Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self 9780748694440

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NARRATIVE, IDENTITY AND THE KIERKEGAARDIAN SELF

NARRATIVE, IDENTITY AND THE KIERKEGAARDIAN SELF Edited by John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes

© editorial matter and organisation John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9443 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9444 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0477 8 (epub) The right of John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes to be identified as Editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations viii Contributors xi Introduction John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes   1. The Moments of a Life: On Some Similarities between Life and Literature Marya Schechtman

1

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  2. Teleology, Narrative and Death Roman Altshuler

29

  3. Kierkegaard’s Platonic Teleology Anthony Rudd

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  4. Narrative Holism and the Moment Patrick Stokes

63

  5. Kierkegaard’s Erotic Reduction and the Problem of Founding the Self Michael Strawser   6. Narrativity and Normativity Walter Wietzke

78 95

  7. The End in the Beginning: Eschatology in Kierkegaard’s Literary Criticism Eleanor Helms

113

  8. Forgiveness and the Rat Man: Kierkegaard, ‘Narrative Unity’ and ‘Wholeheartedness’ Revisited John Lippitt

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  9. The Virtues of Ambivalence: Wholeheartedness as Existential Telos and the Unwillable Completion of Narravives 144 John J. Davenport 10. Non-Narrative Protestant Goods: Protestant Ethics and Kierkegaardian Selfhood Matias Møl Dalsgaard

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11. Narrativity, Aspect and Selfhood Michael J. Sigrist

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12. The Senses of an Ending Kathy Behrendt

186

13. The End? Kierkegaard’s Death and its Implications for Telling his Story George Pattison

203

Bibliography 217 Index 229

Acknowledgements

Several of the papers in this collection were presented at a two-day conference held at the University of Hertfordshire in November 2011, as part of ‘Selves in Time’, a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship project funded by the European Commission. Our thanks to the Commission and to our colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire for this support. Material from Chapter 3 has previously appeared in Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford University Press, 2012) and is reproduced by kind permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 5 is a revised version of Michael Strawser, ‘Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Selfhood’, International Philosophical Quarterly 54:1 (March 2014) pp. 59–74, and is reproduced by kind permission of the editor. An earlier version of some of the material in Chapter 8 was included in John Lippitt, ‘Kierkegaard and Moral Philosophy: Some Recent Themes’, in John Lippitt and George Pattison (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 504–27, and is reproduced by kind permission of Oxford University Press. Finally the editors warmly thank Sylvie Magerstädt and Jessica Doyle for their help and support.

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Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works

The following abbreviations are used for the Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press) series: BA

The Book on Adler, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1998) CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (1980) CD Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1997) CUP 1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol.1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1992) EO 1 Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1987) EO 2 Either/Or, vol. 2, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1987) EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1990) FT Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1983) JC Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1985) OMWA See The Point of View for My Work as an Author PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1998) SLW Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1988) SUD The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1980) viii



TA TDIO UDVS WA WL

Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works ix

Two Ages, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1978) Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1993) Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1993) Without Authority, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1997) Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1995)

The following abbreviations are used for the Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers series: JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78) (citations give entry number rather than page number)

The following abbreviations are used for the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Copenhagen: Gads) series: SKS 2

SKS 3 SKS 4

SKS 5

SKS 6

SKS 7

SKS 8

Enten-Eller, Første del, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1997) Enten-Eller, Første del, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1997) Gjentagelsen, Frygt og Bæven, Philosophiske Smuler, Begrebet Angest, Forord, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1997) Opbyggelige taler, 1843–44, Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1998) Stadier paa Livets Vei, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (1999) Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen and Johnny Kondrup (2002) En literair Anmeldelse og Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig

x

SKS 9 SKS 10 SKS 11

SKS 12

SKS 13

SKS 15

SKS 18

Pap.

Narrative, Identity and Kierkegaardian Self

Aand, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup (2004) Kjærlighedens Gjerninger, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup (2004) Christlige Taler, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup (2004) Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen, Tvende ethisk religieuse Smaa Afhandlinger, Sygdommen til Døden og ”Ypperstepræsten” – ”Tolderen” – ”Synderinden”, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen and Johnny Kondrup (2006) Indøvelse i Christendom, En opbyggelig Tale og To Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen and Johnny Kondrup (2008) Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed, Til Selvprøvelse Samtiden anbefalet, Dette skal siges; saa være det da sagt, Hvad Christus dømmer om officiel Christendom, Guds Uforanderlighed og Øieblikket nr. 1–10 ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard Olesen and Steen Tullberg (2009). Sendebrev til Heiberg; Johannes Climacus; Bogen om Adler, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard Olesen and Steen Tullberg (2012) Journalerne EE, FF, GG, HH, JJ og KK, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen and Johnny Kondrup (2001) Søren Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vœrker, 2nd edn ed. A. B. Drachman, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange (1901–6). (Citations are to volume and tome number, entry category (A, B, or C), entry number and page number)

Contributors

Roman Altshuler is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of the Pacific. Kathy Behrendt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University. Matias Møl Dalsgaard holds a PhD from the University of Aarhus and is CEO of GoMore. John J. Davenport is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Eleanor Helms is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California Polytechnic State University. John Lippitt is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University. George Pattison is 1640 Chair of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. Anthony Rudd is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College and Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Michael J. Sigrist is Professorial Lecturer in Philosophy at George Washington University. Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Patrick Stokes is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University and Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Michael Strawser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. Walter Wietzke is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. xi

Introduction JOHN LIPPITT AND PATRICK STOKES

Questions of self-constitution and personal identity have been amongst the most heavily contested topics in Anglophone philosophy over the last half-century. Yet the pedigree of this discussion goes back considerably further. Such questions are clearly at work as early as the second-century theologians Athenagoras and Irenaeus, who worried about how identity could be preserved in bodily resurrection,1 and this eschatological dimension to the question was still very much alive in early modern discussions of mind and identity. Even Locke’s treatment of personal identity in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding – which has conditioned the entire discussion to the present day – is primarily directed at questions of what we’ll answer for on the Day of Judgement. Aristotle said philosophy begins with wonder, but the philosophy of personal identity partly begins with fear and hope: fear about what will happen to us after we die, hope that death might not be the end. By the middle of the last century, when the Lockean problem of personal identity re-emerged in the philosophical literature, this existential basis for the discussion of identity had been largely set aside. Instead, philosophers such as H.P. Grice, David Wiggins, David Lewis and Derek Parfit came at the problem from a purely metaphysical perspective. The question became one of reidentification: what, they asked, are the persistence conditions across time of these rather odd entities we call ‘selves’ or ‘persons’? Are they physical, or, as Locke was read as claiming, constituted out of psychological factors – and if so, which ones? What forms of connection or continuity between psychological states across time would be sufficient to secure numerical identity? If the self is, instead, something physical, what needs to persist in order for selves to persist: an entire human animal? Whole bodies? Brains? Parts of brains? 1

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This literature is vast, and, by the normally rather dry standards of analytic philosophy, sometimes quite thrilling, offering thought experiments involving body swaps, human fission, teleportation, infinite longevity and transmitting psychology from organic brains into computers. These discussions aren’t entirely devoid of practical consequences; Parfit (1984: 281) for instance, insisted that a reductionist view of identity would make us more altruistic and less fearful of death. But overall, the practical consequences for our identity-tracking moral concerns were taken to be secondary to metaphysics. Animalists like Olson (1997) explicitly sought to distinguish personal identity from the moral and practical considerations in which identity seems to matter to us very much, while reductionists like Parfit distinguished between numerical personal identity and what we actually care about in survival. Beginning somewhere in the 1970s, however, a schism occurred in the discussion of personal identity. The metaphysical research programmes – neo-Lockean, physicalist, animalist, reductionist, eliminativist, and more – are still highly active, but their metaphysical successes have often come at the cost of distancing personal identity from the existential concerns that motivate the topic in the first place. Other writers, such as Harry Frankfurt, Christine Korsgaard, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, moved away from the primarily metaphysical approach towards a conception of identity rooted in personal, practical concerns. The logical relation of strict numerical identity was sidelined in favour of a relation of ‘characterisation’: what is it for a characteristic to be a characteristic of a particular person (Schechtman 1996: 73)? What makes this desire my desire, this past my past, this imagined future my future? And what role does the subject herself play in the constitution of selfhood – is identity a mere given to be discovered, or is it, as philosophers increasingly began to assert, something we ourselves partly construct and maintain? These questions began to be answered in terms of affective volitional identification (Frankfurt), ground projects (Williams) – and, increasingly, in terms of narrative. The idea that narrative is somehow centrally implicated in selfconstitution enters the discussion of personal identity from several different directions. Historians and philosophers of history had begun to advance and then critique the claim that narrative was a central way in which we comprehend the past (cf. Mink 1970). It was only a small step to claiming that this is true of our own pasts, and indeed of our entire lives. In the first half of the 1980s, the claim that narrative is central to the intelligibility of human lives was made simultaneously in two very different contexts: Ricoeur’s hermeneutic understanding of



Introduction 3

history and selfhood, and MacIntyre’s argument that narrative is the condition for the intelligibility of actions in After Virtue. In MacIntyre, we find perhaps the strongest, and to just that extent most contestable, account of human lives as narratives – indeed, MacIntyre even claims that lives belong to distinct genres – and with it, an emphasis on the role of the subject in constituting itself as a person. We are never more than the co-authors of our lives according to MacIntyre – but that is already granting us a significant degree of agency in determining what we are. The self is no longer conceived of simply as an object to be studied, but a state to be attained and a project to be pursued. MacIntyre’s claims for narrative were bold, but the terrain needed to be fleshed out and nuanced. Schechtman’s The Constitution of Selves is perhaps the most important move to date in this direction, and while Schechtman has offered further refinements and developments of her approach, this book remains a touchstone for discussions of narrative identity. Schechtman argues that it is only in being able to articulate a coherent story about our lives, and in actually telling at least part of that story at least sometimes, that we attain the sort of intelligibility that allows us to characterise beliefs, goals, events and concerns as our concerns. The form of intelligibility characteristic of narratives is also, according to this approach, the form of intelligibility that unifies and organises the life of individual subjects. The narrative approach has however been far from monolithic. Davenport (2012: 2) has recently summed up the thrust of the narrative approach in what he calls the Signature Narrative Thesis: ‘each person’s individual identity is, or depends on, an understanding he has of his life in narrative form, as a development from his past towards his future prospects, ending in his death’. But narrativists have disagreed on a great many issues: whether narrative selves are metaphysically real; whether narratives describe states of affairs that are in themselves narrative, pre-narrative or non-narrative in character; whether narratives need to cover entire lives or merely sections thereof; and the extent to which narratives need be teleological in character. Moreover, the narrative approach has had to respond to serious sceptical challenges. A series of objections have been raised against the narrative identity approach: that it confuses stories with their subjects; that it either falsely attributes too many literary properties to human lives or it construes the concept of ‘narrative’ too weakly (the ‘triviality objection’); that narrative intelligibility is threatened by the interruption of life by death (the ‘mortality objection’ or ‘death objection’); and that a focus on narrative ‘wholeheartedness’ can be psychologically and ethically detrimental. A standing challenge to the narrative approach is the

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claim that narratives aren’t the whole story about personal identity – or as Galen Strawson, perhaps the most trenchant critic of the narrative approach to date, puts it, ‘we live beyond any tale we happen to enact’ (2012). K I E R K E G A A R D A N D N A R R AT I V E Kierkegaard has been largely absent from these general discussions of narrative identity, perhaps in part because MacIntyre’s discussion of Kierkegaard in After Virtue leaves no apparent space for Kierkegaard to be relevant to them.2 On MacIntyre’s reading, the transition from the ‘aesthetic’ to the ‘ethical’ life-views that Kierkegaard describes in Either/Or can only be irrational, based on a ‘criterionless choice’, for each life-view itself determines what will and will not count as a reason.3 Kierkegaard scholars then sought to defend Kierkegaard from this charge of irrationalism. A key contribution here was the collection Kierkegaard after MacIntyre (2001), which brought key papers on this topic from the 1980s and 1990s together with new essays. Several scholars argued that Kierkegaard’s position on what constituted authentic self-choice is in fact close to MacIntyre’s own. Either/Or’s Judge William not only aims to give reasons to choose the ethical intended to be compelling to an aesthete; those reasons are remarkably similar to those MacIntyre offers to adopt a neo-Aristotelian ethics. A central claim was that both Kierkegaard and MacIntyre hold an important aspect of ethical selfhood to be a quest for ‘narrative unity’ (Rudd 2001, 2012; Davenport 2001). A two-fold claim emerged: that Kierkegaard himself holds a narrativist view of selfhood, and that his work contains important elements, largely overlooked by the wider debate, that could shed light on the normative aspects of personal identity understood in terms of narrative. However, various questions, sceptical of either or both of these claims, have since been raised. These include versions of those raised in the wider narrative literature (already touched upon above), and more specifically Kierkegaardian questions. Amongst the former, for instance, the allegation that narrativism risks conflating stories with their subjects and life with literature was pressed in the direction of asking whether thinking of one’s life in narrative terms doesn’t make self-deception a more than typical threat. Similarly, does an excessive focus on the narrative unity of one’s life risk cutting one off from various kinds of novelty and creative tension necessary for our development (Lippitt 2007)? What kinds of unity are important in a meaningful, flourishing life; and why?



Introduction 5

Though related to the wider literature, such questions are also clearly pertinent specifically to Kierkegaard, not least to the aesthetic-ethical transition. Objections more explicitly rooted in Kierkegaard’s texts include first: whether narrativist attempts to explain the aestheticethical distinction focused excessively on the young man A, ignoring the diversity of aesthetic ways of life Kierkegaard sketches (Lippitt 2007); and second, the ‘4D objection’ – the narrative unity of a life, if it is a metaphysically real structure, is four-dimensional, such that it cannot be wholly present at any given time. But Kierkegaard demonstrates key senses (such as in important ethical and religious choice) in which ‘self’ refers to an entity fully present ‘now’ (Stokes 2010a, 2012). In recent work, Kierkegaardian narrativists have sought to address these and other sceptical questions, resulting in revised and nuanced accounts of their earlier work, such as Davenport’s new five-level account of narrative unity (unity-0 to unity-4) (Davenport 2012) and Rudd’s Platonist account of the self and the Good (Rudd 2012). Hence the debate over narrative identity has been taking place on two parallel tracks: a ‘mainstream’ discussion, and a Kierkegaardian one that draws upon the former while developing its own insights and challenges. As we have seen, Kierkegaard has been cited as both a narrativist (Davenport 2001, 2012; Rudd 2001, 2012; Lillegard 2001) and as someone suspicious of narrative (e.g. Turner 2001; Lippitt 2005, 2007; Stokes 2006; Dalsgaard 2010), and in the process, our understanding of what is at stake in the narrative approach has been deepened and sharpened. A third track also exists: the discussion of whether Heidegger – a philosopher whose work is undeniably steeped in key Kierkegaardian themes – is best understood in narrative terms. The task of the present book is one of both consolidation and progression. It brings narrativists and sceptics about narrative working in the ‘mainstream’, Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian traditions into dialogue between the covers of one book for the first time, coming at the question of narrative self-constitution from different directions and helping to build up a more complete picture of the state of the subject. But the chapters assembled here all serve to push the discussion forward as well. They seek to settle old problems and raise new ones; they mark how far the debate has come and suggest where it might go next. This engagement between analytic and Kierkegaardian theorists of narrative identity will, we hope, prove to be itself an important moment in this debate. There is much each of these ‘tribes’ can learn from each other.

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N A R R AT I V E I D E N T I T Y T O DAY The first section of the book explores some key themes and directions in contemporary narrative identity, demonstrating the confluence of analytic, Heideggerian, Kierkegaardian and phenomenological literatures around this topic. In the opening chapter, Marya Schechtman outlines how her ‘Narrative Self-Constitution Approach’ addresses deficiencies in the neo-Lockean, psychological continuity approach to personal identity. Narrativity, she argues, both offers a deeper ‘phenomenal unity’ than the psychological approach and allows us to make individual moments themselves intelligible as such. Schechtman then considers one of the key objections raised to narrative accounts of personal identity: that they either wrongly attribute the form of literary narratives to human lives, or otherwise use ‘narrative’ in too denuded a sense to warrant that name. While acknowledging that life and literature differ in crucial ways, Schechtman argues that the narrative approach also captures important features of lives that have analogues to literary forms, features that psychological continuity approaches can’t incorporate. Coming at the topic from a Heideggerian perspective, Roman Altshuler likewise traces the ways in which narrative expands upon the psychological view, adding a vital teleological dimension, while denying the reductionism implicit in that approach. Yet drawing on Heidegger – who like Kierkegaard has recently been claimed as a narrativist about selves – Altshuler argues that the narrative approach inherits the neo-Lockean approach’s emphasis on the past as determining identity, whereas the self is fundamentally about the future. Death is crucial on this picture, not as allowing for the possibility of a final meaning to our lives, but as determining Dasein as ‘pure unactualisable possibility’. Ultimately, Altshuler contends, narrative is not what constitutes selfhood – but this does not mean that narrative is not relevant to personal identity, because narrative allows identity to be expressed in action. Anthony Rudd articulates a strongly teleological Kierkegaardian, rather than Heideggerian version of narrative identity – but one that, unlike MacIntyre’s, is Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Drawing on the Kierkegaardian notion of the self as a synthesis of freedom and necessity, Rudd identifies a tension between ‘self-shaping’ and ‘self-­ acceptance’ approaches to selfhood. On Rudd’s view, it is precisely narrative teleology that allows this synthesis of our free and constrained natures to be worked out. But, Rudd claims, such synthesisation requires that local teloi be related to a further transcendent telos of the



Introduction 7

Good as such – a Platonic spanner in the works for any Aristotelian account, for the Good might sometimes require us to act against our own eudaemonist interests. According to Rudd, Kierkegaard provides valuable descriptions of ways in which the competing teloi of our lives can be oriented and organised in relation to an absolute Good that provides the highest telos for our narratively-organised lives. Taking a more agnostic stance, Patrick Stokes argues that even if narrative is an integral part of how we make our lives intelligible to ourselves, it cannot be the whole story. Narrativists claim that events in our lives can only be individuated and understood by reference to a larger narrative, understood as something with an overall shape and trajectory. But this opens up an important conceptual and phenomenological gap between comprehending a narrative as a whole, and following a narrative as it unfolds before us. Stokes argues that we have two perspectives on ourselves: an implicitly atemporal view of our life as a whole, and a view of our past and future as seen from the lived present. We relate to our life as a diachronic whole from a lived present, and thereby live simultaneously in both narrative and phenomenal time. Yet reading Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of self-experience in this way is, as Michael Strawser shows, open to challenge. Strawser reviews and critiques the claim made by contemporary phenomenologists such as Zahavi, and sometimes attributed to Kierkegaard as well, that consciousness involves a pre-reflective self-consciousness. Strawser instead claims that pre-reflective experience is ‘personally open, rather than subjectively fixed’. Further, he argues that Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of love pulls away from a phenomenology of self­-experience and towards an awareness of others, of the ‘common watermark’ of humanity in others. We are constituted not by self-interpreting ­narrative – though Strawser allows that some weaker versions of the narrativist approach are compatible with his view – but are constituted by love, constituted first as lovers. THE KIERKEGAARDIAN TURN The chapters in the second section extend the debate between Kierkegaardian narrativists and narratosceptics referred to above. Walter Wietzke seeks to advance the narratosceptic case, aiming to undermine the claim that narrative theory can explain how a human being makes the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical. Focusing mostly on Rudd, Wietzke considers how narrative theory could respond to elements of the narratosceptic critique, such as the triviality and self-deception objections. However, like Lippitt, he argues that

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Narrative, Identity and Kierkegaardian Self

this defence only works against a particular kind of aesthete, such as A, whose interests can only be satisfied by ethical values and practices. Wietzke stresses how this is because these values and practices are already motivating reasons for A. He argues that what Rudd highlights in the Judge’s position is rooted in a more complex picture of human practical agency, according to which many aesthetes are functional practical agents not afflicted by A’s problems. He offers a sketch of what such effective aesthetic agency would look like, and concludes that some aesthetes are indeed able to resist Rudd’s critique. Wietzke stresses the importance of the potential gap between what I take to be important in my life and what my telos demands of me, concluding that narratives are not ‘convincingly suited’ to narrowing this gap. Eleanor Helms seeks a ‘third way’ between narrativism and narratoscepticism. Discussing Kierkegaard’s notion of transfiguration (forklarelse), she compares the unity of a life lived in faith with the unity of a novel. Replacing talk of narrative unity with literary unity, she argues that the self is better understood as a reader than a narrator. She compares Frank Kermode’s account of narrative disruption and reorientation with Davenport’s Tolkein-inspired account of eucatastrophe (fulfilment through disruption, in which a final triumph of the good is achieved not by human but divine agency). On this basis, she argues (against Rudd’s strong narrative view) that just as the task of a reader is to hope, so the self is best understood as one who always hopes to find narrative unity in the world – yet recognises her own powerlessness to bring this about. John Lippitt notes that as Kierkegaardian narrativists have revised and expanded upon their positions, the gap between them and narratosceptics has narrowed significantly. Focusing primarily on Davenport, Lippitt argues that despite this narrowing, Davenport’s continued emphasis on the Frankfurtian term ‘wholeheartedness’ (and its purported superiority to ‘ambivalence’) remains problematic. After summarising Davenport’s new position on narrative unity, Lippitt draws on David Velleman’s critique of Frankfurt in the light of Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ case. The latter’s problem is not his ambivalence, but the self-­misinterpretation that constitutes his reaction to it – something troublingly close to Frankfurt’s proposed cure. Lippitt also sees an important insight in Rudd’s discussion of psychotherapy. Very often, psychotherapy’s purpose is not to take a client from ambivalence to wholeheartedness, but from feeling unmanageably to manageably torn (a more liveable kind of ambivalence). He aims to support this by a discussion of forgiveness, of both others and oneself, noting the importance of a variety of forgiveness that continues to incorporate blame or self-reproach.



