Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week we're going to be talking about the third most famous Dane in history after

Hamlet and Scooby-Doo, Soren Kierkegaard.

I'm joined by Claire Carlisle, who's the author of a new book, Philosopher of the Heart, The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. I'm joined by Claire Carlisle, who's the author of a new book,

Philosopher of the Heart, the Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. Claire, welcome.

Now, to most of us, Kierkegaard is someone who maybe we've encountered an undergraduate level

in a, you know, Penguin Classics edition of Fear and Trembling, and that's about as far as we go. Is that the sort of heart of his work?

I mean, it's a big question to ask you to sum up straight away, but, you know,

what's the nub of why Kierkegaard's important?

Well, he's often seen as the first existentialist philosopher, or the father of existentialism.

But as the title of my book suggests, he was called by his contemporaries the philosopher of the heart.

And what that means is that he really directed his philosophical attention to the inner life of human beings,

the human condition, as lived from the inside.

And that's really, that focus on the heart and on the experience of being human is what

is very distinctive about him.

And it's the reason why his writings have touched so many people.

I mean, they've been translated into all sorts of different languages.

And that focus on the human condition and the experience of anxiety and despair and hope

and all the other aspects of being human has fed into the existential tradition,

but it's also done more than that, particularly in the way he is a great critic of religion, but also he's still exploring human

spirituality.

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