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Kierkegaard has not been well served by his English-language biographers. Walter Lowrie wrote two early biographies, one immense and full of long quotations from Kierkegaard's as yet untranslated works, and later the much-read and much-loved A Short Life of Kierkegaard. Though not completely uncritical (as a cleric Lowrie could hardly fully endorse Kierkegaard's later attack on the church), Lowrie's works are today often dismissed, too hastily in my view, as hagiography, since he certainly loved Kierkegaard and generally puts the best face possible on the famous episodes in Kierkegaard's life. Josiah Thompson swung to the other extreme in his biography The Lonely Labyrinth, debunking many of Lowrie's views and generally viewing with suspicion almost every claim Kierkegaard made about himself and his own work. (Thompson's suspicious nature ran deep; after writing his work on Kierkegaard he left academe and became a private investigator, author of Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, and a prominent controversialist about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.)
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It is therefore noteworthy that two new biographies have appeared in the last several years: Alastair Hannay's Kierkegaard: A Biography, and Joakim Garff's much-praised Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, translated from the Danish. Both books are the result of many years of work on Kierkegaard, and both have much to offer the reader. Neither, however, will supplant Walter Lowrie as my first recommendation for someone interested in Kierkegaard's life. Kierkegaard is still waiting for his ideal biographer.
Hannay, a British philosopher born to Scottish parents, spent most of his career teaching in Norway. He was a pioneer in studying Kierkegaard using the tools of analytical philosophy, author or editor of several important works, and has done a series of readable translations of Kierkegaard for Penguin Books. The current book aspires to be, in Hannay's own words, an "intellectual biography," one that looks to the life to help us understand the works and to the works for help in understanding the life. The twin focus gives Hannay's work a lot of its strength; each work of Kierkegaard that is discussed appears in the context of Kierkegaard's own personal struggles, and Kierkegaard's life does offer new angles for understanding those works. Hannay is generally careful to avoid the fallacy of assuming that the biographical context of a work exhausts its meaning, and he is certainly knowledgeable about both the works and the life.
Nevertheless, I found Hannay's book unsatisfying, for two odd reasons. The first stems from one of Hannay's virtues as a philosopher: his ability to see complexity and nuance. This philosophical strength, however, leads to a weakness in the book: Hannay poses multiple possibilities for understanding the episodes of Kierkegaard's life but often finds himself paralyzed when he considers them. Too often the reader is left guessing where Hannay stands himself. One might think that this is a virtue, since Hannay is granting the reader the freedom to make his or her own decisions about the subject, but given that the reader is unlikely to know as much as Hannay himself, the indecisiveness of the author tends to be conveyed to the reader. Frequently the reader discovers that "it is possible that Kierkegaard thought such and such" or that "Kierkegaard might have been motivated by this or that" or simply that "in the end it is unclear" what Kierkegaard was up to. Perhaps Hannay here simply reflects the undecidability that inheres in actual human beings, but it leads to frustration for the reader who longs to know Kierkegaard better, or who at least longs for a vigorous portrait from Hannay with which to interact.
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