Introduction 9

John Davenport responds to Lippitt, Wietzke and Helms in turn. Against Lippitt’s Velleman-inspired critique, Davenport insists that what this attacks is not the best version of Frankfurt’s position on volitional wholeheartedness (which is best derived from his earlier work). While agreeing that Frankfurt is not clear on the distinction between repression and wholeheartedness (which he accepts might more accurately be called whole-willed-ness), Davenport claims that this distinction can be made – on the basis of a clearer distinction between emotions and volition, which he attempts to sketch. He also responds to the tougher forgiveness objection, while recognising that the best autonomy attainable might require profoundly mixed feelings about ourselves. In response to Wietzke, Davenport sketches an account of a robustly meaningful life dependent upon values of ultimate worth (which all aesthetes would lack), while a discussion of heroic epics seeks to show the indispensability of narrative. To qualify Helms, Davenport suggests that fulfilment through eucatastrophe (his unity-4) would only unify our story if we have worked towards unity-3: ‘ethical willing purified in infinite resignation must precede and be preserved in faith’. Matias Møl Dalsgaard adds a further sceptical note from a more theological perspective. Can the Kierkegaardian self adequately be discussed without taking into account Kierkegaard’s Protestant heritage? Drawing on Luther to discuss the problem of the will in Christian thought, Dalsgaard addresses themes also mentioned by Helms and Lippitt. In the joy in Christian living that is central to Kierkegaard’s discourse on the lily and the bird, one forgets one’s self-narratives, concerned as they are with one’s past and future. The lily and the bird do not plan – there is no ‘self-shaping’ – but rather live God’s plan. They are narrated by God. This relates to Helms’ question about whether we are better thought of as readers or narrators of our lives, while the final part also echoes Helms’ emphasis on the importance of hope. T H E D E AT H O B J E C T I O N Death has been taken to present a particular challenge to narrative accounts of identity. While some have argued (e.g. Malpas 1998) that the conclusion provided by death is a necessary condition for understanding life in narrative terms, others have seen the radical interruption of life by death as a threat to narrative intelligibility. In his chapter, Michael J. Sigrist argues the former, along Heideggerian grounds: death is the condition for the temporality in which I understand my life as a whole. Like the narrative self, Heidegger’s Dasein exists, as Sigrist puts it, over time rather than simply in time, having temporal relations

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built into its very structure. Anti-narrativist readings of Heidegger have claimed that death cannot be brought into a narrative understanding of Dasein as death is not an event that might have a determinate narrative meaning, while more general critiques of narrativism argue that the open-endedness of agency is incompatible with narrative intelligibility. Using the linguistic notion of ‘aspect’ and the Aristotelian distinction between kinesis and energeia, Sigrist argues that death as the formal limit of a life is in fact a condition for Dasein’s understanding itself as living a life, and this gives lives the same sort of wholeness as narrative does. Kathy Behrendt argues against the narrativist claim that death has a special role to play in determining the narrative meaning of a given life – a claim Behrendt calls the ‘special ends hypothesis’. Behrendt distinguishes between the importance we might attach to the fact that a life ends and the importance of its specific ending. Examining notions of completeness, closure (explanatory, emotional and anticipatory), telos and retroactive meaning conferral, she finds that none of these manages both to apply to non-literary life-narratives and to give a special status to the event of death. Narrative meaning and teleological significance are not necessarily or even typically more accessible at the end of a life than anywhere else – except in the highly implausible case of lives that are totally focused on the achievement of a final, overarching goal. As George Pattison explains, just such a ‘grand narrative’ reading is to be found in some biographies of Kierkegaard, which have tended to present his life story as a ‘quest for unambiguous life’, culminating with his collapse and death at the apex of his attack on the Danish church. This is true, Pattison demonstrates, among such diverse biographers as Alfred Bauemler, Walter Lowrie and Josiah Thompson – and some of Kierkegaard’s own comments prior to his death appear to license such a view. But there is another way of viewing death, as summed up in de Beauvoir’s claim that every death is in some sense an accident, a radically contingent happenstance. Something like this latter view is in fact entailed by Kierkegaard’s own account of the ‘certain-uncertainty’ of death – a thought that, for Kierkegaard, pushes us back to a consideration of how we live our lives now, not what they will mean at the end. N OT E S 1. On this history, see Martin and Baressi 2006. 2. See especially MacIntyre 1984: 39–45. 3. For his revised version of this objection, see MacIntyre 2001, especially 344.

1  The Moments of a Life: On Some Similarities between Life and Literature MARYA SCHECHTMAN

Over the past several decades narrative accounts of personal identity have become increasingly popular (see, e.g. Davenport 2012, MacIntyre 1984, Ricoeur 1992, Rudd 2012, Schechtman 1996, Taylor 1989). As the narrative approach has become more prominent it has, predictably, attracted its share of criticism, and there has been a fairly strong reaction against the idea that our lives can profitably be understood in narrative terms. The most common and forceful objection to this approach is often formulated as a kind of dilemma: either narrative theories really mean to claim that our lives are significantly like literary narratives or these views use the term ‘narrative’ in some weaker and non-canonical sense. If the former is the case, the argument goes, the view is false and potentially damaging. If the latter is the case, the force of describing our lives in terms of ‘narrative’ is unclear and the view is in danger of triviality. In this essay I offer a response to this dilemma on behalf of a version of the narrative approach which I call the ‘narrative self-constitution view’ and which I developed in The Constitution of Selves (Schechtman 1996). I begin with an overview of the narrative self-constitution view and the objections raised by ‘anti-narrativists’ before going on to answer these charges in more detail, speaking first to the charge that the view is false and then to the charge that it is harmful before concluding with a brief discussion of why the view of narrative employed should be considered non-trivial. T H E N A R R AT I V E S E L F - C O N S T I T U T I O N V I E W: B AC K G RO U N D A N D O B J E C T I O N S Before seeing how the narrative self-constitution view is able to respond to the dilemma described above we will need a few more 11

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details about the view itself as well as a clearer understanding of the objection to it. The narrative self-constitution view is developed as a way of expressing Locke’s basic insights about the nature of personal identity, and presented as an alternative to the expression of these insights found in traditional psychological continuity theories. Locke famously argues that personal identity over time consists in sameness of consciousness rather than sameness of substance. The argument for this view turns centrally on hypothetical cases like the one in which the consciousness of a prince ‘enters and informs’ the body of a cobbler, resulting in someone with the cobbler’s body and the consciousness of the prince (Locke 1975: 340). If we reflect on this case, Locke says, we will conclude that the resulting individual would be the same person as the prince (even though he is the same man as the cobbler). This can be seen, for instance, by recognising that he would be responsible for the prince’s actions and not the cobbler’s, or that before the switch the prince would have reasons to be egoistically concerned about the wellbeing of the resulting individual in a way in which the cobbler would not. A person, on Locke’s view, is ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places [. . .]’ (Locke 1975: 335), and is essentially an agent; ‘[‘person’] is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery’ (Locke 1975: 346). The condition for the continuation of a person is thus the same as the condition for the continuation of an agent, and this, Locke argues, is sameness of consciousness. Although Locke’s position has seemed compelling to a great many people, it turns out to be rather tricky to specify with any precision what ‘sameness of consciousness’ amounts to. The standard development of this idea in recent times has taken place within psychological continuity theories, which define identity between persons existing at two different times in terms of the existence of overlapping chains of sufficient numbers of individual psychological connections, for example those between experiences and memories, intentions and the actions that carry them out, or the different moments of a continuing and stable belief, desire, or value (see, for instance, Parfit 1984: 206–7). Most versions of the view also require that these connections be appropriately caused, and that there be a unique chain of such connections. Very roughly, then, psychological continuity theories define sameness of consciousness over time in terms of a certain kind of stability in one’s psychological states or makeup. David Lewis sums the general idea up nicely: ‘I find what I mostly want in wanting survival is that my mental



The Moments of a Life 13

life should flow on. My present experiences, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and traits of character should have appropriate future successors [. . .] These successive states should be interconnected in two ways. First, by bonds of similarity. Second, by bonds of lawful causal dependence’ (1983: 17). While psychological continuity theories have been extremely popular, they have also been subject to a variety of objections. One of these, labelled the ‘Extreme Claim’ by Parfit, argues that the relation of psychological continuity described in these views cannot, in the end, explain the forensic implications of personal identity. If my only relation to my future self is that there stand between us properly-connected moments of consciousness that are sufficiently like one another, the Extreme Claim charges, it does not seem obvious why I should be especially responsible for my own actions or have a special kind of concern for my own future wellbeing. This objection suggests that the connection Locke finds between the earlier prince and the later person with the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is not captured by the relation of psychological continuity as the traditional view defines it.1 I have argued that psychological continuity theories cannot avoid this problem because of the way they structure the question they address. These theories start by looking at individual moments of human consciousness as independently definable entities, and then asking how they must be connected to one another in order to provide the kind of unity Locke describes. The unity Locke is after is a phenomenological one, an experience of oneself as a persisting self, and this kind of unity, I claim, cannot be built up out of isolated temporal moments held together by externally-describable relations. As an alternative I propose that we think about the unity of a person’s life and consciousness as a narrative unity. The salient feature of a narrative in this context is that the events within it take their significance, and even their character, from the context in which they occur. While we can certainly isolate individual moments in a narrative, I argue, these moments are always abstractions from the whole, which is in an important sense conceptually prior. According to the narrative self-constitution view we constitute ourselves as persons by operating with a (largely implicit) autobiographical narrative which serves as an organising psychological principle of our lives. Through the lens of this narrative we interpret and experience the individual moments of our lives in the context of the life as a whole and this, I claim, provides the kind of deep phenomenological unity which is missing in the relation that defines identity according to the psychological continuity theory. The basic idea is a fairly simple one: a

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ride in a car is one thing if it is a ride in my family’s first car, purchased after scraping our way out of years of poverty; another thing if it is the standard Monday morning commute to a job I hate; yet another if it is the ride to the doctor’s office to get the results I have been dreading. At some superficial level these actions might all be described as a ride down a particular stretch of road at a particular time, but they are very different experiences, and their difference is due to the way in which the past and the future are, as it were, present in the current experience. These examples help also to show the sense in which our selfnarratives are largely implicit. My background knowledge of whether I am in this car for the first time, where it is taking me, what I expect to happen there, and how I feel about it, are all part of how I experience riding in the car, but I do not have to be reflecting upon or actively entertaining thoughts about any of this in order for it to influence what the experience is like. Background awareness of my ongoing narrative infuses my present experience even when I am not attending to it. The kind of self-narration that constitutes our identities as persons on this view thus does not require that we articulate our narratives to ourselves or to anyone else. It does, however, demand that we are usually able to explicate them locally and that they are largely accessible to consciousness when we do reflect on them. I call this ‘the articulation constraint’. To round out our understanding of the basic features of the view it is also worth mentioning a second constraint it places on identityconstituting narratives which I call ‘the reality constraint’. The reality constraint requires that our self-narratives not run afoul of uncontroversial (in the everyday sense) facts about the world and general rules of intelligible human motivation and the parameters of human interaction. I cannot operate with any narrative self-understanding I wish but must understand myself in a way that makes it possible for me to engage in the kinds of interpersonal interactions that define Lockean personhood. This means, among other things, that my self-narrative will, for the most part, have to correspond very closely to my human history, although it does not rule out the possibility that in science fictional scenarios it might not. According to the narrative self-constitution view, we constitute ourselves as agents by recognising our human history as our history, and experiencing and acting upon the world through the lens this appropriation provides. This view is thus clearly a target of the challenges raised against the narrative approach in general, which charge that our lives are so unlike literary narratives that any self-conception rightly called ‘narrative’ is certain to be not only inaccurate but selfdamaging.2 Before considering how to answer the objections of the



The Moments of a Life 15

anti-narrativists, we will need a bit more information about exactly what complaints they raise. Literary narratives are artefacts created by authors for aesthetic and moral purposes, objectors to the narrative approach point out, and because of this there are vast differences between life and literature. For one thing, literary narratives have a very particular form that our lives do not share. At the most general level, such narratives usually begin with exposition and build to a central crisis which is then resolved, tying up any loose ends that may remain. Lives are not like this, the objection runs. While there may be plenty of crisis and conflict in a typical life, and with any luck some resolution as well, there is no reason to think that someone’s life will, from birth, move toward a defining conflict or crisis which will necessarily be resolved in a tidy and decisive manner by the time of her death. Literary narratives, moreover, belong to particular genres and subgenres which serve as templates for how they will unfold, determining what kinds of events will take place and in what order – while lives are messier and more varied and cannot be so easily categorised. Literary narratives, moreover, have thematic unity, and each element within them is purposefully and self-consciously chosen by the author. Everything in a narrative – the weather, the colour of a character’s hair or eyes, the chance meeting of a friend on the street, an illness or a ­collision – meets some aesthetic aim, and never happens by chance or out of natural necessity. This is decidedly untrue of our lives, which are filled with random and trivial events. If we think of our lives as narratives, according to this objection, we will need to think that each and every thing that befalls us carries with it a significance or purpose relative to the whole of our lives. This will lead us to assume that events which are nothing more than the effects of chance or natural causation are full of meaning and portent in a way that they are not. This makes us at best superstitious, and at worst psychotic. A narrative view of the self puts us in danger of succumbing to what Peter Goldie calls the ‘fictionalizing tendency’ of ‘finding agency in the world where it is not’ (2012: 162–4). For these reasons, it is argued, thinking of our lives as narrative in form is simply false. The only way a narrative self-conception could be accurate would be if we were to define ‘narrative’ in such generic terms that the claim that we should think of our lives as narratives would be empty. We can think of our lives as ‘narratives’, that is, only if we remove from our notion of narrative the very features that make literature what it is. Peter Lamarque puts it this way: ‘The more we try to restore the distinctively literary features of [canonical ­literary]

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­arratives the more remote they become from real life.’ Indeed a n stronger point can be made. To the extent that literary features are brought to bear on real-life narratives they have a distorting and pernicious effect on the self-understanding that such narratives are supposed to yield’ (2007: 119). Nor, according to detractors, is the only problem with a narrative self-conception that it causes us to misunderstand our true nature. If we think of our lives as narratives we are likely to think of them as belonging to some genre that spells out their trajectory. This puts us in danger of believing ourselves to be in the thrall of some kind of destiny, failing to explore the possibilities that are open to us or to experience our lives fully. Galen Strawson, for instance, suggests that narrative views of the self ‘close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and are potentially destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts’ (2004: 429). Samantha Vice argues similarly that ‘feminists and post-colonial writers have been arguing for years that individuals are reduced and traduced by forcing their lives into such stories’ (2003: 105). These are important and serious challenges, and in the remainder of this chapter I will describe how they can be met. Before doing so, however, I want to clarify just what I am trying to show. I am happy to acknowledge that there are deep and significant differences between life and literature. The claim I hope to defend is not that our lives are exactly like novels or films or that we are just like literary characters. Autobiographical narratives are not literary narratives. What I hope to show is that there is a non-trivial sense in which it is legitimate and useful to think about our lives in narrative terms despite their very real differences from works of literature. N A R R AT I V E F O R M I N R E A L L I F E One straightforward way to show that our lives should be understood in narrative terms would be to provide general criteria for being a narrative and show that our lives meet them. Unfortunately, this seems a hopeless task, as we are unlikely to find agreement on a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for narrativehood. Here I will take a more modest and targeted approach. The narrative view I am specifically interested in defending is the narrative self-constitution view and, as we have seen, this view is developed as an alternative to the more standard psychological continuity theories. My strategy for defending the invocation of narrative in this approach will thus be to highlight certain structural similarities between our lives and literary narratives



The Moments of a Life 17

that are not captured by the psychological continuity theory but are expressed in the narrative self-constitution view, and to argue that it is legitimate and not intrinsically harmful to understand our lives in the way this view suggests. This discussion will reveal the sense in which I am claiming that it is both correct and necessary to understand the self in narrative terms. Once this has been made more concrete we can return to the question of whether and in what sense it is trivial to do so. Let’s begin with the claim that literature, unlike life, has a defined form. We are taught in school that a literary narrative starts with exposition, builds to a central crisis or conflict, and concludes with resolution of that crisis. Not all literary narratives follow this format, of course. A narrative might, for instance, fail to offer resolution at the end. Sometimes this happens accidentally (an author might meet with an accident in the middle of writing a novel, or a cult television series might be unceremoniously cancelled mid-season). Other times it happens by design and is part of the aesthetic plan of the author. At the end of The Turn of the Screw we do not know whether there has been an actual haunting, and The Sopranos concludes with a carefullychosen fade to black which leaves the protagonist’s fate unclear. An unresolved literary narrative is, however, shocking and frustrating, and this is because we expect resolution. There is a trajectory that a literary narrative is supposed to follow and when it does not it is notable. This is, opponents of the narrative approach claim, untrue of our lives. To a certain extent this difference must be conceded. Real lives do not, or at least do not typically, follow precisely the format of e­ xposition/ crisis/resolution and we do not expect them to do so. But this does not mean that they are shapeless. While it is true that our lives do not unfold just like literary narratives, they do have a presumptive trajectory. At the most general level this structure is imposed by fundamental biological facts of our embodiment around which we organise our lives. Lives do have a beginning, a middle and an end, delimited not only by the number of years lived, but by the point someone has reached in the standard developmental trajectory for humans. We start out as helpless infants, and typically mature through childhood to adulthood, old age and ultimately death. Different kinds of activities and experiences are associated with, and appropriate to, different life stages, and these are frequently tied to biological facts. There are only a certain number of years during which childbearing can occur, and in general the physical and mental traits required for many important activities tend to be present only within certain spans of a lifetime, and in a particular order. There is infancy with dependence, childhood with play and nurturing,

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adulthood with work, independence and the possibility of offspring, old age when labour slows and physical strength declines. Because there is a typical developmental unfolding of a life there is an expectation of this unfolding in particular lives and, as when a literary narrative fails to complete the standard trajectory for narratives of that sort, there is an experience of anomaly and lack of completeness when it does not occur. We talk, for instance, of the tragedy of someone ‘struck down in his prime’. It is a truism that ‘parents are not supposed to bury their children’ and when someone dies young there is often tortured discussion of the first kiss they will never receive, the career they will never choose, the children they will never have. There are unfinished lives just as surely as there are unfinished narratives in literature. It is also worth noting that there is an analogue to purposely unfinished narratives in life. We can think, for instance, of the iconoclastic rock star who insists on living fast and dying young, flouting all convention. This is a life story, but one that is chosen to take an atypical path which is significant precisely because there is a typical one to which it can be opposed. The relation in terms of which psychological continuity theorists define personal identity does not in any way capture this fact about our lives. Psychological continuity is made up of repeated iterations of sufficient numbers of psychological connections between moments. There is no expected trajectory or way in which a life defined in terms of this kind of continuity is supposed to unfold. The psychological continuity theory provides no obvious meaning for the claim that a life is unfinished, or has ended prematurely except, perhaps, that it contains fewer days than is average. As we have seen, however, this does not capture all we mean when we make such a claim. We can thus make a distinction between extended events that have an expected trajectory or diachronic shape and those that do not. A literary narrative falls into the former category, a string of person time-slices connected by overlapping chains of sufficient numbers of psychological connections falls into the latter. I have suggested that the lives of persons also fall into the former category, and part of the force of saying that our lives are narrative in form is to underscore this fact. I expect that for most anti-narrativists the fact that both narratives and lives have a typical diachronic shape is not going to be enough to legitimate saying that our lives are narrative in form. The contrast with the psychological continuity theory does show, at least, that not everything which is counted as a diachronic unit has a shape in this sense. There is, however, more to say about the connection between life and literature. The narrative self-constitution view does not simply claim that our lives are narrative in form, but that we must understand our



The Moments of a Life 19

own lives as narratives or have a narrative self-conception, and it will be useful to think more about what is claimed in describing these selfconceptions as ‘narrative’. To begin, having a narrative self-conception means grasping the fact that human lives have a diachronic shape of the sort described above and applying that recognition in thinking about our own life. The narrative self-constitution view thus holds that we live our lives with a largely implicit, but sometimes explicit, assumption that they will follow the standard developmental pattern. This expectation includes within it an awareness of its own defeasibility in the form of an understanding that lives sometimes deviate from the typical trajectory. Sometimes, in fact, a person can know with reasonable certainty that her life course will not follow the standard developmental path. She might, for instance, be diagnosed with a terminal illness at a young age. Such knowledge is likely to engender a wide range of emotions all of which, like the frustration and surprise that we feel at unfinished literary narratives, can serve as evidence for the existence of a default presumption about the form of a life. This attitude is a key part of having a narrative selfconception, and there seems nothing remotely false or misleading about it. Our lives do have this broad, generic shape. This general feature of our self-conception is connected to another which draws a somewhat closer connection between autobiographical narrative and literary narrative. Our awareness of our lives as unfolding over time makes us, in a sense I will describe in a moment, something like readers of our own lives3 (it also makes us something like authors of our lives, in a way I will describe in the next section). The implicit recognition that our lives are limited, ongoing wholes leads us to experience what is happening now in terms of the whole in the ways exhibited in the example of the various car rides described in the previous section. This allows the narrative self-constitution view to respond to one of the major points of difference between life and literature invoked by anti-narrativists – the fact that each and every element in a literary narrative has a purpose with respect to the whole. There is no doubt that this is true of works of literature in a way that it is not true of life. Literary works are selective about what they include in a way that lives are not, and it is reasonable to ask why any particular detail of such a narrative is as it is in a special sense that is not true of life. This is especially so when we think about natural events. Lamarque, for instance, emphasises the way in which the accident at the beginning of Tess of the D’Urbervilles foreshadows the action to come (2007: 131), or in which the fog at the beginning of Bleak House prefigures and represents the state of the world depicted in the novel (2007: 124). It would obviously

