Volume 11, Tome III: Kierkegaard's Influence on Philosophy: Anglophone Philosophy (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) [1 ed.] 9781409440550, 9781138279070, 1409440559

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Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy Tome III: Anglophone Philosophy

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Volume 11, Tome III

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources is a publication of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

General Editor Jon Stewart Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Editorial Board FINN GREDAL JENSEN Katalin Nun peter Šajda Advisory Board Lee c. barrett maría j. binetti IstvÁn CzakÓ Heiko Schulz curtis l. thompson

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy Tome III: Anglophone Philosophy

Edited by JOn Stewart

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 Jon Stewart and the contributors Jon Stewart has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on philosophy – Anglophone philosophy. Tome 3. – (Kierkegaard research ; v. 11) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855 – Influence. 2. Philosophy, Modern – 19th century. 3. Philosophy, Modern – 20th century. I. Series II. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) 198.9-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on philosophy : Anglophone philosophy / [edited by] Jon Stewart. p. cm. — (Kierkegaard research ; v. 11, t. 3) Includes indexes. ISBN 978-1-4094-4055-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855— Influence. 2. Philosophers–English-speaking countries. 3. Philosophy—English-speaking countries. I. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) B4377.K5125 2011 198’.9—dc23 2011030813 ISBN 9781409440550 (hbk) ISBN 9781138279070 (pbk) Cover design by Katalin Nun

Contents List of Contributors   List of Abbreviations   O.K. Bouwsma:   Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Conceptual Clarity Ronald E. Hustwit Sr.

vii ix

1

Stanley Cavell:   The Sublimity of the Pedestrian Joseph Westfall11 Paul de Man:   The Unwritten Chapter J.D. Mininger

29

Hubert Dreyfus:   Seeking the Self in a Nihilistic Age Joseph Westfall

49

Paul Edwards:   A Rationalist Critic of Kierkegaard’s Theory of Truth Timothy J. Madigan

71

William James:   Living Forward and the Development of Radical Empiricism J. Michael Tilley87 Walter Kaufmann:   “That Authoritarian,” “That Individual” Andrew D. Spear99 Alasdair MacIntyre:   A Continuing Conversation Anthony Rudd

117

Iris Murdoch:   Kierkegaard as Existentialist, Romantic, Hegelian, and Problematically Religious Paul Martens135

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D.Z. Phillips:   Grammar and the Reality of God Jamie Turnbull

157

Richard Rorty:   Kierkegaard in the Context of Neo-Pragmatism J. Aaron Simmons

177

Gillian Rose:   Making Kierkegaard Difficult Again Vincent Lloyd

203

Charles Taylor:   Taylor’s Affinity to Kierkegaard Abrahim H. Khan

219

Index of Persons 231 Index of Subjects237

List of Contributors Ronald E. Hustwit Sr., Philosophy Department, The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691, USA. Abrahim H. Khan, Trinity College, University of Toronto, 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1H8, Canada. Vincent Lloyd, Department of Religious Studies, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 4089, Atlanta, GA 30302-4089, USA. Timothy J. Madigan, Department of Philosophy, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY 14618, USA. Paul Martens, Department of Religion, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97284, Waco, TX 76798-7284, USA. J.D. Mininger, Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy, Vytautas Magnus University, K. Donelaicio g. 58, LT-44248 Kaunas, Lithuania. Anthony Rudd, Department of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. J. Aaron Simmons, Department of Philosophy, 3300 Poinsett Highway, Furman University, Greenville, SC 29613, USA. Andrew D. Spear, Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. J. Michael Tilley, Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. Jamie Turnbull, Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. Joseph Westfall, Department of Social Sciences, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, TX 77002, USA.

List of Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations B&A

Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953–54.

Bl.art. S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, ed. by Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. EP

Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, vols. 1–9, ed. by H.P. Barfod and Hermann Gottsched, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869–81.

Pap.

Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968–78.

SKS

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, vols. K1–K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997ff.

SV1

Samlede Værker, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and H.O. Lange, vols. I–XIV, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1901– 06. English Abbreviations

AN

Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

AR

On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955.

ASKB

The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.

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BA

The Book on Adler, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

C

The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CA

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

CD

Christian Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CI

The Concept of Irony, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

CIC

The Concept of Irony, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966.

COR

The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUP1

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUP2

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUPH Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. EO1

Either/Or, Part I, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EO2

Either/Or, Part II, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EOP

Either/Or, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1992.

EPW

Early Polemical Writings, among others: From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

List of Abbreviations

xi

FSE

For Self-Examination, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

FT

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

FTP

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1985.

JC

Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

JFY

Judge for Yourself!, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (vol. 7, Index and Composite Collation), Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967–78.

KAC

Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944.

KJN

Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007ff.

LD

Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

LR

A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001.

M

The Moment and Late Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

P

Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

PC

Practice in Christianity, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.

PF

Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

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PJ

Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996.

PLR

Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require, trans. by William McDonald, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1989.

PLS

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941.

PV

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

PVL

The Point of View for My Work as an Author including On My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York and London: Oxford University Press 1939.

R

Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

SBL

Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988.

SUD

The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

SUDP The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London and New York: Penguin Books 1989. TA

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

TD

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

UD

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

WA

Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion

List of Abbreviations

xiii

on Fridays, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. WL

Works of Love, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.

WS

Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

O.K. Bouwsma: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Conceptual Clarity Ronald E. Hustwit Sr.

I. Oets Kolk Bouwsma, an American philosopher, was born of Dutch-American parents in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1898. He was educated at Calvin College and at the University of Michigan. In his early years he was an advocate of idealism, but later found the work of George Edward Moore (1873–1958) with his commonsense counters to skepticism more appealing. Still, he was critical of Moore. He developed his own technique of analysis that focused on uncovering hidden analogies driving Moore’s ways of speaking about sense-data. He worked intensely on Moore, publishing a significant paper, “Moore’s Theory of Sense-Data,” which was eventually included in The Library of Living Philosophers volume on Moore.1 The essay reflected the beginnings of his unique method of philosophical analysis. Engaged in Moore’s philosophy, Bouwsma sent students from the University of Nebraska to study with Moore at Cambridge. These students became students of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) as well as of G.E. Moore, and introduced Bouwsma to Wittgenstein’s revolutionary ideas set down in The Blue Book. With a leave from the University of Nebraska, in 1949, and a Fulbright Fellowship, he was able to spend much of the next two years discussing philosophy with Wittgenstein. Through Wittgenstein, Bouwsma developed a unique method of philosophical analysis that he applied to a variety of philosophical problems. This method probed the sentences of philosophers by carefully and often humorously comparing those sentences with actual sentences of daily life—earning Bouwsma a notable place in what came to be called “ordinary language philosophy.” On the basis of this reputation, Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) asked Bouwsma to deliver the first of the famous John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. In addition to Wittgenstein, his reading of and work on Kierkegaard was the other great influence in Bouwsma’s philosophical development. He began reading Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “Moore’s Theory of Sense-Data,” in The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, ed. by Paul Arthur, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and London: Cambridge University Press 1942 (The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 4), pp. 203–21.

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Kierkegaard early in his philosophical career as he broke his engagement with the idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924). He came to understand the significance of Kierkegaard’s concept of “subjectivity” for thinking philosophically about Christianity. On the one hand, “subjectivity” points to understanding the language of religion in the context of particular religious communities—an idea parallel to Wittgenstein’s idea of understanding words and sentences in language-games and forms of life. On the other hand, “subjectivity” makes clear that Christianity is an invitation to new life and not an objective system of metaphysics. Bouwsma’s papers on topics in the philosophy of religion, all reflecting his life-long reading of Kierkegaard, are collected separately in a volume with the title, Without Proof or Evidence.2 Bouwsma taught philosophy at the University of Nebraska from 1928 until 1965, and, after retiring there, at the University of Texas from 1965 until 1977. His influence came through his humorously and finely written essays, through the many graduate students he trained, and through the many professional philosophers who discussed philosophy with him. He served as President of the American Philosophical Association, was a Fulbright Lecturer at Oxford, delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at Oxford, and presented numerous invited lectures in the United States and Great Britain. He published only one book himself—a collection of essays titled Philosophical Essays.3 He died in 1978. His journals, covering his entire philosophical life from 1925 to 1977 and filling hundreds of legal pads, are housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas, Austin. J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit Sr. co-edited and published two additional volumes of his papers, Toward a New Sensibility4 and Without Proof or Evidence, and several volumes of his selected journals. The journals recording his discussions with Wittgenstein, published with the title, Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949–51, have become a primary source for Wittgenstein studies.5 II. As the young Bouwsma found difficulties with F.H. Bradley’s idealism, he soon began reading Kierkegaard with interest. Unlike Moore, whose objections to idealism lay in religiously neutral “common sense,” Kierkegaard offered a critique of Hegelian idealism from the point of view of a Christian who wanted to keep his Christianity while ridding it of misunderstandings. As his unique method of ordinary language analysis developed, Bouwsma focused on exposing the illusions of metaphysics. In

Oets Kolk Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evidence: Essays of O.K. Bouwsma, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1984. 3 Oets Kolk Bouwsma, Philosophical Essays, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1965. 4 Oets Kolk Bouwsma, Toward A New Sensibility: Essays of O.K. Bouwsma, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1982. 5 Oets Kolk Bouwsma, Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949–51, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company 1986. 2

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Kierkegaard, he found a partner from the nineteenth century, who conceived his task as dispelling the illusion that philosophy laid over Christianity. Without Proof or Evidence, a collection of Bouwsma’s papers on religious themes, reflect a hard-won understanding of Kierkegaard’s thought. Bouwsma was not so much a Kierkegaard scholar, as one who thought through Kierkegaard, appropriating him in his thinking on issues in the philosophy of religion. He wrote several essays about Kierkegaard’s work, hundreds of pages of notebook entries that he distributed to his graduate seminars, repeatedly referred to Kierkegaard in his published papers, and continually attempted to articulate what Kierkegaard’s essential task was and how it affected his own work. He regularly taught graduate seminars and directed doctoral dissertations on Kierkegaard’s thought, influencing a generation of college and university philosophy professors. In a paper directly on Kierkegaard—“Kierkegaard’s Monstrous Illusion”— Bouwsma offers a remark comparing Kierkegaard’s task to Wittgenstein’s.6 Both, he thought, were concerned to remove illusions of understanding. Wittgenstein’s task was to remove the illusions of metaphysics arising from misunderstanding the nature of language. The illusions of metaphysics, created by ordinary words used in extraordinary ways, are removed by returning the words to their ordinary uses. Kierkegaard’s comparable task, according to Bouwsma, was to remove the illusion of understanding Christianity created by the reduction of the language of Christianity to the philosophical language of Hegelian idealism and historicism. Kierkegaard’s task was made more difficult by the lazy acceptance of Christian concepts that had also lulled the pew Christian to sleep. For his task of removing the philosophical illusions of Christianity, Kierkegaard proposed returning to the language of Scripture and faith—the “ordinary language” of Christianity—as the source of meaning of Christian concepts. But in the Scriptures, of course, the language is based upon what Kierkegaard calls the “absolute Paradox”: God in history. Hence the language must be understood subjectively rather than objectively. That is, the philosopher is directed to understand the language in the life of the Christian who worships, prays, confesses sins, and serves the poor. Here is the comparison of Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein in Bouwsma’s own words: So there is an analogy in what we may describe as the logical aspects of these investigations. There is illusion in both cases. The task in both cases is conceived of as that of dispelling illusions. The illusion is in both cases one of misunderstanding certain language….In the work of Wittgenstein there is ordinary language we understand. That ordinary language is related to words or expressions that give us trouble. In ordinary language we discover the corrective of the language which expresses the confusion. In the work of Kierkegaard there corresponds to ordinary language in Wittgenstein the language of Scripture which Kierkegaard understands….But Kierkegaard’s task is in that way more formidable. He has first to teach us how to understand the language of Scripture.7

Ibid., p. 46. Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “Notes on Kierkegaard’s ‘The Monstrous Illusion,’ ” in Without Proof or Evidence, pp. 43–87, see p. 85.

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The papers of Without Proof or Evidence, then, center on the idea of the language of Scriptures as the focus of philosophical thinking about Christianity. Further, this central theme is one that connects directly to Bouwsma’s understanding of Kierkegaard. In 1969 he was asked to deliver the Howard W. Heintz Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona. In the letter of invitation it was proposed that he give “some impression of how a philosopher in the Wittgenstein tradition might go about ‘doing philosophy’ in this area [philosophy of religion].”8 He gave the paper the title “The Invisible.”9 “The Invisible” refers to God and is an allusion taken from the eleventh chapter of Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.”10 He began, “There is no subject more bewildering and more frustrating than the subject of religion or, as in the present circumstances, than Christianity. And this is because of the role of the Scriptures. I might say that this is because we do not know how to read the Scriptures….”11 The remainder of the lecture is about reading the Scriptures, the role of the Scriptures in the Christian community, and the role of the Scriptures in understanding Christianity. Throughout the paper, Bouwsma developed the idea that reading and understanding the Scriptures is something more difficult than we had imagined. Philosophers, those who understand the Scriptures as containing language of information about the universe—a kind of “hyper-metaphysical revelation,”12 are under an illusion of understanding. They, if friendly, provide organization and interpretation of that information that is compatible with some philosophical theory. Philosophical confusions follow from the illusion of understanding language. But the language is not what it seems. Bouwsma urges the reader to consider the language of the Scripture as something quite different than it seems. Surprising sentences follow to get the reader to reconsider and attend to the misunderstanding: “God does not speak or write English or any other earthly language, no matter how much like English or any other language the language of Scripture looks and sounds like English.”13 “I think I had better say that we cannot say what understanding the Scriptures is.”14 “I meant also to insist that God in this book, or God speaking through this book, requires of men a special reading, and that this, particularly among the learned, the wise in this world, involves a constant struggle against habits of mind and understanding.”15 The theme of our not understanding the language of Scripture is not limited to this paper. He attributes the project of rethinking the language of Scriptures to Kierkegaard: If we regard Wittgenstein as teaching us how to read, and of course, not only how to read, but to speak as well, reading and discussing philosophy, we may in the same way, Letter from the department chair at the University of Arizona, dated 1969, inviting Bouwsma to present the Howard W. Hintz Memorial Lecture. See Bouwsma’s Collected Papers, the University of Texas at Austin, box 36, pad 8.3. 9 Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “The Invisible,” in Without Proof or Evidence, pp. 26–39. 10 Ibid., p. 27. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 31. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 30. 15 Ibid., p. 33. 8

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or in a similar way, regard Kierkegaard as teaching us how to read and discuss the Scriptures. There are in both cases illusions of intelligibility….16

Here is a longer quotation from Bouwsma’s “The Invisible” in which he directly identifies his understanding of Kierkegaard’s mission as teaching a return to the language of the Scriptures. Above in this paragraph, he has already made the surprising remark that God does not speak or write English: I have already suggested that we do not know how to read [the Scriptures]. By this I do not mean that we open the book, try to read, discover that we cannot, and then close the book. This we might do, were we to open a book in a foreign language…. Our troubles are of another kind. We open the book. We read. The words are familiar. We are well acquainted with the whole book, perhaps too well acquainted. Kierkegaard writes of obtaining, “a little peace for the weary Christian terminology, a rest of which it may stand greatly in need, unfathomable and calmly profound as it is in itself, but made breathless and almost unmeaning in current usage….Christianity tossed about and perplexed in current speech.” So we read and understand—so we think. If then, we do not understand, we must consider how this can be, that we should read a book with which we could scarcely be more familiar….17

With Kierkegaard “the weary peace” for Christian terminology was peace from the turmoil Hegel introduced to it. Hegel damaged the language of the Scriptures: “incarnation,” “creation,” “sin,” even “God.” For Hegel, that language was the mythical expression of his philosophy, thus reducing it to points in his phenomenology of spirit. The Incarnation, for example, reduces to the appearance of self-consciousness in human history, and so on. Bouwsma saw Kierkegaard’s writing as a corrective to this and similar reductionism. Kierkegaard believed that he could not simply return to the language of creation, fall, redemption, and the like, for it was precisely this language that Hegel abused. So Bouwsma read Kierkegaard seeking to return to a primitive reading of the Scriptures—one that found the Scriptures in a state prior to their Hegelian reading. This primitive reading required an account of the Scriptures, particularly the Gospels, in which their common language and that of the church creeds, are circumvented. Kierkegaard provides freshened language: “the Teacher,” “the occasion,” “the moment,” “the Truth,” “the absolute Paradox,” and so on. Though not the language of the Gospels, the language of the Philosophical Fragments is a careful re-presentation of the Gospels. The freshened language highlights the paradoxical nature of Christianity, as contrasted with Hegelian philosophical overlay complete with its reductions, arguments, and historical evidence. Kierkegaard’s language contrasts Socrates to Christ, philosophical truth to revelation, philosophy to faith. Bouwsma’s Kierkegaard notices the difference: the language of faith is not the language of philosophy. Bouwsma’s Kierkegaard strove to show the difference, not just between Hegelian philosophy and Christianity, but between philosophy in general and Christianity. Bouwsma sometimes cast this as the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. 16 17

Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 27.

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Objectivity involves developing hypotheses, collecting evidence, and holding beliefs at arm’s length until one has justification for accepting them. Objectivity is the method of science, but it is also the method of philosophical theory-making as well. Subjectivity, by contrast, attends to one’s manner of life. Does that life reflect the beliefs to which one assents? Christianity cannot exist in the objective mode. It cannot be proved or explained with philosophical or scientific arguments. It cannot be held tentatively, at arm’s length, but must be embraced as salvation—as changing a life from despair to hope. Here the mode of the philosophers is wrong. It is not that they fail to prove or make blunders in logic; it was, rather, that they operate making a category mistake, taking Christianity for philosophy—subjectivity for objectivity. Guided by Kierkegaard, Bouwsma saw the arguments of the philosophers, on religious matters, as misplaced objectivity. He saw the misplacement as a result of the misunderstanding of the language of Scripture. Bouwsma proposed that such a misunderstanding came about through the unexamined presupposition that language has only one purpose—to convey information. There is a great temptation, he thought, to read the Scriptures as conveying information about God and to think of revelation as conveying what we do not know. The conceptual difference between revelation and scientific knowledge, consequently, goes unnoticed. Though revelation is regarded as special, it is still seen objectively as among the deliverances of reason, parts of which can be grounded, and parts not, but accepted as basic for other beliefs. Since the language of the Scriptures looks like knowledge, like conveyed information, it is mistakenly treated as knowledge. Philosophers, favorably disposed towards Christianity take up the task of supporting and defending this knowledge. It is called “Christian philosophy.” Bouwsma regarded the mistaking of Christianity for philosophy as the illusion that Kierkegaard sought to dispel. Christian philosophy obliterates the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity at the expense of subjectivity. In Christian philosophy, Bouwsma saw the same misunderstanding of the nature and function of language that he saw in metaphysics. The language of the Scriptures, Bouwsma continues, is not the language of metaphysics: “The Scriptures are not a body of knowledge, a hyper-metaphysical revelation”;18 and again, “Of course, the Scriptures are not another book in metaphysics. How to show that? The grammar of metaphysics versus the grammar of the Scriptures.”19 The idea that Scriptures yield metaphysics connects to the idea that they convey knowledge. In his essay, “Lengthier Zettel,” he reflects on the question: Why do we still read Kierkegaard? We do not read Hegel any more, so what good is Kierkegaard’s polemic against Hegel and world-historical knowledge, and the like? Bouwsma suggests an answer. We still pursue knowledge with a passion, or at least some of us do. We still desire to know about our origins, about who we are, what kind of beings we are, what sort of place the world is, and what, if anything, is required of us. We turn to science to satisfy this desire for knowledge. But we do more. We treasure knowledge for its own sake. We hoard it and are consumed by the pursuit of it. In this spirit we approach the Scriptures, which may, on the Bouwsma, “Notes on Kierkegaard’s ‘The Monstrous Illusion,’ ” p. 85. Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “A Lengthier Zettel,” in Without Proof or Evidence, pp. 143–5, see p. 140.

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face of it, seem to be a book offering knowledge about these and similar matters. So, as thinkers practiced in the skills of coming to knowledge, we apply our skills to the language of the Scriptures. We take note of the “propositions” that convey the essential information and organize them with respect to each other. We develop hypotheses, collect evidence, and produce proof. We resolve the problems and paradoxes. We do what we are good at in other fields of knowledge, and develop from the Scriptures a body of metaphysical knowledge. The Scriptures may be studied, then, looking for propositions about the origins of the world, the self, freedom, and God. In them can be found accounts of creation, of God’s nature, of human nature, of morality, and of determinism—was not Pharoah’s heart hardened? So why should the philosopher not ask his questions of these accounts? What is God? Why should anything exist? What is a human being? How can a body survive death? How can a good God allow evil to happen? These are the questions of metaphysics put to the information conveyed by Scripture. Some propositions are given in Scripture, so a philosopher may build a body of knowledge that begins there, make it consistent, and develop a complete system. The completed body of knowledge may be used to give support to those who do not believe or to ourselves, as we feel the need to defend it to ourselves. The influence of Wittgenstein on Bouwsma is noteworthy in his attention to the language of Scripture and of faith as the corrective to the philosophical confusions of Christianity. As Bouwsma used ordinary language to show sense and nonsense in the philosophical language of Descartes and Berkeley, he used the details of the exchanges between God and Abraham, Moses, Noah, and St. Paul to show sense and nonsense in the philosophical language of Hegel and contemporary philosophers. Bouwsma stepped back from philosophical assertions and noted the grammatical insights showing how confusions arise. Here is a quotation from “Faith, Evidence, and Proof” on the grammar of the word “belief”: I have now suggested that the word “belief” gives us trouble, and now I will add, no wonder. For the words “belief” and “believe” are used not only in the religious context but in other contexts. And in some of those at least we may say that there is evidence for what one believes….It must now be obvious that the word “believe” in the religious context will certainly tempt the unwary and may tempt too those who know better. In the religious context the words “belief” and “obedience” are closely related. The passages from Scriptures I quoted earlier show this.20

The influence of Kierkegaard on Bouwsma is equally present in Bouwsma’s connecting the grammars of “belief” and “obedience.” With the reminder that believing in God is conceptually connected to God’s making promises, establishing law, and giving commands, there is the expectation of obedience and fulfilling the obligation of the covenant. There are now ethical demands placed on the individual. The concepts of God’s sovereignty, creation, sin, atonement, and forgiveness now have existential significance. And what is this other than Kierkegaard’s subjectivity? Religious concepts take on life. Believing them is to live them. Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “Faith Evidence and Proof,” in Without Proof or Evidence, pp. 1–25, see p. 10.

20

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Bouwsma often quoted Wittgenstein’s expression, “theology as grammar.” This idea also connects to his reading of Kierkegaard. The remark “theology as grammar” refers to the relationship between theological language and the Scriptures. Theological language is the development of what it makes sense to say of the Scriptures. The Scriptures become the guidelines for how to talk about God, faith, sin, and the like. God is known through the Scriptures—through the accounts of God’s relationship with the community of faith. The language-games of “God” are the language-games of the Scriptures. They tell us, as it were, what kind of object God is. Grammar tells us the essence of a concept. The Scriptures provide us with the grammar of “God,” and so tell us of the concept “God.” Bouwsma thought Kierkegaard understood the same point. Although it was the language of the Scriptures that had to be enlivened for his age, Kierkegaard relied upon that language to enliven and re-present it. The “absolute Paradox” of the Philosophical Fragments is Jesus, the incarnate God of the New Testament. The presentation of the idea of the absolute Paradox specifically shows Kierkegaard’s understanding of the role of the Scriptures in theology. After Johannes Climacus sets forth the idea that, left to ourselves, we have no way of knowing how to come to talk about the unknown, he calls the unknown “god.” “It is only a name we give to it,”21 Climacus writes, but of course it is more than a name. “God” is the one who created the world, promised Abraham, instructed Moses, and so on. “God” is not a proper name, like “Napoleon,” who could have born the name “James.” The name “god” carries with it the details of a concept, and that concept is presented in the Scriptures. As god is the “unknown,” we have no way of making discoveries about him through an investigation of nature or history. Yet we do know how to talk about God. Kierkegaard’s insight is that this is possible only by means of the Scriptures where the concept “god” is taught. And apart from the language of Scripture and its community of interpreters, there is neither language nor knowledge of the unknown. Bouwsma’s understanding of the language of the Scriptures as the primary source of understanding “God” and other primary theological words, functions to relieve the philosophical confusions of religious language. In philosophy we are puzzled by the word “God.” What is God? Philosophers deal in generalities. Hegel, Spinoza, and Tillich, Bouwsma reminds us, deal with the word “God” in generalities without such reference to the Scriptures, from which they might have learned how to work with the concept. But “God” cannot be dealt with in general. The concept “God” varies with traditions. Apart from those traditions and their primary scriptures, there is no account of God. There are no philosophical means of getting such a description. Bouwsma makes this point effectively and efficiently in “A Lengthy Zettel” with the repetition of the remark: “There is no God in general.” “If a Jew were writing about God, his God, that is, there is no God in general, whom would he mention?” Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the like. “If Harum El Raschid…were writing about God, his God, there is no God in general, whom would he mention?”22 Mohammed. And so on. “And what if a man were to write about God in general…what name

SKS 4, 245 / PF, 39. Bouwsma, “A Lengthy Zettel,” p. 144.

21 22

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would this writer mention…? I have not said ‘his’ God since God in general is an idea and no God…what name does the writer mention?”23 None. It is the philosopher who writes of God in general. Bouwsma notices that the philosopher works with generalities such as “the ground of all being” and “substance.” He produces evidence and arguments as support for his beliefs. The God of the philosopher is not the God of Abraham. The God of the philosopher does not do anything. He does not promise, give orders, or save his people. The God of the philosopher does not require anything of anyone. In philosophy there are no heroes of faith. There is no one for the philosopher of the God in general to mention. The philosopher’s book will consist of arguments and evidence. It will lack passion. It will not capture the decisiveness, the risk, the fear and trembling of the saint. These are the categories of the knight of faith—the categories of subjectivity. The book about God in general will lack all the essential categories of faith in God. To understand the latter, we must turn to the pages of Genesis or of the Koran or of the Gospel of Matthew, and the like. “God” is understood in the Temple and the Church. “Allah” is understood in the Mosque. And the truth of what is understood of God and Allah is measured subjectively—through knights of faith—by means of their relationship to the precepts of their respective traditions. In this understanding, Bouwsma and Kierkegaard were of one mind.

23

Ibid.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Bouwsma’s Corpus Toward A New Sensibility: Essays of O.K. Bouwsma, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1982, pp. 1–4. Without Proof or Evidence: Essays of O.K. Bouwsma, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1984, pp. 27–39; pp. 73–86; pp. 132–42; pp. 146–56 and passim. Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949–51, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company 1986, p. 46. O.K. Bouwsma’s Commonplace Book: Remarks on Philosophy and Education, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press 2001, pp. 1ff; p. 9; p. 14; pp. 27–8; pp. 31ff.; p. 38; p. 49; p. 51; p. 53; p. 55; pp. 63–4; pp. 95–6; p. 115; pp. 117–19; p. 123; p. 125; pp. 131–2; pp. 137–9; p. 143; p. 146; p. 148; p. 169; pp. 174–6; p. 183; pp. 194–5; pp. 197–8; pp. 210–11; p. 213. II. Sources of Bouwsma’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Heineken, Martin J., The Moment Before God, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press 1956. Holmer, Paul, The Grammar of Faith, New York: Harper and Row 1978. Nielsen, H.A., Where The Passion Is: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Fragments, Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida 1983. III. Secondary Literature on Bouwsma’s Relation to Kierkegaard Hustwit, Ronald E., Something About O.K. Bouwsma, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 1992, pp. 73–83.

Stanley Cavell: The Sublimity of the Pedestrian Joseph Westfall

Stanley Louis Cavell (b. 1926) is, as of this writing, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1961, with a dissertation on skepticism and rationality in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), which he later published as The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy,1 a book which is widely regarded as the centerpiece of Cavell’s wide ranging corpus. In addition to his work on Wittgenstein, however, Cavell has published in the fields of ordinary language philosophy (Must We Mean What We Say?, In Quest of the Ordinary),2 the history of American thought (The Senses of Walden, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes),3 and the philosophy of film (The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears).4 Even this is only a partial and incomplete inventory of Cavell’s work, which is not only voluminous but interdisciplinary and, at times, nondisciplinary or anti-disciplinary in nature. For Cavell, typically disparate avenues of philosophical writing and thought— literary interpretation, cultural criticism, analytic philosophy, film studies, psychoanalysis, autobiography—often intertwine, such that a book like his most recent, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, simply cannot be classified under any one

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, New York: Oxford University Press 1979. 2 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1969; Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988. 3 Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, New York: Viking Press 1972; Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990; Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003. 4 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, New York: Viking Press 1974; Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1981; Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996. 1

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or two categories or genres.5 This disregard for conventional disciplinary boundaries has been especially characteristic of Cavell’s forays into the history of philosophy, where he is perfectly willing to cross the line dividing analytic philosophy from Continental philosophy, contrary to the tradition (more or less uniformly obeyed, at least until very recently) in the United States. Treating American philosophy as a distinct tradition alongside the analytic and Continental traditions, Cavell often addresses philosophical problems or cultural or intellectual phenomena with the combined resources of all three traditions or approaches, which enables him to produce works such as This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein and Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida,6 works that are not so much comparative as they are multi-layered and combinatory (if not yet synthetic) of these differences. Cavell’s work, despite its foundational debt to Wittgenstein and other analytic and American philosophers, is on some level very deeply informed by Kierkegaard—or, perhaps better, a Cavellian reading of Kierkegaard. As Ronald Hall notes: “That Stanley Cavell has been influenced by Søren Kierkegaard comes as no surprise to those who know the work of either.”7 Numerous references to Kierkegaard, Kierkegaardian texts, or themes originating in Kierkegaard occur throughout Cavell’s many writings, despite the fact that only two works—both essays from the 1960s—treat Kierkegaard directly and in an extended way.8 The first of these is “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” first published in Dædelus in 1964, and Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2005. 6 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Batch Press 1989; Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Oxford: Blackwell 1995. 7 Ronald L. Hall, “Pursuits of Knowledge and Happiness: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Stanley Cavell,” Soundings, vol. 77, nos. 1–2, 1994, p. 145. 8 Cavell’s comments on Kierkegaard, aside from the two essays mentioned, can be found in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. xxv; “Austin at Criticism,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 110; p. 112; “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 156; “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 224; “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 309; p. 316; p. 347; The Senses of Walden, p. 12; The World Viewed, p. 102; p. 112; p. 114; p. 153; The Claim of Reason, p. 4; p. 109; p. 176, p. 268; p. 314; p. 352; p. 462; p. 463; Pursuits of Happiness, p. 15; p. 43; p. 238; p. 240; p. 241; Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, p. 80; p. 88; p. 117 (reprint of “The Avoidance of Love”); “The Philosopher in American Life,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 18; “Texts of Recovery,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 63; “Poe’s Perversity and the Imp(ulse) of Skepticism,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 142; “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 177; This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 18; pp. 28–9; pp. 39–40; p. 50; p. 60; pp. 82–3; Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p. xviii; p. 5; Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1994, p. 26; p. 84; Philosophical Passages, p. 182; p. 185; Contesting Tears, p. 82; “Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 87; “The Wittgensteinian Event,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, p. 193; p. 198; and Stanley 5

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subsequently reprinted as one chapter of Themes Out of School.9 “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy” is ostensibly a comparison of the two titular approaches to philosophy, and the first two of the essay’s three sections do engage in the rather broad comparison. The third and longest section, however, is a specific comparison of one work of existentialist thought—Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript—and one work of analytic philosophy—Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—and it is thus this third section that is of most interest to us here. The second essay, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” was originally written for a colloquium on The Book on Adler at the University of Minnesota in 1966; it was first published by Cavell as a part of the collection Must We Mean What We Say?10 Whereas “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy” is a comparative piece, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation” is largely exegetical, and thus is Cavell’s sole work of anything like “Kierkegaard scholarship.” It is naturally the most widely cited of all Cavell’s works in the Kierkegaard literature. In what follows, I will examine Cavell’s use of and references to Kierkegaard in two of the most fundamental avenues of Cavell’s thought: his account of the status of meaning (following Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard) in modernity, including the uneasy relationship between cognitive meaning and what we might call “the meaning of life”; and the significant role played by ordinary language and ordinariness or everydayness more generally in Cavell’s work as it relates to Kierkegaard. In the third and final section of this article, I will offer a critical account of one aspect of Cavell’s use of Kierkegaard, namely, an apparent tension between competing understandings of Kierkegaard in the Cavellian authorship. I. Cognitive Meaning and the Meaning of Life The comparison of analytic and Continental philosophies in Cavell’s “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy” is simultaneously broad in the scope of its conclusions and narrowly focused on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard in its method. Yet, late in the first section of the essay, Cavell offers a helpful summary of the similarity between the two approaches, methods, or traditions: It is striking that the terms “analytical” and “existential” were initially coined to purify philosophy of the identical fool’s gold in its tradition—the tendency to issue in speculative systems. The discovery of analytical philosophy is that such systems make statements which are meaningless or useless; the discovery of existentialism is that such systems make life meaningless.11

Cavell, “Responses,” in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. by Russell B. Goodman, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 167–8. 9 Stanley Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” Dædelus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, vol. 93, no. 3, 1964, pp. 946–74; reprinted in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes, San Francisco: North Point Press 1984, pp. 195–234. 10 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, pp. 163–79. Cavell provides a short history of the essay on p. ix. 11 Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” p. 948.

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There is much discussion of meaninglessness in both analytic philosophy and existentialism, and according to Cavell, one can organize the history of both movements—although perhaps especially the history of analytic philosophy— around such questions of meaning. Of course, what the analytic philosopher typically means by the word “meaning,” and what the existentialist typically means when he or she uses the same word, seem to be two rather different things. “Meaning” for the analytic philosopher in Cavell’s essay refers primarily to logical or sentential meaning, the sense of what is uttered or thought; whereas “meaning” for the existentialist seems instead to refer to the significance, worth, or purpose of a human life. Simply put, for Cavell, analytic philosophy maintains something is meaningful when it can be rationally understood; existentialism (or Continental philosophy) maintains something is meaningful when it is worth pursuing, having, or experiencing. This of course does not explain how both philosophies can be seen to oppose philosophical systematism, but it does give us some idea of the difficulty of the project Cavell has undertaken in the essay. While it would seem the two different philosophies ought to be comparable, from nearly the very beginning of the comparison of analytic philosophy and existentialism we seem to have found that they are incommensurable ways of thinking about things. While Cavell will do some work to mediate this difference, it is nevertheless the case that here we have one of the genuinely fundamental distinctions between the two approaches. Analytic philosophers are typically interested in language and knowledge; existentialists are typically interested in the nature and value of human existence.12 While Cavell identifies the existentialist position more or less straightforwardly with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he provides a more complex and historical understanding of the analytic approach (despite the fact that, by the end of the essay, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will stand in for analytic philosophy in much the same way the Postscript does for existentialism). The history of analytic philosophy, according to Cavell, occurs in three stages: (1) the initial period of analytic philosophy, inaugurated by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the view of which “was expressed by the dictum that the real form of a proposition is its logical form”;13 (2) “logical positivism,” the first practitioners of which took most of their inspiration from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and called 12 This is a distinction that, more or less simultaneously with Cavell’s work, French postmodernism (as well as American so-called “post-analytic” philosophy) does much to nullify. The work of a figure like Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in Of Grammatology and Limited Inc., for example, seems far more concerned with language and knowledge (and, perhaps, if only in a certain sense, the impossibility of both) than it is with what we might ordinarily call “existential matters.” See Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, pp. 55–127; and Cavell, Philosophical Passages, pp. 42–90. Recall, however, that while Of Grammatology was first published in 1967 (in English, not until 1976) and “Signature Event Context,” the first half of what was to become Limited Inc., was first published in 1972 (in English in 1977), “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy” was published in 1964. For mediation of the difference from the “other side,” see also Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. by John Rajchman and Cornel West, New York: Columbia University Press 1985 (in which an essay by Cavell— “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant”—also happens to appear). 13 Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” p. 949.

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themselves the Vienna Circle; and (3) ordinary language philosophy, sometimes called Oxford philosophy, and the branch of analytic philosophy with which Cavell is most closely associated. Most important for our purposes here is this third development (what Cavell calls a “revolution”) in analytic philosophy, as it is the category to which both Cavell and the later Wittgenstein belong. While both Fregean analysis and logical positivism espouse a deep suspicion of language as it is used in ordinary discourse, and thus both approaches understand ordinary language to distort and conceal meaning in a way that a purely logical language (such as the Begriffsschrift of Frege’s design) would not, the ordinary language philosopher insists on the reverse: namely, that meaning is expressed in the everyday, ordinary use of natural languages, and when logical analysis cannot uncover the meaning of an ordinary statement, it demonstrates the weakness of logical analysis to capture meaning, not the inherent unreliability of ordinary language usage to uncover and express meaningful propositions. In any case, we can see that analytic philosophy on Cavell’s view is concerned chiefly with the location and identification of meaning in philosophy—whether meaning is believed to be able to be found in the statements of ordinary language, or only in the “purified” propositions of the logical-mathematical-philosophical language of the (analytic) philosophers—and that, thus, the danger to be rooted out and eliminated according to both camps is the inclusion of essentially meaningless statements in philosophy, mathematics, and empirical science. Ordinary language philosophy is, however, different from the other two developments in the history of analytic philosophy—if we follow Cavell—in its proximity to the concerns of existentialism. Whereas attempts to express religious or ethical “truths” in language are typically understood to be meaningless for the logical analyst and the positivist, such attempts deeply inform much of the work of the ordinary language philosopher, the paradigmatic example of which, for Cavell, is the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. From the perspective of analytic philosophy, Cavell notes, philosophy and ordinary language are fundamentally pitted against one another; for a thinker like the later Wittgenstein, this opposition is not resolved so much as its polarity is reversed. We begin to see in Cavell, then, that Wittgenstein’s linguistic concerns are in their own way existential concerns; likewise, we will come to see that Kierkegaard’s existential concerns are in some sense logical, linguistic, or (to use the term in Cavell’s Wittgensteinian way) “grammatical.” Analytic philosophy in the form of logical positivism maintains that certain sorts of ordinary statements—statements concerning religious faith, to take the case most directly relevant to Cavell’s readings of Kierkegaard—are meaningless. This is, for the positivist, just one more way to say that, because religious faith cannot be understood completely and then situated in its proper place in a system of logic, science, or mathematics, there is nothing to be known about religious faith. Individuals may believe that faith is x or y, or that faith ought or ought not to play some specific role in human life, but these are mere statements of belief—they are fundamentally nonsensical, as there is nothing knowable about the matters with which they are concerned, because objects of faith cannot be empirically observed, measured, and analyzed insofar as they are objects of faith. (One might have faith that one’s recovery from disease constitutes a miracle;

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the positivist does not deny that one has recovered from disease, but will deny that one could ever legitimately believe that recovery to be genuinely miraculous.) Thus, when the positivist speaks of knowledge as a ground for meaning, the positivist is speaking specifically of what Cavell calls cognitive meaning—the justifiability of a claim through empirical observation and logical analysis. Moreover, all meaning is for the positivist directly related to knowability. For a statement to be meaningful (that is, cognitively meaningful), it must be able to be known in this way. Cognitive meaning is thus distinct from what we might call the meaning of a life, the kind of meaning with which the existentialist on Cavell’s model is concerned, related not to cognition but to existence. Beliefs and statements regarding matters such as religious faith are admittedly non-philosophical from a Cavellian-Wittgensteinian perspective, but this is not an argument against their meaningfulness. Writing of such “non-philosophical” voices, Cavell notes: “If these voices [‘which come from conviction, which are made with passion and attention’14] were to be described in one word, the one that for me best captures the experiences they suggest is the existentialist’s term ‘inauthentic.’ ”15 In the conflict over meaning between the philosophical and the ordinary, Cavell argues that Wittgenstein maintains that the ordinary must win. He writes: “I have said that for the Oxford philosopher, ‘ordinary language’ and ‘ordinary contexts’ mean not much more than ‘nonphilosophical language’ and ‘nonphilosophical contexts.’ In Wittgenstein’s work, ‘ordinary’ or ‘every-day’ contexts and examples are, I suggest, meant to carry the force of ‘authentic’ examples authentically responded to in language.”16 While the philosophical language of analysis and positivism promises perfect clarity and the completeness of (mathematical and scientific) knowledge, that promise cannot be fulfilled. It is an illusion. It is this Wittgensteinian observation that grounds the comparison—and the similarity—with Kierkegaard: “Both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard see their worlds as laboring under illusion. Both see their function as authors to be the uncovering or diagnosing of this illusion, and freeing us from it. In both, the cure requires that we be brought (back) to our ordinary human existence”17 and the authenticity of that existence. The cure—such as it is18—is, according to Cavell, a return to the ordinary, and respect for the significance of the sorts of claims made in ordinary language that can give meaning to an individual’s existence. This is true, on Cavell’s reading, for Kierkegaard as much as it is for Wittgenstein and Cavell himself. In a lengthy passage from “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation” that summarizes in many ways the intersection in Cavell’s thought between Kierkegaard and analytic philosophy, Cavell writes:

Ibid., p. 957. Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 958. 18 As Cavell writes, “Readers of both [Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein] have often found the cure they offer worse than the disease….And in both writers the cure seems no cure.” Ibid., p. 960. 14 15

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While Kierkegaard’s account sometimes refuses explanations of meaning, sometimes seems to rebuke us for being confused about a meaning which should be clear with a qualitatively decisive clarity, sometimes seems to suggest a mode of explanation for that sense of “balancing on the edge of a meaning,” he would nevertheless not be surprised at Positivism’s claim, or perception, that religious utterances have no cognitive meaning. Indeed, he might welcome this fact. It indicates that the crisis of our age has deepened, that we are no longer confused, and that we have a chance, at last, to learn what our lives really depend upon.19

That is to say, for Kierkegaard as for the logical positivist, cognitive meaning cannot ground an authentic existence, a meaningful life. This is where Kierkegaard breaks with the idealist systematism of a philosopher like G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), for Cavell, and this is the force of the notion, in the Postscript, that truth is subjectivity.20 The same will be true for Cavell’s Wittgenstein, albeit expressed in a somewhat different way. Coming at the same notion from a Wittgensteinian rather than Kierkegaardian direction, Cavell quotes from § 19 of the Philosophical Investigations. Cavell quotes only the last line in the form of a motto, but at greater length the passage reads: “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. —Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others. —And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”21 This suggestion of Wittgenstein prompts Cavell to begin what may be his most insightful inquiry into Kierkegaard anywhere in his authorship. Cavell writes: “Speaking metaphorically” is a matter of speaking in certain ways using a definite form of language for some purpose; “speaking religiously” is not accomplished by using a given form, or set of forms, of words, and it is not done for any further purpose: it is to speak from a particular perspective, as it were to mean anything you say in a special way. To understand a metaphor you must be able to interpret it; to understand an utterance religiously you have to be able to share its perspective. (In these ways, speaking religiously is like telling a dream.) The religious is a Kierkegaardian Stage of life; and I suggest it should be thought of as a Wittgensteinian form of life.22

Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” pp. 171–2. See SKS 7, 173ff. / CUP1, 189ff. This is also something of what Cavell is getting at when he writes: “The difficulty of ending is, I guess, the hardest of philosophy’s difficulties to bear. Kierkegaard famously rebuked the Hegelians for their endless promises that the system would complete itself.” Cavell, Philosophical Passages, p. 185. 21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell 2003 [1953], p. 7. Quoted in Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” p. 174. The translation of Lebensform has been altered (from “life-form” in the translation of Wittgenstein cited) to match Cavell’s usage (“form of life”). 22 Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” p. 172. Cavell’s suggestion at the end of this passage is one that Ronald E. Hustwit pursues in considerable detail. Hustwit, “Understanding a Suggestion of Professor Cavell’s: Kierkegaard’s Religious Stage as a Wittgensteinian ‘Form of Life,’ ” Philosophy Research Archive, vol. 4, no. 1271, 1978, pp. 329–47. 19 20

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Put another way, for Cavell, the Kierkegaardian religious is not a set of beliefs about religious truths to which some sort of cognitive meaning could be ascribed; the Kierkegaardian religious is a way of expressing oneself within a world, such that one’s efforts at expression—whatever their content—are a formal indication of one’s situation within a specific existential perspective (namely, the religious). It is in this way, for Kierkegaard according to Cavell, that one lives authentically and secures for oneself the possibility of a meaningful life. The religious stage takes on the characteristics of a language—not some perfectly pure Fregean Begriffsschrift, but an ordinary language, with all its nuance, difficulty, fragmentariness, and ambiguity. Just as ordinary language is the “cure” for inauthenticity in Cavell’s Wittgenstein, so the religious understood as ordinary language is the “cure” for meaninglessness in Cavell’s Kierkegaard. As such, to better understand the use of Kierkegaard in Cavell, we must now turn to Cavell’s notion of the ordinary as bridging the gap between linguistic philosophy and existentialism. II. The Life of Ordinary Mortals If there is to be some refuge and recovery from the tendency of philosophy to dismiss the significance of the utterances (and languages) expressive of such forms of life as the Kierkegaardian religious in favor of exclusively cognitive meaning, it is, for Cavell, to be found in the everyday. This is not a new insight, Cavell notes, occurring at least as early as the Renaissance, but it is one that binds Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein fairly closely together. Cavell writes: “Nothing is more characteristic of the writing in the Philosophical Investigations and in the Unscientific Postscript than its shunning of normal modes of argument and the insistence on the language and life of ordinary men.”23 This takes the form of ordinary language philosophy in Wittgenstein, with its corollary emphasis on the failure of most philosophical attempts to understand the significance of language in the sense of what is said by real human beings, not in the highly attenuated, fundamentally artificial senses characteristic of analytic philosophers like Frege and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), as well as the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Cavell situates Kierkegaard squarely on the side of Wittgenstein—on Cavell’s own side—against the forces of positivism and other philosophies dismissive of the ordinary. One of Cavell’s strongest statements aligning Kierkegaard in this way, philosophically, alongside Oxford philosophy can be found in the published edition of the Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures that Cavell delivered at the University of Chicago in 1987. In the volume, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Cavell inserts into his discussion of Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) a passage from The Book on Adler, to which Cavell had devoted “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation” twenty years prior. Cavell quotes a passage from The Book on Adler, the concluding sentence of which reads: “Spiritually and religiously understood, perdition consists in journeying into

Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” p. 959.

23

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a foreign land, in being ‘out.’ ”24 In a rather lengthy commentary on that passage, Cavell writes: Perdition of course is a way of saying: lost. And this is the Kierkegaard whose Knight of Faith alone achieves not exactly the everyday, but “the sublime in the pedestrian” (Fear and Trembling, p. 52).25 I do not quite wish to imply that Kierkegaard’s (melodramatic) sense of the pedestrian here, with its transfigurative interpretation of the human gait of walking, is matched in Wittgenstein’s idea of the ordinary. Yet it seems to me that I can understand Kierkegaard’s perception as a religious interpretation of Wittgenstein’s. In that case an intuitive sense is afforded that the everyday, say the temporal, is an achievement, that its tasks can be shrunk from as the present age shrinks from the tasks of eternity; a sense, I would like to say, that in both tasks one’s humanity, or finitude, is to be, always is to be, accepted, suffered.26

Cavell returns more than once to this notion in Kierkegaard,27 “the sublime in the pedestrian,” a phrase used by Johannes de silentio at one point in Fear and Trembling to describe the knight of faith as a dancer capable, having leapt into the air, of landing “in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.”28 Although there is something of the pun to de silentio’s use of language here, Cavell takes it very much to heart. The one and only marvel, on Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard, is the recognition of the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the sanctification of the everyday. While the Wittgensteinian elevation of the ordinary takes a primarily linguistic form—Wittgenstein is, after all, for Cavell something like the paradigmatic ordinary language philosopher—the Kierkegaardian elevation, or sanctification, of the ordinary has a far more existential character. Thus, while Cavell argues that Wittgenstein advocates the primacy of ordinary, human speech over a purely logical language, Cavell does not make the same case for Kierkegaard. Rather, the ordinary as Kierkegaard understands it, according to Cavell, has to do with experience, existence, and authority. In a passage following once again from The Book on Adler, Cavell writes: Kierkegaard in Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 39. Pap. VII– 2 B 235, p. 190 / BA, 104. Cavell quotes from the Walter Lowrie translation. See Søren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays, ed. by Frederick Sontag, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York: Harper & Row 1966 [1955], p. 155. Cavell’s quotation ends in the middle of Kierkegaard’s (or Petrus Minor’s) sentence, the full version of which reads: “spiritually and religiously understood, perdition consists in journeying into a foreign land, in being ‘out,’ in being objective, so that one gets no impression of oneself by remaining at home with the inward self-concern of conscience.” 25 SKS 4, 136 / FT, 41. Cavell quotes from the Lowrie translation. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books 1954 [1941], p. 52. 26 Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 39. 27 See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 463; Pursuits of Happiness, p. 15; and “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” p. 177. 28 SKS 4, 136 / FT, 41. 24

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Joseph Westfall It is not a matter of the reception of new experience but a matter of a new reception of your own experience, an acceptance of its authority as your own. Kierkegaard wrote a book about our having lost the authority, hence so much as the possibility, of claiming to have received a revelation. If this means, as Kierkegaard sometimes seems to take it to mean, the end of Christianity, then if what is to succeed Christianity is a redemptive politics or a redemptive psychology, these will require a new burden of faith in the authority of one’s everyday experience, one’s experience of the everyday, of earth not of heaven (if you get the distinction).29

Having earlier suggested that Kierkegaard offers a religious version of Wittgenstein, here Cavell seems to suggest that if The Book on Adler is right about the impossibility of Christianity in the contemporary world, a secular, Wittgensteinian philosophy of the ordinary is the final implication even of Kierkegaard’s post-Christian account of Christianity itself. It is not clear, of course, that Cavell is correct in his reading of The Book on Adler—and, with specific reference to the view that, for Kierkegaard, the authority to claim to have received a direct revelation is lost to modernity, it seems Cavell is demonstrably incorrect30—but the emphasis on the everyday, the ordinary, in Kierkegaard need not be rejected on that ground. Reading this passage from Pursuits of Happiness alongside the passage in the preceding quotation, from This New Yet Unapproachable America, we begin to see that Cavell’s understanding of the elevation or sanctification of the ordinary is not limited simply to promotion of the non-philosophical over the philosophical (as, in Cavell, it sometimes seems to be). Rather, and far more significantly, Cavell presents the Kierkegaardian ordinary as a task: if the extraordinary (receiving a direct revelation from God, in the manner of Adolf Peter Adler (1812–69), for example, or a direct command from God, in the manner of Abraham) is impossible, it nevertheless remains possible to embrace the Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 240. As Petrus Minor notes: “Magister Adler’s collision with the universal is, therefore, that of the special individual who has a revelation. To want summarily to deny the possibility that this extraordinary experience could happen to a person also in our age would certainly be a very dubious sign.” Pap. VIII–2 B 13, p. 61 / BA, 30. Thus, Petrus’ approach to Adler cannot be simply to deny that Adler has had a revelation—since, to do so would be to deny that anyone in the present age could have a revelation (the view Cavell ascribes to Kierkegaard), a view Petrus could only admit, were he also to deny the possibility of genuine Christianity in modernity (something he does not do). Petrus’ undermining of Adler thus takes a different form, the basic structure of which can be seen in the title of Chapter III of The Book on Adler: “Adler’s Own Shifting of His Essential Point of View, or That He Does Not Understand Himself, Does Not Himself Believe That a Revelation Has Been Given to Him.” Pap. VII–2 B 235, p. 93 / BA, 51. In short, Petrus argues that the concept of a revelation requires the one to whom the revelation has been communicated to pronounce the revelation with divine authority, not with the dialectical arguments of human reason, and that Adler in his published sermons and accounts of the revelation repeatedly argues dialectically, demonstrating he does not believe he communicates his “revelation” with the authority of God. Contra Cavell, no one has “lost the authority, hence so much as the possibility, of claiming to have received a revelation.” As the authority is not Adler’s to receive but God’s to give, according to Petrus, Adler and the present age have lost nothing. 29 30

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ordinary extraordinarily. Put another way, Cavell reads Kierkegaard to be saying—in The Book on Adler, to be certain, but also in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition—that even the life of an ordinary mortal is a task, and one from which a large portion of the denizens of modern European societies are shrinking. To be an ordinary, mortal human being—to live one’s life authentically, as the finite thing it is—is not easy. On Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard, it requires just as much (paradoxical, impossible) faith as the life of an Abraham. The argument parallels Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein on language, according to which one need not (and perhaps cannot) rely upon the scientific, purely rational, artificial languages of the logician and the mathematician to encapsulate meaning. Rather, meaning can be found—is only ever at home, for Wittgenstein—in ordinary language, the authentic language of ordinary human beings. Thus, if the goal is to locate meaning in language, the task for a Wittgensteinian like Cavell is to return to ordinary language. Having made the intellectual and professional journey into logic, the philosophy of language, and the language of the philosophers, the philosopher in search of meaning must re-appropriate ordinary language, must re-learn his or her native language, as it were, the everyday language in which human meaning is originally communicated and expressed. The specific point here, about language, is one with which Cavell thinks Kierkegaard disagrees; with reference to Emerson, Cavell writes: Emerson’s difference from other nineteenth-century prophets or sages (say Matthew Arnold, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard), and his affinity with Austin and Wittgenstein (unlike other analytical philosophers whose distrust of human language goes with the vision not of reinhabiting but of replacing the ordinary) is his recognition of the power of ordinary words—as it were their call—to be redeemed, to redeem themselves, and characteristically to ask redemption from (hence by) philosophy.31

But the fact that recognition of the value of the ordinary is always re-cognition, recurrence, repetition, return—this, Cavell sees as equally original to two of Wittgenstein’s predecessors: Kierkegaard, of course, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). One might not immediately associate Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—or anything in Nietzsche, for that matter—with the ordinary as it is of interest to Cavell, and Cavell is not especially illustrative in his references to the Nietzschean notion, but in its continual association with Kierkegaard’s use of the term “repetition,” eternal recurrence seems to come for Cavell to represent more or less the same thing repetition does: the true significance of the ordinary, properly experienced and understood, as opposed to the (sometimes merely apparently) extraordinary. When discussing repetition, Cavell’s interest is primarily in marriage—his references to the Kierkegaardian instance of the concept occur exclusively in the context of his ongoing analysis of classic works of Hollywood cinema, with particular reference

31

Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 82.

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to what Cavell calls “remarriage”32—and Cavell reads Repetition as a discourse on marriage, or on the possibility of marriage. In a moment of self-reflection, considering the subtitle of the book in which the passage appears (Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage), Cavell writes: The title registers, to my mind, the two most impressive affirmations known to me of the task of human experience, the acceptance of human relatedness, as the acceptance of repetition. Kierkegaard’s study called Repetition, which is a study of the possibility of marriage; and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, the call for which he puts by saying it is high time, a heightening or ascension of time; this is literally Hochzeit, German for marriage, with time itself as the ring.33

The connection to Nietzsche here seems conspicuously weak, but despite that fact, the association of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on repetition, as “the task of human experience,” is rather compelling. Cavell adds to the preceding in his second book on Hollywood films, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, when he writes, “ ‘Repetition’ is the title Kierkegaard gives to his thoughts about the faith required in achieving marriage; and the willing acceptance of repetition, or rather eternal recurrence, is the recipe Nietzsche discovered as the antidote for our otherwise fated future of nihilism.”34 Here, in his analysis of the relationship between marriage, Kierkegaardian repetition, and Nietzschean eternal recurrence, we find—in miniature, as it were—Cavell’s thoughts on the elevated or sanctified status of the ordinary. Without delving too deeply into Cavell’s theory of marriage, we can see that marriage—like language or religious belief—is a matter of return to or repetition of the everyday. There is no institution or official relationship more ordinary (at least in Western cultures) than marriage, and yet few institutions or official relationships so sanctified by those cultures. To marry is to appropriate the ordinary—but, if done according to Western religious (or Hollywood cinematic) traditions, the ordinariness is achieved by extraordinary means. This is also the case with the ordinary language philosopher, who must appropriate human language by the inhuman road of analytic philosophy; or, as in Kierkegaard’s case, the Christian, who engages the customary religious tradition of his society by a tortuously idiosyncratic route. In all these cases, ordinariness is somehow paradoxically the exalted goal—and the everyday comes to be seen as a labor, a task, set before the individual with no guarantee of its accomplishment. The life of the ordinary mortal, on Cavell’s understanding of Kierkegaardian repetition, thus requires everything of an individual: in a word, it requires faith. And yet, for most human beings, as Cavell (and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard) will readily admit, an ordinary life is not difficult at all. Most human beings never 32 For his references to Kierkegaardian repetition, see Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 241; Contesting Tears, pp. 82–3; and “Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare,” p. 87. 33 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 241. 34 Cavell, Contesting Tears, pp. 82–3.

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stop to consider the means by which their ordinariness comes to be, and most human beings are content simply to be ordinary. They do not need to understand it, do not need to know for certain that they have achieved the human in their ordinariness. Others among us, however, come by more circuitous routes to see ordinariness as the end. In fact, when these apparently extraordinary individuals come to see what Cavell calls “the uncanniness of the ordinary,” when they privilege “the language and life of ordinary mortals” in their understandings of the task of human existence, their position seems so absurd to ordinary persons, so monstrously egotistical (insofar as ordinariness is for them not life but relief from their oppressive extraordinariness), that they seem thus to distance themselves even more from the ordinary thereby. The realization that the ordinary is extraordinary is something Cavell credits to Romanticism, and is a point he discusses at length (in a somewhat schizophrenic moment): One can think of romanticism as the discovery that the everyday is an exceptional achievement. Call it the achievement of the human. —I think I know something of the impatience such ideas can inspire. Think of the spectacle of the likes of Rousseau and Thoreau and Kierkegaard and Tolstoy and Wittgenstein going around hoping to be ordinary, preaching the everyday as the locale of the sublime! Only the madness of their egotism, the monstrousness of it, requires such vaults of relief! Only sinners crave sanctity! —Quite right. Quite right. The everyday is everyday, the ordinary is ordinary, or you haven’t found it. —How true that is. How very true. And yet if what those monsters of egotism and of vision saw is there, then your assurance is as egotistical as theirs, merely less instructive; or else you are as cynical as you evidently are complacent. (My caution against believing the monster can only make sense to someone who knows his or her own human capacities well enough to be moved to believe him. I would not waste my spirit preaching hardness to a stone.)35

Here, in what is perhaps not the most direct way possible, Cavell suggests that the ordinary understanding of the ordinary might be incorrect, insofar as it makes the ordinary seem like something most individuals can lay claim to simply insofar as they are human beings. Ordinary people, ordinarily understood, are born ordinary— they do not have to struggle to achieve ordinariness. This framework is familiar to readers of Kierkegaard, including Cavell, as it is a point Kierkegaard makes about Christianity in Denmark—a nation where almost everyone is born into Christianity, and few see the need to become Christian themselves. In a similar vein (although making a rather different point), Cavell argues that one must become ordinary—and he argues that this is Kierkegaard’s view, as well. The sublime is in the pedestrian only when the pedestrian is struggled for and sought after as if it were sublime. This, according to Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard, is the task of every human being—but it is also, and in a special way, the task of every thinker and writer like Kierkegaard.36 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 463. Including, it would seem, Cavell. Ronald Hall addresses Cavell’s overall approach to and method as a philosopher in precisely this way, arguing “that Cavell has adopted, knowingly or not, a Kierkegaardian way of thinking”—specifically, that “his thought is informed at critical junctures by a peculiarly Kierkegaardian dialectic. This peculiar dialectic [Hall] will call ‘the dialectic of paradox.’ ” Hall, “Pursuits of Knowledge and Happiness,” p. 145. 35 36

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III. Cavell and/on Kierkegaard Although I have tried to present Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard so far as a unified, single interpretation and response—and this is by no means unjustified by Cavell’s texts themselves—it is important to note that there is something of a tension between two different ways in which Cavell depicts Kierkegaard and the significance of Kierkegaard across the many works of the Cavellian corpus. Kierkegaard is presented, on the one hand, sometimes as an ally of Wittgenstein’s (and Cavell’s), Continental philosophy’s or existentialism’s version of the ordinary language philosopher (I call this the “dominant view” of Kierkegaard in Cavell); on the other hand, Kierkegaard is sometimes presented as but one instance of a greater trend in nineteenth-century European philosophy and literature, a trend that includes figures such as Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Karl Marx (1818–83), and which is very much opposed to the Wittgensteinian-Cavellian understanding of and approach to philosophy (what I will call the “lesser view” of Kierkegaard in Cavell). The view presented heretofore in this article has been more or less uniformly the dominant view, the view Cavell takes when he is directly concerned with Kierkegaard or issues related directly to his understanding or reading of Kierkegaard, and it is probably the most charitable view of Kierkegaard (and of Cavell’s view of Kierkegaard) to be found in Cavell. It is not irreconcilable with the lesser view, inasmuch as even in “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” where Cavell makes the case for a fundamental similarity between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, he is clear that the two thinkers are very different, engaged perhaps in opposed and incommensurable philosophical projects.37 There are nevertheless places in Cavell where it does not seem the Kierkegaardian and Cavellian views can be reconciled quite as neatly as I have suggested, and so I want to turn briefly now to this apparent conflict in Cavell’s use of Kierkegaard, if only to suggest some avenues of future comparison and study. In an essay on the American author, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), Cavell divides a relatively large group of philosophers into two camps: What can be known is the fact of one’s existence, and whatever follows from that. Philosophers such as Descartes and Kant and Heidegger and Wittgenstein may agree on this point, and vary completely in what it is they find to follow. One may further try out the thought that the knowledge philosophers such as Marx and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (and you may say Freud) begin from is that we do not exist, and vary in what they find follows from that.38

Here, we see Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein opposed, Wittgenstein on the side of self-existence as the foundation of philosophy, Kierkegaard on the side of the nonexistence of the self. Of course, a disagreement such as the one Cavell sees here does not imply disagreement on every other issue of philosophy, and so this separation of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein is not by itself an argument that there is a tension in Cavell’s use of Kierkegaard.

37 38

See Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” pp. 959–61. Cavell, “Poe’s Perversity and the Imp(ulse) of Skepticism,” p. 142.

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In a passage from This New Yet Unapproachable America, Cavell divides Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein even further, however. There, the argument is that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein write works of philosophy that relate to themselves in fundamentally different ways. Cavell writes: But although what Kierkegaard called his cycle of “Ethico-Religious” essays is about “the present age” in a way one perhaps expects a philosophy or critique of culture to be, its relation to itself, as it were, is not what one demands of a work of philosophy, certainly not what the Investigations expects of its relation to itself, of its incessant turnings upon itself.39

Here, Cavell is explicitly distancing Wittgenstein and his Philosophical Investigations from what he takes to be the Kierkegaardian practice of producing extra- or nonphilosophical works that deal with issues (like the religious) sometimes in a philosophical way. This is a far more substantial difference than the one in the passage from the essay on Poe. And we have already seen a second distinguishing of Kierkegaard from Wittgenstein in This New Yet Unapproachable America, cited above, where Emerson, Austin, and Wittgenstein are differentiated from Arnold, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard—on one aspect of that issue precisely with which Cavell makes the case for Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s similarity in “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” the extraordinariness of the ordinary. This differs markedly at least in tone from much of the rest of what Cavell has to say about Kierkegaard, about Kierkegaard’s relation to Wittgenstein, and about Kierkegaard’s relation to Cavell’s signature idea, that there is something exceptional in the everyday—but this difference does not rise to the level of self-contradiction. It is but a tension in Cavell’s work, an appearance Cavell sometimes gives of moving in two directions at once in his thought on Kierkegaard. And this appearance may be the result of something in Kierkegaard’s work itself. After pointing out that both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard “[insist] on the language and life of ordinary mortals,” and then offering a long quotation describing the centrality of the study of (ordinary) language during the Renaissance, the movement “from philosophy to philology, from logic to literature, from abstract truth to concrete, personal fact,”40 Cavell writes: That description, it seems clear to me, fits Wittgenstein’s procedures and his motives as well as it fits existentialism and a familiar part of contemporary theology. When to this one adds Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s recurrent and obviously pointed use of humor, paradox, aphorism, irony, parable, and dialogue, the memory and effect of these writers take on an hallucinatory similarity.41

Readers of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are no doubt familiar with the literary and stylistic phenomena Cavell describes, and Cavell does seem right to assert that these stylistic similarities are responsible in part for the perceived philosophical similarity between the two philosophers. Much of Cavell’s authorship—including the first sentence of the passage just quoted—seems to try to rebut the force of this Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 40. E. Harris Harbison in Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” pp. 959–60. 41 Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” p. 960. 39 40

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perception, however, arguing for a substantial philosophical agreement in addition to the “merely” stylistic one. Try as he might to push his readers in the direction of seeing a significant parallel between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (or “Cavell’s Kierkegaard” and “Cavell’s Wittgenstein”) as philosophers, the other voice, the one that inserts the adjective “hallucinatory” into the passage, appears from time to time. This other voice, presenting what I have called the lesser view of Kierkegaard in Cavell’s work, receives its own distinct vocalization only a few paragraphs later in “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy.” There, Cavell writes: Before I go further, I feel I should speak for a sense of impatience which has every right to break out. “One thing you’ve said is certainly true, namely, that the similarity between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein is hallucinatory. They are simply different, so why try to deny it? Kierkegaard is important because he describes our lives and depicts salvation, whereas Wittgenstein speaks about words, and if about our lives, then about the commonest portions of our everyday life. It would be more honest simply to say that the term philosophy can refer either to a body of propositions supposed to comprise knowledge of some sort, or else to a mode of life, and that analytical philosophy is an example of the former and existentialism an example of the latter….”42

Recall that it is this sense of impatience that also breaks out in The Claim of Reason, when Cavell acknowledged the absurdity of an extraordinary person like Kierkegaard proclaiming the virtue of the ordinary. There is a tension in Cavell between his view that the extraordinary is in the ordinary, the exceptional is in the everyday, the sublime (to use a Kierkegaardian phrase) is in the pedestrian, and his view that the Kierkegaardian and the Wittgensteinian-Cavellian are just different. The latter is an impatient view, but it is the view of Cavell’s impatience, and it cannot be denied—despite the fact that Cavell argues persuasively to the contrary, he regularly returns to and presents the impatient view in his work. Thus, while Cavell seems to conclude that Kierkegaard does present a philosophy of the ordinary wherein everydayness is heralded as closer to truth than exceptionality, his conclusion does not seem to follow entirely from reasoned argument. Rather, there is the odor of faith to Cavell’s praising depictions of Kierkegaard’s acknowledgment of the power of the ordinary words and the significance of the life of ordinary mortals—a lingering trace of a movement made in Cavell’s work, not from logic alone (as the analytic philosophers would have it), but from a passion Cavell and Kierkegaard share, an ordinary, very human impulse to believe in something meaningful one can live but quite possibly cannot understand.



