After reading a review in last week's New Yorker of Cheryl Misak's Frank
Ramsey, then spending several intense hours seeing if I could (despite
failing in the past) find something in American Pragmatism to relate to, I
had just given up when the mail arrived. I hobbled out to the mail box and
retrieved the current issue of The New Yorker. In it I found a review of
Clare Carlisle's Philosopher of the Heart, a biography of Soren Kierkegaard,
published, or perhaps acquired by Amazon on May 5, 2020. The review was by
Adam Kirsch.
I do have perhaps the more popular volumes by Kierkegaard, none of which I
managed to appreciate. Unwilling to let him go after reading the New Yorker
review I turned to Youtube and found Michael Sugrue's "Kierkegaard's Leap of
Faith": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVqPCayd1c Sugrue is impressive.
Interestingly, Sugrue seems fairly clinical and objective (although dramatic
and intense) in presenting Kierkegaard. The reviewer Kirsch, tells us if
Kierkegaard were to happen today, "say in Denmark, the standard example of a
rational modern society - the man would sooner or later end up in a
psychiatrist's office, where he would probably be given a diagnosis of
depression or bipolar disorder. He would start seeing a therapist and might
be prescribed medication. The goal would be to get him back to normal, as
the world defines normal": able to take pleasure in life, to form
relationships, to meet his obligations as a family member, friend, and
citizen. The man would seek professional help, because in the twenty-first
century, he would recognize his propensities as symptoms - evidence of a
psychological problem."
As to Carlisle's approach, her title The philosopher of the Heart may be an
indication Kiekegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen, "a nineteen-year-old from
a highly respectable family. After a year Kierkegaard broke off the
relationship leaving her "confused and miserable." "The public rejection
threatened to ruin her future marriage prospects. The review, and perhaps
Carlisles' book ends with Kierkegaard on his death bed at age 42 writing a
letter to his brother about the disposition of his estate: "everything he
owned was to go to Regine, 'exactly as if I had been married to her.'"
Lawrence