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be inappropriate for traffic safety officials or meteorologists to seek similar kinds of explanations for real world traffic accidents or fog. There are, nevertheless, also important similarities between the way in which we understand our lives and the way in which a reader understands a literary narrative. For one thing, we recognise the events in our lives as possessing differential significance with respect to the whole. Some of the things that happen to us are turning points while others are part of the background hum of life, and others are somewhere in between. This aspect of self-narrative is, in fact, one that opponents of the narrative approach see as problematic since, they point out, we can never really know the role events will ultimately play in our lives while we experience them, or even while we are still alive. They thus worry that the attempt to make our lives conform to the structure of a narrative exerts a fictionalising pressure on our self-understanding, leading us to ascribe to ourselves at an earlier time insight that only really comes later. ‘I knew the moment I saw her that we were going to be together,’ someone might say with regard to meeting his future spouse at a party; or ‘I knew when I wrote it that this was going to be the book that got me my dream job,’ when in fact there was no such realisation at the time. While people do sometimes misremember what they thought at an earlier time, it is by no means a necessary consequence of the narrative self-constitution view that they do so, nor is it problematic for the view that we cannot know the ultimate and full significance of the events in our life narratives during our lifetimes. In this respect having a self-­narrative is not to be compared to having finished a novel (or film or story) but rather to being in the process or reading (or viewing, or hearing) it. Readers of novels4 will make assumptions about which of the events depicted are turning points or carry special significance and frequently they will be more or less correct. But readers can also be wrong about this, and are often surprised to find that an event that seemed trivial can turn out to be deeply important to the narrative, and vice versa. It is, of course, a meaningful difference between life and literature that in some sense we can never complete ‘reading’ our own lives. There is, however, no reason to conclude from this that we cannot approach our lives as narratives, knowing from the outset that they are narratives whose denouement is not fully available to us. In approaching both our lives and literary narratives it is appropriate to anticipate that some events will have a special significance for the unfolding of the whole that others do not. We can neither read a novel nor live a life without making some assumptions along the way about the significance of the events encountered, but in each case it is prudent to see these assump-



The Moments of a Life 21

tions as provisional. Again, this is a characteristic that the relation of psychological continuity does not share with either the autobiographical narrative described in the self-constitution view or literary narrative. While psychological continuity theorists acknowledge that some psychological connections may be more important than others and so in some sense count for more in determining the degree of psychological connection, there is no developed account of what this means. More importantly, it is completely compatible with the view that all connections might be of equal weight, and so the existence of differential significance – essential to literary narrative and in the narrative selfconstitution view – is at best a contingent feature of some instances of psychological continuity. Anti-narrativists may argue that there is still a vast difference between the way we understand our lives (at least if we are doing so clearheadedly) and the way in which we understand literary works. In literature, it is not just that different elements have different kinds and levels of significance but also, as mentioned earlier, that every element of a literary narrative is chosen to have at least some significance for the whole. Again, this difference must be acknowledged, but it is also important to see that while it is not the case that each and every event in a life is selected with reference to the aesthetic purpose of the whole, this does not prevent each such event from having genuine significance for the whole. A tornado in real life may not occur for the same reasons that it does in a novel, and it may have no symbolic import in the context of a life, 5 but it can certainly be a turning point for those in its path. If someone looks for the meaning of the tornado that destroys all her earthly possessions in just the way she would look for the meaning of a tornado in a novel, she is undoubtedly making some kind of mistake. There is no mistake, however, in anticipating that such a tornado will have implications for her and worrying about what it means for her life as a whole is by no means unreasonable. It is not, moreover, only highly dramatic or unusual events that can have meaning of this sort. Everyday activities are also significant insofar as they give our lives their character. Someone who assiduously brushes his teeth for two minutes each morning and night and performs a thorough housecleaning every second week is living a very different kind of life from someone who frequently stumbles in at 5 a.m., falling into bed fully clothed, and calls a cleaning service every few months. A particular act of tooth brushing or cleaning (or of failure to clean one’s teeth or house) will have quite different significance in each of these lives and to each of these people, and they will be experienced ­differently by each. Someone trying to understand either of these people

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will need to appreciate the significance of these banal events within the lives in which they occur. The character and significance of the individual events in our lives, like those of events in literary narrative, are determined by their place in the unfolding of the life as a whole. They are, admittedly, determined in different (although, as I have suggested, not completely unrelated) ways in life than in literature, but there is an important structural isomorphism nonetheless. The force of this claim can once again be seen through contrast with the relation of psychological continuity. Traditional psychological accounts of personal identity are, as Parfit emphasises, reductionist accounts. This means that everything that there is to be said about the existence or continuity of a person can be said by talking about the individual events that make up a life and the connections between them (1984: 211). The significance of this fact for present purposes is that on the reductionist approach the individual components out of which a whole is constructed are ontologically prior and hence completely well-defined as individuals, independent of the context in which they are situated. I have claimed that this is not the case for events in either literary narratives or human lives. In both literature and life individual events are abstractions from a more fundamental whole, and are as they are only because of their place in that whole. It is, in fact, precisely this diachronic holism that allows the narrative self-constitution view to answer the Extreme Claim. So long as we appreciate that individual events in a life do not take their significance from the whole in precisely the same way literary narratives do it is difficult to see how anti-narrativists could argue convincingly that it is false to view our lives as diachronic wholes in this way. Taking this attitude is largely a matter of the type and level of significance we implicitly attribute to events in our lives and the implications of these attributions for how we experience those events. A claim that this self-conception involves some kind of factual error would need to be based on the assertion that the significance attributed does not really exist. But this will be a difficult assertion to defend. To begin, I hope to have shown that such significance is a real feature of our lives. More to the point, the key idea behind the narrative self-constitution view is that much of this significance exists because we view our lives as diachronic wholes. It is this attitude that constitutes us as persons, the kinds of beings for whom events can have this special kind of significance. It is because I am able to think of myself as a continuing being with plans, projects, hopes, fears and things I want to do before I die, and to recognise individual events in my life as either forwarding or thwarting the kind of life I am hoping to live, that the character and



The Moments of a Life 23

significance of these events is inevitably coloured by their place in my ongoing life. Viewing our lives as diachronic wholes thus makes them so in the relevant sense. Insofar as there is a complaint about seeing elements of our lives as significant in this way, then, it cannot be that it involves a false conception of the self but must instead be that constituting ourselves as diachronic wholes is undesirable or harmful. In this section we have identified several structural similarities between the lives of persons as defined by the narrative self-constitution view and literary narratives. In both cases there is a typical broad trajectory and a standard way of unfolding. Both also involve discrimination concerning the level and kind of significance of individual events, and both have a diachronic holism such that the individual events within them can be fully understood only in the context of the whole within which they inhere. These features are not shared by persons as defined in traditional psychological continuity theories. I have argued that there is nothing obviously false in holding that our lives have these features so long as we recognise that they do not do so in precisely the same way that literary narratives do. In the next section we will consider whether it is nonetheless somehow inherently harmful to think of oneself in this way. N A R R AT I V E A N D S E L F - H A R M Anti-narrativists worry that a narrative conception of the self is unhealthy or self-deforming. The concern is that a narrative selfconception amounts to thinking of one’s life as instantiating some particular template or formula and so seeing oneself as subject to a pre-given destiny or life path. This, it is argued, interferes with the possibility of living a full and authentic life. The reason is that most of our conceptions of kinds of lives are based on cultural and social expectations, and the sense that we should or do instantiate one of these life narratives can lead a person to a form of life that is oppressive or precludes the kind of exploration that would allow for flourishing. The narrative schema with which I operate might, for instance, tell me that women do not go to engineering school but instead get married and raise children, or that people like me do not go to university but must work in the factory, or that people like me do not become fire-fighters but must go to university. Living a narrative handed to me by others hardly seems the recipe for the most actualised or happy life. It is certainly true that there is often pressure for people to conform to preconceived life plans that do not express their authentic selves and are not ultimately healthy for them. What is less clear is that this

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is a special danger for those with a narrative conception of self. Such a conception need not lead to oppression or self-deformation, and can indeed be key to avoiding these. To see how this is so we need first to be clear that operating with an autobiographical narrative in the sense required by the narrative self-constitution view is decidedly not to assume that there is a well-defined template for one’s life that one is destined to follow, or that living one’s life is simply going through the motions of acting out a story that is already written. In the last section we discussed the way in which having a narrative conception of one’s life is like reading a novel one has not read before. This means that when we think of our lives in narrative terms we do not know what is going to happen. We expect a certain broad diachronic shape and, given what has happened so far, we will have formed also somewhat more detailed assumptions about how things are likely to go from here, but these are always provisional, and appreciation of this fact is part of understanding our lives in narrative terms. More important, however, is the fact I mentioned earlier; that we are not just readers of our lives, but also authors. We do not, of course, author our lives in the very same way that authors of literary works author what they produce. There are many more, or at least quite different, constraints on our abilities to define the trajectory of our own lives than literary authors face with respect to their works. We cannot change natural law; we are not able to conjure up a job, or a love interest, or a miracle cure, or a snowstorm at will, or to make other people act in the way that we think works best with our life plans. As Alasdair MacIntyre famously puts it, ‘we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please’ (MacIntyre 1984: 99). We cannot, moreover, go back and revise previous episodes in our lives if we feel that they do not meet our needs going forward. This does not mean, however, that we have absolutely no influence on how our lives go. Our experience is that we are constantly called upon to make choices about what to do next, and that the choices that we make can and do have an important impact on what happens in the future. The worry anti-narrativists are expressing is that if we think of our lives as narratives we will not recognise the full range of possibilities available to us when we are called upon to make choices, but will instead decide according to the template we have been given. This is an over-simplification. The process of creating a literary narrative is, of course, an intensely personal one and will be different for different authors. Two things do seem true, however: First, most authors start out with some ideas about the way their narrative is going to go. Second, to produce a narrative effectively an author must sometimes



The Moments of a Life 25

take the perspective of the reader. An author of a literary work starts with a plan for a narrative which is usually conceived within a broadlydefined category of existing kinds of stories (although sometimes a reaction against these). As the work takes shape the author needs, as already discussed, to consider how the particular episode or passage she is crafting fits into the work and will also sometimes need to step back and look at the narrative as a whole to consider whether it is coming together in the way she wants and heading where she wants it to go. My claim is that having a narrative self-conception involves the same general kind of work. I mentioned earlier that we experience ourselves as constantly faced with the need to make choices about what to do. To have a narrative self-conception is to make those choices in the context of our understanding of our lives as a whole; what has happened in the past, what constraints we operate under at the moment, what we hope to accomplish and what consequences our choices are likely to yield. In most cases this larger context is brought to bear on individual choices without effort or reflection. It is, however, a requirement on an identityconstituting self-narrative that it be accessible to consciousness. This means that part of what is involved in having such a narrative is to reflect periodically, and when needed, on where our choices fit into the overall narrative of our lives and also on whether our narrative is cohesive, and whether it is the narrative we want to have. If we are not satisfied with our life narrative as it looks so far there is the possibility of at least endeavouring to redirect it. It is in this sense that having a narrative self-conception can aid authenticity rather than precluding it. To see better how this works, we can draw an example from someone who is hardly likely to come to mind as a champion of the narrative approach to the self. Consider the following passage from ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’: It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office, or the factory, meal, street car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But then one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement [. . .] it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. (Camus 1991: 12–13)

The experience of numbing alienation described here is part of a narrative sense of self as understood by the narrative self-constitution view – in two senses. First, the panoramic viewpoint from which the repetitiveness is recognised is a narrative viewpoint. Camus’ imagined worker is articulating the implicit realisation of the ongoing, repetitive nature of his life and the likelihood that it is not going to change.

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Narrative self-understanding is also revealed in the ‘why’ question which demands that these activities be intelligible as part of an ongoing life plan. One supposes that the worker has always had some kind of implicit answers to this question – he gets up to get to the streetcar on time, goes to the streetcar to go to work, goes to work to make money and so on. The alienation expressed in the ‘why’ question in Camus’ example signals that he no longer finds this a sufficient answer; his life narrative no longer makes sense to him and so, if he draws the logical conclusion (and does not ‘go back to sleep’), needs changing. What is depicted here is an act of self-conscious reflection rather than an implicit self-narrative, but the capacity to reflect in this way is part of having a narrative self-conception and requires as a precursor the sort of implicit pre-reflective sense of the unfolding of one’s life that makes up the bulk of an autobiographical narrative. It is from this implicit narrative that the sense of malaise and alienation can build. It is a common view that we are capable of autonomy in a way that other animals are not because we are able to step back from the experiences and impulses of the moment and take an evaluative stance toward them. By allowing us to understand these experiences and impulses in the context of our lives as a whole, and to think about and react to the shape and direction of our lives, a narrative self-conception can enable liberation from conformity and oppression, and by no means necessarily leads to these undesirable results. This is not to say that having a narrative self-conception guarantees autonomy and liberation – one might, for instance, suppress conscious reflection on the sources of malaise – but it does mean that this way of thinking about our lives is not in and of itself a force for oppression or inauthenticity. TRIVIALITY Anti-narrativists pose a dilemma for the narrative approach: either the claim is really that we should think of our lives as like literary narratives, in which case the view is false or misleading, or we use ‘narrative’ in some non-canonical way, and then the view is in danger of triviality. So far I have mostly addressed the first horn of this dilemma. The narrative self-constitution view does claim that our lives are like literary narratives, but not precisely like literary narratives, and I have argued that if the differences are respected there is nothing intrinsically misleading or harmful in the view. What remains to be shown is that recognising the differences between life and literature does not cause the view to fall on the second horn of the dilemma, employing an understanding of narrative so weak that the view becomes trivial.



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I will not have much to say about this because it is not evident exactly how this charge can be addressed, since it is not obvious how to calibrate triviality, and because I hope that the characterisation of what ‘narrative’ amounts to on the view I am defending has already suggested the significance of the claim that we should understand our lives as narrative in form. We have seen that the autobiographical sense described in the narrative self-constitution view shares important structural features with literary narrative, and that these very features are the ones that give a life governed by such a self-conception the kind of depth and significance we associate with personhood. It is always open to anti-narrativists to insist that at most this shows that our lives are like narratives, but not that they are narratives; so the differences between life and literature are at least as great as the similarities. But there seems no reason whatsoever to hold that literary narratives are the only kind there are, and it seems just as defensible to say that autobiographical narrative is a kind of narrative that differs from literary narrative in some key features.6 At this point it is just a quibble about the use of a word. I have identified important structural features that autobiographical narrative as understood in the narrative self-constitution view shares with literary narrative, including diachronic shape and holism. In describing this situation we might focus on the differences and deny, therefore, that the autobiographical sense described should be considered a ‘narrative’. We might just as easily, however, focus on the similarities and say that we have two different kinds of narrative – a­ utobiographical and literary. That there is at least some content to the claim that our self-conceptions are narratives can be seen in the contrast with the relation of psychological continuity, which does not share these or, so far as I can tell, any important features with literary narrative. In the context of the original development of the narrative self-constitution view the invocation of narrative was to highlight the points of contact between literary works and lives described above, and to show that the features of personhood that both Locke and psychological continuity theorists try to capture are connected to those points of contact; and whether this claim is made using the term ‘narrative’ or not, I hope to have shown that it is at least not a trivial one.7 N OT E S 1. For an extended description of this objection see Parfit 1984: 307–12. 2. See, for instance, Christman 2004; Lamarque 2007; Strawson 2004; Vice 2003.

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3. See Eleanor Helms’ chapter in this volume for a discussion of this possibility. 4. This applies also to viewers of films or plays or listeners to oral narrations. I will use the case of reading a novel to stand for all such engagement with literary narrative. 5. Although it should be noted that this is not entirely uncontroversial and over the millennia many have believed and do believe that our lives are designed, and that the ‘fictionalising tendency’ of attributing agency is not fictionalising at all. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I will assume at least that our lives are not authored just as literary works are, and therefore should not be read in precisely the same way. 6. For an interesting and important discussion of the relation between lived and told narrative see John Davenport’s discussion of narravive as a ‘living thread of cumulating meaning-relations that is like told narratives in diachronic form’ (2012: 8). 7. I am grateful to John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2  Teleology, Narrative and Death ROMAN ALTSHULER

I Consider the fission problem: a single human being, A, is divided into two such humans, B and C, through teleportation, divine intervention, or some other mythical power. Both B and C are psychologically continuous with A. As the established account of personal identity would have it, psychological continuity is sufficient for personal identity.1 But if fission is conceptually possible, the psychological continuity view of personal identity faces a problem: since both B and C are psychologically continuous and thus identical with A, given the transitivity of identity it must follow that B and C are identical with each other. And yet clearly they cannot be; not only are they two distinct bodies, but they are not psychologically continuous with each other! One way to attempt to circumvent this problem is by positing a teleological conception of personal identity. On such a conception, B and C are different individuals in part because, having diverged, they have different ends. Thus, B is identical with A insofar as both A and B are the same whole, whose end is the end of B. C is identical with A for the same reason. But B and C need not be identical on this account, because the identity does not hold between A and B and A and C as an identity of part to part, but rather as an identity of whole to whole in time. Similarly, my college has a single basement which serves two buildings, and thus the basement is part of each building in space without the two buildings being identical. It may thus seem that the best way to address the problem is by switching to what is often taken as the teleological extension of the psychological continuity view – a narrative theory of identity. Such a view aims to preserve what is right about psychological continuity, its reliance on psychological rather than physical features of human beings to explain their continuity through time, while denying that persons are 29

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reducible to causal chains of psychological states, on the grounds that those states themselves have a meaning only within the wider whole that is the self. We can also extract a teleological theory from Heidegger’s view of the self as Da-sein, a being defined by its possibility or, as I want to put it, a being that is an anticipatory whole. On this view, we have our whole self as the telos of our existence. In a sense, however, this is precisely what the narrative view seems to claim, and Heidegger is consequently often lumped together with narrative theorists. Here I want to argue that this is a mistake – Heidegger’s account is not a narrative account, but rather provides an alternative view of identity along with the material for a reconfiguration of the role of narrative. After arguing that narrative is neither constitutive of identity, nor supported by Heidegger’s view, however, I will argue that this need not mean narrative is dispensable; it serves a crucial role in the expression of identity in action, even if it is not necessarily constitutive of that identity. It may seem, however, that any teleological account must be a narrative one. I thus want to begin with a counter-indication. II Augustine’s Confessions, for example, may be read as a profoundly anti-narrative work. While Augustine certainly does lay out the details of his youthful sin and consequent conversion in narrative fashion, in Book 11 his discussion of time concludes with a prayer that: I may be gathered up from my old way of life to follow that One and to forget that which is behind, no longer stretched out but now pulled together again – stretching forth not to what shall be and shall pass away but to those things that are before me. (Augustine 2002a: 237)

Augustine’s aim, in other words, is to cast off the narrative he has so far laid out; and it is precisely the ‘stretching out’ of his self in time to which he objects. As he makes clear a few sentences later: I have been torn between the times, the order of which I do not know, and my thoughts, even the inmost and deepest places of my soul, are mangled by various commotions until I shall flow together into thee, purged and molten in the fire of thy love. (Augustine 2002a: 237–8)

In other words, Augustine has laid out his previous life as a narrative for two reasons. First, narrativity – where the self is stretched in time, and thus ordered according to past and future, both of which are real only within the soul – belongs to the sinful, fallen condition of humanity. Second, the aim of laying out the narrative is to cast it off, to be unified and purged of the temporal disorder.



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We find a similar conception in someone like Kant, for whom the highest good, at least for the individual, is the accomplishment of a holy will (in fact, Kant goes so far as to insist that Christ is an idea of pure practical reason, as the idea of a human being with a holy will). For Kant, as is well known, the moral law is an imperative for us insofar as our inclinations do not of themselves agree with it. Consequently, all human beings are evil in the sense that all human beings can be understood as having chosen to make occasional exceptions to the moral law when inclinations so demand. The holy will, then, is the ideal of a will whose inclinations are in full agreement with the moral law, such that the agent follows the law willingly. Now for Kant, our fundamental choice of an evil maxim manifests itself through occasional actions either prohibited by or not motivated by the moral law. Thus, overcoming the evil maxim requires making a choice against violating the law. But for Kant, this cannot be a choice we make each time we are faced by a decision – rather, there is only one choice, to occasionally violate or to obey the moral law, and this one choice is manifested in many actions. The evil self, then, is always fragmented; it is torn between the moral law, on the one hand, and the multiple contrary incentives to which it is subject in time. It furthermore imposes a guilt on us: since all of us begin in evil, we have always already failed at some point in our lives to live up to the moral law. To overcome the evil maxim – and Kant is not entirely explicit on how that could be done, since ‘it is less possible to conceive how man, by nature evil, should of himself lay aside evil and raise himself to the ideal of holiness’ (Kant 1960, 54, Ak. 6:61) – one must reverse the original choice, in effect choosing a new life for oneself, a life that in a single, unified choice brings together the new self with the old self, subsuming that fragmented self into a non-fragmented whole. While the evil self is ‘stretched’ among its inclinations, the new self is unified by a single law and no longer tempted by the conditions of time. I introduce these examples only to suggest that a narrative self – a self extended in time – may not be the only option for a teleological theory, even a teleological theory that emphasises the temporal dimension of selfhood.2 For Kant clearly sees the holy will as the telos of human life. And while it is commonly held that the central distinction in his work is that between a temporal world and a completely atemporal one, his account suggests precisely the idea of a third, intermediate temporality – a level at which the discrete actions of a human being are brought together into an articulated whole. In Augustine’s case, this is even clearer. In asking to ‘forget that which is behind’, Augustine is not asking for amnesia; rather, he is asking not to be torn among the

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different times of his life, to have his sinful past united with his postconversion self, a union that remains impossible as long as he remains ‘stretched’ in time. He is asking not to have his memories taken away, but to allow them to cease to be memories, that is, phantom parts of his self that nevertheless stand in opposition to him. III To bring out the point of these examples, I will introduce a distinction between two sorts of temporal unities, each of which has a claim to being constitutive of selfhood. First, there is the narrative conception of a temporally extended whole. By contrast, the Heideggerian picture as I read it – in accordance with Augustine and Kant – is that of a temporal whole. Both pictures, in other words, involve an ordering, and a unification, of events over time. But the unity so produced differs. On the narrative conception, it is extended. On the Heideggerian conception – or at least the version I want to defend – it is not. On this view, to insist on narrativity is to block off an important sense in which our telos is the attainment of a unity, by insisting that the past must remain a burden to be entered into my narrative as something that contributes – through a story – to shaping the overall story of my life. And the Heideggerian view, I believe, aims to overcome this sort of dependence of the temporal unity that constitutes my self on my past stories. To see what I mean, consider the psychological continuity view. Although ‘psychological continuity’ is now the standard name for a theory of personal identity, one often still finds references instead to ‘the memory criterion’, and even those who do speak of ‘psychological continuity’ tend to take memory as the essential component of personal identity. The psychological view assumes that the past cannot be changed, that it consists of fixed events, and that these events causally affect the present. That is, the past is gathered together through accretion, and affects the present through that accretion. Narrative accounts, for the most part, deny this picture of accreting events because the past events – including my actions – derive their meaning from the narrative itself. As Schechtman writes, ‘the most salient feature of narrative form in general is that the individual incidents and episodes in a narrative take their meaning from the broader context of the story in which they occur’ (1996, 96). The notion of context here has several meanings. First, against the psychological continuity view, it means that events do not occur atomistically such that a life can be reduced to causal relations between them – a life is constituted by a unity, not an accretion.



