Alastair Hannay

Recently I complained that a biography of Rousseau spent too much time on the kind of bosom Rousseau preferred, and too little on his ideas. Alastair Hannay heard me, and wrote this book, and now I have to apologize, because I really would like a bit more of the "bosom preference as revelatory of character" approach.

But not really. Hannay's biography is not biography in any way that non-readers of philosophy would recognize it. The bulk of the text is taken up with long descriptions and analyses of Kierkegaard's work. Hannay uses Kierkegaard's journals, and his own extraordinary understanding of nineteenth century Danish intellectual history, to bring out what Kierkegaard was probably trying to do. But he also admits that Kierkegaard's late claim to have been always going in the same direction isn't very plausible.

This is all exactly as it should be for the history of ideas, but it can get a little dense (I say this as a reader of Hegel). Hannay wrote his book, it is clear, for people who already know about Kierkegaard and his books. If you don't know about him, or about his books, this book will make approximately no sense. I knew a little about him, and a little about his books, and even then I was occasionally lost. Hannay's prose doesn't help. It's clear, provided your understanding of 'clear' is 'clearer than the average german idealist.' That is not the case for most readers of Kierkegaard.

I certainly understand more about K than I did before I started, and I want to read more of his books. I'm still not convinced that his arch-enemy Martenson wasn't right to label him an individualist, a doctrine which "represses the sympathetic element in human nature [and] leads every individual to labour autopathically for his own perfection." Hannay's last chapter is a surprisingly interesting comparison between K and Lukacs. It is true, as Hannay suggests, that "Kierkegaardian subjectivity is not at all undialectical." But the real difference between K (or most philosophers) and Lukacs is that Lukacs accepts the importance of history and society in the shaping of ideas and human life. Kierkegaard does not. This biography is short on anecdotes, but I will forever remember that K allowed Either/Or to be reprinted because that would let him pay for the printing of his later works against Christendom. Lukacs could write a book about that decision and what it reveals about Kierkegaard as a thinker. For Kierkegaard, on the other hand, this was just everyday life.… (more)