Kierkegaard: A critical biography

by Josiah Thompson

A very well written biography that is a little sad. Kierkegaard was a "ghostly" figure that, while full of brilliant thought, could never manage to interface with life. My views on some of his wirings were affected by this work, and I am curious to go back and read them with the knowledge that Kierkegaard plays intricate thought experiments within the pages of his pseudonymous works. This book reads like a novel, is full of many interesting anecdotes (although many of them sad), and a good overview of SK's philosophical works.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction

1000 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Josiah Thompson is an American writer, professional private investigator, and former philosophy professor. He wrote Six Seconds in Dallas, A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. In 1967 he published The Lonely Labyrinth, a study of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's thought, and in 1972, Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays. He also wrote a biography of Kierkegaard in 1974, and a well-received book about his own, post-academic life as a private detective, Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye in 1988.

Thompson graduated from Yale University in 1957. He entered the Navy, serving in Underwater Demolition Team 21. Then he returned to Yale for his M.A. in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1964. After receiving his doctorate, he taught at Yale as Instructor of Philosophy and then moved on to teach at Haverford College, where he remained until 1976, resigning to begin a career as a private detective.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Aren't people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don't have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

If anybody is interested in the life and writings of the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, this is your book. Josiah Thompson, American philosopher and Kierkegaard scholar, provides a detailed overview of Kierkegaard, the man and the thinker, from his childhood to his death at age forty-three, an odd, most peculiar life, to be sure.

We read how frail schoolboy Søren dressed in an old-man’s wool jacket and pants, defended himself by his sharp tongue among his schoolmates and how, when at home, an old guilt-ridden, melancholic, rigidly religious father stripped his son of his childhood, refusing to let young Søren leave the house to play with other children, demanding Søren remain indoors, walking back and forth with him in his study, taking imaginary journeys to far off locations, journeys they co-created in their mind’s eye.

And after such an oddball boyhood, we then read how as a young man Søren’s over-active imagination and unending reflections drained all vitality from the present moment. For example, picture yourself sharing a meal with your friend. You exchange words but instead of focusing on the actual conversation you imagine five possible conversations rapidly, almost concurrently; you try to remain attentive to what is being said but your imagination can’t turn itself off – for every verbal exchange, you invent a sting of others. And not only do you continually invent multiple possible realities, you are forever in a melancholy mood, so each of these possibilities is coated with a film of gray. And, if this isn’t bad enough, beyond the borders of each gray-coated possibility looms a philosophical concept that holds the gray possibility like a fishing net holds a flapping fish.

What would be the way out of such a mental quagmire? For the remainder of his short life Kierkegaard turned to writing, writing where he wrote feverishly under multiple pseudonyms with names like Constantin Constantinus, Johannes the Seducer, Judge Wilhelm, Victor Eremita, Father Taciturnus, William Afham, Johannes Climacus, and my personal favorite, Hilarius Bookbinder. Additionally, Kierkegaard kept a daily diary where he penned his on-going commentary. What a literary output! Two dozen books and enough diary entries to fill a dozen thick volumes.

And what were Kierkegaard’s physical circumstances enabling him to live such a life? Thompson writes how Kierkegaard’s wealth via an inheritance from his departed father enabled him to live in a large, many roomed apartment with the temperature regulated just so, to buy rosewood and mahogany furniture and a writing desk for each room, to go for his carriage rides whenever he liked, not to mention purchasing fine food and drink aplenty for his specific taste. We read, “In the years following his break with Regina (the beautiful young woman he was engaged to marry but Søren broke the engagement), Kierkegaard came to withdraw further and further from the world. Like street noises muffled by shuttered windows and many layers of curtains, the affairs of the world came only faintly to his indifferent ears. Insulated from the harsher realities by the comforts of wealth, his life took on the shape of an aesthetic hermitage."

By such an aesthetic withdrawal, to my mind Kierkegaard shares much in common with the sickly jaded aristocrat Des Esseintes from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against the Grain, a novel serving as a cult favorite among the nineteenth century French artists and writers known as the Decadents. Here is a line from the first chapter of Huysmans’s novel, “Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”

Sidebar: Des Esseintes encrusted a tortoise in exotic gems; Kierkegaard encrusted his personal copy of each of his books in gold ornamented black leather so the book looked like a small coffin. Josiah Thompson handed me one of these coffin-like books when we shared an evening together at his home in the early 70s. What a statement about the contents of Kierkegaard's books!

Back on Thompson’s book. Although Kierkegaard did leave his aesthetic hermitage to take his eccentric walks on the streets of Copenhagen, he did so on his own terms, one term being that he wasn’t really committed to conversation in the conventional sense; rather, he used his forays and personal interactions on the streets as raw-material for his writing.

And what are these pseudonyms like? Here is what Thompson has to say, “Like their author they seem inordinately “ghostly,” purely mental, never rooted in the physical world through their bodies, without physical desire or suffering. They all are disembodied hermits lacking parents or home, wife or job, appetite or fear.”

One more quote to give a flavor of Thompson’s keen insights, “The ambience of all these works is that of duplicity, and their essential theme is the inherent volatility of human consciousness. In their elaborate hoaxes and sudden surprises, in their trickery and satire, there is an underlying black humor. For finally the joke is on the reader, and the smarter he is, the sooner he realizes it. But to see through all the pseudonyms, to recognize that the vision of any one is not to be preferred to that of any other, is finally to join Kierkegaard in his cloister. It is to share with him that peculiarly modern laceration – “I must believe, but I can’t believe” – which since his time has become even more painful. The essentially duplicitous character of the pseudonyms is, then, essential to their meaning, and is founded on the simple yet all important fact that in the pseudonyms, Kierkegaard is absent.”

The above quotes and observations are but a sampling of the quirky life and rich authorship of the man who came to be known as "the father of existentialism," a thinker who anticipated the phenomenology of Husserl and the existentialism of Sartre and Camus and Heidegger. For a more complete understanding of Kierkegaard, I highly recommend this fine book by Josiah Thompson.

[Sunny Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in SK, this is the book to read about him. But at least sample SK's "Either/Or" before you do.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was good for me to see Kierkegaard's life and have his pseudonymous works explained. I've tended not to read Kierkegaard because I don't like his style. Some books are hard to read, but in a satisfying way (e.g. Being and Time), but somehow the vibe of the difficulty of Kierkegaard put me off. I think there can be something unnecessarily provoking and clever about it. However, to see the sadness, even tragedy, behind Kierkegaard's masks helps me. I may not read the main pseudonymous works (it's Thompson's claim that Kierkegaard meant to revoke all of them, and thus they're all in a sense "wild goose chases" (my term)), but I'm glad to read of Kierkegaard's project with them, which seems worthy: to point out that humans get caught up in wild goose chases, "human projects", which ultimately come to nothing, and that God is found in the failure of human projects (Thompson's interpretation), everything else is fakery (my interpretation).

My favorite part of the whole book was the portrait of Kierkegaard which Thompson says is more accurate than the familiar one. This more humorous and lively portrait can be found, for example, here.

[Seth Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written biography that is a little sad. Kierkegaard was a "ghostly" figure that, while full of brilliant thought, could never manage to interface with life. My views on some of his wirings were affected by this work, and I am curious to go back and read them with the knowledge that Kierkegaard plays intricate thought experiments within the pages of his pseudonymous works.

This book reads like a novel, is full of many interesting anecdotes (although many of them sad), and a good overview of SK's philosophical works.

Good stuff.