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Second, my life as a whole is the background against which events are to be understood. Call this response to psychological continuity – that past events affect the present only insofar as their meaning depends on the whole and therefore cannot fully determine identity – the Accretion Objection. So far, however, narrative seems to inherit some of the problems of the psychological continuity account, at least from a Heideggerian perspective: it makes personal identity depend strongly on the past. It is true, of course, that past events do not simply impact the present and future causally, but rather through intelligible relations with other events in the context of an overall narrative. However, it is clear that a narrative account depends, to a large extent, on the agent’s being able to incorporate her past into a story that leads up to the present and into the future. So past events do place significant constraints on the kind of identity a narrative theory can allow for. In one sense, of course, this is not problematic, but obvious. Our past clearly places significant constraints on our future possibilities, both in the sense of what we have the ability to do and what we are predisposed to. Action is possible only on the basis of some sort of character, and that character is shaped in large part by past experience. The question, however, is whether ­character – the sort of character required to make our actions intelligible – is constituted exclusively by a narrative form. Galen Strawson, for example, rejects this view. He insists that, the past can be present or alive in the present without being present or alive as past. The past can be alive – arguably more genuinely alive – in the present simply in so far as it has helped to shape the way one is in the present, just as musicians playing can incorporate and body forth their past practice without being mediated by any explicit memory of it. (2004: 432)

Now, clearly, Strawson cannot mean here literally that the past need not be present as past; what he means is that it need not be present in the sense of explicit experiential memory. And that seems obviously true: I can certainly know how to hammer in a nail, for example, without remembering my initially clumsy attempts at getting such hammering right. Practice and experience leave traces on our body and character, and such traces remain to influence future actions and preferences regardless of whether we remember their genetic origins. Knowing how to walk, for example, is an ability I have to perform a basic action that is not dependent on any memory of my first learning how to walk. And as Kieran Setiya has argued, a concert pianist may similarly perform a complex solo as a basic action, one for which she need not remember her practice (2007: 55).

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Schechtman has argued, in The Constitution of Selves, that narrative can accommodate Strawson’s objection here. She illustrates the point with some helpful examples, contrasting the ways in which a life of financial security or insecurity may affect a person’s behaviour even long after a change in their financial fortunes has taken place (she gives the example of people who, as a consequence of having lived through the Depression, continue to save pieces of string or go out of their way to save pennies to this day). The crucial point here being that the past ‘is able to affect the future in this global way [. . .] without being mediated through any specific memories’, which we can see from the fact that ‘there is no absurdity [. . .] in imagining that such a person could suffer some kind of amnesia in which she forgets all particular episodes of her past and yet retains the traits of thrift and financial conservatism that it has caused’ (1996: 111). Strawson’s objection – that we can incorporate the past into the present without the mediation of episodic memory – thus misses the point against (at least Schechtman’s version of) narrativity, conflating it instead with the memory version of the psychological continuity theory. Not every bit of my past needs to be capable of articulation in terms of episodic memory in order to be alive in the present – that I have a certain ability, for example, already implicates the past involved in using such an ability. And so the ability is already part of my narrative self-conception insofar as I implicitly know that I have it, meaning that I not only have the ability, but also access to it when needed. This account does, it seems to me, raise some interesting problems. For example, it is not clear how fully implicit abilities – especially ones that play a role in my life not because I remember something about my past or can tell a story, but merely because I have and can exercise them – really fit into a narrative account. It seems rather as if they are part of who I am, and my narrative self-understanding (insofar as I have one) must take that into account. It does not seem, in other words, as if these abilities constitute who I am by virtue of their narrative role; rather, it seems that they have a narrative role in my self-explanation because they constitute who I am by virtue of my being able to exercise them. In any case, we might ask whether the past here isn’t largely a matter of accretion after all – whether the narrative view doesn’t here backtrack in some way to the psychological continuity view. In other words, it seems as if my past experience is important not as distinct, articulated experience, at least not primarily, but rather as something that has caused me to have some ability, and it is the ability that matters for my narrative.



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IV Of course it is true that the past isn’t just a fixed accretion – it is alive in what we do, and it shifts in meaning and resonance. But it does so only in light of the generative self-orientation toward the future, as Heidegger would note. Heidegger’s view of the self, then, is not as psychological continuity, which builds by accretion, or as a narrative, which introduces subjects and proceeds to attribute actions and character traits to them. Heidegger’s view of the self is as an anticipatory whole. The whole is anticipatory, on this view, because the site of s­elfhood – the site where the self does something, rather than simply being something – is always ahead of it. The past provides the matter of the self, but it cannot be the essence of selfhood, because that matter has significance, or practical consequence, only insofar as it involves a continual pressing forth into possibilities. So here we have a first challenge to the narrative account: insofar as narrative gives the past an important role to play in constituting the self, that is, insofar as it approaches the psychological continuity account’s emphasis on memory, it seems to that extent to downplay the significance of the self’s orientation toward the future. We can, to some extent, mitigate this problem by noting how narrative takes the future into account. Anthony Rudd, for example, writes that, grasping my life ‘as a whole’ [. . .] involves recognising what my life has been up to now, and attempting to direct the trajectory it will take into the future. The future is part of my life as a whole [. . .] not of course as something already set, but as what I am shaping my narrative towards. And so the significance I see in my past life is in part dependent on what I am aiming to achieve in the future. (2007b: 544)

In this sense, then, a narrative theory can make the past dependent on the future: what aspects of my past matter, which aspects enter into my narrative and how, depends on my aspirations, on how I aim to incorporate them. And their meaning is revisable insofar as my aspirations and my sense of my future can change. My aim – my telos – thus structures my past within a narrative. Following this line of thought, John Fischer has argued that the evil of death (for most human agents, at least, if not for those incapable of narrative understanding) consists primarily in death’s power to cut off our ability to revise our narratives and so to improve our pasts by taking them up into the future (Fischer 2009). Before returning to this point, let’s note that one of the primary appeals of narrative theories rests on the fact that we seem to give

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­ arrative explanations of our actions. And these narrative explanations, n in turn, seem to require further narratives. That is – as we’ve seen from Schechtman’s account – every action ultimately derives its intelligibility from an overarching narrative of the agent’s life as a whole. This seems to suggest that my narrative is constantly open to revision – who I am, in both my past and future, is always open – up until the point where I no longer have a future, that is, my death. Thus, Fischer’s suggestion, that the evil of death consists in its cutting us off from the ability to revise our past, can receive a rejoinder: death is not an evil, but rather a good, since it alone allows us to really have an identity; at the very least, if death is an evil, it is only through death that the subject of this evil is constituted. Any identity we have until death is merely provisional, open to revision; death is the great conclusion. And since narrative does not simply involve the placing of each event within a whole but, additionally, that this whole have a teleological structure – that it derive its overall meaning from the end at which it aims – death seems to be constitutive of narrative. Not, perhaps, as the conclusion (few deaths are themselves projects) but as what allows there to be a conclusion in the first place. Is this narrative view of death, then, what Heidegger has in mind with his claim that ‘Death is constitutive of the being of Da-sein’ (Heidegger 1992: 315)? V If narrative does require that every action rely for its explanation – now in Heideggerian terminology – on its situatedness within a projected possibility into which the agent as Da-sein presses forward, and if, as the narrativist may claim, every such project is itself ultimately intelligible only within a wider project that constitutes the agent’s life, then it begins to look as if mortality is an a priori necessity for Da-sein. Indeed, a number of Heidegger interpreters have pushed something very much like this line. William Blattner (1994), for example, argues that death is to be understood as a limit to possibility, and as such is encoded in our taking up any possibility as such. Jeff Malpas (1998) has defended a similar reading, arguing that to embark upon a project, to press forward into it, is already to face the possibility of failure. And Bernard Schumacher has attempted to show that, for Heidegger, death is an a priori necessity built into Da-sein’s existence as possibility. Schumacher (2011: 80–4) correctly responds that this argument cannot go through: from existing as possibility, one cannot know that one is mortal because one cannot know that all possibilities must come to an end. Schumacher is right in his response, I believe, but wrong in the interpretation of Heidegger. Death is not and cannot be simply the failure



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or breakdown of any possibility whatsoever; it is the breakdown of all possibilities. Heidegger’s point is not at all that death – existentially understood – is any kind of conclusion. Rather, in addressing death, Heidegger introduces his all-important conception of temporality. For death, as Heidegger insists, is the possibility of the impossibility of existence.3 It is also, importantly, non-relational. Let’s put these points together. Da-sein exists by pressing itself into possibilities, and since it is being-in-the world, it can only be something by relating to its environment, by treating other entities in accordance with its projected possibilities. But death is not relational, and thus Da-sein cannot press forward into it. Death is therefore importantly different from all other possibilities. What all other possibilities share is their tendency to be seen as actualised and thus to cease to be possibilities. ‘Being out for something possible and taking care of it has the tendency of annihilating the possibility of the possible by making it available’ (Heidegger 1996: 261). Death, because it cannot be pressed into, ‘gives Da-sein nothing to “be actualized” and nothing which it itself could be as something real’ (1996: 262). After all, Da-sein cannot actualise its death since to be dead is no longer to exist as Da-sein. What death reveals to Da-sein, then, is its existence as pure, nonactualisable possibility. And by projecting this possibility, Da-sein can face the future not in the mode of expectation, of waiting for death as an actualisable event that can befall it, but rather by relating to the future as something purely possible and not to be actualised. By recognising, that is, that every actuality is made intelligible, ultimately, on the basis of possibility, so that possibility stands ‘higher than actuality’ (1996: 34). Death, for Heidegger, is thus not an event that bestows meaning on all the actions and events of our lives; it is, instead, what gives Da-sein a relation to those actions and events as essentially unfixed in meaning and thus as determining Da-sein’s future only insofar as they are intelligible in light of the openness of that very future. The temporality of the self is not a series of fixed points, but of relations such that the past depends for its actualisation, its meaning, on a future that is essentially indeterminate. This is also why it is a mistake to interpret Heidegger as arguing that knowledge of our mortality (conceived in the everyday sense) is a priori on the grounds that every possibility must come to an end. The point instead is that no possibility we press into is fully determinate in light of death but remains anticipatory: my abilities are abilities to accomplish certain tasks or meet certain challenges, but the full nature of those abilities depends on the tasks and challenges they will meet (or fail to meet) in the future. Finally, we can recall that Heidegger first introduces his discussion

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of death as a means of explaining Da-sein’s being a whole. And death, following my train of thought here, solves this problem not by allowing for a fixed meaning to be bestowed on Da-sein’s life, but precisely by rejecting the idea that Da-sein could be reducible to the events of that life, however unified and coherent. Da-sein exists as a whole in anticipation because it is no longer scattered among possibilities or fragmented among its multiple projects: Because anticipation of the possibility not-to-be-bypassed also discloses all the possibilities lying before it, this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of Da-sein in advance in an existentiell way, that is, the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-of-being. (1996: 264)

Da-sein’s telos is death, but not because death gives it a final meaning. Rather, it is because death allows Da-sein to be disclosed as whole as possibility as such, not as any concrete possibility or set thereof. And this teleological conception of selfhood is primordial, again, because any concrete possibility or set thereof, such as those stressed by narrativity, is possible only on the basis of Da-sein as pure unactualisable possibility. Where, then, does this leave us with regard to narrative? As we noted earlier, the narrativist approach can attempt to overcome the objection that it reduces life to the product of a past as an accretion by pointing out the role of the future in allowing for the revisability of the past. But how is this future understood? Recall, as Rudd points out, that on a narrative view, while the future is not something already set, it is something I shape my narrative toward, or something I am aiming to achieve. If so, then the future is not here taken in the mode of anticipation, but only expectation: it is not, in its meaning-bestowing capacity at least, an open future, but a pre-arranged one by means of which Da-sein attempts to grasp itself as fully actualisable. Far from allowing the future to thus give us a whole on the basis of which the past can be interpreted, this appeal to the future serves to obscure the very source of any possible meaning the past can have. Nor can the narrativist appeal to the future by pointing to death rather than some overarching plan, since death is just what reveals to Da-sein the necessary contingency of any attempt to understand itself in terms of the concrete, existentiell possibilities of its life.4 VI Now we can turn back to narrative’s difficulties with the past. On Schechtman’s view, self-narrative allows us to constitute ourselves by



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unifying the features of our lives that matter to us, and thus to take responsibility both for those features of our past and the actions we project on their basis. As she puts it, ‘a person’s identity [. . .] is constituted by the content of her self-narrative, and the traits, actions, and experiences included in it are, by virtue of that inclusion, hers’ (1996: 94). This view has much in common with Harry Frankfurt’s argument that we can be responsible for our actions insofar as they proceed from desires with which we identify (Frankfurt 1988). Frankfurt’s recipe for establishing the unity of our will, or practical identity, is thus to identify with some desires and exclude others as foreign (Frankfurt 1992). But while such a strategy seems to suggest how coherence might be possible, it raises a problem noted by David Velleman (2002): if some of our desires continue to operate but are excluded from our will, this sounds like a recipe for illness of the sort Velleman locates in the case of Freud’s Rat Man. Far from being unified, the agent is divided among competing desires, some of which she has lost the ability to reign in because she has ruled them out of her identity. The better strategy for unity, Velleman argues, would surely be to strive for a greater self-understanding and thereby to seek coherence among our motivational states. We can call this the Fragmentation Objection. Schechtman can avoid its consequences by agreeing with Velleman: the aim should be to attain a greater self-understanding, and one does so precisely by developing a better self-narrative. In fact, Schechtman does insist that the ideal of narrative is perfect intelligibility, ‘a life story in which every aspect coheres with every other’ (1996: 97). She simply notes that human beings cannot attain this ideal. But I think the Fragmentation Objection goes deeper. One objection to narrativity is the problem of self-deception. Critics like John Lippitt (2007) have argued that since we can be self-deceived in our self-narratives (indeed, Strawson suggests that self-deception is intrinsic to narrative), our identities cannot themselves be constituted by narrative. But it seems narrative can survive this version of the Fragmentation Objection as well. As Anthony Rudd notes, the only way to expose a narrative as a self-deception is to tell a better narrative (2007b: 548 n. 8). But a deeper problem may lurk in the background. Strawson points to it when he invokes Sartre as a critic of narrative, who thought that narrative is both unavoidable and undesirable, that it necessarily involves self-deception. It involves self-deception necessarily because a narrative self is necessarily fragmented. We can see this by returning to Frankfurt’s problem. Insofar as I have conflicting desires, any act of identification, like any unifying narrative, will simply mask the problem and, in fact, exacerbate it. Any life, however, is shaped by a multitude

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of divergent contingencies. That shape is masked by narrative, but not eliminated. And the solution cannot be to keep looking for a better narrative, because attempting to bring every aspect that has shaped one into a narrative will simply destroy the narrative structure altogether. Unity is necessarily exclusive in a life because it is an abstraction from many events and actions to a smaller number of patterns of facts and actions. The point of the Fragmentation Objection is just this: a concrete life is necessarily fragmented in such a way that it cannot be unified by a narrative without confabulation.5 A defender of narrative might try to incorporate this point. Malpas, for example, noting that even the best of us occasionally act irrationally, mistakenly, or out of character, grants that ‘every life is but imperfectly integrated and the connections that go to make up a life, any life, always display an element of fragmentation’ (1998: 123). But he concludes from this that, since our lives do have a unity, all this shows is that the unity is not a fact that precedes our making it a fact; that, in other words, the unity of our lives involves a unifying activity on our part, the activity of living. In this activity, on his view, we are constructing a narrative, since ‘one can also understand the unity and integrity of a life in terms of the unity and integrity of a particular life-story’ (1998: 127). Malpas’ claim seems to be that although our narratives are always fragmented, it is still possible for our lives to have unity – that our lives have this unity, in fact, by virtue of our imparting a narrative structure on them. But this seems to me the exact wrong conclusion to make, because the conclusion already presupposes that the unity of our lives is a narrative unity. But what the fragmentation of narrative shows is quite the opposite: insofar as the narratives of our lives are fragmented, whereas our lives have a unity, our lives cannot be essentially constituted by narratives. Schechtman wrote that the ideal for narrative is a story in which every aspect coheres with every other. But this isn’t simply unattainable for human beings. This ideal is unattainable for narrative. Or, rather, it can allow for such coherence only at the expense of falsification. This is, in part, why Heidegger holds that Da-sein cannot be reduced to any set of its possibilities. Its potentiality for being a whole rests not on these concrete possibilities, but on its ultimate independence of them. This is why Augustine asked to be free of his memories: because he could become unified only by subsuming them to himself, rather than subsuming himself to them. A temporally extended unity, in the articulation of its parts, still fails to be a unity. A genuine unity is possible only as possibility: anticipation holds out the potential, never actualised, of a self unified in the fragmentary diversity of its pressing forward into its possibilities.



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VII To retrace the argument: the past is interpreted in light of the future. But the future, on the narrative view, consists of events that are planned for and expected. And so the past interpreted on its basis will likewise be composed only of events, an accretion. A narrative account, then, seems no better than a psychological continuity one, and narrative’s contribution to our lives seems negligible. But we should not reach this conclusion too quickly. What we should conclude is only that narrative, by itself, cannot accomplish what we might want it to accomplish.6 It can neither unify the self nor its past. As we have seen, there are some grounds for taking revisability – the fact that the past is interpreted in light of the future – to be a key feature of narrative, and this feature was supposed to explain why the narrative view is superior to psychological continuity: rather than keeping the past an accretion blindly pushing us forward, it allowed for revision of the past, and thus for a unification of the self, in accord with our aims in the future rather than the happenings of the past. But this, as I have been arguing, is precisely what is threatened by the Accretion Objection: once there is a fixed end, the narrative is fixed as well and the meaning of the past now hangs on whether the end can change. Part of the problem lies in how we understand revisability. Schechtman notes that the meaning of events depends on their place in the whole, but this means primarily that the meaning of past events depends on the future events that stem from them. Thus, not only Schechtman, but also Fischer and Velleman (1993) have argued that the meaning of the past is revisable in light of the future, and Arthur Danto (1962) made ‘narrative sentences,’ sentences that describe one event in terms of another temporally removed one, central to a conception of history on which the set of true claims that can be made about any event is in principle unlimited, since it depends on how future historians will characterize it in relation to subsequent events. So unlike psychological continuity views, which naturally go along with a conception on which the future is simply an outgrowth of the past, narrative allows the past to be malleable in light of the future. This means that, for any event that will occur, the narrative of events that led up to it can shift, even if slightly, to make the new occurrence intelligible in light of the previous ones. Thus, the past is revisable up to a point: once no further events occur that the past ones lead up to, it may appear that their meaning is fixed. This is why our aims – concrete events we hope and strive for – seem to give a life a definite shape and also why death, as the limit on future events in a life, may seem to

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give life a fixed meaning, reducing the elements of the narrative to an accretion. The Accretion Objection, thus, applied to narrative, threatens to reduce it to psychological continuity. On the other hand, when defenders of narrative identity appeal to the claim that narrative adds something to the psychological continuity account by introducing the whole against the background of which the elements in the continuity are to be understood, they run into the Fragmentation Objection: narrative can at best make some of the events of a life coherent, but it does not provide the unity in light of which all the elements of the life can fit together. It describes that unity. A powerful way to respond to the Fragmentation Objection, then, is to accept that narrative does not itself create personal identity. It brings out the elements of that identity by interpreting them in light of a projected whole, though the whole itself is not constituted by narrative. And if we take that whole to be one in which the self is unified as possibility in light of a future that is open, anticipatory, we have the emergence of a picture of personal identity that can ground a view of narrative that is not weighed down by the Accretion Objection. On the psychological continuity view, the future follows causally from the past. But on a view in which the past draws its meaning from the future, if that future remains unfixed, then the past too is never entirely fixed; what we have been depends in part on what we will be, but what we will be is not in turn determined – though it may be constrained – by the past. Narrative can thus be seen as helping to adumbrate a metaphysically prior identity and, as I will suggest in a moment, to guide its practical manifestation in the world as agency. The question is which identity underlies narrative. If the base identity is taken as constituted by psychological continuity, narrative works to make sense of that identity, to make it not merely a causal story but one that resonates emotionally and makes sense, in which certain events are meaningful apart from their role in the causal nexus. And it can help guide agents in the future by reflecting on their meaningful past and understanding how best to accomplish what they would – in light of this past – find meaningful in the future. Peter Goldie (2012, Ch. 4), for example, develops a role for narrative in agency that fits well with continuity theories of identity. In reflecting narratively on their past, agents can discover how they respond to the events of that past and in turn construct narratives that aim to minimize the negative and increase the positive in the future. By in turn responding positively to such narratives and rehearsing them, agents can turn those narratives into intentions, and eventually into settled dispositions of character. On this view, then, narrative can



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both interpret the causal nexus (or some strain of it) of the agent’s past and itself enter causally into that nexus by generating future behavior in light of the agent’s response to that past. This picture allows for a certain degree of revisability – how we narratively interpret the past will have an effect on how we respond to it and in turn how we act in light of that response – but how we revise the past, and thus how we act on the revision, will in turn depend on the past. How would the other model look? Velleman (2006) has proposed one way in which narrative can influence the machinery of agency: we choose our actions on the basis of what makes sense. So in deciding how to act, I might retrace a narrative thread leading up to the present and see what makes the most sense to do in light of this thread. This model strikes me as too simple, however. On Velleman’s picture, we seek to do what makes sense to us. But the problem is that, thanks in part to fragmentation, our actions – especially those that are not habitual but require deliberation – will sometimes fail to perfectly cohere with the past, or they will cohere with some aspects better than others. While we can attempt to mitigate this lack of coherence in the course of deliberation by seeking the most comprehensive narrative, we can also mitigate it retroactively: we can understand the narrative thread leading up to the action in light of the action itself. Just as an action can follow on as the most coherent continuation in a narrative, so the most appropriate narrative of the past can vary with future action; I may choose the calico shirt as making the most sense of my narrative self-understanding as a flamboyant dresser, but if I choose to wear a charcoal sweater instead I may reconsider whether my occasional flamboyance may not be simply a desire to conceal an underlying conservative streak. So narrative need not simply trace a line to future actions from a past interpreted in light of a fixed end-point. It may also keep the past open on the basis of an important fact about the future: that it presents us with open possibilities that cannot be fixed by the past. In this way, the narratives of a life are different from those of fictional characters, as Bernard Williams noted: they are not presented as wholes (Williams 2009). But this fact need not mean that narratives are not significant (perhaps even essential) to our lives. It suggests only that life narratives differ from fictional ones in an important way: they resist the Accretion Objection. If they can do so, it is because the identity they elaborate in time is not primarily the identity of an underlying causal sequence, but that of a self defined by its openness to the future, essentially unfixed in its identity and thus (at least in principle) always capable of changing its past in light of the future, and thus of shaping its future differently in light of the newly interpreted past.

