'Kierkegaard. The philosopher of anguish and seduction', by Joakim Garff: an intellectual walk through the thinker's Copenhagen

Portrait of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).WS Collection / Alamy

Some of my compatriots may think that Copenhagen is a small and boring city.

It seems to me, on the contrary, that, refreshed by the sea that borders it and unable to forget, even in winter, the memory of its beech forests, it is the happiest place I can imagine.

These words of love that Kierkegaard (1813-1855) dedicated to Copenhagen can be read in his essay

Stages on the Path of Life

(impeccable edition in Trotta) and are part of the bulk of passages that also mark his diaries: the chance of a description It is combined with the most intimate part of his personality, generating a more far-reaching reflection.

Kierkegaard loved Copenhagen and apparently knew his city like no one else, noticing details that most people overlooked.

The valuable thing about his writing, however, is not so much that reality provides his way of seeing literary material, but rather that it is his gaze that searches reality to test the scope of an aesthetic principle: a boat with a man standing in the stern, fishing for eels with a harpoon, the air suspended in the void of calm and a sky crossed with gray... Kierkegaard lived bewitched by situations that could concentrate something like a glimpse of the world.

And he toured the city in search of the necessary inspiration.

Her hunched figure was easily recognizable: her legs, so thin, her shoulders high, her head tilted forward, her original hairstyle, with a mound of hair on her forehead (like Larra) and the omnipresent umbrella that she moved, like an extension of his arm, in all directions.

Walking with him meant moving sideways so that he had enough space to move in any direction;

he was possessed by great nervousness.

In any case, his figure outlined an image ripe for caricature: everyone knew who Magister Kierkegaard was.

For better and for worse.

The exceptional biography of the philosopher written by theologian Joakim Garff (London, 1960) offers so many details of the life of the author of

The Concept of Anxiety

that reading it gives the sensation of carrying out a mental journey, sometimes excessive, to the world of philosopher, a big and small world, bitter and happy, radically original.

There are so many details that Garff accumulates that if Kierkegaard puts his foot in a lake we know the depth of the mud and how far his limb sinks.

All this thanks to the crossing of materials skillfully used by the biographer, from his essential diaries to the intense understanding of his literary work and the overwhelming information that his contemporaries poured, in one sense or another, on the character, aware of his intellectual relevance.

(I have not been able to help but remember with sadness that when the writer Enrique Gil y Carrasco died in Berlin, where he was sent by the Spanish government in 1844, no one was able to rescue his papers and personal belongings: there they remained, in suitcases today, definitively. lost).

Garff's status as a theologian is very useful to introduce us to what becomes a priority in his book: understanding Denmark at the beginning of the 19th century, when the country was bustling with religious movements that aspired to found congregations independent of the state Church and that They oscillated between a return to the strictest Lutheranism and the adaptation of the anticlerical ideals that came from France.

In the third part of the book, of the five that comprise it, we describe the complex relationship that Danish intellectuals maintained with each other.

They treated each other with courtesy, but their work tables were overflowing with manuscripts where they mercilessly slandered each other.

Kierkegaard threw himself into the controversies that he considered necessary, being the object of real outrage in the magazine

El Corsario

, a publication that minted all the poison of rivalry.

The bloodiest controversy began with a harsh review of one of the chapters of the

Stages on the Path of Life.

That ended very badly for all those involved - Poul Martin Møller, the director of

El Corsario,

and K himself - but it had an unfortunate consequence for the latter and that is that from 1846 onwards the perception of the city changed completely in relation to to the philosopher who had found in his Socratic wandering a support for his solitary life.

The caricatures that the magazine would publish, in the midst of mutual reproaches, resonated with Copenhagen residents, who no longer saw in K the eccentric thinker but rather a poor, ridiculous-looking man who had broken off a marriage commitment and could not get over it.

Everyone laughed at him and the young people shouted jovially:

pereat

(perish).

Copenhagen stopped being the beloved city and became “a bottomless, tiny, suffocating hole.”

For this and other reasons (his probable epilepsy) the philosopher aged rapidly, as if the relationship—Garff points out—between biological age and existential intensity were contrary to each other.

Which does not mean that he succumbed to citizen discredit.

The biographer, co-editor of his complete works, analyzes the subtle mechanics of the writings of a brilliant man who was the cradle of existentialism: “By virtue of reason and freedom, life is what has interested me most, clearing and resolving the “The enigma of life has always been my desire.”

One of his last books focused on despair, titled

The Mortal Disease,

addressing an apparently incomprehensible fact, that is, the human being's impulse to not want to be himself, abandoning himself to the indifferent void of the passage of time.

Life for K is a passion.

The author of

Either One Or The Other

(his best-selling book during his lifetime) died at the age of 43 from a generalized collapse.

Garff reconstructs his last weeks, almost day by day, and then continues with the story of the people close to him who survived him, his brother Peter Christian and Regine Olsen, the love of his life and to whom he, intimately , considered his wife.

She was the secret driving force of that passion.

An extraordinary book whose translation flows with great expressive naturalness.

Look for it in your bookstore

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