Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

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 Søren 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. (May)