INCOMMENSURABILITY.(Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography)(Book Review)

Joakim Garff, an associate professor at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, in a brief preface to his monumental "Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography" (translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse; Princeton; $35), states that "the Danish biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes's critical portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Johannes Hohlenberg's biography from 1940 is the most recent original work in the field." Garff's compendious yet lively work is undeniably a Danish biography; it assumes on the part of its readers a prior acquaintance with, say, the poetry of Adam Oehlenschlager and the intellectuality of King Christian VIII, a firm sense of what the rix-dollar could buy in the eighteen-forties, and a Copenhagener's inherent familiarity with the saga of his world-famous, locally notorious fellow-townsman Magister Soren Aabye Kierkegaard.

The Kierkegaardian tempest needed Copenhagen's teapot. In the years of the great Dane's short and not entirely unhappy life, from 1813 to 1855, Copenhagen still had its medieval walls and numbered about a hundred and twenty-five thousand residents--one resident for every three of this exhaustive tome's nearly four hundred thousand words. Kierkegaard was born in the little city and died there, and left Denmark only five times, once, on a day trip, to Sweden, and repeatedly to Berlin, where, after an initial sojourn spent attending lectures, he usually holed up in rented rooms and relentlessly wrote. Though he complained of "the costly amusement . . . of being an author in Denmark," he left a rapturous page of praise for the Danish language, "a language that understands jest fully as well as earnestness; a mother tongue that captivates its children with a chain that 'is easy to bear, yes, but hard to break!' " What he wrote about, in a dozen hectic years, under his own name and a welter of pseudonyms, was himself, a singular being tricked up in many alter egos and attacked from many angles, not only examined but cross-examined, an intricately guilty defendant on trial. One wonders if Kierkegaard could have found his existence so absorbingly important if he had been born into a larger city, where the edges of his ego might have frayed into the general fabric of indifference. A satirical caricature in the Copenhagen magazine The Corsair, published at the height of his local celebrity, shows him standing at the center of a revolving belt of stars, everyday objects, prominent Copenhagen structures, and the sun itself. The caption reads:

There are moments when one's ideas become confused and one thinks that Nicolas Copernicus was a fool when he maintained that the earth revolved around the sun. On the contrary, the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe, and Copenhagen revolve around Soren Kierkegaard, who stands silently in the center and does not even remove his hat for the honor being shown him.

This was no joke; Kierkegaard's great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. He offered himself as a corrective to idealism, from Plato to Hegel:

Now if we assume that abstract thought is the highest manifestation of human activity, it follows that philosophy and the philosophers proudly desert existence, leaving the rest of us to face the worst.

Garff's "labor of love," as he calls it, not only describes the claustral, interlaced coziness of Kierkegaard's milieu but partakes of it. Though assiduous in setting forth, year by year, in many short chapters, the facts, from the philosopher's Jutland ancestors and the variant spellings of his family name to the forlorn auction inventory of his bachelor estate, Garff has a voice of his own--an "informal style and conversational tone," to quote his translator. Garff's informal voice enlists us in the village gossip of Kierkegaard's time. Of his subject at the age of twenty-two, he tells us, "Everyone could see that Soren Aabye needed a change of atmosphere both mentally and physically. He had to get out of town." Johanne Luise Patges, the wife of the influential litterateur and tastemaker Johan Ludvig Heiberg, is cattily described as "a goddess sprung from the proletariat, who at the age of thirteen had become the object of his distinguished erotic lust and who was now indisputably the leading lady of the Danish stage, the dazzling, bespangled muse of the age." When Kierkegaard, as a young divinity student, is introduced into the Heibergs' circle, we are assured that "the contrast between the pietistic Moravian ...