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The shift to a Heideggerian view of identity need not vitiate the psychological continuity account, however. In an important sense, the self remains a continuity of events and processes bound together by causal connections. But just how we are to understand those events and processes, how we are to make them meaningful in understanding agency, depends on the narrative by means of which the elements in that causal chain are interpreted and connected.7 And the narrative itself is always open to revision, because this narrative is tracing, in fragmentary fashion, the elements contained within an underlying unity. Just as, at any moment, I can carry with me my skills and character without retaining the memory of their acquisition, so the self may be contained in its future, while the details of that self, the precise connections by which it was formed and continues to form itself, are open to being laid out by narratives and drawn out in time. Perhaps what Augustine and Kant are after, then, is the unity of a self not constrained by its fragmented past, and thus capable of shaping itself in the present on the basis of a past that remains open in light of an anticipated future.8 N OT E S 1. Neo-Lockean psychological continuity theories may no longer be the default position on personal identity, but they continue to exercise a strong influence, and they typically present the primary positions attacked by proponents of alternative theories. 2. In recent work, Rudd (2012) grants that narrative and teleological aspects of selfhood may come apart on some views, though his own view is that they are inseparable. And he frequently writes as if temporality implies narrativity. I argue here that both temporality and teleology are independent of narrative, though narrative may presuppose both. 3. Death is the possibility of the impossibility of existence in that in it,­ ­existence – pressing forward into possibilities – is impossible. 4. In Heidegger’s terminology, an ‘existential’ refers, roughly, to a structural feature of Da-sein’s existence; an ‘existentiell’, on the other hand, refers to the way in which the existential is in fact filled out in the course of a given individual’s life. 5. More recently, Rudd has argued that even if our narratives sometimes falsify, this implies that there is something to falsify, that is, some truth about our lives. And this truth, he argues, must itself have a narrative structure, such that there is some ‘ideally truthful narrative’ that corresponds to it, regardless of ‘whether or not this ideal narrative is ever actually told’ (2012: 181), although he insists that both our implicit and explicit narratives may sometimes succeed in corresponding to this ideal. But if I am right here, then either there could be no such ideal narrative, or it would be



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unrecognisably different from other kinds of narratives, because it would have to lack unity. It is also unclear how there could be such an ideal narrative, given the revisability of narrative discussed below. 6. Again, Rudd now agrees that narrative does not do all this work alone. My claim, however, is that narrative doesn’t unify the self at all. It does unify our agency, as I suggest below, but it does so precisely by not simply joining together all the elements of our fragmented lives, but by unifying some and excluding others. Narrative falsifies necessarily, and this is an exceedingly good thing, since it allows us to act. 7. For more on the implications of this relation between narrative and agency, see Altshuler (forthcoming). 8. I would like to thank participants at the conference on Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self, and especially Patrick Stokes and John Lippitt for helpful feedback on this chapter. Michael Sigrist was an invaluable conversation partner in working through these issues.

3  Kierkegaard’s Platonic Teleology ANTHONY RUDD

There has been a good deal of discussion in recent philosophy of narrative theories of personal identity and of ethics.1 And there have been lively debates among Kierkegaard scholars about whether, and to what extent, Kierkegaard can be considered a narrative theorist, and the relevance of his thought to discussions of narrative in contemporary philosophy.2 In some of these discussions, though, there has been a tendency to consider the notion of narrative apart from the broader philosophical context in which it was introduced by the chief founders of modern narrative theory – Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur.3 For them – and particularly for MacIntyre – the understanding of the self in terms of narrative is part of a broader project to recover a teleological understanding of human nature and thus of ethics that has largely been lost in modernity. I will argue here that to understand Kierkegaard as a narrative thinker, we need to understand him too as advancing a teleological view of selfhood and ethics. This is not uncontroversial. MacIntyre, in After Virtue, saw Kierkegaard not as a potential ally but as marking a stage on modernity’s slide toward Nietzschean nihilism. MacIntyre bluntly asserted there that Kierkegaard ‘rejects any teleological view of human nature’ (2007: 54). He has, however, been much criticised for this, and has now himself retracted that claim.4 But if Kierkegaard is a teleological thinker, what kind of teleological thinker is he? I will argue here that Kierkegaard makes a compelling case for a kind of teleological thinking about the self and ethics which – although strikingly original in many ways – is essentially Platonic in structure.5

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I In The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard describes a human being as ‘a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity’ (SUD, 13/SKS 11, 129).6 Each of these polarities is, I think, a particular way in which to think about one basic polarity, between what I shall call our immanence and our transcendence. The former stands for our rootedness in the specificities of nature, society and history, our having a fixed, determinate nature, which sets limits to what we are and what we can do. The latter stands for our capacity to step back from ourselves and our situations, to imagine different possibilities; or to evaluate and change who we are, to question and look beyond the limits apparently set for us. That we are finite, limited beings means that there are things about us that we just have to accept as given. But that we have a capacity for self-transcendence means that we are not wholly given beings; we have the power to step back from and shape ourselves. This tension within our nature gives rise to two competing visions, which I shall call the ‘self-shaping’ and the ‘self-acceptance’ models. As Marya Schechtman has noted,7 people who, perhaps under the influence of stress or drink, act or speak in ways that are unusual for them, may, in retrospect, say things like, ‘I wasn’t myself.’ And others may often agree with them, that they ‘were not themselves’. However, she also notes that such lapses of self-control are often said, on the contrary, to reveal the true nature of the person in question. With the barriers of repression lowered, his or her true self emerges. So it is supposed on the one hand that people fail to be themselves when their self-control fails; but on the other hand, that it is only when self-control does break down that people succeed in really being themselves. A sense of paradox emerges because both responses, in a way, seem to be reasonable. The former sees genuine or authentic selfhood as something that needs to be created, or at least formed by acts of will. The latter insists that the real self is what I am anyway, independently of my acts of will, but which may be stifled through ill-judged acts of repression. Helpfully radical philosophical articulations of the two views can be found in Sartre (for self-shaping) and Schopenhauer (for self-acceptance). Schopenhauer tells us that: The character of a human being is empirical. Only through experience do we come to know it, not merely in others, but also in ourselves. This is why we are often disillusioned, with regard to ourselves and others alike, when we discover that we do not possess this or that quality, e.g. justice, unselfishness, courage, in the degree we fondly assumed [. . .] The character

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of a human being is constant; it remains the same throughout his whole life. Under the changeable mask of his years, his circumstances, and even his cognitions and views, we find the real identical human being, like a crab in its shell, quite unchangeable and always the same. (1999: 42–4)

But this idea that we have fixed characters which bring about our actions is what Sartre condemns as ‘bad faith’. In contrast, Sartre (at least, the existentialist Sartre of the 1940s) takes the idea, not just of self-shaping, but of self-creation, about as far as it is possible to do: What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself [. . .] Man is nothing else than that which he makes of himself. (1948: 28)

Rejecting the radical alternatives that Schopenhauer and Sartre exemplify with such convenient eloquence, Kierkegaard sees the self as a ‘synthesis’ of immanence and transcendence. So for Kierkegaard, there is something importantly right about both the self-acceptance and the self-shaping views. It may seem paradoxical to hold both views together; but for Kierkegaard, that’s just the point; the self is paradoxical. Schopenhauer and Sartre both try to avoid the paradox by taking one of the conflicting views as containing the whole truth; in so doing they give expression to attitudes that Kierkegaard would have considered despairing. The ‘fatalist or determinist’ despairs through feeling unable to change him or her self, feeling that his or her character is fixed and unalterable. The opposite despair is that of supposing that one can make of oneself whatever one pleases; but with the proviso that one can always take apart whatever one has created. Such a self, prizing unlimited freedom, never can really become anything or, therefore, relate to anyone. It is perhaps some confirmation of Kierkegaard’s instincts here that both Schopenhauer and Sartre were clear-headed enough about their respective positions to be deeply pessimistic thinkers. I don’t think either would really have disagreed with the Kierkegaardian diagnosis that they were in despair; but both supposed that despair was the result of recognising clearly enough the nature of the human condition. Of course, many modern philosophers have had a more cheerful view of things and have tried to develop more moderate versions of these radical views, or to find compromises between them; but it is far from clear whether, in the absence of some teleological account of the self, these attempts can work. And modern philosophy has indeed tended to see the self either naturalistically, simply as an element in a deterministic, impersonal world, whose nature is a kind of brute fact,



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amenable ultimately to scientific explanation; or in voluntaristic terms, as a principle of autonomous will, able to shape itself, but with no criteria to indicate in which ways it should do this. (And often enough modern thought has held to both extremes simultaneously, since the hard-line materialism which sees us simply as bits of a mechanistic natural world necessarily presupposes an understanding of the self as radically autonomous, able to transcend its limitations in order to discover the truths of natural science to which the materialist theories appeal.) As Iris Murdoch has complained, modern philosophy tends to picture the moral agent ‘as an isolated principle of will [. . .] inside, or beside, a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines such as psychology or sociology. On the one hand, a Luciferian philosophy of adventures of the will, and on the other, natural science’ (1970: 48). By contrast, teleological thinking about the self holds out the possibility of a synthesis between the elements of immanence and transcendence. It involves, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘a threefold schema in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be [. . .] needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-asit-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos’ (2007: 53). The self as it is, then, is not simply a brute fact to be accepted; it is raw material to be shaped and changed. And since it is the self which has the ethical task of doing this shaping (though never in isolation) the self has the freedom to transcend itself as it is now; and not only to consider but to try to bring about the self as it could be. But this is not simply a Sartrean freedom to make of oneself whatever one chooses – the self-shaping is aimed at a goal (telos) that is not itself chosen at will, and the potential for which is already present in the ‘raw material’ of the self as it now is. This telos is the good of the self, and defiance of it is a form of self-destruction. So on this view – and in sharp contradiction to the typical modern tendency to separate off ‘facts’ and ‘values’ – the self can only be properly understood in a broader ethical or evaluative context, as oriented to its good. Teleological thinking, therefore, offers the prospect of doing justice to the elements of both immanence and transcendence in our nature – it sees us as both free and constrained; and sees the working out of the synthesis as itself an act of constrained freedom on the part of the self. II I hope I have done something to indicate why it might seem attractive to return to a teleological view of the self. But what sort of teleological

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view? Most contemporary philosophers who have tried to revive a teleological account of selfhood and ethics have looked to Aristotle rather than to Plato – the currently flourishing field of virtue ethics is mainly Aristotelian in inspiration.8 And, indeed, the kind of teleological thinking that can be adopted with least disturbance to a modern, broadly naturalistic world view is a kind of scaled-down Aristotelianism, purged of the more Platonic elements which continued to play a big role in the thinking of the historical Aristotle. On this ‘Aristotelian’ view, human ethical flourishing is seen as continuous with natural biological flourishing across the animal and even plant worlds. A living organism is born with certain definite potentials and flourishes to the extent that it is able to realise them. It has an (at least relatively) fixed nature as a member of this or that species, and it is by reference to the essence of its species that we decide whether this or that individual is a good or bad specimen. A ‘good’ wolf is strong and fast, with sharp teeth and a warm coat. The human case is more complex, but not essentially different. To be a good human being is to realise one’s distinctively human potentials. Since we are rational (political, cultural) animals, this includes not only straightforwardly biological flourishing (growing to maturity, staying healthy etc.) though it includes that; but also includes becoming a good reasoner. And this involves developing both practical reason – enabling one to engage in rational social and political interactions with others – and, for full flourishing, one’s capacity for theoretical reasoning also.9 Though I certainly don’t have the space for a full critique of this naturalistic teleology here, perhaps the most fundamental worry about it is that it assumes that humans have more of a fixed, essential nature than in fact we do. (In other words, it exaggerates our immanence.) What makes a wolf a ‘good’ wolf is fixed by a more or less determinate biological essence. But we don’t need to go all the way with Sartre to suspect that human nature is not determinate in anything like an analogous way. At the least, we do have the capacity for a vastly greater range of behaviours than any other species. And if our capacities for co-operation and nurturing are parts of our humanity, with a claim to be cultivated if we are to realise more fully that humanity; why not also our capacities for competition, conflict, destruction? Without an independent criterion to decide what capacities are good, how should we decide which of these apparently equally natural ones to develop? As Anna Lannstrom puts it: If we were trying to ground ethics in human nature, we would not start with the fact that we are the only animal that makes war on its own, or that we often are jealous, that we torture other human beings, or that we often are selfish. Rather, we might note that we are rational, that we are social and



Kierkegaard’s Platonic Teleology 51 that we can form close friendships. That is, we would select good facts about [our] nature. In order to be able to do that, we need a distinction between good and bad already in place. (2006: 99)

Moreover, our ability to look at our own nature and decide which of our capacities to cultivate and which to inhibit shows that we can transcend ourselves in ways that other animals cannot. We do, as persons, have the capacity to step back from and critically evaluate ourselves and our goals – and to set goals for ourselves that not only go beyond merely biological goods, but may even undermine them. (Choosing not to have children, risking our lives in various ways.) The good to which we are ordered on the neo-Aristotelian view is the good for us as members of our species. But it seems to have no place for a notion of what is simply good – whether or not it benefits us (at least in any naturalistic sense). Aristotle himself thought there were things we should just do because of their ‘nobility’ – and whether or not they contributed in any way to our flourishing.10 But it is hard to find a place for that thought in a modern, naturalistic version of Aristotelianism. This is only the start of a possible critique, not a knock-down argument against neo-Aristotelianism. But if one is disturbed by these problems, but still attracted to a teleological way of thinking, this might be a reason to look again at the significantly different kind of teleological thinking which derives from Plato. Let us start by considering Socrates’ argument for justice in the Republic. The argument seems at first to go as follows: Harmony within the soul, which involves a proper order between its three parts – reason, spirit and desire – is a good in a nonmoral sense; that is, a state that anyone can see to be desirable. This is our telos, in the sense of being a goal that anyone will naturally want to achieve, and will be miserable without. But, so the argument goes, this goal can only be achieved by being ‘just’, which means having reason in control of one’s soul. So we all have good reason to be just. Critics have, of course, wondered whether there is really any necessary relation between ‘justice’ in this Platonic sense, and justice in a more everyday sense. And it has also been argued that Plato in fact betrays morality in his very attempt to justify it, for he presents it as a sort of means to an end that can be seen to be desirable apart from any moral considerations. I think, though, that what Plato is really arguing for is something subtler. He does indeed claim that it is only by relating to the Good (the Form of the Good) that we can achieve psychic harmony. But we don’t turn to the Good because we can see that doing so is the necessary means to that independently desirable end. Rather, we are – if we attend properly to it – naturally drawn to the Good for its own sake. The

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idea may be made more plausible if we think of what we are drawn to as the Form of Beauty, as in the Symposium. (I take it that Plato does not intend us to think of the Symposium’s Beauty and the Republic’s Good as distinct entities. They are alternative ways of characterising the highest and ultimate Form.) So our telos (goal) is, in one sense, the Good/Beautiful – the entity towards which we make our laborious way in both the Republic’s Myth of the Cave and the Symposium’s account of the Ascent of Love. But relating properly to the Good brings our souls into harmony. And this is neither a means-end relationship, nor a fortunate side-effect. For the soul’s harmony consists in reason being in control of it; but reason for Plato is the faculty by which we apprehend the Forms, and, ultimately, the Good. So the reign of reason (and the harmony that it brings) ultimately consist in the soul’s being ruled by its perception of the Good. If we are not relating adequately to the Good, then we will feel unhappy, unfulfilled; even if we are not able to articulate what it is we are lacking. So even the disintegrated ‘tyrannical’ soul11 may dimly perceive that an inner harmony would be desirable; but it lacks the ability to understand what that would really involve. So inner harmony is not really a ‘non-moral’ good that can be appreciated by anyone – and I think the arguments in the earlier books of the Republic that seems to suppose that it is, are best thought of as ladders which, by the time we get to the later books, we can see that we need to throw away. In presenting Plato this way, and in differentiating his kind of teleological thinking from Aristotle’s, I am trying to rescue him from the powerful critique of ‘eudaimonism’ developed by John Davenport. On Davenport’s account, eudaimonism is the idea that desire has an ‘erosaic’ structure; that is, desire (eros in the broadest sense) is a striving to gain what we lack, or to actualise what is present in us as potential. Happiness (eudaimonia) is the satisfying of such desire, and human action is to be explained as a quest for the good which we feel ourselves (either clearly or dimly and confusedly) to lack.12 Davenport takes this eudaimonism to be the dominant mode of classical thought, both Platonic and Aristotelian.13 Against it, Davenport argues that it (falsely) makes all motivation formally (though not materially) egoistic14 and ignores ways in which we can be motivated to act by simply perceiving that act as worth doing, quite apart from any prior need we might feel.15 I cannot engage with the detail of Davenport’s enormously rich and complex argument here. But, although Plato certainly uses the ‘erosaic’ model to explain our striving for the Good/Beautiful,16 he is also clear that the turning to the Good is done for its own sake, not for what it offers us. We are attracted to the Good simply because it



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is good. It remains true that we have a need for the Good and cannot be fulfilled outside of a relation to it – but we don’t turn to it because it will satisfy a need we are already conscious of having. We may, indeed, only become aware of our need for some good through finding ourselves drawn to it. I’m not sure whether the above considerations should lead us to conclude that Plato was not a ‘eudaemonist’ in Davenport’s sense, or that a sufficiently sophisticated form of eudaimonism is not such a bad thing. In any case, and despite the differences I have insisted on, the ‘Aristotelian’ and the Platonic views of teleology do share crucial structural features. Both see us as having potentials which we need to realise in order to flourish; both see the good for us as objective, built into the nature of things, not something we invent; both see us as having a capacity to understand that good, which then gives us a criterion for consciously deciding how we are to live, and how we are to shape ourselves. But where the Aristotelian sees our telos as the realisation of our natural potentialities – a state of affairs that we may (or may not) succeed in bringing about – the Platonist distinguishes two senses of telos. Our telos (goal) is indeed a state of affairs (psychic harmony) to be brought about in ourselves. But it is also, and most fundamentally, that to which we need to relate in order to be fulfilled (the Good). We realise our telos in the first sense by properly relating to the entity which is our telos in this second sense. III To return to Kierkegaard: as we have seen, for him, as for Plato, the self or soul is composed of elements or drives which are in tension and which may (and typically do) conflict.17 And, for Kierkegaard, as for Plato, the self has a deep need to synthesise or harmonise these elements – this distinguishes them both sharply from those post-Nietzschean thinkers who have celebrated inner conflict. But, according to Kierkegaard, the self cannot by itself ‘arrive at or [. . .] be in equilibrium [. . .] but only, in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has established the whole relation’ (SUD, 14/SKS 11, 130). The reference is, given the context of Sickness, clearly to God. So we have in Kierkegaard – at least structurally – the two-fold sense of telos which I noted in Plato. Our telos in the first sense is to achieve psychological wholeness; while our telos in the second sense is the ultimate or absolute reality (God or the Good) to which we need to properly relate ourselves. But the similarity is more than simply structural. Kierkegaard, following a long tradition of Christian Platonism, identifies the Platonic Good with God.18 God

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neither establishes standards of goodness by an act of arbitrary will, nor is He subject to the Good as an independent standard. His nature or essence simply is goodness.19 So, for Kierkegaard, as for Plato, the self can only resolve its conflicting elements into a proper harmony through relating itself as a whole to the Good. But these are not simply separate goals, so that I might achieve one but not the other. The self is only able to hold its opposite elements together if it is directed as a whole towards the Good. It is as though a centrifugal force is only held in check by a trajectory of the whole self to an object. Or, to put it less negatively, only the overall trajectory enables the potentially conflicting elements to harmonise properly with one another rather than pulling against each other. However, Kierkegaard does not simply follow Plato, and we should note an important difference here. For Plato, harmony in the soul consists in a proper hierarchical relationship between reason, spirit and desire (in that order). Not only does Kierkegaard understand the elements of self differently (transcendence and immanence cannot simply be equated with reason and desire) but he understands their proper relationship as one of balance, rather than of hierarchy. Neither immanence nor transcendence should be subordinated to the other, and, as we have noted above, he discusses in some detail the kinds of pathology that arise when, for example, possibility is not balanced by necessity, or necessity by possibility. There is also in Kierkegaard’s thought an element which, if not absent from Plato’s, is not expressed as clearly and fully there. This is the recognition of the importance of what we might call relative or intermediate goods. For the self relates itself not only to God but also to other, finite, good things. These include, of course, other persons, but may also include causes, social roles, institutions, places, traditions, things of all kinds. They are the goods celebrated by Judge William in Either/Or, where he argues that the ethical life is built up from the commitments we make to other people and other finite goods. And it is typically in relating to these things that we come to integrate or synthesise the element of selfhood. For instance, necessity and possibility are balanced here, since such commitments are freely chosen and freely maintained (they do not arise simply as brute facts); but they confer limits on the possibilities that are open to us. By contrast, to lead a life which lacks goals – things that one wills deeply and seriously – is to lead a life that is – quite literally – pointless, and which lacks any principle of unity. And to live a life in which one has goals but ones which are simply set by surrounding social or natural forces is to lead a life without autonomy – a life that isn’t really one’s own.



