Kierkegaard: A Biography (review)

Given that Kierkegaard's writings undeniably draw on his personal life in important ways, biography has naturally played a more central role in Kierkegaard scholarship than is the case with most philosophers. As such, it would seem a welcome event to have published a new English-language biography of the Dane that reflects significant developments in Kierkegaard scholarship since the hagiographic biography published by Walter Lowrie in the 1940s and the rather psychoanalytic biography by Josiah Thompson in the 1970s. But while Alastair Hannay's familiarity with Kierkegaard's life, writings (published and unpublished), and context is most impressive, and while his overall agenda of viewing Kierkegaard against the backdrop of his local, contemporary situation is salutary, the book cannot be judged an unqualified success. Although the book is rich in new details not included in prior English-language biographies, and although there are quite a number of highly suggestive interpretive observations offered by Hannay, one only gleans these occasional treasures at the cost of laboring through a sprawling, casually organized, and tediously expository tome. I'll first mention my serious misgivings about the book before focusing my attention on the ideas that, if they had been allowed to organize the book, might have made it quite an illuminating biography of Kierkegaard.

Though the subtitle assures us that Hannay's Kierkegaard is a biography, there are whole chapters that glaringly resist that designation, offering either straightforward exposition of Kierkegaard's writings and/or comparison of Kierkegaard's thought with that of earlier thinkers (especially Kant and Hegel) or later thinkers (especially Nietzsche and Heidegger). Hannay prepares us for this unusual biographical form in his preface by noting that since Kierkegaard's life was in large measure his writings, an intellectual biography of him will not artificially seek to divide the bios from the graphe. That is no doubt true. But this book offers long stretches of tediously straightforward exposition of Kierkegaard's published writings and of his journals from which a biographical angle seems largely lacking. Aside from the issue of classification, I was left wondering about the audience for such exposition. The level of detail is such that I feel sure that beginning students of Kierkegaard would become entirely lost, while those who are already familiar with his writings will find Hannay's exposition thereof both wearisome and unilluminating.

My second major reservation about this book is its strikingly casual organization. The book, of course, traces a chronological arc through Kierkegaard's life, but Hannay resists organizing his material thematically. As an example, I cite the especially egregious fourth chapter in which Hannay places together with the most casual linkage Kierkegaard's disappointment over Martensen's publication of a work on Faust, his brother's wife's death, meeting Regine Olsen, the death of Poul Martin Møller, and his motives for adopting pseudonymity (that in twelve pages!). And the well-known story of Kierkegaard's ill-fated engagement to Regine Olsen loses much of its effectiveness by being fragmented into small bits spread over a number of chapters. I wondered as I read through this disorderly presentation of Kierkegaard's life whether Hannay was out to make the Sartrean point that when we narrate a life, we falsify it by giving a narrative structure it didn't have in reality, where life is "one damn thing after another." But, ironically, Hannay's most intriguing suggestion is that Kierkegaard was self-consciously attempting to live out his life according to formal principles borrowed from Hegel's aesthetic theory, especially as Hegel theorized tragedy in terms of collisions. On that theory, it is hard to understand why Hannay would resist presenting in coherent, dramatic form the episodes of Kierkegaard's life that he tried to live that way. In terms of the reading experience, Hannay's desultory organization of his material makes for a long, hard...