A few years ago, Alain de Botton was mocked for posting a tweet that bemoaned the “plight of thinkers”: “sitting on sofa, gazing blankly, not helping unload dishwasher, dismissed as ‘doing nothing’.”
The notion of philosophers as impractical has been around since Thales of Miletus, who refuted accusations of their uselessness by giving it up for a year and making a fortune from the olive harvest. But the idea persists, and Søren Kierkegaard was perhaps the philosopher who most famously found the business of ordinary life a vexation: “What makes my life so difficult is that I’m tuned an octave higher than other people are ... Most people think – at most – about whom they ought to marry. I have to think about marriage itself. And so it goes with everything. That’s fundamentally my situation now.”
He wrote that in 1849, eight years after he had broken off his engagement to Regine Olsen, an act that his biographers have been trying to unpick ever since. The question of marriage was one he kept returning to: “We need dynamic personalities, unselfish people who are not immersed and exhausted in endless considerations for job, wife and children.” And then there is his famous formulation from Either/Or: “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it.”
Clare Carlisle’s biography does not overcomplicate the issue. Kierkegaard, she says, did not disparage the conventions, or duties and expectations of life: “on the contrary, he wondered whether he was capable of them, and he feared the intimacy of marriage”. There is also the suggestion that he was unwilling to force his melancholy (these days we’d call it depression) or his elevated spirituality on a wife. And his spirituality was elevated: Carlisle makes much of his wranglings with ministers and theologians, and indeed the entire Christian community, which he more or less accused of hardly being Christians at all. His key text was the story of Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and sparing him only at the very last minute.
We balk at this story and wonder whether this is a price worth paying, to worship a God capable of such a command. Kierkegaard’s response was that religious belief stands beyond ethics, and he took a dim view of those who did not grasp this, and “the secret of suffering as the form of the highest life”. (“Søren”, Carlisle tells us, means “severe” in Danish, and “Kierkegaard” means “churchyard”.) Such views did not, however – it’s important to remember – stop him being witty, both in his person and in his works.
His most famous observation is that life must be lived forwards but understood backwards, and Carlisle declares that she wants to write a “Kierkegaardian” biography, so she abandons conventional chronology. The book opens in May 1843, with Kierkegaard amazed to be on a train, returning to his native Copenhagen from Berlin. Instantly, we see a problem that any biographer of someone who did almost nothing but write is going to have to face: how to fill the pages, or bring the life alive.
The train “is a new kind of miracle: an alchemical fusion of steam and steel” and so on. There is much of this in the book. Here is how she gets over the hurdle of describing someone writing: “Although his authorship is a burden, he finds relief only in writing: here at home, especially in the quiet night hours, words run freely from his pen, fluid thoughts dance with joy across the open page, not yet printed and paperbound, not yet revealed to the public’s innumerable, unforeseeable eyes.”
And how she reports the fact that Kierkegaard had a mother: “Like every other human soul, he came into being within the quiet, dark warmth of a woman’s body, and he longs for such a sanctuary when the bright lights of the world become too much for him.”
“Citation needed”, one feels like saying. Carlisle also likes scene-setting, with lighting effects: “Inside the room, the moonlight touches the steel pen on his high desk, the precious tin boxes, the packing cases full of books, the tall rosewood cabinet containing his works.” And when he dies: “After the light left his eyes, the diamond ring Regine had once worn shone on his hand in the moonlight.”
Despite such guff, which we would mock had it come from the pen of a Victorian, this is not a stupid book, and Carlisle quite clearly loves and knows a lot about her subject. Her emphasis is on his religious struggles, which is appropriate in that Kierkegaard thought these the most important part of his work – indeed, its whole point. But one wonders if she couldn’t have told the story forwards, the way we live life.