Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography

My husband is reading this aloud to me. Although it is taking us a long time, we are close to the end now. It has been an incredible read and is written in a very accessible style. It has been a really great book to read aloud as the translation is beautifully done and the humor, both of the subject (Kierkegaard) and the biographer (Garff) shines through in every chapter. The translator (Kirmmse) must be very gifted. I would recommend this book to any student of history, theology, or modern thought and literature. Kierkegaard was a remarkable thinker and his humanity, genius, and foibles as a human being are evident in his own writings and in this beautiful and mesmerizing biography.

I have read a number of reviews of this book. They are unanimous in acclaiming it the definitive Kierkegaard biography, both in its comprehensiveness and its readability. It tells the story of Kierkegaard's life year by year, with special emphasis on what happens from 1835 when he was twenty- two to his death in 1855. The biography places special emphasis on the literary poetic Kierkegaard. It does not interpret in depth his varied and paradoxical philosophical and religious works. It does however provide the valuable biographical information which can enable us to better understand those works. Mankind has few geniuses and when they come along they shock us into a new awareness. It is possible to argue that where Kierkegaard most shocked was in his emphasis on the 'lived life' the 'real experience' the 'authentic encounter with God' .And this as opposed to the false, formal and protected encounter. This of course is the major reason why the Existensialists, including the atheist Sartre could find a true predecessor in him. Kierkegaard 's labors in decrowning Hegel, and in showing the official Church to be at odds with the true experiencing of Christianity were couched in a language, ironic, paradoxical, parabolic and witty. The pseudonymous authors who spoke for various sides of his personality enabled him to express sides of a personality which always wished to remain somewhat hidden, secret and mysterious. I have read only a small part of this work and am very eager to read more. And this because Kierkegaard like Kafka is one of those thinker- poets one of those supreme individual masters of their own way of writing in the world as to to seem to me as for so many others, a true spiritual forbearer.

First published in Denmark in 2000, Joakim Garff's massive and monumental biography of the "melancholy Dane" makes its English debut just in time to commemorate Kierkegaard's death exactly 150 years ago ( November 11, 1855). Anyone who has taken a college freshman class in western civilization or philosophy has a vague familiarity with the name, if not his thought, and some have even dared to tackle his complicated and brilliant work of "indirect" communication via pseudonyms and his later "direct" (and was it ever direct!) communication under his own name. In grad school I took a turn at Kierkegaard, and even now in my office there hangs a poem by him thanks to my wife's calligraphy: Herr! gieb uns blöde Augen (Lord, give us weak eyes) für Dinge, die nichts taugen, (for things that do not matter) und Augen voller Klarheit (and eyes full of clarity) in alle deine Wahrheit! (in all your truth!) Kierkegaard prefaced his work The Sickness Unto Death with this prayer-poem. Although a wild diversity of interpreters from existentialism to deconstructionism has claimed Kierkegaard as their own, and although SK's personality and complex oeuvre present any biographer with an extraordinarily difficult task, Garff shows that he is rightly understood as an artist-poet whose focus was distinctly and deliberately religious. He treats the reader to large doses of SK himself, and reviews all his major writings and journals, focusing on Kierkegaard's life and not really his thought. In this sense he treats Kierkegaard personally rather than intellectually or theologically. He starts with his early years, and proceeds year by year. I would have enjoyed an epilogue that took a stab at Kierkegaard's ecclesiastical, pastoral, and theological legacy. How did a writer in backwater Denmark whose books had print runs of 500 copies (only one of which sold out), whose grave remained unmarked for twenty years after his death, and who barely traveled, emerge as one of the most seminal thinkers of Christian history? Throughout his short life (1813-1855) Kierkegaard battled a pronounced and chronic melancholia that resulted from a number of factors--his pietistic and stern father, his public humiliation in Copenhagen's rollicking newspaper the Corsair, his sense of victimization, his scathing denunciation of the Church of Denmark's chief bishop (Mynster), and his broken engagement with Regina Olsen. His hypochondria did not help, nor did his estrangement from his lone surviving sibling (his five siblings and mother all died by the time Kierkegaard was about 20). For much of his life, he tells us, through a monumental effort of repression, diversion, and displacement, Kierkegaard distracted and protected himself from his melancholia through his prodigious writing. And there is no doubt that his melancholia served as a fund for enormous artistic creativity and interior reflection (a fact not lost on psychiatrist Peter Kra