42

Ibid., pp. 960–1.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Cavell’s Corpus “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 93, no. 3, 1964, pp. 946–74. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1969, p. xxv, p. 110; p. 112; p. 156; pp. 163–79; p. 224; p. 309; p. 316; p. 347. The Senses of Walden, New York: The Viking Press 1972, p. 12. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, New York: The Viking Press 1974, p. 102; p. 112; p. 114; p. 153. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, New York: Oxford University Press 1979, p. 4; p. 109; p. 176, p. 268; p. 314; p. 352; p. 462; p. 463. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1981, p. 15; p. 43; p. 238; p. 240; p. 241. Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, p. 80; p. 88; p. 117 (reprint of “The Avoidance of Love”). In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988, p. 18; p. 63; p. 142; p. 177. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Batch Press 1989, p. 18; pp. 28-9; pp. 39-40; p. 50; p. 60; pp. 82–3. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990, p. xviii; p. 5. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1994, p. 26; p. 84. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Oxford: Blackwell 1995, p. 182; p. 185. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 82. “Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare,” in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2005, p. 87; p. 193; p. 198. “Responses,” in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. by Russell B. Goodman, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 167–8.

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II. Sources of Cavell’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Conant, James, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. by Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press 1989, pp. 242–83. — “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense,” in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. by Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press 1993 (Philosophical Inquiries, vol. 2), pp. 195–224. Lowrie, Walter, “Preface by the Translator,” in Søren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955, pp. i–xxvii. III. Secondary Literature on Cavell’s Relation to Kierkegaard Conant, James, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. by Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press 1989, pp. 242–83. — “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. by Timothy Tessin and Mario van der Ruhr, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1995, pp. 318–19. — “Cavell and the Concept of America,” in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. by Russell B. Goodman, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 56–60. Hall, Ronald L., “Pursuits of Knowledge and Happiness: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Stanley Cavell,” Soundings, vol. 77, nos. 1–2, 1994, pp. 145–61. — The Human Embrace: The Love of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Love: Kierkegaard, Cavell, Nussbaum, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 2000. Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982, p. 377. Hustwit, Ronald E., “Understanding a Suggestion of Professor Cavell’s: Kierkegaard’s Religious Stage as a Wittgensteinian ‘Form of Life,’ ” Philosophy Research Archive, vol. 4, no. 1271, 1978, pp. 329–47. Mulhall, Stephen, “Philosophy Cannot Say Sin,” in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994, pp. 283–312. — “Editor’s Introduction” to “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in The Cavell Reader, ed. by Stephen Mulhall, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, pp. 127–8. Nientied, Mariele, Kierkegaard und Wittgenstein: “Hineintäuschen in das Wahre,” Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 7), pp. 359–64. Schönbaumsfeld, Genia, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, pp. 43–4.

Paul de Man: The Unwritten Chapter J.D. Mininger

I. Introduction to Paul de Man’s Relationship to Kierkegaard; or, the Unwritten Chapter Literary critic and theorist Paul de Man (1919–83) never wrote an essay on Kierkegaard. In fact, somewhat ironically, even his 1977 lecture, later transcribed and included in Aesthetic Ideology, titled “The Concept of Irony,” contains only a handful of sentences about Kierkegaard’s book of the same title. He manages some praise (Kierkegaard’s is “the best book on irony that’s available”),1 some criticism (Kierkegaard “has to invent…a whole theory of history to justify the fact that one should get rid of Friedrich Schlegel, that he’s not a real ironist”),2 but the vast majority of the essay is dedicated to Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), with one lengthy digression into Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). The other references to Kierkegaard strewn about de Man’s texts amount to little more than modest, at times even vague recognition. These gestures to Kierkegaard in de Man’s oeuvre number between 12 and 20, depending on one’s definition of a single reference. Of them all, the most provocative might not even be a reference in the typical sense. Instead, it is the title for the eighth projected chapter in the table of contents of a projected book that eventually (posthumously) came to be titled Aesthetic Ideology: “Critique of Religion and Political Ideology in Kierkegaard and Marx,” with an 0 marked beside it to denote that the work was supposedly “in progress.”3 Paul de Man died in December, 1983, before he had the chance to write this proposed essay on Kierkegaard. Therefore, the one substantial indicator of de Man’s understanding of Kierkegaard’s work and of specifically how he positioned himself and his criticallinguistic analyses in relation to Kierkegaard, remains unavailable, impossible. It is perhaps even fitting that the great theorist of the aporetical, a true champion of the logjams of meaning, should leave this final impasse for his readers permanently to confront.

1 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 163. 2 Ibid., p. 168. 3 Andrzej Warminski, “Introduction: Allegories of Reference,” in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 2, note 4.

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What do we know about this non-existent chapter on Kierkegaard? According to Wlad Godzich it was to be not simply an engagement with Kierkegaard but a reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s (1903–69) take on Kierkegaard: “…Paul de Man did not live to write two essays that would have been of considerable interest: one on Kierkegaard as seen by Adorno, and the other on Marx’s The German Ideology.”4 Surely the work in question is Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. As for generally why it is that de Man had singled out Kierkegaard and Marx, he claims that these choices are related to his project on the category of the aesthetic, as developed from the grounding points of Kant and Hegel. De Man’s reading of the aesthetic tradition places it as an absolutely vital category that philosophy needs in order to make itself relevant to “real” life experience. In his wonderful and penetrating introduction to Aesthetic Ideology, titled “Allegories of Reference,” Andrzej Warminski quotes de Man on the guiding thesis of this project: “the investment in the aesthetic is considerable—the whole ability of philosophical discourse to develop as such depends entirely on its ability to develop an adequate aesthetics. This is why both Kant and Hegel, who had little interest in the arts, had to put it in, to make possible the link between real events and philosophical discourse.”5 What de Man finds so remarkable is that in the process of executing the construction of their aesthetic systems, both Kant and Hegel, according to de Man’s reading, end up undoing, deconstructing, or disarticulating that part (the aesthetic) which was to play the crucial mediating role. In this context, de Man’s interest in Kierkegaard (and Marx for that matter too) is as a reader of Hegel. In his “Reply to Raymond Geuss,” de Man explains that this project starts out from a difficulty, a recurrent uncertainty in the reception of [Hegel’s] Aesthetics, a difficulty perhaps more acute in the case of this particular Hegel text than of any other. The Aesthetics always was and still is a crux in the interpretation of Hegel. It was so for Kierkegaard, who extended the problematic in the direction of religion, and for Marx, who extended it in the direction of the philosophy of law. The same configuration is repeated today in the decisive importance given to the Aesthetics in the two main twentieth-century attempts to reinterpret Hegel: in Heidegger and in Adorno (who started out from Kierkegaard).6

This establishes two key points in de Man’s relationship to Kierkegaard: (1) de Man understands Kierkegaard historically, as a reader of Hegel, as someone writing seemingly always in relationship to Hegel; (2) as Godzich suggests in the introduction to The Resistance to Theory, de Man’s upcoming work on Kierkegaard would have been deeply entwined with Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard, and hence we might further surmise that his proposed work on Adorno (sketched in a preliminary proposal for The Resistance to Theory) might also have been entangled with material from Adorno’s study of Kierkegaard. Wlad Godzich, “Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat,” in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986, p. xi. 5 Warminski, “Introduction: Allegories of Reference,” p. 4. 6 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 186–7. 4

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However, this is all speculation about something never written. We do not know what de Man would have written about Kierkegaard. In fact, de Man himself admits in an interview given towards the end of his life that he did not really know either what it was he would say about Kierkegaard: What will come out of it, I just do not know because I do not work that way. What will come out, will come from the texts of Marx and Kierkegaard as I think they will have to be read. And they have to be read from the perspective of critical-linguistic analysis to which those texts have not been submitted. There has been very little on Kierkegaard along those lines and there has been even less on Marx, except, of course, for elements in Althusser that, I think, go in that direction. But I look forward to seeing what I will produce and know as little about it as anybody else.7

Perhaps he is merely being humble; or perhaps he does know, but, for the sake of organic possibility and the mere delight of chance, he wishes to keep his options radically open; regardless, he states in this interview that he does not know what he has to say about Kierkegaard. This point must be kept constantly in mind as a kind of grain of salt with which to take the following considerations of Kierkegaard’s possible influence on de Man. It is rather difficult to imagine that Kierkegaard’s thought had much significant and direct influence on Paul de Man’s work if, at this key moment of finally turning to address Kierkegaard, de Man had so little to offer on the subject prior to starting the essay. Without a doubt, there are a great many resonances between the critical aims and existing texts of Paul de Man on the one hand, and the rich, intense, voluminous writings of Søren Kierkegaard on the other. But, with respect to the topic at hand— Kierkegaard’s influence on Paul de Man—it must be said that those resonances belong to us, the readers, and not really to de Man. Certainly we can apply de Manian insight to Kierkegaard, his texts, his ideas—we can and should “read” Kierkegaard in the strong sense that de Man uses this term. But the Kierkegaardian texts invite us to do so—it is not because Kierkegaard played much of an influential role in de Man’s intellectual development. De Man’s texts can and should be revisited and reread with Kierkegaard’s lessons and examples in mind—for instance, why not read Kierkegaard’s indirect communication and pseudonymous strategy alongside, say, de Man’s wonderful essay “Autobiography as De-Facement”?8 But, regardless of their interesting and important engagements with Kierkegaard’s work, perspectives which pose Kierkegaard as a kind of deconstructionist (or even postmodern) author avant la lettre must avoid grounding their claims in anything like a thesis that de Man was directly and significantly influenced by Kierkegaard. There simply is not evidence to support the claim of direct influence. Indirect, hidden, conceptual and genealogical (as opposed to historical) influences—these are another matter. But they are also considerations that reach well beyond the scope of this article. Like de Man’s chapter on Kierkegaard, most of those thoughts have yet to be written.

De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 121. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press 1984, pp. 67–81. 7 8

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II. Situating Kierkegaard Of the no more than 20 references to Kierkegaard found scattered throughout de Man’s collections of essays, de Man most frequently frames the Dane within the context of some sort of list of related proper names. At least half of all of de Man’s references to Kierkegaard involve little more than positioning Kierkegaard alongside certain other types within a particular historical category relevant to the topic at hand. In this way Kierkegaard often plays the role of a contextualizing figure—a signpost from the history of philosophy that helps to orient readers to texts, trends, lineages of influence both biographical and conceptual, and histories of reception. This demonstrates that de Man is familiar with the general contours of Kierkegaard’s work and range of influence; however, these types of references reveal little to nothing about the possible influence Kierkegaard’s writing may have had on de Man’s own interests. Nevertheless, this section will briefly outline and explain the most relevant examples of such allusions. De Man’s historical positioning and intellectual mapping of Kierkegaard via passing reference is at points as banal as stating that in the early and middle parts of the twentieth century Kierkegaard was a very popular philosopher to read,9 and at points as specific as including him in a list of the great ironists of the nineteenth century, most of whom do not belong to the traditionally assumed category for irony, namely, the category of the novelist (Stendhal being a/the prime example).10 De Man squeezes the category even tighter at one point, including Kierkegaard in the group of ironists who belong in particular to the Romantic tradition (and its reception).11 In several places de Man includes Kierkegaard among lists of key intellectual figures belonging specifically to the German tradition, such as the following crowd from “The Concept of Irony”: if you are interested in the problem and the theory of irony, you have to take it in the German tradition. That’s where the problem is worked out. You have to take it in Friedrich Schlegel (much more than in August Wilhelm Schlegel), and also in Tieck, Novalis, Solger, Adam Müller, Kleist, Jean Paul, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and all the way up to Nietzsche. An enumeration from which I more or less pointedly omit Thomas Mann, who is generally considered to be the main German ironist. He is [a German ironist], but he is less important than any of the others I mentioned.12

As well as belonging to the German canon, de Man positions Kierkegaard as a key thinker who undermines the classical tradition of understanding allegory, alongside Kant, Hamann, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and this unit’s twentieth-century representative, Walter Benjamin.13 This is a notably positive position for Kierkegaard with respect See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd revised ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983, p. 4. 10 De Man names Kierkegaard, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche. See ibid., p. 210. 11 Ibid., p. 209. 12 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 167. 13 De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 61. 9

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to de Man’s earlier views of Kierkegaard (discussed below), which tended much more towards the skeptical and even downright dismissive. De Man has one label and role for Kierkegaard that figures more prominently than any other, that of an interpreter—a reader—of Hegel. At points de Man considers Kierkegaard a continuator of Hegel’s thought, such as when de Man places Kierkegaard together with Nietzsche as belonging to the stream of thought that treats “the aesthetic as a provisional…form of cognition.”14 In this particular instance de Man is wary of this position, because he believes that whenever “the aesthetic is invoked as an appeal to clarity and control, whenever, in other words, a symptom is made into a remedy for the disorder it signals, a great deal of caution is in order.”15 But de Man also occasionally situates Kierkegaard as perhaps the representative critic of Hegel. In a passing reference in “Heidegger’s Exegesis of Hölderlin,” de Man explains that the critique of Hegel’s work, “from Kierkegaard to our day,”16 emphasizes reconciliation to such a degree as to essentially misrepresent the Hegelian philosophy.17 At a bit of a reflective distance, what may be discerned as a kind of pattern, theme, or guiding thread woven through the majority of de Man’s allusions to Kierkegaard is the largely skeptical stance de Man takes towards Kierkegaard. As can easily be seen in the late lecture “The Concept of Irony,” de Man really does have respect and admiration for Kierkegaard’s work, at least to a point.18 But whether he found himself more open to Kierkegaard as time moved on, or whether he simply began to engage Kierkegaard’s work more seriously, his scattered references demonstrate that in most instances de Man had little to say about Kierkegaard other than to use the proper name and the occasional concept associated with it (such as the “leap”) as a prop in relationship to which de Man might position his own critical-theoretical goals. In this sense, de Man’s references to Kierkegaard could be construed as decidedly political textual moments. Perhaps the finest example of this comes from de Man’s 1964 review of William Barrett’s What is Existentialism?, titled “Heidegger Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 64. 16 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 265. 17 “If there ever was a philosophy of necessary separation,” writes de Man, “it is Hegel’s; to assimilate the notion of Absolute Spirit with idealist reconciliation is to simplify all the way into misprision.” See de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 265. Jon Stewart’s argument(s) in Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered create an intriguing new arrangement from de Man’s original positioning. By virtue of realigning Kierkegaard’s polemic against Hegelian philosophy more forcibly and convincingly in the direction of the Danish Hegelians and Hegel hagiographers, rather than as directed more directly toward the Hegelian texts and ideas themselves, Stewart’s thesis effectively suggests that de Man might at points find himself much closer to Kierkegaard’s position vis-à-vis Hegel than he initially suspected himself to be. This is clearly one area of revisionist criticism still left to explore within the de Man– Kierkegaard relationship. See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002. 18 He praises Kierkegaard for having written “the best book on irony that’s available.” Of course this raises the question as to what the best unavailable book on irony might be. See de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 163. 14 15

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Reconsidered,” in which de Man mentions Kierkegaard twice. In the first instance, Kierkegaard’s name appears in a list of names of philosophers that de Man claims typically pop up in cheap summaries of existentialism, noting that Barrett “spares us the usual hasty resumes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and even Heidegger.”19 Leaving aside the fact that most of de Man’s references to Kierkegaard are typically hasty and often times lack specificity and explanation, there is a bit of a defense of Kierkegaard (as well as the other philosophers named) here. But that defense is in the form of an attack on the poor form of critics, and it does not actually suggest that, for instance, Kierkegaard should not belong to the list of names credited as part of existentialism. This is important, especially in light of the allusion to Kierkegaard on the following page of the essay. This second allusion emerges as de Man starts into an explanation of what he sees as a frequent, even canonical misreading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), namely, that it is a book supposedly about “the realm of immediate experience rather than…a rigorous philosophical discourse on this experience.”20 De Man points out that Being and Time contains, after all, such phrases as “being towards death,” talks at times (though much less often than is generally assumed) about such familiar-sounding experiences as care, guilt, anxiety, etc., devotes a footnote to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (though this is the only literary reference in the book), and mentions, albeit with strong philosophical reservations, Kierkegaard. A reader may therefore assume that this is a “subjective” book that, like Sartre’s essays, somehow tries to cope, in terms of actions, values, and beliefs, with such matters as our anxieties, our historical predicament, or our mortality…. Nothing is more remote from Heidegger than this confusion between the pathos of direct experience and the knowing of this experience—a confusion that, ironically, has become associated with so-called existential thought.21

This passage demonstrates—and herein lies the political element—that de Man saw Kierkegaard as a “subjective” writer. Obviously, in so many ways, that is correct. But there is not even the slightest attempt here to explore the complexities of the gap theorized in various works by Kierkegaard between “the pathos of direct experience” and our necessarily linguistically constructed knowledge of that experience.22 Naturally, it is possible de Man was well aware of this greater sophistication in Kierkegaard’s thought. Nevertheless, in this instance (in 1964), his example of Heidegger’s reference to Kierkegaard in Being and Time appeals to the popular understanding—what de Man might call a misreading, or perhaps a simple misunderstanding, or, even the more generously couched, limited understanding—of Kierkegaard not as a rich and complex thinker, but as a disfigured and perhaps even caricatured version of himself as an existentialist, or the “father of existentialism.” Paul de Man, Critical Writings 1953–1978, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 102. 20 Ibid., p. 103. 21 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 22 For example, inter alia: The Concept of Anxiety; Philosophical Fragments; Fear and Trembling; and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 19

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This account of Kierkegaard is akin to the stereotyped composite figure focused always on the sinister and its associative keywords, on sickness, despair, fear, trembling, the demonic, and anxiety, and the like: in short, the melancholic Dane. While that last comparison does not necessarily fit de Man’s rendering of Kierkegaard, that reference to Kierkegaard as a subjective writer bears witness to a trend in de Man’s formative decades, the 1930s and 1940s. In his introduction to Critical Writings, “Paul de Man: Life and Works,” Lindsay Waters explains that the political climate at the time gave rise to a tremendous number of absolutes, in response to which many, including Paul de Man, were led to reject notions of inwardness.23 Kierkegaard was often named the key representative of this position of inwardness (and perhaps with good reason). Theodor W. Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933) is exemplary of this trend. When de Man insists on understanding Being and Time as a book about the conscious cognition of experience (“as opposed to immediate, intuitive, experienced knowledge”),24 he positions himself against inwardness as potential (non-)politics. When de Man refers to the Kierkegaardian leap as a mystified and disingenuous idealism, he positions himself against this inwardness. When he stubbornly reduces Kierkegaard to a reader of Hegel (whether critic or continuator), he positions himself against this inwardness. From his writings of the early 1960s to his late essays published posthumously, de Man rejects recuperations of the Self that claim reconciliation or wholeness. For de Man, language’s unstable foundations do not support such a movement, and the political ramifications for moving blindly forward with such claims are precisely what his late works on aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology are all about. For this reason—inwardness—de Man finds Kierkegaard suspect. In this particular, oblique sense, perhaps Kierkegaard had some (ex negativo) influence on de Man. But nowhere does he really work this out for his readers. We are left to decipher his passing references in this respect. III. Minor References For many intellectuals, Kierkegaard’s biography and in particular his complicated relationship with Regine Olsen—as indirectly narrated by Kierkegaard’s published work, as narrated more directly in his journals, and as received by popular tale or lecture anecdote—receives as much personal interest and scholarly attention as the ideas and arguments themselves. Given the relative dearth of allusions to Kierkegaard among de Man’s texts, the extent of his interest in Kierkegaard’s biographical drama(s) cannot be clearly discerned. However, there is one reference to Kierkegaard in “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionetten Theater” that, at the very least, demonstrates de Man’s casual acquaintance with Kierkegaard’s infamous relationship with Regine. The allusion springs from a context in which de Man is asking the following question of Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777–1811) Über das Marionettentheater (1810): “Can he [Kleist] say, for example, with full Lindsay Waters, “Introduction: Paul de Man: Life and Works,” in de Man, Critical Writings, p. xix. 24 De Man, Critical Writings, p. 104. 23

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authority, that his text is or is not autobiographical?”25 At stake is the matter of hermeneutic authorial mastery versus the vertiginous lack of control of one’s own literary creation. Among other interpretations, Kleist’s drama submits to a reading in which just this very predicament is allegorized.26 De Man could have posed this question of fiction or (auto)biographical truth via an engagement with Kierkegaard’s body of work, which surely raises the question more emphatically (though not for that reason more meaningfully or truthfully) than Kleist’s example. However, he did not. But there is the faintest hint of that possibility in the way in which de Man suggests that Kleist’s relationship to his Marionetten story bears on his biography with at least enough weight to raise the tension of the question of textual authority to that of a kind of impasse, in which clearly both sides—narrative versus history—claim truth and yet both sides equally reveal falsity and failure. The story’s reference to 1801 makes the case for an autobiographical relationship, because this is the year in which Kleist suffered a heavy intellectualemotional burden from having seriously read and even more seriously accepted the potential consequences of the Kantian project of establishing the limits of the human faculties—his so-called “Kant-crisis.” But “it is also the year,” notes de Man, “during which Kleist’s engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge begins to falter and during which he is plagued by doubts similar to those which plagued Kierkegaard in his relationship to Regina [sic] and Kafka in his relationship to Felice.”27 The comparison to Kierkegaard is certainly apt, and the yoking of the four K’s here (Kleist, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kafka) is provocative and would no doubt repay further inquiry; nevertheless, the fact remains that de Man’s citation of Kierkegaard’s biography is superficial, at least in the overt sense. Kleist’s personal doubts about the possibility of fulfilling the expectations of love, of marriage, of commitment, and so on, may very well be similar to the tortured doubts Kierkegaard experienced (and rehashed ad nauseam in his writings). But we readers are left to decide whether Kierkegaard’s texts are worthy of the same pressing questions being posed to Kleist’s text. Surely they are, and likely de Man would agree, though of course that is sheer speculation. But, for the question and theme of influence, this reference is quickly exhausted. The same fate of quick exhaustion awaits the reader of several other minor allusions to Kierkegaard in de Man’s oeuvre. Two of these examples come from de Man’s rare appeals to a/the so-called Kierkegaardian leap. De Man thrice makes reference to this conceptual act. The first instance occurs in the 1966 review essay, “A Modern Master: Jorge Luís Borges”; the second in the 1966 essay “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self”; the third in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969); the latter two are collected in the second and revised edition of Blindness and Insight, and the former was republished in Critical Writings, 1953–1978. In the essay on Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), de Man discusses 25 De Man, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionetten Theater,” in his The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 283. 26 In the story this allegory is formed by the tension between the folly of the fencer and the nearly mechanical predictability of the bear, who “has killed off all possibility for play.” Ibid., p. 283. 27 Ibid., p. 283.

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the “problematic relationship between subject and object that prevails in the sphere of aesthetics,”28 in particular the problem of form as confronted by the author. De Man’s discussion considers an essay by Georg Lukács (1885–1971) titled “The Subject–Object Relationship in Aesthetics,” to which Ludwig Binswanger appeals in an essay that addresses if and how authors’ own works interpret (and perhaps even transform) their creators.29 Lukács suggests a typically modernist response to the subject–object predicament, namely, that the only authentic subject–object relationship is one in which authenticity has been dismissed. Therefore, explains de Man, the artist is “caught within a dilemma from which he can only escape by means of a Kierkegaardian leap: the work must become a project aimed toward an unreachable goal, and its partial success takes on the form of ‘a renunciation at the very moment when it comes into being.’ ”30 While de Man’s usage of Kierkegaardian leap is hardly flippant, neither is it particularly carefully wielded, let alone explicitly defined or remarked. One assumes the leap to which de Man here refers should bear resemblance to a potentially analogous scenario in, for instance, Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de silentio’s knight of faith uses the act of infinite resignation—here akin to the move of renunciation—to recuperate faith: one must lose the world in order to gain it back, in a sense. Is it a Kierkegaardian leap because it is a move out of the aesthetic? In other words, perhaps de Man is appealing here to Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence? But just as this reference might be better verified as correct and precise through the application of comparative textual study and guesswork as to what specific element of this aesthetic conundrum might best be called Kierkegaardian, so too might it simply be a casual (and yet noteworthy) or even trendy intellectual reference to the procedure of making of decision in the face of uncertainty, impossibility, or absurdity. We might learn a bit more about how to read the reference to a Kierkegaardian leap from the example found in “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” At one point in the section of the essay dedicated to irony, de Man points out that even Friedrich Schlegel, whose definition of irony as “permanent parabasis” serves as a platform for most of what de Man builds onto the category of irony, found himself despairing in the face of irony’s dangerous and potentially infinite rhetorical mise-en-abyme in which the conscious subject consistently “strives to move beyond and outside itself.”31 De Man pairs Schlegel’s answer with what he claims is also Kierkegaard’s answer to this similar showdown with irony’s worst-case scenario: “For the later Friedrich Schlegel, as for Kierkegaard, the solution could only be a leap out of language into faith.”32 From this mention, it appears de Man understands a Kierkegaardian leap to be no mere transitional move in which the self sublimates itself (for instance, out of a mere aesthetic impasse); clearly he understands a Kierkegaardian leap to be a decision made of and on faith. By pairing Schlegel and Kierkegaard in this instance, De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 41. The Binswanger essay in question is: Hendrik [sic] Ibsen und das Problem der Selbstrealisation in der Kunst, cited in de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 41, note 2. 30 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 43. 31 Ibid., p. 222. 32 Ibid., pp. 222–3. 28 29

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one could also add the word de Man deftly omits, namely, Christian faith. For de Man, a leap of faith is a mystification—a denial of the inherently unstable ground and truth of language. To borrow terminology favored by de Man later in his career, we might say that he understands a Kierkegaardian leap of faith as a flight into aesthetic ideology, where, to return to the language of “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” the self forms “an illusory identification with the non-self.”33 To put it bluntly, a leap is a self-mystifying conceptual act according to de Man. In this respect, de Man’s references to Kierkegaard in these contexts are mild, somewhat indirect criticisms. The most obvious case in which we see de Man’s disdain for the notion of the Kierkegaardian leap of faith emerges from his review of Borges. Among the general attributes of Borges’ literature and in particular in the late collection of stories Dreamtigers, de Man admires the author’s refusal of any transcendent or liberatory consolation from art. De Man writes: For although the last reflection may be the face of God himself, with his appearance the life of poetry comes to an end. The situation is very similar to that of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic man, with the difference that Borges refuses to give up his poetic predicament for a leap into faith. This confers a somber glory on the pages of Dreamtigers….34

Obviously de Man does not approve of Kierkegaard’s leap, for glory is a strong word indeed to describe precisely what Kierkegaard’s Christian faith does not achieve. “Somber,” which resonates with several possible meanings in this context, at the very least connotes the seriousness of not choosing an (illusory) liberatory path. Of course, if one takes Kierkegaard’s notion of the leap with a modicum of intellectual rigor, one notes immediately that it does not offer silly or easy consolation, let alone some ignorant jubilation. But regardless of the oversimplified and casual appeal to the Kierkegaardian leap, de Man still places himself in line with a very important tradition within the secondary literature of criticizing the postures of inwardness championed by Kierkegaard. In “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” de Man drops a reference to Kierkegaard into a situation in which the allusion’s rhetorical status is unclear. In the essay de Man sets out to explain how a sign inevitably turns into a symbol, and more specifically, by way of example, how I turns into “I”—that is, how the sign appropriates the particularity and even singularity of the world through a subjective use that renders its status inevitably general. As de Man clarifies: thought subsumes the infinite singularity and individuation of the perceived world under ordering principles that lay claim to generality. The agent of this appropriation is language. “Since language,” says Hegel, “is the labor of thought, we cannot say anything in language that is not general”—a sentence with which Kierkegaard will take issue, in an ironic mode, in Fear and Trembling.35

Ibid., p. 207. De Man, Critical Writings, p. 129. 35 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 97. 33 34

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As with the vast majority of de Man’s references to Kierkegaard, the reader is left to decide what more precisely in Kierkegaard’s work it is that de Man wishes to point out. In general terms, it appears that de Man refers to Johannes de silentio’s suggestion in Fear and Trembling that through the paradox of faith the religious individual (Abraham)—the single individual—surpasses or at least removes oneself from the universal (ethics), because the only one who can understand him is the absolute (that is, God). This is, of course, also related to the problem of communication and justification, dealt with in most detail in Problema Three, in which de silentio raises the question of silence. While appropriate in the aesthetic sphere, communicability (or, disclosure) is incommensurable with the religious. Language (i.e., communication) circumscribes one within universality—this is Hegel’s point, at least in a simplified sense. De Man does not disagree; rather, his concern is with how this inevitable slide into universality occurs. The paradoxical, silent singularity of Abraham, of the knight of faith, happens through the leap. We already know that de Man seems more at odds with this term (“leap”) than laudatory of it. And yet, by noting that Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel comes “in an ironic mode,” it would seem that perhaps de Man feels some sympathy with the endeavor. Nevertheless, as with so many of the others, this allusion also confirms de Man’s fundamental positioning of Kierkegaard as a reader and interpreter of Hegel. Thus, along with this confirmation, comes yet another interpretation of this reference as a kind of benign, quasi-neutral statement. In other words, perhaps de Man does not feel strongly either way about Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel in this context, and he mentions it solely in the role of a helpful teacher who wishes to give his students every opportunity to gain a foothold on difficult material, if even, as here, through digressionary example or analogy.36 This pedagogical motive for making passing references to Kierkegaard proves crucial for understanding several of de Man’s other minor references, in particular those related to the topic of repetition. In the last of his Gauss lectures of 1967, “Irony and Allegory in Baudelaire” (collected and published in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism), de Man compares French poet Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–67) understanding and use of irony—obviously one of the key themes of the lecture—to Kierkegaard’s.37 De Man explains that Baudelaire’s irony emerges in the relationships of some of his (Baudelaire’s) later poems to several of the poet’s earlier efforts. More specifically, Baudelaire ironizes his own (earlier) work by (later) use of intertextual reference and correspondence. One notable example figures prominently in de Man’s interpretation, namely, the conveniently titled poem “Correspondances” (dated at least as early as 1855) and the later poem “Obsession” It is also possible that de Man’s comment may be somewhat misguided. Kierkegaard’s polemic against “Hegel” in Fear and Trembling may have less to do directly with Hegel’s philosophy and is more likely directed at Copenhagen contemporaries Heiberg and Martensen. Obviously this version of the reception of Fear and Trembling that de Man subscribes to has a long, canonized history in the secondary literature. For more on this so-called standardized version of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel and a brilliantly argued corrective to it, see Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. 37 Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993, pp. 112–13. 36

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(1860), the latter poem of which de Man argues is an “explicit demythification of the assertive positivity of the earlier poem.”38 De Man suggests that this Baudelaireian ironic repetition should be understood “in the full Kierkegaardian sense of the term (Baudelaire and Kierkegaard’s notion of irony being very closely related and having, be it said in passing, a common point of reference in Hoffmann’s story “The Princess Brambilla.”39 The parenthetical remark is rather teasingly ambiguous, because it provides specificity for the connection between the two thinkers in the form of a story by German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), but then he does not clarify how we are to understand that connection. Kierkegaard only mentions Hofmann’s story at one point in a journal fragment.40 Therefore, though de Man may have found an appealing connecting thread between Baudelaire and Kierkegaard, it seems to be a mostly invisible one. In his later, more well-known and more influential essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” for which “Irony and Allegory in Baudelaire” is clearly an earlier site in the development of that same material, de Man reveals that this largely invisible link between Baudelaire and Kierkegaard via Hoffmann did not originate with him (de Man), but was a line already drawn by Jean Starobinski, in 1967 in “Ironie et mélancholie: Gozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard.”41 The visible link—Kierkegaardian repetition—is what proves of some greater significance for the question of Kierkegaard’s possible influence on de Man. These comments show de Man’s familiarity with the specifically Kierkegaardian brand of repetition—in particular that repetition in the “full Kierkegaardian sense of the term” denotes not a simple reminiscence of the past, but a repetition spilled forward, which in this context amounts to an ironic reinterpretation of the past in a new and decidedly different present iteration. With Kierkegaard, de Man understands repetition as always repetition with a difference. In Repetition, Kierkegaard writes of simple repetition: “the dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”42 This notion of repetition as never mere recollection, but rather repetition always inflected with difference, is what, in both the above-quoted “Irony and Allegory in Baudelaire” (1967) and later in a similar context in his “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969),43 leads de Man to suggest that the movement at work in both irony and allegory is repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense. Nowhere in his oeuvre does de Man follow up on these gestures towards the figure of repetition in “the full Kierkegaardian sense of the term.” Given that fact, it Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., pp. 112–13. 40 See Pap. II A 627 / JP 2, 1688. 41 See Jean Starobinski, “Ironie et mélancholie: Gozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard,” Estratto da Sensibilitá e Razionalitá nel Settecento, Florence 1967, p. 459. Cited (as given here, without a specified publisher) in de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 217. 42 SKS 4, 25 / R, 149. 43 De Man describes allegory in the following manner: “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority.” See de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 207. 38 39

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seems willful, if not downright illusory and incorrect to suggest that in developing his various definitions of allegory and irony—at the many different places in his writings, and not merely in these two textual sites where the phrase “Kierkegaardian repetition” is intoned—de Man was in any way seriously or deeply influenced by Kierkegaard’s work. There are certainly correspondences between Kierkegaardian repetition and de Manian allegory and irony, and important ones at that. But these are genealogical links, not historicist marks of guiding influence. De Man’s pedagogical spirit seems to lead him to make reference to Kierkegaard in these moments; he does not seem influenced by any particular causal point within the conceptual development, let alone some structural necessity. In other words, de Man’s appeals to Kierkegaard on the topic of repetition may be understood as a teaching strategy, not an acknowledgment of significant intellectual debt. IV. Irony: The Major Engagement There is something ironic in the use of “major” to describe de Man’s engagement with Kierkegaard on the topic of irony, mostly because de Man largely side-steps this supposed confrontation. With the exception of two essential points, which de Man nevertheless deals with tersely in a matter of a handful of sentences, his treatment of Kierkegaard in “The Concept of Irony” is anything but a rigorous direct engagement. The first of the more direct forays into Kierkegaard’s irony book demonstrates a kind of positive influence or response to the book. De Man asserts that Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety is “the best book on irony that’s available.”44 While clearly laudatory, de Man’s assertion may also have a more covert rhetorical force: one wonders if this is perhaps not also a backhanded insult directed towards current studies of irony, such as Wayne Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony.45 But in the following sentence de Man gives us a sense that Kierkegaard’s book has informed his own study, at least in part: The Concept of Irony “is an ironic title, because irony is not a concept—and that’s partly the thesis which I’m going to develop.”46 The next time de Man intones the name Kierkegaard (which comes at the end of the next paragraph), he has already moved on to a more critical position in which he argues that Kierkegaard’s irony book is wrapped up in a dialectic of influence from and resistance to Hegel, which produces ironic complaints from Kierkegaard about Hegel (or so claims de Man).47 But even this slightly more critical angle supports the basic point that de Man professes to have learned from Kierkegaard, namely, that irony is not a concept—that is, it is notoriously difficult to define. So, despite the critique that comes later in the essay, there is some positive influence. Interestingly, de Man never directly addresses Kierkegaard’s definition of irony as “infinite absolute negativity.” It gets mentioned in the lecture only through the mouthpiece of a quotation from Wayne Booth’s irony book.48 Any reader attuned De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 163. Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974. 46 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 163. 47 Ibid., p. 164. 48 Ibid., p. 166. 44 45

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to the de Man–Kierkegaard relationship must begin to wonder if de Man is, in fact, more actively avoiding a serious confrontation with Kierkegaard. This rings especially true since de Man will make some use of Schlegel’s definition of irony (as permanent parabasis), without explaining while Schlegel’s should be considered better or more appropriate than the definition from “the best book on irony.” Why does de Man so gracefully, though precisely for that reason so obviously shirk a more direct engagement with Kierkegaard’s theory of irony? Christopher Norris suggests that it is because de Man seeks to assimilate ethics to narrative poetics: “It is a symptom of a marked and persistent refusal to envisage any form of ethical discourse that would appeal to some wider, inter-personal or social realm of values.”49 Certainly for de Man ethics is thorny, but important territory; but he does not thoroughly dismiss ethics. Instead, de Man attempts to resituate ethics from the actions of a responsible, autonomous subject to the duty of a criticreader who must vigilantly attempt to exhaust the inexhaustible allegories produced by the insistent disconnect in the object’s representation between the literal and figural, between symbol and allegory, between aesthetic ideology and rhetorical awareness, and between “a desire for selfsameness or identity and the acceptance of the ‘impossibility’ of such a desire,”50 just to name a few of the crucial tensions in modern aesthetics that de Man’s work admirably pinpoints. According to de Man, Schlegel’s theory and practice of irony amounts to the ultimate tool for resisting and preventing a slip into aesthetic ideology. Because irony, with its infinite absolute negativity, is the disruptive trope of allegory par excellence, its refusal to calcify around a single firmer, more substantially supportive meaning always keeps before it the basic fact of the arbitrary relation between sign and meaning. The rather cryptic definition that de Man arrives at, in part following Schlegel, is that: “irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes.”51 Even de Man himself admits that one may not be much the better or wiser for having been given that definition. At any rate, we may paraphrase this definition as follows: irony is the permanent suspension, interruption, disruption of narrative coherence and systematicity. As de Man suggests, this leaves irony the role of undoing any theory of narrative whatsoever, and, by taking up this task, irony places the very category of understanding in question. Though the terminology is quite different, in terms of defining irony where de Man arrives and where Kierkegaard arrives have many similarities, at least in the potential danger that irony can pose.52

49 Christopher Norris, “De Man Unfair to Kierkegaard,” in Dis/Continuities: Essays on Paul de Man, ed. by Luc Herman, Kris Humbeeck, and Geert Lernout, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1989, p. 215. 50 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Romanticism’s Paradoxical Articulation of Desire,” in Theory as Practice, ed. by Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997, p. 2. 51 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 179. 52 This paragraph and the preceding paragraph appeared in a slightly different form in my essay “The Persistence of Desire: Paul de Man on Kierkegaard on German Romanticism,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2009, pp. 167–83.

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But the similarities end there, with irony’s potential danger. Simply put, for de Man irony is not dialectical or transitional in the way that it can be for Kierkegaard.53 De Man rejects irony in its self-reflexive or specular form, especially as it might be understood—as by Kierkegaard—as a stage on the way to greater self-understanding and development. Recall that de Man’s early references to Kierkegaard reveal that the Dane represented for de Man a kind of mystified theory of inwardness in which the self was recuperated through (false) synthesis. De Man separates himself from Kierkegaard’s theory of irony at the point in which, according to de Man, Kierkegaard submits the evaluation of a certain ironic moment in history to its place in history. Socratic irony is valid irony because Socrates, like Saint John, heralds the arrival of Christ, and as such he came at the right moment. Whereas Friedrich Schlegel, or the German ironists his contemporaries, were not at the right moment. The only reason that they are to be discarded is that they were out of joint with the historical movement of history, which for Kierkegaard remains the final instance to which one has to resort in order to evaluate. So irony is secondary to a historical system.54

So we are to understand Schlegel versus Kierkegaard here, where de Man privileges Schlegel’s position. De Man claims that Schlegel’s position is the more noble, because more radical—because it eschews any mystifying consolation through the escape valves of history, of synthesis, of Aufhebung. Though dangerously simplified, we might see an analogy here to de Man’s review of Borges, in which Borges’ writing is privileged over Kierkegaard’s, because “Borges refuses to give up his poetic predicament for a leap into faith. This confers a somber glory on the pages of Dreamtigers….”55 Schlegel’s treatment here receives some of that somber glory, because the de Maninan version of Schlegelian irony does not hide in a system of history. Due to its necessary foundation in narration, history must be susceptible at all points to irony. “Friedrich Schlegel’s interpreters have all felt this, which is why all of them, including Kierkegaard, have to invoke history as hypostasis as a means of defense against this irony,” says de Man.56 De Man favors standing face to face with the radical potential of irony, confronting all of its dangerous ramifications. To posit a “way out,” as it were, is what he scolds Kierkegaard for, and this is what keeps de Man from embracing too quickly or closely Kierkegaard’s book on irony and its potential influence. V. Secondary Literature on De Man’s Relationship to Kierkegaard Of the relatively few engagements in the current secondary literature that directly address the topic of the relationship between de Man and Kierkegaard, in particular Kierkegaard’s influence (or lack thereof) on de Man, there are several 53 See, for instance, the final section of Kierkegaard’s text: “Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony,” SKS 1, 352–7 / CI, 324–9. 54 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 183. 55 De Man, Critical Writings, p. 129. 56 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 184.

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to recommend. Though nearly twenty years old by now, Arne Melberg’s 1990 article in Diacritics, called “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term)” merits attention.57 Contemporaneous to Melberg’s article, Christopher Norris’ “De Man Unfair to Kierkegaard? An Allegory of (Non)-Reading,”58 is a thoroughly polemical, yet thoughtful and carefully considered essay on the potential ethical pitfalls of de Man’s endorsement of Schlegel’s radical form of irony. Though it is a contribution to the secondary literature worthy of consideration, do not let the fact of its having been thrice published fallaciously suggest that the essay is therefore three times more important than the others. With an eye to the specific topic of de Man and Kierkegaard’s relationship to irony, Jacob Bøggild’s “Breaking the Seals of Slumber: An Inquiry into a Couple of Examples in Kierkegaard and Paul de Man” is the best single essay on the subject.59 My own “The Persistence of Desire: Paul de Man on Kierkegaard on German Romanticism” also speaks to the topic of their relationship,60 though the essay moves from the strictly historical plane to the conceptual-genealogical level in order to theorize the possibility that the two thinkers’ perspectives on irony can be partially reconciled in the wake of an intervention in the traditional interpretation of early German Romanticism. Although it is longer than a traditional journal essay, Thomas Pepper’s “Absolute Constructions,” in Singularities, repays careful study, especially the sections of the essay titled “The past not recaptured, or ‘the figure of this circularity is time’ ” and “Concern for repetitions.”61 Finally, lest one believe this topic to be largely dried up, Ayon Roy published “Hegel contra Schlegel; Kierkegaard contra de Man” in 2009.62 Like Norris’ article, Roy’s has a strong polemical bent to it. The book-length studies to be mentioned all fall into the category of indirect treatments of the de Man–Kierkegaard relationship, at least in the sense that it is not their immediate goal to ruminate on the possible influence of Kierkegaard on de Man. Rather, much of the value of the following studies rests in their readings of Kierkegaard from (various kinds of) de Manian perspectives. John Vignaux Smyth, a former student of Paul de Man’s, provides outstanding close readings (of both de Man and Kierkegaard) in his A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes.63 Roger Poole has some very de Manian and deconstruction-style moments in Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, which is a creatively argued Arne Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” Diacritics, vol. 20, no. 3, 1990, pp. 71–87. 58 Norris, “De Man Unfair to Kierkegaard? An Allegory of (Non)-Reading.” 59 Jacob Bøggild, “Breaking the Seals of Slumber: An Inquiry into a Couple of Examples in Kierkegaard and Paul de Man,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 253–69. 60 J.D. Mininger, “The Persistence of Desire: Paul de Man on Kierkegaard on German Romanticism,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2009, pp. 167–83. 61 Thomas Adam Pepper, “Absolute Constructions: An Essay at Paul de Man,” in his Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, pp. 88–172. 62 Ayon Roy, “Hegel contra Schlegel: Kierkegaard contra de Man,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 124, no. 1, 2009, pp. 107–26. 63 John Vignaux Smyth, A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes, Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University Press 1986. 57

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and brilliantly researched book.64 Geoffrey Hale’s “Learning to Read: Adorno, Kierkegaard, and Konstruktion” in Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language may offer some of the same sorts of insights on Adorno’s Kierkegaard book that Paul de Man might have pursued in his unwritten proposed chapter.65 Both Jacob Bøggild’s Ironiens tænker, tænkningens ironi. Kierkegaard læst retorisk and Pat Bigelow’s Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing effectively and productively apply de Manian styles of deconstructive textual analysis to Kierkegaard’s texts.66 Finally, though clearly written under the influence and tutelage of Jacques Derrida, one could make a strong case that Sylviane Agacinski’s impressive Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard (skillfully translated by Kevin Newmark) also proceeds in a very de Manian spirit.67

Roger Poole, The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia 1993. 65 Geoffrey Hale, “Learning to Read: Adorno, Kierkegaard, and Konstruktion,” in his Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002, pp. 37–72. 66 Pat Bigelow, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University Press 1987; Jacob Bøggild, Ironiens tænker, tænkningens ironi. Kierkegaard læst retorisk, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 2002. 67 See Sylviane Agacinski, Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Kevin Newmark, Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University Press 1988. 64

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in de Man’s Corpus “Criticism and Crisis,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed., Revised, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983, p. 4. “Heidegger’s Exegesis of Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed., Revised, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983, p. 265. “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed., Revised, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983, p. 43. “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed., Revised, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983, pp. 187–228. “Reading and History,” in The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986, pp. 66–8. “A Modern Master: Jorge Luís Borges,” in Critical Writings 1953–1978, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 129. “Heidegger Reconsidered,” in Critical Writings 1953–1978, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, pp. 102–3. “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press 1993, pp. 283–4. “Hegel on the Sublime,” in Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 115. “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, pp. 163–84. “Reply to Raymond Geuss,” in Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 187. “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in his Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 97. “Typed Table of Contents (sent with a letter 11 August 1983 to Lindsay Waters, then an editor at the University of Minnesota Press),” reprinted in Andrzej Warminski, “Introduction: Allegories of Reference,” in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 2, note 4. Rosso, Stefano, “An Interview with Paul de Man,” in The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986, p. 121. II. Sources of de Man’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor W., Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979 (vol. 2 in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–21, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–84).

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Benjamin, Walter, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1974 (vol. 1.1 in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–6 in 12 volumes, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1971–99), see pp. 245–55. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Halle: Niemeyer 1927, pp. 175-96, see also p. 190, note 1; p. 235, note 1; and p. 338, note 1. III. Secondary Literature on de Man’s Relation to Kierkegaard Bigelow, Pat, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University Press 1987. Bøggild, Jacob, “Breaking the Seals of Slumber: An Inquiry into a Couple of Examples in Kierkegaard and Paul de Man,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 253–69. — Ironiens tænker, tænkningens ironi. Kierkegaard læst retorisk, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 2002. Melberg, Arne, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” Diacritics, vol. 20, no. 3, 1990, pp. 71–87. Mininger, J.D., “The Persistence of Desire: Paul de Man on Kierkegaard on German Romanticism,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2009, pp. 167–83. Norris, Christopher, “Fictions of Authority: Narrative and Viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s Writing,” Criticism, vol. 25, no. 2, 1983, pp. 87–107. — “De Man Unfair to Kierkegaard? An Allegory of (Non)-Reading,” in Kierkegaard—Poet of Existence, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1989 (Kierkegaard Conferences, vol. 1), pp. 89–107; published also in Norris’ Deconstruction and the Interest of Theory, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press 1989, pp. 156–86 and in (Dis)continuities: Essays on Paul de Man, ed. by Luc Herman, Kris Humbeeck, and Geert Lernout, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1989 (Postmodern Studies, vol. 2), pp. 199–239.) Pepper, Thomas Adam, “Absolute Constructions: An Essay at Paul de Man,” Singularities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, pp. 88–172. Roy, Ayon, “Hegel contra Schlegel; Kierkegaard contra de Man,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 124, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 107–26. Smyth, John Vignaux, A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes, Tallahassee, Florida State University Press 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism, vol. 2), p. 2, note; p. 5, note; p. 29, note; p. 187; p. 200, note; p. 207; p. 306; p. 310; p. 312, note; p. 131, note; p. 327, note; p. 328, note; p. 333; p. 336; p. 338; pp. 343–6; pp. 350–7; pp. 360–5; pp. 372–3; p. 375.

Hubert Dreyfus: Seeking the Self in a Nihilistic Age Joseph Westfall

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (b. 1929) is an American philosopher, and as of this writing is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1964. He is known chiefly for his interpretation of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), as well as his work on the nature and limits of artificial intelligence, and his two chief works of philosophy are What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason,1 and Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I.2 More recently, he has made a major contribution to philosophical studies of the Internet with his book, On the Internet.3 In almost all of his philosophical work, Dreyfus is most deeply influenced by what he takes to be Heidegger’s understanding of the self, and a Heideggerian understanding of learning and skill acquisition (developed extensively by Dreyfus with his brother, Stuart Dreyfus, in a series of articles and one book, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuitive Expertise in the Era of the Computer4). This Heideggerian concern for the threat information technologies pose to the possibility of an authentic human self is no less present in Dreyfus’ use of and work on Kierkegaard than it is in his more explicit considerations of Heidegger, information technology, and skill acquisition. Dreyfus has published 12 journal articles or book chapters that deal centrally with Kierkegaard,5 and mentions Kierkegaard in eight of his otherwise non Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, New York: Harper & Row 1972. 2 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1991. 3 Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet, London: Routledge 2001. 4 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuitive Expertise in the Era of the Computer, New York: Free Press 1986. 5 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Samuel J. Todes, “The Existentialist Critique of Objectivity,” in Patterns of the Life-World: Essays in Honor of John Wild, ed. by James M. Edie, Francis H. Parker, and Calvin O. Schrag, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1970, pp. 346–87; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “You Can’t Get Something for Nothing: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on How Not to Overcome Nihilism,” Inquiry, vol. 30, nos. 1–2, 1987, pp. 33–75; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” in Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, pp. 283–340; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age: The Case of Commitment as Addiction,” 1

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Kierkegaardian writings.6 Kierkegaard is mentioned three times in What Computers Can’t Do,7 12 times in Being-in-the-World,8 three times in Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (co-authored with Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores),9 and three times in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (co-authored with Sean Dorrance Kelly).10 Dreyfus also mentions Kierkegaard in four essays on Heidegger: the introduction to Heidegger: A Critical Reader (coauthored with Harrison Hall), “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art,” and the foreword to Carol White’s Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude.11 In seven of Synthese, vol. 98, 1994, pp. 3–19; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Education on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment,” The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 1, no. 2, 1998, pp. 113–24; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Reply to Alastair Hannay,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 1, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2000, pp. 321–3; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Christianity without OntoTheology: Kierkegaard’s Account of the Self’s Movement from Despair to Bliss,” in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 88–103; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity versus Commitment in the Present Age,” in Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice, ed. by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, pp. 69–81 (revised and republished as Chapter 4 of Dreyfus’ On the Internet, pp. 73–89); Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, Oxford: Blackwell 2006, pp. 137–61; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, “Staring at the Sun: U2 and the Experience of Kierkegaardian Despair,” in U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall, Chicago: Open Court 2006, pp. 15–24; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. by Edward F. Mooney, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008, pp. 11–23. 6 Dreyfus was also an invited presenter at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre’s Research Seminar, August 5–7, 1998 at the Centre in Copenhagen. The focus of the Seminar was Kierkegaard’s book, A Literary Review, and Dreyfus’ presentation was entitled “Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age.” While readers of Dreyfus would not be incorrect in the belief that Kierkegaard enters from time to time into the (mostly Heideggerian) world of Hubert Dreyfus, the Research Seminar of 1998 was an opportunity for Dreyfus to enter briefly into the world of Søren Kierkegaard—and his scholars. A version of Dreyfus’ presentation—revised for publication—appears in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1999, pp. 96–109. 7 Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do, p. 113; p. 189; and p. 191. 8 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 3; p. 143; p. 148; p. 154; pp. 156–7; p. 176; p. 194; p. 226; p. 229; p. 234; p. 237; and pp. 275–6. 9 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa, and Fernando Flores, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1997, p. 191, note 6; p. 196, note 22; p. 207, note 4. 10 Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, New York: Free Press 2011, p. 106; p. 130; p. 236, note 28. 11 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, “Introduction,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, Oxford: Blackwell 1992, p. 14; Hubert

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the eight works where Kierkegaard is mentioned but not treated at length, Dreyfus refers to Kierkegaard for one of only four reasons: (1) to show some way in which Heidegger is indebted to Kierkegaard, (2) to discuss the Kierkegaardian conception of the self, (3) to make use of Kierkegaard’s notion of spheres of existence and the leap from one sphere to another, and (4) to appropriate Kierkegaard’s criticisms of leveling, the public, and the press for application to Heideggerian or otherwise contemporary concerns.12 Dreyfus’ 11 works on Kierkegaard likewise demonstrate concern chiefly for the issues raised in (2), (3), and (4), above. Dreyfus does not seem to read Kierkegaard in Danish, and so he depends upon English translations of Kierkegaard’s works in his analyses. More often than not, he prefers translations by Alastair Hannay, David and Lillian Swenson, and Alexander Dru to the standard English translations by Howard and Edna Hong.13 Given his other philosophical commitments, it is unsurprising that throughout Dreyfus’ nearly forty years of analysis and interpretation of Kierkegaard, his chief interest seems to be in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the self, and the ramifications of that understanding for social, cultural, and ethical action and interaction. Unifying the two projects, for Dreyfus, is Kierkegaard’s notion of an “infinite passion” or “unconditional commitment,” the cornerstone of Religiousness B in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Only by making an unconditional commitment to something finite, Dreyfus reads Kierkegaard to say, can a self truly come to be itself and overcome despair. And, only by supporting and encouraging such unconditional commitments in the individuals who constitute a society can cultural nihilism— according to Dreyfus, what Kierkegaard in A Literary Review calls “leveling”— be avoided or overcome. Thus, over the course of his writings on Kierkegaard, Dreyfus proposes a schematic account of the self; alongside that schema, Dreyfus systematically organizes the Kierkegaardian “stages” or “existential spheres” in a way that culminates in authentic selfhood and Religiousness B; and, finally, in a variety of cultural analyses, most of which are concerned with the widespread and growing L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. by Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, pp. 289–91; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, Oxford: Blackwell 2005, pp. 417; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Foreword,” in Carol White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, ed. by Mark Ralkowski, Aldershot: Ashgate 2005, p. xxi; p. xxiii; p. xxvi; and p. xxix. 12 In the most recent of these works (at the time of this writing), All Things Shining, reference is made exclusively to Kierkegaard’s approach to Christianity and the figure of Jesus. To what extent this marks a new direction in Dreyfus’ thought, to what extent it is indicative of the influence of Dreyfus’ co-author, Sean Dorrance Kelly, and to what extent this difference signifies nothing is beyond my ability to say. 13 Dreyfus reads The Sickness unto Death in the translation by Hannay; he reads Either/ Or and the Upbuilding Discourses (Edifying Discourses: A Selection) in the translations by the Swensons. Until 2001, Dreyfus referred exclusively to The Present Age, the Alexander Dru translation of only the final section of the full work, when making reference to En literair Anmeldelse; beginning with his book, On the Internet, however, Dreyfus now makes reference to the Hannay translation of the entire work, A Literary Review, instead.

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use of new information technologies, Dreyfus suggests that a reorientation of the individual in the direction of a Kierkegaardian (or “secularized Kierkegaardian,”14 that is, Heideggerian) understanding of the self will combat nihilism and restore for many a sense that their lives are meaningful. In each of the next three sections, I will address one of these elements of Dreyfus’ understanding and appropriation of Kierkegaard in more detail. In the fourth and final section, I will return to a general interpretation of the role played by Kierkegaard in the work of Hubert Dreyfus. I. A Schema of the Self From nearly the very beginning of his publications on Kierkegaard—in his work with Jane Rubin comparing Heidegger and Kierkegaard—and appearing regularly again throughout his corpus, Dreyfus sets forth a schematic account of selfhood based primarily upon The Sickness unto Death that not only presents what Dreyfus takes to be the Kierkegaardian notion of the self, but which serves him as a diagrammatic understanding of the development of the idea of the self in Western thought.15 Although the history of Western philosophy is very much the history of a developing understanding of the self, Dreyfus notes a fundamental shift within that tradition in the writings of the French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623–62). Dreyfus writes: “Pascal saw that human beings had no essence to self-realize, but rather defined themselves through their cultural practices.”16 This is a radical break with the traditional view, inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle, and according to which human selves were supposed to realize themselves in the process of actualizing their inherent potential, in more or less the same manner as acorns become oak trees. Dreyfus writes: “Although the self has no nature, according to Pascal, it does have a structure. Plato already understood the self as combining two contradictory sets of factors: body and soul. On this Greek account, if both sets of factors were equally essential, the self would be in hopeless self-contradiction.”17 Thus, Pascal reasoned, the Greeks constructed a notion of the self that remedied this contradiction in a peculiarly Greek way. Other, later, interpretations of the self will address the potential for contradiction in different ways, but according to Pascal—and to Dreyfus—any conception of the human self must find a way to address the difficult issue of the reconciliation (or, alternatively, combination or synthesis) of the contradictory factors constituting the structure of the self. Not to do so is not to have a coherent conception of the self, for Pascal or for Dreyfus. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 299. In addition to the two works co-authored with Rubin, Dreyfus gives a full account of his understanding of Kierkegaard’s notion of the self in at least three other works, see Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology”; Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism”; and Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self.” In each of these three later examples, Dreyfus includes an actual diagram illustrating his schema of the self. It appears as Figure 1 in “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 92; as Figure 11.1 in “The Roots of Existentialism,” p. 143; and as Chart 1.1 in “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 13. 16 Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” p. 140. 17 Ibid. 14 15

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The contradictory factors are, for Kierkegaard, never quite as simple as the Platonic antagonism of body and soul. In what Dreyfus takes to be a more sophisticated assessment of the situation, Kierkegaard identifies three opposing sets of factors at work along the rough lines of Platonic dualism: on the side of the body, according to Dreyfus, Kierkegaard situates finitude, temporality, and necessity. Opposing each of these factors, respectively, on the side of the soul, are infinitude, eternality, and possibility.18 Kierkegaard’s definitions of these factors cannot be divorced from the perspectives on and understandings of the self made possible by the structure Dreyfus is elucidating; as Dreyfus notes, “infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, and the eternal and the temporal have no existence independent of my defining them by making a commitment, i.e., taking a stand on how these terms or factors are expressed in my life.”19 As such, to address the definitions of the terms, one must first address the Kierkegaardian notion of commitment, which Dreyfus does in the context of the Kierkegaardian spheres of existence. The earliest attempt to reconcile the contradictory factors constituting the self— the Greek way, already mentioned—is logically preceded, according to Dreyfus, by the minimal recognition of the potential for contradiction instantiated by the attempt to evade or ignore the problem. As Dreyfus notes: This is what Kierkegaard calls spiritlessness. One has a sense that the self is a contradiction that has to be faced, but one lives in what Pascal called distraction so that one never has to take a stand in thought or action as to how to get the factors together.20

Here, in spiritlessness (or what, in Dreyfus’ diagram, is labeled “R1”), selfhood is avoided by way of avoiding any attempt to reconcile the self to itself. An individual in spiritlessness is a human being, but he or she is not a self.21 To address the problem, however, is to see that the one set of factors (finitude, temporality, and necessity—which Dreyfus sums up under the term “facticity”) actually do contradict the other set (infinitude, eternality, and possibility—which Dreyfus organizes under the term “freedom”).22 The second “stage” in Dreyfus’ schema, labeled “R2,” refers to attempts to draw a coherent unity from the contradiction. Dreyfus explains: 18 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age.” This breakdown of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the factors contributing to the structure of the self appears, in one form or another, in nearly every account of the self in Kierkegaard in Dreyfus’ authorship. Whether this account ultimately has its origin in the thought of Dreyfus or Rubin is unclear; as Dreyfus has noted recently, “I’m indebted to Jane Rubin for this systematic account of the factors of the self.” Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 246, note 4. Whether the account is Dreyfus’ or Rubin’s, or is ultimately ascribable to both, is beyond the ability of any reader (and, perhaps, of both Dreyfus and Rubin as well) to discern. It is, in the end, the account of Kierkegaard’s view of the self that Dreyfus continues to espouse in his work, and I will thus treat it as Dreyfus’ account. 19 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” p. 10. 20 Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 92. 21 Cf. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” p. 10. 22 Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 92, fig. 1.

