Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (review)

In the history of the secondary literature concerning this celebrated Danish religious thinker, several radically different Kierkegaards have vied for center stage. Existentialism generated Kierkegaard the heroic rebel against all collectivities and objectivities and Kierkegaard the proponent of criterionless, radically subjective leaps over the yawning existential abyss. Neo-orthodoxy produced Kierkegaard the champion of undomesticated divine transcendence and Kierkegaard the implacable enemy of theological liberalism. More recently, post-structuralism has spawned Kierkegaard the prophetic precursor of the themes of the death of the author and the elusiveness of all textual meaning. In all of these instances, no matter how different the portraits may be, Kierkegaard has emerged as a Promethean figure, larger than life, bringing fire from heaven to engulf in flames the comfortable certainties of bourgeois culture and piety.

In this massive volume, engagingly translated by Bruce Kirmmse, Joachim Garff seeks to avoid all such hagiographic distortions of Kierkegaard that depict him as a religious or philosophical genius strangely detachable from his historical context. For Garff, the key to understanding Kierkegaard is to resist the temptation to treat his vast authorship as a disembodied canon and to re-situate his texts in the complex dynamics of Kierkegaard's life and times. Garff sets out to "scrutinize the minor details and incidental circumstances, the cracks in the granite of genius, the madness just below the surface, the intensity, the economic and psychological costs of the frenzies of writing, as well as the profound and mercurial mysteriousness of a figure with whom one is never really finished (xxi)." Rather than treating the development of the literature in the abstract as the key to understanding Kierkegaard's life, Garff focuses on Kierkegaard's inner tensions, his social conflicts, and the salient features of his immediate Danish context. The brilliant works were shaped by ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) interactions with friends, enemies, and chance encounters with strangers. According to Garff, the life that generated the works must be recovered in order to grasp the works' genuine significance.

Garff's rather novelistic presentation, complete with flashbacks, prefigurings, and tantalizing subplots, succeeds in re-situating Kierkegaard in his original context. The sights, sounds, and even the stenches and aromas of "Golden Age" Copenhagen come alive in his pages. In this regard, the sheer breadth and quantity of Garff's research is staggering, everything from Kierkegaard's favorite hymns and preferred restaurants to his bathroom difficulties while in Berlin are included in this portrayal. Insofar as Garff was attempting to put ordinary (and culturally specific) flesh on the bones of genius, he has surely succeeded.

Crucial to Garff's unique approach is his contention that Kierkegaard's self-presentation in his journals may often be as fictive as the personae that he adopts in his pseudonymous literature. Convinced that his life would be raw material for future biographers, Kierkegaard carefully crafted the image of himself that he wanted posterity to behold, engineering his own posthumous reception. Kierkegaard, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unconsciously, constructed his own mythic self in his journal entries. In order to counteract this idealization, Garff trolls the pseudonymous literature for traces of those aspects of himself that Kierkegaard sought to disguise or conceal, finding the pseudonymous works often to be more revealing than the signed literature or the journals. To serve as a further check on Kierkegaard's literary self-portrait, Garff also pays particular attention to descriptions of Kierkegaard by his contemporaries and to the specific events dominating the public life of Copenhagen as Kierkegaard wrote specific pieces.

Using these strategies, Garff emphasizes two major dynamics in Kierkegaard's life. One is Kierkegaard's desire to become a brilliant writer. In fact, according to Garff, writing was so essential to Kierkegaard that he used it to work through his internal tensions and to forge his own identity. In a way, Kierkegaard wrote himself into existence. Kierkegaard's failure to be adequately appreciated by the literary elite, especially by the circle of J. L. Heiberg, and the tension between...