who have dealt biographically with Kierkegaard (Anything at all, but please
notthat!) and for decades there has been something close to a systematic
exorcism of the man from his work. The typical introduction to Kierke-
gaard presents what writers prefer, with unmistakable condescension, to call
the private person Kierkegaardas a sort of eccentric appendix to a brilliant
oeuvre. The cause of this is not merely the circumstance that Kierkegaard
distanced himself from his pseudonymous writings and that he requested,
furthermore, that his readers not direct their curiosity to his person. Clearly,
an additional contributing factor has been the concern of later generations
that a biographical presentation ultimately leads to banal reductionism in
which theological and philosophical problems are linked to the author’s
repressions, to oedipal conflicts, or to fateful encounters with cold chamber
pots in the middle of the night.
This aversion to biography is paradoxical when applied to an author who
not only thought—and wrote—himself into his works, but was also fully
satisfied that his “existence” was the “most interesting existence of any au-
thor in Denmark,” and thatthis was whyhe would be “read and studied in
the future.” In the same vein (and with a very un-Danish self-conscious-
ness), he wrote the following words in November 1847: “And therefore
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.” At first,
however, this prophetic vision did not come to much, as can been seen in
the example of Hans Brøchner, who had had the misfortune to promise an
acquaintance a few lines about Kierkegaard’s life and personality, but then
fell into a biographical panic: “When one restricts oneself to external events,
there is of course very little that can be said about his life at all. He was born
May 5, 1813; he became a student at the university in 1830; he took his
degree in theology in 1840; he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1841; and
he died in 1855. These are of course more or less all the external facts of a
biographical nature that can be provided, and they are not interesting. His
inner life, his personal development, was certainly a great deal richer, but
it has left its impression in his writings, and the finest contents of that inner
life are certainly to be found in these writings.” This is how one writes a
very skimpy biography.
Israel Levin, who had served as Kierkegaard’s secretary for years, surveyed
the problem from the opposite side—absolutely from within, so to speak—
but he, too, found the prospect of a Kierkegaard biography no less suspect
than did Brøchner: “Anyone who wants to deal with Søren Kierkegaard’s
life must take care not to burn his fingers: This is a life so full of contradic-
tions that it will be difficult to get to the bottom of his character. He often
refers to double reflections; all his own words were more than sevenfoldxx {Preface}