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On this the Judge would agree with modern philosophers like Harry Frankfurt and Bernard Williams, who have argued that ‘final ends’ or ‘ground projects’ are necessary for the leading of a meaningful life and the achievement of a coherent sense of identity.20 Hubert Dreyfus sums it up well: According to Kierkegaard, if and only if you let yourself be drawn into a defining commitment, can you achieve that which, while you were in despair, looked impossible, viz., that the two sets of factors [immanence and transcendence] reinforce each other, so that the more you manifest one, the more you manifest the other. (2008: 16)

But for Dreyfus, what matters is to commit yourself to something: so long as you can will it with commitment and passion, more or less anything would do, it seems. This is the attitude that Judge William describes as ‘earnest’ aestheticism (EO 2, 225–6, 261/SKS 3, 216, 248). What is distinctive of the ethical life, by contrast, is that such commitments are chosen in the light of an overriding commitment to the Good. This does not, of course, mean that one wills the Good instead of willing specific commitments to individuals, causes or vocations. The point is to will these in the light of the Good. It is crucial for us as finite beings that we relate to other finite beings, but we first need to commit ourselves to the Good, so that we will make those specific commitments that are right for us, and make them in the right spirit, rather than for example selfishly or opportunistically. It is true that Kierkegaard, in his later signed writings, often seems less enthusiastic than the Judge about the value of finite particular goods, and Works of Love in particular has sometimes been seen as denigrating particular attachments in favour of a universal neighbour-love, based on a primary and overriding love for God. (Plato too, of course, has often been criticised for advocating a love for the Good that leaves particular loves behind.) But I think that commentators such as Jamie Ferreira and John Lippitt have shown that Works of Love does indeed endorse friendship and romantic love as being of value in their own right, even if that isn’t the main focus of Kierkegaard’s attention there.21 (And I think that Plato can be defended against the charge of dismissing particular loves also, though I won’t attempt to do that here.) I think we can now see that Kierkegaard’s teleological view involves, not just a two- but a three-fold teleology. We become authentic selves by relating properly to ourselves (our telos in the first sense); which we can only do by relating properly to other people, causes and so on (our telos, or teloi, in the second sense); which in turn we can do only because we relate unconditionally to the Good (our telos in the third, and for Kierkegaard, the deepest, sense). Commitment to the Good is

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thus fundamental here. And it should again be emphasised that, for Kierkegaard as for Plato, one makes that commitment to the Good just because it is good; not because it is a means to one’s ends – even the ends of achieving psychic harmony, or balancing one’s immanence and transcendence. We can relate properly to ourselves only if we relate to the Good, but we can only do that if we relate to the Good for its own sake. Kierkegaard emphasises this point especially in Purity of Heart. There he argues that one cannot relate properly to the Good by willing it for anything except its own sake.22 To will the Good for the sake of any reward is a kind of double-mindedness. And this is the case even if one wills it for the sake of eudaimonia, if eudaimonia is thought of as anything but being in a right relation to the Good. The Good, as Absolute, must be willed for its own sake; but it is only by doing this that the self can become whole. ‘That the Good has its own reward is forever certain [. . .] it is not even more certain that God exists, for that is one and the same thing’ (UDVS, 39/SKS 8, 151). Here Kierkegaard is clearly identifying God with the Good,23 and the pattern of his thinking about the self and the non-instrumental character of its need for the Good is clearly similar to the pattern of Plato’s teleological thinking as outlined above. And there is every reason to think that this similarity was not just coincidental, but that Kierkegaard was consciously and deliberately following Plato here. It is striking to note that Purity of Heart – an upbuilding discourse intended for a specifically Christian context (‘On the Occasion of a Confession’) – contains frequent positive references or allusions to Plato and Socrates, and even direct quotes from the Republic.24 Clearly, Kierkegaard was happy not only to recognise but to highlight the way in which his own thinking about the self and the good follows Plato’s. IV Back, finally, to the theme of narrative. Can this account of the nature of Kierkegaard’s teleological thinking help us to understand the sense in which he is or is not a narrative theorist? As I mentioned at the start of this essay, MacIntyre, Taylor and Ricoeur all developed their narrative theories of person identity in the context of defending teleological, and therefore evaluative, theories of selfhood. Let me say a word more about this before returning to Kierkegaard. MacIntyre in particular presents his project as counter-cultural – as an attempt to rediscover a mode of thinking that has been marginalised in modernity. And it is certainly true that modernity has been characterised by the rejection of



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teleology in the natural sciences – and by a constant pressure to extend natural scientific methods of explanation in terms of mechanistic causality to the human sciences also. And along with this has gone the ‘Enlightenment Project’ of attempting to understand and justify ethics without teleology – a project which – so MacIntyre argues – has clearly failed.25 However, MacIntyre also notes the stubborn persistence of teleological thinking in our ordinary practices of understanding our own and other people’s actions. To understand an action is to see it as done for a reason, which is to say, for a purpose. But to understand actions as purposive is to understand them in a temporal context, including the past which has shaped the situation to which I have to respond, and the future that I am trying to bring about. This is why the understanding of an action, according to MacIntyre, takes a narrative form; for a narrative, as opposed to a mere chronicle (a listing of events in chronological order), presents an agents’ intentional activities as intelligible by showing what they were intended to bring about; and why the agent could reasonably, given those circumstances, have formed those intentions. Narrative explanations are thus irreducibly teleological, and this is inseparable from their involving evaluation. A rational agent, as distinct from a creature which acts simply on instinct, is one that forms intentions on the basis of some sense (however inchoate and inarticulate it may be) of the good, at least in the sense of what is good for me – of what is worth my while to try to achieve. In Taylor’s words: Since we cannot do without an orientation to the good, and since we cannot be indifferent to our place relative to this good, and since this place is something that must always change and become, the issue of the direction of our lives must arise for us [. . .] [I]n order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good [. . .] this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story [. . .] in order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become and of where we are going. (1989: 47)

The understanding of ones’ life as an ‘enacted narrative’ (MacIntyre 2007: 211) is thus tied up with understanding it as a ‘quest’ for what is good (worth pursuing). And this is impossible without assuming some form of evaluative realism robust enough to at least make sense of the idea that one may be mistaken about one’s good; that something is not worth doing just because one currently feels a desire for it. Neither Kierkegaard nor his various pseudonyms make much use of the term ‘narrative’ as such, but they would, I think, agree with the main ideas from Taylor and MacIntyre that I have just sketched. I have argued elsewhere that the Judge’s argument in Either/Or appeals to

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something like this MacIntyrean sense of narrative intelligibility.26 For a central part of that argument is the claim that A’s refusal to commit to practices or relationships which require a constancy of behaviour over time means that his life is fragmented; there is no coherent story-line running through it. He does a bit of this, a bit of that, but it doesn’t add up to anything. Accordingly, A lacks any clear sense of his past as being significant for his present actions, or of those present actions as being meaningful through contributing to long-term goals he cares about. Most fundamentally, he lacks any sense of his life exhibiting a meaningful pattern, as progressing towards (or even regressing from) the realisation of goals that matter to him, whether particular projects, or the realisation of the telos of his life as a whole. Indeed, he tries to avoid developing any such meaningful pattern, or to actively subvert it. But of course there is something self-contradictory here, for A is trying to shape his life in such a way as to ensure that it has no shape. But this means that once we can understand him teleologically – that is, see what his real goal is, what he really thinks is worth doing (avoiding commitments, keeping life interesting) – then he becomes intelligible. His otherwise puzzling behaviour – breaking off love affairs or leaving jobs just when they are going well for him – does make sense; we can tell a coherent story about it. The self-defeating nature of A’s attempts to avoid having a narrative structure in his life supports the claim that some sort of narrative unity is inevitable. Perhaps one could say that his life has a sort of meta-unity in that his chaotic first-order behaviour makes sense in terms of his higher-order goals. But at that first level, he is devoted to subverting continuity, and that is why the good that he pursues (and he certainly does have a sense of the good, of what is worth doing and what isn’t) is a non- or anti-ethical one; one that prevents him from making serious commitments to others. He claims that ‘Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically’ (EO 1, 292/SKS 2, 282) and that ‘No part of life ought to possess so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to’ (EO 1, 293/SKS 2, 282). By ‘forgetting’ he does not mean consigning to literal oblivion, but the ability to assign whatever interpretation one pleases to past events, and thus to treat them as important or not according to whim. In sharp contrast, Judge William writes ‘The healthy individual lives simultaneously in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life gain true and substantial continuity’ (EO 2, 142/SKS 3, 140). For the Judge, narrative unity should exist not only on what I called the meta-level as a formally necessary feature of any intentionally directed human life, but should be a first-order feature of that life – one derived



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from commitments to others, to relationships, to projects, to social roles, commitments that require continuity across time. Lacking the ‘true and substantial continuity’ that comes through one’s life exhibiting a coherent narrative in this way, A is in danger of volatilising his soul, suffering the ‘disintegration of [his] essence into a multiplicity’ and in that way losing ‘what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality’ (EO 2, 160/SKS 3, 158). MacIntyre has emphasised that the notions of narrative, personal identity, evaluation and teleological comprehensibility are all necessarily intertwined: It is important to notice that I am not arguing that the concepts of narrative or of intelligibility or of accountability are more fundamental than that of personal identity. The concepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identity just as it presupposes their applicability [. . .] The relationship is one of mutual presupposition. (2007: 218)

I think this is true for Kierkegaard (and the Judge) also. Judge William is not claiming that having narrative unity – ‘true and substantial continuity’ – in one’s life is a non-moral good (something that anyone can see to be desirable); and then arguing that only ethical commitments such as marriage can enable one to achieve that good. This would seem to make morality into a merely hypothetical imperative and leave him vulnerable to A simply replying that unity in his life is precisely what he doesn’t happen to want. There is a clear similarity between this reading of Either/Or and the common reading of the Republic I mentioned above, which would see psychic harmony as a non-moral good and morality justified in terms of its instrumental usefulness in achieving it. But for Kierkegaard and Judge William, as for Plato, we choose the good for its own sake. Narrative unity is itself an ethical ideal, part of our telos, and is inseparable from our overall orientation to the good. But this seems to leave the Judge vulnerable to MacIntyre’s old charge that he is an advocate of ‘criterionless choice’ – that on his view no reason can be given for someone who does not already accept ethics to become ethical. To give A non-ethical reasons to become ethical would be to miss the point of the ethical – it would be precisely what Kierkegaard condemns in Purity of Heart as double-mindedness. But to give him ethical reasons would be futile since he is, ex hypothesi, outside the ethical. However, this argument misses the point that, from the perspective of Kierkegaard’s teleology, the aesthete is a divided self. A has (qua human self) a fundamental need for the Good of which he cannot be wholly and literally unaware, but also a set of attitudes which lead him to suppress or deny that knowledge. In Purity of Heart

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Kierkegaard argues that even the most depraved characters cannot will evil whole-heartedly; they cannot avoid, not only retaining some knowledge of what the Good is, but of retaining some longing for it: however desperately he seems to will one thing, such a person is nevertheless double-minded [. . .] There is a power that constrains him; he cannot tear himself loose from it; indeed, he cannot even quite will it [. . .] if you were to meet him in what he himself would call a weak moment (alas, what you might call a better moment) when his dizziness had passed for a moment and he felt an anguished longing for the good [. . .] then you would discover that he had two wills, and his anguished double-mindedness. (UDVS, 32–3/ SKS 8, 145–6)

A isn’t exactly depraved, but his desire to enjoy the maximum freedom to follow his whims means that he refuses to acknowledge any normatively significant telos that could give point or meaning to his life. But by living in a way that defies what he at some deep level knows to be his telos, A is naturally dissatisfied and unhappy. MacIntyre himself has actually made the suggestion that we might understand the argument of Either/Or in this way: 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. (2001: 348)

Unfortunately MacIntyre thinks this view is in conflict with what he takes to be Either/Or’s insistence on the ‘radical discontinuity of the aesthetic and the ethical’ and is therefore present in the book only as a ‘subtext’ (2001: 349). Interpretatively, I think he is quite wrong on this – what he takes to be a subtext is actually the main argument. A is aware, not just of his unhappiness, but, at some level, of why he is unhappy. He desires the continuity, the friendship and love, the sense of meaning in his life, that he rejects; but he represses those desires. What he needs, then, is not really a neat intellectual argument proving the validity of the ethical, but psychotherapy, which will confront him with the deep need of his own soul for the Good which is its telos. N OT E S   1. See Schechtman 2011 and Roberts 1997 for helpful overviews.   2. See Rudd 1993; Davenport and Rudd 2001; Lippitt 2007; Stokes 2010a; Davenport 2012.



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  3. See MacIntyre 2007; Taylor 1989; Ricoeur 1992.   4. See MacIntyre 2001: 344.   5. This paper summarises ideas that I develop in much more detail in Rudd 2012. I am grateful to the publisher for allowing me to reprint some passages from the book here.   6. I deliberately choose to refer to ‘Kierkegaard’ rather than ‘Anti-Climacus’ as the author of this text, which I consider to be only ‘weakly’ pseudonymous.   7. See Schechtman 2004.   8. Although this is true of MacIntyre, his Thomistic version of Aristotelianism is a good deal closer to Platonism than most contemporary versions.  9. For what is perhaps the best recent statement of this neo-Aristotelian account, see Foot 2001. 10. See Aristotle 2009: II.6, 1107. 11. See Plato 1981: Book 9, 372b–576d. 12. See Davenport 2007, Chapters 4 and 5. 13. Although he does find the beginnings of an anti-eudaimonist tradition in what Plato says in the Timaeus about non-eudaimonistically based generosity as the motive for creation. See Davenport 2007: 287–303. 14. He does not ascribe to Plato or Aristotle the crass thesis that for example we only care about our friends for the benefits they might bring us. The ‘eudaemonist’ can agree that, in a genuine friendship, I genuinely care for my friend. But the ‘eudaemonist’ continues to insist I do so because I have a need to care; a need without which I cannot feel fulfilled, a lack which the caring involved in genuine friendship makes up. See Davenport 2007, Chapter 7. 15. It is worth noting that he sees radical evil – where we cause harm for its own sake, even if it goes against our own interests to do so – as an example of this sort of ‘non-erosaic’ motivation, as well as agape and the dutiful doing of justice. See Davenport 2007, Chapter 10. 16. See, for example, Plato 1989: 200e. 17. Though I think for Kierkegaard, as for Plato, the complexity of the self in this sense is compatible with its being unified. Indeed it requires it; the conflict between the different drives is only an internal conflict, a problem for me to resolve, because they are all mine, all aspects of the one me who has to come to terms with them all. 18. This is made especially clear in the discourse Purity of Heart, which I shall discuss shortly. 19. See for instance, Augustine 2002b: 7–8 (Book 8.3); Aquinas 2006: 63–8 (I, 6). 20. Frankfurt 1999: 82–94; Williams 1981: 1–19. 21. Ferreira 2008; Lippitt 2013. 22. See UDVS, 36–77/SKS 8, 148–84. 23. In Purity of Heart (and other ‘Upbuilding Discourses’) he uses the terms

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‘God’, ‘the Eternal’ and ‘the Good’ more or less interchangeably, going easily back and forth between them. 24. See UDVS, 37, 45, 50, 95–6, 96–7, 133/SKS 8, 149–50, 156, 161, 199–200, 200–1, 230. 25. See MacIntyre 2007, Chapters 4 and 5. 26. See Rudd 1993, Chapter 3; Rudd 2001.

4  Narrative Holism and the Moment PATRICK STOKES

N A R R AT I V E A N D A N T I - N A R R AT I V E I N KIERKEGAARD Personal identity theory is a rather odd sort of hybrid: born of philosophy of mind and metaphysics, with some pneumatology and soteriology a bit further back in the family tree, and eccentric uncle philosophy of religion living in the shed out the back (where the others let him potter around doing his own thing, hoping he’ll eventually move out). When narrative theory married into this family, having been introduced in the 1980s via philosophy of history and through the dual tracks of MacIntyrean virtue ethics and Ricoeurian hermeneutics, it brought a much-needed infusion of ethics, value theory and philosophical psychology into the gene pool. While ethically neutral, purely metaphysical ways of discussing selfhood are still very much with us, narrativists such as MacIntyre, Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Marya Schechtman and David Carr have done much to refocus our attention on the practical and ethical concerns that propel questions about personal identity.1 Practical identity has increasingly come to be seen as fundamental to, rather than supervenient upon, what we essentially are. This shift wasn’t wholly down to narrativists – other theorists of practical identity, such as Korsgaard, were also central to this process – but a definite ‘narrative turn’ has occurred, whereby narrative, as that by which we ‘emplot’ our practical identities and unify our experiences and projects into an internally coherent, diachronically-extended whole, has increasingly come to be viewed as centrally important for understanding the ways in which we negotiate our way through temporality. At the same time, the last decade or so of Kierkegaard scholarship, particularly the work of John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, has demonstrated that Kierkegaard – and particularly Judge Wilhelm in the 63

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second volume of Either/Or – has useful things to say to the narrative self-constitution view, whether we ultimately accept that view or not. Kierkegaard’s claim that each of us has the task of acquiring his or her self in the form of a history (like the German Geschichte, the Danish historie can mean either ‘history’ or ‘story’), and the account of how that acquisition takes place via self-consolidating choices out of the immediacy of drives and dispositions and the self-conscious adoption of projects, are a mine of theoretical and phenomenological insights for narrativists. Other places in Kierkegaard’s work, such as Two Ages, also contain useful resources for discussions of practical identity more broadly construed, as commentators such as Norman Lillegard (2001) have noted. Yet I’ve argued previously (Stokes 2010a) that in Either/Or, in Sickness Unto Death, and in religious discourses such as ‘Strengthening the Inner Being’ and especially ‘Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing’, we also find a serious complication to the narrativist reading of Kierkegaard. In those works we find references to the self as something conceptually and experientially separable from its facticity and history. We encounter, if fleetingly, references to a ‘naked self’, a self that sees itself as separable from its story and its concretion, something not reducible to its facticity. This is not to be read as some sort of Cartesian, ego-substantialist throwback – Kierkegaard is both too modern and too Lutheran for that sort of move to be available to him – but is rather a result of Kierkegaard’s fundamentally soteriological picture of what it is to be a self. An orientation towards salvation requires a self that transcends its concrete and relational constitution, something that can somehow look ahead to a life outside time. Moreover, in his (deliberately few) comments on the subject of the afterlife, Kierkegaard insists that this life outside time is something radically discontinuous with our lives as we lead them now, not a simple continuation of our earthly narrative.2 So even if Kierkegaard is some sort of narrativist about selves, he isn’t simply a narrativist, and the Kierkegaardian self cannot just be a narrative. That soteriological focus might strike us as a limitation on just how useful Kierkegaard can be for any contemporary discussion of personal identity. If Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood is only finally instructive if we buy into a specific religious worldview, then it seems he has little to offer philosophers who don’t share his religious commitments. Moreover, there are also scattered hints of a Kierkegaard who is suspicious of narrative itself: not merely the Kierkegaard who, as Jeffrey S. Turner (2001) has argued, is suspicious of distorting, self-deceptive or flattering narratives, but the Kierkegaard who famously warns us that life must be understood backwards but lived forwards, and therefore



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‘life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance: backwards’ (JP, 1030/SKS 18, 194). This is the Kierkegaard who claims that ‘to arrange oneself dramatically in temporality’ such that our life takes on a recognisable narrative structure runs counter to ‘God’s plan for existence’ (WL, 251/SKS 9, 251). Yet what I wish to suggest is that despite these apparent limitations, the ways in which Kierkegaard does depart from the more usual narrativist accounts are themselves instructive for theorising about personal identity. Building on recent work by Dan Zahavi, I’ll argue that the next move for narrativist accounts of identity is to shift their focus from the construction of diachronic narratives to a consideration of the present-tense experience of relating to those constructed narratives. Ricoeur famously offered narrative poetics as a way of interrelating the ‘time of the universe’ and the ‘time of the soul’ (as emphasised by Aristotle and Augustine, respectively);3 what I wish to suggest here is that Kierkegaard equips us to take the step of interrelating the time of the soul with the time of narrative itself. He offers a model of how phenomenal and narrative time intersect – of how, here and now, we relate to the whole. T H E D E AT H O B J E C T I O N A number of objections to narrative identity have been emerging as standard in recent literature: that narrative is too artificial a form to make sense of the messy complexity of human lives without gross distortion (Vice 2003; Christman 2004; Drummond 2004; Lamarque 2004, 2007; see also Schechtman’s chapter in this volume); that necessities of narrative economy and teleology will tend to exclude meaningless or haphazard experiences from identity (leading to apparent ‘orphan’ experiences of a given subject that, if narrative is the criterion of selfconstitution, don’t ‘belong’ to anyone); and that narrative identity confuses the subject of a narrative with the narrative itself (Goldie 2003: 303; Goldie 2012; Menary 2008: 72). Here, as a way into the question of how narrative and phenomenal time (and their associated registers of identity) interact, I’ll briefly consider one of the most prominent objections to narrative identity, which we may call the ‘Death Objection’ (cf. Stokes 2006; Lippitt 2007; Davenport 2011). There’s a natural intimacy between the notion of the narrative self and the idea of a life-story, and life stories typically have biologicallygrounded, if not always well-defined, boundaries. Hence narrativists appeal to narrative not simply as that which unifies selves across given stretches of time, in the way that neo-Lockeans appeal to psychological