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Joseph Westfall If a human being acts only as a combination of factors, he or she is not yet a self. To be a self, the relation must relate itself to itself, by taking a stand on both sets of factors through its actions. It must manifest that something about the self is essential by making something in its life absolute. This can take a negative and a positive form.23

Thus, within R2, according to Dreyfus, there are two different approaches: a negative unity and a positive one. “When the relation is a negative unity, the relation relates to itself in the Greek way; denying one of the sets of factors and acting as if only the other aspect of the self were the essential one.”24 This negative unity can go in either direction: if one denies “facticity” (body) in favor of “freedom” (soul), one takes the Platonic view that the self is essentially immaterial, albeit incarnate at present but in no significant way substantially corporeal. If, on the other hand, one denies “freedom” in favor of “facticity,” one espouses a view comparable to that of a materialist thinker like Lucretius. For Lucretius, the self is essentially corporeal; anything apparently spiritual about the self can and must be explained as a physical phenomenon (as Lucretius did when he maintained that the soul is extended and composed of atoms). Dreyfus maintains that the negative unity view cannot account for the self as Kierkegaard understands it: This would work if the self were a combination, but it is a synthesis. Thus, if one lives just for the temporal, one loses the eternal and does not have any continuity in his life at all, while if one tries to make the infinite and the eternal absolute, one loses the finite and the temporal.25

While the Greek view of the self as a negative unity resolves the contradiction inherent in the opposition of the sets of factors Dreyfus describes, it is ultimately unhelpful in coming to an understanding of the self, for Kierkegaard, precisely because it must deny at least some of the elements constitutive of a self as indicated by the human experience of selfhood, both of one’s own self as well as the selves of Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. 25 Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 14. It is worth noting that, in earlier pieces— “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” published in 2003, and “The Roots of Existentialism,” from 2006—Dreyfus uses this account of Kierkegaard’s view as an argument against the positive unity, or “Positive R2,” view of the self. In “Kierkegaard on the Self,” published in 2008, Dreyfus has shifted the line into opposition of the negative unity, or “Negative R2,” view. In so doing, he simplifies the argument against the positive unity view considerably—and, it seems, helpfully. In my account of Dreyfus’ account, I have tried to remain true to the overall argument as it appears throughout Dreyfus’ authorship—while at the same time following Dreyfus in his revisions of various elements of the argument as it is presented over the course of that authorship as it developed. In short, when there has been disagreement—and it has only ever been slight— between different versions of the argument as presented by Dreyfus, I have favored the most recently published version as most likely representative of Dreyfus’ considered view. For more on these changes in Dreyfus’ view, see Alastair Hannay, “Kierkegaard on Commitment, Personality, and Identity,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. by Edward F. Mooney, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008, pp. 49–50. 23 24

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others. Selves are not just one or the other of the two sets of factors; selves are both. This leads to the second R2 view on Dreyfus’ schema, positive unity. As Dreyfus summarizes the positive unity view of the self, he notes: “Such selves try, by themselves, to express fully both sets of factors in their lives, but this turns out to be impossible.”26 Following Dreyfus, if one were to attempt to express one factor or set of factors fully—possibility, for example, or freedom—one would find oneself precisely thereby unable fully to express the opposing factor or set of factors—necessity, or facticity. To live in the full expression of possibility is not to live in the full expression of necessity, and vice versa. Thus, the positive unity view fails, according to Dreyfus, for the same reason that the negative unity view fails. Neither can the R2 view give full expression to the contradiction at the heart of the self as Dreyfus takes Kierkegaard to understand it. We see, then, in Dreyfus’ analyses of both R1 and R2—spiritlessness and unity (negative or positive)—that neither is a coherent view of the self. The incoherence stems from the fact that, in all of the cases considered heretofore, the self has been understood to become a self by its own power. Thus Dreyfus, quoting Kierkegaard, notes that “the self cannot by itself arrive at or remain in equilibrium and rest.”27 Expressing both sets of factors coherently is impossible for an individual insofar as he or she attempts to do so alone. The last and highest view of the self on Dreyfus’ schema, and the one that will correspond directly to views of the self in Kierkegaard (that is, in Sickness)—the “R3 view”—is successful in the attainment of a self by looking outside the self for the principle that will make the self’s disparate factors or elements coherent. Adding to Sickness elements of Either/Or and the Postscript, however, Dreyfus argues that the R3 view presents itself in each of the Kierkegaardian spheres of existence—the aesthetic sphere, the ethical sphere, Religiousness A, and Religiousness B.28 It is to Dreyfus’ account of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought that we must now turn. II. The Aesthetic and the Ethical Dreyfus makes regular reference to the various Kierkegaardian spheres of existence throughout his work. Of chief importance to Dreyfus’ thinking on the self, especially after Heidegger, are the two essentially religious spheres of existence— Religiousness A and Religiousness B.29 And Dreyfus’ single longest and most comprehensive treatment of Kierkegaard—“Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” co-authored by Jane Rubin and published as an appendix to Dreyfus’ Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 14. Ibid. The quotation is from SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14. Dreyfus, however, uses the Alastair Hannay translation and abridgment of The Sickness unto Death throughout the essay. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin 1989, p. 44. 28 Cf. Hannay, “Kierkegaard on Commitment, Personality, and Identity,” p. 50. 29 Although this is a formal and terminological distinction only really made by the pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, for the moment I will follow Dreyfus in treating it as fundamental to Kierkegaard and fundamentally Kierkegaardian. See SKS 7, 505–10 / CUP1, 556–61. 26 27

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Being-in-the-World—is dominated by a careful illumination of this distinction. Dreyfus offers a Kierkegaardian explanation of the superiority of Religiousness B to Religiousness A, and an attempt to situate the later works of Heidegger as an extension of Religiousness A into the sphere of Religiousness B (or, alternatively, as a secularization of Religiousness B so as to contain it within the limits Kierkegaard establishes around Religiousness A). The central importance of the religious sphere or spheres on Dreyfus’ account, however, is not readily apparent without at least a brief examination of the earlier spheres, the aesthetic and the ethical. The aesthetic is in some ways the simplest Kierkegaardian sphere, for Dreyfus, by virtue of its being the most straightforwardly immediate. Yet it is identified in different places by Dreyfus as situated alternatively as a position prior to commitment and as one possible type of commitment. That is to say, on some occasions, Dreyfus classifies the aesthetic sphere as a species of the R2 view (specifically, the “Positive R2” or positive unity view), and on other occasions, he seems to classify instead the aesthetic as a species—admittedly limited, and no less bound to fail—of the R3 view, wherein one makes an unconditional commitment to some external thing.30 The difference is practically minimal but philosophically significant, between failing to make a commitment (the aesthetic as R2) and making a commitment that is bound to fail (the aesthetic as one type of R3). Some consideration of these apparently different accounts would seem to be warranted thereby. The impossibility of the positive unity view of the self has already been discussed; for Dreyfus, such a view shipwrecks on the inescapable contradiction inherent in attempting to live fully in both sets of opposing factors constituting the human self (trying to live fully in both freedom and facticity). The end result for any individual attempting to espouse the Positive R2 view in his or her own life, then, is necessarily either a reversion to the Negative R2 view (by which the individual dismisses one of the sets of factors as inessential to authentic selfhood) or a kind of multiplicity or fragmentation of the self (a R2 view that certainly differs from the negative view, but which fails precisely along the lines of that difference). While the Negative R2 view remains unwilling to grasp the totality of the human self, the Positive R2 view wants to but is unable to do so. Thus, there is ultimately no meaningful practical or existential distinction between the Negative and Positive R2 views, for Dreyfus; Negative R2 fails to acknowledge one-half of the self, and Positive R2 cannot help but fail in the same way. As Dreyfus writes: Such selves try, by themselves, to express fully both sets of factors in their lives, but this turns out to be impossible. For example, if one makes possibility absolute and lives constantly open to new possibilities, one is in the aesthetic sphere of existence (Kierkegaard’s anticipation of Nietzsche and the postmoderns) but one has no way to Dreyfus presents the aesthetic sphere as an example of the Positive R2 view, see Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 93; Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” p. 142; Dreyfus and Wrathall, “Staring at the Sun,” p. 20; and Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 14. On the other hand, Dreyfus presents the aesthetic sphere as an example of the R3 view, see Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” p. 10; Dreyfus, “Education on the Internet,” p. 116; Dreyfus, “Nihilism on the Information Highway,” p. 74; and Dreyfus, On the Internet, pp. 80–3. 30

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express the self’s facticity. If one tries to make facticity absolute, one loses possibility and one is paralyzed by fatalism.31

On this model, whether we understand the aesthete to subscribe to the positive unity view, or we follow Dreyfus in concluding that even the positive unity view inescapably results in some kind of negative unity view, the aesthetic sphere is situated entirely within the realm Dreyfus has dubbed “R2.” It is not spiritlessness, to be sure, but the aesthetic is not a coherent conception of the self, either. Moreover, if the aesthetic is a species of R2, it remains unclear where Dreyfus can situate the ethical sphere of existence. In those texts where Dreyfus treats the aesthetic as an R2 view, the ethical is conspicuously absent. For a robust consideration of the ethical sphere in Dreyfus, we have to go to the other set of writings on Kierkegaard, those wherein Dreyfus depicts both the aesthetic and the ethical as species of commitment—characteristic of the R3 view, rather than the R2. On this model, once an individual has realized that both R1 (spiritlessness) and R2 (unity) are doomed to failure, he or she turns to the only remaining possibility: R3 (synthesis via commitment). R1 and R2 both refuse to look beyond or outside of the individual self for the coherence of the self; both attempt to rely upon the individual self alone, and in so doing show us—and Dreyfus and Kierkegaard—that no self reliant upon itself alone for a conception of itself will succeed in relating to itself in an authentic way. In order to relate itself to itself in the appropriate fashion, then, an individual self must mediate its self-relation through something external to its own structure. As Dreyfus notes, quoting Kierkegaard: “Only when the self ‘in relating to itself relates to something else,’32 Kierkegaard contends, can it get the two sets of factors into a positive relation. Only then is each set of factors defined in such a way as to support rather than be in conflict with the other.”33 Thus, Dreyfus takes Kierkegaard to have moved beyond both the distracted spiritlessness Pascal criticizes, as well as the conception of the self as a mere combination of self-contradictory factors to which Pascal ultimately adheres.34 For Kierkegaard, the self is neither inert nor a contradiction. For the self to be a self, the self must be a synthesis (not a combination)—of finite and infinite, possible and necessary, eternal and temporal.35 On Dreyfus’ synthetic, relational model of the self, then, the distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical is made in terms of commitment. Both spheres are understood as means by which the self attempts to relate to something else in relating to itself, and so the difference lies in the “something else” to which individuals in each sphere relate:

Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 14. SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 13–14. Dreyfus, as usual, quotes from the Alastair Hannay translation. See Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Hannay, p. 43. 33 Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 16. 34 Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” pp. 140–1. 35 Dreyfus writes, “Kierkegaard affirms that the self is a synthesis between two sets of opposed factors, not just a combination. That is, that each set is essential and requires the other.” Ibid., p. 141. 31 32

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If I am committed to enjoyment, as in the aesthetic sphere of existence, everything in my world is significant or insignificant according to whether I enjoy it or do not. If I am committed to choice, as in the ethical sphere, everything is significant or insignificant according to whether I choose to give it significance or not to.36

Likewise: When Kierkegaard says that commitments are finite, he means that I cannot be committed to the world-defining in general. Rather, I have to be committed to something specific in my world. Thus, I cannot simply be committed to enjoyment. I have to be committed to specific kinds of enjoyment. Similarly, I cannot simply be committed to choice. I have to be committed to specific choices.37

Thus, commitment is infinite in that it defines an entire world—and finite, in that the world it defines is, in the case of my commitments, my world. The aesthetic sphere becomes one way of orienting that commitment, specifically toward the enjoyment of my world. Whatever kinds of enjoyment are enjoyable for me come to determine the difference between significant and insignificant for me. While the criteria at which I arrive in this manner are not necessarily shared by all (or any) other individuals, they nevertheless determine what for me are universal standards of significance and insignificance. Thus, the aesthetic is not simply a conglomeration of opinions on matters of enjoyment. In defining a world, the aesthetic is what Kierkegaard calls a sphere of existence. The same holds true for the ethical as a sphere of existence, as well. Accordingly, Dreyfus does not need to see the aesthetic sphere as an instance of the R2 view of the self. The aesthetic will, however, fail to achieve authentic selfhood on either of Dreyfus’ accounts. While the R2 version of the aesthetic failed to achieve selfhood in its inability to see the self as taking a stand on itself, the R3 version fails insofar as it delivers nothing stable or enduring to the individual to serve as a self with continuity through time. Put another way, Dreyfus’ criticism of the R3 version of the aesthetic is that it is all possibility and no necessity, all freedom and no facticity—that is, as in the case of the Positive R2 view, the R3 version of the aesthetic must ultimately collapse into the Negative R2 view of the self. As Dreyfus notes in the specific case of an aesthete seeking enjoyment on the Internet: For such a person just visiting as many sites as possible and keeping up on the cool ones is an end in itself. The only qualitative distinction is between those sites that are interesting and those that are boring. Life consists in fighting off boredom by being a spectator at everything interesting in the universe and in communicating with everyone else so inclined. Such a life produces a self that has no defining content or continuity but is open to all possibilities and to constantly being drawn into new games.38

Dreyfus concludes on the basis of the radical fluidity of the aesthetic “self” that the life of the aesthete is, in the end, unlivable: “Without some way of telling the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant, everything Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 11. 38 Dreyfus, “Education on the Internet,” p. 116. 36 37

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becomes equally interesting and equally boring.”39 And, further: “This inability to distinguish the trivial from the important eventually stops being exciting and leads to the very boredom the aesthete and net surfer dedicate their lives to avoiding.”40 That is to say, the aesthetic sphere fails to produce a self because it fails to define a world for the aesthete. Instead, the aesthete is left with an infinite number of possible worlds—and an individual who is always open to infinite possibilities is no one self. He or she remains any number of possible selves, in competition with each other (very much along Nietzschean or postmodern lines, as Dreyfus has indicated), but never “victorious,” never actually becoming a self in the Kierkegaardian sense. An individual in the ethical sphere, on the other hand, does not attempt to rest selfhood on the shaky ground of enjoyment and interest. Rather, realizing that he or she is free to choose the standards by which he or she lives his or her life—and thus, to choose for himself or herself the manner in which he or she will become a self, if he or she becomes a self at all—the individual in the ethical commits himself or herself to choice itself, the very ability he or she possesses to make commitments. Of course, as we saw above, the ethical individual must commit himself or herself to specific choices—not merely to choice in general—but as a free being, there would seem to be no limits on what kinds of choices to which the individual is free to commit, and thus which define the ethical individual’s entire world. As such, the freedom to choose can become a danger for the ethical individual, if the extent of that freedom forces one’s choices to take on the aspect of arbitrariness. Dreyfus notes: To avoid arbitrary choice, one might, like Judge William, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author of the description of the ethical sphere in Either/Or, turn to facts about one’s life to limit one’s commitments. Thus, Judge William says that his range of possible relevant commitments is constrained by his abilities and his social roles as judge and husband.41

While this might satisfy Judge William, however, it does not satisfy Dreyfus—or, it would seem, Kierkegaard. As the aesthete is characterized by his or her pursuit of enjoyment, so the ethical individual is characterized by his or her freedom to choose and make commitments, not as constrained by the details of his or her facticity, but genuinely freely. Thus, Dreyfus maintains that as an autonomous agent, [Judge William] is free to give whatever meaning he chooses to his talents and his roles and all other facts about himself. Thus, he claims that, in the end, his freedom to give his life meaning is not constrained by his talents and social duties, unless he chooses to make them important.42

Dreyfus quotes Judge William from the second volume of Either/Or to make his point: “The good is for the fact that I will it, and apart from my willing, it has no existence.

Ibid., p. 117. Ibid. 41 Dreyfus, On the Internet, p. 84. 42 Ibid., p. 85. 39 40

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This is the expression for freedom.”43 While the aesthete, if not constrained, is at least bound by his or her affects in distinguishing between the significant (for the aesthete, the interesting) and the insignificant (the boring), the ethical individual on Judge William’s model is entirely unconstrained. Even when he or she navigates the difference between significance (for the ethical individual, the good) and insignificance (evil) according to his or her talents or social roles, he or she does so only because he or she has freely chosen to do so. The ethical individual can always choose otherwise. As such, Dreyfus argues that Kierkegaard would respond that, if everything were up for choice, including the standards on the basis of which one chooses, there would be no reason for choosing one set of standards rather than another. Besides, if one were totally free, choosing the guidelines for one’s life would never make any serious difference, since one could always choose to rescind one’s previous choice. A commitment does not get a grip on me if I am always free to revoke it.44

The situation for the ethical individual is thus, according to Dreyfus, ultimately the very same as it is for the aesthete, or anyone subscribing to the R2 view of the self, for that matter. If the ethical individual is, like Judge William, free not only to make commitments, but to choose the standards according to which his or her commitments are made, then nothing constrains the freedom of the ethical individual—which is to say that the ethical sphere is all possibility and no necessity, all freedom and no facticity, and the ethical version of the R3 view must also collapse, like the aesthetic and the positive unity view, into Negative R2. The ethical, like the aesthetic, fails to ground a conception of the self, for Dreyfus’ Kierkegaard. III. Religiousness, Commitment, and Nihilism That neither the aesthetic nor the ethical can ultimately ground a coherent, stable, continuous conception of the self means, for Dreyfus, that such persons are condemned to a kind of nihilism—a world-view on which, in Kierkegaard’s terms, all qualitative distinctions45 are leveled. Leveling follows directly from both the aesthetic and the ethical, inasmuch as leveling is the erosion and eventual extinction of any distinction Kierkegaard in ibid. The quotation is located at SKS 3, 214 / EO2, 224. Dreyfus quotes from the David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson translation. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, vol. 2, trans. by D.F. Swenson and L.M. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959, p. 228. 44 Dreyfus, On the Internet, p. 85. 45 SKS 8, 75 / TA, 78. While Howard and Edna Hong translate Kierkegaard’s Qvaliteternes qvalitative Disjunktion as “the qualitative disjunction of the qualities,” Dreyfus follows translator Alexander Dru in translating the term “the qualitative distinctions.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Harper 1962, p. 43. Dreyfus’ most recent writings on Kierkegaard make reference to the Alastair Hannay translation, and Hannay translates the term as the Hongs do: “the qualitative disjunction of qualities,” while Dreyfus maintains his use of the Dru translation. Søren Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin 2001, p. 69. Although “qualitative disjunction of 43

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between significant and insignificant in a society’s view of the world. As we have seen, according to Dreyfus, Kierkegaard condemns both the aesthetic and the ethical for failing to provide individuals with standards by which to make distinctions of precisely this sort—qualitative distinctions. This failure—the inability to distinguish between the good and the bad, the significant and the insignificant, the meaningful and the meaningless—is what Dreyfus says Kierkegaard calls despair. Both the aesthetic and the ethical are, on Dreyfus’ view, attempts at achieving the R3 view of the self based on commitment, and both fail to remedy the weaknesses of the Negative R2 view, thus keeping us in despair. Both spheres fail because neither attempts to situate the principle of the coherence of the self outside of the self; in both the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, the individual attempts to resolve the mutually contradictory sets of factors constitutive of the self by himself or herself, and in both spheres the individual finds the task to be impossible. Despair is inevitable from the perspectives of the aesthetic and the ethical spheres. On Dreyfus’ account, Kierkegaard proposes the third sphere of existence, Religiousness A, as a sort of dialectical resolution of this problem. Dreyfus writes: For Religiousness A, the third sphere, the contradictions of the aesthetic and ethical spheres conclusively demonstrate that the attempt to become a self will necessarily result in failure. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Edifying Discourses call Religiousness A “self-annihilation before God” and propose that a human being “arrives at the highest pitch of perfection when he becomes suited to God through becoming absolutely nothing in himself.”46

On this model, “Religiousness A asserts that only once I give up trying to become a self can I overcome leveling.”47 The aesthete and the ethical individual fail to become selves because they try to become selves. They seek out and try to commit to various standards by which to navigate and evaluate the world, and want desperately for the standards to which they have committed—whatever they are—to produce meaning in their lives, to define a world. The aesthete needs to remain interested in the enjoyment he chooses. The ethical individual needs her choices to endure as stable and static elements of self-definition, not to evaporate into the ether of the arbitrary. When these needs go unfulfilled, when their hopes are dashed, these individuals are left with nothing—nothing from which to make a world, and nothing by way of which to become a self. The aesthete and the ethical individual are qualities” is the most literal rendering in English, for the purposes of this analysis I will follow Dreyfus in using “qualitative distinctions.” 46 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 288. The Kierkegaard quotations are from SKS 5, 303 / EUD, 310–11. Dreyfus and Rubin quote from the David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson translation, however. Søren Kierkegaard, Edifying Discourses: A Selection, ed. by Paul L. Holmer, trans. by David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson, New York: Harper & Row 1958, p. 155. It is also worth noting that the Upbuilding Discourses never make direct reference to Religiousness A, a term that occurs only in later works. If Kierkegaard means to indicate Religiousness A in the Upbuilding Discourses, he does so only indirectly. Nevertheless, Dreyfus treats the Upbuilding Discourses as unproblematic examples of Religiousness A, and I follow him in that here. 47 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 289.

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doomed eventually to experience the collapse of their worlds into meaninglessness and confusion. Religiousness A differs radically from the two lower spheres of existence in this way. “According to Religiousness A, once I become absolutely indifferent to the satisfaction of my desires, I can commit myself to satisfying them because my world will not collapse if they are not satisfied.”48 Or, put another way, Religiousness A “is not a matter of choosing to give significance to some experiences and to withhold it from others but of accepting the significance that all of my experiences have when I am absolutely indifferent to the satisfaction of my desires.”49 Religiousness A recognizes my particular desires as an individual human being, and at the same time frees me from them in a way that neither the aesthetic nor the ethical could do. When I can see that my needs are merely my needs—and in no way absolute—then whether they are satisfied or not is truly a matter of indifference, and can be so for me. Everything I experience—as well as anything I can conceive as possible experience—can thus be understood as meaningful, if I accept that “my only real need is my need of God. My only real need, in other words, is to see all of my particular needs as relative.”50 Naturally, however, this view will not satisfy a Heideggerian existentialist like Dreyfus any more than it satisfied Kierkegaard, “the radical Christian.”51 Religiousness A attempts to overcome leveling by maintaining both elements of a contradiction. On the one hand, the person in Religiousness A attempts to achieve absolute indifference to whether his or her desires are satisfied; on the other, Religiousness A can only evade leveling—the total dissolution of any difference between what matters and what does not—if the person in Religiousness A actually does desire and need specific, finite things. Dreyfus questions whether an individual who truly desires something can in fact be indifferent to whether or not he or she attains that thing. He raises a series of rhetorical questions to make his point: can I really be said to have the desire to be an athlete if it makes absolutely no difference to me whether I am one or not? Can I be said to have the need to be in proper shape for competition if it makes absolutely no difference to me whether I am an athlete or not?52

Dreyfus and Rubin conclude: Either I am absolutely indifferent to the satisfaction of my desires and needs, in which case I have no desires and needs and cannot overcome leveling, or I am not indifferent to the satisfaction of my desires and needs, in which case I am vulnerable to their not being satisfied.53

But here we see the fundamental failing of Religiousness A, a failing it shares with the aesthetic and the ethical spheres alike. Ibid. Ibid., p. 290. 50 Ibid., p. 291. 51 Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 89. 52 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 293. 53 Ibid. 48 49

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When considering why individual human beings go in for the impoverished lives of those who, captivated either by the press in Kierkegaard’s time or the Internet in our own, flit about from point of interest to point of interest, treating the essential and the trivial as if there were no distinction between them, Dreyfus maintains that “Kierkegaard thought that people were addicted to the press, and we can now add the Web, because the anonymous spectator takes no risks.”54 The failing of Religiousness A, as Dreyfus and Rubin noted in the passage above, is that the individual either acquiesces to leveling or becomes vulnerable to dissatisfaction. Of course, dissatisfaction in this context is no small thing—if one rests the coherence of one’s entire world upon the satisfaction of certain specific, discrete desires, then a failure to satisfy those desires results in the incoherence of one’s world. The aesthete and the ethical individual, when they think and live through their perspectives to their logical conclusions, see the need for some sort of commitment as the worlddefining basis of the self. Neither the aesthete nor the ethical individual can make such a commitment, anxious that they might fail, and so both the aesthete and the ethical individual are in despair. The person in Religiousness A tries to do both—to make the commitment, and to be invulnerable to failure—and in this is reminiscent of Pascal in his attempt to live fully in both facticity and freedom. As Dreyfus has already pointed out, this is impossible for Kierkegaard. Thus, Dreyfus concludes, commitment necessarily involves risk, and as such no sphere of existence will successfully escape despair if it does not commit and acknowledge the vulnerability entailed by the commitment. He writes: Religiousness B, in contrast, will propose that only a commitment to something concrete and specific, outside myself, can overcome leveling. Thus, if I am an athlete in Religiousness B, my particular sport—not fantasizing about sports [the aesthetic], the choice of sports [the ethical], or indifference to the results of athletic activity [Religiousness A]—will be world-defining for me.55

This sort of commitment—specific, concrete, personal, world-defining—is what Dreyfus, using Kierkegaardian language, calls an “unconditional commitment.” Unconditional commitments differ from our ordinary, everyday commitments inasmuch as an unconditional commitment is made “with what Kierkegaard calls infinite passion.”56 An unconditional commitment entails an incredible degree of risk; as Dreyfus notes of one of his favorite examples, the athlete in Religiousness B: If I am a Religiousness B tennis player and develop tendonitis, I cannot simply substitute another object of fantasy [the aesthetic] or choice [the ethical], and I cannot be indifferent [Religiousness A]. Rather, I experience the grief of having lost my world, my identity and the continuity of my life.57

Voluntarily to accept such risk when other options for constructing a life (the aesthetic, the ethical, Religiousness A) appear to be available is absurd. As such, Dreyfus, On the Internet, p. 81. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 297. 56 Dreyfus, On the Internet, p. 86. 57 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 298. 54 55

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writes Dreyfus: “Accepting this risk is what Kierkegaard calls ‘faith.’ ”58 And, just so there is no confusion, Dreyfus goes on to compare his tennis player to Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith. Leveling, then, which Dreyfus equates with nihilism, is the result of individuals choosing for themselves invulnerability over vulnerability, safety over risk. The widespread destruction of qualitative distinctions in our society is the direct result of individuals opting not to risk their selves, their identities, and their worlds on the admittedly precarious venture of an unconditional, world-defining commitment. Opting for security against the loss of the world, however, leaves the individual with Religiousness A, at best, and for Kierkegaard, according to Dreyfus, the indifference of Religiousness A is just as antithetical to meaning as are the aesthetic and ethical spheres: “To say that nothing makes any difference to an individual is to say that his or her life is meaningless.”59 The difference between Religiousness A and Religiousness B, then, is not incremental. It is the difference between the very real danger of world loss and a guarantee of meaninglessness. The press and the Internet, in cultivating anonymity and undermining any attempt to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant or trivial, become the primary tools in contemporary culture by which leveling overtakes individual commitment. As Dreyfus concludes: So it looks like Kierkegaard may be right. The press and the Internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment, but only the unconditional commitment of what Kierkegaard calls the religious sphere of existence can save us from the nihilistic leveling launched by the Enlightenment, promoted by the press and the public sphere, and perfected in the World Wide Web.60

Faithful but by no means certain that he will not lose his world, Dreyfus opts for Religiousness B—or, at least, a secularized version thereof. IV. On Dreyfus on Kierkegaard While Dreyfus’ reading of Kierkegaard is for the most part careful and straightforward—as Alastair Hannay has noted, “Dreyfus’ skill in putting together clear-headed and topical accounts of texts widely considered inaccessible is enviable and legendary”61—the conclusions Dreyfus draws on the basis of his reading rest, in addition to care and straightforwardness, upon at least one controversial hermeneutical practice and one controversial philosophical presupposition about Kierkegaard’s thought and writings. The hermeneutical practice is Dreyfus’ willingness to read the variously authored works of Kierkegaard’s sometimes pseudonymous authorship as representative of the thoughts of a single thinker, Søren Kierkegaard. The philosophical presupposition is that, despite the thoroughgoing Christianity of Kierkegaard’s (and many of his pseudonyms’) comments on the Ibid. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” p. 7. 60 Dreyfus, On the Internet, pp. 88–9. 61 Hannay, “Kierkegaard on Commitment, Personality, and Identity,” p. 48. 58 59

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religious sphere, Dreyfus treats Religiousness B as if it can be used to describe any passionately committed way of life whatever. Although these may seem like minor points, especially in light of Dreyfus’ clear, thoughtful, and voluminous Kierkegaard scholarship, I think the consequences of both for the degree to which Dreyfus’ account of Kierkegaard is genuinely reflective of “Kierkegaard” (the thinker or the authorship) are rather significant. In what remains of this article, I would like to address each of them, briefly, in turn. Dreyfus maintains that Kierkegaard’s authorial and philosophical method is a practice of what he calls “phenomenology”62—which requires Kierkegaard to show from within each existential perspective the merits and failings of that perspective, rather than from some objective, third-person point of view. In their Kierkegaardian analysis of the Irish rock band, U2, Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall write: One response [to the phenomenon of despair] that U2 and Kierkegaard share is to reflect on and describe these kinds of unresolved lives—to do phenomenology. Kierkegaard and Bono both share a penchant for writing pseudonymously. Whether it is Johannes Climacus or the Fly, Vigilius Haufniensis or Macphisto, these pseudonyms allow them to explore a form of life from the inside out: “rather than write about the character, become the character.”63

Dreyfus himself, however, is apparently not bound by a similarly “phenomenological” method. Throughout Dreyfus’ analyses of Kierkegaard, he presents Kierkegaard’s views unmediated by their often pseudonymous authors, and he will only rarely make reference to the different authors of the texts in which he locates Kierkegaard’s views—Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, AntiClimacus, and Søren Kierkegaard—as different. Dreyfus seems, in fact, to address the Kierkegaardian practice of pseudonymity only once in addition to the passage cited above. In a footnote to the word “Kierkegaard’s” in the phrase, “Kierkegaard’s famous account of the self in The Sickness unto Death,”64 Dreyfus and Rubin write: Kierkegaard does not claim authorship of the definition of the self. Rather, he attributes it to the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. While an understanding of the role of the pseudonyms is crucial for an understanding of Kierkegaard’s work as a whole, for the present purposes we refer to Kierkegaard as the author of all the works under consideration.65

Although only made explicit in the footnotes to “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” this appears to be Dreyfus’ method for dealing with Kierkegaardian pseudonymity in all of his writings on Kierkegaard. In addition to Anti-Climacus, only A and Judge William from Either/Or receive specific recognition as distinct Dreyfus and Wrathall, “Staring at the Sun,” p. 22. Ibid. The quotation is from Bono in Bill Flanagan, U2 at the End of the World, New York: Delta 1995, p. 57. Bono continues, “Rather than write about some sleazy psycho, become one. I didn’t realize these sleazy psychos had so much fun!” 64 Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” p. 284. 65 Ibid., p. 357, note 5. The note concludes by referring readers interested in Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms to Rubin’s Ph.D. dissertation. 62 63

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personalities, but in both cases so as to use their views as indicative of what Kierkegaard thinks of the aesthetic and the ethical spheres. The possibility that Kierkegaard might use a pseudonym to present a view with which Kierkegaard disagrees is, with the exception of the authors of Either/Or, never addressed and apparently never taken very seriously by Dreyfus.66 In addition to Anti-Climacus, Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Vigilius Haufniensis all are read to write in Kierkegaard’s voice, and each is essentially erased from the works he authors in Dreyfus’ writings—where the name “Kierkegaard” stands in for each of their names. Although the relative significance of the elision of the pseudonyms’ distinctness is a matter of some contention among readers of Kierkegaard, with many of those who write on pseudonymous texts adopting strategies relevantly similar to that of Dreyfus, in Dreyfus’ case this practice seems to lead directly to another difficulty in aligning Dreyfus’ readings with Kierkegaard’s writings. As we have already seen, Dreyfus takes the unconditional commitment of Religiousness B to be the essential element of any Kierkegaardian notion of selfhood and identity. He writes: “Kierkegaard tries to show that only if you define the factors in terms of a total involvement that gives you your identity do you get a positive synthesis.”67 He goes on to show that this is precisely the sort of commitment being discussed in Fear and Trembling, both in terms of Abraham’s unconditional commitment to and total involvement with Isaac, as well as in the chivalric romantic terms set forth in one of the returning examples of that text. Following from his demonstration that, for the author of Fear and Trembling, fatherly love and romantic love are two excellent examples of what Dreyfus elsewhere identifies with Religiousness B, Dreyfus notes: “Kierkegaard adds in a footnote that ‘any other interest whatever in which an individual concentrates the whole of life’s reality’ would do as well.”68 Dreyfus makes this point repeatedly throughout his authorship69—sometimes citing lines from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, instead of Fear and Trembling70—that,

Cf. Hannay, “Kierkegaard on Commitment, Personality, and Identity,” p. 50. Dreyfus, “Christianity without Onto-Theology,” p. 96. 68 Ibid. The quotation is from SKS 4, 136, note / FT, 41, note. Dreyfus quotes from the Hannay translation. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin 1985, p. 71, note 1. Importantly, although perhaps irrelevant to the point I am making about Dreyfus here, Johannes de silentio makes this note to a discussion of the knight of infinite resignation—not the knight of faith, as Dreyfus contends. Cf. Alastair Hannay, “Comments on Honderich, Sprigge, Dreyfus and Rubin, and Elster,” Synthese, vol. 98, 1994, p. 106. 69 See Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age,” pp. 16–17; Dreyfus, “Nihilism on the Information Highway,” p. 77; Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” p. 150; Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” p. 23. 70 See Dreyfus, “The Roots of Existentialism,” p. 150, where he quotes the passages corresponding to SKS 7, 182–3 / CUP1, 199 and SKS 7, 186 / CUP1, 203. Dreyfus quotes Postscript in the Swenson and Lowrie translation, however: Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1968, p. 178 and p. 181. 66 67

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for Kierkegaard, Religiousness B, although inspired by Christianity, does not require one to be specifically Christian or to make a specifically Christian commitment. While it is beyond the scope of this article to try to resolve the question of the Christianity of Kierkegaard or his authorship once and for all, it is worth noting that there is much to argue for the view that Religiousness B is an essentially Christian religious sphere of existence, with other forms of religiousness falling either under the rubric of the “ethical-religious” (in Either/Or) or Religiousness A (alongside Religiousness B, in Postscript). Whether Kierkegaard ultimately believes that, in order to be in Religiousness B, an individual must have made a distinctly Christian commitment to and through the God-man is, in some sense, however, beside the point. For our purposes, it is enough to see that Dreyfus arrives at his view—that one can be in Religiousness B, unconditionally committed to tennis, for example— by ignoring the fact that the only textual support he provides for his conclusion is authored by Johannes de silentio and Johannes Climacus, not Kierkegaard. Dreyfus seems more recently to have taken a different view, writing that all selves constituted by unconditional commitment and infinite passion (faith), and thus healed of despair—that is, all selves living in Religiousness B—“are grounded in Jesus, the God-man, the paradigm—the power who first made radical transformation of the person and of the world possible.”71 And yet, even this view, like every account Dreyfus has given of the self in Kierkegaard (demonstrated throughout his authorship, and made explicit in his comments on pseudonymity cited above), rests entirely upon his willingness to elide any difference between Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus. Certainly, Dreyfus may be right about Kierkegaard—his account is clear and persuasive, and the pseudonyms (at least some of the pseudonyms, and least controversially, Anti-Climacus) may serve simply as mouthpieces to communicate Kierkegaard’s own views. Despite Kierkegaard’s protestations to the contrary, the distinctions between the pseudonyms (and between Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms) may not be qualitative distinctions. Unless Dreyfus can bring his considerable rigor and persuasiveness to the issues of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity and its (ir)relevance for philosophical interpretations of Kierkegaard, however, it will be impossible to say.

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Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Dreyfus’ Corpus Together with Samuel J. Todes, “The Existentialist Critique of Objectivity,” in Patterns of the Life-World: Essays in Honor of John Wild, ed. by James M. Edie, Francis H. Parker, and Calvin O. Schrag, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1970, pp. 346–87. Together with Jane Rubin, “You Can’t Get Something for Nothing: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on How Not to Overcome Nihilism,” Inquiry, vol. 30, nos. 1–2, 1987, pp. 33–75 (revised and expanded as “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” appendix to Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1991, pp. 283–340). “Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age: The Case of Commitment as Addiction,” Synthese, vol. 98, 1994, pp. 3–19. “Education on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment,” The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 1, no. 2, 1998, pp. 113–24. “Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1999, pp. 96–109 (revised and republished as “Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity versus Commitment in the Present Age,” in Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice, ed. by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, pp. 69–82; and as Chapter 4 of Dreyfus’ On the Internet, pp. 73–89). “Reply to Alastair Hannay,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 1, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2000, pp. 321–3. “Christianity without Onto-Theology: Kierkegaard’s Account of the Self’s Movement from Despair to Bliss,” in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 88–103. “The Roots of Existentialism,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, Oxford: Blackwell 2006, pp. 137–61. Together with Mark A. Wrathall, “Staring at the Sun: U2 and the Experience of Kierkegaardian Despair,” in U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall, Chicago: Open Court 2006, pp. 15–24. “Kierkegaard on the Self,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. by Edward F. Mooney, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008, pp. 11–23.

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II. Sources of Dreyfus’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Carman, Taylor, “Must We Be Inauthentic?,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. I, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2000, pp. 13–18. Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard, London: Routledge 1991. — Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays, New York: Routledge 2003. — “Kierkegaard’s Present Age and Ours,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. I, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2000, pp. 105–22. Rubin, Jane, Too Much of Nothing: Modern Culture, the Self and Salvation in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley 1984. Stangerup, Hakon, “His Polemic with the Press,” in Kierkegaard as a Person, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1983 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 12), pp. 119–27. Taylor, Mark C., Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975. III. Secondary Literature on Dreyfus’ Relation to Kierkegaard Hannay, Alastair, “Comments on Honderich, Sprigge, Dreyfus and Rubin, and Elster,” Synthese vol. 98, no. 1, 1994, pp. 103–6. ― “Kierkegaard on Commitment, Personality, and Identity,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. by Edward F. Mooney, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008, pp. 48–55. ― “Kierkegaard’s Levellings and the Review,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1999, pp. 93–4. ― “Kierkegaard’s Present Age and Ours,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1, ed. by Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2000, pp. 105–22. McPherson, Ian, “Global Nihilism and Local Meanings? Dreyfus on Kierkegaard and Heidegger Today,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, 2002, pp. 395–401. Peters, Michael, “Dreyfus on the Internet: Platonism, Body Talk and Nihilism,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, 2002, pp. 403–6. Prosser, Brian T. and Andrew Ward, “Kierkegaard and the Internet: Existential Reflections on Education and Community,” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 2, no. 3, 2000, pp. 167–80. Standish, Paul, “Euphoria, Dystopia and Practice Today,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, 2002, pp. 407–12.

Paul Edwards: A Rationalist Critic of Kierkegaard’s Theory of Truth Timothy J. Madigan

I. Paul Edwards Best known as the editor-in-chief of the monumental Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards (1923–2004) was a modern philosophe. Like the Enlightenment writers he himself so admired, Voltaire, Diderot, and D’Alembert, he spent his career defending the ideas of rationalism, freethought, materialism, and the application of scientific methodology to philosophy. In addition, deeply influenced by the Vienna Circle, he used his editorship of the Encyclopedia to keep alive the memories of many of the philosophers connected with that particular Logical Positivist movement. As a Positivist of sorts himself, he had no love for philosophers whom he considered to lack clarity, and like the philosophes—especially Voltaire, whose work he anthologized in a volume entitled Voltaire Selections1—he had a gift for using biting humor to attack those with whom he disagreed. One of his foremost targets was Søren Kierkegaard, whom he considered to be the very model for how one should not do philosophy. While he referred several times in his writings and lectures to Kierkegaard’s life and work, Edwards’ best-known critique is found in the 1971 article “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” published in Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.2 Paul Edwards (whose original name was “Eisenstein”) was born to well-todo Jewish parents in Vienna, Austria on September 2, 1923, the youngest of three brothers. Austria was in a state of turmoil during this time, and there was great unrest among the citizenry, particularly regarding the intentions of Germany. A gifted student, he was admitted to the prestigious Akademisches Gymnasium. But after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 his parents sent him to stay with friends in Scotland. He later joined his family in Melbourne, Australia, where they had fled to avoid the horrors of the Holocaust, and where they changed their surname to “Edwards” to disguise their Jewish origins—for even in that country so far from Voltaire: Selections, ed. by Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. 1989 (Great Philosophers). 2 Paul Edwards, “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 176, 1971, pp. 89–108. 1

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Hitler’s reach they feared the implications of anti-Semitism. While in Australia Edwards continued to explore analytic philosophy, which he had first gleaned as a precocious young man in Austria. He had been intrigued by the views of Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), often called the founding father of the Vienna Circle, whose assassination by a former student and member of the Austrian Nazi Party was a topic Edwards often mentioned, feeling that above all else Schlick had never received the recognition that was due him for his work on Logical Positivism. Edwards studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne and was much influenced by the analytic tradition that held sway there. He received his B.A. (1944) and M.A. (1946) in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. After World War II he originally intended to do further studies in the United Kingdom, but decided to complete a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University in New York City after being offered a lectureship there. He did postgraduate teaching at Columbia after completing his dissertation and was to spend the rest of his life in New York City, becoming a professor at such institutions as New York University, the New School for Social Research, and Brooklyn College. In 1979 he received the Nicholas Murray Butler Silver Medal for distinguished contributions to philosophy from Columbia University. Edwards published several articles relating to analytic philosophy, and also became a friend and editor of Bertrand Russell, arguably the founding father of that particular movement. Edwards had originally contacted him in 1947, shortly after Russell’s return to England from an unhappy time in the United States, where he had been denied a position at the College of the City of New York because of his radical views on religion and morality. In 1957 Edwards would edit a collection of Russell’s previously scattered writings dealing with religion, entitled Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays, which became a seminal work in the promotion of unbelief and which has never gone out of print. There is a long afterword written by Edwards on the City College case,3 which he considered to be a gross violation of Russell’s civil rights and a miscarriage of justice in general. Edwards is primarily known for editing the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which originally appeared in 1966. With its 1,500 entries and nearly 500 contributors, most of whom constituted a veritable “Who’s Who” of contemporary philosophers themselves, it remains the essential reference work for the field of philosophy. While he authored many other books and articles, his name will forever be synonymous with this particular work, for which he wrote several entries himself. Using his editorial prerogative, Edwards made sure that there were plentiful entries on atheism, positivism, materialism, and critiques of God’s existence, and he himself co-wrote the long entry on his own philosophical hero, Bertrand Russell. However, very aware of his own biases, he made it a point to try to find what he considered to be the best experts in the field to write entries on the various figures and topics discussed in the encyclopedia, and attempted to be scrupulously fair to those philosophers he himself disagreed with. Whether he was successful in this remains a bone of contention. Paul Edwards, “How Bertrand Russell Was Prevented From Teaching at the College of the City of New York,” appendix to Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, New York: Simon and Schuster 1957, pp. 207–59.

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For instance, the entry on Kierkegaard in the Encyclopedia was written by Alasdair MacIntyre, whose own interpretation of Kierkegaard has been the subject of much debate.4 Those who knew Edwards will always remember his erudition and his wicked sense of humor. An admirer of Voltaire and Russell for their great wit as well as their philosophical acumen, Edwards had a special fondness for the life and works of David Hume, the man he considered to be the best exemplar of a learned individual who lived life to the fullest and who remained to the day of his death a cheerful nonbeliever. He particularly admired Hume’s clarity, and his willingness to expose what Edwards considered the nonsensical implications of metaphysical speculation. His own skeptical views regarding morality, human knowledge, and religious belief were quite close to Hume’s, which did not always jibe well with his more Positivistic leanings. Edwards never married but, like his hero Hume, he reputedly had many lady friends throughout his life, and was something of a bon vivant himself. His dinner parties in the 1960s were legendary. They brought together many leading intellectuals, including those then writing entries for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and were a sort of modern-day salon. Shortly before his death, Edwards published a collection of essays entitled Heidegger’s Confusions,5 dedicated to demolishing the legacy of the man whom Edwards considered to have done the greatest damage to the field of philosophy in the twentieth century. The book brought together five essays he had previously published, with such titles as “Heidegger’s Quest for Being” and “Double-Talk about Life after Death.” He especially abhorred Heidegger’s confusing writings on the nature of death and his cryptic comment that “Only a God can save us.”6 For Edwards, such an expression was beneath contempt. Moreover, he put Heidegger’s approach to philosophy in direct line of descent from Kierkegaard, and made it a point to compare the two men’s views on the topic of human existence, stating that “we are assured that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and other existentialists have achieved a proper understanding of death.”7 For Edwards, this was the height of nonsense, and while the bulk of the book takes Heidegger to task for such a claim, he clearly considers Kierkegaard to be equally culpable. Edwards also wrote a biting critique of reincarnation, entitled Reincarnation: A Critical Examination,8 in which he scornfully looked at both popular and esoteric attempts to describe human existence after death. Interestingly enough, he makes only one reference to Kierkegaard in the book, and that a positive one. When discussing parapsychologist Ian Stevenson’s writings on reincarnation, Edwards remarks: “a rational person will conclude either that Stevenson’s reports are seriously See, for instance, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001. 5 Paul Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusions, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 2004. 6 Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel, vol. 30, May 1976, pp. 193–219. 7 Paul Edwards, “Heidegger and Death,” in Heidegger’s Confusions, p. 65. 8 Paul Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 1996. 4

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defective or that his alleged facts can be explained without bringing in reincarnation. An acceptance of the collateral assumptions would, to borrow a phrase from Søren Kierkegaard, amount to the ‘crucifixion’ of our intellects.”9 The volume which Edwards co-edited with Arthur Pap, A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, went into three editions. It contained copious selections from such unbelievers as Paul Rée, John Stuart Mill, Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Ernest Nagel, and A.J. Ayer, as well as Edwards’ own insightful introductions and annotations. Yet there are many selections from philosophers with whom Edwards disagreed, especially in Chapter V, “On the Existence of God,” including St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, F.C. Copleston, John Hick, and Kierkegaard, with long selections from Book I, Chapter I and Book II, Part II, Chapters I and II of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Never one to hide his own unbelief, Edwards often commented that his two main goals as a philosopher were to demolish the influence of Heidegger and keep alive the memory of Wilhelm Reich, the much-reviled psychoanalyst whose critiques of religion Edwards felt remained valid. He had undergone therapy with Reich himself in the late 1940s, and continued to practice various Reichian techniques throughout his life. While his admiration for Reich was considered by his friends to be one of his personal quirks, Edwards always made it clear that he considered Reich to be one of the world’s foremost critics of organized religion. He shared Reich’s view that religion had caused much more harm than good by alienating people from the natural world and from understanding their own natural selves. For all their philosophical differences, this was a point of view shared by such disparate figures as Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, and, of course, Edwards himself. Edwards always made it clear that he was not only a nonbeliever, but someone with a visceral dislike for religion. Shortly before his death he was gladdened to know of the rise of what has come to be called “The New Atheism,” identified with such thinkers as Daniel C. Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, all of whose work he closely followed in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement. These and many other newspapers, thoroughly annotated in his often indecipherable handwriting, would be found throughout his huge book-laden apartment in the Apthorp at 390 West End Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was known by everyone as “the Professor” and where he lived for the last thirty years of his life. A hard-headed realist with a concern for the proper use of language, Edwards despised philosophers—particularly so-called “existentialists”—who, he felt, engaged in deliberate obfuscations to cloud their real meanings. Death is not, as Heidegger would put it, “our capital possibility”10—it is the end of one’s existence. Or, as Bertrand Russell once so memorably put it: “When I die, I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive.”11 It is perhaps not surprising that one of the entries that Edwards personally wrote for The Encyclopedia of Philosophy was entitled Paul Edwards, “More about Dr. Ian Stevenson, the ‘Galileo of Reincarnation,’ ” in Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, p. 255. 10 Paul Edwards, “Heidegger and Death,” in Heidegger’s Confusions, p. 78. 11 Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, New York: Routledge 2004, p. 13. 9

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“My Death.”12 Like Epicurus, what he most feared was not eternal punishment or reincarnation into another body, but rather a long and painful demise. Mercifully, while his health issues did cause him much distress (particularly severe and recurring back pain which originated from his falling from a ladder in his apartment while retrieving a book on a high shelf), he did not, as he had dreaded, spend his last days in a hospital, but died in his living room while reading—a very Epicurean way to go. Paul Edwards died on December 9, 2004. His final book, entitled God and the Philosophers, a summation of the views of many of the major Western philosophers on the subject of the deity, was published posthumously.13 He worked on it continuously for the last decade of his life, rewriting each chapter obsessively. Given his many health problems, which led to his having to—much against his desires—retire from teaching (the genuine love of his life), he rightly suspected that this would be the last book he would work on. He was loath to complete it, knowing that it was unlikely he would have the energy to devote to starting a new project. However, Edwards was assured by his literary executor that the book would appear, and he was glad to know that it would likely place him in the company of the “New Atheism” movement whose writers had all been influenced by his own lifelong defense of materialism and rationalism. It finally appeared in 2009, five years after his death. II. Edwards’ Critique of Kierkegaard Given Edwards’ animus towards Kierkegaard’s approach to philosophy, one might be surprised to learn that he wrote a not unsympathetic short biography of Kierkegaard in his widely-used textbook, A Modern Introduction to Philosophy.14 Interestingly enough, it is by far the longest entry on all the philosophers whose works are excerpted in that text. Edwards was fascinated by Kierkegaard’s tortured life, especially his unsuccessful romantic endeavors and his painful relationships with the Danish State Church. Furthermore, he considered him to be the precursor to the existentialist movement which played such a dominant role in the Western World following World War II. Kierkegaard’s analysis of guilt and dread, Edwards writes, “and his discussions of the ways in which human beings seek to avoid taking ultimate decisions concerning their lives have strongly influenced the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre.”15 In his introduction to Chapter Five, “On The Existence of God,” Edwards discusses Kierkegaard’s views on “the absolute paradox” of the Incarnation and why it is disturbing to both theists and critics of theism: Paul Edwards, “My Death” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1–8, ed. by Paul Edwards, New York: Free Press and Macmillan Publishing Company 1966, vol. 5, pp. 416–419. 13 Paul Edwards, God and the Philosophers, ed. by Timothy J. Madigan, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 2009. 14 Paul Edwards, “Søren Aabye Kierkegaard,” Biographical Note, in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, New York: Free Press 1957, pp. 588–92. 15 Ibid., p. 588. 12

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Timothy J. Madigan Kierkegaard had no time for theologians who tried to explain away difficulties and thus “shirk something of the pain and crisis of decision.” Kierkegaard did not indeed think that the evidence against the existence of God was stronger than the favorable evidence, but he did regard belief in the “absolute paradox” (the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus) as “absurd.” While it is not entirely clear what he meant by this, it is certain that Kierkegaard regarded belief in the incarnation as highly objectionable from a logical or rational point of view. He nevertheless taught that faith in the absolute paradox was both possible and highly desirable. The person who has this faith achieves the highest kind of life attainable for human beings. Moreover it is only by attaining such faith that one can become a Christian and only a Christian can gain eternal happiness. To be told that one ought to believe something although or perhaps even because it is “logically repellent” sounds like strange advice, but it is an essential part of Kierkegaard’s defense of Christianity and it is intimately connected with his doctrine, celebrated by contemporary existentialists as a major contribution to human thought, that “truth is subjectivity.”16

The notion attributed to Kierkegaard that “truth is subjectivity” is dealt with in detail below, in the discussion of Edwards’ 1971 Philosophy article. There is also a chapter on “Fideism” in Edwards’ final, posthumously published work God and the Philosophers, in which the views above are further explicated. But there are only three fleeting references to Kierkegaard himself in that book, perhaps because its emphasis is on philosophers who were nonbelievers and/or critics of theism rather than on theism’s defenders. In the chapter on “Fideism” Edwards makes a direct connection between Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” concept and William James’ essay “The Will to Believe”—a rather uncharitable comparison, since James goes to some trouble in the essay itself to differentiate his views from those of Kierkegaard. Edwards writes: This new interpretation of the idea of “truth” has been hailed as a momentous contribution to philosophy and religion. A little reflection shows, however, that it is nothing but a confusing redefinition. From the fact that a person sincerely and passionately believes in God, it does not follow that there is a God, and the disagreement between the believer and the unbeliever obviously concerns the latter question. As we shall see shortly, Kierkegaard’s attempt to save religion by redefining truth reappears in William James, and Kierkegaard is a forerunner of various contemporary philosophers who deny that there is such a thing as objective truth.17

One might expect Edwards to criticize Kierkegaard more in his various writings, given his unsympathetic attitude toward fideism and existentialism, both of which he strongly identified with Kierkegaard. The best reason for such a lack of written references is most probably due to the fact that he thought the bulk of his specific criticisms against the Dane and his influence could be found in his article “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity” which appeared, as previously mentioned, in the April 1971 edition of Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.



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Paul Edwards, “Fideism,” in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, p. 505. Paul Edwards, “Fideism,” in God and the Philosophers, pp. 165–6.

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Often anthologized, a slightly edited version of the article appears in his A Modern Introduction to Philosophy as well.18 What are the main points of the article? Edwards begins by using the phrase “The Alleged Turning Point” in European Philosophy to describe Kierkegaard’s major contribution. Modern-day followers of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, he writes, have initiated a campaign against “scientism,” “scientific rationalism,” and “positivism” as defective and inadequate ways of arriving at truth, and utilize Kierkegaard’s writings to provide an alternative route to truth. As one of the last great defenders of Positivism himself, these were fighting words for Edwards, who in the essay devotes the bulk of his argument to attempting to prove that there is only one kind of truth, “objective scientific truth.” Kierkegaard’s writings do not mark a turning point in the understanding of the nature of truth, but rather a retreat from rationality and, perhaps an even worse cardinal sin in Edwards’ view, a misuse of language by redefining the meaning of “truth” itself. Most of the examples used in the article come from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Edwards points out that he is fully aware that attributing the views of Johannes Climacus to Kierkegaard himself is highly problematic, and he admits that he is not qualified enough in Kierkegaard scholarship to make a learned judgment on this. But since most of the existentialist writers he quotes do attribute the concept of “truth as subjectivity” to Kierkegaard rather than to characters created by Kierkegaard, Edwards feels entitled to do the same. “I am concerned with the soundness or otherwise of the doctrine that truth is subjectivity as it has been interpreted by contemporary existentialists who regard it as a momentous contribution,” he writes. “Whether or how far Kierkegaard himself really believed it or any of the other theories proposed in the pseudonymous writings is quite another matter.”19 As far as Edwards could see, Kierkegaard’s underlying concerns with objective scientific truth were due to the fact that he desired certainty, and science cannot give this. There were three basic inadequacies of using the scientific method to arrive at certainty. First, it relies upon probability, which can only give approximation, and which furthermore has no connection with “passion.” Probable knowledge cannot impel someone to believe. Second, science does not give evidence for or against the truths of religion. For instance, no matter what evidence one relies upon, the question of the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven. And third, the specific doctrines of Christianity, the religion that Kierkegaard is passionately committed to, are by scientific standards literally “absurd.” Kierkegaard’s defense of the subjective truth concept is therefore an amalgamation of all three criticisms directed against science. Edwards adds: It is unnecessary for our purposes to inquire into the sense or senses in which Kierkegaard uses “absurd,” “breach with all thinking,” and similar expressions…. Whatever their exact meaning, there is no doubt that Kierkegaard regarded the doctrine Paul Edwards, “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 505–22. 19 Paul Edwards, “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 176, 1971, p. 108. 18

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of the incarnation as highly objectionable from the point of view of reason so that it would have to be rejected if it were simply a matter of rational considerations.20

One senses in reading the essay that Edwards is not really so willing to overlook the exact meaning of such terms, since another of his arguments is that Kierkegaard opens up a philosophical floodgate by both changing the common meaning of terms and allowing the usage of vague and ambiguous definitions—the very sort of linguistic inexactitude that would set a Positivist on edge. Nonetheless, by then focusing on the central concept of the Incarnation—which Edwards stresses is Kierkegaard’s main objective in his goal to redefine “truth”—the essay returns to the question asked at its beginning: is this really a “turning point” or rather a return to a confusing way of talking that the Vienna Circle and other linguistic philosophers had sought to rectify? Here Edwards focuses on what does seem to be a genuine contribution in Kierkegaard’s thought: an elaborate attempt to explain the difference between what is believed (which Kierkegaard is willing to grant is “objective content”) and how this is believed, which relates to the subjective attitude of the believer. Edwards concurs that this can be a fruitful avenue to pursue, especially by focusing on the question of “what is believed.” He writes: Kierkegaard here evidently thinks of the kind of situation in which we might agree with what a particular person is saying and yet find it odd and even distasteful that he of all people, should be saying it. Sometimes we might even refer to such people as “living lies” although what they say is quite true or the sort of thing that we ourselves approve of.21

Edwards gives the example of theologians who talk a great deal about “love” but seem to be cold and uncaring individuals themselves. Yet, while this topic, which relates to the field of the ethics of belief, is a rich one to investigate, there does not seem to be anything new to it added by Kierkegaard’s writings. Furthermore, it is the second half, relating to “how one believes,” that seems to be more pertinent to Kierkegaard’s defense of subjectivity. But here, too, Edwards argues, Kierkegaard makes no great contribution to understanding the nature of truth itself, but rather develops in great detail the concept of “faith.” Kierkegaard’s understanding of “faith” does indeed seem to be radically different from that of many other writers in the Christian tradition, especially the view that there can be no such thing as faith without risk. Edwards writes: “It is risk which gives faith the kind of tension that Kierkegaard regards as extremely desirable. A feeling of security is neither admirable nor any indication that the person has attained the right God-relationship.”22 But the emphasis on “insecurity” as a necessary stage of belief, as well as the related famous concept of the “leap of faith,” are matters of debate regarding levels of commitment, rather than—as Kierkegaard’s defenders claim— saying anything central to the concept of truth itself. Edwards then adds that Kierkegaard argues for two senses of being “in the truth”—an objective and a subjective sense. Kierkegaard insists that science has Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 93. 22 Ibid., p. 94. 20 21

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“demoralized” people by only stressing the first, which tries to provide logical arguments that will allow a person to calmly and carefully commit to a belief, based upon preponderance of evidence and a satisfactory chain of reasoning. But it is only in the subjective sense of “being in the truth” that there is actual decisiveness. It is clear, Edwards points out, why this view would appeal to theologians who recognize—thanks primarily to the devastating logical critiques of David Hume and Immanuel Kant—the flaws in the traditional arguments for God’s existence, but it is not fair to scientists, who caution against committing oneself to causes that lack objective verification. Kierkegaard’s confusion regarding “subjective truth,” in Edwards’ view, relates to the fact that he does not have a single theory, but rather an amalgamation of theories, which are inadequately differentiated from each other. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to criticize the concept, even putting aside the question as to whether it is really Kierkegaard’s actual argument or only one put forth by an imaginary character. “Perhaps,” Edwards states, we should begin by pointing out that although much of the time Kierkegaard appears to tell us that we should forget about the objective questions except as a means of heightening the tension of inwardness, he does revert to these issues and as a Christian he must do so. Putting it in different words, Kierkegaard reverts and must revert, from the new sense of “true” in which to say that a belief is true means no more than that it is held sincerely and without reservations, to the old sense in which it means that it is in accordance with the facts or with reality.23

So, when Kierkegaard speaks of “the truth of Christianity” he is not jettisoning objectivity. It is crucial to him that Jesus really must be the son of God—it is not enough that one just believes it to be so. The Incarnation would lose its importance if it was simply a deeply held belief, and not a matter of fact. At this point in the essay, Edwards has some fun by “resurrecting” none other than his own hero, David Hume. Imagine a scenario in which Hume and Kierkegaard both arrive at the Pearly Gates to be judged as to whether they deserve immortal life: something Hume was skeptical about, and which Kierkegaard made the centerpiece of his philosophical hopes. Suppose that God, rather than respecting passionate commitment, prizes intellectual rectitude instead. Hume, therefore, while not believing in God or eternal life, had based his beliefs upon the best available evidence he had, and is rewarded with eternal bliss. But Kierkegaard is condemned by God for concocting cowardly schemes to shield himself from the evidence before him. “I very much doubt,” Edwards writes, “that Kierkegaard would reply, ‘I stand vindicated. The fact that you are about to annihilate me and that unlike David Hume I shall miss out on eternal happiness is of no importance. I believed what I did without reservations. Hence I was in the truth. Hence I achieved the highest kind of life. The rest is of no consequence.’”24 So, while Kierkegaard may praise inwardness and a lack of reservations as the highest form of life, this does not have any actual bearing upon the truthfulness 23 24

Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 98.

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of one’s beliefs. It is a value judgment, not a truth judgment. Furthermore, such commitment is fully consistent with views that would have likely appalled Kierkegaard. A follower of Ayn Rand, for instance, may demonstrate just as much commitment to selfish capitalism. Sidney and Beatrice Webb demonstrated their complete commitment to Socialism throughout their lives. Surely they were all just as committed to their causes or beliefs as a Kierkegaardian Christian would be to belief in the Incarnation. Such a “highest form of existence,” therefore, is no justification of the truths of Christianity per se. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself realizes that the implications of appealing to sincerity can lead to utter chaos. Inwardness can easily be equated with madness. Don Quixote, for example, was sincere in his beliefs about giants. Kierkegaard distinguishes, therefore, between genuine versus aberrant inwardness. The type of absurdity he advocates is not congruent with delusions of grandeur, or economic or political systems, no matter how utopian. Rather, for Kierkegaard, commitment to the absurd must be to the absolute, to the ultimate meaning of existence, namely, eternal life. That would rule out Don Quixote, Ayn Rand and the Webbs, since whatever the strength of their commitments, their focus in not upon the ultimate. But even if one grants Kierkegaard such a distinction, there are many other versions of the Savior and the Incarnation which are passionately upheld by Christians and other theists who do have the ultimate as their aim. Is not objective reality still the deciding factor as to which such belief one should commit to, rather than which is most passionately adhered to? Ultimately, then, Edwards holds, Kierkegaard is talking not about truth but about commitment. And the only justifiable commitments are to propositions that are not merely strongly felt but also are in accord with the facts. Thus, regardless of what existentialists may claim, there is, after all, no new concept of truth found within Kierkegaard’s writings. At best, there is a new, or at least unconventional, analysis of the meaning of “passion.” At worst, there is a deliberate misuse of language. Rather than offering a “new” meaning of truth, Kierkegaard merely gives us a misleading redefinition, a “verbal fog.” He is guilty of committing the age-old logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi (or “red herring”). Instead of leading us to a better understanding of the meaning of truth, Kierkegaard and his advocates throw us off the scent. In conclusion, Edwards writes: “We can now regard a person as in the truth if, in addition, to feeling infinite concern, it is also the case that the object or objects appropriate to this infinite concern do in fact exist.”25 That is the only sort of existentialism to which a pro-Positivist like Edwards would passionately commit himself. III. Edwards and Kierkegaard While “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity” remains the primary work by which Edwards’ criticism of Kierkegaard will be known, it is clear that he continued to grapple with the thought and influence of Kierkegaard for many years thereafter. Edwards’ personal files, including his dictated notes (which he had typed up for him and which he used in teaching his courses in philosophy) may be found in Ibid., p. 105.

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the archives at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York. The Center is the home of two publications founded by Edwards’ friend Paul Kurtz (with whom he once co-taught a course in philosophy at the New School for Social Research), The Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry. Unfortunately, while they are a rich resource of materials, especially relating to the history and compilation of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Edwards’ archives are not yet catalogued. I was able to do research in the archives, under the auspices of Center for Inquiry archivist and chief librarian Timothy Binga. While there, I found Edwards’ files relating to Kierkegaard. Given his obsessive working habits, it is not surprising that among these were several drafts of “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” as well as his rewrites of the article which later appeared in various publications. All of the changes are fairly minor and do not alter in any way the content of his criticisms. It was always Edwards’ technique to test his articles ahead of time by sending drafts to friends and fellow philosophers for their opinions, and by discussing the works-in-progress with his students. In the Edwards’ archives at the Center for Inquiry there are also several files labeled “Class Notes.” In these, which Edwards used for the various courses he taught over the years at Columbia University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the New School for Social Research, there are points he makes about Kierkegaard which are either not found in any of his published writings or strengthen some of the points he does make on the written page. Unfortunately, the notes are not dated, and it is impossible to tell when they were delivered or how specifically he used them in the classroom. Nonetheless, they should be of interest to those desiring further information on Edwards’ views about Kierkegaard as a philosopher. Below are some of the choicest examples. In relationship to Kierkegaard’s views on sincerity of belief, Edwards notes: Various Small Points Relating to K. In the exposition where K. has a good point about people advocating a certain view which they themselves do not adequately feel or believe in, like my friend when he praises the Jews—in this connection the word to use is “it rings false in his mouth.” This is exactly the right phrase and what I have now is not very good.

Here Edwards comments upon a position of Kierkegaard’s that he initially agrees with, the concept of what constitutes a “true believer,” although as usual he makes it clear that he must ultimately part company with him: On the point where K. is right—that what makes up a true believer are emotions and actions rather than intellectual sophistication, something needs to be said as to why he is right. I suppose in the long run all I can say is that this is the way in which we normally use the word “belief” or “genuine belief” when it comes to belief in religions or ideologies or anything else where not only verbal responses count (as they might in the case of belief in certain metaphysical systems). Our chief criterion is not what a person says or how intelligently he can support what he says, but how he acts and feels.

Edwards does express an ongoing desire not to overstate Kierkegaard’s views regarding the subjective nature of truth, and thereby portray him too much as a strawman:

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But, as always, he wants to take issue with what he feels to be Kierkegaard’s continuing misuse of language. Still, even Edwards is willing to concede that the word “truth” can be used in differing ways: “There is no doubt that ‘truth’ in the philosophically most interesting sense of ‘corresponding to fact’ is not the only one in everyday life. This in no way helps Kierkegaard or makes his various moves or tricks any more defensible.” Nonetheless, Edwards in his notes to himself for classroom use stresses that his criticisms of Kierkegaard are not trivial, and that in defining truth one must always be cautious of falling into ambiguities: It is important that when I write up some of the above comments I should emphasize that these are not pedantic points, but they are quite central, especially the criticisms of Kierkegaard and the various ambiguous uses of “truth.” All of this shows that being clear about the meanings of word is not something trivial, but in philosophy at least something extremely important and people who don’t learn the art of attending to redefinitions, linguistic shifts, etc. are apt to become the victims of their own or other people’s redefinitional games. I should also bring in as much of my material on James as possible. This is the place—the two things are very similar and readers can be persuaded more easily about the enormities of the Kierkegaard type of confusion when the same sort of thing is demonstrated in James.

Here again one can see his conflating Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” with William James’ concept of “The Will to Believe.” What seemed to primarily motivate Edwards’ animus towards Kierkegaard’s philosophy was what he considered to be a conflation between commitment to a cause and the assumption that such commitment justified the truth of the cause itself: All of this needs to be done more clearly if at all. The main point is the contrast between blind and informed commitments. In general I should point out that I am not opposed, in suitable situations, to a person’s giving himself entirely to a therapist, a doctor, a teacher, a singer. No opposition to such complete giving is involved in my criticisms of K. I am opposed to total giving in unsuitable situations—a movement like the Communist Party or Christianity which has not been adequately investigated or as making this some sort of argument for a baseless conclusion like the existence of God.

And in conclusion, while expressing some cautious admiration for Kierkegaard’s sincerity, Edwards distanced himself from what he felt to be the dark side of existential commitment: the espousal of beliefs that were untenable or even atrocious: Finally, though here one can do little more than express one’s own feelings, I find certain aspects of K.’s value-judgment quite horrifying. I will grant that sincerity is usually admirable and that in certain contexts unreserved commitment is much to be preferred to doubts and reservations (e.g. the way Churchill threw himself into the fight during the

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second World War) but I cannot see that this is necessarily and always the case. K. gives us a blank check for any and every kind of fanaticism and, although he does not see this, for the indulgence of any and every kind of intellectual and emotional cowardice.

As these notes demonstrate, Edwards remained fascinated by Kierkegaard, particularly his psychological approach to philosophy. While he had no truck for Kierkegaard’s fideism or belief in eternal life, he does express grudging admiration for Kierkegaard’s zest for life (“I feel some sympathy,” he writes in his classroom notes, “for the value judgments that are implicit in K—a life without passion doesn’t seem very worthwhile and a life in which a person doesn’t deliberately decide and allows himself to be driven by events is not the kind of life I admire”). There is one connection between the two thinkers which might otherwise go unobserved: their shared puckish sense of humor. Edwards surely appreciated Kierkegaard’s use of laughter as a weapon. Most of all, just as Edwards used such a weapon in his life-long campaign against Heidegger, he admired Kierkegaard’s similar campaign against Hegel, whom Edwards likewise considered a master of obfuscation (or in Schopenhauer’s memorable term “the intellectual Caliban”).26 In his files on Kierkegaard, Edwards saved the following quotation from Karl Popper: Although Kierkegaard never freed himself entirely from the Hegelian tradition in which he was educated, there was hardly anybody who recognized more clearly what Hegelian historicism meant. “There were,” Kierkegaard wrote, “philosophers who tried, before Hegel, to explain…history. And providence could only smile when it saw these attempts. But providence did not laugh outright, for there was a human, honest sincerity about them. But Hegel? Here I need Homer’s language. How did the gods roar with laughter! Such a horrid little professor who has simply seen through the necessity of anything and everything there is, and who now plays the whole affair on his barrel-organ: listen, ye gods of Olympus!” And Kierkegaard continues, referring to the attack by the atheist Schopenhauer upon the Christian apologist Hegel: “Reading Schopenhauer has given me more pleasure than I can express. What he says is perfectly true: and then—it serves the Germans right—he is rude as only a German can be.” But Kierkegaard’s own expressions are nearly as blunt as Schopenhauer’s: for Kierkegaard goes on to say that Hegelianism, which he calls “this brilliant spirit of putridity,” is the “most repugnant of all forms of looseness”: and he speaks of its “mildew of pomposity,” its “intellectual voluptuousness,” and its “infamous splendour of corruption.”27

Given Edwards’ own love for blunt and often rude expressions, and his animus toward the sort of writing style Hegel and the Hegelians exemplified, it is not surprising that he adds “This is good stuff.” On this issue, he and Søren Kierkegaard were in passionate agreement.

26 Arthur Schopenhauer, Preface to the Second Edition, The World as Will and Representation, vols. 1–2, trans. by E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover Editions 1966–69, vol. 1, p. xxi. 27 Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vols. 1–2, London: Routledge 1945, vol. 2, p. 275.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Edward’s Corpus A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, New York: Free Press 1957, pp. 505–22; pp. 588–92. “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity,” Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 176, 1971, pp. 89–108. Heidegger and Death: A Critical Evaluation, La Salle, Illinois: The Hegeler Institute 1979, p. 16. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 1996, p. 255. Heidegger’s Confusions. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 2004, p. 17; p. 65; p. 100. God and the Philosophers, ed. by Timothy J. Madigan, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 2009, p. 163; pp. 165–6. II. Sources of Edward’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Barrett, William and Henry D. Aiken, eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vols. 1–4, New York: Random House 1962, vol. 3, pp. 147–56. Blanshard, Brand, Reason and Belief, New Haven: Yale University Press 1974, pp. 113–26. Garelick, Herbert M., The Anti-Christianity of Kierkegaard, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1965. Geismar, Eduard, Lectures on the Religious Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Publishing House 1938. Kaufmann, Walter, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1958, pp. 22–61; pp. 108–14; pp. 278–8; pp. 299–301; p. 411. Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Fear and Trembling, trans. by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Journals, trans. by Alexander Dru. New York: Harper Torchbooks 1958. Murphy, Arthur E., “On Kierkegaard’s Claim that Truth is Subjectivity,” in Reason and the Common Good, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall 1963, pp. 178–89.

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III. Secondary Literature on Edward’s Relation to Kierkegaard Daise, Benjamin, Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999, p. viii; pp. 99–110; pp. 132–3. Kellenberger, J., “Faith and Emotion,” Sophia, vol. 19, no. 3, 1981, pp. 31–43. Levine, Michael, “Kierkegaard: What Does The Subjective Individual Risk?” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 13, no. 1, 1982, pp. 13–22. Solomon, Robert C., “Kierkegaard and Subjective Truth,” Philosophy Today, vol. 21, 1977, pp. 202–15.

William James: Living Forward and the Development of Radical Empiricism J. Michael Tilley

One of the most repeated Kierkegaard quotations, in a variety of slightly different forms, is “life is lived forward but understood backward.”1 One of the first references to the quotation in English was in a lecture in October 1904 delivered by the Dane Harald Høffding (1843–1941). Høffding had been invited by William James (1842– 1910) to deliver a lecture to his students addressing an upcoming discussion dealing with James’ views on pragmatism, radical empiricism, and pluralism. Høffding mentions Kierkegaard by name and refers to a version of the quotation above. James was captivated by the quotation and from that point on used it in the explication of his own views. This article examines this quotation as it relates to James’ understanding of experience and radical empiricism. The article is divided into three sections: (1) a brief overview of William James’ life; (2) a description of James’ references to Kierkegaard and the history of how he became aware of the Dane; and (3) an account of how the quotation, often repeated by James, provides an insight into James’ larger body of thought as well as the relationship between James and Kierkegaard. I. Overview of William James’ Life and Works William James was an American philosopher and psychologist known as the founder of pragmatism and for his work on religion including The Will to Believe and The

1 This quotation occurs in a variety of different forms in Kierkegaard’s work. See SKS 1, 33 / EPW, 78: “life is understood backward through the idea…”; SKS 18, 99, FF:122 / KJN 2, 91: “Life can be interpreted only after it has been experienced, just as Christ did not begin to expound the Scripture and show how they taught of him until his Resurrection.” And perhaps the best known form of the quotation is SKS 18, 194, JJ:167 / KJN 2, 179. There is some controversy concerning the origin of Kierkegaard’s use of the quotation. For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s use of this motif and the controversy about its origin see Jon Stewart, “Daub: Kierkegaard’s Paradoxical Appropriation of a Hegelian Sentry,” Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2007 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6), pp. 72–4.

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Varieties of Religious Experience.2 He was born in New York City the eldest child of Henry James, Sr. and Mary Walsh, and he was the brother of novelist Henry James (1843–1916). He was educated at some of the finest institutions in the United States and Europe including the University of Berlin and the Harvard School of Medicine where he earned his highest degree (M.D.). He was a world traveler spending a significant amount of time in Europe and on an expedition along the Amazon. He also opened the first American psychological laboratory and taught comparative physiology, psychology, and philosophy at Harvard, although he never completed collegiate coursework in psychology or philosophy. Much like Kierkegaard, James suffered from periods of depression which he saw as a sickness of his soul. His work on religious belief—The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience— are expressions of how James handled his depression.3 Throughout his career, but especially toward the end of his life, James was quite prolific. He wrote a number of articles and books in a variety of fields including The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a series of essays that were collected posthumously and entitled Essays in Radical Empiricism (1904– 05), and Pragmatism (1907). Pragmatism provoked the largest response among James’ contemporaries, particularly among British philosophers such as Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), George Edward Moore (1873–1958), and Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924),4 and James published a response to his critics entitled The Meaning of Truth (1909). Unfortunately, James’ work has primarily been understood and addressed from the standpoint of his religious writings and his pragmatism. Often these topics are not situated and understood in the larger context of James’ psychology and his radical empiricism, and this situation partially explains why James thought that his critics misunderstood key portions of his argument.5 John McDermott has expressed a similar thought: “While both [James’ religious views and his pragmatism] are intriguing and carry important philosophical implications, they are subject to grave distortions if seen apart from his insight into the meaning of relations as formulated William James, The Will To Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York: Longmans Green 1896; and William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Longmans Green 1902. 3 For further biographical details, see Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2006; and Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1998. For an account of the encounter between James and Høffding, see Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, New York: Basic Books 1974, pp. 112–20. 4 Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” Philosophical Essays, New York: Simon and Schuster 1966, pp. 79–111; Bertrand Russell, “William James’s Conception of Truth,” Philosophical Essays, pp. 112–30; George Edward Moore, “William James’ ‘Pragmatism,’ ” Philosophical Studies, London: Routledge 1922, pp. 97–146; Francis Herbert Bradley, “On Professor James’s ‘Meaning of Truth,’ ” Essays on Truth and Reality, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1914, pp. 142–9. 5 William James, The Writings of William James, ed. by John J. McDermott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977, p. 317. 2

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in his psychology and metaphysics.”6 This aspect of James’ thought will be the primary emphasis in section III below, but I must first indicate where and how James uses Kierkegaard in his own works. II. James’ References to Kierkegaard Studies on the relationship between Kierkegaard and James have mainly compared each of the figures’ views on religion.7 This work is intriguing and reveals much about James and Kierkegaard and their views about religious belief, but it is important to note that although James knew of Kierkegaard, he apparently knew little or nothing about Kierkegaard’s religious thought. James only references a single quotation from Kierkegaard, yet he refers to it often in the explication of his views on his “radical empiricism.”8 There are four places where he references the quotation. The first published reference is mentioned in 1905, and it refers to the relationship between reflection on a prior experience and the experience itself. He gives an example of a person’s actual experience of a pen and contrasts this with second-order conscious reflection on the experience of using the pen: “The pen-experience in its original immediacy is not aware of itself, it simply is, and the second experience is required for what we call awareness of it to occur.”9 He footnotes this comment and makes an explicit reference to the quotation “We live forward, we understand backward” as “a phrase of Kierkegaard’s which Høffding quotes.”10 In 1904, Harald Høffding, a Danish philosopher who was influenced by Kierkegaard and sympathetic to James delivered a lecture at Harvard per James’ request. Høffding’s lecture addressed a series of lectures that were to be given by James outlining his “theory of pluralism on the basis of experience,” that is, radical empiricism, and then a subsequent series of lectures offered as an alternative to James on “a speculative theory of the absolute.”11 He addressed the question by highlighting the role of experience in understanding and its implications for adopting a pluralist or monist standpoint. Høffding frames his position around Kierkegaard’s claim that “we live forward, but we understand backward.”12 “Pluralism,” according to Høffding, is the “tendency John J. McDermott, “Preface,” in The Writings of William James, pp. xv–xvi. See C. Stephen Evans, Subjectivity and Religious Belief: An Historical, Critical Study, Washington, D.C.: Christian University Press 1978. 8 James may have been more familiar with Kierkegaard than his references suggest. There is evidence that he was very familiar with Harald Høffding’s work, and Høffding often references Kierkegaard. In fact, James wrote the preface for the translation of Høffding’s The Problems of Philosophy, trans. by Galen M. Fisher, with a preface by William James, New York: Macmillan 1905, pp. v–xiv. 9 William James, “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 7, 1905, p. 180. 10 James, “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” p. 180, note. 11 Harald Høffding, “A Philosophical Confession,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 4, 1905, p. 85. 12 Ibid., p. 86. 6 7

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to accentuate the multiplicity and difference of phenomena,”13 while monism maintains that “every difference and multiplicity supposes a deeper continuity, which it is our task to discover.”14 Human experiences are differentiated from one another, but the task of philosophy and the understanding is to discover a deeper unity among experiences. Høffding does not believe, however, that this task can ever be complete; “a perfect and universal synthesis is for us always an ideal which has to struggle for existence. Every totality we find in nature has always had a history; it has developed through interaction of elements and supposes differences in the nature and the tendencies of the different elements.”15 According to Høffding, although an absolute system of knowledge is impossible, it is an ideal that filters and directs experience. The inherent incompleteness of systems of knowledge opens up the world to scientific and philosophical inquiry; it constitutes “the impulses of thought and… the leading [of] experiences.” These systems of knowledge serve as “projections,” and “electric search-lights, with whose help we try to explore the dark.”16 Høffding claims that his thought developed in this direction partially through the influence of Kierkegaard who was “decisive” for Høffding insofar as “[Kierkegaard] waged a passionate war against speculation, with strong accentuation of the conditions of thought and the value of the single, real, personal life.”17 James’ use of and references to Kierkegaard are best understood within this context. His understanding of Kierkegaard and the way it frames James’ project depend on the way the quotation was expressed in the lecture delivered by Høffding. The general thrust of James’ overall project had already been expressed prior to becoming acquainted with Kierkegaard, but this lecture and the subsequent development of James’ radical empiricism is from this point on often illustrated and framed in terms of this quotation. It was said that James “was so taken with the sentence from Kierkegaard” that, according to one commentator, it became “James’s favorite philosophical quotation” and that he often “cited it to explain his intent” in subsequent work.18 The three other uses of the quotation reveal how James appropriated Kierkegaard’s sentence and Høffding’s use of it. At first, it appears that James wanted to propose a contrast between his own view and Kierkegaard’s, but in subsequent references he appears to hold to something very similar to Kierkegaard’s view on the matter. James wrote: In Professor [Høffding’s] massive little article in a recent number of this [journal], he quotes a saying of Kierkegaard’s to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 88. 17 Ibid., p. 90. 18 Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, p. 112. 13 14

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empiricism alone insists on understanding forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life.19

In this passage, James articulates what seems to be a criticism of Kierkegaard’s quotation. He claims that radical empiricism is an advance on both rationalism and empiricism because it does not commit the mistake that both make. It does not assume, as empiricism does, that sense data represent isolated and discrete bits of information, but it plays close attention to the realm of experience in a way foreign to forms of rationalism. Radical empiricism is, therefore, able to understand prospectively and respectively. Experience will always and should always have an impact on concepts and connections between ideas. It will change and correct the mistakes that we make both in theory and in practice. At this point, it appears as if James sees his own ideas in opposition to the claim that life is understood backward. In the third reference of the quotation, James sees the quotation in a different light. It is seen as a way to illustrate James’ own account: Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. The “absolutely” true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal, vanishing point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truth will some day converge….[W]e have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even [though] no past thinker had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world’s previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story.20

This quotation was delivered as part of a lecture series not quite two years after the publication of the two prior uses of the quotation. In this lecture series, James maintains the same basic idea that experience corrects and forms philosophical concepts and that the historical process of becoming is such that any present understanding of an issue always leaves open the possibility of future revision. Understanding cannot be complete until experience and life are completed. Of course, we can make respective judgments about philosophical and practical matters, but these judgments are always provisional. James uses Kierkegaard’s quotation as a way to summarize this basic idea. In his final use of the quotation, James contrasts his idea of the flexibility of philosophical and social practices with “the conceptual method.” According to James, the conceptual method subordinates experience and practice to theory. It presupposes a set of concepts that apply to and structure the world in universal and unchanging ways. He writes: [L]ogic, giving primarily the relations between concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified William James, “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 9, 1905, p. 237. 20 William James, Pragmatism, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1907, pp. 222–3. 19

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J. Michael Tilley with concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interest of practice essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We live forward, we understand backward, said a [D]anish writer; and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and project them into the future.21

Although James was unfamiliar with Kierkegaard’s larger project, his language, style, and argument are similar to Kierkegaard’s own criticism of logic and speculation in that they both claim that it fails to understand existence as a process of becoming. In the following section, I will outline how the development of James’ radical empiricism during the period of time when he regularly references the quotation relates to these basic themes and ideas. III. Living Forward and Radical Empiricism James was taken with the quotation primarily because it expressed in a succinct and interesting way a central aspect of James’ thought. It illustrates how the process of inquiry is always ongoing, never completed, and that all attempts to understand ourselves, God, and the world depend on our experiences. This basic account of human experience and psychology, called “radical empiricism,” lays the groundwork for James’ account of religious experience and his pragmatism. In James’ preface to Høffding’s The Problems of Philosophy, which James commissioned to be translated and “carefully revised,” James characterizes the differences between rationalism, empiricism, radical rationalism, and radical empiricism. He asserts that rationalism “proceeds from the whole to its parts, and maintains that the connection between facts must at bottom be intimate and not external,” and empiricism “goes from parts to whole and is willing to allow that in the end some parts may be merely added to others, and that what the word ‘and’ stands for may be a part of real Being as well as of speech.”22 Radical rationalism maintains that “Reality in itself is eternally complete, and the confusions of experience are our illusion,” while radical empiricism holds that “confusion may be a category of the Real itself, and ‘ever not quite’ a permanent result of our attempts at thinking it out straighter.”23 Radical empiricism is a form of empiricism insofar as it moves from the particularity of experiences to generalizations. The connections, the “ands,” between events are experienced just as the objects themselves are experienced. Radical empiricism maintains in addition to this that reality itself may be such that it is unable to be William James, Pluralistic Universe, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1920, pp. 243–4. 22 James, “Preface,” in Høffding, The Problems of Philosophy, p. vi. 23 Ibid. 21

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systematized and understood in its totality. That is, radical empiricism implies that reality is, at the bottom, pluralistic.24 In a later work, James describes radical empiricism as expressing a postulate, advancing a statement of fact, and offering a conclusion in light of these claims: The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperiencable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.) The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.25

James maintains that philosophical disputes can only be understood when they originate in life and in experience. Severing “understanding” from life precludes any genuine understanding of the phenomenon. As such, James proposes to limit philosophical investigation to matters pertaining to human experience. James is not, however, defending some form of logical empiricism where claims are only meaningful if and only if they can be verified by some particular sense datum or set of sense data. According to James, ordinary empiricism of this sort makes a dogmatic assertion that is itself foreign to human experience.26 The ordinary empiricist treats sense experience as discrete independent sources of information, but it fails to recognize that “so much of what we call a fact consists of its relations to other facts, that we are…unable to see any fact as wholly independent. The part in itself remains for us an abstraction, and from a whole which itself is for us a mere ideal.”27 It treats sense experience as a given in which the subject plays no role. Furthermore, it fails to recognize that relations between the various elements in experience as themselves given in experience. As such, James’ empiricism encompasses more than just sense data; it also includes objects and their relations (or lack thereof) with other objects including one’s own self. James’ radical empiricism is similar in many respects to Kierkegaard’s own views on existence and subjectivity. At the very least, James would be sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s thought as it pertains to existence, subjectivity, and human psychology. Both emphasize the particularity of human existence, the importance of the human subject in knowledge, and both are critical of any systematic account of human life and experience. This similarity is partly explained by the influence of Kierkegaard on Høffding and the cross-pollination between Høffding and James. On the one hand, Høffding was well aware of James, and James’ psychology had an Harald Høffding, A Brief History of Modern Philosophy, trans. by Charles Finney Sanders, New York: Macmillan 1912, pp. 302–3. 25 William James, The Meaning of Truth, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1914, pp. xii–xiii. 26 James, “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” p. 237. 27 James, “Preface,” in Høffding, The Problems of Philosophy, p. x. 24

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influence on Høffding’s thought.28 On the other hand, James was taken by Høffding’s philosophical acumen and use of Kierkegaard. He commented: “Professor Høffding of Copenhagen is one of the wisest, as well as one of the most learned of living philosophers.”29 Although the mutual influence of James and Høffding partially explains the similarity between James and Kierkegaard, it cannot account for all of it. There are two places where this basic similarity between James and Kierkegaard becomes more concrete—in their subjective justifications of religious belief and in their defenses of anti-intellectualism. “Intellectualism,” according to James, “has its source in…translating the crude flux of our merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order,” and it becomes “vicious” when it allows the concepts themselves, the definition, to tell us “what a thing really is.”30 Swenson says that James is an anti-intellectual insofar as he denies both that “conceptual logic is the final authority in the world of being or fact,” and that “the logic of identity is the most intimate and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.”31 According to Swenson, it is also the case that Kierkegaard was the first critic of intellectualism who liberated human existence from “the intellectualist application or misuse of logic in the world of life and reality.”32 As I mentioned above, James’ religious views are often compared to Kierkegaard’s views, and this similarity is best understood in the context of this larger background of commonality. Evans rightly claims that “James clearly fits the general model… exemplified in…Kierkegaard, of a thinker who tries to give a subjective justification of religious belief.”33 Religious (or Christian) truths cannot be demonstrated from a purely theoretical standpoint, but since the matters addressed by religion are more important than what can be demonstrated merely from a theoretical standpoint, and since rational inquiry encompasses more than theoretical reason, a person may be justified in adopting the claims of a religion in general or Christianity in particular. Based on arguments like this one, both Kierkegaard and James propose somewhat similar accounts of a subjective justification of religious belief. Although there are important similarities as well as a clear line of influence from Kierkegaard through Høffding to James, it is also important to note a few of the significant differences. First, James, like Høffding, gives a general account of the subjectivity inherent within all belief including theoretical and scientific belief. This approach may be drawing out the spirit of Kierkegaard, but it deviates from the letter of the text. Kierkegaard makes a clear distinction between the matters that pertain to subjectivity, which are of the highest concern; but he does not deny that objectivity and theoretical reason have their place, for example, in mathematics or historical knowledge.34 James, however, expresses a stronger claim about the ways in which Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, pp. 119–20. James, “Preface,” in Høffding, The Problems of Philosophy, p. v. 30 James, A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 217–18. 31 David F. Swenson, “The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines, ed. by Lewis Lawson, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1970, p. 27. 32 Ibid., p. 27. 33 Evans, Subjectivity and Religious Belief: An Historical, Critical Study, p. 125. 34 SKS 7, 177 / CUP1, 193. 28 29

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the particularities of the individual subject, of selective inquiry, undermine the possibility for objective reflection and disinterestedness in all domains of inquiry— not just in the highest matters. Second, James gives a subjective defense of theistic religious belief in general, whereas Kierkegaard’s subjective account of religious belief is more specifically about the Christian religion. Despite these differences, James’ references to and uses of Kierkegaard serve as a springboard in the expression of his radical empiricism, and the famous “life is understood backward but lived forward” quotation is regularly used as an illustration of James’ thought. The lecture by Høffding where James first heard the quotation by Kierkegaard was an important one in James’ intellectual development, and James was quite taken by Høffding’s thought in general and the Kierkegaardian themes in particular. It is impossible to determine how much influence this encounter with Høffding had on the later development of his thought since the basic ideas are expressed much earlier in James’ Principles of Psychology; but James’ most important philosophical works are formulated and published after this event, and James references Kierkegaard in a significant number of these works. The most interesting facet of James’ relationship to Kierkegaard is that it illustrates the extent to which there is a great deal of cross-pollination between early twentieth-century Danish and American philosophy, psychology, and other empirical sciences.

Bibliography I. References or Uses of Kierkegaard in William James’ Corpus “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 7, 1905, p. 180. “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 9, 1905, p. 237. Pragmatism, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1907, pp. 222–3. Pluralistic Universe, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1920, pp. 243–4. II. Sources of James’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Høffding, Harald, “A Philosophical Confession,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 2, no. 4, 1905, p. 86. — The Problems of Philosophy, trans. by Galen M. Fisher, New York: Macmillan 1905, p. 2; p. 69; p. 161. III. Secondary Literature on the James’ Relation to Kierkegaard Brown, Hunter, William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000, p. 3; p. 24. Conant, James Ferguson, Three Philosophers: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and James, Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1991. Evans, C. Stephen, Subjective Justifications of Religious Belief: A Comparative Study of Kant, Kierkegaard, and James, Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 1974. — Subjectivity and Religious Belief: An Historical, Critical Study, Washington, D.C.: Christian University Press 1978. Farré, Luis, “Unamuno, William James y Kierkegaard,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 57, 1954, pp. 279–99 and no. 58, 1954, pp. 64–88. (Reprinted in his Unamuno, William James, Kierkegaard y otros ensayos, Buenos Aires: La Aurora 1967, pp. 17–97.) Ferreira, M. Jamie, Love’s Grateful Striving, New York: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 23; pp. 50–2; pp. 142–4. Feuer, Lewis S., Einstein and the Generations of Science, New York: Basic Books 1974, pp. 109–57. Gilmartin, Thomas V., Soul-Sickness: A Comparison of William James and Sören Kierkegaard, Th.D. Thesis, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley 1974.

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Mehl, Peter J., Søren Kierkegaard, William James, and the Contemporary Search for an Ideal of Humanness: Toward a Comprehensive Perspective on Personhood, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago 1989. Sánchez Barbudo, Antonio, “La intimidad de Unamuno: Relaciones con Kierkegaard y W. James,” Occidental, no. 7, 1949, pp. 10–13. Sands, Paul Francis, A Christian Appraisal of the Justification of Religious Faith in Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and William James, Ph.D. Thesis, Baylor University, Waco, Texas 2001. Sussman, Henry, “Søren Kierkegaard and the Allure of Paralysis,” in his The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982, pp. 63–158; pp. 245–49. Swenson, David F., “The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines, ed. by Lewis Lawson, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1970, pp. 27–8; p. 41. Wahl, Jean, The Philosopher’s Way, New York: Oxford University Press 1948, Chapter 12, pp. 214–32.

Walter Kaufmann: “That Authoritarian,” “That Individual” Andrew D. Spear

“To those whose minds are not liberated, wars, revolutions, and radical movements will never bring freedom but only an exchange of one kind of slavery for another. That is one of the most tragic lessons of the twentieth century.”1

I. Walter Kaufmann’s Life Walter Kaufmann was born in Freiburg, Germany on July 1, 1921. His upbringing was Protestant, though all four of his grandparents were Jewish; a fact which gave Kaufmann a direct connection to the Jewish religious tradition and was also to lead to difficulties for him and his family in the years leading up to and during World War II. In an article published in Harper’s Weekly in 1959, Kaufmann explains his religious development, which took him from Protestantism through a conversion to Judaism and finally to the realization, in 1939 as a newly arrived 17-year-old college student at Williams College in Williamston, Massachusetts in the United States, that he could not believe in the God of Jewish tradition either. This final realization resulted in a religious outlook that might be called “qualified agnosticism” or, as Kaufmann himself described it, “the faith of a heretic.”2 Kaufmann completed his Bachelor of Arts at Williams College with a major in philosophy in 1941 and, remaining in the United States, began graduate studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1942. Shortly after this Kaufmann enrolled for military service and served in World War II from 1943 to 1946. After the war he returned to Harvard and completed his Ph.D. thesis, Nietzsche’s Theory of Values, in 1947. In the same year he became a member of the faculty of philosophy at Princeton University in New Jersey. Though travelling often, including a Fulbright award for research at Heidelberg in 1955–56, which was the occasion of some interactions with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and a visiting professorship in Jerusalem in

Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice, New York: Peter H. Wyden 1973, p. 3. Walter Kaufmann, “The Faith of a Heretic,” Harper’s Weekly, February 1959. A more detailed account, both of this article and of Kaufmann’s own personal development, is provided in the “Prologue” to Kaufmann’s book The Faith of a Heretic, New York: Doubleday 1961. 1 2

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1975, Kaufmann remained at Princeton teaching and doing research until his death on September 4, 1980 at the age of 59. II. Walter Kaufmann’s Work Walter Kaufmann was a scholar, translator, anthologizer, commentator, poet, photographer, and original philosophical thinker. His writings cover a broad range of issues, including topics in existentialism, the philosophy of religion, comparative religion, philosophy of education, literature and literary criticism, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of politics, and ethics. Broadly speaking, Kaufmann’s work falls into three largely overlapping periods. The first, beginning with his dissertation work on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is a period marked primarily by scholarship and interpretation of the work of other thinkers, including the translation of many works from German to English and the compilation of a number of new figure- and topic-specific anthologies. In the English-speaking world, and especially in the United States, Kaufmann’s work on Nietzsche has had a large and lasting impact. In his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, which was first published in 1950 and reprinted in three more editions between 1946 and 1974, Kaufmann did a number of things that, taken together, served to initiate a new era of Nietzsche interest and scholarship. First, he dissociated Nietzsche’s thought from its entanglement with Nazism. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (1846–1935), Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister and a committed antiSemite and later a Nazi sympathizer, took over the management of his writings and their interpretation after Nietzsche went mad in January 1889. Kaufmann argues that it was she who, through her editing, rearranging and selective publishing of Nietzsche’s books and notebooks, is primarily responsible for his association with anti-Semitism and later with Nazism. Second, Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche’s works, even his more aphoristic ones, ultimately do comprise a unified philosophical outlook, one that can be seen to develop and evolve over Nietzsche’s lifetime. Third, Kaufmann provides an interpretation of Nietzsche’s notions of the Übermensch (the overman or superman) and of der Wille zur Macht (the will to power) according to which these involve the cultivation and development of primarily positive human characteristics, including creativity and intellectual ability. By dissociating Nietzsche from Nazism and the two world wars, by dispelling the idea that Nietzsche’s writings are a disorganized collection of aphorisms with no interconnecting unity, and by arguing that Nietzsche need not and should not be interpreted as an advocate of the indiscriminate exercise of force or power by some human beings against others, Kaufmann made possible a reevaluation and renewal of interest in Nietzsche in the English-speaking world. In addition to this, Kaufmann’s translations and anthologies of Nietzsche’s work, which he began in the 1950s and which would continue to occupy him until shortly before his death, both made the major works of Nietzsche widely available to English-speaking readers and, through introductions, editor’s footnotes and supplementary material, continued the work of undermining popular misconceptions about Nietzsche that was begun with Kaufmann’s original book.

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The other major focus of Kaufmann’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, which is especially relevant here, is his work on existentialist philosophy. After World War II there was a growing interest in existentialism in the United States. Walter Kaufmann occupies a place similar to that of William Barrett in the role that he played in interpreting, introducing, and making more widely available existentialist ideas and philosophical texts.3 In particular, Kaufmann’s anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre,4 which included selections from Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–18), Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875– 1926), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and Albert Camus (1913–60), became a widely used textbook for university courses on existentialism. The majority of Kaufmann’s writing about Kierkegaard also took place during this period of his work. The second period of Kaufmann’s career involves him in the more or less sustained development of a series of ideas on religion, philosophy, and morality, beginning with his Critique of Religion and Philosophy5 and his collection of essays From Shakespeare to Existentialism,6 and culminating, arguably, with the publication of his book Without Guilt and Justice in 1973.7 In each of the works during this period, Kaufmann begins with a discussion of the ideas of another thinker or tradition and then uses this as a basis for the development of his own views, devoting more space and consideration to his own views with each successive publication. Dealing especially with topics from existentialism and religion, Kaufmann seeks to develop an understanding of the relationship between freedom, responsibility, autonomy, honesty, self-deception, critical reflection, the need to consider alternative points of view, and the question of significant or meaningful human action. Kaufmann views individuals as free and responsible for making their own choices. Life is most meaningful when we are able to commit ourselves passionately to the choices that we have made and the paths that we have chosen. However, the confrontation with choice and responsibility is frightening and leads many people to self-deception. Further, the attempt to be honest about the options that confront us leads to the question of what standard or standards we should use in making our choices. It is not enough to just make choices passionately, Kaufmann insists that we must reflect on our choices as well, and have answers to the question of why we choose to do one thing rather than another. Our choices must be made “with eyes open.”8 An individual who makes choices in this way, having reflected carefully on the alternatives, weighed them, and made the decision to act and live in a certain 3 William Barrett’s most significant work along these lines is probably his Irrational Man, New York: Doubleday 1958. 4 Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, revised and expanded ed., New York: New American Library 1975 [New York: Meridian Books 1956]. 5 Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, New York: Harper and Bros. 1958. 6 Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, revised and expanded ed., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1980 [Boston: Beacon Press 1959]. 7 Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice. 8 Ibid., p. 3.

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way for reasons of her or his own, is an “autonomous” individual. For Kaufmann, the state of being an autonomous individual is an ideal to be striven for. He returns to this theme again and again in his writing, citing thinkers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) amongst others as people who both in their lives and in their work exhibited the kind of autonomous ideals and existence that it is important for all human beings to strive to attain. Philosophy can, of course, be of some help in this process, though Kaufmann repeatedly stresses the themes that philosophical ideas and theories are by their nature provisional and fallible attempts to make sense of the world, and that abstract philosophical reflection runs the danger of ignoring or misunderstanding crucial features of lived human experience. The upshot of Kaufmann’s views of the nature of the human condition and of philosophy itself is that the making of honest responsible choices absolutely requires the use of critical and philosophical reflection, but that no single choice or even accepted system of philosophical reflections can be considered permanent, finished, abiding for all time, or completely accurate to all of the situations that will be confronted in actual human existence. Since we cannot expect a final philosophical (or religious or artistic) truth to mitigate the need for honest, responsible choice-making once and for all, what we need to do instead, according to Kaufmann, is develop in ourselves virtues or habits of choosing, of acting and of responding to the world that are consistent with and in fact can help to support our existence as constantly evolving free beings who must seek to make honest, critically sound and responsible choices even as we are denied any permanent certainties or ultimate solutions. To this end, Kaufmann proposes four virtues: honesty, love, courage, and what he calls “humbition.” Kaufmann discusses and elaborates on these virtues in a number of his works during the 1960s and into the early 1970s.9 Kaufmann’s approach to the questions of ethics and morality is thus a type of virtue approach. His view is that what matters most is being a certain kind of individual, specifically an autonomous one, and that being truly autonomous consists in cultivating the abilities and dispositions that he describes in relation to his four virtues. Kaufmann maintains that each of these virtues is interrelated (that to possess one adequately will often require possession of another; for example, it takes courage to be honest), that it is possible for the virtues to conflict (for example, love may suggest one course of action while honesty seems to require another), and, consistent with his view about the limits of abstract rational reflection, that even knowing about or possessing all of the virtues that he describes does not guarantee that there will be just one right answer for any given situation. Recognizing the challenges of human freedom and responsibility, and the equal dangers of self-deception and of dogmatic adherence to any particular system of beliefs (philosophical or otherwise), Kaufmann’s proposal is that we must develop a way of being and living in the world that will prevent us from running aground on either of these dangers while Kaufmann first introduces these virtues and discusses them at length in The Faith of a Heretic, pp. 317–42. He further elaborates on the same ideas in his Without Guilt and Justice, chapters 7 and 8. 9

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simultaneously allowing us to develop our human potential. It is in this context that he provides his account of virtues and of autonomy, which is intended to provide at least the outline of such a way of living. In the third period of his career, which also represents unexpectedly the final years of Kaufmann’s life, he began a series of new explorations, becoming ever more experimental in his use of different mediums, especially photography and poetry, in his work. Building on his previous scholarship and on his ideas regarding virtue and autonomy, Kaufmann sought ways of capturing more completely the different dimensions of human experience. The single clearest example of this kind of work is Kaufmann’s Man’s Lot trilogy, a series of three books that combined prose written by Kaufmann, photographs that he himself had taken, and a mixture of poetry, some written by Kaufmann and some reprinted from the works of other authors.10 Kaufmann’s last series of books, The Discovering the Mind trilogy, was also published during this time, with the final volumes published posthumously. In Discovering the Mind, Kaufmann is interested in “self-knowledge, meaning knowledge both of our own minds and of the human mind in general,” and by “mind” he means a broader sense of the term including “feeling and intelligence, reason and emotion, perception and will, thought and the unconscious.”11 These books continue Kaufmann’s concern with self-knowledge, self-deception, and honesty. A distinctive feature of these books is that they express, much more prominently than his previous works, Kaufmann’s position that the personality of a philosopher and the ideas that he or she develops are intimately connected, and that to produce truly insightful philosophy, the kind of philosophy that will contribute to the “discovery of the mind,” one must be a certain kind of individual, namely the kind of individual who has himself or herself arrived at some self-understanding, and who has developed their character in other ways as well. III. Kaufmann’s Engagement with Kierkegaard Kaufmann’s engagement with Kierkegaard has its roots in his interests in Nietzsche, in existentialism, and in the philosophy of religion. While Kaufmann makes regular reference to the ideas of Kierkegaard throughout his works, the majority of his sustained discussions of Kierkegaard is to be found in four places: (1) an article published in the Kenyon Review in 1956 (revised and expanded for inclusion in Kaufmann’s From Shakespeare to Existentialism in 1959),12 (2) Kaufmann’s introduction to Kierkegaard in his anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre in 1956,13 (3) a “Preface to Kierkegaard” originally written as a preface to Alexander Walter Kaufmann, Man’s Lot, New York: Reader’s Digest 1978. Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, vols. 1–3, New York: McGraw-Hill 1980, vol. 1 (Goethe, Kant and Hegel), pp. 3–4. (The other two volumes are Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber (vol. 2) and Freud, Adler, and Jung (vol. 3).) 12 Walter Kaufmann, “Kierkegaard,” Kenyon Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1956, pp. 182–211 (revised and expanded in his From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Boston: Beacon Press 1959, pp. 175–206). 13 Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, pp. 14–18; pp. 83–121. 10 11

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Dru’s translation of The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle in 1962 and reprinted in Kaufmann’s Existentialism, Religion and Death in 1976,14 and (4) a discussion of Kierkegaard that occurs in the first chapter of the second volume of his Discovering the Mind trilogy: Volume 2: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber.15 All of the other discussions of Kierkegaard in Kaufmann’s works are much shorter than the material contained in these four sources and serve only to restate the basic themes and ideas already developed in them. The bibliography of this article contains page references to mention of Kierkegaard in Kaufmann’s other publications. In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre Kaufmann introduces Kierkegaard as “the first existentialist,” largely for his concern with individual freedom and choice, and provides approximately 30 pages of material selected from Kierkegaard’s writings. This material is arranged under the subject-headings “On His Mission,” “On His Works,” “On His Mode of Existence,” “That Individual,” “Dread and Freedom,” “Authority,” and “Truth is Subjectivity.” Kaufmann explains that he has included the first four selections as an introduction to Kierkegaard the individual and to his self-conception, while the last three are presented as representing themes of central importance for understanding Kierkegaard’s work. Kaufmann’s selections for this anthology are taken from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944); The Point of View of My Work as an Author, translated by Walter Lowrie (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1950); The Concept of Dread, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1946); On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, Or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955). Kaufmann’s writings and mention of Kierkegaard indicate that he had a wide knowledge of Kierkegaard’s works. His most sustained treatment of Kierkegaard, the essay titled simply “Kierkegaard” in From Shakespeare to Existentialism, makes heavy use of Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler, while also quoting from or citing the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the journals, The Sickness unto Death, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, Either/Or, and Stages on Life’s Way. Full bibliographical information for the versions and editions of these books upon which Kaufmann relied is included at the end of this article. Kaufmann was fluent in both German and English and seems to have done most of his reading of Kierkegaard in English translation, though he regularly includes the Danish Samlede Værker in the bibliography of works where he discusses Kierkegaard. Kaufmann also makes regular references to Walter Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard.16

Walter Kaufmann, “A Preface to Kierkegaard,” in Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1962, pp. 9–29. (Reprinted in Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays, New York: New American Library 1976, pp. 1–14.) 15 Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, vol. 2, pp. 12–43. 16 Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1942. 14

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While Kaufmann clearly devoted a good deal of time to reading and thinking about Kierkegaard, it is worth noting that Kierkegaard was not a primary focus of his research in the way that Nietzsche was and that he does not seem to have been involved in the community of Kierkegaard scholars of his time in anything like the way in which he was involved with scholarship on Nietzsche. IV. Kaufmann’s Interpretation and Criticism of Kierkegaard [Kaufmann writing of Leo Tolstoy] “…I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard.”17

Kaufmann’s interpretation of Kierkegaard is a highly critical one, though one that exhibits a marked sympathy for Kierkegaard’s approach, giving Kierkegaard credit for his singular individualism and, to a lesser extent, for the insights that he provided into the phenomenon of freedom, choice and self-deception. Overall, Kaufmann views Kierkegaard as a thinker whose singular obsession with a small range of topics (Christianity obviously, but also his relationship to his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838), and his broken engagement to Regine Olsen (1822–1904)) prevented him from thinking sufficiently broadly or in sufficient detail about the topics that he wrote about. Kaufmann often contrasts Kierkegaard with Nietzsche on this point, suggesting that Nietzsche is an example of a writer who was more organized stylistically, and who was more willing to consider multiple points of view and provide clear analyses of ideas.18 On the other hand, what Kaufmann finds most impressive in Kierkegaard is the way in which, in all of Kierkegaard’s writing, we are confronted with the sustained presence, not just of ideas, arguments, or stories, but of a living, breathing, suffering individual, whose very individuality and struggle to come to terms with his existence forces us, if we are at all honest, to be aware of and reflect on our own. Motivated in part by this appreciation for Kierkegaard’s individuality, both of his major writings on Kierkegaard are written in a non-conventional style. His 1956 essay from the Kenyon Review, revised and expanded as “Kierkegaard” in From Shakespeare to Existentialism, is written using two different pseudonyms: “Brother Brash” and “Brother Brief,” while his 1961 “Preface to Kierkegaard” for Alexander Dru’s translation of The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle is in large part written as a critique, almost a mockery, of prefaces; an irony that Kierkegaard himself could well have appreciated. In his early writing on Kierkegaard (during the mid and late 1950s) Kaufmann criticizes what he perceives to be the dominant attitude amongst contemporary Kierkegaard scholars as much as, if not more than, he criticizes Kierkegaard himself. Kaufmann launches two major criticisms against the Kierkegaard scholars of his Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, New York: Harper and Brothers 1961, p. 3. 18 For example, Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, pp. 19–21. 17

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time. The first is that most writers on Kierkegaard function as apologists for him, explaining away his tangled prose and simply ignoring the problems with and potential consequences of his denigration of reason and his insistence on obedience to authority. The second is that Kierkegaard scholarship tends to be as pedantic and systematic as the Hegelian philosophy that Kierkegaard himself was such a critic of and that, more worrying still, the scholarly appropriation of Kierkegaard tends to downplay, blunt, and nearly extinguish the offence and the challenge that he himself intended for his works to convey.19 By the time of his final significant discussion of Kierkegaard in Discovering the Mind, volume 2: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber, Kaufmann’s criticisms of both Kierkegaard and of contemporary Kierkegaard scholars are much more muted, and give way to a slightly more favorable evaluation of Kierkegaard, especially regarding his contributions to understanding the issues of freedom, choice, and self-deception. By far Kaufmann’s most thorough discussion of Kierkegaard is the version of the essay “Kierkegaard” that appears in From Shakespeare to Existentialism. While quite long (42 pages), the essay is very ambitious, amounting to a statement of Kaufmann’s comprehensive evaluation of Kierkegaard’s work. The essay is written in two parts, both of which rely on pseudonyms. The first, and by far the longer part, is entitled “A Preliminary Expectoration” and is written by “Brother Brash,” whom Kaufmann characterizes as a sort of devil’s advocate against those who would canonize Kierkegaard. Brother Brash is a relentless critic of Kierkegaard, evaluating him as a stylist, a religious writer, a psychologist, and a philosopher. Kaufmann’s rationale for opening the essay with sustained criticism is that, with Kierkegaard, “one should first be offended.”20 His rationale for using a pseudonym is both that he considers the criticisms that he is offering to be an expression of the original “offence” and “vexation” that reading Kierkegaard should cause, and because such criticisms must ultimately “give way to another attitude.” The second and much shorter part of the essay is written under the pseudonym of “Brother Brief.” In this part of the essay Kaufmann does not undermine or reject the criticisms offered by Brother Brash, but rather suggests that Kierkegaard himself was not primarily interested in the categories that Brother Brash has made use of in criticizing him, but rather in the category of “the individual” as “a category that cracks all other categories.”21 Kaufmann then develops this idea, emphasizing the positive challenge of self-evaluation and selftransformation that is to be found in Kierkegaard’s writing and, even more, in the Kaufmann does not name many names explicitly in this connection; however, he mentions Robert Bretall on p. 198 of From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980) and Emanuel Hirsch on p. 176 of the same volume. It is likely that Kaufmann also has Alexander Dru in mind when he makes such criticisms. Or at least this could be plausibly inferred from Kaufmann’s description of his conflict with Dru over the inclusion of the former’s “Preface to Kierkegaard” as preface to a new edition of the latter’s translation of The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle; for Kaufmann’s discussion of this encounter, see his Existentialism, Religion and Death, New York: New American Library 1975, pp. x– xii. 20 See Kaufmann, “Kierkegaard,” in his From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959), p. 175. 21 Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 200. 19

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existence of Kierkegaard himself as the ever present and unavoidable author of these writings. Here I will provide a brief summary of Brother Brash’s criticisms of Kierkegaard (giving the most space to his criticism of Kierkegaard as a religious thinker, which seems to have been the area where Kaufmann most took issue with Kierkegaard’s views) and of Brother Brief’s response. Then I will conclude this article with a discussion of Kaufmann’s last writing on Kierkegaard from the second volume of the Discovering the Mind trilogy, written in the late 1970s. Kaufmann’s discussion (in the guise of “Brother Brash”) of Kierkegaard as a stylist is relatively short. Though not universally critical, Kaufmann does describe Kierkegaard’s writings as “verbose and repetitious; his theoretical prose is often needlessly involved; and in his attempts at philosophy he out-Hegels Hegel.”22 That Kaufmann discusses Kierkegaard as a stylist at all seems motivated primarily by his dislike of two defenses of Kierkegaard’s writing style, which Kaufmann views as common ones in the Kierkegaard literature. The first of these is that Kierkegaard’s more convoluted passages are attempts at satirizing Hegel, while the second is that they represent conscious attempts on Kierkegaard’s part to force the reader to slow down and think carefully about the passage.23 To the first, Kaufmann responds “If, as some of them [Kierkegaard’s commentators] plead, his intention in such cases was humorous and he was trying to satirize Hegel, he would seem to have failed in an endeavor in which success should have been relatively easy to attain.”24 While to the second point Kaufmann responds by simply stating that the impenetrability of some of Kierkegaard’s writing simply does not bear the stamp of such an intentional design, and that, at least at certain points, it is much better viewed as simply sloppy writing resulting from the speed at which Kierkegaard wrote and published his books. Kaufmann’s primary view of Kierkegaard as a religious writer (and also arguably his primary complaint against Kierkegaard as a thinker) is that he is “first of all, one of the foremost recent spokesmen of authoritarian religion.”25 Kaufmann substantiates this claim by focusing on passages from Kierkegaard’s journals where Kierkegaard discusses the importance of religious authority and obedience.26 Kaufmann then goes on to discuss what he views as the ethical implications of Kierkegaard’s authoritarian view of religion in Fear and Trembling. Kaufmann argues that Kierkegaard’s Ibid., p. 176. Kaufmann only cites one example of these claims, specifically of the second one, which he quotes from p. 121 (1. Abteilung, vol. 1, Section 33) of Emanuel Hirsch’s edition of Kierkegaard’s Die Schriften über sich selbst in Søren Kierkegaard, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–28, trans. by Emanuel Hirsch, Düsseldorf and Cologne: Diederichs 1950–69. 24 Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 176. 25 Ibid. 26 In particular, the passage “They would have us believe that objections against Christianity come from doubt. This is always a misunderstanding. Objections against Christianity come from insubordination, unwillingness to obey, rebellion against all authority. Therefore they have hitherto been beating the air against objectors, because they have fought intellectually with doubt, instead of fighting ethically with rebellion.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1938, see Section 630, which corresponds to SKS 20, 87, NB:121 / JP 1, 778. 22 23

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appropriation of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac is doubly anachronistic. In the first place, Kierkegaard’s attribution to Abraham of a distinction between the religious and the ethical orders (in terms of which the “teleological suspension of the ethical” is to be understood) is neither supported by a careful reading of Genesis nor entirely consistent with Kierkegaard’s own authoritarian view of the relationship between human beings and God. While this first point may not be entirely relevant to Kierkegaard’s project in Fear and Trembling, the second “anachronism” of which Kaufmann accuses him arguably is. This is the charge that, whereas it is a presupposition of the entire story of Abraham in Genesis that Abraham knows God well, is familiar with God, and can be certain that it is God who is commanding him to sacrifice his son, it is precisely this certainty that we as modern readers, either of Genesis or of Kierkegaard, do not in fact possess. As Kaufmann puts his concern: “If a man today proposed to act as Abraham did, I should not, like Kierkegaard, ‘saddle my horse and ride with him’ (p. 43); for I should not believe the man that it was God who had asked him to sacrifice his son.”27 Whereas Kierkegaard seems to frame the matter as a question of whether or not one’s faith will be strong enough to obey a command that clearly is from God, no matter how absurd that command may seem, Kaufmann’s point is that the first challenge for a contemporary religious believer is to have some non-arbitrary way of understanding whether or not a command does indeed come from God at all. And, from Kaufmann’s point of view, the fact that the command seems absurd does not necessarily speak in its favor. Given the situation of actual religious believers, in Kierkegaard’s time and in his own, Kaufmann’s complaint is that “Kierkegaard places the intuitive certainty that we are confronted with God’s will above all critical reflection.”28 Kaufmann discusses Kierkegaard’s conception of religious authority and its relationship to critical scrutiny and reflection further, relying in particular on discussions of these matters from Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler. He focuses particularly on the question of whether or not Kierkegaard provides any sort of criterion for determining whether or not a particular claim should be considered true and accepted based on religious authority. Based on his own reading of On Authority and Revelation, Kaufmann proposes two criteria, which he quotes directly from Kierkegaard in the following passage from On Authority and Revelation: “An apostle has no other proof but his own assertion, and at the most by his willingness to suffer everything for the sake of the doctrine.”29 Kaufmann proposes a number of examples intended to show that these criteria are simply inadequate, particularly if one’s goal is to guard against the use of certainty based on religious authority as justification for carrying out otherwise morally atrocious actions, something that Kierkegaard himself has proposed in Fear and Trembling. In Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 178. The page reference embedded in the quotation is to Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. 28 Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 178. 29 Søren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955, pp. 117–18 (which corresponds to SV1 XI, 107 / BA, 186). Quoted in Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 181. 27

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light of these considerations, Kaufmann reaches the conclusion that, as a religious thinker, Kierkegaard has contributed “a single-minded insistence on authority and obedience, a superior contempt for doubt and ‘insubordination’—but no clarification of the genuine difficulties that have beset religious men and women for centuries.”30 In other words, “very little.” The “difficulties” that Kaufmann is referring to here are specifically the difficulties of determining how to balance beliefs based on faith and authority, on the one hand, with the need to be critical and reflective regarding those beliefs, on the other. By insisting absolutely on faith and authority to the exclusion of reason Kierkegaard has, so far as Kaufmann is concerned, opened up the door to the most passionate and self-assured kinds of fanaticism, those that dispense with the need to have reason on their side by simply denying the legitimacy of reason as a means of criticizing their beliefs at all. Kaufmann continues: “Far from being unfortunately rare in our time, such blind fanaticism is one of the scrooges of humanity. There are too many men, not too few, who are willing to believe that it is their sacred duty to sacrifice others.”31 Kaufmann’s conclusion is that Kierkegaard simply fails to provide anything new or helpful for religious believers to use in navigating these problems. In evaluating Kierkegaard as a psychologist, Kaufmann criticizes him along two lines. The first is that Kierkegaard’s discussions of psychology are based on a small range of experiences about which he obsessed for his entire life. Among these Kaufmann numbers his father’s sin in cursing God when he was a poor boy, long before Kierkegaard was born; his father’s dissoluteness, particularly his probable seduction of Kierkegaard’s mother when she was a maid in his house; his own dissoluteness after he first found out about his father’s; and the way he broke his engagement, pretending that he was a frivolous person, unworthy of Regine.32

The second of Kaufmann’s criticisms of Kierkegaard as a psychologist is rather explicitly ad hominem and consists of the charge that Kierkegaard himself is often involved in self-deception in his writings, more specifically, that in Kierkegaard’s writings there are many places where the discussions clearly have to do with him (indeed, with one of the experiences just mentioned) and his attempt to explain, justify or interpret what happened, especially in the case of his own actions, in a positive light. The upshot of these two criticisms is that Kaufmann views Kierkegaard’s psychological observations on topics such as love and religious faith or religious experience to be largely impaired by the fact that they are based too narrowly on his own experiences, without taking other people or other possibilities into account. In evaluating Kierkegaard as a philosopher, Kaufmann (still in the guise of Brother Brash) begins by pointing out that there are a number of reasons not to think of Kierkegaard as a philosopher at all. The first, Kaufmann suggests, is that Kierkegaard himself was not interested in philosophy or being a philosopher, except insofar as philosophy was involved in his attempt to come to terms with himself and Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1980), p. 182. Ibid., p. 178. 32 Ibid., p. 186. 30 31

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his own religious faith. The second is that at the very least Kierkegaard could not be viewed as a philosopher in the modern tradition, as his insistence on the primacy of faith and religious authority over reason runs directly contrary to all of philosophy since the time of Descartes. Finally, Kaufmann charges that Kierkegaard simply takes over categories and concepts both from Christianity and from Hegelian philosophy and makes use of them without subjecting them to systematic critical analyses. This last point of Kaufmann’s is related both to his criticism of Kierkegaard’s style of writing and to his criticism of Kierkegaard’s views on the value of reason in evaluating authority, though he does not develop it at any length. Rather, having made these initial statements to the effect that there are good reasons not to view Kierkegaard as a philosopher in any traditional sense, Kaufmann suggests that there are two ideas in Kierkegaard’s writings that have a particularly strong claim to be considered as philosophical theories. The first is his idea of the three stages, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, while the second is his thesis that “truth is subjectivity.”33 Kaufmann criticizes Kierkegaard’s three stages as being both too broad and too narrow. They are too broad in the sense that they include a diverse range of human activities under single headings (for example, the aesthetic covering both enjoyment of artistic experiences and the living of a hedonistic and uncommitted life) and too narrow in the sense that they leave possibilities out (here Kaufmann’s interpretation is that the stages presented by Kierkegaard are ultimately developed around the idea that there really is just one choice, that between the life of Christian religious belief on the one hand and every other kind of life on the other). Kaufmann’s discussion of the thesis that “truth is subjectivity” is slightly longer and also more detailed. Kaufmann begins by stating that Kierkegaard’s claim is a “multiple confusion,” then enumerates and criticizes different meanings that Kierkegaard seems to have given to this claim at different times, ultimately rejecting each of them as unsatisfactory. Kaufmann also discusses the relationship between the idea that “truth is subjectivity” and Kierkegaard’s authoritarian conception of religion, which he has already criticized. Having criticized Kierkegaard as a stylist, religious thinker, psychologist, and philosopher in the guise of Brother Brash, Kaufmann briefly steps out from behind this pseudonym to point out that the criticisms he has offered should not be viewed as final and definitive, but rather represent the frustration and vexation that one should feel on first encountering Kierkegaard. He then introduces “Brother Brief,” the pseudonym he will use to defend Kierkegaard and to point to some more positive features of Kierkegaard’s work.34 Brother Brief’s response, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Significance,” begins by stating that the right response is not to try to reject the criticisms of Brother Brash, but rather to show that they tell only half of the story. The central point of the other half of the story is that Kierkegaard was not primarily interested in being any of the things that Brother Brash has criticized him for. Rather, his own central category, as already mentioned above, was the category of “the individual,” “as a category Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 199.

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that cracks all other categories.”35 According to Kaufmann, what Kierkegaard was interested in was his life, his relationship to God, and his salvation, along with the choices that he needed to confront and make in order to achieve these things. What is most admirable about Kierkegaard then, is that in his writing we are confronted, not primarily with facts, ideas, or theories, but with the inescapable presence of an individual struggling to come to terms with the questions and choices that torment him most deeply. It is Kierkegaard’s achievement of this intense individuality and his expression of it in his writings, however flawed these may be in other respects, that is, according to Kaufmann, his greatest achievement. And for us, as readers of Kierkegaard, what we get primarily is, once again, not facts or ideas, but a challenge to ourselves to confront our own lives and choices with urgency and directness. Seen in this light then, Kierkegaard’s style and psychology are valuable, first and foremost, for the challenge that they raise, from one individual to another, to become aware of and confront the most significant questions in life. While his relation to philosophy might be summed up, according to Kaufmann, “by changing one small word in Marx’s famous dictum: “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world differently, but what matters is to change it”—not “it,” as Marx said, but ourselves.”36 In light of all of these comments Kaufmann, in the guise of Brother Brief, sums up his evaluation of Kierkegaard in the following passage: Essentially, then, Kierkegaard is a moralist with a rare power to upset—a moralist in a perfectly recognizable sense, though one would be at a loss to find anyone else in quite the same genre. One can hardly be satisfied with him or pleased; but his greatest value may well be that he does not allow us to be satisfied or pleased with ourselves.37

Kaufmann’s interpretation of Kierkegaard as a thinker open to a great deal of criticism but also valuable in the model of individual commitment and reflection that he exhibits is further articulated in both Kaufmann’s introduction to Kierkegaard in his anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956) and in his “Preface to Kierkegaard” (1962); however, he does present a somewhat more positive discussion of Kierkegaard’s views, especially in the area of psychology, in the second volume of his Discovering The Mind trilogy. This is also Kaufmann’s last written discussion of Kierkegaard. The second volume of Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind trilogy has the subtitle Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber. Kaufmann’s discussion of Kierkegaard in this work comes at the very beginning, in a chapter titled “Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.” The point of this chapter is primarily to discuss the ideas of these thinkers as background and points of contrast to Nietzsche’s thought. However, the focus of the Discovering the Mind trilogy is on issues of self-knowledge and self-understanding broadly conceived, so the discussion of Kierkegaard focuses mainly on his contributions to this topic. Specifically, Kaufmann considers once again Kierkegaard’s contributions to psychology. Though he does not withdraw his earlier charge that Kierkegaard’s psychology is narrow (relying primarily on a Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 202. 37 Ibid., p. 203. 35 36

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small range of experiences that Kierkegaard obsessed over) and involves some selfdeception on Kierkegaard’s part, his overall evaluation is certainly more positive. What Kaufmann thinks Kierkegaard contributed to the “discovery of the mind” are primarily his insights regarding the phenomenon of anxiety or dread and despair, especially as these are expressed in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, which Kaufmann suggests could as well have been titled “Varieties of Despair, by a Connoisseur.”38 Kaufmann credits Kierkegaard for three insights regarding despair. The first is that it involves a “sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.”39 This means, at least as Kaufmann reads Kierkegaard, that despair involves the experience of being divided against ourselves, of part of us wanting something that another part does not. The second is that there is a close connection between dread and guilt. While this is certainly something that Kierkegaard discussed in some detail, Kaufmann’s own gloss of it seems to be (as he himself recognizes) heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. For Kaufmann, guilt is a result of dread caused by a strong suppressed desire for something that our conscience disapproves of. The feeling of dread gives rise to guilt because, though objectless, we nevertheless suspect that we are feeling dread because of a desire for some object, even if it is a desire we have not yet explicitly acknowledged.40 Insofar as Kierkegaard identified a connection between dread and guilt, however, Kaufmann sees him as contributing to and a forerunner of this idea. Third, Kaufmann credits Kierkegaard with recognizing better than any writer prior to him the relationship between freedom and dread. Specifically, Kaufmann is impressed by Kierkegaard’s claim that “dread is the dizziness of freedom.”41 As Kaufmann writes, “nobody before Kierkegaard had seen so clearly that the freedom to make a fateful decision that may change our character and future breeds anxiety.”42 In addition to the concept of anxiety or dread, Kaufmann also views Kierkegaard’s discussion of despair as a major contribution to the “discovery of the mind.” Taking Kierkegaard’s notion of despair to consist in an individual standing in an “unfortunate relationship” to himself (which can include, and for Kierkegaard does, an unfortunate relationship to God and to the Christian faith), Kaufmann is especially fascinated by Kierkegaard’s claim that it is possible to be in despair without knowing it, and that most people in fact are in this condition. This kind of despair must be understood as involving a kind of self-deception (otherwise how could an individual be in despair and “not know it”?), and it is Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different ways that people seek to distract themselves and to avoid their own despair that Kaufmann thinks is particularly compelling and valuable. However, in spite of giving Kierkegaard credit for arriving at deep insights into the nature of self-deception, Kaufmann does not retract the earlier charge of self-deception that he leveled against Kierkegaard himself. Kaufmann maintains that Kierkegaard is at his best when he is analyzing Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, vol. 2, p. 27. Ibid., p. 25. 40 Ibid., p. 26. 41 Kierkegaard quoted in ibid., p. 26. 42 Ibid., p. 26. 38 39

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the ways in which people go wrong, are in despair and deceive themselves, but that when Kierkegaard describes how to escape from despair, namely, through passionate affirmation of the Christian faith, he is in effect committing some of the very errors that he himself has identified.43 Near the end of his discussion of Kierkegaard and, as it turns out, near the end of his own life, Kaufmann sums up his discussion with a statement that arguably applies equally well to his entire view and interpretation of Kierkegaard when he writes: “After the Second World War some of us are less inclined to romanticize the ‘knight of faith’ and more interested in the rich possibilities of self-deception and escape from themselves in people of that kind.”44 As someone who had experienced many different religious traditions, Kaufmann could not abide Kierkegaard’s narrow focus on Protestant Christianity. While as someone who had been directly affected by and fought in the Second World War, Kaufmann could not but criticize what he perceived as Kierkegaard’s single-minded glorification of faith and obedience to authority to the detriment and even to the exclusion of critical reflection. But as someone who believed that one of the greatest obstacles to human freedom and responsibility was self-deception, and that the most important thing in life is to establish oneself as an autonomous individual through passionate commitment to confronting and facing one’s choices with “eyes open,” Kaufmann could not help but find Kierkegaard’s individuality and his analyses of freedom and choice compelling and significant.

43 44

Ibid., pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 30.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Kaufmann’s Corpus Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1950, pp. 125–6; pp. 161–2. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, revised and expanded ed., New York: New American Library 1975 [New York: Meridian Books 1956], pp. 14–18; pp. 83–121. “Kierkegaard,” Kenyon Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1956, pp. 182–211. (Revised and expanded in his From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Boston: Beacon Press 1959, pp. 175–206.) Critique of Religion and Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row 1958, pp. 19–21; pp. 77–8. “Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion” [audio recording], Pacifica Tape Library BB3870.01, 1960. The Faith of a Heretic, Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1961, pp. 84–90. (ed.), Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, New York: Harper and Brothers 1961, p. 3; p. 42. “A Preface to Kierkegaard,” in Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1962, pp. 9–29. Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy, New York: Peter Wyden 1973, p. 5; pp. 15–17. Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays, New York: New American Library 1976, pp. x–xii; pp. 1–14; pp. 31–2; pp. 100–2; pp. 114–16. The Future of the Humanities, New York: Reader’s Digest Press 1977, pp. 49–52. Discovering the Mind, Discovering the Mind, vols. 1–3, New York: McGraw-Hill 1980, see vol. 2: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber, pp. 12–43. II. Sources of Kaufmann’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Collins, James, The Mind of Kierkegaard, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1953. Fox, Marvin, “Kierkegaard and Rabbinic Judaism,” Judaism, April 1953, pp. 115– 24. Jaspers, Karl, “The Importance of Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard in the History of Philosophy,” trans. by Stanley Godman, Hibbert Journal, April 1951, pp. 226–34.

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Kierkegaard, Søren, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr, and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1909–48. — Samlede Værker, vols. I–XIV, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1901–06. — The Journals, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1938. — Fear and Trembling, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Attack upon Christendom, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1943. — Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. — Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, vol. 1 trans. by D.F. and L.M. Swenson, vol. 2 trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Pres 1944. — Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1945. — A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. by Robert Bretall, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1946. — The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeon University Press 1946. — Philosophical Fragments, trans. by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1946. — Die Tagebücher: 1834–1855, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Munich: Kösel-Verlag 1949. — Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–36, trans. by Emanuel Hirsch, Düsseldorf: Diederichs 1950. — The Point of View of My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1950. — On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955. — The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1962. — A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1942. Malantschuk, Gregor, Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1968. (Translated and reprinted in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971.) Thomte, Reidar, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1956.

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III. Secondary Literature on Kaufmann’s Relation to Kierkegaard Crites, Stephen, “Introduction” in Søren Kierkegaard, Crisis in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama, trans. by Stephen Crites, London: Cox and Wyman 1967, pp. 38–9. Jacoby, Mathew Gerhard, “Kierkegaard on Truth,” Religious Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2002, p. 32. Lee, Jung, H., “In a Different Voice: Rereading ‘Fear and Trembling’ with Care,” Religious Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 2000, p. 14, note. Sefler, George, F., “Kierkegaard’s Religious Truth: The Three Dimensions of Subjectivity,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, no. 1, 1971, p. 52.

Alasdair MacIntyre: A Continuing Conversation Anthony Rudd

Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) is one of the most influential and controversial figures in late-twentieth/early twenty-first century Anglo-American philosophy. He has written critically but also appreciatively on Kierkegaard at a number of points in his career, and, although Kierkegaard is not one of the most important influences on him, MacIntyre’s reflections on Kierkegaard appear to have been of some significance for the development of his thought. And Kierkegaard continues, it would seem, to be a figure of some significance for him. Moreover, MacIntyre’s work has provided an important point of reference for Kierkegaardians who want to bring Kierkegaard into dialogue with contemporary philosophy. For MacIntyre has provided a particularly clear and incisive version of the common criticism that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist, in response to which a number of commentators have been provoked into developing rich and nuanced accounts of the essential rationality of Kierkegaardian existential choice. But MacIntyre has also been in large measure responsible for the remarkable revival of Aristotelian-style virtue ethics in recent philosophy, and this has opened up new possibilities for fruitful dialogue between Kierkegaardians and contemporary ethicists. In particular, it has helped to make perspicuous the extent to which Kierkegaard is concerned with character and the virtues, as much if not more than with choice and the “leap” of faith. MacIntyre’s work, then, has acted as an important stimulus, both negative and positive, to Kierkegaard scholarship, and to attempts to show the continuing contemporary relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought. I. MacIntyre’s Work: A Brief Overview Born in Scotland, MacIntyre at one time considered entering the ministry of the Presbyterian church,1 but chose instead to pursue an academic career, teaching philosophy at a number of universities in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s before moving to the United States at the end of the 1960s. Since then he has taught at a number of American universities and is currently (2009) Professor Emeritus at the See Kelvin Knight, “Introduction,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. by Kelvin Knight, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press and Cambridge: Polity Press 1998, p. 24. 1

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University of Notre Dame. During the 1950s he combined Protestant theological commitments with an allegiance to Marxism (he was, for a time, a member of the Communist Party and, after leaving it, belonged to various Trotskyite groups).2 Looking back on that time, he remarked, “Then I aspired to be both a Christian and a Marxist, or at least as much of each as was compatible with allegiance to the other and with a doubting turn of mind.”3 But he was also at that time absorbing the style and techniques of the analytic philosophy that dominated post-war British philosophical culture and which generally held itself aloof from religious or political commitments. Though he was not hugely unorthodox in his philosophical style, MacIntyre’s unusual breadth of interests was shown in his early publication. His first book (1953) was Marxism: An Interpretation4 (later reissued in revised form as Marxism and Christianity5); he co-edited in 1955 a volume of New Essays on Philosophical Theology which was widely credited with reviving the philosophy of religion as a serious sub-discipline within analytical philosophy;6 and in 1958 he published a book on Freud, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis.7 During the 1960s, MacIntyre abandoned both Christianity and Marxism. He later said that he had come to believe “that the only versions of Christianity in which it retained its theological and religious integrity, that of Kierkegaard, for example, or Karl Barth, were philosophically indefensible.”8 In 1968 he described himself as “skeptical of both [Christianity and Marxism] though also believing that one cannot entirely discard either without discarding truths not otherwise available.”9 As that qualification suggests, however, he also continued to be hostile to the secular liberalism that was the prevailing orthodoxy amongst the Anglo-American intelligentsia, rejecting the then fashionable “end of ideology” thesis,10 and insisting that his skepticism about Christianity and Marxism was not “a general philosophical skepticism that would hold that any view of the world with the scope of Christianity or Marxism must be false.”11 He retained from the Marxist and Hegelian traditions the conviction that philosophy must be understood in its historical and sociological context, a view that informs his A Short History of Ethics;12 but without any overarching teleological account of history as having some overall meaning, this See ibid., p. 2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, 2nd revised ed., New York: Schocken Books 1968, see “Preface,” p. vii. 4 Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism: An Interpretation, London: SCM Press 1953. 5 See MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, p. vii. 6 See New Essays on Philosophical Theology, ed. by Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, London: SCM Press 1955. 7 Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1958 (revised ed., London: Routledge 2004). 8 MacIntyre, “An Interview for Cogito,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 267. 9 MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, Preface, p. vii. 10 See Alasdair MacIntyre, “The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology,” in his Against the Self-Images of the Age, New York: Schocken Books 1971, pp. 3–11. 11 MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, Preface, p. ix. 12 Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1967. 2 3

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approach inevitably seemed to lead to a skeptical relativism, with which MacIntyre himself was never comfortable. His engagement with sociology in the 1960s also lead him to develop a vigorous critique of the positivistic or more generally scientistic philosophical assumptions underlying much work in the social sciences and psychology.13 MacIntyre describes a “radical change” occurring in his intellectual life around 1971, followed by “an interim period of sometimes painfully self-critical reflection” lasting until 1977.14 Since then, he says, “I have been engaged in a single project”15— that of articulating a neo-Aristotelian account of ethics and politics, in the course of which he has also explored the underpinnings and implications of that account in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and action. In 1981 MacIntyre published his most influential book, After Virtue.16 There he argues, with a remarkable combination of careful analysis and sweeping historical narrative, that both first-order moral discourse in the West and the philosophy that reflects on that discourse are in a state of grave disorder. Rational moral discussion has become impossible because we are operating with only the disconnected fragments of what once was a relatively coherent moral framework. That lost framework was the one that received its classic philosophical articulation in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Central to it were the ideas of the Good Life for human beings (eudaimonia, the condition of full human flourishing) and of the virtues, those states of character that are constituatively, not just instrumentally) necessary for such flourishing (justice, courage, practical wisdom, etc.). The idea of the Good Life provides an overriding telos for human life. But, with the coming of “modernity” the sense of a normatively relevant telos was lost. We were left with a set of moral rules, mostly regulating our interactions with one another, whose rationale was left unclear. Hence moral philosophy became committed to the “Enlightenment Project” of finding some rational—or even non-rational—grounding for those rules. But none of these attempts—Humean, Kantian, intuitionist, or other—was able to succeed. MacIntyre applauds Nietzsche for the ruthless clarity with which he recognized this failure. But, he argues, as an alternative to Nietzschean nihilism, there remains the option of returning to the Aristotelian tradition; and in the second half of After Virtue he argues that a compelling case can still be made for a broadly Aristotelian account of virtues and the Good. One major reason for the occlusion of the Aristotelian tradition in the modern world is the scientistic tendency to think of both individual and collective human action in reductive, atomistic, and mechanistic terms. Against this, MacIntyre argues that actions can only be understood in temporal and social contexts, and that, therefore, explanation in psychology and the social sciences, as well as in the historically informed philosophy he himself is practicing, must take the form of narrative. Personal identity itself is to be understood in narrative terms; and our See MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age, Part Two, essays 17–22. MacIntyre, “An Interview for Cogito,” p. 268. 15 Ibid., p. 269. 16 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth and Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1981 (2nd ed., 1984). 13 14

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narratives must ultimately be understood in terms of our quest for the good. But all of this needs to be understood on a social rather than a merely individual level, just as the failings of modern moral philosophy have to be understood as part of the story of the failures of modern society. And for the Aristotelian tradition to really come alive again would require, not just advocacy on a philosophical level, but a radical transformation of the capitalist/bureaucratic structures of contemporary Western society. MacIntyre was not the first to argue for a revival of Aristotelian-style virtue theory in ethics.17 But the brilliance, ambition and provocative radicalism of After Virtue has been largely responsible for putting virtue theory at the center of recent philosophical debates. In After Virtue, MacIntyre explicitly repudiated Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology” and offered a version of teleological ethics without any metaphysical grounding for that teleology. Despite its acute critique of reductionism, the perspective of After Virtue remained a broadly naturalistic one. However, as he continued to develop the line of thought opened up in After Virtue, MacIntyre came to repudiate its naturalism and to embrace a metaphysical teleology, itself grounded in theism: Explanations of what it is for someone to succeed in progressing toward or to fail in progressing towards their ultimate end…are of interest only if and insofar as we have good reason to believe that they are true. But such explanations will be true if and only if the universe itself is teleologically ordered, and the only type of teleologically ordered universe we have good reason to believe is a theistic universe.18

During the early 1980s MacIntyre became a Roman Catholic. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?19 (1988) moves, albeit tentatively, from the secular Aristotelianism of After Virtue to a Thomistic position, which was then strongly affirmed in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990).20 Both these books are concerned with the question of how, given that rationality always operates within a historically and sociologically situated tradition, there can be rational debate between rival, incommensurable traditions of moral thought. MacIntyre’s answer is that the superiority of one tradition over others can be shown, historically and dialectically, by its ability to resolve its internal crises, revitalize itself by drawing on elements from outside, and account for the strengths and weaknesses of rival traditions in its own terms. (This

After Virtue is, to an extent, an elaboration of Elizabeth Anscombe’s striking polemical article, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124, 1958, pp. 1–19. Philippa Foot had also argued for a neo-Aristotelian view; see the papers collected in her volume Virtues and Vices, Oxford: Blackwell 1978. 18 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 152. 19 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality, London: Duckworth 1988. 20 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, London: Duckworth 1990. 17

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has seemed to some critics to be more of a Hegelian than a genuinely Thomistic approach, however.21) Since then MacIntyre has published a number of important papers22 and in Dependent Rational Animals23 has argued for the importance of our animal (and therefore vulnerable) nature for thinking about the virtues. This book he presented as “not only a continuation but also a correction of some of my earlier inquires,”24 thus responding to some critics who had accused him of down-playing our biological nature in favor of historical and cultural relativities. It also highlights aspects of Aquinas’ thought that are (tacitly) critical of rather than continuous with, Aristotle’s. A 2006 book on Edith Stein (1891–1942) represents his most sustained engagement with the phenomenological tradition,25 while his most recent work, God, Philosophy, Universities is a “selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition.”26 II. MacIntyre and Kierkegaard MacIntyre has written about Kierkegaard at a number of points over a period of several decades. I have quoted above his remark that he abandoned Christianity because he had come to believe that “the only versions of Christianity in which it retained its theological and religious integrity, that of Kierkegaard, for example, or Karl Barth, were philosophically indefensible.”27 This suggests that he had seen his own early Protestantism in Kierkegaardian (and/or Barthian) terms and that his coming to conclude that Kierkegaard’s position was philosophically indefensible thus played an important role in his own loss of religious faith.28 In the mid-1960s he published three critical discussions of Kierkegaard, which largely overlap. The first occurs in a Chapter on “Existentialism” which he contributed to a collectively authored history of philosophy;29 the second is the article on Kierkegaard which See Janet Coleman, “MacIntyre and Aquinas,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. by John Horton and Susan Mendus, Cambridge: Polity Press 1994, pp. 65–90; and John Haldane, “MacIntyre’s Thomistic Revival: What Next?” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, pp. 91–107. 22 Some of them are collected in the two volumes of his Selected Essays; see Alasdair MacIntyre, Selected Essays, vols. 1–2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, vol. 1, The Tasks of Philosophy; vol. 2, Ethics and Politics. 23 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago: Open Court 1999. 24 Ibid., p. x. 25 Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield 2006. 26 Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield 2009. 27 MacIntyre, “An Interview for Cogito,” p. 267. 28 Alasdair MacIntyre, “An Interview with Giovanna Borradori,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 257. 29 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. by Daniel John O’Connor, New York: Free Press 1964, pp. 509–29. 21

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he contributed to the Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,30 and the third is in the chapter “Kierkegaard to Nietzsche” in A Short History of Ethics.31 The next significant discussion of Kierkegaard in his work comes in After Virtue, where Kierkegaard is given a fairly significant role in his narrative of the failure of the “Enlightenment Project.”32 Following the publication of After Virtue, a number of Kierkegaard scholars wrote articles criticizing MacIntyre’s interpretation of Kierkegaard and arguing by contrast that Kierkegaard has a sophisticated account of the rationality of ethical choice, and one that is in some ways, interestingly close to MacIntyre’s own account. Some of these articles were republished, along with some newly commissioned ones, in a volume entitled Kierkegaard After MacIntyre edited by John Davenport and myself.33 MacIntyre, who had only alluded to Kierkegaard in passing in publications subsequent to After Virtue, was interested enough in the project to contribute a concluding essay, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” responding to his critics. There he modifies or withdraws some of his earlier claims, while still continuing to insist on the main points of his interpretation and critique of Kierkegaard. His book on Edith Stein contains some interesting comments on how Stein herself and Georg Lukács (1885–1969) read Kierkegaard, and in God, Philosophy, Universities he mentions Kierkegaard, along with Husserl and Wittgenstein, as non-Catholic philosophers from whom contemporary Thomists should learn.34 The three pieces on Kierkegaard from the 1960s can be taken together, since they cover much the same ground, give the same interpretations of Kierkegaard, and the same criticisms of Kierkegaard, thus interpreted. On MacIntyre’s reading, Kierkegaard claims that one’s fundamental commitments—in particular, to an aesthetic, ethical, or religious way of life—have to be chosen, and that this choice cannot be a rational one. He is, therefore, a kind of irrationalist, though MacIntyre is careful to qualify this judgment. Kierkegaard’s position “is not mere irrationalism, an arbitrary exaltation of arbitrary choice.”35 For Kierkegaard allows not only that objective reasoning is quite legitimate in mathematics and science,36 but also that, even in existential matters it can at least “present us with [the] alternatives between which we must make our own choices.”37 Moreover, MacIntyre finds in Kierkegaard a rational argument for why existential choice must be arbitrary: “any argument 30 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1–8, ed. by Paul Edwards, London: Macmillan 1967, vol. 4, pp. 336–40. (Revised ed.: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1–10, ed. by Donald M. Borchert, Farmington Hill, Michigan: Thompson-Gale 2006, vol. 5, pp. 61–6.) 31 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard to Nietzsche,” A Short History of Ethics, pp. 215–26. 32 MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 38–45 (2nd ed., pp. 39–47). 33 See Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001. 34 MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, p. 178. 35 MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 215 (my emphasis). 36 See ibid., p. 215; see also MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 510; MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 63. 37 MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 215; cf. also MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 510.

