Gordon Marino

There is no better conversation partner for thinking about faith than the lyrical Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55). Kierkegaard, of course, has earned his place in Woody Allen’s scripts and in New Yorker cartoons as the epitome of hard-to-fathom profundity. He is not for those who demand their epiphanies in tear-off calendar format. So when you decide to make friends with Kierkegaard’s writings, do not be ashamed to consult a guide or three. Bring Gregor Malantschuk’s Kierkegaard’s Thought, Bruce Kirmmse’s, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, and Alastair Hannay’s new biography, Kierkegaard.

Hannay has been walking with the Dane for decades. He is not only one of the most penetrating and prolific Kierkegaard scholars in the world, but also a philosopher of great acuity and breadth himself. A master of both the analytic and continental traditions, he has written on problems as diverse of artificial intelligence and Aquinas’s view of despair. As if that were not enough, he is a gifted and experienced translator, and his knowledge of both Kierkegaard’s Danish and his milieu reverberates throughout this monumental study.

Kierkegaard, unlike that other Galileo of the inner world, Freud, did not leave much of a trail of his personal life. Still, by all accounts, he was a strange bird who came from a strange and (by yesterday’s no less than today’s account) a dysfunctional family. While Hannay’s study is rightly advertised as an “intellectual biography,” no biographer of Kierkegaard could legitimately ignore the familial loam out of which Kierkegaard’s thought grew.

Hannay’s short story of Kierkegaard’s early life works very well. Most important, he offers a compelling account of Kierkegaard’s petulant relationship with his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756-1838). In his posthumously published intellectual autobiography (From the Point of View of My Work as an Author), Kierkegaard observed that his father ruined his chances for worldly happiness but prepared him well for the only thing that was important, namely, the task of faith. Kierkegaard’s father died while Kierkegaard was still rebelling against him. Twenty-five at the time, he had been dawdling while taking a degree in theology. After the death of the old man, Kierkegaard set frenetically to work. By 1841, he had written and defended his famous dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. There can be no doubt that Kierkegaard’s father was a father to him in more ways than one. Once a poor shepherd boy from Jutland, but later an enormously successful business man in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard’s father was a theological conservative in a world that was increasingly coming to see faith in Hegelian terms, that is, as a kind of “philosophy made simple.” On Hannay’s insightful reading, Kierkegaard’s work was an indirect defense of his father’s faith against the sneering attitudes of the Danish intelligentsia. Ultimately this defense was transmogrified into a virulent attack on the Danish State Lutheran Church.

The other person who held constant court in Kierkegaard’s consciousness was Regine Olsen (1822-1904). Kierkegaard had ambitions that would take him out of the ordinary gyres of life but he fell in love just as lesser mortals do. He met Regine at one of the open houses hosted by her parents in 1837. A few years and encounters later, Kierkegaard shocked Regine by proposing to her. Swept off her feet, Regine accepted but almost immediately Kierkegaard’s doubts began to trickle. Kierkegaard scandalized everyone when after a short time he sought to break off the engagement. Regine fought fiercely to keep him, but in August 1841 she relented and returned her engagement ring. Though some scholars have called his reasoning lame, in his journals Kierkegaard explained that he did not want to bring Regine into the crushing melancholy that seemed to afflict his family. Though Regine ended up marrying a former suitor, she may as well have been right down the hall. Kierkegaard was always thinking of the woman he jilted. As Hannay documents, in a letter containing his last wishes, Kierkegaard proclaimed:

It is, of course, my will that my former fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel, inherit unconditionally whatever little I can leave behind… What I want to express in this way is that to me an engagement was and is just as binding as a marriage.

A Freudian would say that it was no mistake that Kierkegaard’s muse arrived just as Regine was going out the door. In the early 1840s, books began to cascade from his pen, one philosophical-spiritual classic after another. Hannay makes it clear that the Danes did not know what to do with the flaneur who seemed to suddenly morph into a genius. While I think Hannay has given short shrift to what the secular world deems Kierkegaard’s minor, straight-forwardly Christian works, he provides astute commentary on the required texts of any Kierkegaard reading list, such as Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments, Stages on Life’s Way, and Works of Love. Hannay’s guide-wire readings offer support to those new to Kierkegaard while his interpretations are rich enough to challenge people who have been squinting over Kierkegaard’s manuscripts for decades.

Hegel is often understood to be the bull’s eye of Kierkegaard polemical writings. Although it is true that Kierkegaard, no less than Schopenhauer, was highly critical of the German speculative philosopher, Hannay does the English-speaking world the great service of showing that Kierkegaard’s antagonists were more often than not other Danes. At last, Kierkegaard is presented on his true cultural stage as Hannay introduces Hans Lassen Martensen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Bishop Jakob Mynster, and other Copenhagen addresses of Kierkegaard’s works.

This is the first full-scale biography of Kierkegaard in English to appear in decades, and it concludes with a sparkling chapter on Kierkegaard’s second life as a world historical thinker. Hannay sketches Kierkegaard’s ongoing lively reception as well as his acknowledged influence on Heidegger, Sartre, and other existential luminaries. The book’s coda consists of a revealing reflection on Georg Lukacs’s reading and rereading of Kierkegaard. Like its subject, this book does not make difficult matters easy, but Hannay’s readers will find the door to Kierkegaard’s texts easier to open, and therein lies no small spiritual treasure.