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Review
Did Kierkegaard’s heartbreak inspire his greatest writing?
Jane O’Grady reviews Philosopher of the Heart by Clare Carlisle
Practically nothing irritates me more than when great philosophers, scientists, writers, composers, painters, architects and inventors – some of the greatest benefactors of humankind, in fact – are dismissed as “dead white men”. But Clare Carlisle’s biography of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard made me want to apply a similar epithet to him.
He comes across as a sort of Casaubon: narcissistic, morbidly introspective, self–preoccupied and proud, with a distinctively masculine blend of outraged sensitivity for himself and callous insensitivity to others. Even Carlisle admits that, despite her admiration for Kierkegaard, she sometimes finds herself disliking him when reading his Journals. And it is a testimony to her skill that, as in a great novel, the portrayal of her protagonist (aided by telling quotations) is so vivid that it transcends her own opinion and feelings about him.
Of course it is Kierkegaard’s philosophy, not his character, that is important. Carlisle shows that with him, even more than with most philosophers, the two are indissolubly interwoven. He is often considered to be the founder of existentialism, and ideas integral to the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre originated with him – the rightly dizzying precipice of choice; the authentic individual’s heroic duty to spurn the conforming “they”; anxiety as the ineluctable flip side of our sense of being free.
Most existentialists, though, inhabit a meaningless, God-denuded world. For Kierkegaard, the whole of existence is an anguished confrontation with God. Torturedly religious, he set himself the “Socratic task” of redefining Christianity, which had, he said, become “an enormous illusion” – bourgeois, complacent, conventional, subsumed in the establishment, its radical teachings prettified and emasculated. Concentration on ethics, rather than faith, had reduced it to mere humanism, rendering God redundant: “an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought, his power being only in the ethical”.
In Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard drags the story of Abraham and Isaac back from cosy familiarity. He rubs his readers’ noses in the moral repugnance of what Abraham was prepared to do – murder his own son because he thought God had commanded it, and sacrifice morality to faith in God. “He who explains the riddle of Abraham has explained my life”, wrote Kierkegaard, “but who of my contemporaries has understood this?”
Possibly he felt himself to be a sort of Isaac. He both loved and feared his religiously repressive father, a peasant–turned–businessman, who, when his first wife died, had married her illiterate maid. Kierkegaard (born in Copenhagen in 1813) was their seventh child, one of the only two who lived to adulthood. He studied theology at Copenhagen University for 10 years; then, instead of becoming a cleric or theologian, as expected, he lived off his father’s wealth while writing copiously.
His early work was written under various pseudonyms. He was (he lamented) “always, always outside himself”; also, was afraid to acknowledge his views. How much were they actually represented by Johannes the Seducer, Constantin Constantius, Victor Emerita (Victorious Hermit), Hilarius Bookbinder, or any of the others? None of them is Kierkegaard, says Carlisle: “They are paths which converge at the question of his own existence.”
Aged 28, he broke off his 11-month-long engagement to 20-year-old Regine Olsen. He spent his remaining 14 years brooding and writing on his reasons for doing so. His agony he contrasted to the “easy task” of the rejected Regine, “which permits her to enjoy not only the reputation and consciousness of being faithful, but also the most finely distilled sentiment of love”.
A woman becomes masculine, he wrote, if she has sufficient “egotism” to imagine that “she proves the fidelity of her love by clinging to her beloved instead of giving him up”; though, when hearing that she was engaged to her music tutor, he condemned Olsen's superficiality. In a coffin-like rosewood cabinet that he himself had designed, he kept “everything reminiscent of her”, and two copies (“one for her, and one for me”) of Either/Or, which was mainly co-written by two of his alter egos, a Don Juan figure and a moral, happily married judge, in the year after he left her.
Kierkegaard elevated his personal anxiety and despair into metaphysical and moral significance. Despair, he said, is a “sickness unto death”, but “the possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his upright walk, for it indicates infinite uprightness or sublimity: that he is spirit”. Despair enables us to become conscious of God. To learn to be anxious “in the right way” is to learn “the ultimate”. Kierkegaard links anxiety to original sin, Carlisle tells us, tantalisingly but too cursorily.
She wonderfully conveys how, pelican-like, Kierkegaard tore his philosophy from his own breast, but ultimately she fails to transmit its tortuous complexity and why, despite or because of his defects, he is considered to be so great.
Philosopher of the Heart by Clare Carlisle is published by Penguin at £25. To order your copy for £20, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop