Philosopher of the Heart
The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement
'This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescuses Kierkegaard from the scholars and shows why he is such an intriguing and useful figure' Observer
Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and challenging of modern philosophers, is now celebrated as the father of existentialism - yet his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style rooted in the inward drama of being human.
As Christianity seemed to sleepwalk through a changing world, Kierkegaard dazzlingly revealed its spiritual power while exposing the poverty of official religion. His restless creativity was spurred on by his own failures: his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, haunted him throughout his life.
Though tormented by the pressures of celebrity, he deliberately lived amidst the crowds in Copenhagen, known by everyone but, he felt, understood by no one. When he collapsed exhausted at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the question of existence: how to be a human being in this world?
Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's remarkable life as far as possible from his own perspective, conveying what it was like to be 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.
