Short Life of Kierkegaard

Rating:
Summary: the dramatic life of an absorbing Dane
Review: Lowrie gives his version of Kierkegaard's life - the only version I really know. That said, his telling of the Kierkegaard story is supplemented by many quotations from Kierkegaard's journals and his books, many of which contained veiled autobiography.

Lowrie's assessment of Kierkegaard's motivations and his sense for the dramatic and important moments of this man's life is indisputable. By my understanding, Lowrie was primary in bringing Kierkegaard into the English language and the wider culture. Bravo, an excellent job which remains a worthwhile and engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: the dramatic life of an absorbing Dane
Review: Lowrie gives his version of Kierkegaard's life - the only version I really know. That said, his telling of the Kierkegaard story is supplemented by many quotations from Kierkegaard's journals and his books, many of which contained veiled autobiography.

Lowrie's assessment of Kierkegaard's motivations and his sense for the dramatic and important moments of this man's life is indisputable. By my understanding, Lowrie was primary in bringing Kierkegaard into the English language and the wider culture. Bravo, an excellent job which remains a worthwhile and engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: Marred by an untenable understanding of Kierkegaard's work
Review: Walter Lowrie was one of the two key early figures in Kierkegaard studies in the English-speaking world, along with David Swenson. Swenson, teaching at the University of Minnesota, achieved his influence in three ways: 1) important early essays that introduced many in the English speaking world to the thought of Kierkegaard for the first time (collected in the still interesting volume SOMETHING ABOUT KIERKEGAARD), 2) through his translations of some of Kierkegaard's most important works, notably the PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS and CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPTS, and 3) through two of his students, who have in turn exerted massive influence on Kierkegaard studies, Howard Hong and Paul Holmer. Hong and his wife have retranslated nearly all the works of Kierkegaard in a new edition available through Princeton University Press. Holmer, teaching first at the University of Minnesota and then for most of his career at the Yale University Divinity School, directed vastly more doctoral dissertations on Kierkegaard than anyone else.

Lowrie, on the other hand, has exerted his influence on Kierkegaard studies in two ways: his two biographies of Kierkegaard and his translations of most of his works. Swenson was a gifted and careful translator, with a profound knowledge of Danish and an appreciation for its subtleties. Lowrie, on the other hand, learned Danish very late in life. His work on Kierkegaard was, in fact, more or less his retirement project. Lowrie had been the minister of a large and prestigious church, and was quite well off financially through marriage. This is significant in that it allowed him, when he discovered references to Kierkegaard in the work of German theologians in his mid-sixties, to subsidize his own research into Kierkegaard. This meant not only going to Denmark to study Danish, but obtaining all the various editions of Kierkegaard's works in Danish, as well as all relevant contemporary works, many of which were not available in American research libraries. As a result, Lowrie was able to make possible a degree of Kierkegaard research in America that might otherwise have been impossible.

Unfortunately, Lowrie remained until the end merely a gifted amateur. He learned Danish, but was never its master, and his translations, as opposed to those of Swenson, were of a much lower quality than one might desire of a figure the stature of Kierkegaard. To be fair, Lowrie felt that the goal of the first generation of Kierkegaard scholars was to get SK's works out in the public as quickly as possible, and then let subsequent generations retranslate them. In effect, because of Swenson's unfortunately early death, this is what happened.

All of this is a long intro to say that both Lowrie's full length biography and this shorter version of the biography are well meaning but profoundly flawed books, and are not only unreliable guides to the thought of Kierkegaard but provide misleading ways of looking at Kierkegaard's work as a whole. For instance, Lowrie treats all of Kierkegaard's works as if their primary value is in illuminating the life of Kierkegaard than his thought. This is seen in the almost obsessive manner in which Lowrie continually relates every possible event in Kierkegaard's life to his broken engagement with Regina Olson. In fact, the broken engagement illumines surprisingly little of Kierkegaard's thought.

So, while I think that anyone studying Kierkegaard should feel the greatest appreciation of the debt we in the English-speaking world owe to Lowrie's pioneering efforts, both his biographies and his translations should be avoided. Unfortunately, we have yet to see the appearance in English of a truly first rate biography of Kierkegaard. Bruce Kirmmse's books are more narrowly focused but are otherwise superb (perhaps the finest works on Kierkegaard in English). Alastair Hannay has recently published a solid scholarly biography that is marred by a sometimes impenetrable, impossibly dry prose. Nonetheless, it can provide a far more reliable guide to Kierkegaard's life than this biography by Lowrie.