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derives its conclusions from premises which have to be vindicated, and if these premises are themselves derived as a conclusion from prior premises, then these prior premises will in turn stand in need of vindication. Ineluctably we come to a point where not argument but decision is necessary.”38 This means, according to MacIntyre, that Kierkegaard thought the choices between the aesthetic and the ethical, and the ethical and the religious, could only be arbitrary: “[T]he choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is ultimate. It cannot be governed by criteria, for it is a choice of criteria.”39 The aesthete judges the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical in aesthetic terms, the ethicist judges it in ethical terms. Hence, they are talking past each other, and their confrontation in Either/Or can only serve to demonstrate to the reader the necessity for making his or her own choice. Similarly with the choice of the religious over the merely ethical. This too must be “criterionless,”40 simply because such fundamental choices involve the choice of what criteria one will use to make choices. MacIntyre does note that Kierkegaard himself plainly commends the ethical over the aesthetic and the religious over both, and “explicitly affirms at times that one choice can be more correct than another.”41 However, MacIntyre goes on to argue, it seems inconsistent to suppose that a choice can be criterionless, but also such that one alternative is genuinely better than the other.42 He considers that Kierkegaard failed to notice this inconsistency, and that, as a result of it, his whole account of existential choice is deeply flawed. MacIntyre also notes a further reason for Kierkegaard’s refusal to attempt a rational argument in favor of Christianity in particular. For him, rational apologetics “is a falsification of Christianity itself, which necessarily must appear to the ordinary reasonable man or to the philosopher as absurd and paradoxical.”43 He takes Kierkegaard to argue for that claim in the distinction he makes between the “Socratic” and non-Socratic hypotheses in Philosophical Fragments. However, MacIntyre thinks that once we have noticed “the prosaic point that the truth which furnishes Plato with his example in the Meno is geometrical truth,” then “all the compellingness of Kierkegaard’s delineation of the two alternatives [will] fall MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 511; cf. also MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 216; MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 63. MacIntyre does not give a reference for where this argument occurs in Kierkegaard, but Johannes Climacus does argue along roughly these lines for the impossibility of rationally refuting skepticism, and thus for the need to halt the skeptical regress by an act of will. See SKS 4, 281–3 / PF, 82–5. 39 MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 512; cf. also MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 216. 40 See MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 218 and MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 63. 41 MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 512. 42 Ibid.; see also MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., vol. 5, pp. 63–4. Actually there is no inconsistency in supposing that there is a truth about some matter, but no reliable way for us to determine it, awkward though this predicament would certainly be. 43 MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 511. 38

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away.”44 He does, however, commend Kierkegaard for fully recognizing a dilemma which he thinks many theologians have fudged: “Either Christianity accepts the terms of secular reason and argues on these, or it insists on being judged by no criteria but its own. The first alternative leads…to the reduction of Christianity to something other than itself; the other leads to Christianity becoming self-enclosed and unintelligible.”45 Kierkegaard clearly chooses the second horn of the dilemma here, with, MacIntyre supposes, the dire consequences he mentions. It is because of this that Kierkegaard takes Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a paradigm of faith, thus opening up a “rift between the highest human consciousness and the divine intrusion of the apparently absurd.”46 Kierkegaard thus emerges from MacIntyre’s account firstly as the inventor of a radical form of individualism, based on the idea of criterionless choice, and thus as the intellectual ancestor of Sartre, but also committed to the inconsistent notion that such choices may be genuinely better or worse. He appears secondly, as someone who manages to retain the “theological and religious integrity” of Christianity, by insisting that it is answerable only to its own criteria, but who, in so doing, renders it morally and intellectually repulsive and absurd. Although he recognizes “the brilliance of [Kierkegaard’s] prose style” and his “gift of psychological insight,”47 it is no wonder that MacIntyre found Kierkegaard’s position, so interpreted, to be “philosophically indefensible.” The account of Kierkegaard given in After Virtue, and the criticisms leveled against him, are largely the same as in the earlier works. But they are now placed in the rich context of MacIntyre’s narrative of the failure of the Enlightenment project, and Kierkegaard’s work, whatever its philosophical flaws, is seen as having a particular historical importance. MacIntyre now notes the “astonishing novelty” of Either/Or “in the time and place of its writing,” and describes it as “at once the outcome and the epitaph of the Enlightenment’s systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality.”48 Kierkegaard is seen in particular as the heir of Kant: “Kierkegaard and Kant agree in their conception of morality, but Kierkegaard inherits that conception together with an understanding that the project of giving a rational vindication of morality has failed. Kant’s failure provided Kierkegaard with his starting-point: the act of choice had to be called in to do the work that reason could not do.”49 MacIntyre repeats his earlier claim that “the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles that depict the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.”50 But MacIntyre now presents the problem as one faced by someone who “confronts the choice between them [the Ibid.; cf. also MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 65. 45 MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 218. 46 MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 511; cf. also MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 217. 47 MacIntyre, “Existentialism,” p. 511; p. 515. 48 MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, p. 38 (2nd ed., p. 39). 49 Ibid., p. 45 (2nd ed., p. 47). 50 Ibid., p. 41 (2nd ed., p. 42). 44

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aesthetic and the ethical] having as yet embraced neither” and concludes that “he can be offered no reason for preferring one to the other.”51 This is because the choice between the ethical or the aesthetic is precisely the choice of what will count as a reason for choosing anything. MacIntyre does suggest that Kierkegaard himself is really behind what he (MacIntyre) takes to be Judge William’s argument that “the energy, the passion of serious choice…will carry the person who chooses into the ethical.”52 MacIntyre, though, thinks this is false; the aesthetic can be chosen seriously, he thinks, citing the example of those who came back from the trenches of World War I with their illusions shattered, and went on to create the “aesthetic triviality of the nineteen-twenties.”53 However that may be, MacIntyre’s main objection to the idea that morality can be the product of radical, criterionless choice is that one cannot consistently hold that principles which one is aware of having chosen by an ultimately arbitrary decision have a real authority over one—as moral principles must do, and as Kierkegaard himself clearly supposes them to do. “How can that we adopt for no reason have any authority over us? The contradiction in Kierkegaard’s doctrine is plain.”54 MacIntyre does not address Kierkegaard’s specifically religious thought in After Virtue. He presents him as a significant figure in the history of modern moral philosophy, the first fully to realize the groundlessness of the Enlightenment’s conception of morality. But his attempt to retain that morality on the basis of arbitrary choice was internally incoherent (moral commitment being incompatible with merely arbitrary choice), and so Kierkegaard is only a stage on the way towards Nietzsche’s more consistent radicalism, which abandons morality along with its supposed foundations. There are, however, a couple of further, though rather incidental, references to Kierkegaard in After Virtue which suggest that MacIntyre was able to find more positive importance in his work than his main account suggests. In arguing that a coherent virtue theory must involve the idea of “the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity,” MacIntyre stresses the virtue of integrity or constancy, and then quotes approvingly Kierkegaard’s dictum “Purity of Heart is to Will one Thing.”55 Later, having argued that the good of a whole human life must be conceived in narrative terms,56 he returns to the topic of constancy, in the context of a discussion of Jane Austen. There he notes that in Either/Or Kierkegaard shows that in the ethical life the commitments and responsibilities to the future springing from past episodes in which obligations were conceived and debts assumed unite the present to past and future in such a way as to make of a human life a unity. The unity to which

Ibid., p. 39 (2nd ed., p. 40). Ibid., p. 39 (2nd ed., p. 41). 53 Ibid., p. 38 (2nd ed., p. 41). (Though I am not sure that many of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s were actually war veterans.) 54 Ibid., p. 41 (2nd ed., p. 42). 55 Ibid., p. 189 (2nd ed., p. 203); cf. SKS 8, 138ff. / UD, 24ff. 56 Ibid., Chapter 15. 51 52

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Here Kierkegaard is presented, not as a modernist apostle of arbitrary choice, but as a representative of the tradition of the virtues, who anticipates MacIntyre’s own central argument about the importance of narrative unity. Sadly, MacIntyre does not follow up this line of interpretation in After Virtue. Presumably he would say that his quarrel was not with Kierkegaard’s account of ethics, but with his account of its foundation (or non-foundation) in arbitrary choice. But in his earlier discussion of Kierkegaard he had claimed that the morality Kierkegaard attempted to base on such choice was the Enlightenment morality of rules—Kierkegaard was explicitly said to have been following Kant in this. Here, however, he appears as an advocate of the Aristotelian tradition, concerned with virtues, the human good, and the need to find or make a narrative unity through time in our lives. But then Judge William’s argument against the aesthetic—that it dissolves human life into a heap of disconnected fragments, and that we cannot satisfactorily live our lives in that way—starts to look very like MacIntyre’s own argument against modernism (represented paradigmatically by Nietzsche) and for the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. III. MacIntyre and his Kierkegaardian Critics Kierkegaard featured fairly prominently in After Virtue, but he is barely mentioned in its successors, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. In both books, though, as in After Virtue, MacIntyre does cite with approval the dictum about purity of heart being to will one thing.58 Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions are both written from MacIntyre’s newly adopted Thomistic viewpoint, and in both Kierkegaard’s dictum is mentioned in the course of defending or commending Aquinas’ “singleness of purpose.”59 And in Three Rival Versions, Kierkegaard’s work is mentioned alongside Newman’s as “among the most notable” nineteenth-century “restatements” of Christianity in response to various attempts “to reshape and to diminish central Christian doctrine in a way that would make it acceptable to post-Enlightenment culture.”60 Despite these hints of a more sympathetic reading of Kierkegaard, MacIntyre remained mainly associated with the interpretation and critique of Kierkegaard as an advocate of “criterionless choice.” (Interpretation and critique go together, as it would indeed be hard to defend Kierkegaard’s position if it were what MacIntyre took it to be.) As mentioned above, MacIntyre provided a starting point for a number of Kierkegaard scholars who wanted to challenge the irrationalist interpretation of Kierkegaard. This is not the place to survey the quite extensive literature that MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard provoked, nor, of course, did all the critics make Ibid., p. 225 (2nd ed., p. 242). MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality, p. 165; MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 143. 59 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality, p. 165. 60 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 69. 57 58

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exactly the same points. But a rough consensus emerged among MacIntyre’s critics on the following points: (1) Either/Or is not about a criterionless choice between the ethical and the aesthetic, made from a point external to both; to be outside the ethical is, necessarily, to be in the aesthetic, which is the default position. (2) Judge William gives reasons why the aesthete should adopt the ethical. He does not, of course, offer mathematical proofs. His conception of reason is one that does not exclude the personal and the passionate. But it is nonetheless genuinely rational, for all that. (3) Those reasons are, ironically, similar to those which MacIntyre himself offers to the disengaged modern subject to reengage with a broadly Aristotelian conception of ethics; they have to do with the impossibility of leading a coherent and therefore satisfying life without the narrative unity which only the life of the virtues can bring. (4) Kierkegaard, therefore, should be seen as himself a virtue theorist, concerned with the development of character and the whole-hearted quest for the good life. MacIntyre’s critics were, accordingly, often sympathetic to his substantive philosophical conclusions, and suggested that Kierkegaard was really a potential ally whom MacIntyre had misinterpreted as an enemy. However, they were not uncritical of MacIntyre’s overall emphasis. Some suggested that while MacIntyre himself was closer than he had realized to Judge William, this exposed him to some of Kierkegaard’s later criticisms of the purely ethical stage. This issue was complicated by MacIntyre’s conversion to Catholicism, which reintroduced a religious element to his thought, but also raised the differences between Catholicism (and particularly Thomism) and the Protestant theological tradition. In “Once More on Kierkegaard”61 MacIntyre responds directly to his critics. In tone this is certainly the most positive of his extended pieces on Kierkegaard; he withdraws some of his criticisms of Kierkegaard and reformulates others. But he still concludes that his perspective and Kierkegaard’s are “not only different but irreconcilable...systematically at odds, both philosophically and theologically. The gap between an Aristotelian or Thomist ethics of the virtues and a Kierkegaardian ethics is just too great.”62 He does insist that the dialogue between Kierkegaardians and Thomists can be mutually beneficial, and the last words of his essay are “May the conversation continue!”63 However, the benefit he expects would come from allowing each side to become clearer about its own commitments, rather than the production of any deep agreement between them. MacIntyre does concede that “features of Kierkegaard’s subtle and nuanced positions...were ignored and obscured by my earlier oversimplified expositions.”64 He makes it clear that, in his view, the incommensurability of the aesthetic and the ethical does not mean that Judge William and “A” are literally unable to understand one another. Moreover, he now agrees that Kierkegaard does have a teleological view of human nature and, most strikingly, accepts that “there are good reasons for individuals to move from the aesthetic to the ethical, and not merely good-reasons Alasdair MacIntyre, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, pp. 339–55. 62 Ibid., p. 353. 63 Ibid., p. 355. 64 Ibid., p. 340. 61

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from-the-standpoint-of-the-ethical. Those reasons are in general the ones advanced by Judge Wilhelm.”65 With this, MacIntyre might appear to have given in entirely to his critics. But in fact it is merely the prelude to a restatement of the “criterionless choice” interpretation: this is not in the least inconsistent with the thesis that the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical is and can be made only by a criterionless choice. For to be in the aesthetic stage is to have attitudes and beliefs that disable one from evaluating and appreciating those reasons….So…on Kierkegaard’s view, what can be retrospectively understood as rationally justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively.66

So MacIntyre’s claim is that, although there are good reasons to adopt the ethical life, these cannot be what lead aesthetes to do so, since those reasons can only be appreciated once the transition to the ethical has been made. So from the perspective of the aesthete, the decision to embrace the ethical still has to be seen as a leap in the dark. A little later in his essay, though, MacIntyre suggests another way in which we might interpret the predicament of the aesthete: suppose…that the aesthetic personality is viewed as one that is engaged in a covert and unacknowledged resistance to the ethical….Implicit in that refusal is a recognition that only from the standpoint of the ethical are there answers to a set of questions which the aesthete needs to ask, but insistently evades asking….If that were so, then there would be that in the aesthete to which arguments from the standpoint of the ethical could appeal.67

MacIntyre presents this story of unconscious repression as an alternative to both his own account of arbitrary choice and his critics’ account of rational choice, although a number of his critics have in fact argued for essentially the view that MacIntyre outlines here. But MacIntyre suggests that Kierkegaard did not himself fully endorse this view, that his insistence on the “radical discontinuity” between the aesthetic and the ethical means that it only appears as a “subtext” in Either/Or.68 MacIntyre, then, maintains the criterionless choice interpretation of the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, albeit in a subtler form. As for “the transition from the ethical to Christian faith,” he concedes that Kierkegaard could not have understood that simply as an (arbitrary) choice, since “on Kierkegaard’s as on any Christian view, faith is a gift by God” and one we are not free to accept without being freed by grace from the bondage of sin.69 However, he also quotes passages from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript which refer to “the leap” and “the decision.”70 And he suggests that these passages can be reconciled with the emphasis on grace only by invoking the same prospective/retrospective distinction that he employs to Ibid., p. 344. Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 348. 68 Ibid., p. 349. 69 Ibid., p. 342. 70 Ibid., p. 342, cf. SKS 7, 96–101 / CUP1, 98–103. (MacIntyre quotes from the Swenson/ Lowrie edition, see PLS, pp. 90–4.) 65 66

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describe the move from the aesthetic to the ethical: “What can only be understood as a gift and a liberation from bondage retrospectively appears prospectively as a matter for decision, and a decision that takes one beyond anything that dialectics can afford.”71 MacIntyre goes on to place his disagreements with Kierkegaard in a broader framework by considering “central issues that divide me from Kierkegaard...[but which] arise not from any thesis or argument that is peculiarly mine but from large differences between any Thomistic position, and some of Kierkegaard’s theological affirmations.”72 These have largely to do with the relation of reason to revelation and the possibility of knowing the good apart from revelation: Kierkegaard, himself an exemplar of an enquiring and reasoning human being, misconstrued the relation between reasoning and revelation. For he failed to realise that God, in revealing himself to us, appeals to our recognition of standards independent of Christian revelation…prior to and independently of revelation and of the gift of faith, we do have a conception of the human good adequate to provide direction for our actions and a knowledge of the corresponding precepts of the natural law….What we learn from…revelation…extends and reinforces, but never abrogates…the natural law. So there is no possible place for anything that could be characterised as a teleological suspension of the ethical.73

Here we see the differences between Kierkegaard and MacIntyre subsumed in the wider conflict between Catholic (Thomistic) and Protestant theology. MacIntyre had once criticized Kierkegaard (and, by implication, his own earlier Protestantism) from a skeptical, agnostic viewpoint. Returning to Kierkegaard as a Thomist, MacIntyre finds more in him to admire, but it is not surprising that he also discovers irreconcilable differences. Nonetheless, as noted above, he concludes the essay with the injunction “May the conversation continue!”74 And it has. Ian Duckles has written defending MacIntyre’s reformulated criterionless choice criticism; Davenport and I have written in criticism of it; John Lippitt has criticized both Davenport’s and my interpretations of the rationality of the Judge’s argument in Either/Or and MacIntyre’s own emphasis on narrative unity.75 Whether positively or negatively, MacIntyre’s work will continue to be a valuable stimulus and provocation to those seeking to understand Kierkegaard— and, one hopes, Kierkegaard will also serve in that way to those developing the traditions of Aristotelian virtue theory and neo-Thomism. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 350. 73 Ibid., p. 351. 74 Ibid., p. 355. 75 See Ian M. Duckles, “Kierkegaard’s Irrationalism: A Response to Davenport and Rudd,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 21 no. 2, 2005, pp. 37–51; Anthony Rudd, “Reason in Ethics Revisited: Either/Or, ‘Criterionless Choice’ and Narrative Unity,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2008, pp. 179–99; John J. Davenport, “Kierkegaard, Anxiety, and the Will,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001, pp. 158–82; and John Lippitt, “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative Unity,” Inquiry, vol. 50, no. 1, 2007, pp. 34–69. 71 72

Bibliography I. References or Uses of Kierkegaard in MacIntyre’s Corpus “Existentialism,” in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. by Daniel John O’Connor, New York: Free Press 1964, pp. 509–29. “Kierkegaard,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1–8, ed. by Paul Edwards, London: Macmillan 1967, vol. 4, pp. 336–40. (Revised ed: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1–10, ed. by Donald M. Borchert, Farmington Hill, Michigan: Thompson-Gale 2006, vol. 5, pp. 61–6.) A Short History of Ethics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1967, pp. 215–26. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, and Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1981, pp. 38–43; p. 45; p. 189; p. 225. “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 339–55. II. Sources of MacIntyre’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Barrett, William, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, New York: Doubleday 1958, pp. 149–76. Blackham, Harold John, Six Existentialist Thinkers, New York: Routledge 1952, pp. 1–23. Bretall, Robert, A Kierkegaard Anthology, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1946. Collins, James, The Existentialists: A Critical Study, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1952, p. vii; p. 4, pp. 5–17; pp. 18–20; pp. 23–3; pp. 29–36; p. 72, p. 78; pp. 89–92; p. 93; p. 95; pp. 117–19; p. 120; p. 123; p. 127; pp. 130–1; pp. 135–6; p. 146; pp. 153–4; p. 165; p. 173; p. 175; p. 180; p. 182; p. 186; p. 188; pp. 194–5; p. 208; p. 213; p. 218; p. 219; p. 222; p. 232; p. 237; p. 244; p. 246. Geismar, Eduard O., Lectures on the Religious Thought of S. Kierkegaard, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House 1937. Grene, Marjorie Glicksman, Introduction to Existentialism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1959, pp. 15–40. Hohlenberg, Johannes, Søren Kierkegaard, New York: Pantheon Books 1954. Jolivet, Régis, Introduction to Kierkegaard, trans. by W.H. Barber, London: Frederick Muller 1950. Kierkegaard, Søren, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr, and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909–48.

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— Samlede Værker, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and H.O. Lange, vols. 1–20, 2nd ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1920–31. — Philosophical Fragments, trans. by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1936. — Purify Your Hearts!, trans. by A.S. Aldworth and W.S. Fine, London: The C.W. Daniel Company 1937. — The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Selection, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, London: Oxford University Press 1938. — Christian Discourses, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1939. — Fear and Trembling, trans. by Robert Payne, London: Oxford University Press 1939. — Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1940. — The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises, trans. by Alexander Dru and Walter Lowrie, London and New York: Oxford University Press 1940. — Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — For Self-Examination, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — The Point of View, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Repetition, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Either/Or, vols. 1–2, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941–44. — The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. — Training in Christianity, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. — Works of Love, trans. by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1946. — Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard, London and New York: Oxford University Press 1938. — A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1942. Mackey, Louis, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971. Malantschuk, Gregor, Kierkegaard’s Thought, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971. Shéstov, Lev, Athènes et Jérusalem: un essai de philosophie religieuse, Paris: Vrin 1938, p. xxx; p. xxxiv; p. xxxv; p. 140; p. 197; pp. 199–250; p. 303; p. 331; pp. 360–1; p. 378–9. Swenson, David F., Something about Kierkegaard, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House 1941. Wahl, Jean, Études Kierkegaardiennes, Paris: Aubier 1938.

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III. Secondary Literature on MacIntyre’s Relation to Kierkegaard Ballard, Bruce W., “MacIntyre and the Limits of Kierkegaardian Rationality,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 12, 1995, pp. 126–32. Bellinger, Charles K., “Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and the Parable of the Prodigal Son; or, Three Rival Versions of Three Rival Versions,” in Either/Or, Part II, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1995 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4), pp. 218–30. Carr, Karen L., “After Paganism: Kierkegaard, Socrates and the Christian Tradition,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 173– 90. Davenport, John J., “The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical. A Response to MacIntyre,” Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1995, pp. 73–108 (reprinted in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 75–112). — “Piety, MacIntyre, and Kierkegaardian Choice. A Reply to Professor Ballard,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, 1998, pp. 352–65. — “Kierkegaard, Anxiety, and the Will,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001, pp. 158–82. — “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 265–324. — “Life-Narrative and Death as the End of Freedom: Kierkegaard on Anticipatory Resoluteness,” in Kierkegaard and Death, ed. by Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2011, pp. 160–83. Duckles, Ian M., “A (Partial) Defense of McIntyre’s Reading of Kierkegaard,” Idealistic Studies, vol. 36, 2006, pp. 141–51. — “ ‘Kierkegaard’s Irrationalism: a Response to Davenport and Rudd,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 21 no. 2, 2005, pp. 37–51. Johnson, Richard, “Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 151–72. Kirmmse, Bruce H., “Kierkegaard and MacIntyre: Possibilities for Dialogue,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 191–210. Khan, Abrahim H., “Review of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue,” Religious Studies and Theology, vol. 20, no. 2, 2001, pp. 74–6. Lillegard, Norman, “Judge William in the Dock: MacIntyre on Kierkegaardian Ethics,” in Either/Or, Part II, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1995 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4), pp. 83– 111. — “Thinking with Kierkegaard and MacIntyre About the Aesthetic, Narrative and Virtue,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and

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Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 211–32. Lippitt, John, “Review of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 4, 2005, pp. 496–502. — “Telling Tales: Johannes Climacus and ‘Narrative Unity,’ ” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2005, pp. 71–89. — “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative Unity,” Inquiry, vol. 50, no. 1, 2007, pp. 34–69. Marino, Gordon D., “The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 49–64 (reprinted in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 113–28). Mehl, Peter J., “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, pp. 247–78 (reprinted in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 3–38). Mooney, Edward, “Music of the Spheres: Kierkegaardian Selves and Transformations,” in his Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s MoralReligious Psychology from ‘Either/Or’ to ‘Sickness unto Death,’ London and New York: Routledge 1996, pp. 89–104. — “The Perils of Polarity: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre in Search of Moral Truth,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 234–64. Nielsen, Kai, “Rationality, Intelligibility, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s Talk of God,” Religious Studies, vol. 14, 1978, pp. 193–204. Piety, Marilyn G.,“Kierkegaard on Rationality,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 1993, pp. 365–79 (in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 59–74). Quinn, Phillip L., “Unity and Disunity, Harmony and Discord: A Reply to Lillegard and Davenport,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 327–38. Possen, David D., “Review of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue,” in Soren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 44, 2002, pp. 17– 19. Olsen, Thor Olav, Fortellerbegrepet. En studie av forholdet mellom fortelling og menneskeligt liv, Oslo: Pragma 2001, pp. 23–8. Rudd, Anthony, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993, pp. 81–114. — “Ragione ed Etica in MacIntyre e Kierkegaard,” Studi Perugini, vol. 2, no. 1, 1997, pp. 201–24 (reprinted in English as “Reason in Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 131–50).

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— “Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Narrative Unity: Reply to Lippitt,” Inquiry, vol. 50, no. 5, 2007, pp. 541–9. — “Reason in Ethics Revisited: Either/Or, ‘Criterionless Choice’ and Narrative Unity,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2008, pp. 179–99. Taels, Johan, “Søren Kierkegaard. Existentie en contradictie,” in Denk-wijzen 6: Een inleiding in het denken van A. Schopenhauer, S. Kierkegaard, K. Marx en A. MacIntyre, ed. by Harry Berghs, Leuven: Amersfoort 1991, pp. 47–71. Turner, Jeffrey S., “To Tell a Good Tale: Kierkegaardian Reflections on Moral Narrative and Moral Truth,” Man and World, vol. 24, no. 2, 1991, pp. 181–98 (reprinted in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 39–58).

Iris Murdoch: Kierkegaard as Existentialist, Romantic, Hegelian, and Problematically Religious Paul Martens

Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch’s official biographer and ardent sympathizer, once wrote that Murdoch can be “uneven, over-intellectual or romantic.” He continued: There is some unfinished and repetitive writing. The books can seem contrived or overplotted, the characters sometimes insufficiently imagined. Her social range is not huge, she says little about work and often appears to take money for granted. She can seem to be playing a complex game with the reader. There is, as early reviewers noted, “too much” in the books.1

But, this does not come close to a final assessment of Murdoch. Despite these “frailties,” and thanks in no small part to her attempt to rehabilitate and redefine Platonism for the twentieth century, Murdoch is widely considered to be one of the great English writers and philosophers of the twentieth century. And, as Charles Taylor (b. 1931) once noted, “summing up her contribution is impossible. Her achievement is much too rich, and we are much too close to it.”2 I. Murdoch’s Encounter with Kierkegaard Born in Dublin in 1919, Murdoch grew up in London and, as an undergraduate, read ancient history, classics, and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. In the 1940s, Murdoch worked as a temporary wartime civil servant with the Treasury, which was followed by a stint with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in London, Brussels, and then Austria. During her years with the UNRRA, Murdoch encountered a vibrant and populist intellectual movement that both fascinated and provoked her. That movement was existentialism. Upon her return to England in 1947, she held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge for a year, and then, in 1948, she became Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow of St. Anne’s 1 Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, London: Macmillan Press 1986, p. 4. 2 Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. by Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 3.

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College, Oxford. In 1963, she gave up teaching full-time but she continued to write energetically into the mid-1990s when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She passed away in 1999, and her last years have been highly stylized by the writings of her husband, John Bayley,3 and the acting of Dame Judi Dench in the movie Iris (2001).4 The interest in Murdoch’s biography may have been temporarily piqued by Iris, but her novels and philosophical works seem to be demanding interest for the long haul.5 After all, it is clear that Murdoch’s accomplishments are exceptional: she published 26 novels, five books of philosophy, half a dozen plays, and two poetry collections; she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbred Literary Award, and the Booker Prize; and, in 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. This article attends primarily to Murdoch’s philosophical work and seeks to return to the beginning of Murdoch’s intellectual journey for the purpose of tracing one particular theme throughout her developing thought. It returns to the precariously unstable years of the 1940s, to the encounter with existentialism in Brussels, and more specifically, to the encounter with Søren Kierkegaard that both haunts and aids her throughout her career. In her published correspondence, Kierkegaard first appears in a letter to her friend David Hicks, dated December 12, 1944. In her typically scattered recounting of what was keeping her busy, Murdoch notes that she has been reading “loads of Henry James & Kierkegaard, and lots of French things—French books and French conversations & Frenchmen.”6 It did not take Murdoch very long to put together a rough outline of Kierkegaard’s relationship to these “French things.” Writing on October 10, 1945, again to Hicks, she summarizes her early placing of Kierkegaard: Existentialism, which is being acclaimed as the new philosophy of France & the philosophy of this age (acclaimed, by its adherents, that is,—fairly numerous among French intellectuals) is a group of theories descended from Kierkegaard, via Jaspers & Heidigger [sic], & now incarnated in Jean-Paul Sartre (non-Catholic variety) & Gabriel Marcel (Catholic variety) and others.7

See John Bayley, Elegy for Iris, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1999; John Bayley, Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories, London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. 1999; and John Bayley, Widower’s House: A Study in Bereavement, New York: W.W. Norton 2001. 4 Iris, Miramax, 2001. 5 That is not to say, however, that Murdoch’s life will not continue to fascinate and provoke, as A.N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch Biography, London: Hutchinson 2003, clearly illustrates. 6 Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–46, ed. by Peter J. Conradi, London: Short Books 2009, p. 216. Five months later, in May, she comments further on Kierkegaard’s relation to the French intellectual scene: “As a result of the late repercussions from Kierkegaard & Kafka the French novelist seems to be in a dilemma, wondering whether to write a philosophical essay or a novel” (p. 225). 7 Murdoch, Writer at War, p. 245. Kierkegaard appears incidentally a few more times in her correspondence with Hicks (p. 262 and p. 279). See also the journal entry cited in Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, London: HarperCollins 2001, p. 252. 3

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Referring back to her time in Brussels, she would later write: “there was a tremendous ferment going on; everyone was rushing about reading Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre.”8 Although Murdoch knew “something about them” from her undergraduate days, it is during this time that she “read them deeply,” and it is in these years that she would begin to define Kierkegaard’s fundamental role in the history of Western philosophy and religion. The depth of her new-found resonance with Kierkegaard at this time is unmistakable when she writes from Austria on February 4, 1946: “Kind friends have sent me books from home, but nothing that particularly nourishes me: Sean O’Casey, DH Lawrence’s poems, & Sidney Keyes. Oh for a draught of Kierkegaard!”9 Aside from Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Kierkegaard,10 Murdoch was also reading the usual suspects grouped under the existentialist umbrella: Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948). It appears, however, that the “tremendous ferment” she found in Brussels did not cross over to England upon her return to London. In a letter to Raymond Queneau, dated August 7, 1946, Murdoch rued the intellectual climate she had returned to, noting that Oxford was, “more ‘logical positivist’ than ever, & anyone interested in psychology, history or religion is regarded as ‘romantic’ & ergo unsound. Sartre is mentioned only with derision & no one reads Kierkegaard.”11 Clearly, Murdoch was not including herself in this analysis as she was busy collecting Kierkegaard’s writings. By August, 1946, she had already purchased four of his texts: Fear and Trembling in March 1943, Alexander Dru’s The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard on June 28, 1944, Repetition in September 1944, and an edition called Consider the Lilies in July 1946. Two months later, in October 1946, she would also acquire The Concept of Dread.12

See Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals, New York: Columbia University Press 1983, p. 54. 9 Murdoch, Writer at War, p. 294. 10 Interestingly, Murdoch had not yet read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as of December 6, 1945 (See Writer at War, p. 267). 11 See Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, p. 253. 12 The dates provided here are the dates inscribed in the books. The particular editions she used, which are archived in her working library at the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, London, are the following: Fear and Trembling, trans. by Robert Payne, London: Oxford University Press 1939; The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Selection, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Oxford University Press 1938; Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1942; Consider the Lilies: being the second part of “Edifying Discourses in a Different Vein,” trans. by A.S. Aldworth and W.S. Ferrie, London: Daniel 1940; and Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1944. Murdoch self-deprecatingly mocks her penchant for buying Kierkegaard’s texts in a hopelessly star-crossed and ill-fated letter to Hicks dated January 19, 1946: “You are going to have a wife with expensive tastes. (Kierkegaard at two guineas a volume, & so on).” Murdoch, Writer at War, p. 284. 8

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Although her youthful enthusiasm for the existentialist movement would become tempered rather quickly, Murdoch did not stop reading existentialists.13 Obviously, she continued to read Sartre, publishing her first philosophical work on his thought— Sartre: Romantic Rationalist—in 1953.14 Further, she would remain interested in Kierkegaard for many years, later collecting at least five more volumes of his writings in subsequent years: The Sickness unto Death in 1950, The Point of View on July 27, 1965, The Crisis in the Life of an Actress in July 1969, and Training in Christianity and The Concept of Irony (both without a date inscribed).15 She was not merely reading Kierkegaard for personal enjoyment since these texts also contributed to her tutoring and advising. For example, Conradi notes that, in 1964–65, Murdoch had four tutorial groups working on Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, J.S. Mill’s (1806–73) utilitarianism, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.16 In addition, he reports that her dissertation topics for the same year reflect her preoccupation with these themes: “ ‘Compare and contrast Mill’s picture of “the good man” with that of Kierkegaard’; and, á propos the latter’s distinction between the ethical and the religious, ‘What are the merits and the dangers of the idea of going “beyond the ethical”?’ ”17 Although the figures of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831), and ultimately Plato stand as the unavoidable pillars around which Murdoch constructs her moral metaphysic, George Steiner (b. 1929) is right to note that: “Dame Iris’s relations to Kierkegaard constitute, of themselves, an intriguing ‘minidrama.’ His paramount role in the development of modern religious psychology and phenomenology, his anticipation of European existentialism, his stature as a witness, are obvious to Murdoch.”18 The purpose of this article is to sketch the “mini-drama” of Murdoch’s relations to Kierkegaard as she evolves in both her appropriations of and challenges to his thought. To serve this end, I will trace three interwoven and artificially separated threads that illuminate Murdoch’s ambivalent relationship to what she understands to be Kierkegaard’s polyphonic individualism: (1) Kierkegaard as existentialist, (2) Kierkegaard as Romantic, and (3) Kierkegaard as Hegelian. Of course, there is a sense in which all three are present from beginning to end, but there is also a sort of shifting emphasis in her philosophical corpus—from Kierkegaard George Steiner’s comment concerning Murdoch’s continued reading of Kierkegaard is apropos: “Yet she cannot but think him ‘tiresome’ and ‘queer’; the strictures of the Oxford tutor come through.” See Steiner, “Foreword,” in Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi, New York: Penguin Books 1999, p. xiv. 14 Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes 1953. 15 The particular editions used by Murdoch are as follows: The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1944; The Point of View, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York: Oxford University Press 1939; Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and Other Essays on Drama, trans. by Stephen Crites, London: Collins 1967; Training in Christianity; and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied” It, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944; and The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966. 16 Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, p. 472. 17 Ibid., p. 473. 18 Steiner, “Foreword,” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. xiv. 13

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as existentialist to Kierkegaard as Hegelian—that correlates to the chronological development of her philosophy. Having addressed the full complexity of Murdoch’s engagement with Kierkegaard, I will turn to the final issue or “problem” around which Murdoch parts with Kierkegaard, a problem that is indirectly tied to his existentialism, Romanticism, and Hegelianism. The break concerns religion, and it is precisely at this point that Kierkegaard runs up against her rehabilitated Platonism, a collision that, ultimately, forces Murdoch to leave Kierkegaard behind. II. Kierkegaard as Existentialist Murdoch, like so many of her generation in Europe, was caught up in the blossoming of existentialism in the years immediately following World War II. But, existentialism is a complex idea for Murdoch: “One can think of it as a literature, as a morality, as a psychology, or as a piece of academic metaphysics which mixes Cartesian and Hegelian strains.”19 To be sure, the root idea of existentialism is “the conception of a private individual destiny,” which is also described as the idea that “the individual human existence is not enclosed by a world of essences.”20 But, she is very aware that there are many ways to articulate a conception of private individual destiny and resistance to enclosure by a world of essences. Of course, Hegel is the immediate backdrop against which twentieth-century existentialism asserts itself and Kierkegaard, as the arch-enemy of Hegel and his system, stands as the point of reference for its subsequent manifestations.21 At the first level, then, Murdoch employs Kierkegaard as Hegel’s foundational challenger and critic. Her sharp claim that “Kierkegaard objected to Hegel’s dialectical barrel-organ because the egocentric privacy of the act of choice seemed to be lost in the objectively determined rational movement of the dialectic” stands as

Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth,” The Socratic Digest, no. 5, 1952, pp. 52–63, see p. 52 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 130). 20 Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Yale Review, vol. 49, December, 1959, pp. 247–71, see p. 251 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 265). Another early and undeveloped definition is offered in her correspondence: “It’s anti-metaphysical, & phenomenalist in flavour—concerned with the concrete puzzle of personal existence, rather than with general theories about the universe. In general, I suppose, it’s a theory of the self, the relation between selves, & the self’s attitude to death.” Murdoch, Writer at War, pp. 245–55. She then immediately steps back, continuing: “I won’t try to expound, as I haven’t read the texts” (ibid., p. 255). It is relevant to note that in her later years Murdoch would back away from identifying with existentialism, including backing away from using the term itself. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, after evoking the thought of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, she states: “The vague word ‘existential,’ which I shall in general avoid, might seem in place here.” Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Penguin Books 1993, p. 174. 21 Writing in the margins of her copy of Fear and Trembling in her earliest reading of Kierkegaard, Murdoch notes: “All later existentialism is within SK.” See Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 125. 19

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a good representation of her understanding of Kierkegaard’s critique.22 In her early years, Kierkegaard often appears in Murdoch’s philosophy as a source for Sartre’s critical posture, especially as they both relate to Hegel. For example, in “Hegel in Modern Dress,” Murdoch notes that the obvious point that “Sartre at several points makes the appeal to Kierkegaard against Hegel,” and then goes on to specify that the individual demands recognition as a particular person and not as part of something suprapersonal.23 Or, a few years earlier, “Sartre praises Kierkegaard for maintaining against Hegel that what I crave from the world is the recognition of my being as an individual, and not as an abstract truth.”24 Or, “Like Kierkegaard, Sartre is both anti-totalitarian and anti-bourgeois.”25 In all of these critical appeals to Kierkegaard, Murdoch is challenging what she took to be the void in moral philosophy, the void that existentialism filled: “it at least professes and tries to be a philosophy one could live by.”26 22 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 60. Another clear and representative assessment would be: “Kierkegaard saw this great system as a deterministic machine obliterating the concept of the solitary responsible moral person.” Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 148. See also p. 268 and p. 408. Maria Antonaccio rightly notes that, methodologically, Murdoch uses oppositions between major philosophical figures to describe alternative viewpoints “that help to define a normative position by way of contrast.” Two of the key contrasting figures in Murdoch’s thought are Hegel and Kierkegaard, and in so far as Murdoch is concerned about individuality in opposition to the universal, Kierkegaardian existentialism also appears parallel to Hobbesian empiricism. See Maria Antonaccio, “The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 29, no. 2, 2001, p. 326; and Picturing the Human, p. 23; pp. 105–6; p. 166. Antonaccio also recognizes Murdoch’s construal of Kierkegaard as Hegelian, and I will return to this complication below. 23 Iris Murdoch, “Hegel in Modern Dress,” The New Statesman and Nation, vol. 53, May 25, 1957, pp. 675–6, see p. 675 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 149). As this passage indicates, it appears that Kierkegaard provides the initial language for criticizing Hegel, and subsequent critiques must then be oriented in relation to Kierkegaard. For examples, see her comment that Isaiah Berlin’s Historical Inevitability, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1957, contains “accents which remind us of Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel.” Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in The Nature of Metaphysics, ed. by D.F. Pears, London: Macmillan 1957, pp. 99–123, see p. 118 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 72). See also the language of Kierkegaard’s “horror” in relation to Hegel’s thought used by Murdoch in Metaphysics, p. 80. 24 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, pp. 63–4. In this vein, Murdoch highlights Kierkegaard’s image, drawn from Repetition, of someone dividing humanity into “officers, serving maids and chimney-sweeps,” a classification that “sets the imagination in motion.” See SKS 4, 37 / R, 162. For Murdoch, this theoretical and categorical characterization is “the perennial justification of rationalism.” See Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 76. 25 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 67. 26 Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” in The Anatomy of Knowledge: Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity, Bowdoin College 1965 and 1966, ed. by Marjorie Grene, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969, pp. 233–55, see p. 233 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 337 and The Sovereignty of Good, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, p. 47). In making this claim, Murdoch appeals to the image, drawn from Kierkegaard’s journals, of a “systematiser” who “builds an enormous castle and lives in a

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Articulating a way out of, or perhaps beyond, the void is more difficult than identifying it, however, and it would be fair to say that Murdoch spends the rest of her years addressing precisely this question. At points, it may appear that Kierkegaard might be part of the answer as she explores the options of Sartre and Simone Weil (1909–43). Writing of Weil in 1956, Murdoch notes that Weil is one who, “like Kierkegaard’s ‘subjective thinker,’ does not simply convey information but is most properly to be understood as an example,” an example of a passionate search for truth “with a simplicity and austerity of personal living.”27 Murdoch will continue to appeal to Weil through to the final pages of Metaphysics as Guide to Morals, but the further Murdoch presses the link between Sartre and Kierkegaard, the less Sartre becomes a real possibility. She describes Sartre’s picture of the individual as “curiously depersonalized and mechanical,”28 as one who suffers from the solipsistic and incurable isolation of Kierkegaard’s individual that pushes beyond even that of the Cartesian doubter.29 Especially revealing is the terminology the early Murdoch adopts to define Sartre’s Kierkegaardian self: “one fundamental predicament.”30 But this is not the last word, and Murdoch is also aware that Kierkegaard and Sartre are not univocal. Opening up a crack between Sartre and Kierkegaard, she describes Sartre’s individual as one who so isolates the self to the extent that it treats others as objects to be feared, manipulated, and imagined about.31 She explains further with reference to one increasingly important distinction between Sartre and Kierkegaard: “Whereas Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’ correspond to types of character or at least deep psychological phases in which a person persists for long, Sartre is including also in his description the shifts which a consciousness may undergo from one moment to the next.”32 Assuming Murdoch appreciates the potential contribution of Kierkegaard, she continues to place him within the immensely problematic category shack close by” (SKS 18, 303, JJ:490 / KJN 2, 279). Murdoch, reiterating Kierkegaard’s point, states that a moral philosophy should be inhabited. See Metaphysics, p. 202. 27 Iris Murdoch, “Knowing the Void,” Spectator, no. 197, November 2, 1956, pp. 613– 14, see p. 614 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 160). In a formal conversation with Bryan Magee, Murdoch does not identify Kierkegaard as a philosopher for precisely this reason. For Murdoch, philosophical writing is not self-expression, “it involves a disciplined removal of the personal voice.” Rather, Murdoch describes both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as “great individual thinkers who are great writers.” See Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,” in Men of Ideas, ed. by Bryan Magee, London: BBC Books 1978, pp. 262–84, see p. 265 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 4). 28 Murdoch, “Hegel in Modern Dress,” p. 675 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 149). 29 Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth,” p. 54 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 133). 30 Iris Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” The Listener, no. 43, March 16, 1950, pp. 473–6, see p. 473 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 103). To flesh this out, Murdoch explains: “The free and lonely self, whose situation Sartre pictures in these somewhat Kierkegaardian terms, discovers the world to be full of ambiguities. These have to be resolved by action, or by the species of action which we call inaction. That is, we are condemned to choose; we choose our religion or lack of it, our politics or lack of it, our friends or lack of them. Within the wide limits of our historical situation we choose one world or another one.” 31 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 64. 32 Ibid., p. 58.

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of existentialists. To conclude Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Murdoch focuses her early conclusion concerning Kierkegaard, Sartre, and, it seems, existentialism in general. She acknowledges that it is clear that the real lesson to be learned is that the human being is precious and unique, but “we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.”33 Later, in The Fire and the Sun, Kierkegaard is, again, construed as an anti-Hegelian. In this context, however, he is hailed as an artist attempting “to use art itself as an anti-theoretical mystification in order to scare off disciples and promote live thought.”34 By this time, Murdoch’s Kierkegaard, like her Plato, is uneasy about certain forms of art—especially what she refers to as “spectacle”—because it encourages one to admire and relax.35 Rather approvingly, Murdoch presents Kierkegaard as seeking to promote a direct relationship with truth, to prevent the dogmatic relaxation of tension brought about “by a hard aesthetically burnished theology.”36 But then she follows with the question: “But art is tricky stuff: did he succeed?”37 The answer, though merely implied in The Fire and the Sun: probably not. In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” Murdoch poses this question in another form after noting Kierkegaard’s sarcastic construal of Hegel’s system as an uninhabited castle: Existentialism has shown itself capable of becoming a popular philosophy and of getting into the minds of those…who have not sought it and may even be unconscious of its presence. However, although it can certainly inspire action, it seems to me to do so by a sort of romantic provocation rather than by its truth; and its pointers are often pointing in the wrong direction…Briefly put, our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves.38

Kierkegaard, as the foundation of modern existentialism, does not seem to escape this rather scathing charge. And, Murdoch does not look further than Fear and Trembling to find examples of Kierkegaard’s “romantic provocations.”

Ibid., p. 76. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977, p. 23 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 406). 35 Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, p. 77 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 453). 36 In Metaphysics, Murdoch comments on Kierkegaard’s use of indirect communication to accomplish this task. Noting that Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Derrida resemble one another in this way: they “consciously or unconsciously, avoid ‘telling a good story’ because if the story is ‘good’ enough the idle lazy reader will fail to appreciate its deeper meaning.” See Metaphysics, p. 87 and p. 40. She also notes that Wittgenstein’s exhortation to “throw away the ladder” at the end of the Tractatus would have been appreciated by Kierkegaard for precisely this reason (p. 36). 37 Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, p. 70 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 447). 38 Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” p. 234 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 338 and The Sovereignty of Good, p. 47). Murdoch continues by returning to Kierkegaard on original sin, which I will turn to below. 33 34

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III. Kierkegaard as Romantic Murdoch is well aware that Kierkegaard opposed Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788– 1860) representation of “the interesting.” He scathingly wrote, in a late journal entry, that: In a certain sense [Schopenhauer] makes asceticism interesting—the most dangerous thing possible for a pleasure-seeking age which will be harmed more than ever by distilling pleasure out of—asceticism; that is to say by studying asceticism in a completely impersonal way, by assigning it a place in the system.39

Murdoch goes on to note that Kierkegaard’s point is that philosophizing that produces a gratifying lethargy in the individual is completely misguided. But, rather ominously, she goes on to note that Kierkegaard’s attack is also charming, an evaluation he would consider less than a compliment.40 Already in 1950, Murdoch had stated that “Kierkegaard might be called a great romantic, though a queer one.”41 But, what exactly did she mean by this? Murdoch partially answers this question with reference, unsurprisingly, to Hegel. Describing Kierkegaardian existentialists as “pure Romantics,” she argues that even though Kierkegaard is anti-system and even anti-bourgeois, he is, psychologically speaking, “a ‘totalitarian,’ in the sense that he is concerned with the whole man and with his isolated struggle for salvation.”42 This is a significant contribution—alongside those offered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Henry Fielding (1707–54) on one side and John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–76), and Kant on another— to the conception of the “modern” individual.43 To justify this claim, Murdoch illuminates three examples of Kierkegaard’s Romanticism: (a) Abraham, (b) the Imitatio Christi, and (c) the tax collector. Abraham is the knight of faith drawn from the pages of Genesis and poetically portrayed in Fear and Trembling. As any reader of Fear and Trembling knows (including Murdoch), Abraham is emphatically not intended to be a tragic hero. Nonetheless, Murdoch fearlessly turns Kierkegaard’s intentions on their head: the paradox that Kierkegaard is not unaware of is that “by celebrating Abraham in beautiful heart-felt prose he is trying to make Abraham comprehensible, and is thus in danger of turning him into a universal tragic character.”44 Murdoch’s target, however, is not merely the example of Abraham, but the type that he exemplifies and that type is both the knight of faith and the universal tragic hero. And, concerning the Murdoch, Metaphysics, pp. 175–6. The passage Murdoch quotes is from Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, p. 524 (SKS 26, 141, NB32:35 / JP 4, 3883). 40 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 175. 41 Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” p. 473 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 101). 42 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” p. 251 (in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 264–5). 43 Murdoch, Metaphysics, pp. 351–2. 44 Ibid., p. 125. It is helpful to note that Murdoch, following the lead of Kierkegaard’s first English translators, identifies Kierkegaard and not his pseudonym Johannes de silentio as the author of Fear and Trembling. 39

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latter, the Imitatio Christi becomes an example par excellence. 45 Murdoch pulls no punches: “The Imitatio Christi in the later works of Kierkegaard is a distinguishing instance of Romantic self-indulgence.”46 Implicitly gesturing to Kierkegaard’s encounter with the Corsair and acknowledging that Kierkegaard himself suffered for telling his society some truths, Murdoch continues by suggesting that the idea of suffering in the embrace of the good—the “central image of Christianity”— became satisfying, and even thrilling, in the wake of Romanticism. Moving beyond Kierkegaard without directly separating him from what followed, she contends that the idea of an exciting suffering freedom soon began to enliven “the austerity of the Puritan half of the Kantian picture, and with this went a taming and beautifying of the idea of death, a cult of pseudo-death and pseudo-transcience.”47 The implication here is that the Romantic vein in existentialism that followed Kierkegaard tended to represent the neo-Kantian Lucifer.48 But is Murdoch really considering Kierkegaard within this same lineage? Does she consider Kierkegaard’s earnestly suffering Christian to be an exemplar of the modern neo-Kantian Lucifer? Perhaps, but if so, only partially. Having essentially damned Kierkegaard’s knight of faith to Luciferian Romanticism, Murdoch changes course and opens the door to the possibility that Kierkegaard’s legacy cannot be painted with one broad brushstroke when she claims that the track that leads to the neo-Kantian Lucifer is beaten by the “popular philosophies of the present” and not by “the great Romantic artists and thinkers at their best.”49 Further, as she turns to the example of the tax collector, Murdoch clearly signals the positive aspect of her split evaluation of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s tax collector is the good man, the humble man, the knight of faith who maintains a private and silent inner personal spirituality, the man who is “very unlike the big neo-Kantian Lucifer.”50 According to Murdoch, Kierkegaard works very hard to remove the possibility of idealizing the knight of faith (as she contends Abraham is idealized) by identifying him with a tax collector. He wants to commend a form of inwardness without romanticizing religion. He wants to assure his reader that this man is not a poet and not a tragic hero but that he is simply an ordinary person. In this way, the tax collector seems to provide resistance to Murdoch’s late assertion that Kierkegaard (along with the existentialist line of thought and “some modern theologians”) suggests that spiritual understanding emerges “especially in extremis” and thereby implies that people who lead quiet orderly lives are less Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 125. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 82 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 367). 47 Ibid. 48 Clearly Murdoch has an aversion to allowing the will to create its own values, a characteristic she sees in Kant. And, in this way, she also suggests that there is not a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche and from Nietzsche to existentialism. In this way, Murdoch bifurcates Kant: half becomes the neo-Kantian Puritan; half becomes the neo-Kantian Lucifer. See The Sovereignty of Good, pp. 77–104 (in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 363–85). 49 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, pp. 82–3 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 368). 50 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 103 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 385). To be clear, the tax collector Murdoch refers to in all instances is drawn from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (SKS 4, 133 / FT, 39). See Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 67, note. 45 46

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spiritual than those who are tormented.51 And yet, Kierkegaard falls into a trap one more time: But of course this is a parable making a rhetorical point. By this time we are more likely to be thinking: what an endearing character! What a simple yet noble chap, a genuinely saintly being! Why, this fellow is just as charming as the other one! Avoiding one kind of romantic exposition Kierkegaard falls (so beautifully) into another; to avoid the traditional hero he conjures up a now not unfamiliar kind of anti-hero.52

And, with that, Kierkegaard enables Murdoch to return to one of her primary concerns: the relationship between art and morality. At the same time, Murdoch again reveals the tremendously ambivalent relationship she has developed with Kierkegaard.53 And, to further complicate the picture, there is one more essential layer to her portrayal of Kierkegaard: he is not merely an anti-Hegelian existentialist and Romantic; he is, despite himself, also a Hegelian. IV. Kierkegaard as Hegelian Acknowledging the aforementioned emphasis on Kierkegaard’s resistance to Hegel, Murdoch is also well aware, from very early on, that Kierkegaard also evidenced considerable affinity with several aspects of Hegel’s thought. In 1952, she claimed that “as far as method goes, we are all Hegelians nowadays.”54 Kierkegaard is no exception. In Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Murdoch observes that Kierkegaard, like the Marxists, turned Hegel’s “rational” dialectic into a “real” dialectic. More specifically, she meant that Kierkegaard appropriated Hegel’s rational movements as spiritual or psychological movements of a personality from one phase to another. The movements, in Kierkegaard, have become subjective, reversible, and certainly not inevitable.55 Yet, according to Murdoch, Kierkegaard has merely adapted Hegel, “though in some ways tiresomely,” to describe individual moral struggle.56 And, Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 417. Ibid., p. 126. 53 Yet, in Metaphysics, it appears that Murdoch still has not made up her mind about the tax collector. At another point in the text, he is again linked to what had earlier been defined as the neo-Kantian Lucifer: “The man whom Kierkegaard rated highest is an inward conscientious not unpassionate religious man, a calmly unobtrusive good man. Yet is not this ideal also related, perhaps even causally related, to the demonic or Luciferian individual of Nietzsche, or the authentic heroic man of Heidegger and Sartre? Is there not something (for all his apparent ‘ordinariness’) self-assertive about Kierkegaard’s ‘best’ man?” (p. 352). 54 Iris Murdoch, “The Existential Political Myth,” p. 54 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 132). 55 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 57. 56 Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Dreams and Self-Knowledge, Supplement no. 30, 1956, pp. 32–58, see p. 47, note (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 87, note). In 1950, Murdoch also indicates that Kierkegaard profoundly affected the evolution of Hegelian phenomenology in Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, etc., noting that Hegel would view these as “deformities.” See “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” p. 473 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 102). It is also worth noting that 51 52

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even in developing a solipsistic individualism against Hegel, Kierkegaard’s self is still at war with itself and passing through Hegelian phases in the direction of selfknowledge.57 In her later years, Murdoch refined her analysis of Kierkegaard’s Hegelian movements, linking the triadic structure of the stages to a person’s existence in society. This refinement appears only in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and deserves further attention. After noting that Kierkegaard’s three stages—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—are Hegelian in style, she continues: “The first and third are private and obscure, belonging in the secrecy of the individual soul, the second, being clearly and rationally explicable, can represent a public model. This picture exhibits the possibility, so present to Plato, of the aesthetic being confused with the spiritual.”58 With the recognition of this double movement away from the private and then back again,59 we get closer to the heart of Murdoch’s significant and meaningful engagement with Kierkegaard. With this recognition, Murdoch acknowledges that Kierkegaard is neither merely a historical thinker to be placed in the history of ideas nor a thinker to be used for one’s own gain against a common enemy,60 as important as these assigned roles might be. Rather, with this recognition, Kierkegaard becomes a challenger to Murdoch’s own project and, therefore, a direct conversation partner. With this recognition, Murdoch’s real problem with Kierkegaard is brought into relief.

Murdoch only invokes Hegel’s Phenomenology in the context of his link with Kierkegaard. See Metaphysics, p. 219 and p. 351. 57 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” p. 251 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 265). See also Metaphysics, p. 219 and p. 351. In this way, Murdoch also indirectly links Kierkegaard and Freud. See Metaphysics, p. 223; and Cole J. Preston, The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud, New Haven: Yale University Press 1971, which is also found in Murdoch’s working library. 58 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 124. See also p. 175 for a reiteration of the similarity between Kierkegaard and Plato here. No longer is Kierkegaard merely the one who spiritualizes or psychologizes Hegel. Rather, he construes the outer and the inner in a “continual volatile dynamic relationship” (p. 349). Murdoch reads Kierkegaard in a way that contradicts Peter Mehl’s attempt to link Kierkegaard with her project. Mehl claims that Kierkegaard and Murdoch are both taking a sort of Aristotelian/Hegelian “natural law” view which is premised on the conclusion that Kierkegaard enjoins the unification of the different stages of life in simultaneity, the conclusion he takes to be Kierkegaard’s summation of the task of human beings. He may be right concerning Murdoch, and he may be right about Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus, since he appeals to Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SKS 7, 318–19 / CUP1, 348–9). But, according to Murdoch’s Kierkegaard, the stages cannot be held in simultaneity which is why he will always maintain a clash between the public and the private, and between the aesthetic and the religious. See Peter Mehl, “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, p. 269. 59 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 174. 60 She does, however, continue to use Kierkegaard in this way in her late writings. For example, see Metaphysics, p. 489.