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continuity as connecting person-stages at different times for instance, but to something considerably larger: in MacIntyre’s words, to ‘the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end’ (1984: 205). This unity, narrativists agree, goes beyond the merely causal; narrativity unifies events via a form of internal coherence that gives the sequence of events involved a ‘shape’ – and it’s only pushing the metaphor slightly to note that only things with boundaries (even if they’re fuzzy boundaries) can have shape. This is closely connected to Narrative Holism, the narrativist claim that events or experiences cannot be understood in abstraction from the narrative that connects them: they only are events or discrete experiences by reference to the narrative context that makes them intelligible. As Slors (2001: 89) puts it, ‘Narrativity refers to relations that hold between events that can be considered particulars only by abstracting them from the whole of a diachronic process of which they are a part, a process that portrays a “story”, in the broadest sense of that term’, and thus ‘It is the whole of such processes that endow their “parts” with their full meaning.’ Narratives have a wholeness that makes their boundaries, their beginning and ending, integral in a way that the mere commencement and cessation of the events in some given period are not. The beginning and ending of a story, even a very short one, are different in kind and significance than the events that just happen to be occurring when some period of time starts and stops. (One would not tell the ‘story’ of the 20th century by starting with the Federation of Australia on 1 January 1901 and ending with the closure of the Millennium Dome exhibition in London on 31 December 2000, unless one could find a way to tell a ‘story’ that somehow ties the one to the other in the relevant narrative sense.) The meaning of a narrative and the way it begins and ends stand in a relationship of mutual presupposition: the narrative meaning of the story determines where a story begins and ends, and the beginning and ending of the story constrain the narrative meaning. Where life begins is notoriously ambiguous, and as Ricoeur (1992: 60) points out, our conceptions and maybe even births are arguably more events in our parents’ lives than ours own,4 but it’s the other end of the story, our deaths, that has been taken to be most problematic for narrativists. If selves have essentially narrative structures, then how selves end is crucial for their narrative intelligibility. In David Carr’s terms, ‘only from the perspective of the end do the beginning and the middle make sense’ (1986: 7), and as Ricoeur puts it, ‘I am always moving toward my death, and this prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end’ (1992: 160). We never get, as Kierkegaard puts it, a place to stand to look backwards and survey the whole. The



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ineradicable contingency of death, both in terms of timing and nature, prevents the event of my death from playing the same role in my selfinterpretation as it will play in the interpretations others may make of my life. If the event of my death is experientially unavailable to me, then so too is the ultimate nature of my life-narrative, for this will be – or even simply might be – determined largely, perhaps decisively, by when and how I die. To this, narrativists can respond, as Davenport does, that we often do have a more-or-less accurate sense of how our lives will end, especially in old age or in cases of grave illness, and in any case we can live in such a way that contingent events such as sudden death (or irreversible coma or massive disruption of cognitive ability) cannot fundamentally alter the (narrative) meaning of our life. Both these responses downplay contingency: the first only applies to a subset of cases at best, while the second seems to conflate dispositional or ethical consistency with narrative meaning. The story of an ethically consistent life may be a radically different type of story depending on whether it is cut tragically short, leaving unfinished ends, or runs to a satisfied old age. Davenport claims that: if the objection is that the time or manner of my death might undo the meaning that my life has for me in its final moments, the response is that freedom only needs to make deep narrative unity possible, not to ensure it. It is up to us to choose so that either (i) our final moments faithfully express our identity rather than undoing us, or (ii) our sense of embracing meaning continues right up to our sudden end, if it happens that way. (Davenport 2011: 173)

Davenport’s example is Lincoln: mightn’t Lincoln, aware of the constant risk of assassination and having finally reached a state of stable moral equilibrium after years of wrestling with the issue of slavery, have had his ‘affairs in order’, so to speak, so that the intrinsic meaning of his life was settled in a way no assassin’s bullet could destroy? Perhaps – yet that doesn’t make his foreshortened life any less tragic. Indeed it retrospectively adds a new note of sadness to his achievements, one that no telling of his life could leave out and still hope to be complete. Even events after our death can have this sort of impact on our lives, as where some future calamity, long after my death, makes it the case that my life’s work has amounted to nothing.5 Narrativists might reformulate their claim in light of the above: while key, narrative-trajectory-defining events in our lives may be experientially unavailable to us, given that we don’t remember our birth or experience our death, nonetheless we can view our lives as having a narrative shape or trajectory, even if the beginning and ending are only

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conceptually rather than experientially apprehended (and in the case of the ending, only in a very undefined way). I can still understand my life as being a whole, even if ‘what is meant by this will have to differ from what is meant by my biographer grasping my life as a whole after my death’ (Rudd 2007b: 542). For the purposes of self-ascription and self-understanding, a conception of myself as the subject of a story, an understanding of our lives as having a trajectory, is sufficient. We don’t need knowledge of the whole narrative in order to be able to view the events it contains in narrative terms, just as we can follow, at least to a large degree, the plot of a movie even if we’ve missed the start. Should things happen differently from the way I project they will, such that my future-directed actions turn out to have been futile, then my narrative understanding of those actions will turn out to be wrong in some crucial respect; but that won’t fatally lessen my grip on their narrative structure. In the same way, if I stop watching a movie before the big plot twist that completely changes our understanding of everything that’s gone before (Fight Club or The Usual Suspects, for example), then I’ll still have followed a lot of the narrative and understand how it hangs together – I’ll just be mistaken as to what the ultimate meaning of the events of the narrative were.6 LIVING AND TELLING But this opens up an important phenomenological distinction, one first noticed by Louis O. Mink, between the phenomenology of following a narrative and of having followed it, corresponding to the activities of following and comprehending a narrative. Mink takes W. B. Gallie to task for conflating these two. Gallie is right that we are able to ‘follow a series of events across their contingent relations and to understand them as leading to an as yet unrevealed conclusion without however necessitating that conclusion’ (Mink 1970: 545), as we do when we watch a movie without knowing the ending. We can certainly be said to have a grasp on the events we’re following; after all, my anxiety when the whole match comes down to this one next kick from a player who’s missed three shots at an open goal already today only makes sense insofar as I understand how we got to where we are and how that conditions what might happen next. But, Mink claims, ‘to know an event by retrospection’, that is, in what Mink calls the ‘configurational’ mode of narrative, is ‘categorically, not incidentally, different from knowing it by prediction or anticipation’ because ‘there is no story of the future’ (1970: 546). In telling a narrative, rather than in following as events unfold, the end is already built into the beginning;7 the



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meaning of events for the overall narrative is already determined in a way it isn’t when we follow events in life. That last goal that levelled the scores might turn out to be a prelude to a heroic victory or it might be what makes the final loss all the more painful by making the losing margin so heartbreakingly small.8 But right now, it’s neither – that level of meaning isn’t available to us. And there’s a sense, as Mink notes, in which that previous goal isn’t even the same event as the prelude to the comeback or the doomed last stand, because the logic of the completed narrative determines those events as what they are, and that logic cannot be operative until the sequence of events it unifies in narrative is complete (1970: 546). Mink concludes that: Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later, and there are partings, but final partings only in the story. There are hopes, plans, battles and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal. (1970: 557)

N A R R AT I V E T I M E A N D P H E N O M E N A L T I M E This has the interesting consequence of driving a wedge between phenomenal time and narrative time, between what we experience in the here-and-now and the temporality figured in our retelling of the past and projecting of the future. When we move from direct experience to configurational thinking, according to Mink, then ‘time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey’ (1970: 554–5). When we survey the river from the air, we view the whole, even as our eyes track across from one end to the other; similarly, when we understand a sequence of events configurationally we do so against a sense of the sequence as an implicitly completed totality. Frances Kamm has argued that when we take such a view of a life ‘from the outside’,surveying it in its totality,9 the viewpoint we take is not necessarily ‘atemporal or timeless’, for ‘there is a now outside the life we are viewing’, relative to which we can employ not merely the notions of before and after (McTaggart’s ‘B-Series’ time descriptors) but also ‘those of past, present and future and of what are to be past and future at certain points’ (‘A-series’ time descriptors) (Kamm 1993: 29). This now, however, is not essentially the now of the person whose life it is, ‘now’ as that term would be used from within that life, but the ‘now’ of someone observing from the outside. It is, inescapably, true that any consideration of a life as a whole must be done from the perspective of someone who is themselves alive, who themselves will

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have a ‘now’, a ‘yesterday’, a ‘tomorrow’ and so on (I’ll return to this fact, and the conceptual primacy it gives to a certain perspective on the self, below). Yet in the context of narrative totalities, this second sense of ‘now’ has something arbitrary and somewhat inessential about it, in contrast to the ‘now’ of phenomenal experience. If I pick up a copy of War and Peace, what I have in my hand is the physical medium of a narrative whole; there is no point in War and Peace that is essentially ‘now’ any more than any other point in the novel. If I tell you the story of War and Peace (or read it), there is a ‘now’ that corresponds to the ‘now’ of following a game: now is where we’re up to in the story. And there is, correspondingly, a ‘now’ that’s ‘where my life-story is up to now’. Yet there is a sense in which even this now isn’t necessarily the now of phenomenal time. I could, for instance, tell my life story and mistakenly stop a bit too early; if that sounds unlikely, consider someone who tells you his life story and then adds, a few minutes later, ‘Oh! I forgot to mention, I got engaged last week and accepted a job in Barbados.’ This information shows that the narrative’s previous stopping place, the place we thought to be the ‘now’ of the narration, is in fact not where we’re up to at all. So the ‘now’ of ‘where we’re up to in the story’ turns out to be, in a sense, only contingently the ‘now’ of phenomenal experience, just as the ‘now’ of Kamm’s outside observer of a life needn’t be the ‘now’ of the observed self (whose life might, relative to the observer, be in the future or long-since completed). The ‘now’ of phenomenal time, the Husserlian ‘lived present’, is not arbitrary (or mistakable) in this way. In phenomenal time it’s always now, so to speak, which is the origin of the rather misguided sense of wonder that can arise when we reflect that of all the times we could have been living in, isn’t it amazing that we just happen to be living in the present. Such astonishment arises when we fallaciously assign significance within cosmological time to the ‘lived present’ of experience.10 As we know, according to Ricoeur, narrative is precisely the poesis by which we interrelate cosmological time – the (Aristotelian) time of the universe – and phenomenal time – the (Augustinian) time of the soul.11 Yet the contingency of the ‘now’ of ‘where we’re up to in the story’ points to a problem within the relation of phenomenal time and narrative time itself. It’s not the impersonal time of the universe that’s come apart from the time of the soul here, but the time of the story, the temporally-extended whole that is implicit in and conditions all moments of its narration. Narrative time is an implicit whole and as such is both temporally extended and schematised and yet, in a curious sense, timeless in that all points are simultaneous (or nearly so, given the time it takes to narrate



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the story), all equally present in a single apprehension – Mink’s river seen from the air, viewed from its source to its outpouring in the sea all at once. In phenomenal time, however, we are very much in the river, that ‘never-ending stream’ that ‘bears all its sons away’ as Isaac Watts famously put it. Whereas narrative time involves definite boundaries that are already coded into the logic and meaning of the narrative itself, in phenomenal time we are in the thick of things, standing at a definite point between an unremembered beginning – a ‘dark genesis’, to borrow a term from Taylor (2007) – and an unknown end. S E LV E S A N D P E R S O N S So consideration of the ways in which we make our lives intelligible through narrative has led us from narrative as the interrelation of phenomenal and cosmological time (or external time, in Husserlian parlance) to a consideration of how, in phenomenal time, we relate to our narrative itself, as a diachronic whole. This point has been implicit in some recent discussions of narrative that have invoked a distinction between persons as diachronically extended entities and selves as the subjects we experience ourselves as being here-and-now. In an important response to Galen Strawson’s defence of ‘episodic’ self-experience, Marya Schechtman argues that: The narrative self-constitution view can thus be separated into two distinct claims. First is the claim that in order to constitute oneself as a person – someone with the capacity for moral responsibility, prudential interest, relations of compensation and related person-specific activities – one must implicitly organize one’s experience according to a narrative that recognizes past and future experiences as one’s own in the sense that one sees the past as having implications for one’s present situation and choices, and the present as having similar implications for the future. Second is the claim that in order to constitute oneself as a self, one must have a narrative in which one experiences the past and future as one’s own in the strong sense of experiencing the present as part of the whole narrative. (Schechtman 2007: 171)

In bringing the question of ‘experiencing the present as part of the whole narrative’ into the narrative self-constitution view, Schechtman raises precisely this question of the phenomenology of relating to our life as a narrative totality – and the implicit question of how the divergent temporalities of these two registers of selfhood (or of personhood and selfhood) interact with each other. Dan Zahavi (2012) has recently drawn attention to precisely this relationship between narrative time and phenomenal time (and the ‘narrative self’ and ‘minimal self’ figured in each). Zahavi is motivated partly by a concern that narrative accounts of selfhood privilege a

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reflective stance towards the self. When narrativists such as Davenport speak of the attainment of progressively higher levels of volitional unity – talk with inescapably Frankfurtian overtones of evaluating and selecting higher-order volitions to determine and co-ordinate lower-order ones – it does indeed seem as if self-constitution is being considered as an essentially reflective process, even if the self is not the explicit thematic focus of such reflection. Against this, Zahavi offers an account of pre-reflective, experiential givenness as a constitutive feature of firstpersonal experience. What Zahavi calls the ‘experiential approach’ to selfhood involves a sense that all present experience is my experience, the experience of a given subject. This sense is immediate rather than recovered or constructed reflectively (narratively or otherwise). As we’ve seen, both the narrative and phenomenal self each has its own distinctive temporality, and Zahavi is at pains to point out that any serious consideration of human selfhood needs to take both the narrative and experiential dimensions into account. Yet he also remarks that the experiential approach is ‘the more fundamental of the two’. Based on his earlier comments on the asymmetrical dependency between the ‘minimal’ and ‘narrative’ selves, I take him to mean by this that phenomenal selfhood is a prerequisite for diachronic narrative selfhood, but not vice versa. To that we can add that there’s another, related conceptual priority at work here too: all our self-narrativising, our relating to ourselves as diachronically-extended wholes, takes place in phenomenal consciousness – and accordingly, happens from the given here and now of phenomenal time.12 This thought opens up a new perspective from which to analyse the question of narrative self-constitution. It may be that we each make our lives into an intelligible, coherent, diachronically extended and emplotted whole (though there may be other reasons to be dubious about this claim), but we always do so from here and now. Thus we survey the whole – Mink’s aerial view of the river – but we do so from mid-stream. So the question that has been slowly emerging in these recent discussions of narrative looks something like this: what, phenomenologically, is it like to relate as a present-tense self to a diachronically extended person, and to see our present-tense self as being identical with that extended person? Or to put it differently, what is it like to live in both narrative and phenomenal time at once? K I E R K E G A A R D ’ S B I VA L E N T T E M P O R A L I T Y When we phrase the question in that second way, we can perhaps see why Kierkegaard has something to offer here. On the one hand,



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Kierkegaard certainly does give priority to phenomenal time over narrative time, as evidenced by the ‘naked self’ that haunts Judge William and Anti-Climacus, and by his normativising of the phenomenology of attentive following over configurational narrativising. This can be found in various places, but is perhaps clearest in Works of Love’s denunciation of one who: without the consent of eternity [. . .] ends where the end is not; instead of, like someone taking dictation, continually having his pen poised for what comes next, so that he does not presume meaninglessly to place a period before the meaning is complete or rebelliously to throw away his pen. (WL, 252/SKS 9, 252)

Here Kierkegaard seems to be opposing narrative completeness to a sort of Heideggerian ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ in the face of an open-ended and radically uncertain future, and endorsing the latter comportment. But that is hardly Kierkegaard’s final word on what it is like to relate to one’s life as a whole. Indeed, Kierkegaard is very much alive to the ways in which awareness of one’s life as a totality transfigures one’s present experience of oneself and of temporality. Throughout his career, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms speak of having to live simultaneously in time (tidelighed) and in eternity (evighed). At least two accounts of what this is like are offered. The first is found in Either/Or, where Judge William claims that the married man ‘solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet to hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking does not shorten but lengthens his eternity’ (EO 2, 138/SKS 3, 137). By committing himself to the ethical project of marriage, he gives his life a continuity and consistency that helps him overcome the predations of time, which would otherwise cause his love to fade and his life to dissipate into a parade of disconnected passing passions. The second account is offered by Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety and by Kierkegaard under his own name in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ (aka ‘Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing’). Here too we are told that the subject lives simultaneously in time and eternity, but here ‘eternity’ takes on a very different complexion. Whereas for William ‘eternity’ means a sort of open-ended continuity, for Haufniensis and for Kierkegaard (and for Anti-Climacus as well) ‘eternity’ refers more directly to the concept of a final judgement over the totality of one’s life. Though it has been argued (e.g. Marks 2010, 2011; Rudd 2008b), correctly I think, that Kierkegaard does believe in the Christian doctrine of personal immortality that his Hegelian contemporaries had largely abandoned, he nonetheless insists that immortality is not ‘continued life’ in some other realm, but is rather to be understood as ‘judgement’.

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For Haufniensis, the soteriological prospect of being held to account for our sins changes the whole character of time. We live, according to Haufniensis, in ‘the Moment’ (Øjeblikket), which he describes as the ‘intersection’ of time and eternity (CA 88/SKS 4, 392). And that intersection actually changes the way we experience time itself: categories of past, present and future become co-ordinate to the present moment, according to Haufniensis, on the basis of the prospect of eternal judgement. This is a very strong claim: it’s only when we have soteriological categories such as sin, final judgement and redemption that, according to Haufniensis, we are fully situated in a directional flow of time with distinct past and future (‘A-Series’ time in McTaggart’s terms).13 So the prospect of having to account for our diachronically extended lives as a whole changes the character of our experience of time. This understanding of the dual temporality of humans is at work in ‘An Occasional Discourse’. Here, Kierkegaard compares the narratively-schematised life of organisms, in which there is a ‘time for everything’ and in which birth, growth, decay and death follow in an inexorable sequence, with the experience of time had by an organism that regards itself as immortal (in the sense of being subject to an eternal judgement). For such a being, the character of time itself is altered. We each live out a largely biologically determined narrative and there is always a point which we’re up to in that narrative (child, student, adult, parent, pensioner, etc.). But as we’ve seen, the ‘pointwhere-we’re-up-to’ form of ‘now’ that’s encountered in a narrative has a certain contingency to it. For Kierkegaard, however, once we posit that eternal judgement could come at any time, the narrative/biological ‘now’ also becomes ‘the eleventh hour’. If we could be called upon to answer for our life as a whole, to account for ‘every idle word’ spoken, then the phenomenal ‘now’ becomes oriented to the narrative totality in a new and qualitatively different way. We’re not just following the story along, we’re accepting here-and-now responsibility for the whole story from beginning to end. S E LV E S B E YO N D S O T E R I O L O G Y This brief, and exegetically quite inadequate, overview suggests that Kierkegaard offers us some interesting resources for discussing what it is like to relate to one’s life as a totality, and thereby to understand better how the ‘minimal self’ interacts with the ‘narrative self’ (or in other terminology, how the ‘self’ interacts with its ‘person’). As I’ve tried to show, the need to conceptualise, explore and understand this interaction is emerging as a key task for narrative-inspired discussions



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of personal identity – and, I’d suggest, for personal identity theory more broadly. I have argued elsewhere that ‘narrative’ may be too strong a term for what its proponents want it to do; very often it seems as if ‘practical reason’ would do much the same work without bringing the sort of objections narrative brings with it (Stokes 2012: 89–90, 102–3). I have also argued more generally (e.g. Stokes 2014) that there is something irreducible about the perspective of the minimal self, and have accordingly argued against collapsing first- and third-personal and present-tense and atemporal perspectives on the self into each other. However, even for someone like myself who remains agnostic about the claims made for and about narrative selfhood, the discussions above do, I think, point to a form of self-experience I take to be pervasive (if not universal): the experience of the self we experience ourselves as being now as having ultimate responsibility for the life we have and what we do with it. I do think the sense of final answerability for our time on earth and what we have done with it, something that runs through much of the best work on narrative selfhood, is a feature of self-experience that needs to be taken seriously. But what becomes of answerability if we think we will never be made to answer to anyone? Kierkegaard’s explicitly Christian-soteriological conception of the self might make his contribution to this discussion a non-starter for many, perhaps most philosophers grappling with issues of self and identity. The worldview according to which human lives are subject to a final judgement may have a long and diverse history (cf. Brandon 1967) but for many of us it may seem simply too far afield from our own. What Kierkegaard’s work may lead us to ask, however, is whether secular analogues to soteriology can play a similar role in regarding our lives as a whole. We do, at least sometimes, ask ourselves questions that have a sort of soteriological structure independently of any eschatological beliefs: ‘If I died right now, would my life have been worth it?’ ‘Do I really deserve to ever be happy?’ and so forth. When we seek meaning in life we do it, I think, as if we were implicitly judging the totality of our life after the fact, and this does seem to involve the sort of bivalent temporality at work in both Kierkegaard and narrative identity, and in seeking to redeem or justify the whole of a life we do seem to be working out our salvation in some sense. While these are highly reflective questions that many people may never ask themselves, it may be that a sense of answerability for one’s entire life nonetheless plays a decisive role in self-experience even if one does not think there will ever be a forum in which to answer for it or a judge to whom we must answer. When we depart from Kierkegaard and his defining

