and Regine.
Besides it being sometime flat and uninteresting, I really enjoyed and gained from this beautiful biography of one my favorite philosophers – for in his delicacy and restlessness, I too am a Kierkegaardian.
Ratings: 4/5 **** (October 15, 2020)