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V. Murdoch’s Problem with Kierkegaard In short, Murdoch’s real problem with Kierkegaard is his construal of religious life, and the problem entails two particular foci: (1) the dependence on Kierkegaard’s God, and (2) the qualitative distinctions between the stages. The former is illuminated by two suggestive images; the latter entails significant consequences that illuminate just how problematic Kierkegaard is for Murdoch. Although she has always understood Kierkegaard as an existentialist and a romantic, he has always been a bit odd and out of place with respect to most twentieth-century representatives. There may be several reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that Kierkegaard’s individual always stands against a background of a transcendent religious truth,61 within a universe where “there is God.”62 Acknowledging this non-negotiable foundation for Kierkegaard, Murdoch describes the existentialist agnosticism that frequently occurs in Kierkegaard’s thought as a “dramatic agnosticism” and not a commonsensical agnosticism that would be prevalent in a philosopher like Locke.63 For Murdoch, there are two images that help illuminate or clarify Kierkegaard’s dependence on God. First, drawn from The Sickness unto Death, she highlights an image from sewing, namely, the image of knotting a thread so that the thread remains fastened and does not pull through the garment.64 Applying the metaphor to philosophy, this means a “fundamental starting point” is required. For Murdoch’s Kierkegaard, this fundamental starting point is a human’s original relationship with God.65 Though it would be false to assume Murdoch agrees with Kierkegaard’s knot, she will also use this particular image analogously in conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), asserting that there must be a knot in one’s “inner life” that is not adequately accounted for empirically.66 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, p. 25. In this connection, Murdoch references “Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself be Put to Death for the Truth?” published under H.H. It appears that Murdoch did not own this essay, and although the edition of The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard mentions H.H. (SKS 22, 83, NB11:141 / JP 2, 2069 and SKS 22, 152, NB12:12 / JP 6, 6911), it seems that Murdoch has either read the essay or about the essay in another source. 62 Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth,” p. 55 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 134). Having spent considerable time reading Fear and Trembling, Murdoch understands that his account of sin implies a reality separate from humanity. She cites him directly to this end: “an ethic which ignores sin is an altogether useless science…but if it recognizes sin it is eo ipso beyond its sphere.” See “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” p. 234 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 338 and Sovereignty of Good, p. 47). See also SKS 4, 188 / FT, 98–9. Later, in Metaphysics, she notes that Kierkegaard “saves” his individual by asserting the subjective inwardness of each person who is held in a private relationship with God (p. 229). 63 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” p. 251 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 265). 64 See SKS 11, 205–6 / SUD, 93. 65 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 186. It appears the same could be said for Murdoch’s construal of Gabriel Marcel. 66 Ibid., p. 286. 61

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The second image is that of a preacher. Since 1950, Murdoch described the Sartrian existentialist as mixing philosophy and preaching: “He is describing what he takes to be the character of man’s relations with the world, and recommending certain lines of conduct.”67 The difficulty that the existentialist has trouble accounting for is the derivation of an “ought” from the phenomenological description of the self “without the intermediary of a dogmatic metaphysic.”68 Inevitably, imperatives are introduced from an external source. Simone de Beauvoir does it.69 Popular existentialism does it.70 And, perhaps more honestly, Kierkegaard does it. Again, naming the task that would occupy her for much of her life, Murdoch states: But some fuller account of moral reflection and decision is needed to link these two, as well as a franker discussion of the “dogmatic” character of the Sartrian picture of the self. As it is we have Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology on one hand and Kierkegaardian preaching on the other.71

It becomes clear, as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals proceeds, that Murdoch has some affinity for what she calls Kierkegaard’s emotional proof of the existence of God: “There is only one proof of the truth of Christianity, and that quite rightly is from the emotions, when the dread of sin and a heavy conscience torture a man into crossing the narrow line between despair bordering on madness, and Christendom.”72 But, she will neither embrace Kierkegaard’s form of the proof nor the existence that is proved. After all, Murdoch is attempting to demythologize Christianity, or, as Fergus Kerr would construe it, Murdoch is attempting to articulate a theology which can continue without God.73 The second point of particular concern with Kierkegaard’s account of the religious life concerns his qualitative separation of the religious stage from the aesthetic and the ethical stages of life. The first clue that Murdoch has picked up on the seriousness of the separation lies in her reiteration of his language, the language of paradox, discontinuity, shock, leap, and foundering.74 Of course, Murdoch is Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Hero,” The Listener, March 23, 1950, pp. 523–4, see p. 523 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 110). 68 Iris Murdoch, “De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity,” Mind, no. 59, 1950, pp. 127– 8, see p. 127 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 122). 69 Ibid. 70 Iris Murdoch, “A House of Theory,” in Conviction, ed. by Norman Mackenzie, London: MacGibbon & Kee 1958, pp. 218–33, see p. 224, note (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 177, note). 71 Murdoch, “De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity,” p. 127 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 123). 72 See Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 417 where she, drawing from Norman Malcolm, cites The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, p. 314 (SKS 22, 99, NB11:166 / JP 3, 3588). The conclusion to this entry in Kierkegaard’s Journals, which Murdoch omits here, is: “There lies Christianity.” See also Metaphysics, p. 440. 73 See Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity, London: SCM Press 1997, p. 73. For this move, Murdoch draws heavily, if temporarily, on Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, New York: Crossroad 1981. See Metaphysics, pp. 452–6. 74 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 7; p. 24; p. 29; p. 122. 67

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more than willing to appropriate this language against either an encroaching form of Hegelian deterministic philosophy or an anesthetizing form of bourgeoisie, organized, or “ritualized” religion.75 She is very uncomfortable, however, using this same language in her own narrative to distinguish between the aesthetic and the religious, or the moral and the religious. Rather, she appropriates the language of “void,” loosely drawn from Buddhism. Void, for Murdoch, is the empty category that undermines deterministic universalities; it is the region that accounts for personal despair, hopelessness, or the lack of soothing transcendence. Although it may evoke or resonate with Kierkegaard’s description of the negative movement of the knight of resignation, entering the void is not a willed action but simply the experience of “the average inhabitant of the planet.”76 What one finds in this void, for Murdoch, is not the traditional Christian God or a fantasy of some other form; what one finds is a live or magnetic reality.77 To describe it, one might say that something comes from the unconscious. Or, Murdoch continues vividly: “The empty space, to pursue one (not the only) picture of the matter, may be found to be full of forms, boiling and seething like Eckhart’s God, or like the innumerable divine forms of India, whose proliferation shocks the more puritanical religious of the north.”78 Here, sharply and profoundly, Murdoch must part with Kierkegaard again, undoubtedly a puritan of the north. And, this parting has further ramifications. The first ramification is that Murdoch has to reject Kierkegaard’s account of the development of the self. And, at this point, Kierkegaard’s debt to Hegel’s dialectic damns him. Replacing the disjunctions between the stages that Kierkegaard articulated so powerfully, Murdoch proposes an identification of the ethical and religious, or at the very least, a continuum: The “ordinary” good man, aware of the magnetism of good as well as the role of duty, is thus connected to a mystical ideal whether or not he is, in the traditional sense, religious. Kant’s Reason, as well as Imitatio Christi, recognizes perfection as a possibility for every person. Kierkegaard makes a drama of what might be better seen as an intelligible continuum when he contrasts the (decent) Ethical with the (holy) Religious. At least the holy man is (often is) unostentatious (“like a Tax Collector”). One would like to think that it is a matter of experience, rather than of faith or definition, that the mystical man is a good man.79

Murdoch is well aware that she may be allied with Kierkegaard one more time in this critique. She is also willing to identify with Kant—one of the great systematic “demythologisers” of Christianity—to this end as well. See Metaphysics, p. 433; p. 444; p. 487. 76 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 498. 77 Hence her return to and dependence on metaphysics in a Platonic form. Pre-emptively separating herself from Kierkegaard’s Romanticism, she states: “Sartre’s néant, with its ancestry in Kant’s Achtung and Kierkegaard’s Angst, is more like an exciting springboard than a void.” To support this identification, she notes Kierkegaard’s citation of Macbeth in The Sickness unto Death to illuminate despair over sin. See Metaphysics, pp. 499–500, p. 260; and SKS 11, 222 / SUD, 110. 78 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 505. 79 Ibid., p. 355. 75

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Certainly, a soft spot for the tax collector remains in Murdoch’s heart. But, she is forced to reject the qualitative distinctions Kierkegaard assumed in favor of a continuum one is drawn through mystically toward the good.80 The second ramification is that one can no longer maintain Kierkegaard’s strict ordering or valuation of the stages of life. Murdoch recruits Theodor Adorno (1903– 69) to level the most strident critiques. For Adorno, the aesthetic is “politically necessary.”81 As an artist, pianist, and composer, Adorno regarded art as a redeemer of society, not in the manner of Sartre’s revolutionary or “committed literature,” but in the sense that art, with its aesthetic honesty and power could (incidentally) criticize society by exhibiting the deep horrors and sufferings of ordinary people. Murdoch’s parenthetical comment: “I like this preference.”82 Kierkegaard, like Hegel, is simply wrong in his assertion that the aesthetic is at the lowest stage of moral development. Finally, Adorno is brought forward to attack the inwardness and concern for the self found in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: [Adorno] attacks a “false inwardness,” as of the “cantingly emancipated theologican,” who “neutralizes the element of danger by internalisation,” enjoying a spiritual struggle which, seemingly “concerned,” is only concerned with self…Equally self-centered and “heroic” is the “authenticity” and “genuineness” of the existential subject who in seeking personal liberation loses the world of detail and other.83

Whether Adorno is correct or not in his reading of Kierkegaard here is hotly debated today, but what matters in this context is that Murdoch appears to accept his reading.84 At the end of the day, then, Murdoch’s Kierkegaard is problematic for two related reasons: first, he exhorts the anti-Hegelian individual to separate oneself from the social in the direction of the religious. Second, he is adamant in his derogation of aesthetic individualism (it is below both social ethics and the religious) in favor of religious individualism. In both cases, Murdoch sees Kierkegaard’s internalized religiousness as a Puritanism that is fundamentally anchored to a transcendent God.85 It is clear that Murdoch is self-consciously disagreeing with Kierkegaard, and she says as much. Kierkegaard’s construction of the self and its progress towards the religious necessarily entails recognition of sin, and therefore God’s forgiveness of said sin. Therefore, for Kierkegaard, God is not ancillary to his description of existence. “God must exist” for Kierkegaard’s entire dialectic to function. See Metaphysics, pp. 486–7. 81 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 246, emphasis in original. 82 Ibid., p. 371. 83 Ibid., pp. 377–8. 84 Of course, Murdoch read a considerable number of Kierkegaard’s texts before encountering Adorno. What appears to have occurred is that Murdoch’s view of Kierkegaard was becoming fairly firm by this point and Adorno probably articulated what she had already been thinking for some time. Although The Fire and the Sun is written about Plato, there is a sense in which much of what is said there could have been said about Kierkegaard. Despite their shared resistance to the aesthetic, Murdoch continues to return to Plato and not Kierkegaard because of Plato’s account of a non-personal and non-Christian Good. 85 In what appears to be the only sustained treatment of the relationship between Murdoch and Kierkegaard, C.S. Gurrey dispassionately describes a fundamental difference between them: “The ‘essentially private feature’ of experience at issue is not any discernable 80

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Although Kierkegaard himself seems to fall prey to the aesthetic, or Romanticism, in his articulation of the knight of faith, he does so in contradiction to his avowed convictions. For all of these reasons, by the end of her engagement, Murdoch’s Kierkegaard is more complex and useful than Sartre, but he still falls far short of Simone Weil.86 Against Kierkegaard’s fundamental separation of the aesthetic, moral, and religious, Murdoch asserts the metaphysical reality of the Good that lies behind or beyond or beneath our experience, the Good that magnetically draws people to itself. The Good mystically makes its presence felt in morality, as mysticism is also assumed to be, by definition, moral.87 The Good makes its presence felt in art and as religion, as “the energy of the attentive scholar and artist is spiritual energy.”88 And so, as Steiner intimated, the “mini-drama” of Murdoch’s relations to Kierkegaard comes to a close. He has had a part to play, and he has played it well. The part is perhaps larger than one might suspect. Yet, the part is essentially a utility role, a part that has a role in developing the plot, and a part that must eventually be eliminated for the plot to continue. One cannot forget the image of a young, thirsty Murdoch yearning for a draught of Kierkegaard in the 1940s. By the 1980s, however, it is not merely the strictures of the Oxford tutor that make Kierkegaard “tiresome” and “queer,” but it is Murdoch’s own development—intellectual, spiritual, and moral— that has refocused her reading, and therefore rejection, of Kierkegaard. VI. A Postscript on Murdoch’s Novels Having come to the conclusion of this survey of Murdoch’s philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard, it might seem that we have not yet come to the conclusion of Murdoch’s engagement with Kierkegaard. After all, as a novelist with 26 books to her credit, must we not also probe these for Kierkegaard’s influence? The short answer is, of course, yes. The long answer, however, is more complicated for at least three reasons. First, and most simplistically, Kierkegaard is not mentioned in any of Murdoch’s novels.89 Second, and more substantively, because Kierkegaard is a complicated and developing character in her philosophical writing, it is unclear how one would go about judging the “Kierkegaardian” nature of references or characters item as a sensation or image. It is rather, according to Kierkegaard, the whole character of a relationship—the God relationship. For Murdoch it is the individually constituted notion of what some virtue comprises, conditioned, as that is held to be, by the subject’s own history, change and self-understanding.” See C.S. Gurrey, “Faith and the Possibility of Private Meaning: A Sense of the Ineffable in Kierkegaard and Murdoch,” Religious Studies, vol. 26, 1990, p. 205. 86 One thinks especially of Murdoch’s appeal to Weil’s anamnesis in the final pages of Metaphysics (p. 505). 87 Ibid., p. 487. 88 Ibid., p. 505. 89 Interestingly, Sartre does not appear either. On the other hand, a whole range of other philosophers and writers appear, including but not limited to Socrates, Plato, Homer, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Weil, and Kafka.

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in her novels without rather vague generalities.90 Conradi, in Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, provides a few suggestions that illustrate precisely this difficulty. For example, he notes that Kierkegaard pointed out in Repetition that “repetition in life always implies change and difference and forces us to understand that we do not inhabit the realm of the aesthetic. This is the lesson Murdoch’s characters are obliged to begin to learn.”91 Conradi’s statement is probably correct, but it would be difficult to prove (a) that this movement is attributed specifically to Kierkegaard (either alone or in harmony with other influences) and (b) that this movement is the same movement that she understands occurs in Repetition. A further example Conradi suggests is the character of Bradley in The Black Prince. Here we seem to have a more solid foundation from which to build: Bradley describes himself as a retired tax collector, a character of Kierkegaard’s that Murdoch attends to carefully and frequently. Conradi concludes that, like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, Bradley is a pilgrim in quest of virtue.92 In a gesture toward a sketch of his character, Bradley appears to be some amalgam of Kierkegaard’s tax collector and Kierkegaard himself wrestling with one of the central contests in Murdoch’s philosophy (the relationship between art and morality). A final example, suggested by Murdoch herself, is probably the best place to start. Describing Ann (of The Unofficial Rose) in an early interview, Murdoch acknowledged that she is like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith in the disguise of a tax-gatherer.93 Parsing this further, and then relating Ann to Bradley would perhaps be the surest way to start a conversation concerning Kierkegaard’s influence in Murdoch’s novels, but saying more than this would take considerably more fine-grained analysis than can be provided here. Finally, the third reason it is difficult to nail down Kierkegaard’s direct influence on Murdoch’s literary output is rooted in her understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy. She openly claims that she sees no “general role” of philosophy in literature, and she is even more pointed in her comments concerning her novels: “I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories or ‘philosophical ideas’ as such into my novels.”94 She acknowledges that her novels

The identification of something as “Kierkegaardian” is also complicated by the fact that the usual sources of aesthetic characters in Kierkegaard’s corpus—Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way—are neither present in her working library nor do they seem to have been influential in Murdoch’s reception of Kierkegaard. Certainly, she is familiar with the theory of the stages and the aesthetic stage in particular, but the literary depictions provided in these specific texts seem absent from her work. 91 Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, p. 83. 92 Ibid., p. 189. 93 See Ben Obumselu, “Iris Murdoch and Sartre,” English Literary History, vol. 42, no. 2, 1975, pp. 303–4; and Ruth Heyd, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch,” University of Windsor Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1965, p. 141. Heyd gives the impression that Murdoch also considers Belfounder (Under the Net) and Tayper Pace (The Bell) as manifestations of the knight of faith, but the account of the interview is unclear concerning whether Heyd is providing what she takes to be illustrative examples to Murdoch’s comments on Ann (An Unofficial Rose) or whether Murdoch provided these further examples herself. 94 Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy,” p. 276 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 19). 90

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contain things about philosophy because she knows about philosophy,95 but that is a different matter for Murdoch. And, it appears that she is also very nervous about explicit and intentional existentialism evocations in literature as she is very critical of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s novels on precisely this matter, stating that “as soon as the ‘existentialist voice’ is turned on, the work of art rigidifies.”96 All that being said, the last word on Kierkegaard’s influence on Murdoch’s literary corpus has not been written. And, it is also my hope that the same goes for her philosophical corpus as well.

95 96

Conradi’s allusions, noted above, would probably fall into this category. Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy,” p. 277 (in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 21).

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Murdoch’s Corpus “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” The Listener, March 16, 1950, p. 473. “De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity,” Mind, no. 59, April 1950, p. 127. “The Existentialist Political Myth,” Socratic Digest, no. 5, 1952, pp. 54–5. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, London: Bowes & Bowes 1953, p. 25; pp. 57–8; p. 60; pp. 63–4; p. 67; p. 76. “Knowing the Void,” The Spectator, November 2, 1956, p. 614. “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Dreams and Self-Knowledge, Supplement no. 30, 1956, p. 47. “Hegel in Modern Dress,” New Statesman and Nation, May 25, 1957, p. 675. “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in The Nature of Metaphysics, ed. by D.F. Pears, London: Macmillan 1957, p. 118. “A House of Theory,” in Conviction, ed. by Norman Mackenzie, London: MacGibbon & Kee 1958, p. 224. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Yale Review, December 1959, p. 251. “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” in The Anatomy of Knowledge, ed. by Marjorie Grene, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969, p. 233. The Sovereignty of Good, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, p. 47; p. 82; p. 103. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977, p. 23; p. 70; p. 77. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto & Windus 1992, p. 7; p. 24; p. 29; p. 36; p. 40; p. 80; p. 87; p. 122; pp. 125–6; p. 148; pp. 174–7; p. 186; p. 202; p. 219; p. 223; p. 229; p. 246; p. 260; p. 268; p. 282; p. 286; p. 349, pp. 351–2; pp. 354–5; p. 371; p. 378; p. 408; p. 417; p. 433; p. 440; p. 444; p. 452; p. 455; pp. 486–7, p. 489; pp. 499–500. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi, New York: Penguin 1997, p. 4; p. 72; p. 87, note; pp. 101–4; pp. 122–3; pp. 133–4; p. 149; p. 160; p. 177; pp. 264–5; pp. 337–8; p. 357; p. 385; p. 406; p. 447; p. 453. A Writer at War: Letter and Diaries 1938–46, ed. by Peter J. Conradi, London: Short Books 2009, p. 216; p. 225; p. 245; p. 262; p. 279; p. 284; p. 294.

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II. Sources of Murdoch’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973, p. 39; p. 49; pp. 62–3; p. 68; pp. 122–9; p. 141; p. 182; p. 280; p. 353; p. 363; p. 375. — Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. by Edmund F.N. Jephcott, London: Verso 1978, p. 58, note; p. 75; p. 90; p. 134; pp. 152–4; p. 223. Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith, London: Kegan Paul 1947, pp. 40–82; p. 137; pp. 161–3; p. 167; pp. 171–81. — Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, London: Victor Gollancz 1953, pp. 149–56. Cole, J. Preston, The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press 1971. Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God, New York: Crossroad 1981, pp. 7–8; p. 59; pp. 64ff.; p. 75; p. 92; pp. 113–14; p. 117; p. 127; pp. 168ff. — Radicals and the Future of the Church, London: SCM Press 1989, p. 1; p. 7; p. 67; p. 72; p. 110; p. 115; pp. 143ff.; p. 178. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London: SCM Press 1962, p. 492; p. 494; p. 497. Kierkegaard, Søren, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Selection, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Oxford University Press 1938. — Fear and Trembling, trans. by Robert Payne, London: Oxford University Press 1939. — The Point of View, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York: Oxford University Press 1939. — Consider the Lilies: Being the Second Part of “Edifying Discourses in a Different Vein,” trans. by A.S. Aldworth and W.S. Ferrie, London: Daniel 1940. — Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1942. — Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1944. — The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1944. — Training in Christianity; and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied” It, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. — The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966. — Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and Other Essays on Drama, trans. by Stephen Crites, London: Collins 1967. Lebowitz, Naomi, Kierkegaard: A Life of Allegory, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1985. Löwith, Karl, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. by David E. Green, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1964, p. 20; p. 25; pp. 28–9; pp. 45–50; p. 56; p. 58; p. 60; pp. 68–71; pp. 75–6; p. 81; pp. 109–20; p. 135; pp. 137–8; pp. 140–1; pp. 144–52; pp. 158–62; pp. 172–3; p. 176; pp. 204–7; p. 210; p. 244; pp. 249–51; pp. 282–6; p. 297; pp. 309–10; p.

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320; p. 334; pp. 338–9; p. 351; pp. 359–68; p. 371; p. 373; p. 377; pp. 379–80; p. 384; pp. 387–8; p. 401; p. 404; p. 411; p. 414; p. 444. Malcolm, Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, London: Oxford University Press 2001, pp. 59–62; pp. 106–7. Poole, Roger, and Henrik Stangerup (eds.), A Kierkegaard Reader: Texts and Narratives, London: Fourth Estate 1989. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library 1956, p. 29; 94, note; p. 239; p. 580; p. 629. Wyschogrod, Michael, Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1954. III. Secondary Literature on Murdoch’s Relation to Kierkegaard Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 23; pp. 105–6; p. 166. — “The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 29, no. 2, 2001, p. 326. Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, London: Macmillan 1986, p. 83; p. 189. — Iris Murdoch: A Life, London: HarperCollins 2001, pp. 252–3; pp. 472–3. Gurrey, C.S., “Faith and the Possibility of Private Meaning: A Sense of the Ineffable in Kierkegaard and Murdoch,” Religious Studies, vol. 26, 1990, pp. 199–205. Heusel, Barbara Stevens, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press 1995, p. 26. Heyd, Ruth, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch,” University of Windsor Review, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1965, p. 141. Mehl, Peter J., “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, p. 269. Obumselu, Ben, “Iris Murdoch and Sartre,” English Literary History, vol. 42, no. 2, 1975, pp. 303–4. Steiner, George, “Foreword,” in Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi, London: Penguin 1999, p. x; p. xiv.

D.Z. Phillips: Grammar and the Reality of God Jamie Turnbull

D.Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) Phillips (1934–2006) was profoundly influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Phillips’ interests included ethics, philosophical methodology, and literature, but he is best known for his Wittgensteinian approach in the philosophy of religion. At the time of his death Phillips held the Danforth Chair in Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California and was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swansea University. Phillips was also director of both the Rush Rhees (1905–89) and Peter Winch (1926–97) Archives, based at Swansea. (Rhees and Winch were both Wittgenstein-inspired philosophers in their own right, and Phillips’ teachers.) In this article we will take a brief look at Phillips’ philosophical project, before charting the influence of Kierkegaard within his work. Finally, we shall consider Phillips’ use of Kierkegaard. In this I want to suggest that although Phillips’ appropriation of Kierkegaard is a relatively sensitive one, in comparison to the treatment he has received at the hands of other Wittgenstein scholars, his interpretation of Kierkegaard is ultimately untenable. I. Phillips’ Wittgensteinian Project Phillips’ philosophical venture is profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein’s late work, the Philosophical Investigations. In that work Wittgenstein famously claims that philosophical problems result from a confusion of the grammar of natural language. Wittgenstein’s thought is that our language plays an incredibly complicated and diverse role in our lives and practices. Indeed, our life with words is so complex that certain ways in which we use words look very similar to other uses (even of the same word), when they are in fact different. When we engage in philosophy and ask what is involved in our using a certain term, we assume that all uses are united in virtue of some common features or essence. In doing this, we are led into philosophical confusion because we are now at a loss to explain why certain features of a concept make sense in some cases and not others and why no single feature holds universally. The solution to this problem, according to Wittgenstein, is not a better philosophical theory, but a change in our conception of philosophy. Philosophy, as the late Wittgenstein conceives of it, is not a theoretical activity but a descriptive, clarificatory, and therapeutic one. To understand what is going on with a philosophical problem, one needs to understand its genesis. This understanding

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is achieved by locating the point at which one conflates two different concepts or attempts to illegitimately extend the use of one term to cover cases in which it has no natural application. The solution, or rather dissolution, of philosophical problems is thus achieved by means of greater attention to our lives with words: an attention to the particular ways in which words function and the complex roles they play in our practices. Wittgenstein’s philosophical methodology thus raises serious questions about the nature and identity of philosophy, questions such as what is it that we do when we engage in philosophy or what is reasonable for us to expect from it? Phillips’ career is perhaps best understood as the application and exploration of this Wittgensteinian methodology of grammatical investigation within the philosophy of religion. Phillips’ enterprise is perhaps best depicted against the background of a certain conception of philosophy. A certain tradition of philosophy (which, like most traditions, began with Plato) defines itself as the aspiration to arrive at a metaphysical and epistemological foundation. The project is to determine an Archimedean point capable of functioning as a basis upon which to measure, and thereby adjudicate between, appearance and reality, opinion and knowledge. In terms of this conception, philosophy is thought to have a certain privileged status with respect to the other disciplines, as well as with regards to our common sense and everyday beliefs and activities. Being in exclusive possession of the means to differentiate reality from illusion, and opinion from knowledge, philosophy is held to preside over the other disciplines. So conceived, philosophy either allows the other disciplines to remain free as rational investigations into the truth or sentences them for perpetuating irrationality and falsehood. Similarly, philosophy is also thought to have jurisdiction over our common-sense beliefs and practices. The philosopher decrees when our beliefs and activities accord with reality and points out when they stray into falsehood and irrationality (our religious beliefs and practices being prime targets for dismissal). Phillips takes this foundationalist project to have failed, with the result that philosophy has no privileged status with respect to either other disciplines or our everyday actions and claims to hold certain things as true. What counts as reality, truth, and knowledge is internal to particular disciplines and practices. To understand what amounts to reality, truth, and knowledge in a particular discipline or practice we need to pay attention to the way in which terms and concepts are used and our engagements with reality. The job of the philosopher is thus to pay attention to the grammar of our practices and upon that basis to indicate any misapplication of terms, and resulting philosophical confusions, as and when they arise. The particular focus of Phillips’ project is the application of this methodology to understanding our religious beliefs and so its application within the philosophy of religion. Philosophers of religion have traditionally focused upon subjects such as the nature and knowledge of God, the relationship between faith and reason, as well as the rationality of religious belief. In accord with the spirit of Wittgenstein’s thought, Phillips holds that it is not the job of philosophy to determine the metaphysical nature of God, or to place knowledge of God on a sure epistemological footing. Neither should philosophy be concerned with formulating a standard against which the rationality of religious belief is to be determined. Indeed, Phillips holds that it is not the role of philosophy to pass judgment upon the truth and rationality of religious beliefs and practices. Those beliefs and practices do not need philosophy to license

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whether or not they are intelligible, sensible, rational, or true. Rather, those beliefs already make sense in the context in which they have their home: the lives and practices of religious believers. As Phillips puts the point in “Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding”: The criteria of what can be sensibly said of God are to be found within the religious tradition. This…has important consequences for the question of what account of religion philosophy can give. It follows…that the criteria of intelligibility cannot be found outside religion, since they are given by religious discourse itself. Philosophy can claim justifiably to show what is meaningful in religion only if it is prepared to examine religious concepts in the contexts from which they derive their meaning.1

If we are to understand the sense of religious concepts, we need to understand them within the context in which they derive that sense: the lives, practices, and traditions of religious believers. To attempt a philosophical understanding outside of that context risks violating the conditions of sense of those concepts and thereby a descent into philosophical nonsense. Thus, according to Phillips, understanding religious beliefs philosophically is not a matter of formulating a philosophical theory about the nature of God, how believers know him, and whether or not they are rational to so believe, but of paying close attention to the grammar of religious terms. In this way Phillips thinks that we can come to clarity about how our religious language functions and makes sense within its own terms while avoiding the dangers of philosophical abstraction, generalization, and over-intellectualism. Against this background we can come to understand the appeal Kierkegaard came to have for Phillips (as, indeed, he has come to have for numerous Wittgensteinians). What Phillips envisages to be taking place in Kierkegaard’s work is a concern with the ambitions and limitations of philosophy, a dubiousness with regards to philosophical explanation, in favor of attention to the particularities of our lives with words. Phillips takes Kierkegaard to be engaged in a project of conceptual clarification, of being concerned with the sensible employment of religious terms and thus illuminating their misapplication. Specifically, in the wake of the demise of the foundationalist project, Phillips takes the work of both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard to be important resources in answering the question of what form philosophical activity might now take. Let us look in greater detail at Phillips’ use of Kierkegaard. II. Attention to Particulars Phillips thought Kierkegaard’s work a useful resource for the future of philosophy. Throughout the course of his long career Phillips called upon, and made use of, Kierkegaard. The particular texts that occupy Phillips’ attention are Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love, and, above all, what is known in English translation as Purity of Heart. These texts were used by Phillips to reflect upon issues in ethics, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical D.Z. Phillips, “Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding,” in Religion and Understanding, ed. by D.Z. Phillips, New York: Macmillan 1967, pp. 63–79, see p. 68.

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methodology. In this section I will begin by undertaking a general survey of the different issues Phillips uses Kierkegaard’s work to examine. I will then go on to look at two particular topics in greater detail: Phillips’ conception of Kierkegaard’s methodology and his treatment of the “truth is subjectivity” thesis. My justification for proceeding in this fashion is as follows. Phillips’ appropriation of Kierkegaard is too multivalent to receive detailed consideration in all of its aspects. Yet the two topics I have chosen can be said to condition Phillips’ treatments of particular issues in relation to Kierkegaard. Getting clear about these topics will, therefore, be of greater value to the reader who wishes to go on and consider Phillips’ particular usages of Kierkegaard in greater detail. First, then, I begin with a general survey of the different areas and issues Phillips uses Kierkegaard’s work to examine. In ethics, Phillips repeatedly calls upon Kierkegaard in considering the question of the goodness and unity of the will.2 For instance, this is the subject of one of the earliest pieces Phillips wrote on Kierkegaard, entitled “Does it Pay to Be Good?,” a response to the Aristotelian ethicist Philippa Foot (1920–2010).3 Phillips claims Foot to hold that virtuous action constitutes a good to the virtuous man; a good external to the action itself. Against Foot, Philips calls upon Kierkegaard to argue that the good of moral action cannot be external to that action but must rather constitute its own reward. In this Phillips points out that if moral action is undertaken for external reward the agent will in principle be open to inconsistency, a loss of integrity, and the dissolution of the moral will. In the introduction to Kant and Kierkegaard on Philosophy of Religion, Phillips gives a candid assessment of Kierkegaard’s contribution to the subject. Kierkegaard’s work, we are told, raises “issues which still dominate contemporary philosophy of religion,”4 specifically, issues concerning the relationship between religious belief and metaphysics, and different conceptions of rationality. Phillips himself uses Kierkegaard’s work in treating the topics of revelation and religious authority,5 immortality, Christian patience,6 and love.7 (Works of Love’s distinction See, for instance, D.Z. Phillips, “Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard,” Sophia, vol. 7, 1968, p. 3; D.Z. Phillips, “Self-Deception and Freedom in Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart,” in Kierkegaard and Freedom, ed. by James Giles, New York: Palgrave 2000, pp. 156–71. 3 Reprinted in D.Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, New York: State University of New York Press 1992, pp. 110–24. This material is also treated in “Practice and Justification II,” in Moral Practices, ed. by D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969, pp. 32–43. 4 D.Z. Phillips, “Introduction: Why Kant and Kierkegaard?” in Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, ed. by D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, London: St. Martin’s Press 2000, p. xi. 5 See D.Z. Phillips, “Revelation and the Loss of Authority,” in his Recovering Religious Concepts: Closing Epistemic Divides, London: St. Martin’s Press 2000, pp. 82–102. 6 See, for instance, D.Z. Phillips, Through a Darkening Glass, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1982, p. 99; D.Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, p. 46; Phillips, “Self-Deception and Freedom in Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart,” p. 168. 7 See, for example, Phillips, “Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding,” pp. 70– 5; Phillips, “Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard,” pp. 10–11; Phillips, Through 2

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between earthly and religious love is the subject of the last paper Phillips wrote on Kierkegaard, “Kierkegaard and Loves that Bloom.”) In philosophical methodology Phillips utilizes Kierkegaard’s work to explore issues concerning the relationship between the form philosophical enquiry takes and the strategy of authorship appropriate to it, the nature of philosophy and the ethical or religious beliefs of the philosopher, as well as the closely related issue of the relationship between our personal beliefs and philosophical practices. In examining these issues Phillips is concerned with determining the nature of Kierkegaard’s project and its relationship to philosophy.8 Specifically, Phillips asks: “[H]ow can there be a serious philosophical authorship after the demise of foundationalism? What style can philosophy have?”9 It is in answering these questions that Phillips envisages Kierkegaard’s work to have a significant role to play in determining the form that post-foundationalist philosophy will take. In light of our general survey, it would seem Kierkegaard played a far-reaching and significant role in Phillips’ thought across a wide range of philosophical domains and issues. Throughout the course of his numerous books, Phillips will often revisit a particular issue or concern and Kierkegaard’s treatment of it. His engagement with Kierkegaard is, thereby, continually evolving. In attempting to furnish the reader with a way into Phillips’ complex use of Kierkegaard, I shall now turn to the two topics in Phillips’ treatment I have singled out for more detailed consideration. I shall begin with Phillips’ view of what Kierkegaard is up to methodologically since these considerations can be said to condition his treatment of the “truth is subjectivity” thesis. The methodological issues that arise in Phillips’ appropriation of Kierkegaard are perhaps the most interesting aspect of that appropriation since it is in these that Phillips’ interest in Kierkegaard and his adherence to a Wittgensteinian methodology of conceptual clarification meet. Indeed, it is fair to say that the various ways in which Phillips’ commitments to Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are played out in his own project comprise his most interesting work on Kierkegaard. Specifically, we might ask, how do Phillips’ commitments to, and appropriations of, both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard stand to each other in his work? If Phillips thinks that a Wittgensteinian methodology of conceptual clarification is the correct one to adopt in philosophy, how does this stand with respect to his appropriation of a Darkening Glass, p. 104; Phillips, Recovering Religious Concepts, pp. 56–7; D.Z. Phillips, “Kierkegaard and Loves that Blossom,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology, vol. 4), pp. 155–66. 8 This led Phillips into an exchange with James Conant concerning the nature of the revocation, issued by Kierkegaard at the end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. See D.Z. Phillips, “Authorship and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” in his Wittgenstein and Religion, London: St. Martins Press 1993, pp. 200–19. Conant replied in “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. by Timothy Tessin, and Mario Von der Ruhr, London: Macmillan 1995, pp. 248–331. Phillips responded in Chapters 2 and 3 of D.Z. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1999. 9 Phillips, “Authorship and Authenticity,” p. 200.

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Kierkegaard? What is the relationship between the philosophical method advocated by the late Wittgenstein and that of Kierkegaard’s own intellectual endeavor? How far can Kierkegaard be accommodated to a methodology of grammatical investigation and where, if anywhere, will his views diverge? As we shall see, in answer to these questions Phillips conceives of Kierkegaard’s project to be a more through-going application of conceptual clarification to religious language, yet he is also sensitive to the differences between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard’s concerns. The following passage can be said to outline Phillips’ methodological vision of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein oppose philosophy’s foundationalist pretensions, its claim to possess a rational measure by which all our practices must be assessed. No such rationale exists, and no theses concerning it can be “said.” What philosophy provides is an elucidatory “showing” of what our practices come to, in face of our tendencies to be confused about them. Foundationalism’s direct method of demonstration is replaced by an indirect method of perspicuous representation.10

In Phillips’ view Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are united in virtue of a common conception of the nature and function of philosophy. (Although, as we shall see, it is on this subject that the views of these two figures also diverge for Phillips). According to Phillips, both thinkers agree that philosophy is unable to provide an independent measure by which to differentiate reality from illusion and truth from opinion; as such, their projects are anti-metaphysical and anti-foundationalist. The job of philosophy is to clarify our practices and presumably how our intellectual lives stand in respect to them. This is achieved by means of a perspicuous representation: a depiction of how our various uses of a certain term stand in relation to our practices, and the point at which the particular philosophical confusion with which we are concerned arise. For Phillips, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are united by a certain conception of philosophical method and the forms of argument appropriate to it. What, or who, then is the target of Kierkegaard’s authorship? What is the particular grammatical or conceptual confusion to which his work is addressed? In answer to this question, Phillips tells us, “He [Kierkegaard] exposes the confusion of trying to turn religious belief into a philosophical thesis.”11 Phillips elaborates: He protests against the confusion involved in the fact that genuine acceptance or rejection of Christianity in the Denmark of his day had been replaced by a “strife-waged pro and contra” devoid of passion. Such contentions move in a vacuum. Kierkegaard asks, For whose sake do they do all this?12

The confusion at which Kierkegaard’s authorship is said to be addressed is that of making the truth of Christianity a matter of intellectual dispute and treating it independently of the emotional lives and practices of human beings. Such disputes move in a vacuum or, as Wittgenstein says, are like free-spinning wheels on the machine that do not actually do any work. Yet Kierkegaard’s target is not merely Ibid. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, p. 36. 12 Ibid., p. 38. 10 11

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a confusion prevalent amongst intellectuals, but one more generally affecting the other inhabitants of Christendom. As Phillips states, “Kierkegaard has particular confusions in mind. He called them ‘the monstrous illusion,’ by which he meant the pervasive illusion in the Denmark of his day that led people to think they were Christians when they were not.”13 Phillips, like other Wittgenstein scholars, takes Kierkegaard’s treatment of this confusion to consist, at least in part, in offering the reader a series of grammatical remarks.14 With respect to Kierkegaard, Phillips writes, If a philosopher says that “God’s ways are above human understanding” is a grammatical remark, he is not claiming to understand God’s ways. Rather, he is claiming to locate and clarify the place that the remark has in religious life and to mark it off from others with which it may be confused.15

The idea, presumably, is that Kierkegaard’s project is not founded upon dubious metaphysical or theological assumptions, such as might commit him to claiming knowledge of God. In making his claims about God, the relationship between God and human beings, and religious language, Kierkegaard is rather merely elucidating the role certain religious concepts play in religious life and thereby differentiating them from other concepts with which they may be confused. In this respect one of Kierkegaard’s aims, like that of the later Wittgenstein, is thought to be to get us to pay attention to the ways in which we actually use words, to understand our practices, and grasp the complicated roles our beliefs play there. For instance, Phillips tells us, “Socrates brought people to see, indirectly, that it makes no sense to seek a conception of reality that transcends our practices. Kierkegaard, like Socrates, is telling us to be content with clarity about the practices we engage in.”16 Instead of seeking a metaphysical, epistemological, and practice-independent conception of reality, Phillips holds Kierkegaard to teach us that we should be satisfied with clarity about our practices; and presumably how our intellectual lives stand in respect to them. The underlying assumption being that for both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard our beliefs get their sense and meaning in virtue of the use we make of them and the practices in which they occur, and that we go wrong when we attempt to tell a story about them independently of that context. Phillips is not, of course, so crude as to claim that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’s projects are identical. His account of the relationship between them is also sensitive to their differences, and these differences are as illuminating as the similarities he envisages to connect them. For Phillips, commentators get into trouble when they take too tidy a parallel to exist between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. An important part of Phillips’ work on Kierkegaard thereby concerns clearing up Ibid., p. 25. On Kierkegaard offering the reader grammatical remarks or insights, see Phillips, Recovering Religious Concepts, p. 91; Phillips, “Self-Deception and Freedom in Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart,” p. 166; and Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 125. 15 Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, p. 37. 16 Ibid., p. 24, my emphasis. 13 14

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misunderstandings concerning the nature of his relationship with Wittgenstein. In this Phillips is concerned to outline that “there is an important asymmetry between Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic and Wittgenstein’s philosophical method.”17 Where, exactly, then does Phillips take these figures’ methodologies to diverge? One of the differences, if not the main difference, according to Phillips lies in the overall context in which grammatical investigation occurs in these thinkers’ works. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein differ in respect to the end conceptual clarification serves in their respective projects, and the role and conception of philosophy which results. The idea would seem to be that Wittgenstein has a general end of clarification or elucidation in view; his work is not addressed to any particular set of problems. Wittgenstein’s means of enabling us to achieve clarity is to equip us with the philosophical tools to deal with confusions as and when they arise. We will, perhaps, be continually seduced into making the same kinds of mistakes. Yet given the dynamic nature of the logic of natural language, and the consequence that we do not face a determinate set of philosophical problems, a selection of useful tools to aid us in achieving clarity in our philosophical thinking is what we need. Kierkegaard, by contrast, has a very particular conception of the illusions to be treated and the end that that treatment subserves. With respect to this end, Phillips tells us “it is Kierkegaard’s concern about Christianity which leads him to make the qualitative distinctions that he does. It is important to recognize that this concern gives Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic its rationale.”18 For Kierkegaard’s main concern is with confusions about religion. In exploring them, he brings many conceptual distinctions to our attention. We can call them philosophical distinctions if we want to, but Kierkegaard’s interest in making them is not primarily philosophical. He is, above all, a religious thinker, which is why, I argue, we do not find a contemplative conception of philosophy in his work.19

We can call a certain element of his project “philosophical” if we want to, but Phillips suggests that such a label will be merely arbitrary. Kierkegaard is primarily a religious thinker and his authorship a religious Christian one. This, Phillips maintains, indicates an important difference between the conception of philosophy with which Kierkegaard is operating and that found in the later Wittgenstein. What Phillips takes to be absent from Kierkegaard’s work, yet present in Wittgenstein, is what he terms a “contemplative conception of philosophy.” Phillips characterizes such a conception in terms of a certain coolness, or detachment. Thus although philosophy goes awry when it attempts to give an account of reality or human beings independently of human practice, there is still a legitimate kind of detachment to which it can hold claim. This detachment is characterized by wonder, not a wonder that this or that is the case, and so not a wonder that might presumably arise within one of our practices, but a wonder at the possibility of anything at all. To the extent that philosophy engages in, or is characterizable by, such wonder Ibid., p. 27, my emphasis. Ibid., p. 28. 19 Ibid., p. 25. 17 18

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it is extricable from the different practices it describes and clarifies. Against the background of such a conception Phillips can say: [A] contemplative conception of philosophy is not to be found in Kierkegaard. He is a religious thinker, concerned with specific confusions concerning Christianity. Kierkegaard never doubts the categories of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, whereas Wittgenstein wonders at their very possibility. An asymmetry therefore exists between their authorships.20

Perhaps Phillips would have been on a surer footing if he had said that Kierkegaard never doubts the categories of the absolute paradox, but the general point is the same. For, “Kierkegaard did not want the sense of Christianity confused with the sense of other things, but he did not question the sense that he saw in Christianity and those other things. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, wonders at the possibility of there being sense in things at all….Therein lies the authorial asymmetry between them.”21 Not only does Kierkegaard not doubt the sense he sees in Christianity, but he never doubts that it is the sense, that is, that his interpretation of the logic of the Christian message and interpretation of Scripture, as opposed to the Hegelian interpretation, is the Truth. Despite this divergence concerning the overall ends of their authorships, and the role that philosophy plays in respect to those ends, if Phillips is right, the connections between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are far more pertinent than their differences. For these figures are said to be united in virtue of a common conception of grammar, and of the genesis of philosophical problems as resulting from grammatical confusion, as well as the idea that such confusions are treated by means of offering grammatical reminders and perspicuous representations, and an attention to the role that our words and concepts play in our practices. If this is correct, the extent and degree to which Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein share a common conception of philosophy is remarkable. In the remainder of this section I would like to turn from Phillips’ conception of Kierkegaard’s project to what, I think, is a closely related issue: his treatment of the “truth is subjectivity” thesis. One of the first papers Phillips devotes exclusively to Kierkegaard exegesis is “Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard,”22 in which he seeks to address what he takes to be common misunderstandings of Kierkegaard’s claim that truth is a matter of subjectivity. In outlining what the “truth is subjectivity” thesis amount to, Phillips states, Kierkegaard…sees, rightly, that thanking God is a necessity, not an option, for the Christian. How is it possible? It is possible precisely because the thanking is not an appropriate conclusion inferred from the way things go….The Christian thanks God whatever happens, in the sense that nothing can render God pointless. The way things go is contingent, but the possibility of thanking God in all things…is, Kierkegaard says, part of the eternity which God has put in men’s hearts.23 Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 39. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 20 21

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For the Christian, thanking God is not an action performed at the conclusion of a practical syllogism, the premises of which are contingent matters of fact. That God is to be thanked does not depend upon certain states of affairs obtaining, but rather constitutes part of the bedrock of religious practice. That God is due thanks gives purpose and meaning to the world, a meaning which permeates all things. One might say that “God is due thanks” serves as a grammatical remark for the Christian. It remarks upon the role and function that God plays and the attitudes of which he is worthy in a certain Christian practice and tradition. In this way Phillips interprets Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity and the subjectivity thesis as an emphasis on the usage of Christian beliefs and the practices in which they occur. The thought, presumably, is that the subjectivity thesis is to be understood as claiming that the “truth” of Christian beliefs is to be determined with reference to the context of Christian practice and so is internal to that practice. Phillips’ interpretation of Kierkegaardian subjectivity thus allows him to view Kierkegaard in an overtly Wittgensteinian fashion. Understood in this way, Phillips claims, Kierkegaard’s views are not subjectivist or irrationalist. For “Kierkegaard’s use of ‘subjectivity’ in relation to belief in God does not mean that there are no criteria of truth and falsity, right and wrong, depth and shallowness, involved, since indeed there are.”24 These criteria are not arrived at by an impartial assessment of the facts but rather “belong to the realm of faith itself.”25 The claim is that, for Kierkegaard, the criteria which determine the sense and legitimacy of the application of Christian concepts are internal to a tradition of Christian practice. III. Grammar and the Reality of God Having considered Phillips’ conception of Kierkegaard’s methodological views in some detail, as well as his interpretation of the “truth is subjectivity” thesis, let us turn to fashioning a general interpretation of Phillips’ appropriation. In this I will be concerned to suggest that even on the basis of Phillips’ own story about the relationship between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, there is good reason why Kierkegaard’s intellectual endeavor cannot be accommodated to a Wittgensteinian methodology of grammatical investigation. Moreover, as outlined in the last section, Phillips attributes the asymmetry between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein to the fact that Kierkegaard is a Christian author and his project a religious and Christian one. Phillips is right about this, but I want to suggest that if we take this idea seriously, it belies even the more modest sense in which Phillips wants to conceive of Kierkegaard’s project as a philosophical one. The conception of Kierkegaard’s project as one of Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation is remarkable. The reason for this is that, although Kierkegaard is concerned with religious language and what it is for that language to be meaningful, a Wittgensteinian conception of grammar as determining the limitations of sense is, I think, foreign to him. In Wittgenstein the notion of grammar develops in response Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8.

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to the logical or Platonic atomism of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), as well as in response to the philosophy of Wittgenstein’s younger self as outlined in the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Phillips (like other commentators who have sought to bring Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein together) takes it as given that Kierkegaard’s notion of the existence spheres or stages on life’s way can be understood as Wittgensteinian forms of life or language-games. Yet this move is commonly made with little or no worry about the possibility of anachronistic projection or, indeed, argument.26 From a general historical view, the idea that Kierkegaard should be engaged in a Wittgensteinain project of grammatical investigation is also somewhat curious. The reason for this is that we can take there to be some analogy between the general philosophical movement that occurs between Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), and that which takes place between Russell and Wittgenstein (or between the early and late Wittgenstein). Painting with a very broad brush, Hegel takes Kant’s transcendental and a priori conception of logic and brings it down into the world. This, indeed, might be taken to give rise to Kierkegaard’s problem. For if necessity and essence were merely a part of the world, emerging in our relationship to it as opposed to standing over and against it, any sense of God or the human soul being eternal and transcendent would be lost. Hegel brings rationality into relationship with history and the practices of human beings. The Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations also brings logic down from a transcendental realm and locates it in our traditions and practices. There is, thereby, a general analogy between Hegel and the project of the later Wittgenstein. For this reason it is difficult to believe that Kierkegaard should spend at least the majority of his intellectual life defending Christianity from Hegelianism, on the one hand, and be engaged in a Wittgensteinian project of grammatical elucidation, on the other. Indeed, Kierkegaard is both a realist and an essentialist when it comes to the theological nature of human beings (the human soul), the nature of God, and the nature of Christianity, which are the cases in which he is primarily interested. Phillips is right that Kierkegaard’s views do not amount to metaphysical realism or epistemological foundationalism. For it is not as if human beings can determine the absolute nature or knowledge of God (or, indeed, their own theological natures) wholly in virtue of their own cognitive capacities. However, Phillips is wrong to conclude from this that Kierkegaard is not a realist, essentialist, or that there are not certain foundationalist views at work in his thought per se. While Kierkegaard’s views are not to be counted amongst the flavors of metaphysical realism and epistemological foundationalism, they do comprise a theological or Christian realism and essentialism. It is not difficult for us to note the points at which Phillips’ Wittgensteinianism and Kierkegaard’s own intellectual endeavor will diverge.27 See, for instance, James Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. by Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1989, pp. 242–83; and most recently Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. 27 Anthony Rudd has also argued that Phillips’ interpretation of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard’s own views are divergent, although Rudd’s argument is very different from my 26

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The divergence between Phillips’ use of Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard’s own views is perhaps most striking when considering the claim that lies at the heart of Phillips’ appropriation, namely, the claim that Kierkegaard is engaged in a project of conceptual clarification, the aim of which is to return us to the common sense and meaning our beliefs have in the context of our practices. One of the main targets, if not the target, of Kierkegaard’s authorship is the Hegelian claim that the nature of Christ as human and divine, and thereby the Christian message, admits of mediation. To the extent that Kierkegaard envisages this conception of Christianity to be contaminating the sermons of Copenhagen’s pastors, and the beliefs of the inhabitants of Christendom, we might understand his project as one of conceptual clarification.28 In the face of an intellectual movement he charges with conceiving of Christ’s incarnation and the Christian message as a tautology, Kierkegaard is concerned to stress that the true conceptual form or logic of the Christian message is one of absolute paradox. If we take Hegelianism to be a corruption and misunderstanding of Christianity, afflicting some of the inhabitants of Christendom and Kierkegaard’s conception of the nature of Christianity to reflect the more common and sensible usage, then we might think of Kierkegaard’s project as one of conceptual clarification.29 Conceiving of Kierkegaard’s project as one of conceptual clarification will, I think, only get us so far. For when it comes to the question of whether the logic of our beliefs is to be determined by our practice and usage, or whether our beliefs and practices must conform to an independent standard, Kierkegaard and Phillips must part company. This divergence becomes evident in one of Phillips’ early works Through a Darkening Glass where, in considering the concept of promising, Phillips quotes the following passage from Joe R. Jones (b. 1936): [S]uppose that over a period of time many people came to use “I promise” as though they meant “I will if it is convenient.” They no longer felt morally bound to keep promises beyond what convenience might allow. Would we not have in this case something like ‘having forgotten’ what it is to promise, or having forgotten the concept of promise?30

own. Specifically Rudd accuses Phillips of perpetuating a continuation of the foundationalist philosophical project, albeit in an enfeebled form. See Anthony Rudd, “Warming Up the Cool Place: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and D.Z. Phillips,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 22, 2005, p. 129. 28 Those commentators who wish to read Kierkegaard in this Wittgensteinian fashion have yet, I think, to give persuasive examples of just which beliefs, norms, or practices Hegelianism is guilty of corrupting. 29 As Rudd notes, “If practices themselves are confused, then a perspicuous description of them will reveal that confusion. But one can only demonstrate such confusion by reference to other (unconfused) practices, which means that we cannot coherently suppose all of our practices to be confused.” Rudd, “Warming Up the Cool Place,” p. 128, my emphasis. Phillips is not necessarily wrong in claiming that for Kierkegaard there are criteria, internal to a tradition of Christian practice, which determine the sense and legitimacy of the application of Christian concepts. However, it would be wrong to conclude from this that, for Kierkegaard, everything is determined by relation to our practices. 30 Phillips, Through a Darkening Glass, p. 124, my emphasis.

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In commenting upon this passage Phillips writes: If the redefinitions became pervasive we should have to say that this is what a promise has become. Instead of asking, in a theoretical way, what is the essence of promisekeeping, all we can do is to ask what it is to keep a promise. There may be practices or traditions which enable us to comment on the character of promise keeping within them, but no answer in the abstract about the essence of promise-keeping would be helpful. So the mere uttering of the words. “Remember me? You promised me…” would have no magic hold in themselves. They cannot be made effective as if by what Wittgenstein called “a baptism of meaning.” Everything depends on how these words bear on other features of people’s lives—on how they bear on convenience, for example.31

Phillips’ point is the by now familiar one that there is no practice or traditionindependent essence to our concepts, but that our concepts are determined with respect to our traditions and practices. Different conceptions may be found in different traditions, which we may be able to compare and contrast, but there is no sense a tradition-independent essence. As Phillips acknowledges, this admits the possibility that if our traditions and practices change, and our concepts in relation to them, then we will simply have to say that the resulting usage and meaning is what the concept means. For given that the meaning of a concept is determined by its common and normative application, it is not as if a deviant or historical usage could be made to work by “a baptism of meaning.” Yet the idea that there is no essence to a certain conception (Christianity, for example), and that its meaning is to be wholly determined by its social and cultural usage (and is thereby subject to change and “corruption”), is precisely the possibility that Kierkegaard is concerned to argue against. For that the essence of Christianity is to be determined with respect to its historical and social conditions and thereby that, strictly speaking, it has no permanent essence is what Kierkegaard takes to follow from Hegelianism. That the sense and meaning of our religious beliefs is to be wholly determined by the role they play in our practices is not, a la Phillips, the claim that Kierkegaard is seeking to defend, but precisely that which he is arguing against. We might imagine ages in which Christians’ conceive of God’s nature in tautological terms, or simply hold Christ to have been an extraordinary man. Alternatively, we might imagine a society in which “Are you a Christian?” is synonymous for “Do you come from a certain country?” Phillips will say that what it is to be a Christian in these cases is to be determined by reference to the traditions and practices in which the concept “Christian” is used, whereas for Kierkegaard these will be cases in which human beings can no longer come into relationship with God. Indeed, that the Christian message should be so corrupted, and the possibility that human beings come into relationship with a transcendent God lost, is Kierkegaard’s impetus in re-presenting the issue of the absolute paradox. For Kierkegaard, the truth of Christianity is not to be determined by means of referring to the usage human beings happen to be making of certain words, or the practices they happen to be engaged in. The truth of Christianity is not relative to 31

Ibid.

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the practices of human beings, or their social or cultural understandings, but is the absolute Truth. For Kierkegaard there are practice-independent standards against which whether or not one is a Christian is to be measured, points at which human beings come into contact with the Reality of God. Specifically, Kierkegaard holds that human beings come into contact with the ultimate nature of theological reality through the reading of the Scriptures, and the witness of the Holy Spirit. It is in respect to these points that the asymmetry Phillips envisages to exist between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard’s intellectual endeavors undermines the connections he draws between them. Recall that Phillips located this asymmetry in terms of the overall context in which these figures’ use of conceptual clarification occurs, and the end those respective clarifications serve. In drawing his asymmetry Phillips calls upon the work of O.K. Bouwsma (1899–1978), for “Bouwsma brings out well how Kierkegaard’s religious priorities affect the task he took himself to be confronted with; a task importantly different from Wittgenstein’s.”32 Phillips then quotes the following passage from Bouwsma: In the work of Wittgenstein there is ordinary language we understand. That ordinary language is related to words or expressions that give us trouble. In ordinary language we discover the corrective of the language which expresses the confusion. In the work of Kierkegaard there corresponds to ordinary language in Wittgenstein the language of Scripture, which Kierkegaard understands. Without this latter assumption Kierkegaard cannot be effective. And this is not how it is in Wittgenstein. There, ordinary language is taken to be language which we all understand. Here, there is agreement. But Kierkegaard’s task is in that way more formidable. He has first to teach us how to understand the language of Scripture.33

In this passage Phillips calls upon Bouwsma’s claim that Scripture plays an analogous role to ordinary language in Wittgenstein; he also suggests that ordinary language and our understanding of it, and our understanding of Scripture, can diverge. Moreover, Bouwsma further admits that Kierkegaard’s understanding of Scripture may not reflect common understanding and usage. For Kierkegaard, it is said, is in a situation in which the meaning of Scripture (as he understands it) must first be taught before common agreement and understanding can be reached. The problem is that if these differences do in fact constitute the asymmetry Phillips takes to exist between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, then it belies the more general connections he holds between them. Whereas “ordinary language” for the late Wittgenstein, as for Phillips, is subject to change with respect to our practice and usage, for Kierkegaard the language of Scripture and “the meaning” of it (that it constitutes an absolute paradox) must stand firm. Moreover, if Kierkegaard’s understanding of Scripture does not reflect the common understanding and usage of religious terms, this leaves Phillips with a serious problem. For if Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and the common understanding are divergent, we cannot conceive of Kierkegaard’s presentation of the logic of the Christian message to constitute a clarification or elucidation of actual religious usage. If Phillips, “Authorship and Authenticity,” p. 211, my emphasis. Ibid. My emphasis.

32 33

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Phillips’ account of the asymmetry that he takes to exist between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein is correct, Kierkegaard is not engaged in a Wittgensteinian project of conceptual clarification. Perhaps the biggest problem facing Phillips’ claim that Kierkegaard is engaged in a project of conceptual clarification, with respect to Christian belief and practice, is one of Kierkegaard’s own key moves against the Hegelians. For against Hegelianism’s attempt to incorporate Christianity to a philosophical system, Kierkegaard contends that attention to the beliefs and practices of human beings will leave it indeterminate as to whether or not they are Christian. Whether beliefs are to be counted Christian, strictly speaking, cannot be judged, even if we should consider all of the contents of those beliefs and the practices, in which they occur to be just as they should be. On the basis of attention to beliefs and practices it is impossible to distinguish or identify a knight of faith and a tax-collector. The world provides no criteria by means of which one can differentiate Christians from pagans because whether or not one is a Christian lies beyond all human judgment, a matter for God alone. Against the Hegelian claim to have incorporated Christianity into philosophy, Kierkegaard contends that the essential feature of Christianity is not to be found in what might be objectively, or intersubjectively, determined about it. This leads us, neatly, to the other point at which human beings can come into contact with the ultimate nature of theological reality for Kierkegaard. Specifically, the inwardness, or absolute passion, of subjectivity: an experience of divine love, and the witness of the Holy Spirit. Again, such an experience is not thought to be wholly determined by the Christian believer’s relationship to society but, once realized, stands absolutely independent of that relationship.34 This point is evident in the concluding sections of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Kierkegaard offers an overview of his book and attempts to state what is essentially Christian.35 In stating what he takes to be the essential feature, Kierkegaard writes: “[B]ecoming and being a Christian are defined neither objectively by the ‘what’ of the doctrine nor subjectively by the appropriation, not by what has taken place within the individual but by what has taken place with the individual: that the individual is baptized.”36 The essential feature of being a Christian is, Kierkegaard claims, baptism. But he is careful to point out that by this he does not mean the religious ceremony of having one’s head anointed or being immersed in holy water. The baptism of which Kierkegaard speaks is that of being touched by God’s spirit: If…someone says that he did indeed receive the spirit in Baptism and by its witness with his spirit knows that he has been baptized, the conclusion is directly reversed—from the witness of the spirit within him he draws the conclusion that he must have been baptized; he does not draw the conclusion that he has spirit from his having been baptized.37

This conclusion does not rest upon historical premises (I was baptized) subject to skeptical doubt, but the witness of God’s spirit within about which (if Christ is alive Which is not, of course, to say that society plays no role in one becoming a Christian. SKS 7, 552–9 / CUP1, 607–16. 36 SKS 7, 553 / CUP1, 609–10. 37 SKS 7, 554 / CUP1, 610. 34 35

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in me) Kierkegaard thinks I cannot be wrong. The mark of being a Christian is thought to be the inwardness and appropriation of God’s spirit alive in me. In the witness of the spirit the Christian comes into a direct relationship with the ultimate nature of theological reality, God. This relationship between Christian believer and transcendent divinity is a direct relation of believer to God, independent of the mediation of society. In this way subjectivity and the Truth it allows one to come into relationship with play a foundational role for Kierkegaard in respect to the individual’s “knowledge” of God.38 The above outlines the essential role that subjectivity plays in Kierkegaard’s thought, in that it allows the individual to transcend his or her worldly nature and identity and come into a relationship with the transcendent source of all things. At this point it will be useful to revisit Phillips’ treatment and defence of his interpretation of the “truth is subjectivity” thesis. As already noted, Phillips is concerned to deny that Kierkegaard’s views about truth amount to subjectivism or irrationalism. The way in which Phillips attempts to rule this out warrants further attention. In characterizing and attempting to defeat the threat such a notion of subjectivity represents, Phillips writes: Kierkegaard speaks sometimes as if God could ask my neighbor to sacrifice his son, and that in doing so He would be asking him to do the same deed as He asked Abraham to perform. I think that this is logically absurd. What Abraham was asked to do can only be understood in terms of the context in which the request was made: the religious Jewish family, the status of the first-born, Abraham’s status in the tribe, and, of course, the institution of child sacrifice. It is logically impossible for my neighbor to repeat Abraham’s action. Even if he discovered the exact route Abraham took to Mount Moriah, even if he discovered the altar, bound his son on it, and raised the knife, he would not be doing what Abraham did.39

In this Phillips’ depicts the idea that one might have a wholly private relationship to the divinity as absurd. We can, according to Phillips, only understand that idea in the case of Abraham in terms of that figure’s historical, social, and religious context. Phillips finds absurd the idea that his neighbor could be asked to repeat Abraham’s actions today, on the grounds that even if his neighbor went through all of the motions, he would still not be Abraham. (Perhaps Phillips could have ruled this out simply by demonstrating that Swansea is not the Holy Land, although this might prove contentious.) The point of Fear and Trembling is not, of course, the rightly absurd suggestion that one might (per impossibile) be asked to perform the same token actions as Abraham. If this were the case and the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical were unique to Abraham, there would be no fear and trembling in Fear and Trembling. The possibility with which Fear and Trembling is concerned is that the Christian might find himself in the same predicament as Abraham today, of being called upon by God to act in a way which contradicts the moral law. Given that Although, being a matter of subjective knowledge, such knowing cannot be accommodated and naturalized to human reason. 39 Phillips, “Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard,” p. 7. 38

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Phillips will only license criteria that are internal to a particular practice, as opposed to any that may stem directly from a transcendent God, the fact that he fails to acknowledge this possibility is perhaps unsurprising. It should now, I hope, be evident that Phillips’ conception of Kierkegaardian subjectivity, and the “truth is subjectivity” thesis, are at odds with Kierkegaard’s own view. For, as outlined above, Phillips interprets Kierkegaardian subjectivity as an emphasis on the role Christian beliefs play in the lives and practices of Christian believers. In fact, subjectivity for Kierkegaard is the domain in which the believer comes into a direct relationship with God; it comprises the Christian realism, foundationalism, and essentialism in Kierkegaard’s thinking. In interpreting subjectivity to meet his own Wittgensteinian agenda, Phillips disarms Kierkegaard of his Christian realism and foundationalism, and in doing so betrays the very essence of his thought. That Phillips’ interpretation amounts to a betrayal is established by the following. For Kierkegaard the essence of Christianity is not a matter of objectivity, or human intersubjectivity, but essentially hidden inwardness. The life of the spirit does not appear in the world at all and so cannot be incorporated into a philosophical system. Indeed, it is precisely by confining the essence of Christianity to a realm in which there are no objective determinants that Kierkegaard seeks to prevent Christian faith from being integrated into philosophical reason. Yet by making subjectivity a matter of the beliefs, norms, and practices of Christian believers, Phillips would leave Christianity incorporable to the very Hegelianism Kierkegaard is concerned to oppose. For this reason Kierkegaard would, I think, take Phillips’ attempt to account for Christianity by means of attention to the grammar and practices of Christian believers to be yet one more attempt (in a Hegelian vein) to reduce divinity to humanity. As outlined, Phillips recognizes that the element of Kierkegaard’s project that we might term “philosophical” is undertaken in the service of a religious Christian end. Yet, Kierkegaard’s conception of subjectivity is more intimately connected to that end than Phillips allows. This, I think, draws into question even the more modest sense in which Phillips wishes to conceive of Kierkegaard’s project as a philosophical one. For Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity is not a stress on the conditions of sense and rationality in terms of which we might make sense of religious beliefs philosophically. It is, rather, precisely the means by which Kierkegaard seeks to defend Christian belief from philosophy, by maintaining that its essential feature lies in its element of unintelligibility. In the face of what he takes to be Hegelianism’s threat to naturalize and explain Christianity, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the essential subjectivity of Christian belief is an attempt to preserve the divine mystery and wonder of Christian faith. IV. Conclusion This article began by taking a brief look at the nature of D.Z. Phillips’ philosophical project, before charting the use and influence of Kierkegaard within his work. Finally, I have offered a general interpretation of Phillips’ appropriation of Kierkegaard. In

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this I have suggested that, although Phillips is more sensitive than most Wittgenstein scholars to the differences between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, to take the differences Phillips envisages between these figures seriously would be to undermine the points on which he wishes to bring them together. Phillips acknowledges that the “philosophy” Kierkegaard engages in is undertaken in service of a religious Christian end. In respect to this I have argued that if we take Kierkegaard’s defense of Christianity against Hegelianism seriously, Kierkegaard appears as even more of a Christian thinker and less of a philosopher than Phillips is prepared to allow. Phillips claims that Kierkegaard “is telling us to be content with clarity about the practices we engage in.”40 I have suggested that Kierkegaard will not be content with a metaphysically and theological neutral description of the grammar of our practices, for such a description fails to contend with the Reality of God.

Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place, p. 24.

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Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Phillips’ Corpus “Does it Pay to be Good,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 65, 1964–65, pp. 45–60. (Reprinted in D.Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, New York: State University of New York Press 1992, pp. 110–24.) “Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding,” in Religion and Understanding, ed. by D.Z. Phillips, New York: Macmillan 1967, pp. 63–79. “Moral and Religious Concepts of Duty: An Analysis,” in Religion and Understanding, ed. by D.Z. Phillips, New York: Macmillan 1967, pp. 191–8. “Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard,” Sophia, vol. 7, 1968, pp. 3–13. (Reprinted in D.Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, New York: Schocken Books 1971, pp. 202–22.) “Practice and Justification II,” in Moral Practices, ed. by D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969, pp. 32–43. Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, New York: Schocken Books 1971, pp. 204–22. Religion Without Explanation, Bristol: Basil Blackwell 1976, pp. 131–7. “Philosophy and Commitment,” Metaphilosophy, vol. 11, 1980, pp. 1‑16. Through a Darkening Glass, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1982, pp. 123–5. Faith after Foundationalism, London: Routledge 1988, pp. 226–37. Interventions in Ethics, New York: State University of New York Press 1992, pp. 110–24. “Authorship and Authenticity. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1992 (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 17), pp. 177–92. (Reprinted in D.Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion, London: St. Martins Press 1993 (Swansea Studies in Philosophy), pp. 200–19.) Philosophy’s Cool Place, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1999, pp. 13–39. “Self-Deception and Freedom in Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart,’ ” in Kierkegaard and Freedom, ed. by James Giles, London: Palgrave 2000, pp. 156–71. “Introduction: Why Kant and Kierkegaard?” in Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, ed. by D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, London and New York: Macmillan 2000 (Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion), pp. xi–xxii. Recovering Religious Concepts: Closing Epistemic Divides, London: Macmillan 2000, pp. 83–101.

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Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, pp. 125–7. “Kierkegaard and Loves that Blossom,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology, vol. 4), pp. 155–66. II. Sources of Phillips’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Bouwsma, O.K., Without Proof or Evidence: Essays of O.K. Bouwsma, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1984, pp. 27–39; pp. 73–86; pp. 132–42; pp. 146–56 and passim. Holmer, Paul, The Grammar of Faith, New York: Harper and Row 1978. Jones, Joe R., “Some Remarks on Authority and Revelation in Kierkegaard,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 57, 1977, pp. 234–5. Klemke, Elmer Daniel, Studies in the Philosophy of Kierkegaard, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1976. Nielsen, Harry A., Where the Passion Is: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida 1983. Thompson, Josiah, Kierkegaard, London: Gollancz 1978. Weston, Michael, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy, London: Routledge 1994. III. Secondary Literature on Phillips’ Relation to Kierkegaard Conant, James, “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. by Timothy Tessin and Mario Von der Ruhr, London: Macmillan 1995, pp. 200–19. Rudd, Anthony, “Warming Up the Cool Place: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and D.Z. Phillips,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 22, 2005, pp. 127–43. Schönbaumsfeld, Genia, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, pp. 74–83.

