Looking at Life from the Inside
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
Allen Lane, 368pp, £25.00, ISBN 9780241283585
reviewed by Ruby Guyatt
‘Joy is the present tense, with the whole emphasis upon the present.’ Clare Carlisle may not quote these words, written by Søren Kierkegaard in 1848, but her lyrical biography of the Danish philosopher-poet nevertheless performs them.
Unlike much writing about philosophy, Carlisle’s prose is imaginative and lucid; unlike most biographies, much of Philosopher of the Heart is written in the present tense, inviting the reader to accompany Kierkegaard as he walks Copenhagen’s cobbled streets and drinks endless cups of sugary coffee, always asking what it means to be a human being in this world:
For Kierkegaard, the human life is characterised by the difficulty that while it must be lived forwards, it can only be understood backwards. Carlisle dramatises this truth by resisting the convention of presenting a chronological account of her subject’s life and thought, thus imposing on it a retrospective coherence or meaning inaccessible to the human being who lived and thought it. Instead, much of the book moves back and forth between different moments in Kierkegaard’s life. While this might prove disorienting for readers who are less familiar with Kierkegaard’s life and works, Carlisle’s objective is not to provide her readers with a road-map to Kierkegaard’s thought, but rather to allow them to experience it in real time.
Carlisle’s imaginative structure and lucid prose are not the only refreshing things about this philosophical biography, which – also in a Kierkegaardian fashion – she imbues with a dash of autobiographical detail and self-reflection, ingredients which are more often absent from academic writing. Carlisle, who has spent over two decades studying Kierkegaard, readily admits: ‘I have sometimes found myself disliking him – a painful feeling, similar to finding a fault in a loved one.’ Reflecting on the place Kierkegaard has had in her life, Carlisle writes frankly about the realities of academic work. In an aside to which many graduate students will likely relate, Carlisle admits that when, as a young doctoral student at Cambridge, her PhD supervisor suggested she consider publishing her thesis, she ‘felt more inclined to burn it – I would invite my friends, and we’d dance round the fire’.
Throughout Philosopher of the Heart, Carlisle connects Kierkegaard to many of the philosophical, theological and literary figures and movements that informed his work – from giants of western thought such as Plato and Martin Luther, to the now lesser-known Danish clergymen and academics to whom Kierkegaard’s writings most directly respond, and with whom he often came to intellectual and personal blows. The book’s length, and Carlisle’s commitment to making it accessible and compelling to a wide readership, necessitates that she condense and simplify the contributions of these other thinkers. Although understandable, this occasionally risks conflating their actual work with Kierkegaard’s construal of it; for example, Kierkegaard’s reading of Plato as unworldly is arguably at odds with the historical Plato’s understanding of worldly things as participating in the Real and the True, and of the intimate connection between city and cosmos.
Nevertheless, the questions with which Kierkegaard grappled – how to live with anxiety, how to be faithful (to a person or an ideal), how to seize the present or live in the moment – are characteristically human, and by accentuating this and situating Kierkegaard in the long philosophical tradition of thinking about how to be human, Carlisle communicates the enduring appeal and universal relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought.
Indeed, even in refusing to gloss over Kierkegaard’s less appealing qualities – his arrogance, obsessiveness and self-aware yet enduringly unattractive self-preoccupation – does Carlisle gesture to how Kierkegaard might speak to his 21st-century reader. In particular, Kierkegaard’s painstaking curation of his public image – his deliberate cultivating of the appearance and manner of a flâneur, his exacting design and oversight of the presentation and production of his pamphlets, his fury at the unveiling of his (already transparent) pseudonymity, and his deep hurt at being ridiculed by the popular press – brings to mind the constant and conscious way in which we curate a particular image of ourselves through the comments we tweet and images we post, our online self-posturing and self-promoting.
Often described as ‘the father of existentialism’ after his influence on the secular thought that emerged from the smoke-filled cafés of 20th-century Paris, the Kierkegaard of the popular imagination seems more often to be one of angst and polo-necks than eternal Christian truth. However, despite Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the lives of his readers and importance to the work of subsequent philosophers – Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Derrida to name just a few – he nevertheless self-identified as a religious author with a religious goal: reinjecting the safe, bourgeois, institutional religion of Danish Christendom with a dose of the challenging, individual essence of true Christianity, and of assisting his reader in the lifelong task of becoming (even if never being) such a Christian. One of Carlisle’s achievements in Philosopher of the Heart is to communicate Kierkegaard’s universal appeal and relevance, while always attending to the Christian particularity of his self-understanding and worldview.
The Kierkegaard of Philosopher of the Heart may not be the Kierkegaard that some readers are expecting or hoping to encounter in its pages, but he is a Kierkegaard that is all the more authentic and radical for this.