It may seem astonishing to many that a nearly-900 page biography of Soren Kierkegaard would ever be described as riveting, or as a page-turner, but that is exactly what this book by Joakim Garff, translated by Bruce Kirmmse from the original Danish, turns out to be. I first noticed it at the bookstore of my seminary, and, intended only to read through a few pages at the beginning to be somewhat familiar with the text (having a friend who is very into Kierkegaard), I noticed when I next looked up that I was 60 pages into the book, and half an hour late for my next appointment. As Garff states in his preface, biographies of Kierkegaard are few and far between. Even in his native Danish language, 'biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes' critical portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand.' Part of this was Kierkegaard's own stated desire that readers read his works, not into his person, and he often published under pseudonyms. However, this is an ironic situation, Garff writes, because Kierkegaard puts so much of himself into his writing that there are definite autobiographical elements. Israel Levin, Kierkegaard's secretary for many years, also recognised the paradoxical situation in dealing with a Kierkegaard biography - 'this is a life so full of contradictions that it will be difficult to get to the bottom of his character.' One of the things Garff should be credited for is not trying to force a particular paradigm or interpretation on Kierkegaard. We don't discover 'Kierkegaard the existentialist' or 'Kierkegaard the religious rebel' or other such personas here - rather, these elements and more are all interwoven into Garff's text to show a complex and not always comprehensible figure. Garff is neither a true-believer nor an official apologist from any set place - he instead set out 'not only to tell the great stories in Kierkegaard's life but also to scrutinse the minor details and incidental circumstances, the cracks in the granite of genius....' Kierkegaard was a troubled and troubling figure. His life was very brief for someone with such a prodigious output - he lived only 42 years, and his productive time as an intellectual was really only half that time. Garff organises the biography chronologically, taking a year-by-year approach (after putting Kierkegaard's childhood and adolescence together into one chapter, 1813-1834), each year being devoted to its own chapter. In this fashion, Garff looks much more closely at the events and relationship in Kierkegaard's life (both personal and institutional relationships) rather than systematically looking at themes and ideas in his works. Garff seems to assume some familiarity with Kierkegaard's works at various points - this is not a critical analysis of Kierkegaard's thinking, nor is it even necessarily descriptive of his work in many cases. However, the biography is accessible to those who do not have much exper

With its 800 pages of text, Garff's life of Kierkegaard will no doubt inspire fear and trembling (sorry, couldn't resist) in even the most diehard fan of SK. Fear not, however, as Garff has written the best Kierkegaard biography that one can find in English (though it would be nice if Walter Lowrie's and Josiah Thompson's excellent full-length biographies were also in print). It's an impressive piece of scholarship, and it is a rewarding experience to read it. Unfortunately for those of us on this side of the pond, perhaps only a Dane could have written such a book. Perhaps only someone who has walked the streets that SK did and who knows his Mother Tongue could put us in Kierkegaard's little world so well. We not only come to know SK inside and out after reading this large tome, we also get a feel for the sights, smells, and color of nineteenth century Copenhagen. If you have never read Kierkegaard, you will probably not want to read this book. Yet, those that have never read him, or even those who have, will profit from Garff making SK's milieu come alive. We not only get a lot about Kierkegaard, we also are treated to details about cholera epidemics, wars, and the Danish crown--all of which SK couldn't be bothered much with, but I liked reading about anyway. Kierkegaard, first and foremost, was a writer, and Garff never lets us lose sight of how impressive his subject's achievements were (the amount he produced in the 1840s boggles the mind). All of SK's major works are discussed as well as his lesser known writings. The major events of SK's life are also dealt with in detail--his dour father and difficult brother, the relationship with Regine, and the disastrous sparring he did with "The Corsair." At some points, Garff must speculate on his subject's private world. For example, what was SK's sex life like? Did he visit prostitutes? Were there STDs in the Kierkegaard household? Yet, Garff never descends into sensationalism, nor does he induce eye-rolling. The fact that he dwells little on SK's life in the bedroom suggests that very little ever happened there (if anything). Although I was not convinced that SK was an epileptic, which Garff suggests at one point, I commend the author for exploring the possibility. The book makes for enjoyable reading, yet, it is not without some flaws. At times it contains too much detail. A certain amount of context is good--even essential--in understanding SK, but some material could have been trimmed. For example, I thought the author gave a bit too much space to Nielsen's "A Life in the Underworld." He could have summarized this non-SK book more succinctly. I also think Garff focuses much more on SK the writer and man while giving less weight to the importance that his thought had in shaping later philosophy/theology. At times, Garff works too much on the assumption that we all know how significant SK was in affecting Christian thought. It is probably unfair to ask Garff to boil down SK's