Soren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and challenging of
modern philosophers, is now celebrated as the father of existentialism -
yet his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart.
Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen
analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing
and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style rooted in the inward
drama of being human. As Christianity seemed to sleepwalk through a
changing world, Kierkegaard dazzlingly revealed its spiritual power
while exposing the poverty of official religion.
His restless
creativity was spurred on by his own failures: his relationship with the
young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to
writing, haunted him throughout his life. Though tormented by the
pressures of celebrity, he deliberately lived amidst the crowds in
Copenhagen, known by everyone but, he felt, understood by no one. When
he collapsed exhausted at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the
question of existence: how to be a human being in this world? Clare
Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's
remarkable life as far as possible from his own perspective, conveying
what it was like to be this Socrates of Christendom - as he put it,
living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.
This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescuses Kierkegaard from
the scholars and shows why he is such an intriguing and useful figure'
Observer
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard - Clare Carlisle
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£9.99