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Imprint: Allen Lane
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Published: 04/04/2019
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ISBN: 9780241283585
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Length: 368 Pages
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Dimensions: 240mm x 34mm x 162mm
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Weight: 592g
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RRP: £25.00
Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement
'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
Søren 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.
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Imprint: Allen Lane
-
Published: 04/04/2019
-
ISBN: 9780241283585
-
Length: 368 Pages
-
Dimensions: 240mm x 34mm x 162mm
-
Weight: 592g
-
RRP: £25.00
Reviews
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This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescues Kierkegaard from the scholars and makes it abundantly clear why he is such an intriguing and useful figure: that we want, above all, to be reassured about our lives rather than find out what about our lives matters to us. ... Carlisle writes with verve and sympathy. Kierkegaard's life is exemplary, as Carlisle shows with such plain and accessible eloquence
Adam Phillips, Observer
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Engrossing ... Carlisle has pulled off the feat of writing a truly Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard
Julian Baggini, Financial Times
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It is a testimony to her skill that, as in a great novel, the portrayal of her protagonist is so vivid ... She wonderfully conveys how, pelican-like, Kierkegaard tore his philosophy from his own breast
Jane O'Grady, Telegraph
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Clare Carlisle has an especially deep admiration of Kierkegaard and has studied his work with an intensity that has rarely been matched. Her book, she writes, "takes its shape from the Kierkegaardian question about how to be a human being in the world"
Ray Monk, New Statesman
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Readable and entertaining
James Marriott, The Times
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Philosopher of the Heart enacts Kierkegaard's audacity and verve in thinking and writing, his "new way of doing philosophy", in a thrillingly inward and intimate style
Boyd Tonkin, Arts Desk
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One of the best biographies of modern masters by a new generation
Daniel Johnson, Standpoint
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Carlisle's biography is impressively well researched, and brings its subject vividly alive
Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
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Carlisle enters into a closer than ever relationship with her subject. She gives the reader a vivid sense of what Kierkegaard meant ... It is an excellently told story in which the author weaves familiar and less familiar details of Kierkegaard's life together in a compelling framework that brings this explorer of anxiety and despair to life as never before.
Alastair Hannay, Tablet
