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Danish Scholar’s Review of Controversial Kierkegaard Biography

I’ve mentioned in several earlier posts that I am working on a book entitled Fear and Dissembling on the controversy surrounding Joakim Garff’s book Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton, 2005). It will begin with the initial reception of Garff’s book upon its publication in 2000 and then the controversy that arose in the summer of 2004 when another scholar, Peter Tudvad, exposed the book as riddled with factual errors and passages that had been plagiarized from earlier biographies of Kierkegaard. The book will be comprised primarily of English translations of articles from Danish newspapers. There were a couple of reviews, however, that appeared in scholarly journals. I’ve translated both of them and have received permission from the authors to publish excerpts from them on this blog. What follows are a three sections excerpted from a review of by the Danish scholar Johan de Mylius, of the University of Southern Denmark, that appeared in the journal Nordika vol. 19 (2002). De Mylius’ review was written before the revelations about the errors and plagiarisms were made public in the summer of 2004, so the review takes no account of them, but comments on what the reviewer sees as the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the work. The parenthetical references are to the English translations of the biography and the wording of passages de Mylius quotes directly is also taken from the this translation.

Kierkegaard scholarship has gotten a spectacular center in Copenhagen. The primary purpose of the center is the production of the new edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works and papers–on the basis of which this fat biography, Joakim Garff’s bestseller, SAK, was produced. But Kierkegaard scholarship as such has for many years had its center, at least in a purely quantitative sense, elsewhere. This is easily established by a glance an the annual Kierkegaard Newsletter, edited by Julia Watkin (formerly of Copenhagen University, now at the University of Tasmania). As far as the number of books and articles, as well as seminars and conferences on Kierkegaard, the U.S.A. is clearly in the lead by a large margin, with several other nations also performing admirably in this competition.

It is thus a little strange to see how this sizeable new biography of Kierkegaard leaves international Kierkegaard research out of its frame of reference. It can’t be because Garff is unfamiliar with this research. Of course he is familiar with it. There is not a single reference, however, in the entire biography to a work published outside Denmark.

The result is that obvious presuppositions for Garff’s own, predominantly esthetic view of Kierkegaard go unmentioned. This is the case, for example, with respect to Theodor W. Adorno’s famous book Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (1993) [Kierkegaard Construction of the Aesthetic] and Louis Mackey’s Kierkegaard, A Kind of Poet (1971), but also with other important books. References to Josiah Thompson’s biography of Kierkegaard from 1973 as well as his Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays (1972), another anthology, Kierkegaard vivant (1966), […] and Sylvia Walsh’s Living Poetically (1994) are conspicuous by their absence.

[….]

The entire biography is actually written in journalistic style. It is lively, often detailed and entertaining. Occasionally, however, the language becomes painfully overwrought as is the case when Garff writes of Johanne Luise Heiberg that she was “a goddess sprung from the proletariat, who, at the age of thirteen had become the object of [Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s] distinguished erotic lust and who was now undisputedly the leading lady of the Danish stage, the dazzling, bespangled muse of the age. Everyone admired her, worshipped her and fell in love with her so thunderously and passionately that they became profoundly depressed, or even–in keeping with the tragic style of the day–committed suicide” (68)(as if there at other times had been cheerful suicide!). It is not surprising that this sort of literary style would involve even the Olympian Goethe being referred to as “in” (74). The objective would appear to be to encourage the poor unprepared reader to tolerate, and even to accept, the view that it is “in” to read about Kierkegaard.

[….]

The biggest problem is that even though Garff wants his approach to Kierkegaard to be aesthetic, he has little to offer when it comes to the literature of the period, the literature which Kierkegaard as a writer plays up against.  One gets no sense of Kierkegaard as a figure in the literary world of the day, with roots in the period that is often referred to as post-romanticism. What was actually going on in Danish literature at that point? And how did Kierkegaard conceive of his role in these developments? To the extent that the literary world is brought in at all, the issue always concerns Kierkegaard’s personal relationships to literary figures. That is too little, that is journalism on the level of BT[1] rather than of a literary biography.

This is only a small portion of the review. The entire review will appear in Fear and Dissembling: The Copenhagen Kierkegaard Controversy (Gegensatz Press, forthcoming).

[1] BT is a Danish tabloid newspaper.

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Hilarious History of Western Philosophy!

Anthony Kenny has an excellent review of three books on religion and “the new atheism” in the July 22 TLS. He devotes most of his attention, and praise, to Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (Saint Augustine Press, 2010). Feser apparently thinks philosophy took a wrong turn in the Renaissance when it abandoned Aristotle (a view that has been increasing in popularity since Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue). Since one can’t assume that the average TLS reader is going to know enough about the history of philosophy to be able to follow Kenny’s commentary on Feser’s thesis, Kenny opens his review with an absolutely hilarious “master-narative” of the history of philosophy. The narrative, according to Kenny, goes something like this:

[P]hilosophy was started in the ancient world by Plato and Aristotle, who were not bad philosophers considering how long ago they lived. Once the Western world became Christian, however, philosophy went into hibernation for many centuries, and saw as its only task to write footnotes to Aristotle. Some of the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages were clever chaps, but they wasted their talents on logical quibbles and pettifogging distinctions. It was only when Aristotle’s metaphysics was thrown over in the Renaissance that philosophy got into its stride again, and renewed its connection with scientific inquiry. Descartes showed that the way to understand the material universe was to treat it as a conglomeration of purposeless material objects operating according to blind laws: there was no need for Aristotle’s final causes. While Descartes was a rationalist, a succession of philosophers writing in English, from Hobbes to Hume, showed that it was sensory experience, not reason, that was the basis of all our knowledge. Kant and his German Idealist followers introduced a degree of obfuscation into philosophy, from which Continental philosophy has never totally recovered. But in Britain and America in the twentieth century, philosophy re-emerged into the daylight with the logical empiricism of brilliant minds like A.J. Ayer.