Richard Rorty: Kierkegaard in the Context of Neo-Pragmatism J. Aaron Simmons

I. Introduction What Socrates was to Athenian society, Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was to twentiethcentury analytic philosophy—a stinging gadfly. Praised by some as one of the most original and provocative thinkers in recent memory, cursed by others as merely a flippant literary critic who trivialized the gravitas required by philosophical inquiry, and viewed by many more as perhaps being both, Rorty certainly “shook things up like few of his contemporaries.”1 An exemplar of the notion of a public intellectual, Rorty’s expansive authorship goes beyond the walls of academe and the pages of philosophy journals by modeling a deep commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue. An ardent defender of what he took to be a decidedly pragmatic (and specifically Deweyan) perspective, Rorty is perhaps best understood as someone who challenged philosophical privilege in the name of envisioning an expansive conversation for all humankind.2 In this way, Rorty is often thought of as an anti-philosopher. However, he is certainly a philosopher’s anti-philosopher. His work demonstrates just how extraordinarily well-read he was in the history of philosophy and his willingness to bring together figures as divergent as Donald Davidson (1917–2003), Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), John Rawls (1921–2002), and John Dewey (1859–1952) continues to be a model of how to overcome the stagnation that can accompany one’s singular operation within the all too rigid boundaries that characterize much of professional philosophical debate. Despite his wide appreciation of the history of philosophy, Rorty’s appropriations of specific thinkers tends to be less an example of careful exegesis and more a demonstration of selective readings and creative interpretations. For figures through which Rorty spends a great deal of time working, the specifics of these interpretations Danny Postel, “Last Words from Richard Rorty,” The Progressive, June 2007. Many have suggested that Rorty’s expansive conversation is still problematically too narrow. See, for example, Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, London and New York: Verso 1995; J. Aaron Simmons and Diane Perpich, “Making Tomorrow Better than Today: Rorty’s Dismissal of Levinasian Ethics,” Symposium, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 241–66; Dianne Rothleder, The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity, Albany: State University of New York Press 1999. 1 2

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become fairly easily considered and critiqued (for example, his readings of Derrida and Rawls).3 When it comes to thinkers that Rorty mentions by name but fails to discuss at length, however, it is often hard to get clear on exactly what his use of those thinkers amounts to and whether or not it is an appropriation worth taking seriously. One of the figures that receives only marginal attention in Rorty’s expansive appreciation of the history of philosophy is Søren Kierkegaard.4 The striking aspect of Rorty’s minimal use of Kierkegaard is that, despite being only rarely mentioned, Kierkegaard is actually a thinker who seems to be a valuable interlocutor for Rorty’s own neo-pragmatic project. Though, in the final analysis, I do not think that Rorty will, or should, stand as a major figure in Kierkegaard research, I do believe that precisely where Rorty seems to be so quick to move past Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard scholars would do well to pause, at least briefly, and consider Rorty’s account. Though Rorty might have gotten Kierkegaard quite wrong in many ways, I will argue that he is not simply wrong about Kierkegaard. My thesis is that we should take Rorty seriously, but constantly remember, as one Rorty scholar notes, “taking Rorty seriously is not the same as accepting all his beliefs.”5 I will proceed in this article as follows. First, I will provide a very short introduction to Rorty’s philosophical project. Second, I will consider places where Rorty’s philosophy seems to be quite consistent with Kierkegaard’s thought and suggest a possible rationale for why Rorty’s seems to overlook these points of resonance. Third, I will work through the specific places where Rorty discusses Kierkegaard throughout his authorship. Finally, I will conclude by outlining lessons that Kierkegaard scholars can learn from Rorty’s, albeit limited, use of Kierkegaard. II. From Philosophy to Politics: A Brief Introduction to Rorty’s Thought For Rorty, philosophy is not a foundational discourse that offers some sort of privileged access to objective truth. Rather, receiving inspiration in particular from

See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 3), see especially chapters 16 and 17; Richard Rorty, “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), pp. 119–28; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin Books 1999, see chapter 15. See also, Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 1), pp. 175–96; Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), pp. 42–55. 4 In his account of Rorty’s “heroes and villains,” David L. Hall does not include Kierkegaard on either list; see David L. Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press 1994, pp. 240–1. 5 Matthew Festenstein, “Richard Rorty: Pragmatism, Irony, and Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, Oxford: Polity Press 2001, pp. 1–14, see p. 1. 3

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John Dewey’s claim that pragmatism is “the philosophy of democracy”6 and from the formative influences of his socially active parents and their friends, Rorty’s work is as much social commentary and literary criticism as it is technical scholarship. Without wanting to introduce rigid divisions into an authorship that displays a generally coherent trajectory, Rorty’s philosophical career can be split into three basic periods—each representing a shift of emphasis and style from what came before. The first period, which spans from Rorty’s first academic appointment at Wellesley College in 1958 to 1972 (a period that includes his receiving tenure at Princeton University in 1965), might be termed Rorty’s professional period. It was during these years that Rorty attempted to engage the main debates dominating analytic philosophy while still bringing to bear insights from his extensive work in the history of philosophy. Early on in this period, Rorty’s thought had a decidedly metaphysical and metaphilosophical cast to it. Given the joint influences of his former professors, including Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) at Chicago and Paul Weiss (1901–2002) at Yale, it is not surprising that Rorty’s initial work would be geared towards such issues. However, Rorty’s own interest in metaphysics had much earlier roots. In his autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” Rorty notes that when he was 15 he read Plato and it “seemed clear that Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable.”7 As Rorty explains, “I wanted very much to be some kind of Platonist, and from 15 to 20 I did my best. But it didn’t pan out.”8 Rorty’s more metaphysical work in the late 1950s and early 1960s eventually gave way to technical analytic scholarship in the mid-1960s. Perhaps the most influential text from this period is Rorty’s edited volume The Linguistic Turn (1967),9 but many of his journal articles from the same time also display rigorous analytic discipline.10 Noting a shift in Rorty’s philosophical direction, his own mother writes in a letter in 1966 that “Dick has stopped being a metaphysician.”11 The second period of Rorty’s authorship, which I will label his polemical period, spans from 1972 to the mid-1980s. The defining text of this second period, and perhaps Rorty’s most important book, is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which was published in 1979.12 The works of this period are defined by two See Christopher J. Voparil, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2006, pp. 16–18. 7 Rorty, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 3–20, see p. 9. 8 Ibid. 9 Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1967. 10 See Richard Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 19, 1965, pp. 24–54; Richard Rorty, “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 67, 1970, pp. 399–429; Richard Rorty, “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 24, 1970, pp. 112–21; and Richard Rorty, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 24, 1970, pp. 207–44. 11 Winifred Rauschenbush to “MR,” November 6, 1966, cited in Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2008, p. 189. 12 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979. 6

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general characteristics. First, as displayed in 1972’s “The World Well Lost”13 and culminating in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there is a decidedly historicist and anti-realist critique of the history of Western philosophy. Second, there is a move towards pragmatism as the model for philosophical inquiry. When taken together, these characteristics yield a rigorous challenge to what Rorty takes to be the epistemological project of modern philosophy—namely, “foundationalism.” Getting clear on what Rorty means by “foundationalism” can be a difficult task because there are many conceptions that overlap and interplay in his thought.14 Nonetheless, Rorty brings these various conceptions together when he outlines the “aim” of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: The aim of the book is to undermine the reader’s confidence in “the mind” as something about which one should have a “philosophical” view, in “knowledge” as something about which there ought to be a “theory” and which has “foundations,” and in “philosophy” as it has been conceived since Kant.15

Rorty goes on to claim that “the book, like the writings of the philosophers I most admire, is therapeutic rather than constructive. The therapy offered is, nevertheless, parasitic upon the constructive efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose frame of reference I am trying to put in question.”16 Here, we can see the polemical nature of the works from this period. He is not simply arguing for a philosophical thesis that stands in contrast to the theses that dominate contemporary debates. He actually challenges the very status of philosophical argumentation itself by contesting what he takes to be the dominant metaphor in philosophy—namely, the “mirror” of nature. Simply put, Rorty’s position, a position he finds in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), as well as in Davidson, W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), and Sellars, is that there is not a “world” out there beyond the domain of linguistic context and cultural frames. This leads him to defend a neo-pragmatic perspective that is anti-foundationalist, anti-realist, anti-essentialist, and thoroughly contextualist. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty terms this basic perspective “epistemological behaviorism” and defines it as the notion of “explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former.”17 In stark contrast to his earlier metaphysical leanings, Rorty now says that “this sort of behaviorism can best be seen as a species of holism—but one which requires no idealist metaphysical underpinnings.”18 In this polemical period, Rorty’s authorship begins to display a decidedly literary tone as he moves away from the notion of philosophy as foundational discourse for human Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 69, 1972, pp. 649–65. (Reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, pp. 3–18.) 14 See Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell 1995. 15 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 7. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 174. 18 Ibid. 13

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knowing and toward the notion of philosophy as a literary genre. This aesthetic dimension of his work will become even more pronounced in the third period of his work. Rorty’s third period, which I will term his political period, begins roughly in the mid-1980s and continues up to his death in 2007. This period was largely defined by Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) in which Rorty explicitly argues for philosophy as a political task.19 Richard Bernstein (b. 1932) notes that this shift to the political in Rorty’s thought is a major transition in his authorship: Rorty’s political allegiances were virtually unknown until the 1980s. Using the distinction that he makes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity between the “private” and the “public,” we might even say that his political views were relatively private— those of a private citizen. His public persona was that of a professional philosopher who, initially attracted to metaphysics and the history of philosophy, had been converted to analytic philosophy.20

Major themes in Rorty’s political period are a fairly rigid distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere, an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy, and an even more explicit willingness to embrace the pragmatist or neopragmatist moniker. For Rorty, pragmatism named the realization that philosophy is best understood as a “cultural politics” of a particular sort. The political vision that Rorty defends is one defined by an embrace of continued, and ever more inclusive, conversation and a shared commitment that “cruelty is the worst thing we can do.”21 Importantly, Rorty brings his epistemological critique from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to bear on his increasingly political discourse. Having abandoned foundationalism in all its forms, Rorty now readily admits that “there is no answer to the question ‘Why not be cruel?’ ” and there is “no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible.”22 On Rorty’s model, there is no position outside of the historical and social context in which moral and political principles are articulated and affirmed. Instead, “anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to [these] sort[s] of questions…is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician.”23 Having repudiated metaphysics and displaced theology along with philosophy, Rorty now turns his attention to social criteria for judging the value of a philosophical text. There are two sorts of texts and two sorts of thinkers: those devoted to private self-creation and those devoted to public social hope. The key for Rorty is that we should not expect thinkers exemplary of the former to be of use in the project of the latter: Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. 20 Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 124–38, see pp. 127–8. 21 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. xv. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 19

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J. Aaron Simmons Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection—a self-created, autonomous human life—can be like. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort—the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel.24

With such a distinction in place, Rorty’s late work is not about the business of using argument to convince his philosophical interlocutors of the truth of his position, but is devoted to “redescribing” the basic tenets of liberalism as more attractive to his fellow citizens. Summarizing the general arc of his philosophical project from the mid-1970s onward, Rorty says in an interview in 2002 that “if you have hope, it [doesn’t] really matter whether you believe that Christ was the son of God, or that there are universal rights. The essential thing is to dream of a better world. Hope doesn’t require justification, cognitive status, foundations, or anything else.”25 Although Rorty’s polemical and political writings gained him a wide readership, they have received mixed reviews from the philosophical community. For some, Rorty’s philosophy is one of the most original and important models of how to think and live in a postmodern world.26 For others, Rorty’s wide use of varied philosophical traditions leads to problematic and superficial readings of other philosophers.27 While he has been described as the “prophet and poet of the new pragmatism,” many thinkers working in the pragmatist tradition are stringent critics of Rorty’s appropriation of the term. As Bernstein writes: When Rorty speaks of “pragmatism” or “we pragmatists,” his meaning is so idiosyncratic that one can barely recognize any resemblance between what he says and any of the classical pragmatists. So rather than viewing Rorty as a hero who has helped make pragmatism intellectual respectable, his critics view him as the villain in the story—who betrays the tradition he is always invoking.28 Ibid.,p. xiv. Richard Rorty, Derek Nystrom, and Kent Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press 2002, p. 59. 26 See, for example, Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism; Alan Malachowski, Richard Rorty, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2002. 27 As Charles Hartshorne writes: “In Rorty’s thinking there is much subtlety and a wide acquaintance with contrasting philosophies. However, in dealing with some topics of interest to me, also to Peirce and James, he becomes crude or dogmatic.” See Charles Hartshorne, “Rorty’s Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. by Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., Nashville, Tennessee and London: Vanderbilt University Press 1995, pp. 16–28, see p. 20. 28 Richard J. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, pp. 54–67, see pp. 62–3. Cheryl Misak clearly distinguishes between Rorty’s neo-pragmatism and the Peircean inspired group of “new pragmatists” of which she considers herself a part. As she writes: “New Pragmatists can be seen as the latest contribution to [the] longstanding set of debates [regarding what pragmatism entails]. Some [new pragmatists]… explicitly try to reclaim the label ‘pragmatism’ from a particular interpretation of it—from Richard Rorty’s view that there is no truth or objectivity to be hand, only solidarity, or agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away with saying.” See New Pragmatists, ed. by Cheryl Misak, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2007, p. 1. 24 25

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Finally, when it comes to politics, many take issue with his account of “postmodern bourgeois liberalism.” As an example, one critic suggests that Rorty’s pluralism, “rejects relativism at the expense of a kind of cavalier elitism, and his politics makes room for solidarity only by imposing a form of terror; his public/private distinction forces the notion that only one form of political discourse, the liberal democratic one, is valid.”29 A thinker that is both controversial and yet compelling, sincere and yet ironic, rigorous and yet playful, Richard Rorty deserves the attention that has been paid his work while rightfully receiving robust criticism of it. III. Missed Opportunities and Multiple Kierkegaards Considering Rorty’s significant use of irony, his breakdown of the divide between philosophy and literature, his focus on lived truth, his thoroughgoing antiprofessionalism,30 and his affirmation of a distinction between systematic and edifying discourse, Kierkegaard would appear to be a profound resource for Rorty’s own philosophical (and, importantly, social) project. Moreover, Rorty’s critique of modern epistemology is something that might resonate with Kierkegaard’s own resistance to the objectivism and epistemic certainty that he took to accompany Hegel’s philosophy. In light of all of these possible points of resonance between the thought of Rorty and Kierkegaard, there has been surprisingly little work done putting the two in conversation. Only a few essays have been devoted to such an engagement. For example, Brad Frazier and Anthony Rudd have both written essays that detail the possible points of convergence and points of divergence between Rortian irony and Kierkegaardian irony.31 Additionally, Jon Stewart has objected to Rorty’s recommendation that philosophy be viewed as a species of comparative literature by suggesting that Kierkegaard, among others, offers arguments that resist such a suggestion.32 In an essay on Rorty and antirealism, Frank B. Farrell spends a paragraph considering Kierkegaard and Rorty on the relation between the public and private spheres of human existence.33 Despite these examples, discussions of

Honi Fern Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York and London: Routledge 1994, p. 44. See also Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 124–38; Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyan Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. by Guignon and Hiley, pp. 139–57. 30 I borrow the term “antiprofessionalism” from Voparil, Richard Rorty, p. 17. 31 Brad Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006; Anthony Rudd, “Kierkegaard’s Critique of Pure Irony,” in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, ed. by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1998, pp. 82–96. 32 Jon Stewart, “The Philosophical Curriculum and Literary Culture: A Response to Richard Rorty,” Man and World, vol. 27, 1994, pp. 195–209. 33 Frank B. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, pp. 154–88, see pp. 186–7. 29

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Kierkegaard in Rortian literature are few and far between.34 In his book-length annotated bibliography of the secondary literature on Rorty, Richard Rumana only mentions Kierkegaard twice.35 In Neil Gross’ very detailed intellectual biography of Rorty, Kierkegaard does not even show up in the index.36 Further, though Kierkegaard’s name sometimes does appear in other essays on Rorty, such mentions rarely involve deep engagement.37 Finally, in the extant literature of Rorty, there has been no sustained consideration of the use that Rorty makes of Kierkegaard or the particular interpretations of Kierkegaard that Rorty suggests. As one possible explanation for why Rorty just does not seem to seriously consider Kierkegaard a resource to his own work one might suggest that Kierkegaard’s decidedly Christian approach to existence stands in stark contrast to Rorty’s own general apathy towards religious belief. Indeed, instead of viewing religion as the highest stage of human existence and the knight of faith as a model of singularity, Rorty once claimed that we should view “religion as a conversation stopper,”38 and he seems to suggest that the knight of faith is a disaster in the context of democratic society.39 Though there are certainly deep differences between the two thinkers on the value of religious belief, even here Kierkegaard might be of more value to Rorty than initially supposed. Rorty claims that atheism is a problematic description of his own position because it displays too metaphysical a perspective on religion, which is better understood as a social practice and not as a set of “true beliefs” about the existence of a divine being. As such, Rorty suggests that he does not want to really defend atheism as such, but rather anti-clericalism.40 This approach allows Rorty to characterize his opposition to religion as a political gesture and not as an ontological thesis. Considering Kierkegaard’s own “attack on Christendom,” it is not without warrant that one could describe his work as also displaying an anti-clerical disposition. Therefore, Rorty’s limited use of Kierkegaard is not adequately explained simply because one is a Christian and one is an atheist. Instead, I contend that Rorty’s use 34 One other place where a more extended consideration of Rorty and Kierkegaard can be found is my own doctoral dissertation. See J. Aaron Simmons, Violence and Singularity: Thinking Politics Otherwise with Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Levinas, Ph.D. Thesis, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 2006. 35 Richard Rumana, Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002. 36 See Gross, Richard Rorty. 37 See, for example, Robert B. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. by Robert B. Brandom, Oxford: Blackwell 2000, pp. 156–83, see p. 172; James Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell,” in Rorty and His Critics, pp. 268–342, see p. 331, note 135; and Allen Hance, “Pragmatism as Naturalized Hegelianism: Overcoming Transcendental Philosophy?” in Rorty and Pragmatism, pp. 100–21, see p. 109. 38 Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 168–74. 39 Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. by Santiago Zabala, New York: Columbia University Press 2005, p. 71. 40 Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, pp. 29–41.

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of Kierkegaard is so minimal primarily due to Rorty’s belief that Kierkegaard’s “religious” philosophy offers no social value for contemporary democratic politics.41 With this general rationale in place, we can begin to understand why in some of the places where Rorty mentions Kierkegaard he does so in a way that exposes a deep appreciation and sensitivity to the Kierkegaardian project (for example, as an exemplar of edifying discourse and a striking model of opposition to systematic philosophy), and yet in other places Rorty does so in a way that is so dismissive that it might cause one to conclude that Rorty just really did not read much Kierkegaard at all (for example, the details regarding Kierkegaard’s notions of faith and ethical life). Accordingly, I want to suggest that rather than seeing Rorty’s account of Kierkegaard as simply having several components, that we consider Rorty as presenting multiple Kierkegaards. There are at least four versions of Kierkegaard that appear in Rorty’s authorship: Kierkegaard 1—the reader and critic of Hegel; Kierkegaard 2—the religious thinker; Kierkegaard 3—the private ironist; and Kierkegaard 4—the literary jokester. Though Rorty creates something of a straw-man for each of these four Kierkegaards, his account of each cannot be quickly dismissed as irrelevant to Kierkegaardian research. Instead, Rorty’s readings, while superficial, actually open spaces for moments of potentially profound insight that Kierkegaardians would be wrong to ignore. In the next four sections, I will consider each of Rorty’s Kierkegaards in turn. In what follows, I have attempted to include (either in the body of the article or in the notes) every reference that Rorty makes to Kierkegaard throughout his authorship. IV. Kierkegaard 1: The Reader and Critic of Hegel In his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” Rorty offers the following account of his early relationship to Hegel: My starting point was the discovery of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which I read as saying: granted that philosophy is just a matter of out-redescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition…. For quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the

I propose the following argument as a more extended account of this rationale: (1) The religious trajectory of Kierkegaard’s work is thoroughgoing and pervasive throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. (2) Religion is a potential obstacle for productive social discourse, and if there is a way to reach our social goals without it, then all the better for society itself. (3) The really valuable aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought (namely, the resistance to systems, the literary style, the turn to subjectivity, etc.) are all also found in other thinkers who avoid the religious tendencies of Kierkegaard—for example, Heidegger, Derrida, and Michel Foucault (1926–84). (4) Therefore, though it is worth mentioning Kierkegaard as an occasional example of a particular position, a deep engagement with his thought does not yield anything productive for the future of human social existence that a deep engagement with Derrida, say, does not. And, according to a generally pragmatic calculus, it is a better strategy to engage those thinkers who are most useful for a particular end without also raising problems for that end. 41

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What Rorty appreciates most in Hegel is his historicism (that is, his “anti-Platonism”). What Rorty finds most troubling about Hegel is his continued “pretensions to scientificity and rigor.”43 Rorty finds Kierkegaard to be a valuable commentator on Hegel precisely because Kierkegaard, like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), “sneers” at such Hegelian pretensions while maintaining a commitment to the importance of historical particularity.44 Rorty suggests that, for Kierkegaard, Hegel “was a ‘poor existing individual’ who invented the System in the vain hope of losing his finitude by absorption into it.”45 It appears, then, that Rorty did not initially read Kierkegaard because of an interest in Kierkegaard, but because of an interest in Hegel. When asked why he began to read Heidegger in the late 1950s, Rorty replies: “I think that I read Heidegger to find out what people who read Hegel were saying about him; I read Kierkegaard for the same reason.”46 Rorty’s appropriation of Kierkegaard as a reader of Hegel displays two characteristic themes. First, Rorty will often, as expressed in the passages above, reference Kierkegaard as a critic of Hegel’s systematicity and universality.47 For Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 11. Richard Rorty, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, pp. 50–65, see p. 61. 44 Ibid. 45 Rorty, “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” in Truth and Progress, p. 333. Later in the same essay, Rorty comments that it was precisely this reading of Hegel that actually motivated Kierkegaard’s own original philosophy as a response to the historical context in which he found himself: “Imitate Kierkegaard, who praised Kant for the honesty of his resistance to dialectic, yet knew that it would never have occurred to him that he was only a poor existing individual unless Hegel had hinted that he might, in a dialectical way, be God” (p. 341). 46 Richard Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. by Eduardo Mendieta, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2006, p. 44. 47 Often, such mentions are quick and without real substance. For example: “It would help us Western philosophers get our bearings in the East if we could identify some Eastern cultural traditions which made fun of Eastern philosophy. The kind of fun I have in mind is not the in-house kind which we philosophers make of one another (for example, the kind of fun which Plato makes of Protagoras, Hume of natural theology, Kierkegaard of Hegel, or Derrida of Heidegger). It is rather that made by people who either could not follow a philosophical argument if they tried, or by people who have no wish to try.” See Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, pp. 66–82, see p. 73. Elsewhere, they are a bit more substantive: “Hegel still tried to break culture up into parts labeled ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Art,’ ‘Natural Science,’ and the like, and tried to give priority to philosophy. In particular, he insisted that there was something called ‘the System’ or “Absolute Knowledge’—something so big and so finely structured as to eliminate any residual blurs. This insistence that there might be a completed object of knowledge provoked justified ridicule from, among others, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Dewey. Nobody since their time, with the possible exception of Kojève, has taken seriously the idea that there was something called ‘Philosophy’ that reached its completion with Hegel. Rather, we have treated Hegel as a reduction ad absurdum of the 42 43

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example, despite the important historical emphasis one finds in Hegel, Rorty says that he “agree[s] with Kierkegaard” that it was the “mistaken notion” of “an autonomous, self-generating, speculative kind of philosophy” that eventually “made Hegel fall on his face.”48 Rorty rarely locates Kierkegaard as unique in such a critique, but instead mentions him as part of a general reaction to Hegelian thought: “By the time of Marx and Kierkegaard, everybody was saying that the emperor had no clothes—that whatever idealism might be it was not a demonstrable, quasi-scientific thesis.”49 Elsewhere Rorty refers to the “aggressive post-Hegelian anti-rationalisms of Kierkegaard, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and others.”50 One particular Kierkegaardian text that Rorty often draws upon in his use of Kierkegaard as a critic of Hegel is Philosophical Fragments. What Rorty finds to be helpful in Fragments is the distinction it draws between the “Socratic” and, what we might term, the “religious” modes of learning truth. Though never providing a detailed exegetical analysis of Fragments, Rorty summarizes the “Socratic” approach as a model of “the idea that anybody who is willing to listen to reason— to hear out all the arguments—can be brought around to the truth.”51 “This view, which Kierkegaard called ‘Socratism’ and contrasted with the claim that our point of departure may be simply a historical event,” Rorty continues, “is intertwined with the idea that the human self has a center…and that argumentation will, given time and patience, penetrate to this center.”52 For Rorty, the key to the “religious” mode idea of Absolute Knowledge and so have dropped the Platonic-Hegelian ideal of the Wise Man. We have become content to say what Hegel himself said once, and Marx and Dewey said pretty consistently: that philosophy is, at most, its time held in thought.” See Rorty, “The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope,” in Truth and Progress, p. 233. 48 Richard Rorty, “Response to Allen Hance,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, pp. 122–5, see p. 123. 49 Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” Monist, vol. 64, no. 2, 1981, pp. 155–74, see p. 163. (Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 147.) 50 Rorty, “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 79. 51 Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 188. 52 Ibid. Later in the same essay, Rorty again deploys this distinction: “In Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, to which I have referred earlier, we find the Platonic Theory of Recollection treated as the archetypal justification of ‘Socratism’ and thus as the symbol of all forms (especially Hegel’s) of what Bernard Williams has recently called ‘the rationalist theory of rationality’—the idea that one is rational only if one can appeal to universally accepted criteria, criteria whose truth and applicability all human beings can find ‘in their heart.’ This is the philosophical core of the Scriptural idea that ‘truth is great, and will prevail,’ when the idea is dissociated from the idea of ‘a New Being’ (in the way that Kierkegaard refused to dissociate it)” (p. 191, note 43). The idea of Kierkegaardian faith being something that resists reduction to argument and universal assent is a recurring theme in Rorty: “For religion in its uncontaminated form, argument is no more important than is belief. To become a New Being in Christ is, as Kierkegaard insisted, not the same sort of thing as being forced to grant the truth of a proposition in the course of Socratic reflection, or as the outcome of Hegelian dialectic. Insofar as religion requires belief in a proposition, it is, as Locke said, belief based on the credit of the proposer rather than backed by argument. But beliefs are irrelevant to the

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of learning is that it is thoroughly historical and denies anything like a universal access-point to truth that is available to all humans simply because of their shared rationality. In a more extended passage from his essay “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” Rorty will again draw upon this Kierkegaardian distinction: Another way is to think of [Plato] as convinced that all human beings have the truth within them, that they are already in possession of the key to the ultimate secrets—that they merely need to know themselves in order to attain their goal. This is the basic assumption of what Kierkegaard, in his Philosophical Fragments, called “Socratism.” To make this assumption is to believe that we have a built-in affinity for the truth, a built-in way of tracking it once we glimpse it, a built-in tendency to get into the right relation to a more powerful Other….For Kierkegaard, the opposite of Socratism was Christianity—the claim that man is not complete, is not in the truth, but rather can attain truth only by being re-created, by being made into a New Being by Grace. Kierkegaard thought that Socratism was Sin, and that Sin was the attempt by Man to assume the role of God, an attempt which found its reduction in Hegel’s System.53

Though Rorty will certainly not advocate the specifics of Kierkegaard’s “Christian” alternative, he does seem to appreciate the way in which Kierkegaard was an uncompromising defender of the importance of the historical moment as the space in which truth happens. Accordingly, the Kierkegaardian framework, when stripped of its religious trajectory will be used by Rorty to facilitate his own contention that the happening of truth is located in the social discourse of human conversation. This is precisely why Rorty sees Kierkegaard to be “edifying” as opposed to “systematic.”54 special devotion of the illiterate believer to Demeter, or to the Virgin of Guadelupe. It is this irrelevance that intellectuals like St. Paul, Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth—spiritual athletes who relish the thought that their faith is a folly to the Greeks—hope to recapture.” See Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 92. 53 Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 31. Rorty goes on to say that “A lot of Heidegger can profitably be read as a reflection on the possibility that Kierkegaard was right to reject Socratism but wrong to accept Christianity—or, more generally, on the possibility that humanism and Pauline Christianity are alternative forms of a single temptation.” See ibid. Later in the same essay, he writes: “To be fair to Kierkegaard, he too realized that something other than power relations were needed to make sense of Christianity. See his claim that ‘the form of the servant was not something put on’ in his discussion of the Incarnation as a solution to a loving God’s need not to overwhelm the beloved sinner.” See ibid., p. 33, note 13. 54 Consider Rorty’s claim in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 369: “On the one hand, there are revolutionary philosophers…who see the incommensurability of their new vocabulary with the old as a temporary inconvenience, to be blamed on the shortcomings of their predecessors and to be overcome by the institutionalization of their own vocabulary. On the other hand, there are great philosophers who dread the thought that their vocabulary should ever be institutionalized, or that their writing might be seen as commensurable with the tradition. Husserl and Russell (like Descartes and Kant) are of the former sort. The later Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger (like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) are of the latter sort. Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its point when the period they were reacting against is over. They are intentionally peripheral.

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The second theme that is characteristic of Rorty’s appropriation of Kierkegaard as a critic of Hegel is the claim that Hegel’s vocabulary is really better understood as an aesthetic gesture than as a metaphysical one: Once it began to seem (as it did to Kant) that we had always known a priori all there was to know about the “morally relevant” portion of human beings, the Hegelian urge to enrich our vocabulary of moral reflection began to seem (as it did to Kierkegaard) a merely “aesthetic” demand, something that might amuse a leisured elite but which had no relevance to our moral responsibilities.55

With the aestheticization of philosophical discourse, Rorty contends, comes a disregard for certainty as the gold-standard for inquiry. Finding this epistemological consequence to be displayed in Kierkegaard’s thought, Rorty writes that “the knight of faith has no need of, or desire for, certainty. Kierkegaardian, Nietzschean and Dostoievskian heroes know that the quest for certainty is a cop-out, and that absolute commitment has nothing to do with the ability to win arguments or convince opponents.”56 According to Rorty’s redescription of the history of philosophy, there was a transition from a philosophical to literary culture that “began shortly after Kant” and was exemplified by Hegel’s claim that “philosophy paints its gray on gray only when a form of life has grown old.”57 Rorty suggests that Kierkegaard and Marx both recognized the form of life that had grown old to be ironically located in Hegel’s own philosophical project. “The generation of Kierkegaard and Marx,” Rorty writes, “realize[d] that philosophy was never going to fill the redemptive role that Hegel himself had claimed for it.”58 To Rorty, Kierkegaard expressed the “verdict of the literary culture” on idealist metaphysics when he claimed that “if Hegel had written at the end of his books that ‘this was all just a thought experiment’ he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, but that, as it was, he was merely a buffoon.”59 In a rather uncharacteristic interpretive expansion on this Kierkegaardian passage, Rorty continues on to offer his own take on this claim:

Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation.” 55 Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 157. 56 Rorty, “Honest Mistakes,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 65. See also Rorty’s claim in “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude” that “If you have something like what Kierkegaard called ‘faith,’ or if you can engage in what Heidegger called ‘Denken,’ it will not matter to you whether or not other people can be persuaded to share your beliefs.” See Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 78. 57 Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 91. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 96. The reference Rorty gives for this quotation is to Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books 1996, p. 182. Interestingly, the actual passage from the Hannay translation makes no mention of Hegel as a “buffoon,” but instead merely claims that “as it is he is comical.” The Hong and Hong translation accords with Hannay here: “as it is he is comic.” See JP 2, 1605 (this corresponds to SKS 18, 224–5, JJ:265 / KJN 2, 206).

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For Rorty, the Kierkegaardian challenge to Hegel’s dialectical tropes continues to press in the context of contemporary philosophy because there remain today examples of the “somewhat farcical attempt to be ever more un-Platonic.”61 However, Rorty notes that such attempts “ha[ve] produced the suspicion that, like so many windup dolls, the philosophers of this century are still performing the same tedious dialectical inversions which Hegel did to death in the Phenomenology, the inversions which Kierkegaard liked to call ‘dog-tricks.’ ”62 V. Kierkegaard 2: The Religious Thinker Religion is a rather complicated topic in Rorty’s work—especially in his political period. Most often discussed in the context of social discourse and the project of solidarity, Rorty usually presents religion as something that is acceptable if and only if it is “redescribed” as another way of referring to the “social hope” that unites “we liberals.” However, if religion is understood in a more private and doctrinal way, then Rorty’s contention that it amounts to a “conversation stopper” presents an obstacle to something like a Kierkegaardian version of neo-pragmatism. Though towards the end of his life Rorty had begun to be more accommodating to the notion of religion in the public square, he never considered something like the “absolute 60 Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 97. See also Rorty’s comment elsewhere: “My favorite remark of Kierkegaard’s about Hegel is that if he had ended books like Science of Logic and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the remark that ‘this was all just a thought experiment,’ he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. Kierkegaard went on to say that, as it was, he was a buffoon. The epithet is too harsh, but the spirit of the remark seems right.” See Rorty, “Response to Allen Hance,” p. 221, note 2. 61 Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 96. 62 Ibid. The phrase, Hegelian “dog-tricks” shows up elsewhere in Rorty’s corpus. See Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 30, no. 2, 1976, pp. 280–305, see pp. 296–7. (Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 48.) The Danish term here is Hundekunster, and it is translated in the Hong and Hong edition of Philosophical Fragments as “flip-flopping tricks” (SKS 4, 217 / PF, 6). Since Rorty frequently suggests that Kierkegaard was one of the funniest philosophers of all time (see section VII below), one wonders whether the phrase “flip-flopping tricks” would have made the same impression on him as “dog-tricks” clearly did.

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relation to the Absolute” described by Kierkegaard to be of much worth. For Rorty, the best way to conceive of religion was to follow Dewey’s lead in rethinking it as a general disposition towards recognizing fellow human beings as worth being concerned about. As Rorty makes clear, “for Dewey God is in no way Kierkegaard’s Wholly Other.”63 Rorty’s take on Kierkegaardian religion is anything but sophisticated. Despite Rorty’s approval of the otherwise commendable historicism that Kierkegaard displays in his critique of “Socratism” (that is, Kierkegaard 1), his account of Kierkegaard 2 is as a fideist who makes God so transcendent as to be of no social use. Repeatedly, Rorty will simply refer to “Kierkegaard’s Wholly Other” as an almost dismissive way of removing Kierkegaardian religion from any relation to the social engagement where humans meet other humans. In the book he wrote with Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936), The Future of Religion, Rorty praises Vattimo’s own conception of religion as overcoming that found in Kierkegaard: Kant’s suggestion that we view God as a postulate of pure practical reason rather than an explanation of empirical phenomena cleared the way for thinkers like Schleiermacher to develop what Nancy Frankenberry has called “a theology of symbolic forms.” It also encouraged thinkers like Kierkegaard, Barth, and Levinas to make God wholly other— beyond the reach not only of evidence and argument but of discursive thought. Vattimo’s importance lies in his rejection of both of these unhappy post-Kantian initiatives.64

What Rorty finds Vattimo to recognize (that Kierkegaard does not) is that religion should be “privatized,” that is, a matter of what one does with one’s solitude and not what one does in the public square.65 “If one gives up the idea that either the quest for truth or the quest for God is hard-wired into all human organisms and allows that both are matters of cultural formation,” Rorty proclaims, “then such privatization [of religion] will seem natural and proper.”66 In a dialogue with Rorty, Vattimo attempts to defend Kierkegaard by suggesting that Fear and Trembling is really about the potential conflict between “the general rule and the personal vocation.” Rorty replies that “Kierkegaard has a taste for dramatization and infinite differences. There is no suggestion that Abraham and God might have talked things over.”67 Again, here we see Rorty clearly suggesting that religion is fine as a matter of personal self-creation but quite irrelevant as a political gesture.68 Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 41. 64 Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in Rorty and Vattimo, The Future of Religion, pp. 34–5. 65 I should note that this is certainly a contestable reading of Vattimo. 66 Rorty and Vattimo, The Future of Religion, p. 39. 67 Ibid., p. 71. 68 I want to make clear that from about 2002 onward, Rorty has been much more amenable to religious belief being deployed in the public square. However, despite this change of attitude from his earlier perspective that, following his reading of John Rawls, required individuals to bracket their comprehensive doctrines in order to participate in public discourse, Rorty never really believes that the incorporation of religion will be a productive contribution to public debate, but merely something that cannot be necessarily excluded from 63

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Although Rorty’s liberal proclivities might suggest that he would be fine with whatever truth claims a religious believer wants to affirm as a tool of self-creation, his anti-realism and deflationary conception of truth will not allow him to grant that Kierkegaard’s account of Christianity is somehow true outside of its embeddedness in historical tradition. For Rorty, both Heidegger and Kierkegaard “need to invoke the tradition to identify what it is that has been wrongly approached, or has veiled itself. But both need to repudiate the tradition utterly in order to say what they want to say.”69 The problem occurs, Rorty contends, “when Kierkegaard reaches beyond Hegel and history for that which thought cannot think—the intersection of the temporal and the eternal—he has no business hinting that we should call it ‘Christ.’ Christ, after all, is what Christians think He is.”70 Rorty’s frustration with Kierkegaard is not that Kierkegaard was religious—indeed, Rorty often praises the way that Kierkegaard stands as a model of “edifying philosophy”71—but that Kierkegaard does not really recognize what the real stakes of human existence are all about. Considering “Kierkegaard’s attempt to escape from the aesthetic to the ethical, and then from the ethical to the consciousness of sin,” Rorty simply comments: C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.72 The real battle, for Rorty, is to “make the best selves for ourselves that we can” through the process of “continual redescription.”73 If religion is helpful in such a project, then so be it, but if not, then we should be willing to move on without it. The Kierkegaardian temptation, Rorty believes, is to get stuck in a “final vocabulary” regarding the shape of human existence in relation to God. Despite Kierkegaard’s historicist criticisms of Hegel’s forgetfulness of the “poor existing individual,” Rorty’s conclusion is that Kierkegaard himself falls prey to

it. This is made clear when Rorty differentiates between the public utility of a “campaign” and the unhelpful phenomenon of a “movement.” As Rorty writes in his Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1998, p. 114: “By ‘campaign,’ I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called ‘the passion of the infinite.’ They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism.” 69 Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” p. 303. (Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 53.) 70 Ibid. 71 See, for example, the following two passages from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: “On the periphery of this history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a ‘tradition,’ resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of this sort” (p. 367); “The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing with Lessing’s choice of the infinite striving for truth over ‘all of Truth’ ” (p. 377). This last passage contains the following footnote: “Kierkegaard made this choice the prototype of his own choice of ‘subjectivity’ over ‘system’ ” (p. 377, note 20). 72 Rorty, “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 169. 73 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 80.

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an all too objective account of subjectivity; an account that is not receptive to the dynamism of public discourse and social progress.74 VI. Kierkegaard 3: The Private Ironist Summarizing Rorty’s public/private distinction, Robert Brandom (b. 1950) claims that “public vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our answering to each other; private vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our each answering to ourselves.”75 “Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Heidegger, Proust, and Nabokov,” Brandom continues, “are theorists, practitioners, and admirers of the kinds of private vocabularies whose job it is to transform and perfect individual selves, making possible the formulation and pursuit of novel personal goals and projects.”76 Given Kierkegaard’s literary and religious focus, Rorty finds him to stand in stark contrast to the “public vocabularies” of Karl Marx (1818–83), John Stuart Mill (1806–73), John Rawls, and John Dewey. “When people develop private vocabularies and private self-images, people like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Derrida,” Rorty writes, “it’s very unclear what impact, if any, this will ever have on public discourse.77 74 In a discussion of Heidegger, Rorty’s critique of Kierkegaard on this front is made clear: “[Heidegger] is not saying, like Tillich, that it is getting hard to find a good symbol of our ultimate concern. He is saying, like Kierkegaard, that symbol-hunting is sin. This way of putting things may suggest that I am, like a good modern, neglecting the ‘ontological difference’ between Being and beings. But…Heidegger neglects it too—and it is well for him that he does. If he did not, he would no longer have anything to differentiate his talk of Being from Kierkegaard’s talk of God and of Grace. Unless Heidegger connected the history of Being with that of men and nations through such phrases as ‘a nation’s relation to Being,’ and thus connected the history of philosophy with just plain history, he would be able to say only what Kierkegaard said: that when all the advances of modern civilization are utilized, all the dog-tricks of the Hegelian dialectic practiced and perfected, and all the aspects of life and culture related by all the concepts one could imagine ever being evolved, we shall still be as far as ever from that which is strenger als das Begriffliche….With this reference [to the history of nations] we at least seem to have an analogue of an eschatological and Augustinian sort of Christianity, rather than an analogue of Kierkegaard’s private and Protestant hope that Grace may make him a New Being, able to believe the self-contradictory doctrine of the Incarnation.” See Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 48. 75 Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” p. 172. 76 Ibid. 77 Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, p. 50. In a discussion of Freud as a private thinker, Rorty stresses the lack of direct public traction in his thought and that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard: “Freud, in particular, has no contribution to make to social theory. His domain is the portion of morality that cannot be identified with ‘culture’; it is the private life, the search for a character, the attempt of individuals to be reconciled with themselves (and, in the case of some exceptional individuals, to make their lives works of art). Such an attempt can take one of two antithetical forms: a search for purity or a search for self-enlargement. The ascetic life commended by Plato and criticized by Nietzsche is the

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Given Rorty’s own commitment to being a public intellectual and his devotion to the project of social hope and solidarity, it might seem plausible that he would be motivated to challenge the philosophical legitimacy of private discourse tout court. However, he does exactly the opposite. Although Rorty admits one might perceive a thinker like Dewey to require a sense of social well-being or a notion of the common good as necessary for the project of individual fulfillment, he wonders whether Dewey would “have insisted on the point.”78 As examples of philosophers who would decisively reject such a requirement he mentions Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and Kierkegaard.79 Liberalism, as interpreted by Rorty, is what actually protects the freedom for different people to conceive of the private task in various ways. Further, the public/private split is not something that itself privileges one over the other. The argument that runs throughout the texts from Rorty’s political period is that problems arise when we expect thinkers working in one sphere to be of use in the other: “Just as Kierkegaard’s knight of faith looks like a bank clerk, and in public acts like one, so the Romantic intellectual can be, for public purposes, your ordinary bourgeois liberal. It is only when a Romantic intellectual begins to want his private self to serve as a model for other human beings that his politics tend to become antiliberal.”80 Even though he always understands philosophizing to be a social practice that operates according to historically located norms, Rorty never suggests that philosophy itself should be defined as a public task that devalues the importance of the private project of self-creation. This does not mean that all private theorists are rightly labeled “philosophers,” however. Rorty defines a “philosopher” as “somebody who thinks and writes with constant reference, implicit or explicit, to the problems formulated by Plato and Kant.” 81 He admits that “this is not a very precise definition,” but notes that he “cannot give a better one.” The value of such a criterion is that it “accords with our practice of putting Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on the philosophy shelf in the library, but not Proust and Mann.”82 Ever the model of enlarged conversations, one of Rorty’s synchronistic agendas is to contest the narrowing of the philosophical canon because paradigm of the former. The ‘aesthetic’ life criticized by Kierkegaard is the paradigm of the latter.” See Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reasoning,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 154. Importantly, however, Rorty does seem to allow for the long-term possibility of private vocabularies having an impact on public life (see Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, p. 50). 78 Richard Rorty, “Response to Matthew Festenstein,” Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, pp. 219–22, see p. 221. 79 Ibid. 80 Rorty, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 194. 81 Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, p. 69. 82 Ibid. See also Rorty’s claim in his “Philosophy in America Today,” American Scholar, 1982, pp. 183–200, see p. 188. (Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 217): “just as one would be hard put to it to say what the nature of ‘philosophy’ is such that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Frege are all great nineteenth-century philosophers, so it is hard to define ‘philosophy’ so as to make clear why, for example, Kuhn, Kripke, and Rawls are three important contemporary philosophers.”

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of the increasing professionalization of the discipline. “If one thinks of oneself as showing that one need not think about what he tried to think about (as in, e.g., Ayer’s dismissive interpretation of Heidegger, or Heidegger’s dismissive description of Kierkegaard as a ‘religious writer’ rather than a ‘thinker’),” Rorty contends, “then one will think of oneself as explaining why he should not count as a fellowphilosopher. One will redefine ‘philosophy’ so as to read him out of the canon.”83 Rorty’s concern, here, reflects more than simply a commitment to inclusivity. From at least Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards, Rorty contends that we should stop seeing philosophy as something that is essentially different from other modes of social discourse. Yet, by being more inclusive, Rorty is able to performatively deflate the arrogance that he sees to be so dominant in philosophy’s historical relationship to other models of inquiry. Often, Rorty suggests, when a philosopher challenges the radical distinctiveness of philosophy itself, “Kierkegaard and Dewey, for example,” they are then “discovered not to have been ‘real philosophers.’ ”84 The fact that Rorty mentions Kierkegaard alongside his hero, Dewey, should indicate just how much he appreciates Kierkegaard as a philosopher, despite Kierkegaard’s lacking social utility. Elsewhere, Kierkegaard is similarly offered as an exemplar of a philosopher who disrupts the overly professionalized conception of philosophy characteristic of analytic discourse: There is no need to solemnly expel Derrida and Foucault from a temple labeled “philosophy” in order to show one’s dislike for the uses to which their work has been put by others. The question of whether they are “really” philosophers is…without interest. The question of whether they provide a “model” for philosophy should be answered by saying: of course they do, and so do Plato, Hobbes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Davidson.85

Although Kierkegaard would never be considered by Rorty to be someone important for community building, say, he is someone whom Rorty repeatedly celebrates as being part of his own philosophical tradition. While it is clear that Rorty has only a limited appreciation of the complexity of Kierkegaard’s account of religion, it is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard’s religiosity does not, according to Rorty, make him a theologian instead of a philosopher—though it might minimize Rorty’s ability to see him as valuable for Rorty’s own work. VII. Kierkegaard 4: The Literary Jokester In Section IV above, I mentioned places where Rorty cites Kierkegaard as claiming that Hegel was a “buffoon” who was constantly about the business of doing “dogtricks.” Despite the fact that Rorty might have misquoted Kierkegaard a bit, when Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Truth and Progress, p. 257. 84 Rorty, “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein,” Yale Review, vol. 65, no. 3, 1976, pp. 336–56, see p. 336. (Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 19.) 85 Rorty, “Response to Jacques Bouveresse,” in Rorty and His Critics, pp. 146–55, see p. 153.

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coupled with Kierkegaard’s frequent use of such literary devices as irony, parable, and metaphor, references such as these lead Rorty to claim that Kierkegaard was one of the funniest philosophers in the Western tradition. Just as Rorty challenged the foundational assumptions of the philosophical tradition, he also challenged the notion that philosophical style had to be modeled after the systematic treatises of modernity or the technical discourse of contemporary analytic scholarship. According to Rorty, readers miss something when they do not appreciate just how funny authors like Derrida and Kierkegaard actually are. Indeed, when Rorty notes that a philosophical text is humorous, he means it to be high praise. This is clearly displayed in the following passage: However else Derrida may look to history, he will be viewed as one of the great French writers of his time—a writer who happened, like Sartre, to have started off as a philosophy professor, but who quickly transcended his humble origins. Apart from his incredible, almost Nobokovian, polylingual linguistic facility, he is a great comic writer—perhaps the funniest writer on philosophical topics since Kierkegaard.86

Having suggested that Rorty attempted to expand the philosophical canon in order to make way for a more humble philosophical self-conception, it is also important to realize that Rorty provides a sociological account of why such an expansion is more allowable in contemporary society than it had been in the past. Namely, he suggests that as individuals working in one area begin to read more widely in other areas, it becomes increasingly difficult to erect walls of clear demarcation between literature and philosophy: That genre of writing, which does exemplify the dream of philosophy, which culminates in claims like “All intelligible linguistic expression must…” or “All rational discourse must…,” forms only a small part of the history of philosophy. That particular genre has been read with more and more irony and distance in recent centuries. For it is being read by people who have read not only other genres of philosophy but also many of the various other genres of writing shelved under “literature.” A typical contemporary reader of Parmenides, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Ayer will also be a reader of Heraclitus, Hume, Kierkegaard, Austin, Freud, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens— and, for that matter, Jean Genet.87

When philosophy is no longer understood to be contaminated, or made nonphilosophical, when it comes into contact with literature, there is space to allow philosophy itself to become more innovative. For Rorty, Kierkegaard’s literary style Rorty, “Two Meanings of Logocentrism: A Reply to Norris,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 113. Elsewhere, Rorty notes that many of his “analytic colleagues” claim that, “a contribution to philosophy should come in the form of an argument for the truth of a proposition.” In response, Rorty comments in his “Response to Jacques Bouveresse,” in Rorty and His Critics, p. 148: “I think that that is just one of the many forms in which such contributions are made. Contributions are also made by, for example, Kierkegaardian and Derridean jokes.” 87 Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 100. 86

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and humorous turns of phrase make him all the more valuable as a member of the philosophical tradition. VIII. Conclusion: Assessing Rorty’s Four Kierkegaards Having traced in detail the places where Rorty mentions Kierkegaard and provided an overview of the ways in which these references stand in relation to Rorty’s overall philosophical project, I want to conclude by providing a brief assessment of Rorty’s use of Kierkegaard. When we read Rorty as really deploying four different Kierkegaards, it becomes easier to avoid the task of forcing his various references to cohere with each other and, ultimately, coalesce into one overarching unified interpretation. Rorty’s notion of Kierkegaard as a literary jokester need not have any impact, or even relevance, to Rorty’s account of Kierkegaard as a religious thinker. That said, the four Kierkegaards that show up across Rorty’s authorship do not need to be approached as necessarily contradictory. Though Rorty’s readings of Kierkegaard are often superficial, they importantly demonstrate the way that Kierkegaard’s own authorship invites multifaceted appropriations. It is a testament to the fecundity of Kierkegaard’s philosophy that it can give rise to Rorty’s varied articulations. When it comes to the question of whether Rorty was a good reader of Kierkegaard, the best answer, I believe, is that he was a highly selective one. As just a few examples of this selectivity, consider that though it would certainly be wrong to ignore the ways in which Kierkegaard does seem to be more concerned about the “private” task of an individual’s relation to God than about the “public” task of an individual’s relationship to her society, Rorty overlooks the important work that has been done over the past few decades considering Kierkegaard as a valuable resource for social practice and political theory.88 Similarly, while Rorty appreciates Kierkegaard’s humor, he never makes any mention of Kierkegaard’s substantive account of irony (which is especially odd given Rorty’s own substantive account of the topic). Further, even recognizing Kierkegaard’s pervasive critique of Hegel, Rorty makes no mention of the ways in which Kierkegaard also perpetuates certain aspects of Hegelian philosophy.89 For just a few examples, see Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1991; Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press 2001; Martin J. Matuštík, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel, New York and London: Guilford Press 1993; Martin J. Matuštík, “Kierkegaard’s Radical Existential Praxis, Or Why the Individual Defies Liberal, Communitarian, and Postmodern Categories,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1995, pp. 239–64; and Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion, ed. by J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2008. 89 See, for example, Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press 1996. 88

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Though there is evidence that Rorty read only Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and selected excerpts from the journals, and though readers of both Rorty and Kierkegaard might wish that Rorty had done more to locate Kierkegaard as a resource for neo-pragmatism (if for no other reason than to see if such an argument could be successfully made), Rorty does encourage us to appreciate Kierkegaard alongside Nietzsche, Dewey, and Emerson, among others, as potential models for a different way of doing philosophy itself. His multiple accounts of Kierkegaard simultaneously contest those who would dismiss Kierkegaard as non-philosophical because of the literary and religious aspects of his thought and also challenge those who would defend Kierkegaard’s philosophical vocation by minimizing the role of such literary and religious dimensions. While one might be right to resist many moves that Rorty makes regarding a whole host of topics, his critical defense of Kierkegaard is one particular move in his authorship that I think we all would do well to tarry with for a while.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Rorty’s Corpus Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979, p. 367; p. 369; p. 377, note 20. “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein,” The Yale Review, vol. 65, no. 3, 1976, p. 336. (Reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, p. 19.) “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 30, no. 2, 1976, pp. 296–7; p. 303. (Reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, p. 48; p. 53.) “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” Monist, vol. 64, no. 2, 1981, p. 163. (Reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, p. 147.) “Philosophy in America Today,” American Scholar, 1982, p. 188. (Reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, p. 217.) “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 1), p. 188; p. 191, note 43. “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 31; p. 33, note 13. “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 61. “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 73. “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 96; p. 100. “Two Meanings of Logocentrism: A Reply to Norris,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 113. “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), p. 154; p. 157.

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“Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2), pp. 193–4. “Response to Allen Hance,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. by Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., Nashville, Tennessee and London: Vanderbilt University Press 1995, pp. 123; p. 221, note 2. “The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope,” in his Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 3), p. 233. “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in his Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 3), p. 257. “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” in his Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 3), pp. 333–4; p. 341. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1998, p. 114. “Response to Jacques Bouveresse,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. by Robert B. Brandom, Oxford: Blackwell 2000, p. 153. “Response to Matthew Festenstein,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, Oxford: Polity Press 2001, p. 221. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. by Eduardo Mendieta, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2006, p. 44; p. 50; p. 69. “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), p. 41. “Honest Mistakes,” in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), p. 65. “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), pp. 78–9. “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), pp. 91–7. “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn,” in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007 (Philosophical Papers, vol. 4), p. 169. Together with Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. by Santiago Zabala, New York: Columbia University Press 2005. pp. 34–5; p. 71. II. Sources of Rorty’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Halle: Niemeyer 1927, pp. 175–96, see also p. 190, note 1; p. 235, note 1; and p. 338, note 1.

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Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. — Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. — Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books 1996. — Fear and Trembling (no indication of which translation or edition). Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943 (Bibliothèque des Idées), pp. 58–84; pp. 94–111; pp. 115–49; pp. 150–74; pp. 291–300; pp. 508–16; pp. 529–60; pp. 639–42; 643–63; pp. 669–70; pp. 720ff. III. Secondary Literature on Rorty’s Relation to Kierkegaard Farrell, Frank B., “Rorty and Antirealism,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. by Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press 1995, pp. 154–88. Frazier, Brad, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006. Hellesnes, Jon, “Livsvisdom eller autistisk innovasjonsfeber? Om nyskildring og sjølvskaping hos Kierkegaard og Rorty,” Nytt norsk tidsskrift, vol. 13, 1996, pp. 201–11. Jaranowski, Marcin, “Richard Rorty a wiara religijna” [Richard Rorty and Religious Belief], Znak, no. 1, 2001, pp. 65–85. Mehl, Peter J., “Edifying Hermeneutics: Kierkegaard’s Existential ‘Method’ and Its Limits,” in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication, ed. by Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2003, pp. 49–59. Reece, Gregory L., Irony and Religious Belief, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology, vol. 5). Rohrer, Patricia Jean, The Ethical Ironist. Kierkegaard, Rorty, and the Educational Quest, Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, New York 2003. Rudd, Anthony, “Kierkegaard’s Critique of Pure Irony,” in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, ed. by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1998, pp. 82–96. Simmons, J. Aaron, Violence and Singularity: Thinking Politics Otherwise with Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Levinas, Ph.D. Thesis, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 2006. — God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2011. Stewart, Jon, “The Philosophical Curriculum and Literary Culture: A Response to Richard Rorty,” Man and World, vol. 27, 1994, pp. 195–209. Zavodny, John, The Marks and Noises of the Monster at the End of the Book. From Irony to Camp with Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Derrida, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 1997.

Gillian Rose: Making Kierkegaard Difficult Again Vincent Lloyd

Gillian Rose’s (1947–95) work mixes ethics, aesthetics, social theory, critical theory, and religious thought. Her mix of interests leads to a distinctive engagement with Kierkegaard’s works. She approaches Kierkegaard’s authorship not from the perspective of one discipline or another, but with an openness and sensitivity that is particularly useful for writing about someone, such as Kierkegaard, whose writings mix literary sensibilities, philosophical sophistication, and religious concerns. Rose does not approach Kierkegaard with a set of questions to be answered or a set of concepts to be refined. At times it seems as though she cedes her authorial voice to his, but it is in the mixing of voices, of hers and his, that new questions are opened, that what seemed settled and easy becomes troubled and difficult. Because of her multiple academic interests, and her liminal disciplinary role (her appointments were always in sociology but her interests much broader), the influence of Rose’s work remains primarily in academic niches. She is read in certain circles interested in modern Jewish thought, in critical social theory, in neoKantian philosophy, and in contemporary Christian theology. This last group is particularly notable because Rose, or at least the invocation of her name, has gained a certain public prominence of late amongst theologians. Rowan Williams (b. 1950), the current Archbishop of Canterbury, counts Rose as a leading influence on his theology. The first book on Rose was written by Andrew Shanks, Canon Theologian of Manchester Cathedral. Its subtitle advertises a study of “Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith”; the book begins with Rose’s deathbed conversion from Judaism to Anglicanism and reads her earlier, ostensibly secular works as foreshadowing this final moment. John Milbank (b. 1952) and those associated with the “Radical Orthodoxy” theological movement have pointed to Rose as a seminal influence. This enthusiasm for Rose amongst Christian theologians, and her deathbed conversion, have led to the misconception that Rose was a theistic, or specifically Christian, thinker.1 While Rose grappled with religious, and specifically Christian, ideas throughout her life, it was only on December 9, 1995, immediately before her death, when she could no longer speak, that she accepted the Christian faith with a

See, for example, Scott Lash, Another Modernity, a Different Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell 1999, p. 10. For a general discussion, see Vincent Lloyd, “On the Use of Gillian Rose,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 48, 2007, pp. 697–706. 1

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squeeze of her hand.2 Finally Rose had allowed Kierkegaard’s thought to penetrate her life beyond the purely intellectual realm, or so some scholars and theologians appear to argue. Of course, this final conversion could be read differently: it could be understood as Rose finally stepping away from Kierkegaard, taking the final step of worldly commitment that Kierkegaard always refused. Rose was born Gillian Rosemary Stone on September 20, 1947 to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in London. Her interest in philosophy developed as an isolated teenager: it began as she read Plato and Pascal.3 In the works of these authors, she found philosophy fueled by passion, by eros. Reflecting on her early philosophical interests later in life, Rose would tell an interviewer: “People say to me, ‘How do you know you’re a philosopher?’ I say, ‘There’s only one way to find out if you’re a philosopher: whether you fall in love with Socrates.’ ”4 Philosophy fueled by eros was not what Rose found at Oxford. She endured, then spent a year in New York, and then returned to Oxford to write a dissertation on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69). This dissertation would become Rose’s first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, and in it Rose’s first published discussion of Kierkegaard would appear.5 Adorno’s Habilitation study of Kierkegaard, sponsored by Paul Tillich, would result in a 1933 book and would inflect Adorno’s thought more broadly. One of the distinguishing features of Rose’s study is its careful attention to Adorno’s style, and his reflections on style. According to Rose, this style is best expressed in Minima Moralia, Adorno’s fragmentary meditations on “Damaged Life.” While Rose does not label this work Kierkegaardian, in her reading of it she brings out familiar Kierkegaardian themes. Minima Moralia is written “from the standpoint of subjective experience,” relying on “indirect methods” of communication.6 Rose explores Adorno’s use of irony, which she finds throughout his work but especially in Minima Moralia, and which she accuses Adorno’s readers of often ignoring. Among her examples of Adorno’s irony are his inversions: “The whole is the false” (Hegel), “the melancholy science” (Nietzsche), “this side of the pleasure principle” (Freud)—and the Kierkegaardian section title, “The Health unto Death.” According to Rose, Adorno uses irony to expose the difference between ideology and reality, to call attention to the apparently seamless fit between our view of the world and the world itself. However, in The Melancholy Science Rose locates the provenance of Adorno’s irony in Nietzsche’s works, not Kierkegaard’s. In her reading of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard, Rose brings to the fore Adorno’s accusation that Kierkegaard ultimately relies on an abstraction of the individual. Kierkegaard unwittingly affirms a commitment to abstract equality which hides Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith, London: SCM Press 2008, pp. 1–2. 3 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, New York: Schocken Books 1995, p. 128. 4 “Interview with Gillian Rose,” ed. and introduced by Vincent Lloyd, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, 2008, p. 207. 5 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, New York: Columbia University Press 1978. 6 Rose, Melancholy Science, p. 16, quoting Adorno. 2

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actual inequality and, consequently, allows individuals to agglomerate into a mass, destroying the individual altogether. Rose does present Adorno as sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s refusal of autonomous reason. However, the dialectic which Kierkegaard attempts to replace autonomous reason with is, according to Adorno, contradictory. Kierkegaard wants to found his dialectic on the personal history of an individual but finds himself relying on “an extra-historical notion of sin as the first event of human history.”7 The larger problem to which this antinomy points is that Kierkegaard refuses mediation, and the result is that the individual becomes “absolutized,” a process also evident when Kierkegaard describes the “objectless” quality of love. Rose presents her comments as explication of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book; she does not cite any of Kierkegaard’s own writings in The Melancholy Science. The respect that Adorno had for Kierkegaard’s thought undoubtedly struck Rose, but Kierkegaard would not appear in Rose’s next two books. The Melancholy Science is ultimately critical of Adorno and gestures towards the need to move beyond the impasses in which his thought relishes (“melancholy” will become a pejorative term in Rose’s later work). It is Hegel who becomes a privileged figure for Rose, and Rose’s commitment to retrieving a lost Hegelianism precludes Kierkegaard from playing a role in her next two books, Hegel contra Sociology and Dialectic of Nihilism. Adorno struggled against being trapped in history by, for example, using irony. Rose’s assessment is that the more Adorno struggled, the more he was trapped. Hegel, by contrast, is able to provide an account of his own historical location and the philosophical resources available to him. With Hegel, read rightly (Rose thinks Adorno reads him wrongly), Rose can accept the critical component of Adorno’s thought but also add a constructive component which is missing from Adorno. Rose turns Adorno’s criticism of Kierkegaard back onto Adorno: she accuses Adorno of neglecting “social forms” and the “social subject,” the individual as part of a social and political context. While Rose’s second book, Hegel contra Sociology, does not mention Kierkegaard, it lays the groundwork for the explicit engagement with Kierkegaard that will be found in her later work. Her presentation of Hegel will immunize him from criticisms that Kierkegaard launches. Rose’s Hegel is not “totalizing.” His philosophy is not stifling, it is dynamic. Rose differs from her contemporaries, particularly her French contemporaries, who would separate Hegel’s “radical method” from his “conservative system.” This is the essence of her criticism of Adorno: he tries to endorse the dialectical method while jettisoning the Hegelian system that goes along with that method. Critics of Hegel are wary of the “absolute,” but, according to Rose, the potency of Hegel’s thought is taken away as soon as the absolute is no longer thought. Spirit just is the social structure of recognition and misrecognition. “Objective spirit” cannot be detached from Hegel’s system and used to describe a given culture. “Objective spirit” is always connected with “absolute spirit,” which is “the meaning of history as a whole.”8

7 8

Rose, Melancholy Science, p. 64. Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, London: Athlone Press 1981, p. 41.

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Rose puts religion front and center in her account of Hegel’s thought. Her explication of Hegel’s work as a whole begins with, and revolves around, an explication of a passage from the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: “In general religion and the foundation of the state are one and the same thing; they are identical in and for themselves.”9 This equation of two seemingly dissimilar items is a speculative proposition, not a logical identity. The similarities and differences between the two items are worked out as social and historical detail is added. This is why Hegel’s system is not “totalizing”: he is employing a rhetorical strategy to demonstrate the progression of consciousness. This is also what is meant by thinking the absolute: not setting out a list of truths, or legitimizing the status quo, but acknowledging an illusion of identity and complicating that illusion. People are always mistakenly identifying the absolute and associating it with a particular social formation. Rose writes: “Religion is not the concept or thought of the absolute, but some form of its misrepresentation. As long as the absolute is represented as ‘God,’ it is inconceivable as the absolute.”10 Not only does Rose protect “religion” from what is imagined to be the totalizing grip of Hegel’s system, she also inserts faith into the core of the system. Rose draws attention to passages in Hegel’s Lectures where he suggests religion, and religious language, have been exoteric manifestations of philosophical truth.11 Religious language is important simply because it is the language of οἱ πολλοί. Christianity has a privileged place because in it the absolute becomes a subject, Christ. According to Rose, when Hegel calls Christianity “the absolute religion” he does not mean that the propositions of Christianity are true. Rather, Christianity is a privileged configuration of exoteric representations, privileged because it points towards the speculative (not logical) proposition that the absolute is the subject. Rose’s Hegel may avoid some of Kierkegaard’s criticisms, but there is still a gulf between his work and Kierkegaard’s. Rose emphasizes that Hegel often writes “in the severe style,” a style which “is concerned to give a true representation of its object and makes little concession to the spectator. It is designed solely to do justice to the integrity of the object.”12 Hegel, it seems, is no ironist. Moreover, Rose praises Hegel because, unlike Kant, he does not leave any realm of ignorance. This is what it means to think the absolute: it is to refuse an infinite which is unthinkable. The absent object, the unknowable, animates thought—and distracts thought. The result: “this irrational relation to the infinite makes a rational relation to the social and political conditions of our lives impossible.”13 Here, Rose’s emphasis seems to be pushing Hegel away from, rather than towards, Kierkegaard. It will be the task of The Broken Middle to reconcile, or rather “work,” these tensions.

Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, p. 48, [sic] removed and grammar modified, quoting Hegel. 10 Ibid., p. 92. 11 Ibid., p. 105. The passage in question was removed in later versions of the Lectures, although Rose does not note this. See Shanks, Against Innocence, pp. 90–1. 12 Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, p. 51. 13 Ibid., p. 45. 9

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Rose’s writings are sometimes divided into an early and a late period.14 The early period is said to consist of her first three books, The Melancholy Science (1978), Hegel contra Sociology (1981), and Dialectic of Nihilism (1984). These books concerned critical social theory. They retrieve from Adorno and Hegel resources for theorizing society and mobilize these resources against theoretical errors. Then there was a gap. Eight years later, Rose’s thought had transformed. She published The Broken Middle (1992), closely followed by Judaism and Modernity (1993), the memoir Love’s Work (1994), and the posthumously published essay collection, Mourning Becomes the Law. In that eight-year gap between the early and late works, Rose is supposed to have “found religion”—or, more specifically, to have found Kierkegaard. This story is more pithy than true. Rose’s interest in “existential theology” was longstanding: it predates her formal training in philosophy. The themes she explored in her book on Adorno were deeply Kierkegaardian. Moreover, the eight-year publication gap is not a dark, mysterious void. As early as July 1986 Rose said that she was working on a book about Kierkegaard, a book that would be framed around the question: dialectic or repetition?15 The result that would emerge in The Broken Middle, Rose’s magnum opus, was an attempt to work through how the apparent choice between Hegel and Kierkegaard could be transformed into an affirmation of both, the disjunction transformed into a conjunction. While Rose described The Broken Middle as a book “on Kierkegaard,” it would seem equally appropriate to call it “Kierkegaardian.” In its structure and style, both on a superficial level and on a deeper level, Rose performed her understanding of Kierkegaard’s works. The author’s voice is submerged in copious quotations. The argument proceeds through juxtaposition of cited texts. Sections of the text are organized around Kierkegaardian themes: repetition, love, authority, commandment. Section titles resonate with familiar Kierkegaardian vocabulary: “Unscientific Beginning,” “Dialectical Lyric,” “Illusory Fragments,” “Confession and Authority,” and “Suspending the Political,” to take a few. Rose discusses Kierkegaard himself and juxtaposed Kierkegaard’s texts with those of other writers who range from the expected (Hegel and Kafka) to the unexpected and provocative (Blanchot, Freud, and Lacan). These juxtapositions compose Part One of the text; Part Two consists of explorations of Kierkegaardian themes at an even greater distance from Kierkegaard’s own texts. Repetition, love, and political theology organize these chapters, which range widely from discussion of Thomas Mann to Rosa Luxemburg to Franz Rosenzweig. The Broken Middle begins, and ends, with meditations on beginning. The epigraphs to the first chapter are from Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. They both urge: “One must just begin.” One notes the difficulty of doing this, while the Tony Gorman, “Gillian Rose and the Project of a Critical Marxism,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 105, 2001, p. 25. 15 Gillian Rose Archives, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS. 377, Box 18. Rose signed a contract with Blackwell for the book that would become The Broken Middle in December 1987. Progress was slow but steady: in August 1989 she had completed four chapters. 14

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other suggests that “it would turn out all right” if one does this, and just begins.16 Rose takes this advice quite literally: she places the book’s preface at the very end of the text (it still functions as a preface, offering an overview of the chapters that compose the book). The problem with beginnings, Rose suggests in “Unscientific Beginning,” the first section of her first chapter, is that they function to authorize what follows. The more energy is expended in revealing, or contesting, the site and time of beginning, the greater its authority, and the more that authority overshadows what follows. Her example is Hegel, and what he overshadows is modernity. Hegel represents “System.” It is what characterizes the modern, and what must be contested by those who would characterize the modern differently. Adorno, Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, and Rosenzweig are among Rose’s examples of those “standard refutations of the System in the name of an exceeding moment.”17 These each promise a new beginning, but each has the effect of entrenching authority, the authority of Hegel. Modernity is supposed to be founded in opposition to religious authority, but theorists of modernity act no differently than medievals making reference to Aristotle as The Philosopher. This, Rose concludes, is irony if anything is. The solution to this problem of beginnings is not to substitute Kierkegaard for Hegel. This would be to replace one authority for another, and ultimately to remain within the System to which Kierkegaard is supposed to respond. There is a second irony here, according to Rose. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard, when read rightly, are entirely opposed to taking exulted figures as authorities. They both commend thinking, the process in which the individual becomes his own author, his own authority. According to Rose, Hegel and Kierkegaard each offers himself as an example of what it means to be an author, to be an authority for oneself. This is why Kierkegaard writes with pseudonyms, so that his own name is not held up as an authority. And this is why Kierkegaard refers to Hegel as the “master” of irony: Hegel seems to do the opposite of what he says. Hegel’s irony has been lost on most of his readers (including, it seems, Rose in her earlier book), just as the significance of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms has been lost on most of his. So Rose intends to begin in the middle, by which she means rejecting the fixation on beginnings. It is hard to take Rose entirely seriously here, because this is how she begins her book, with a rejection of beginnings. She rails against taking Hegel and Kierkegaard as the beginning, and she does just that. It is not exactly with Hegel and Kierkegaard that Rose begins, but with the tension between the two: “the play of System and fragment” that exposes both their connections and their differences.18 Perhaps this offers an alternative to reading Rose as entirely ironic in her discussion of beginnings. Irony, no doubt, is part of what she intends, but at times this seems to be irony without bounds, with an effect uncomfortably close to the free play of signifiers of the deconstructionist, one of Rose’s consistent antagonists. Perhaps she intends not for the reader to wallow in irony, but rather for irony to inflate, so as to pop convenient but wrong-headed conceptions. By over-emphasizing, over Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Oxford: Blackwell 1992, p. 3. 17 Rose, Broken Middle, p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 9, referring to Adorno’s Minima Moralia. 16

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inflating, the authority of Hegel and Kierkegaard, at the beginning, it pops, opening up options which otherwise would not have appeared. What is left is what Rose terms “the middle.” The reason that “the middle” is broken is that it is not what lies between two authorities, nor is it what remains when two authorities are deflated. Those are what Rose terms “holy middles.” The “broken middle” is what becomes visible when two authorities, at two conceptual ends, are so inflated as to pop. This middle is what comes about when one has to navigate connections and differences rather than wallowing in one or the other. Rose points to ways of reading Kierkegaard to illustrate what she means. Many readers, she charges, ignore Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, attempting to reconcile the apparently conflicting claims of the works attributed to Constantin Constantius, Johannes de silentio, Anti-Climacus, and the others with the views of S. Kierkegaard in order to form a consistent set of beliefs. Other readers, particularly those who would find in Kierkegaard a precursor to deconstruction, take the pseudonyms so seriously that each is treated as an entirely different author (not coincidentally, Rose finds the “play of personae” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to have the same effect, and require the same sort of investigation, as Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms). Appreciating the middle, in this context, is to acknowledge the importance of the pseudonyms but also to struggle to make sense of their relationship to each other. Rose characterizes the middle as “difficult,” the two options which it replaces as “easy.” According to Rose, in the absence of authority, what is needed to begin is faith. Indeed, Rose’s account of faith is quite counter-intuitive, though perhaps no less so than Kierkegaard’s, on whom Rose repeatedly draws as she develops it. Faith is what is needed when there is no authority, when there are no guarantees. If religion is understood to offer guarantees, to provide any sort of reassurance, then Rose is an advocate of what might be paradoxically termed secular faith.19 Here is where she differs from Kierkegaard: when conventional, worldly authorities are suspended, there is no higher authority that takes its place, not even a higher authority which could only be named absurd. Rose takes Kierkegaard seriously when he refers to faith as passion, and to human life as passionate.20 Faith is just a capacity that humans have; there is no more to it than that. While this account of faith may seem quite different from Kierkegaard’s, or at least different in a crucial respect, Rose develops it through a shift in emphasis in her reading of Fear and Trembling. Against Adorno, whose reading of Fear and Trembling focuses on the oppositions—spirit and nature, fulfillment and lack, aesthetic and erotic—all of which make Abraham’s sacrifice paradoxical, Rose draws our attention to the fact that nothing is sacrificed. When this is realized, we can see that the narrative is not animated by the paradoxes of the sacrifice, but the conflicts—“story against story, crisis against crisis”—which function to teach the reader. It teaches the reader how resignation differs from faith, how “the opposed dichotomies of loss and gain, infinite and finite, spirit and nature” which characterize See Vincent Lloyd, “The Secular Faith of Gillian Rose,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 683–705. 20 Rose, Broken Middle, p. 10. 19

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resignation can be set aside in favor of the “repetition or plenitude without possession or presence” which characterizes faith.21 Rose accuses Adorno of a misreading that is easy, and that makes Fear and Trembling easy: Adorno adopts, and attributes to Kierkegaard, the role of “resignation.” It is by recognizing the significance of the pseudonym “de silentio” that faith, as an alternative, appears. Where resignation is boisterous (it “swims”), faith is subdued, as if silent (it “floats”). Rose’s analysis of Fear and Trembling focuses on what the text does, and how it does it. She is interested in Kierkegaard’s rhetoric, how he intends to persuade, and she takes this to be inextricable from the content of the claims that he advances. She notes how Kierkegaard commends risk. On her account, this is not the familiar risk of suspending the ethical, or at least not only that risk. Before the ethical risk comes, according to Rose, an “erotic” risk: Kierkegaard is “narrating a collision which cannot be absorbed into our infinite erotic egoism.”22 In implicit contrast to Hegel, whose story of a struggle for recognition she discusses earlier in the same paragraph, Kierkegaard examines an instance in which we are not struggling for ourselves but for someone else, someone we love even more than ourselves. Kierkegaard also takes a risk in his choice of stories. Rose notes how familiar the story of Abraham and Isaac is and how difficult it is for Kierkegaard to associate a new meaning with it: to make its meaning Hegelian or Jewish or Greek is a temptation with which the reader is confronted. Throughout her discussion of Fear and Trembling, she attempts to present it as parallel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Both, on her readings, are texts intended to educate, to tell a story about how we came to be who we are, and in so doing to bring out features of who we are which are often forgotten. Moreover, both Hegel and Kierkegaard are concerned with how “to bring Revelation into philosophy.”23 Revelation is not transparent or “realized.” In a sense, Rose gives Revelation the opposite meaning to what it has in ordinary language. Revelation is the realization that no System is complete, that the work of philosophy, and ethics, is always “open and unresolved.” Revelation raises the incomprehensible to a privileged position. Revelation has an effect but no content. The crux of Rose’s reading of Fear and Trembling is a shift in emphasis away from the (lack of) sacrifice towards the effects of that moment. It is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice that matters, and its effect is that the text is able to draw the reader’s attention to “the sublime in the pedestrian.”24 Rose argues that this is happening both within the text and in the way the text is presented. The figure of Abraham is a figure of “sublime pathos,” but that pathos is already distanced from the reader through its representation. This is another parallel that Rose finds to Hegel’s work: both Kierkegaard and Hegel acknowledge that absolute meaning cannot be represented, and so they concoct ways to use the means of representation available in order to gesture towards absolute meaning (in other words, their talent lies in understanding their role as rhetoricians, as persuaders). Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 16, quoting Kierkegaard. 21 22

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This realization that the sublime mixes with the pedestrian, that pathos mixes with representation, is central to The Broken Middle. Its preface, located at the end, is titled “Pathos of the Concept” and suggests that the book itself is intended to make the reader witness just this. Here again is another example of the middle exposed: the sufficiency of either pathos or concept is rejected, and the work of the difficult negotiation between them is begun. Such breaks as these Rose labels with the Hegelian term “diremption,” and she understands her work as an exploration of them. What is wrong with Kantians, neo-Kantians, and their followers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, is that they have an instinct to forcefully separate law and ethics. A pure ethical imperative is brought to bear on a pure representation of the world. It is this picture against which those who would overcome “Western metaphysics,” and particularly those enamored with deconstruction, respond. Their response results not in displacing the fixation on these terms but in increasing it, over and over again. They reveal a “singular, antinomian aconceptuality,” feeding a cycle in which the world appears wrong and needs to be mended.25 Instead of overcoming “Western metaphysics,” Rose urges that we acknowledge diremption and engage “the difficulty of claiming the middle from the beginning.”26 In place of a fixation on origins, or on locating an antinomian, aconceptual point from which to begin critique of origins, Rose urges the “agon of authorship.” Grappling with questions of authorship are central to Rose’s readings of Kierkegaard: she is attentive not only to his pseudonyms but also to his autobiographical writings. Indeed, the range of texts Rose discusses is striking: her citations include all of the expected texts, many of Kierkegaard’s writings on Christianity, five volumes of the published edition of his Journals and Papers, as well as more obscure works such as “The Crisis of a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.” It is out of this mix of works and life that Rose develops the idea of “failing towards form.” It is in the second chapter of The Broken Middle, the chapter juxtaposing Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka (1883–1924), that Rose introduces “failing towards form.” It is brought up in response to the biographical moments which seem to animate the aesthetic production of both Kierkegaard and Kafka. They both break off their engagements to women they appear to love, to Regine and Felice. Rose resists what much biographically oriented scholarship on Kierkegaard and Kafka has done: she resists taking these moments as “beginnings,” as inaugurating the writers’ work. By refusing to fixate on these as beginnings (while also, ironically, writing copiously about them), Rose argues that a clear-headed view of their effects becomes visible. It is out of these moments, these apparent failures, that the proliferation of authorial voices taken up by Kierkegaard and Kafka has its origin. Moreover, these moments of refusal, of apparent failure, were not really beginnings. They were the precipitate of the process of “failing towards form,” a dual movement “from the aesthetic to the ethical to the absolute, as the inability to marry; from the absolute to the ethical to the aesthetic, as the inability to write without arrogating illegitimate authority.”27 Rose takes Kierkegaard’s categories and uses them to bring together all Ibid., p. 308. Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 53. 25 26

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of Kierkegaard’s “authorship,” both his work and his life. His inability to marry was the result of working through a problem of aesthetics, the proliferation of authorial voices was the result of working through the biographical refusal to marry Regine. These twin movements become visible, and become possible, when we refuse the fixation on one as the beginning, as the authority. This refusal Rose names sustaining the “anxiety of beginning.” To appeal to an authoritative moment of beginning is to refuse that anxiety, which is to refuse “the middle.” Rose rather mysteriously suggests that what appears when these twin movements between aesthetics and the absolute are acknowledged, what appears in the middle, is “law.” With this turn to law as the name of what characterizes the broken middle—a gesture she also made in Dialectic of Nihilism—Rose begins to leave the Kierkegaardian orbit. Although throughout The Broken Middle and her later work she will continue to associate herself with Kierkegaard, apparently without reservation, the appearance of law in the middle is Rose’s most novel philosophical contribution. If Rose’s allegiance to law is ignored, it becomes impossible to differentiate her work from the deconstructionists whom she repeatedly criticizes.28 Moreover, Rose’s allegiance to law is what allows her to differentiate her account of the middle from the “holy middles” offered by Mark C. Taylor and John Milbank. Taylor, like Rose, imagines himself to be bringing together the thought of Hegel and Kierkegaard, to be exploring the “shifty middle ground between” the two.29 Rose accuses Taylor of taking too seriously the opposition between knowledge and faith that he finds in Fear and Trembling. She accuses Taylor of ignoring the significance of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship which is meant to educate rather than to propound. Third, Rose accuses Taylor of being smitten with transgression and claiming to find transgression in Fear and Trembling when in fact there is no transgression there. It is stopped before it happens. Taylor opposes “the Law” to “the Call of the Other,” extolling the latter while reproving the former. While Taylor purports to be deconstructing theology, Milbank purports to be deconstructing “the secular.” Both, Rose argues, arrive at the same point: they oppose some new Jerusalem, based on faith, to an old Athens, based on reason or law. These new Jerusalems are antinomian, characterized by “Dionysian joy,” “nomadic ecclesial eschatology,” “harmonious peace,” by a “joy that ‘breaks the power of law.’ ”30 The result is that Taylor and Milbank repeat the classic supersessionist move of opposing law and grace; in the process, they ignore the richly textured social world, which is what Rose calls the world of law. These writers would rather mend the middle, and sanctify it, than leave it broken. Here we see Rose beginning to reach escape velocity from the Kierkegaardian orbit. She takes Taylor to be misreading Kierkegaard, and associates her own position with Kierkegaard’s. However, deep engagement with the richly textured social world is not a central concern of Kierkegaard’s authorship, 28 Milbank notes this danger, but (as one would expect based on Rose’s criticisms of Milbank) does not note the mitigating role of law in Rose’s work. John Milbank, “Living with Anxiety,” Review of The Broken Middle in The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 26, 1992. 29 Rose, Broken Middle, p. 279, quoting Taylor, emphasis in the original. 30 Ibid., p. 218, quoting Taylor in the final phrase.

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however it is conceived. Perhaps, then, it is best to return to Rose’s characterization of The Broken Middle as a book about Kierkegaard instead of labeling it “Kierkegaardian.” In The Broken Middle, Rose writes in her own, distinctive voice, a voice developed through her critical engagements with Kierkegaard’s authorship. The Broken Middle is Rose’s magnum opus. Afterwards, she published two collections of essays (one posthumously) and two memoirs (one of these was also posthumously published). Her memoirs are highly stylized, and their stylization reflects Rose’s philosophical thought. In a sense, she puts into practice the dual movement from aesthetic to absolute and back that she attributes to Kierkegaard. She does this most clearly in a book with an unmistakably Kierkegaardian title, Rose’s memoir Love’s Work. It is not the brink of marriage, refused, that animates Rose’s aesthetic, but another “existential” moment: the brink of death. Halfway through Love’s Work, Rose reveals that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the face of this personal turmoil, Rose wrote as she never had before, producing pellucid, engaging prose throbbing with vitality, depicting the “reckoning with life” named by its subtitle. The dense, almost impenetrable prose of The Broken Middle, thick with scholarly apparatus and allusive arguments made by juxtaposing the voices of others gives way to witty tales of friends, family, and, of course, lovers. Yet there remains, in Love’s Work, something of the allusiveness which characterizes The Broken Middle. While Love’s Work toys with Kierkegaardian themes, the conception of love it offers is quite distinct from that found in Works of Love. Collegiality, friendship, familial love, romantic love, and spiritual love all intermingle, barely distinguishable, in Rose’s narrative. If there is a difference between these “loves,” it is their degree of intensity. Each involves negotiation: in cliché, giving and taking. But Rose means more than the cliché. She means risking oneself, allowing oneself to be put in question by a proximate other. What might be called the spiritual enters love as a supplement when its intensity crosses a certain threshold. Rose depicts this in physical intimacy: “Kiss, caress and penetration are the relation of the relation, body and soul in touch….The three I harbour within me—body, soul and paraclete—press against the same triplicity in you.”31 Rose describes a love relationship much like she describes the dual movement from aesthetic to ethical to absolute and back. Playful words advance into bodily movements together which advance to ecstasy. Ecstasy becomes intimacy as lovers sleep together, and into the aesthetic as they return to their worldly lives. Through these movements, the lovers learn faith. In the morning after a night of sexual intimacy, “Eros passion is fled: its twin, the passion of faith, is taunting my head.”32 An underlying theme of Love’s Work, a theme that moves front and center in Mourning Becomes the Law, is the need to acknowledge difficulties and work through them. Again, Rose means more than the cliché. She diagnoses a human tendency to appeal to easy answers, to authorities, in short, to blind ourselves to difficulties, where blinding is, on the psychic level, repressing. On her reading, Fear and Trembling is intended to teach us to resist this tendency. In her last works, this 31 32

Rose, Love’s Work, p. 69. Ibid., p. 70.

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tendency is diagnosed as a refusal to mourn, as melancholia. Instead of noting a loss, or an encounter with the tragic, and allowing it to inflect our worlds, our “law,” there is a tendency to disavow the tragic and so allow it to warp our worlds. This is the problem with deconstruction and much post-structuralism, according to Rose. These movements take their whole work, their whole world, to be mourning the lost certainty promised by reason, to be mourning without end. In so doing, they refuse to engage with the richly textured social world around them, instead wallowing in their melancholia (in Derrida’s case, materialized in the logorrhea of his texts). Rose describes the choice Kierkegaard poses between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation as a choice between mourning and melancholia. The former encounters moments of the tragic, moments when it is as though ethics has been suspended, and is willing to acknowledge them, to take the leap of faith. The latter prefers “infinite pain and resignation,” for he “dwells in the romance of the nonethical.”33 The knight of resignation refuses to acknowledge the tragic, the need for the leap of faith, the need for risk. But Rose goes beyond Kierkegaard. In Love’s Work she suggests that the knight of faith, who is willing to “reckon with life,” is recognizable in a world of melancholia. Her descriptions of vivacious friends and acquaintances—Yvette, a lusty grandmother who would read through all of Proust’s A la Recherche every year; Edna, a nonagenarian who drank heavily, refused to eat vegetables, and survived cancer—as well as her descriptions of her own active life are contrasted with lives of infinite resignation. In this group of melancholics Rose includes her own mother, who refuses to discuss the loss of many relatives in the Holocaust and who, consequently, treats her daughter cruelly (or so Rose’s narrative leads us to believe). It seems that there is a visibility to the knights of faith and resignation, on Rose’s account, to which Kierkegaard might object. But in her later reflections, Rose brought this visibility into question. Rose intended to write a sequel to Love’s Work, Paradiso; the fragments that she completed were published after her death. In Paradiso, Rose describes Love’s Work as “profoundly Kierkegaardian” because “it allows one to pass unnoticed.” She continues: “It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace.”34 A long chapter in Paradiso meditates on Edna, a nun who befriended Rose and in whom Rose finds a kindred spirit. What Rose admires in Edna is precisely her ability to hide, to live in the silence of grace. Edna had led an active life in the world as a dancer and an enthusiast of New Age thought before entering the convent. In the convent, she studied Rabbinics as well as Christian mystical writings, with a special interest in the Song of Songs. Rose describes Edna, and herself, or at least her aspirations for herself, as one “who notices everything yet is not noticed herself.”35 This figure, who Rose associates with the knight of faith, as well as Agatha Christie’s detective, Miss

Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 111. 34 Gillian Rose, Paradiso, London: Menard Press 1999, p. 17. 35 Ibid., p. 18. 33

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Marple, is not simply stoic. Rather, she becomes hidden and visible at once, doing what one is supposed to do, but doing it as a vocation, accompanied by the sublime. It would be tempting to read Paradiso, written shortly before Rose’s deathbed conversion, as Rose coming her closest to expressing an explicitly Christian position. In Paradiso, she writes of Augustine (his hiddenness preserved in the Confessions), she writes of the theological virtues, she writes of the dangers of Gnosticism. It is tempting to see Rose finally embracing her Kierkegaardian instincts. Yet Paradiso, like Love’s Work, also ponders the significance of Judaism. During that eight-year publication gap, Rose was also developing an interest in modern Jewish thought.36 She befriended an international group of Jewish studies scholars, and in 1988 and 1991 visited Israel. She writes of Judaism with the same combination of intrigue and skepticism with which she writes about Christianity. Judaism has been understood wrongly, on her view, the diremption between law and ethics ignored. What Jews need, Rose seems to suggest, is a more Kierkegaardian Judaism; what Christians need is a more Jewish Christianity (that is, a Christianity paying more attention to law, to the richly textured social world). Both Jews and Christians have paid too much attention to the supposed oppositions between law and grace, between law and love. Edna offers an alternative: her “mystical theology was inseparable from attention to divine and human law, to the workings of the world.”37 At the end of the day, when faced with the question, dialectic or repetition, Rose answers: both. In one of her last essays, on “untimely death,” Rose presents Hegel and Kierkegaard as offering “two views of eternity.” Kierkegaard focuses on “the crisis of Christ, the irruption of the eternal as scandal into the continuities of historical experience,” while Hegel presents a “triune or trinitarian exposition of experience as recognition.”38 Is Rose suggesting that Hegel is actually a more orthodox Christian, more trinitarian, than Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard’s focus on the interruption of the eternal almost seems Gnostic. Rose attempts to bring Kierkegaard in line, noting how his explicitly Christian writings bring with them a trinitarian framework. But Rose is careful not to capitalize “trinitarian,” and it would be misleading to conclude that Rose finally acknowledged Hegel and Kierkegaard as the foundations for a new Christian faith which she could embrace. Quite the opposite: the trinitarian framework she finds in Hegel and Kierkegaard offers a new place to begin again, in making sense of Rose’s work, and in making sense of Kierkegaard’s significance.

Rose Archives, Box 18: Rose makes reference to a book on modern Jewish thought in correspondence from January 1988. 37 Rose, Paradiso, p. 19. 38 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 138. 36

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Rose’s Corpus The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, New York: Columbia University Press 1978, pp. 62–5. Hegel contra Sociology, London: Athlone Press 1981. The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Oxford: Blackwell 1992, Part One. Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Blackwell 1993, especially pp. 155–73. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 111; pp. 137–8. Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, New York: Schocken Books 1995. Paradiso, London: Menard Press 1999, pp. 17–18; p. 24. “Interview with Gillian Rose,” ed. and introduced by Vincent Lloyd, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, 2008, pp. 201–18. II. Sources of Rose’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor W., Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1933. Buber, Martin, “The Question to the Single One,” in Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith, London: Fontana 1979, pp. 60–108. — “On the Suspension of the Ethical,” in Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, trans. by Maurice Friedman, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1988, pp. 113–20. Haecker, Theodor, Soren Kierkegaard, trans. by Alexander Dru, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1937. Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard: The Arguments of the Philosophers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982. Lowrie, Walter, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1974. Taylor, Mark C., Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley, California: University of California Press 1980. Thulstrup, Niels, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. by George L. Stegren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

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III. Secondary Literature on Rose’s Relation to Kierkegaard Gorman, Tony, “Gillian Rose and the Project of a Critical Marxism,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 105, 2001, pp. 25–36. — “Nihilism and Faith: Rose, Bernstein and the Future of Critical Theory,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 134, 2005, pp. 18–30. Lloyd, Vincent, “The Secular Faith of Gillian Rose,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 683–705. Shanks, Andrew, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith, London: SCM Press 2008, pp. 50–71 and passim.

Charles Taylor: Taylor’s Affinity to Kierkegaard Abrahim H. Khan

Charles Margrave Taylor, a prominent Canadian philosopher, and Søren Aabye Kierkegaard are separated by almost 120 years and the Atlantic. Yet, they share some striking similarities in their perceptions of the condition of ordinary human life of their day. The socio-political circumstance of the world to which they came, the cultural traditions, historical situations, philosophical orientation of each thinker about the self in relation to the world, to significant others, and their objection to a totalizing Hegelian philosophical system seem parallel or have remarkable semblances that raise a question about the intellectual influence of one on the other and its extent. Kierkegaard describes the year of his birth, 1813, as one in which worthless banknotes were put into circulation. Denmark had declared bankruptcy, a year later had lost Norway, and then the following year Holstein had ceased to be integral to the Danish monarchy. It was not until 25 years later that ordinary life in the nation as a whole would know better economic times and prosperity. Interestingly, during that somber economic period the highly cosmopolitan bourgeois life in Copenhagen continued as a part of the Golden Age cultural movement, and thus defined culture for the more economically thriving nearby provincial cities. Bourgeois Copenhagen life instanced distaste for public life and politics, and correlated with a temperament that was conservative, aristocratic, and seemingly apolitical. It stood in contrast to the democratic temperament of the common man, represented by a growing middle class in Copenhagen, pushing for reforms and liberal politics in the nation. Taylor, born 1931 in French- and English-speaking Montreal in the Province of Quebec and becoming Canada’s well-known contemporary philosopher and public intellectual, makes no comment about his birth year. To draw a parallel to Kierkegaard’s socio-political and cultural context, the world to which Taylor came was marked by plummeting economic prices associated with the collapse of international trade and a worldwide depression. In Canada high levels of unemployment and drought in the prairies, or wheat land, were severe enough to spawn a variety of reform movements to initiate economic recovery. These include the Social Credit movement, “Work and Wages” Program, and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the latter a precursor to the New Democratic Party for which Taylor was one of the theoreticians and political candidates. Relief programs for families in need were not enough in those lean economic years. The government in 1932 established a radio network in

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English and French, known now as the CBC, which for some provided an escape from the hopelessness they experienced. But after a 25-year period, with World War II behind it, Canada was well on the road to economic recovery. It had opened its door to immigration from Europe, and not until some years later, in the 1980s, gave similar hospitable reception to those of Asian and Mediterranean backgrounds. By the dawning of the twenty-first century, the writings of Taylor,1 a fully established McGill and Oxford educated academic and a political theorist who ran in federal elections, were being employed in support of multiculturalism. His own background, Roman Catholic with French and English parentage, also factored in his political outlook and choices in the cultural-political cauldron of French Canadian politics and in the nation’s constitutional debates for Canadian federalism. His work on the explanation of human behavior, begun with his doctoral thesis for Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) and G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001), and sustained with publications on Hegel, had moved on to deal with socio-political issues challenging Canada as a nation. He argued for the recognition of cultural differences and asserted that the right to maintain one’s cultural identity is a logical extension of the politics of recognition flowing from the tradition of liberal democratic theory. These instances reflect Taylor’s sensibilities to the political and cultural tensions of his day, his conception of the common man, and his construal of ordinary life as encompassing reproduction and production, work, and family. In fact, they allude to some of the experiences or resonances constitutive of Taylor’s social or self-understandings and horizons of common expectations, and are suggestive of a similarity to Kierkegaard’s politico-cultural and historical situation. Taylor and Kierkegaard each interpreted ordinary human life in civil society of their own day as the experiencing of a malaise with respect to self-fulfillment, a dulling of the human sensibility for an inner life. Alternatively put, both sensed within modernity a deep ambiguity. Each proposed a remedy implicating a notion of the Good that requires our subjectivity in appropriating it. On first glance the remedies seem similar, but on closer examination they are starkly different. Tracing influences or reception of Kierkegaard, this article also explains how they are different, even though Taylor is very much aware of Kierkegaard’s critique of society as one that presupposes a notion of transcendence in discussion of the self. Kierkegaard’s influence on Taylor, at best, is minimal and hardly central to his writings, including his recent and erudite magnum opus, A Secular Age (2007).2 This title is an expansion of his Gifford lectures (1999), and brings to culmination years of reflection on and writing about understanding modernity, especially how human thinking on the nature of the self in relation to society has changed. It argues for freeing-up the self from the irony cage of modernity by re-enchanting society, using a new poetic or subtler language. Yet, it makes no reference to Kierkegaard. The earliest reference comes in his Hegel (1975), a massive philosophical commentary By the year 2000, nine titles had appeared with Taylor as their sole author. Other titles are jointly authored and are in addition to a stream of well over a hundred published journal articles. 2 Charles Taylor, The Secular Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2007. 1

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that registers agreement with Kierkegaard’s protest against the proposal of a rationalistic framework by which everything can be grasped or explained through reason alone. Such a framework would not accommodate the call of God to the human in the biblical tradition.3 In a later discussion on unbridled freedom, the text again references Kierkegaard’s idea of despair, indicating that unrestricted freedom leads to despair or the inability to affirm oneself. One of the treats to modern freedom was just this inability or despair that is overcome, according to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, only by relating the self to the power (God) that has constituted it in the first place. He certainly shares with Kierkegaard the idea that the self has to become grounded in a higher end or Platonic telos. These references are also found in his Hegel and Modern Society (1979), a short and more readable version of the massive study on Hegel. Kierkegaard is next referenced in the magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), and The Malaise of Modernity (1991), two titles continuing the project of understanding what has gone wrong with modernity and how it is to be corrected. Malaise contains a single reference, and in fact is mainly the substance of the concluding chapter of Sources, but now slightly expanded. Its explicit reference is to the “loss of passion,” a terminology that Kierkegaard used in describing the “present age.”4 Taylor interprets that loss of passion as a condition in which there is nothing left that would give life its powerful sense of purpose. It was a loss of meaning to life. The same loss or stultifying of human life, in his view, was occurring in Western modernity. The malaise or loss was resulting from the dominance of a bureaucratic, utilitarian based, instrumentalist approach, or reasoning brought to bear on human life, to the point of emptying it of its richness, flattening it out. That estimate is very similar to how Kierkegaard depicted his own times. The “present age,” for Kierkegaard, was one that was flaring up superficially. It had flashes of enthusiasm, alternating with apathy, or disengagement with society and withdrawing from others. There was no idea of commitment, no emphasis on action and decision.5 It was marked by a calculative shrewdness, a plethora of experts on legal matters who would let “matters reach a verdict and decision without ever acting.”6 In the same vein he wrote that “the trend today is in the direction of a mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so, many uniformly make one individual.”7 This is precisely what Taylor was decrying about modernity. It had become a show of technical skills, instrumentalist reasoning connected with self Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975, pp. 493–4, and pp. 562–3. The text makes mention also of existentialism as stretching from Kierkegaard to Sartre, see p. 92. Some of these references occur also in Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1979, p. 29; p. 159. 4 See Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, Toronto: Anansi Press 1991, p. 4, and in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1989, p. 500. Note that Malaise was published in the USA under the title Ethics of Authenticity (1992). 5 See SKS 8, 66–7 / TA, 68–9 and SKS 8, 69ff. / TA, 71ff. 6 SKS 8, 67 / TA, 69. 7 SKS 8, 81 / TA,85. 3

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realization, the bombarding of the individual through the media with sound bites and images to the point of equivocation, of him or her not wanting to act or decide; for the decision has already been made by the media and a deluge of statistics and learned reports. As Taylor puts it, “the institutions and structures of industrial-technological society severely restrict our choices…force societies as well as individuals to give a weight to instrumental reason that in serious moral deliberation we would never do, and which may even be highly destructive.”8 Kierkegaard used also the term “leveling,” to describe that loss of purpose or meaning. He meant by it “a sensate stimulation that excites momentarily and only makes the evil worse, rescue more difficult, and destruction greater.”9 There are, he continued, many ways to bring about, this “counterfeit anticipation of an eternal life,”10 Interestingly, Taylor, in Malaise, references the notion of leveling in connection with a malformed individualism resulting from centering the self in a way that it “flattens and narrows our lives.”11 He returns at least three times to the image of flattening and narrowing to express an existence bereft of a moral teleology, but it is as though he is unaware that Kierkegaard has employed that image also in depicting the “present age,” and instead acknowledges indebtedness for it to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.12 As with Kierkegaard so too with Taylor, each was concerned with the common man, that is, with shaping people’s lives in relation to an ideal instead of preferences or modes that would flatten out ordinary life. In fact much in Malaise is suggestive of Kierkegaard’s reading of the moral predicament of his day. And that fact is enough to make one wonder about the extent of the influence of his thinking on Taylor. No adequate account can be given without taking into consideration the earlier title, Sources. Its concluding chapter is essentially that of the slimmer text, Malaise, which proposes Taylor’s remedy to the predicament of modernity. That is, it proposes retrieving features of the moral idea of the good in order to restore practice or to widen the horizon of the self that is central to the experiencing of ordinary yet full human life. At one level, Sources is a description of the how the self is understood to be inextricably intertwined with a notion of the good, as part of an account of the history of the changing notions of identity. At a deeper level, it is a work of retrieval in order to reintroduce modern Western culture to that from which it has become alienated, a moral horizon, in its struggle between two tendencies. One is represented by instrumental reason or approach to life, the other by a self-fulfillment approach that slides into narcissism, through stressing the “me” and the “now,” without a background of things that matter in an ultimate way to one’s existence. Nor is the conceptualization of individual identity by traditional liberal democratic theory a move in the direction of restoring a sense of the intertwining. Alternatively put, the human self is not its own foundation, not constituted by reason alone, but has to Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, p. 8. Pap. VII–1 B 123 / TA, Supplement, p. 135. 10 Pap. VII–1 B 135.15 / TA, Supplement, p. 134. 11 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, p. 4; p. 14; p. 69; p. 103. 12 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster 1987. 8 9

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reaffirm itself by relating itself to its foundation. To assist in retrieving of the moral horizon or vision, without which a self would collapse, Taylor draws on Kierkegaard, in particular his pseudonymous text Either/Or and especially the idea of “choice” as an ethical category to lay out the possibility of the moral transfiguration of the self. That pseudonymous text by Kierkegaard is, for Taylor, about reversal or transfiguration of the self in which the latter now has a life project, the reconnecting of itself with a moral order (the good or the infinite) as it manages its worldly affairs as a member of civil society. That is, when the self chooses or affirms itself infinitely, it is adopting a changed stance towards the world.13 Elements finite to one’s life are no longer held as final or absolute ends but become relative to one’s life projects as defined by the changed stance in the self. Or, all finite things, including relations with the world and significant others, are ascribed their value from the choice by which the self acquires an infinite dimension. In choosing itself infinitely, the self is thereby grounding itself to a higher end or moral order. Taylor understands Either/Or as instancing how the self becomes grounded or transfigured, how it moves from an aesthetic stance towards the world to an ethical one, and finally to a religious one14 in which its relation to the world and itself becomes grounded in God. Taylor does not follow through with Kierkegaard to the religious, stopping at the ethical or, at maximum, that which is considered in the Kierkegaard corpus as the ethico-religious. His interest is limited to how the self moves from the aesthetical to the ethical, how it affirms itself, pulls itself out of a crisis of affirmation. In Kierkegaard’s language, his interest is in how the self overcomes despair and dread. By not following through to the religious, it is clear that the remedy Taylor is proposing for what has gone wrong with contemporary Western culture is markedly different. Each proposed a different prescription for the malaise of their times. Succinctly stated, for Taylor, the self had to become regrounded in a moral order and for Kierkegaard it had to be grounded in the notion of God that correlates with New Testament Christianity. Taylor is undertaking the work of retrieval to restore practices with respect to reuniting the self to a moral order or the notion of the Good. Kierkegaard’s aim is to reintroduce New Testament Christianity, vis-à-vis becoming a genuine person. Each interprets human existence as requiring for its fullness a transcendent order. But the question that distinguishes between them is how the order is be conceptualized—ethically or ethico-religiously, in terms of a biblical conception of God. On the one hand that question alludes to an important difference between these two authors on the final end or telos of the self when seen with respect to the overall intention of their authorship. On the other hand, that very question presupposes an affinity between these authors in a way that the explanation of one illuminates the other conceptually. Specifically, with respect to the idea of ethically becoming, of a transfigured self, Taylor does not quite explain the dialectic of becoming, how the transfiguration in the self occurs, how the exercise of choice makes it possible. But Judge William in Either/Or does. Accordingly, everyone has a primary duty to reveal the universal through the choices they make for themselves. The duty is 13 14

Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, p. 450. Ibid., pp. 450–1.

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unlike a Kantian one, where the individual is the self-legislator. Instead, the human self, unlike other beings in nature, has spatio-temporal limitations and within itself an unlimitedness in the form of a telos. This limited-unlimitedness is precisely the universal in the human and is attainable through actions and decisions, that is, striving to hold together the limited and unlimitedness simultaneously. This then is the essential duty, a possibility, that everyone has, and as Judge William puts it, “to transform himself into the universal human being is possible only if I have it within myself κατὰ δύναμιν (potentially). In other words the universal can very well continue in and with the specific without consuming it.”15 It may seem that this line of thinking leads to an atomism or even the worst kind of subjectivism that Taylor decries about modernity. But in fact, what is being defended, as one commentator on Kierkegaard points out, is the notion “that we have subjective access to our own reality which is different from the cognitive understanding that we have of other actualities.”16 This reality is the only one that, when known, does not become a possibility by being known. Nor can it be done by anyone but ourselves as agents. Each of us has within, both the goal and the activity for the transfiguration, or manifestation of what we ought to become. To bring that Kierkegaardian insight closer to Taylor’s agenda, the self never is able to transcend its own necessity—its capability, dispositions, past, historical situation. It has that necessity as a precondition for making a free and resolute choice by which it accepts or transforms but never transcends that necessity to arrive at sufficient knowledge for a rational choice regarding one’s possibilities or stance towards the world. This affinity of the two authors is based on a shared Aristotelian insight about the self. It can become only what it is by striving for a goal that requires the movement of potentiality to actuality in the self itself. One of the many ways that Taylor renders that insight is through these words: “Fulfilling my nature means espousing the inner élan, the voice or impulse. And this makes what was hidden manifest for both myself and others.”17 A few lines later, Taylor wrote of that conception of nature as reflecting the accounting of human development based on a model that Herder had articulated, and that “obviously owes a great deal to Aristotle’s idea of nature which actualizes its potential.”18 Clearly, for Kierkegaard and Taylor the transfiguration to an ethical self at the most elementary level involves a telos that is the self at hand, and not that which is outside it. To choose that self resolutely and absolutely, that self that is constantly changing in relation to its historical situatedness, requires passion and earnestness. The social critique by each author as having an affinity is better understood against the backdrop of how a self becomes transfigured. Both read the reigning ideology SKS 3, 249 / EO2, 261. George J. Stack, Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics, University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press 1977, p. 198, note 23. Stack reads Kierkegaard with respect to Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics. Aristotle is one of Taylor’s resources for thinking about ethics and the good. 17 Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, p. 374; cf. also the reference to transformation on p. 124, and to Aristotle on the awareness of the right order of life on p. 125. 18 Ibid., p. 375. 15 16

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of their day as negating or snuffing out that sense of a dialectical individuality. The nemesis for Kierkegaard was Hegelian philosophy and the State Church in Denmark, colluding together to spawn a monstrous illusion or counterfeit Christianity with a leveling effect. People were no longer passionately committed to an ethico-religious ideality and were lacking the deep subjectivity that correlates with becoming a developed self or person. His review of Two Ages renders the leveling effect this way: “The established order continues to stand, but since it is equivocal and ambiguous, passionless reflection is reassured.”19 A few lines later, it continues “we are willing to keep Christian terminology but privately know that nothing decisive is supposed to be meant by it.”20 One of his early pseudonymous writings expresses the generation’s contempt for dialectical individuality this way: “the immorality of our age is perhaps not lust and pleasure and sensuality, but rather a pantheistic, debauched contempt for individual human beings. Everything, everything must be together…no one wants to be an individual existing human being.”21 The collusion between church and state to forge a framework for self-understanding out of an instrumental rationality and a Socratic-Hegelian view of truth meant now that people were becoming forgetful of the self as having a spiritual component as well. His critique was intended to retrieve the idea of the self as having a spiritual component, by introducing in Fear and Trembling the testing of Abraham as a man of faith, and in Fragments and its sequel, the Postscript, the idea of a thought experiment and terms such as error/sin, paradox, and the God-man. Taylor interpreted the nemesis of modern culture to be instrumental rationality coupled with a skewed view of authenticity held as an ideal. The operations of a market and bureaucratic state tend to strengthen what Taylor calls an atomistic stance towards the world and others, and consequently to make it harder for individuals to identify with their political community and its democratic initiatives.22 There is a sense of futility, or, as Taylor puts it: “A sense grows that the electorate as a whole is defenseless against the leviathan state; a well-organized and integrated partial grouping may, indeed, be able to make a dent, but the idea that the majority of the people might frame and carry through a common project comes to seem utopian and naïve. And so people give up.”23 Taylor, too, wants to retrieve the self, to reenergize interest in it by directing attention to its moral source, namely, the good. And, it is through linguistic articulation of it that we are empowered by it to act from the depth of our being. Note that the affinity starts to dissipate as we look closely at how the self comes to reground itself in its moral telos. Kierkegaard has a theory of indirect communication as to how another is to be helped in the reconfiguring the self. Taylor has no comparable theory other than a broad view of articulacy. Or, as he puts it: “there seem to be very strong reasons in favor of articulacy wherever a constitutive good serves as a moral source. Moral sources empower…words can at times have

SKS 8, 77 / TA, 80. SKS 8, 78 / TA, 81. 21 SKS 7, 324 / CUP1, 355. 22 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, pp. 111–12; p. 117. 23 Ibid., p. 113. 19 20

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tremendous moral force.”24 The articulacy would involve giving an account of how the self came to be in the situation in which it finds itself, how we lead our lives, how things matter to us. In short, a phenomenological description of what it means to be a person in the world would be a way of releasing the self from the iron cage of modernity. Closely related to the preceding two points, ethical becoming and the social critique, is a third point of affinity in the respective thinking of Taylor and Kierkegaard: that is, the conceptualizing of the self in connection with the good. For neither thinker does clarity about the self occur in the absence of its orientation towards the good. However, Taylor’s interpretation of the good is somewhat narrow, perhaps framed by his interest as a political theorist. He employs the term “hypergood” to mean the highest good among social goods and is that which can challenge and reject the social good.25 But there is resonance here of a heteronomy ethics, the supreme good conceptualized in terms of a social good that is a hypergood, or of a higher order. This higher order good to which I turn for a sense of wholeness, which moves me in a total way, is in fact historicized, in issuing from the arrangement that stabilizes the social group that is the matrix for my identity. A hypergood is conceptualized as that what matters most to people with respect to their stance towards the world and the ethos of the social group to which they belong. It is likely to vary from one social group to another and can be competing when the groups find themselves in conflict. Further to understanding how they imply a heteronymous ethics is the fact that, according to Taylor,26 hypergoods arise through historical succession, and are associated with a transfiguration or trans-valuation that does not occur once and for all. They are, in short, historically specific and socially functional to a group. Kierkegaard, however, does not reject the idea of the highest good, but is able to describe it in such a way that there is no shade or resonance of heteronymous ethics. What is of telling significance is whether the manner in which the self comes to relate itself to the good is the same for each thinker. There is some vacillation on Taylor’s part, due perhaps to him wanting to leave room for tradeoffs in the tension of moral conflicts in daily life, and for the recognition of others in a multicultural society. But the good that Kierkegaard conceptualizes, according to “Purity of Heart,” is in its essence and various manifestations always one, a unity.27 This would mean that the good is neither temporal, nor finite, nor accidental, and is that to which the self stands related, is actualizing. Only in the act of willing it passionately and resolutely does one become related to it. Taylor’s emphasis is more on knowing the good by articulating one’s sense of it and less on the passion or how one wills that good. For him the conceptual location of the hypergood is in hermeneutics, in the quest to make sense of it through our speech acts.28 Our sense of what it is Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, p. 96. Ibid., p. 65. 26 Ibid., pp. 64–5. 27 SKS 8, 143 / UD, 30. 28 For a more substantial account of the connection between the self and the good for Taylor and Kierkegaard, see Abrahim H. Khan, “The Good and Modern Identity: Charles Taylor and Søren Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers, ed. by Roman 24 25

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good to be, what moves us, is challenged or deepened through dialogue that would involve discriminating between right and wrong, making evaluations as a member of a society. The accumulations of the very strong discriminations and evaluations are constitutive of our identity and orientation toward a moral good. In this respect, Taylor is assigning a greater valence to collective identity compared to Kierkegaard. Finally, affinity notwithstanding, the contention that Kierkegaard’s influence on Taylor is at best minimal rests on two counts. One is that Taylor draws also on two other nineteenth-century thinkers, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, to illustrate instances of self-affirmation, or transfiguration. Kierkegaard rendered self-affirmation in terms of choice, Dostoevsky in terms of love for ourselves and the world or by being loved by God, and Nietzsche as self-overcoming or the will to power. In a way, Kierkegaard stands as another example with a different vocabulary that bolsters Taylor’s project illustrating ways in which certain authors at different points or historical situatedness in Western culture are trying to reconnect the self to its final end, one higher than itself. The second count is that there is no clear indication of Taylor having a firsthand or in-depth acquaintance with any of the Kierkegaard texts. He is, nevertheless, quite familiar with a range of Kierkegaard’s ideas, enough to go on with his project on the modern identity. By his own account, his acquaintance is through a secondary source,29 and he mentions Either/Or only to say that it provides “a kernel idea which Heidegger made into his notion of resoluteness.”30 Further, one would have expected the more recent and erudite work Secular Age, that seeks to rescue religious morality from secularism, to make reference to Kierkegaard, though it might be argued that its category of a post-Durkheimian imaginary presupposes the subjectivity that co-occurs with a moral choice of being authentic. Taylor’s project of retrieving sources of the self in modernity does not in any axial way require thinking with and through Kierkegaard’s works. In short, while Kierkegaard may not be as relevant for the project of modernity as are Aristotle, Hegel, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, or Heidegger, this nineteenth-century thinker is nonetheless sufficiently significant for Taylor to tip his hat by the references that Sources of the Self accords him.

Králik et al., Šaľa: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos 2007 (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 2), pp. 161–72. 29 Taylor expressed in a note his indebtedness to Jane Louis Rubin for a discussion of Kierkegaard. Rubin wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled Too Much of Nothing: Modern Culture and the Self in Kierkegaard for the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, p. 583, note 71. 30 Ibid.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Charles Taylor’s Corpus Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975, p. 92; p. 494; pp. 537–8; p. 562. Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1979, p. 29; p. 159. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1989, p. 220; p. 449; p. 450; p. 453; p. 500. The Malaise of Modernity, Toronto: Anansi Press 1991, p. 4. II. Sources of Charles Taylor Knowledge of Kierkegaard Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1954. — Either/Or, vols. 1–2, trans. by David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson, and Walter Lowrie, Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1959, vol. 2. — The Present Age and On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. by Alexander Dru, introduced by Walter Kaufmann, London and Glasgow: Collins 1962. — Two Ages, trans. by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1978. Rubin, Jane Louise, Too Much of Nothing: Modern Culture and the Self in Kierkegaard, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, California 1984. III. Secondary Literature on Charles Taylor’s Relation to Kierkegaard Davenport, John J., “Towards and Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 261–323. Dooley, Mark, The Politics of Exodus: Soren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press 2001, p. 31, note. Khan, Abrahim H., “The Good and Modern Identity: Charles Taylor and Søren Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers, ed. by Roman Králik et al., Šaľa: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos 2007 (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 2), pp. 161–72.

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Mehl, Peter, J., Thinking through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World, Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2005. Piety, Marilyn, “Kierkegaard on Rationality,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 59–74. Rudd, Anthony, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993, p. 8; p. 42.

Index of Persons

Abraham, 7–9, 21, 39, 66, 107, 108, 124, 143, 172, 191, 209, 210, 225. Adler, Adolf Peter (1812–69), Danish theologian, 20. Adorno, Theodor W. (1903–69), German philosopher, 30, 35, 45, 150, 204–10 passim. Agacinski, Sylviane (b. 1945), French philosopher, 45. Althusser, Louis (1918–90), Algerian-born French philosopher, 31. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1919–2001), British philosopher, 220. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), scholastic philosopher, 74. Aquinas, Thomas (ca. 1225–74), Scholastic philosopher and theologian, 74, 121, 126. Aristotle, 52, 117–21 passim, 126, 127, 129, 160, 208, 224, 227. Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), British poet and critic, 21, 25. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), church father, 215. Austin, J.L. (1911–60), British philosopher, 21, 25, 196. Ayer, A.J. (1910–89), British philosopher, 74, 195, 196. Barrett, William, 33, 34, 100. Barth, Karl (1886–1968), Swiss Protestant theologian, 118, 121, 191. Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre (1821–67), French poet, 39, 40, 182, 193. Bayley, John, 136. Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86), French philosopher and writer, 137, 148, 153.

Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), German philosopher, 32. Berdyaev, Nikolai (1874–1948), Russian philosopher, 137. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher, 187. Berkeley, George (1685–1753) Irish philosopher, 7. Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97), British philosopher, 220. Bernstein, Richard (b. 1932), American philosopher, 181, 182. Bigelow, Pat, 45. Binga, Timothy, 81. Binswanger, Ludwig (1881–1966), Swiss psychiatrist, 36, 37. Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003), French philosopher, 207, 208. Bloom, Allan (1930–92), American philosopher, 222. Bøggild, Jacob, 44, 45. Booth, Wayne (1921–2005), American literary critic, 41. Borges, Jorge Luís (1899–1986), Argentine writer, 36, 38, 43, 196. Bouwsma, O.K. (1898–1978), American philosopher, 1–9, 170. Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924), British philosopher, 2, 88. Brandom, Robert (b. 1950), American philosopher, 193. Camus, Albert (1913–60), French author, 101. Cavell, Stanley (b. 1926), American philosopher, 11–26.

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Christ, 5, 8, 43, 67, 76, 79, 168, 169, 182, 192, 206, 215. Conradi, Peter, 135, 138, 152. Copleston, F.C. (1907–92), British historian of philosophy, 74.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), American philosopher and writer, 18, 21, 25, 194, 198. Epicurus, 75. Evans, C. Stephen, 94.

D’Alembert, Jean le Rond (1717–83), French mathematician and philosopher, 71. Darrow, Clarence (1857–1938), American lawyer, 74. Davenport, John, 122, 129. Davidson, Donald (1917–2003), American philosopher, 177, 180, 195. Dawkins, Richard, 74. De Man, Paul (1919–83), Belgian-born American philosopher, 29–47. Dennett, Daniel C. (b. 1942), American philosopher, 74. Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), French philosopher, 45, 177, 178, 193, 195, 196, 214. Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher, 7, 24, 109. Dewey, John (1859–1952), American philosopher, 177, 179, 182, 191, 193–5, 198. Diderot, Denis (1713–84), French philosopher and Enyclopaedist, 71. Don Quixote, 80. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821– 81), Russian author, 101, 189, 227. Dreyfus, Hubert (b. 1929), American philosopher, 49–69. Dreyfus, Stuart, 49. Dru, Alexander, 51, 103, 105, 137. Duckles, Ian, 129. Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917), French sociologist, 227.

Farrell, Frank B., 183. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), German philosopher, 29. Fielding, Henry (1707–54), English author, 143. Flores, Fernando, 50. Foot, Philippa (1920–2010), British philosopher, 160. Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth (1846–1935), 100. Foucault, Michel (1926–84), French philosopher, 187, 195. Frankenberry, Nancy, 191. Frazier, Brad, 183. Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925), German mathematician and philosopher, 14, 15, 18. Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian psychologist, 24, 74, 101, 118, 196, 204, 207.

Eckhart or Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1328), German mystic, 149. Edwards, Paul (1923–2004), AustrianAmerican philosopher, 71–85.

Genet, Jean (1910–86), French writer, 196. Geuss, Raymond (b. 1946), American-born British philosopher, 30. Godzich, Glad, 30. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat, 101. Gross, Neil, 184. Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929), German philosopher, 182. Hale, Geoffrey, 45. Hall, Harrison, 50. Hall, Ronald, 12. Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88), German philosopher, 32. Hannay, Alastair, 51, 64.

Index of Persons Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000), American philosopher, 179. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm (1770– 1831), German philosopher, 2, 5–8, 17, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 44, 83, 105, 107, 109, 118, 120, 138, 139, 140, 143–50 passim, 167, 168, 173, 183–92 passim, 195–7, 204–12 passim, 215, 219, 220, 225, 227. Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher, 24, 30, 33, 34, 49–52, 55, 56, 73–5, 77, 83, 99, 101, 137, 180, 182, 186–8, 192, 193, 195, 227. Heraclitus, 196. Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803), German philosopher, 224. Hick, John (b. 1922), British philosopher of religion, 74. Hicks, David, 136. Hitchens, Christopher, 74. Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 72. Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), English philosopher, 195. Høffding, Harald (1843–1931), Danish philosopher, 87–95 passim. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776– 1822), German Romantic author, jurist, composer, 40. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843), German poet, 33. Hong, Edna H. (1913–2007), American translator, 51. Hong, Howard W. (1912– 2010), American translator, 51. Hume, David (1711–76), Scottish philosopher, 73, 74, 79, 119, 143, 196. Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), German philosopher, 122, 148. James, Henry (1843–1916), American novelist, 88, 136. James, William (1842–1910), American philosopher, 76, 82, 87–97.

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Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969), German philosopher, 77, 101, 136. Jean Paul, i.e., Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), German author, 32. John, 43. Jones, Joe R., 168. Joyce, James (1882–1941), Irish author, 196. Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), Czech-Austrian novelist, 36, 101, 144, 207, 211. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher, 24, 30, 32, 35, 79, 119, 124, 126, 138, 143, 149, 167, 180, 189, 191, 194, 196, 203, 211, 224. Kaufmann, Walter (1921–80), GermanAmerican philosopher, 99–116. Kelly, Sean Dorrance, 50. Kerr, Fergus, 148. Keyes, Sidney (1922–41), English poet, 137. Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen (1756– 1838), Søren Kierkegaard’s father, 109. Kierkegaard, Peter Christian (1805–88), Danish theologian, elder brother of Søren Kierkegaard, 105. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55) The Concept of Irony (1841), 29, 41, 138. Either/Or (1843), 55, 59, 65–7, 104, 124, 125, 127–9, 159, 223, 227. Repetition (1843), 21, 22, 40, 137, 152. Fear and Trembling (1843), 19, 37, 38, 39, 64, 66, 104, 107, 108, 137, 138, 142, 143, 159, 172, 191, 198, 209, 210, 212, 225. Philosophical Fragments (1844), 5, 8, 123, 187, 188, 198, 207, 225. The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 41, 104, 112, 137. Stages on Life’s Way (1845), 104. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 51, 55,

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66, 67, 74, 77, 104, 128, 159, 171, 198, 225. A Literary Review of Two Ages (1846), 51, 103, 225. The Book on Adler (ca. 1846–47), 13, 18–21, 104, 108. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), 125, 137, 226. Works of Love (1847), 159, 160, 212. “The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress” (1848), 138, 211. The Point of View for My Work as an Author (ca. 1848), 104, 138. The Sickness unto Death (1849), 52, 65, 104, 112, 138, 147, 221. Two Ethical-Religious Essays (1849), 103, 105. Practice in Christianity (1850), 138. Journals, Notebooks, Nachlaß, 107, 137, 198. Kleist, Heinrich von (1777–1811), German poet and dramatist, 32, 35, 36. Kurtz, Paul, 81. Lacan, Jacques (1901–81), French psychiatrist, 207. Lawrence, D.H. (1885–1930), English author, 137. Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95), French philosopher, 191, 208. Lippitt, John, 129. Locke, John (1632–1704), English philosopher, 143, 147. Lowrie, Walter (1868–1959), American translator, 104. Lucretius, 54. Lukács, Georg (1885–1971), Hungarian philosopher, novelist and literary critic, 37, 122. Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919), German Marxist theorist, 207. MacIntyre, Alasdair (b. 1929), British philosopher, 73, 117–34.

Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), German author, 32, 194, 207. Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973), French philosopher, 136, 138. Marx, Karl (1818–83), German philosopher and economist, 24, 29–31, 111, 182, 187, 189, 193. McDermott, John, 88. Melberg, Arne, 44. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61), French philosopher, 227. Milbank, John, 203, 212. Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), English philosopher, 74, 138, 182, 193. Moore, George Edward (1873–1958), English philosopher, 1, 88. Moses, 7, 8. Müller, Adam (1779–1829), German literary critic, 32. Murdoch, Iris (1919–99), British philosopher, 135–56. Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977), Russianborn American author, 182, 193, 196. Nagel, Ernest (1901–85), Czech-American philosopher of science, 74. Newman, John Henry (1801–90), British Catholic cardinal and theologian, 126. Newmark, Kevin, 45. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), German philosopher, 21, 22, 24, 32–4, 56, 59, 74, 100–5 passim, 111, 119, 122, 125, 126, 150, 182, 186, 187, 189, 193–5, 198, 204, 227. Noah, 7. Norris, Christopher (b. 1947), British philosopher and literary critic, 42, 44. Novalis, Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), German lyric poet, 32. O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964) Irish dramatist, 137.

Index of Persons Olsen, Regine (1822–1904), 35, 105, 109, 211, 212. Ortega y Gasset, Jose (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher, 101. Pap, Arthur (1921–59), Austrian-born American philosopher, 74. Parmenides, 196. Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662), French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, 52, 57, 63, 204. Paul, 7. Pepper, Thomas, 44. Phillips, D.Z. (1934–2006), British philosopher, 157–76. Plato, 52–4, 135, 142, 146, 158, 167, 179, 188, 190, 194, 195, 204, 221. Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), American author, 24, 25. Poole, Roger, 44. Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94), Austrian philosopher, 83. Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), French author, 182, 186, 193, 194, 214. Queneau, Raymond (1903–73), French author, 137. Quine, W.V.O. (1908–2000), American philosopher, 180. Rand, Ayn (1905–82), Russian-American novelist, philosopher and playwright, 80. Rawls, John (1921–2002), American philosopher, 177, 178, 182, 193. Rée, Paul (1849–1901), German author and philosopher, 74. Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957), AustrianAmerican philosopher, 74. Rhees, Rush (1905–89), British philosopher, 157. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), German poet, 101. Rorty, Richard (1931–2007), American philosopher, 177–201.

235

Rose, Gillian (1947–95), British philosopher, 203–17. Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929), German Jewish philosopher and theologian, 207, 208. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, 23, 143. Roy, Aron, 44. Royce, Josiah (1855–1916), American philosopher, 190. Rubin, Jane, 52, 55, 65. Rudd, Anthony, 183. Rumana, Richard, 184. Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), British philosopher, 18, 72, 73, 74, 88, 167. Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76), British philosopher, 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), French philosopher, 34, 75, 101, 124, 136–42 passim, 145, 148, 150, 151, 153, 187, 196. Scheler, Max (1874–1928), German philosopher, 106. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1767–1845), German critic, 32. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829), German Romantic writer, 29, 32, 37, 42–4. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. (1768– 1834), German Protestant theologian, 191. Schlick, Moritz (1882–1936), German philosopher, 72. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher, 21, 25, 83, 111, 143. Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89), American philosopher, 177, 180. Shanks, Andrew, 203. Smyth, John Vignaux, 44. Socrates, ix, 5, 43, 123, 163, 177, 190, 204. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander (1918–2008), Russian novelist and dramatist, 101. Spinosa, Charles, 50.

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Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, 8, 196. Starobinski, Jean (b. 1920), Swiss literary critic, 40. Stein, Edith (1891–1942), German philosopher and nun, 121, 122. Steiner, George (b. 1929), American literary critic, 138, 151. Stendhal, i.e., Henri Beyle (1783–1842), French author, 32. Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), American poet, 196. Stevenson, Ian, 73. Stewart, Jon, 39, 87, 183. Swenson, David F. (1876–1940), American translator, 51, 94, 104. Swenson, Lillian M., American translator, 51. Taylor, Charles (b. 1931), Canadian philosopher, 135, 212, 219–29. Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), American author, 23, 193. Tieck, Johann Ludwig (1773–1853), German poet, 32. Tillich, Paul (1886–1965), GermanAmerican Protestant theologian, 8, 204. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–59), French political thinker, 227.

Tolstoy, Lev (1828–1910), Russian author, 23, 34, 105. Unamuno, Miguel de (1864–1936), Spanish philosopher, novelist and essayist, 137. Vattimo, Gianni (b. 1936), Italian philosopher, 191. Voltaire, i.e., François-Marie Arouet (1694 -1778), French Enlightenment writer, 71, 73, 74. Waters, Lindsay, 35. Weil, Simone (1909–43), French philosopher, 141, 151. Weiss, Paul (1901–2002), American philosopher, 179. White, Carol, 50. Williams, Rowan (b. 1950), Anglican bishop and theologian, 203. Winch, Peter (1926–97), British philosopher, 157. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher, 1–4, 7, 8, 11–26 passim, 122, 147, 161–71 passim, 180, 195, 227. Wrathall, Mark, 65. Zenge, Wilhelmine von (1780–1852), 36.

Index of Subjects

absurd, 37, 76, 77, 80, 123, 124. aesthetics (see also stages, the aesthetic”), 30, 55–61, 66, 110, 123, 125, 127–9. allegory, 40–2. analytic philosophy, 11–18 passim, 21, 22, 26, 72, 118, 177, 179–81, 195, 196. anguish, see “anxiety.” anti-Semitism, 100. anxiety, 34, 35, 74, 104, 111, 112, 223. aphorism, 25. appropriation, 38, 172, approximation, 77. art, 142, 150, 152, 153. atheism, 72, 74, 75, 184. atonement, 7. Aufhebung, 43. authenticity, 16–18, 21, 37, 49, 51, 56–8, 150, 225, 227. authority, 19, 20, 105–10 passim, 113, 160, 207–12 passim. autonomy, 101–3, 113, 182. baptism, 169, 171. belief, 7, 88, 158. Bible, 3–8, 170. Genesis, 9, 107, 108, 143. Hebrews, 4. Song of Songs, 214. boredom, 58–60. care, 34. Catholicism, 121, 127, 129. choice, 58–61, 63, 101, 102, 104–6, 110, 111, 113, 117, 122–9 passim, 139, 214, 222–4, 227. Christendom, 148, 163, 168, 184.

Christianity, 2–7, 20, 23, 64, 67, 71, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 94, 105, 109, 113, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126, 144, 148, 162, 165–74 passim, 179, 188, 192, 203, 206, 211, 215, 225. commitment, 36, 51, 53, 56–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 78–80, 82, 101, 111, 113, 122, 125, 189, 204, 221. communication, 39, 204. indirect, 31, 225. Corsair, 144. creation, 5, 7. critical theory, 203. death, 73, 74, 144. decision (see also “choice),” 128. deconstruction, 209, 211, 214. demonic, the, 35. despair, 6, 35, 51, 61, 63, 67, 111, 112, 148, 149, 221, 223. dialectical method, 205. dread, see anxiety. empiricism, radical, 87–95 passim. Enlightenment, 71, 124–6. eternality, eternal, 53, 83. and temporal, 57, 192. ethics, the ethical (see also “stages, the ethical”), 42, 55–61, 66, 110, 123, 125, 127–9, existence, 19, 80, 93. sphere of, 51, 53, 55, 58. existentialism, 13–15, 18, 24–6, 34, 74–6, 80, 100–6 passim, 121, 135–44 passim, 148, 153.

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facticity, 53–8 passim, 60, 63. faith, 4, 7, 15, 16, 21, 22, 37–9, 64, 67, 78, 108, 109, 113, 124, 128, 129, 173, 185, 206, 209, 210, 212. Fall, the, 5. fanaticism, 83, 109. fear and trembling, 9, 35, 172. fideism, 76, 83. finitude, finite, 53. and infinite, 57. foundation, 24, 35, 43, 125, 126, 147, 152, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167, 173, 178, 180–2, 196, 222, 223. foundationalism, 180, 181. freedom, 7, 53–5, 58, 60, 63, 101–6 passim, 112, 113, 221. Gnosticism, 215. God-man, 67, 225. grace, 128, 188, 212, 214, 215. guilt, 34, 75, 112. Hegelianism, 169, 171, 173, 174. historicism, 3, 186, 191. history, 5, 29, 43, 83, 118, 137, 192, 205. Holy Spirit, 170, 171. hope, 6, 182, 194. humor, 25, 197. idealism, 1–3, 35, 187. identity, personal, 119. imitation, 143, 144, 149. immanence, see “transcendence.” immortality, 160. inauthenticity, 16, 18. incarnation, 5, 75–80 passim, 168. indirect communication, see “communication.” individual, the (see also “single individual”), 106, 110. infinitude, 53. intellectualism, 94. interesting, the, 60, 143. internet, 49, 58, 63, 64. inwardness, 35, 43, 79, 80, 150, 171–3.

irony, 25, 29, 32, 37–43 passim, 183, 196, 197, 204, 205, 208. Socratic, 43. irrationalism, irrationality, 117, 122, 126, 158, 166, 172. isolation, 141. Judaism, 99, 203, 215. knight of faith, 9, 19, 37, 39, 64, 113, 143, 144, 151, 152, 171, 184, 189, 194, 214. Koran, 9. language, 2–8 passim, 14, 17, 18, 21, 37–9, 157, 166. language-games, 2, 8, 167. leap, 33–9 passim, 43, 76, 78, 82, 117, 128, 148, 214. leveling, 51, 60–4, 222, 225. liberalism, 118, 182, 183, 194. logic, 91, 92, 94. love, 66, 78, 102, 109, 160, 161, 205, 207, 212, 215. marriage, 21, 22, 36. Marxism, 118, 145. materialism, 71, 72. meaning, meaningfulness, 13–18 passim, 21, 26, 42, 52, 56 61, 64, 80, 93, 101, 166, 168–70, 205, 210, 221, 222. meaninglessness, 13–18 passim, 61, 62, 64, 221, 222. mediation, 168, 205. melancholy, 205, 214. metaphysics, 3, 6, 7, 73, 89, 139, 179, 181, 189. modernity, 119, 208, 220–7 passim. moment, the, 5. multiculturalism, 220. narrative, 119, 126. narrative unity, 129. natural language, see “ordinary language.”

Index of Subjects Nazism, 100. necessity, 53, 55. negativity, infinite absolute, 41, 42. neo-Kantianism, 211. neo-pragmatism, 177, 182, 190, 198. New Testament Christianity, 223. nihilism, 22, 51, 52, 60, 64, 119. ordinary language, 2, 3, 7, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 157, 164, 170. philosophy, 1, 11, 13, 15, 19, 21, 24. parable, 25. paradox, 25, 39, 123, 148, 225. absolute, 3, 5, 8, 75, 76, 165, 168–70. passion, 9, 51, 67, 77, 80, 83, 171, 221, 224. phenomenology, 5, 65, 121, 138, 148. philosophy of religion, 2–4, 100, 103, 118, 157–60. Platonism, 139. pluralism, 87, 89, 183. Positivism, 17, 18, 71, 77, logical, 15, 72, 137. possibility, 53, 55. and necessary, 57, 58, 60. post-structuralism, 214. pragmatism, 87, 88, 92, 179–82. press, the, 51, 63, 64. Protestantism, 99, 121. pseudonyms, 31, 64–7, 209. psychoanalysis, 112. psychology, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 109, 111, 119, 137–9. public, the, 51. purity of heart, 126. rationalism, 71, 75, 77, 90–2. rationality, 11, 77, 117, 120, 122, 129, 158, 160, 167, 173, 180, 188, 221, 225. redemption, 5. reincarnation, 73–5. relativism, 118, 183. religiousness A and B, 51, 55, 56, 61–7. renunciation, 37. repetition, 21, 22, 39–41, 44, 152, 207, 215.

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resignation, 37, 149, 209, 210, 214. responsibility, 101, 102, 113. revelation, 5, 6, 129, 160, 210. Romanticism, 23, 32, 44, 139, 143, 144, 151 salvation, 6, 26, 143. Scripture, see “Bible.” self-deception, 101, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111–13. sickness, 35, 55, 88. sign, 38, 42. silence, 39. sin, 5, 7, 8, 128, 148, 188, 192, 205, 225. single individual, the, 39. skepticism, 1, 11, 118. sociology, 119, 203. stages, 17, 43, 51, 110, 141, 146, 147, 149, 167. the aesthetic, 148, 165, 223. the ethical, 110, 138, 148, 149, 165, 223. the religious, 110, 138, 148, 149, 165. subjectivism, 172, 224. subjectivity, 2, 6, 7, 9, 76, 78, 93, 94, 166, 171–3, 193, 227. sublime, the, sublimity, 19, 23, 26, 210, 211, 215. suffering, 105, 143, 144. symbol, 38, 42. synthesis, 43, 52, 54, 57, 66, 90. system, systematic philosophy, 7, 13, 14, 17, 30, 42, 43, 51, 81, 90, 93, 105, 139, 142, 143, 171, 173, 185, 186, 188, 205, 206, 208, 210, 219. tax collector, 143, 144, 149, 150, 152, 171. teleological suspension, 107, 129, 172. temporality (see also “time”), 53. truth as subjectivity, 77, 82, 104, 110, 160, 161, 165, 166, 172, 173. utilitarionism, 138. Vienna Circle, 15, 71, 72, 78. virtue, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125–7, 129.