Unlike much writing about philosophy, Carlisle’s prose is imaginative and lucid; unlike most biographies, much of Philosopher of the Heart is written in the present tense, inviting the reader to accompany Kierkegaard as he walks Copenhagen’s cobbled streets and drinks endless cups of sugary coffee, always asking what it means to be a human being in this world:
‘If he sits backwards and draws the little curtain from the window, he sees the miles travelled recede, watches his own journey unfold. He cannot see where the train is going: the landscape only comes into view once he has passed through it. He has come to think that life itself is like this. We have some knowledge of the past, but not of the future – and as for the present, it is continually in motion, always eluding our grasp.’
For Kierkegaard, the human life is characterised by the difficulty that while it must be lived forwards, it can only be understood backwards. Carlisle dramatises this truth by resisting the convention of presenting a chronological account of her subject’s life and thought, thus imposing on it a retrospective coherence or meaning inaccessible to the human being who lived and thought it. Instead, much of the book moves back and forth between different moments in Kierkegaard’s life. While this might prove disorienting for readers who are less familiar with Kierkegaard’s life and works, Carlisle’s objective is not to provide her readers with a road-map to Kierkegaard’s thought, but rather to allow them to experience it in real time.
Carlisle’s imaginative structure and lucid prose are not the only refreshing things about this philosophical biography, which – also in a Kierkegaardian fashion – she imbues with a dash of autobiographical detail and self-reflection, ingredients which are more often absent from academic writing. Carlisle, who has spent over two decades studying Kierkegaard, readily admits: ‘I have sometimes found myself disliking him – a painful feeling, similar to finding a fault in a loved one.’ Reflecting on the place Kierkegaard has had in her life, Carlisle writes frankly about the realities of academic work. In an aside to which many graduate students will likely relate, Carlisle admits that when, as a young doctoral student at Cambridge, her PhD supervisor suggested she consider publishing her thesis, she ‘felt more inclined to burn it – I would invite my friends, and we’d dance round the fire’.
Throughout Philosopher of the Heart, Carlisle connects Kierkegaard to many of the philosophical, theological and literary figures and movements that informed his work – from giants of western thought such as Plato and Martin Luther, to the now lesser-known Danish clergymen and academics to whom Kierkegaard’s writings most directly respond, and with whom he often came to intellectual and personal blows. The book’s length, and Carlisle’s commitment to making it accessible and compelling to a wide readership, necessitates that she condense and simplify the contributions of these other thinkers. Although understandable, this occasionally risks conflating their actual work with Kierkegaard’s construal of it; for example, Kierkegaard’s reading of Plato as unworldly is arguably at odds with the historical Plato’s understanding of worldly things as participating in the Real and the True, and of the intimate connection between city and cosmos.
Nevertheless, the questions with which Kierkegaard grappled – how to live with anxiety, how to be faithful (to a person or an ideal), how to seize the present or live in the moment – are characteristically human, and by accentuating this and situating Kierkegaard in the long philosophical tradition of thinking about how to be human, Carlisle communicates the enduring appeal and universal relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought.
Indeed, even in refusing to gloss over Kierkegaard’s less appealing qualities – his arrogance, obsessiveness and self-aware yet enduringly unattractive self-preoccupation – does Carlisle gesture to how Kierkegaard might speak to his 21st-century reader. In particular, Kierkegaard’s painstaking curation of his public image – his deliberate cultivating of the appearance and manner of a flâneur, his exacting design and oversight of the presentation and production of his pamphlets, his fury at the unveiling of his (already transparent) pseudonymity, and his deep hurt at being ridiculed by the popular press – brings to mind the constant and conscious way in which we curate a particular image of ourselves through the comments we tweet and images we post, our online self-posturing and self-promoting.
Often described as ‘the father of existentialism’ after his influence on the secular thought that emerged from the smoke-filled cafés of 20th-century Paris, the Kierkegaard of the popular imagination seems more often to be one of angst and polo-necks than eternal Christian truth. However, despite Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the lives of his readers and importance to the work of subsequent philosophers – Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Derrida to name just a few – he nevertheless self-identified as a religious author with a religious goal: reinjecting the safe, bourgeois, institutional religion of Danish Christendom with a dose of the challenging, individual essence of true Christianity, and of assisting his reader in the lifelong task of becoming (even if never being) such a Christian. One of Carlisle’s achievements in Philosopher of the Heart is to communicate Kierkegaard’s universal appeal and relevance, while always attending to the Christian particularity of his self-understanding and worldview.
The Kierkegaard of Philosopher of the Heart may not be the Kierkegaard that some readers are expecting or hoping to encounter in its pages, but he is a Kierkegaard that is all the more authentic and radical for this.