Philosopher of the Heart
The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world.
Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.
Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée.
Clare Carlisle’s innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard’s life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carlisle (On Habit), reader in philosophy and theology at King's College London, makes an intimidatingly chilly and mercurial figure relatable to readers in this admirable biography. By weaving S ren Kierkegaard's life story around the Socratic question he obsessively asked what does it mean to be human? he becomes sympathetic in Carlisle's hands. If Kierkegaard started with the idea that love is what makes one human, he also famously wrote about anxiety and doubt's place in the human experience. Moving fluidly backward and forward through Kierkegaard's life, Carlisle shows how this concern connected to his life's key event: his engagement to a young woman named Regine Olsen. He later broke the engagement, for reasons that remain unclear, and spent the rest of his life philosophizing about life's "dual extremities" of "suffering and joy." As he grew older, he became more focused on Christ as the figure central to understanding this condition and inflamed Copenhagen's leaders by arguing that institutional Christianity was a failure. Carlisle quotes amply from Kierkegaard's writing, to put the reader into his mind, and from his contemporaries, to convey how deeply his work moved many of them. Nevertheless, Carlisle's Kierkegaard remains surprisingly elusive throughout her scrupulous study, which is perhaps the only reasonable way to depict this complex man.
