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Loading... Søren Kierkegaard: A Biographyby Joakim Garff
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. In this massive tome, Joakim Garff attempts to separate fact from fiction in the life of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. While Kierkegaard wrote a lot of works and pieces of philosophy, much of his personal life remained shrouded in mystery. Originally printed in Danish, this book was translated by Bruce Kirmmse. It was wonderfully researched and very thorough in scope. Alongside the text are several pictures and portraits done of Kierkegaard in various stages of life. The book was thoroughly researched, as I mentioned before, and contains references to all of Kierkegaard's extant works with some portions being cited to make his point. All in all, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a troubled man but wrote quite beautifully. At least, in my opinion, he was very skilled with language. Kierkegaard is a very interesting man, in that at times he was both heroic and at the time afraid. he has the courage to follow his passion, writing and at the same time runs from his passion for Regina. He had the courage and passion to question the church but not the courage to break away. he like many of us faced and ran from his demons. Soren Kiekegaard is not always the easiest writer to read. This biography, by an Associate Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, is not only a great biography, but also an excellent summary/introduction to the work of this mercurial and purposefully anbiguous philosopher. no reviews | add a review
"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." S©ıren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fianc©♭e Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)198.9Philosophy and Psychology Modern western philosophy Scandinavian philosophers DenmarkLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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However, where Garff lacks substance is where scholarship on Kierkegaard becomes more difficult (and more interesting). How does someone like S.K come to be? What are the thoughts of his which may have been left out of diary entries? What is his reflection upon his own scholarship, besides what he has put to print? Of course, there is a risk of inaccuracy in such speculative fumbling, and Garff's immaculate scholarship never takes such risks. I wonder about the irony in that.
Our unfortunate predicament is that such weighty scholarship (900 pages!) cannot be ignored. Garff has placed the academy in a kind of zugzwang, in which any repudiation would dampen all future scholarship, while any approbation will bind us to this mediocrity for perpetuity. Fortunately, we still have the Hong translations of the primary work. ( )