‘And What Was Kierkegaard's Weapon? But a Pen!’

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Notes

Notes

1. In his preface Garff refers to some previous biographies—all of them in Danish. This allows him to state, rather oddly, that since Georg Brandes’ first portrait of Kierkegaard published in 1877, “the most recent original work in this field is that of Johannes Hohlenberg from 1940” (xix). Thus he neglects to mention several more recent biographies in English written by established Kierkegaard's scholars, including, for example, Walter Lowrie's Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938, 636 pp.) and its more concise version A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942, 271 pp.); Peter Rohde, Søren Kierkegaard: An Introduction to His Life and Philosophy, trans. A. M. Williams (London: Allen Unwin, 1963). The omission of most English biographies of Kierkegaard and of major recent English studies of his philosophy is one of the main shortcomings out of the very few shortcomings of Garff's exposition.

2. And see the chapter on Kierkegaard in Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity from Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995) and the appended biography.

3. For helpful summaries of various psychological and physiological analyses of Kierkegaard, see A. Henriksen, Methods and Results of Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia: A Historical and Critical Study (Copenhagen, 1951), 66-128; M. Grimault, La Melancholie de Kierkegaard (Paris, 1965); H. Fenger, Kierkegaard, The Myths and Their Origins, trans. G. C. Schoolfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 62–80. Against the reductive tendency, see the classic essay of T. Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple, trans. C. Van O. Bruyn (London: Harvill, 1948).

4. J. Thompson, The Lonely Labyrinth: Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1967), xiii.

5. See Kierkegaard's admission that “my task has continually been to provide the existential-corrective by poetically presenting ideals and inciting people,” in The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 16.

6. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lilian Marvin Swenson (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 19.

7. Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. A. Dru (New York: Harper  & Row, 1962), 33. This important composition, which anticipates by almost a hundred years both Heiddeger's 1927 critique of modernity and the Dasein that is lost in the crowd and cannot become eigentlich (authentic) without the crowd, and 1923 Buber's account of the I—It inauthentic relations in Part 2 of his I and Thou, is only skimpily dealt with in the present biography on pp. 487–90. This beautiful essay appeared recently in Hebrew in Carmel Publishing House, (Jerusalem, 2008), translated by Mirian Eytan, edited by Jacob Golomb

8. On the importance of irony for Kierkegaard's philosophizing, see Jacob Golomb, “Kierkegaard's Ironic Ladder to Authentic Faith,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1991): 11–16.