Feser, Kenny explains “rightly rejects this story. …. It was the abandonment of Aristotelianism,” Kenny continues, paraphrasing Feser, “that threw up the pseudo-problems that still haunt us.” These problems include, according to Feser, the mind-body problem, the problem of induction, and the problem of personal identity. The book sounds promising, though Kenny concludes that the negative arguments are more successful than the positive one. It sounds as if it would be a good read for Kierkegaard scholars though because not only is the general defense of religion relevant to almost any serious work on Kierkegaard (independently of which side of the debate one comes down on), but also because Kierkegaard is a thoroughly teleological thinker as my friend Anthony Rudd argues in a really excellent forthcoming piece on Kierkegaard’s Platonic teleology, so any work that examines the advantages of a teleological interpretation of reality is worth a read!

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Kierkegaard as Psychologist: On Passion

It never rains but it pours, eh. No posts here for quite a while and then two in rapid succession. The thing is, I came across an article on positive psychology that I thought would be of interest to Kierkegaard people, so I thought I would pass it along via this blog. The article is “What about Passion?” by Kathryn Britton and its on the Positive Psychology News Daily website. Dr. Robert Vallerand, the incoming president of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) defines passion, according to Britton, as “a strong inclination towards a self-defining activity that people love, that they consider important, and in which they devote significant amounts of time and energy.”

All passions, Dr Vallerand explains however, are not created equal. There are what he calls “harmonious passions” and “obsessive passions.” “Harmonious passions” are defined as “freely chosen for the pleasure that comes from the activity, a concept very similar to intrinsic motivation. Harmonious passion is characterized by autonomy and flexible persistence. People pursue these activities because they want to, not because they want to please someone else or outshine someone else or avoid being outshone.”  “Obsessive passions,” on the other hand, are defined as “connected to extrinsic motivations — wanting to please others or to maintain a certain status that is important to self-esteem.” Not surprisingly, harmonious passions tend to have a positive effect on the development of the self and obsessive passions tend to have a negative effect.

What is missing from Britton’s article is any discussion of whether the passions in question actually differ from each other as passions, or whether it isn’t merely the objects that determine whether the passion in question is positive or negative. This is an issue for Kierkegaard as well. Kierkegaard tends to extol  passion in general as prerequisite to becoming a Christian, or a fully developed self in the positive sense. His emphasis is on the object of one’s passion rather on the nature of the passion itself. I’ve heard Kierkegaard scholars debate the issue, however, of whether there could actually be positive versus negative passions along the lines suggested by Vallerand, and apparently others in the positive psychology movement.

I’m inclined to agree with Kierkegaard here. If you look at the description above of the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion you’ll see a conspicuous difference in the objects relative to each. The objects of harmonious passions are pursued for their own sake whereas the objects of obsessive passions are pursued as a means to some other end (e.g., wealth, fame, etc.).

Another way of putting this would be to say that the real object of an obsessive passion is not the apparent object, but is the end with respect to which the apparent object is only a means. That is, someone with an obsessive passion for playing the violin well, would really be pursing wealth or fame rather than the art of violin playing. Kierkegaard would argue, of course, that wealth or fame are simply not adequate objects on which to base one’s passion and that’s why a passion for them is going have a negative effect on the development of the self.

Still, I think the question of whether there is actually some kind of difference in these passions as passions is an interesting one. It might help to explain, for example, why some people seem constitutionally predisposed to base their passions on one sort of object or the other. The explanation may not lie in the nature of the passion in question, but in some other aspect of the self. Still, it is a very interesting issue and I thought Kierkegaard people might want to read the article.

I found the article, by the way, through a tweet. Yes, that’s right, I’m on Twitter now. I kept seeing articles about how great Twitter was and then a friend recommended I check it out, so I did. You should try it to if you haven’t yet. You don’t have to tweet yourself, you can just follow other people or organizations. There are some very good philosophical tweeters. Just type “philosophy” into the search box on the “who should I follow” screen and all kinds of interesting things will come up.

I won’t be doing another post on Tudvad’s book for a while because I’m behind on Fear and Dissembling. I’m not taking a hiatus from blogging though. My next post will simply be an excerpt from FD. I’ve translated quite a few interesting articles already, so I’ll take a part of one of those to and throw it up as a little “smagsprøve” as they say in Danish. I’d like to take this opportunity, as well, to thank all the many authors who’ve given me permission to reprint their articles. Not a single author I’ve approached has refused. I’m very grateful to them all!