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c­ ommitments we must be clear that we’re doing so, marking clearly where faithful exegesis ends and philosophical application of the material uncovered begins. But that should not put us off considering what Kierkegaard might point us towards. N OT E S   1. Importantly, some of those who see an important philosophical role for narrative bracket the more problematic idea that narrative constitutes the diachronically-extended self; see e.g. Velleman 2006: 223; Misak 2008; Goldie 2012.   2. See e.g. CD, 205/SKS 10, 214; also UDVS, 66/SKS 8, 174, where we are told that eternity will not simply be ‘another’ world such that, having made a go of life here in time, we can try our hand at life in eternity.   3. A key theme of Ricoeur 1988, 1992.   4. As Adam Buben points out to me, however, Ricoeur still needs some criteria here for where our story begins and where our parents’ ends, lest we have to include their births, or the creation of the universe, as part of our individual narrative.   5. On these seemingly ‘retroactive’ posthumous harms, see Pitcher 1991.  6. Even this response, however, may miss crucial features of death that a narrativist account of the self might struggle to explain. Frances Kamm makes a passing remark that I think stands as an open challenge for any narrativist account of the role of death in life: ‘Because of death, something of value that already existed is taken apart. It suffers a defeat. A person does not come to an end in the same way that a book does, intact’ (Kamm 1993: 39). I take Kamm to mean here that a completed narrative is not destroyed by the conclusion of its narration; by definition it could not have gone on longer and therefore suffers nothing for ending where it does, which is not true of human lives. Lives are lost in a way that stories are not.   7. ‘The end is built into the beginning’ should not be understood in the sense in which the position of all objects at the end of a given period is at least theoretically fully predictable if we know the position of every object at the start of that period and the unvarying physical laws that govern them (à la Laplace’s Demon). It would not be true to say that we can predict with absolute certainty that Nora will leave Torvald in A Doll’s House based on how things stand at the start of Act 1 – if we could, then the revised ending Ibsen was forced to write for its German premiere, in which Nora apparently stays in her marriage for the sake of her children, would be not merely narratively unconvincing, but literally miraculous! That said, perhaps part of what we do as we follow a narrative along is gain a fuller picture of what the starting state of the narrative actually was, such that how we get to the ending from there makes sense. Again, think of Ibsen, whose plays often involve the gradual exposure of truths about the



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past: only over the course of Ghosts do we learn that Oswald’s fate was inevitable from the time of his birth, well before the play begins.  8. I suspect this analogy will start to fall apart at this point for fans of European football (i.e. soccer) and will have made little sense to begin with for fans of American football. The confused reader is invited to look into Australian Rules football where the experience described here is surprisingly common.   9. Kamm discusses this perspective on the self in the context of the problem, posed by Derek Parfit, of whether it is rational to prefer a greater quantity of pain and suffering in our past to a smaller amount of pain and suffering in our future – meaning in some cases we would choose a life with more pain over one with less pain, where the only difference is where that pain is temporally located relative to us now. Arguing against Lucretius’ ‘symmetry argument’, Kamm seeks to show that there are reasons, independent of this ‘bias towards the future’ diagnosed by Parfit, to regret the goods we will lose by dying more than we regret the goods we lost by not being born earlier. 10. Of course, presentists might argue that there is something metaphysically privileged about the specific moment of time in which we are living, that is, it is the only ontologically actual one. See for example Bourne 2006. 11. Indeed, part of the reason that astonishment might arise is precisely that, as Ricoeur puts it, ‘a psychological theory [of time] and a cosmological theory mutually occlude each other to the very extent they imply each other’ (Ricoeur 1988: 14). 12. This priority does not impact upon the validity, one way or the other, of the Ricoeurian claim that phenomenal and cosmological time have conceptually mutually dependent features: the before-after structure of cosmological time ‘borrows’ from the past-present-future structure of phenomenal time, which in turn borrows from the before-after structure of cosmological time. ‘Because each implies the other, each partially constitutes the meaning of the other, and so their mutual implication is at the same time mutual explanation’ (Atkins 2008: 71). 13. I discuss all of the above in much greater depth than is possible here, in Stokes 2010b.

5  Kierkegaard’s Erotic Reduction and the Problem of Founding the Self MICHAEL STRAWSER

For what is it that is at work, even poorly, in any man whatsoever, if not love? St Augustine (Marion 2012: 272)

I N T RO DU C T I O N The ‘signature narrative thesis’ serves particularly well in explaining how personal identity gets constituted through one’s reflective consciousness or understanding, although it leaves open the question of how reflective consciousness itself is constituted (cf. Davenport 2012: 2–3). Is the ‘self’ identical to the narrative form of a person’s understanding, or is there a deeper self than that which emerges on the reflective level? In contrast to this narrative view, according to recent scholarship the phenomenological tradition unanimously affirms that the core self is to be found in pre-reflective consciousness. Further, Kierkegaard has not only been suggested to be significant for the narrative discussion, but he has also been read as connected to the phenomenological tradition by affirming a similar view regarding situating the core self in pre-reflective consciousness. In this contribution, I focus on the phenomenological tradition and question the attempt to show that the notion of the self is founded in pre-reflective consciousness and conceived as first-person subjective givenness. This view, as we shall see, is problematic in important ways. Then, I address the relationship between Kierkegaard and the phenomenological tradition, with specific attention to the problem of selfhood. Rather than proceeding directly, however, I argue that we must first consider the ‘erotic reduction’ Kierkegaard describes in his edifying discourse ‘Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins’ (1843) and Works of Love (1847) before we can consider what we might call his phenomenology 78



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of selfhood, for the former holds crucial implications for the latter. As we shall see, not only does Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of love problematise the phenomenology of selfhood, but it also raises important concerns for narrative theorists. Whether Kierkegaard can be read as a phenomenologist has recently been addressed by several prominent Kierkegaard scholars, and this contribution may thus be seen as my attempt to join this intriguing discussion. I wish to do this also in the manner presented by Jeffrey Hanson, the editor of Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment (2010). In other words, this is an experiment. As such, the results and their significance are yet to be fully determined. Thus, let us first analyse how phenomenology attempts to found the notion of self, and then see how Kierkegaard’s thinking may be related to this pursuit of knowing oneself, which is perhaps philosophy’s grandest and most championed pursuit – perhaps, that is, if we prioritise self-knowledge over philosophy’s often neglected, if not abused, origin of love. IS THE SELF FOUNDED BY PRE-REFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS? In contemporary phenomenology of mind we find a case for situating the core self, the centre of subjectivity, in the pre-reflective self-consciousness. Immediately, however, a worry occurs, for it is surely problematic to think that the phenomenological method, with its focus on the things themselves and letting them appear to consciousness as they are without any metaphysical presuppositions, can unveil, examine and ultimately know that which is pre-reflective. Surely, that which is purely pre-reflective cannot be the subject of a logical, philosophical investigation, which by its very nature lies on the plane of reflection? What is it then that would lead one to proceed in this manner? Is it because one feels the pre-reflective self, the supposed core self, can actually be glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye, even though as soon as one turns to look, it changes its position? As narrative theorists hold, reflective consciousness undoubtedly posits a self, but is it right to maintain that this self is actually founded on another, more primordial self? If it is, then, is it right to understand this primordial self as a singular being, one that expresses a first-person perspective? In this section of the essay I argue that the use of the term ‘self’ in the expression ‘pre-reflective self-consciousness’ is not warranted, and that there is ample evidence within the phenomenological tradition, broadly construed, to support this view. Further, I suggest that what we can glimpse at the core of pre-reflective consciousness is at best ‘personally open’ or ‘personally

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indifferent’ and reveals life in general, rather than an isolated human subject. This suggestion could then be seen as lending more credibility to the narrative thesis. P H E N O M E N O L O G Y A N D T H E S E A RC H F O R S E L F One of the richest and most clear-headed treatments of the self and subjectivity can be found in the recent work of Dan Zahavi (Zahavi 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). What makes these works admirable is their breadth of understanding, for they proceed from a phenomenological perspective, but one that is not unaware of analytic investigations into the philosophy of mind and recent experimental work in the cognitive sciences. Just what does this enhanced phenomenological perspective have to say about the perennial philosophical question of the self? Zahavi opens his Subjectivity and Selfhood by raising a series of questions, the most direct of which is this: ‘What is a self?’ (2005: 1). He then asks: ‘Is it a conceptual and experiential truth that any episode of experiencing necessarily involves a subject of experience?’ and ‘Is self-awareness always to be understood as awareness of a self, or can it rather be understood simply as the awareness that a specific experience has of itself?’ (2005: 2). This last question already raises concerns, for it appears that the notion of self is equivocal, and it seems self-evident that the clearest perspective of the self will be one that avoids equivocation as far as possible. So, is it appropriate to use the term self in both parts of the question, or would it be clearer to reserve the term ‘self-awareness’ for ‘an awareness of a self’ and to avoid the awkward notion of ‘the awareness that a specific experience has of itself’? Zahavi attempts to integrate the investigations of self, self-awareness and experience, and it seems to me that this integration is founded on his understanding of the seemingly synonymous notions of self-­awareness, self-consciousness and pre-reflective self-consciousness. Although well aware that ‘the term “self-awareness” is notoriously ambiguous’ (2005: 13), Zahavi intends to use this term to refer to a primitive, minimalist notion of self that is to be found in the writings of ‘literally all the major figures in phenomenology’ (2005: 11; cf. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 45–6). This claim, I argue, is problematic, and with it the recent suggestion that Kierkegaard is connected with the phenomenological tradition by affirming a similar view ‘60 years before Husserl’ (Stokes 2010c: 55). For starters, who are all these major figures? Unfortunately, Zahavi does not name them in this passage, but one gathers from the larger context that the reference is to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. As we shall see, however, the views of these thinkers are by no means



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unanimous, and their positions on the question of the self are not entirely clear. Strictly speaking, the notion of the self that Zahavi is advocating is found in the later Husserl (not the Husserl of the Logical Investigations), perhaps in the later Sartre (not the Sartre of The Transcendence of the Ego) and in the early Heidegger of Being and Time (but not the later Heidegger). Let us consider these views briefly. First, Zahavi rightly recognises that the views of Husserl and Sartre in particular share some affinities to non-egological theories of consciousness. In the Logical Investigations Husserl held that ‘experiences are not states or properties of anybody, but mental events that simply occur’ (Zahavi 2005: 33) and in The Transcendence of the Ego – the title itself expresses the central claim of the work – Sartre powerfully argues that ‘constituting consciousness’ or ‘unreflective consciousness’ is absolutely ‘impersonal; or, if you like, “pre-personal,” without an I’ (1960: 32). It is interesting to note that this early work by Sartre is criticising the later Husserl. Be that as it may, Zahavi argues that both Husserl and Sartre come to reject as mistaken their early view that pre-reflective consciousness lacks a clear sense of self. While the evidence Zahavi presents may be seen as supporting the position on the philosophers’ changing thoughts (cf. Zahavi 2005: 44–7; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 115–16), it does not clearly demonstrate that the earlier views found in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego were, in fact, mistaken. Specifically, regarding Sartre, Zahavi argues that Sartre made a crucial move when he distinguished the ego from the self. Where this distinction is made is not cited, although it is suggested to have occurred in Being and Nothingness. Here Sartre writes: ‘pre-reflective consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of consciousness’ (1956: 76; Zahavi 2005: 113). But as rightly suggested by Stephen Priest (2000: 55), how this ‘self’ fits with Sartre’s view that ultimately ‘consciousness is a “nothingness”, a pure awareness of objects’, remains unexplained. In addition, Priest explains nicely how Sartre’s famous and ‘perhaps paradoxical’ statement in The Transcendence of the Ego that ‘consciousness is conscious of itself’ (2000: 40) is quite distinct from selfconsciousness. He writes: Although ‘being conscious of’ sounds like a relationship and ‘being conscious of itself’ sounds like a reflexive relationship, these would be rather misleading interpretations of the nature of consciousness in Sartre’s view. This is because consciousness’s being consciousness of consciousness is something which characterizes pre-reflective consciousness for Sartre. This is a kind of consciousness quite distinct from self-consciousness [. . .]

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Pre-reflective consciousness is a kind of consciousness of consciousness in which no self appears. (2000: 45)

Priest goes on to argue that the claim that consciousness is conscious of itself cannot be verified and that the evidence for this claim is of ‘only a weak and inductive kind’, and yet ‘despite these severe philosophical difficulties for Sartre’s claim’, Priest admits that the claim is not necessarily false or meaningless, and thus leaves it ‘open as a logical possibility’ (2000: 46–7). None of this is enough to conclude positively that the notion of self is founded in pre-reflective consciousness, so let us now turn to Heidegger. The Heideggerian notion of ‘mineness’ is central to the phenomenological perspective on the core self, for it is claimed that a central feature of this self is that whatever is experienced is experienced as mine or for me. First, it is important to note what Einar Øverenget (1998: 159) has pointed out, namely, that Heidegger never actually ‘uses the term “self-consciousness” [Selbstbewusstsein] in Being and Time’. Nevertheless, it is well-known that Heidegger’s work poses significant interpretive difficulties. Even though he does not agree with the view, Mark Okrent admits that it is nevertheless defensible to claim that the essential feature of Dasein ‘appears to be just the one that has traditionally been taken to be distinctive to human beings, at least qua thinkers and intenders, since Descartes: self-awareness, or self-consciousness’ (1988: 18). Øverenget corroborates by showing convincingly that such a claim ‘is not off target’ (1998: 140). Second, there are additional problems occasioned by Heidegger’s shifting positions, and the fact that he later abandons the notion of mineness. This is clearly demonstrated by Michel Haar, who shows that ‘as early as the Beitrage (G.A. 65) of 1936–1938, Heidegger breaks with two essential features of Dasein’, one of which is ‘the purely formal character of mineness’ (1989: 13). Haar explains how the later Heidegger (after ‘The Turning’ [1949]) not only denies the mineness of Dasein, but he speaks of the self ‘in a radically non-subjective way’ (1989: 12). The questions to which this thinking leads are nicely raised by Haar: How is an ipseity conceivable which no longer has at all the form of representative consciousness and no longer leads back to an individual self? How is it possible to reject the self, whether it be substantial or formal, to deconstruct the subject and the representation, and yet paradoxically maintain ‘reflection’ as the essence of man? What could a non-subjective, nonindividual reflection be, which would nevertheless have the characteristic of ipseity and not be a self-reflection of the absolute? (1989: 12)

Thus a brief look at these major phenomenological figures and some significant recent scholarship suggests that an alternative phenomeno-



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logical perspective to the one offered by Zahavi is possible, and that for Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger it is clearly questionable whether they all unequivocally defend the notion of a subjective self in pre-reflective consciousness. In addition, we can also inquire into other prominent figures in the phenomenological tradition such as Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Derrida. Here the agreement is far from clear, as a glance at a few passages from key works will demonstrate. In Truth and Method, Gadamer writes that ‘subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life’ (1989: 278). In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘It is because it is a preobjective view that beingin-the-world can be distinguished from every third person process, from every modality of the res extensa, as from every cogitatio, from every first person form of knowledge’ (1962: 77), and one could certainly explore Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for further insight in this regard. According to Ricoeur, the positing of the self [. . .] is at once the positing of a being and of an act; the positing of an existence and of an operation of thought: I am, I think; to exist, for me, is to think; I exist inasmuch as I think. Since this truth cannot be verified like a fact, nor deduced like a conclusion, it has to posit itself in reflexion; its self-positing is reflexion [. . .]. (1970: 43)

And in Derrida’s well-known essay ‘Différance’ we read: What then is consciousness? What does ‘consciousness’ mean? Most often in the very form of ‘meaning’, consciousness in all its modifications is conceivable only as self-presence, a self-perception of presence. And what holds for consciousness also holds here for what is called subjective existence in general. Just as the category of subject is not and never has been conceivable without reference to presence as hypokeimenon or ousia, etc., so the subject as consciousness thus means a privilege accorded to the present [. . .] This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the very element of our thought insofar as it is caught up in the language of metaphysics. (1973: 146–7)

Perhaps one would object that these figures – Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Derrida – are neither major nor truly phenomenological – that they are not ‘classical phenomenologists’ – but such a view would seem disingenuous. At any rate, it would be helpful to know specifically which figures are intended. Consider now more fully this important passage from The Phenomenological Mind: Literally all of the major figures in phenomenology defend the view that a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in

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an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a ‘pre-reflective’ self-consciousness. (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 45–6)

As the evidence from the major phenomenologists cited above has demonstrated, this claim goes too far. It seems rather that, literally, all the major figures in phenomenology are quite far from unanimously affirming a core subjective self in pre-reflective consciousness. Further, although the notion of a self that Gallagher and Zahavi are arguing for here is a minimalist one, one that is arguably tacit and non-thematic, is it not a strong contention that this core self, which will serve to found the other notions of self and subjectivity, is that which is pre-reflective (or ‘unreflective’ as Sartre would have said)? Is it not problematic, both phenomenologically and theoretically, to claim that before or without looking, before or without casting a reflective gaze, I can know that there is a first-person experience, an experience that is mine? By what argument shall we conclude that pre-reflective consciousness is firstpersonal and subjective? Before proceeding, it is important to note that Gallagher and Zahavi distinguish between ‘a weak and a strong first-person perspective’: Whereas the latter presupposes mastery of the first-person pronoun and entails the actual adoption of a position or perspective on oneself (as in ‘I am angry’ or ‘I would like some coffee’), the former is simply a question of the first-personal, subjective manifestation of one’s own experiential life. (2008: 47)

Indeed, as I maintain, the question is precisely whether pre-­reflective experiential life is first-personal and subjective, so the distinction between a weak and strong perspective does not alleviate the problem. One of the reasons for considering Zahavi’s contemporary perspective on the self over others is the clarity of the arguments for this position. But sometimes language does create difficulties. Zahavi writes: ‘In its most primitive and fundamental form, self-consciousness is taken to be a question of having first-personal access to one’s own consciousness; it is a question of the first-personal givenness or manifestation of experiential life’ (2005: 15). Indeed, what is taken to be ‘a question of’ is precisely that, a question. These are not ‘matters of’ (which is how I think we are expected to understand the phrase ‘a question of’) self-evident experience. As I am suggesting, the question of whether the givenness of pre-reflective experiential life is first-personal cannot be answered with any certainty. The argument for ‘the existence of a tacit and unthematic self-



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awareness’, Zahavi explains, ‘is occasionally an indirect argument by elimination [. . .]’ (2005: 24). And further, Phenomenologists would first deny that we could consciously experience something without in some way having access to or being acquainted with the experience in question. They would then argue that this first-person access to one’s own experiences amounts to a form of self-awareness [. . .] As for the more specific claims concerning the structure of this pre-reflective self-awareness, in particular the claim that it is nonobjectifying and therefore not the result of any self-directed intentionality, phenomenologists would insist that this claim is based on a correct phenomenological description of our conscious life – in everyday life, I might enjoy a continuous first-personal access to my own consciousness, but I am definitely not aware of my own stream of consciousness as a succession of immanent marginal objects – and that this is the best argument to be found. (2005: 24)

Although not entirely satisfying, it seems correct to proceed indirectly, for finding a direct argument for the existence of a self in pre-reflective consciousness seems doomed to failure from the start. Still, however sympathetic I am to this general phenomenological approach, labelling this as ‘the best argument to be found’ is troubling, for surely having first-person access to an experience does not necessarily entail that the experience in question is a first-person experience. The experience and the consequent access to it must be understood as separate movements. Is it not entirely possible that pre-reflective conscious experience is pre-personal? In other words, it is not pre-reflectively understood as mine, but it is through the first-person access to this experience that it takes on the quality of mineness. This may involve rejecting Heidegger’s claim that ‘every consciousness is also self-consciousness’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 46), but as Derrida has shown, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein may in certain respects prolong the life of the Cartesian cogito and is in need of being entirely recontextualised. The question is whether one can ‘free the relation of Dasein to being from every living, utilitarian, perspective making-project, from every vital design, such that man himself could “let the being be”’. Here, Derrida writes, ‘the stakes are so radical that they concern “ontological difference”, the “question of being”, the whole framework of Heideggerian discourse’ (2008: 160). The pivotal chapter in Zahavi’s Subjectivity and Selfhood is Chapter 5 (‘Consciousness and Self’), where he reintroduces the key questions of his study, one of which is this: ‘When we speak of self-awareness, do we then necessarily also speak of a self?’ (2005: 99). After carefully surveying the many different notions of the self, Zahavi answers affirmatively that where there is pre-reflective self-awareness there is ‘a minimal sense of self present’ (2005: 146). Such a self is characterised as ­first-person

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givenness and the ‘what it is like’ of experience. Considering the way the question is posed, it would be odd not to conclude there is a sense of self, but why ask the question in this way? Has not a self been reflectively assumed from the start of the question? If, instead, we ask about ‘awareness’ or ‘pre-reflective consciousness’ will we be as ready to conclude that a sense of self is necessarily found here? And, further, is a ‘sense of self’ the same thing as ‘a self’? Questions of the self beget more questions. Although the phenomenological method with its focus on ‘the things themselves’ can and does deal with ‘things’ that manifest themselves through their non-appearance (consider, for example, Sartre’s treatment of nothingness in Being and Nothingness or Marion’s analysis of the flesh of the other in The Erotic Phenomenon), this is not the argument that Zahavi makes. Instead, he concludes there is a specifically structured presence, presumably human, that is the minimal self belonging to pre-reflective consciousness. But try as one may, it is impossible to unveil this core non-reflective self through a reflective phenomenological reduction. When one reflects on the experiences of being absorbed in reading or viewing a landscape (common examples found in phenomenological texts), what is clear is that there is givenness and consciousness, and one can agree that there is first-person access to these states. My reflective gaze seems somehow to be lurking alongside these experiences, but to claim that such pre-reflective experiential states are intrinsically first-personal and subjective, to claim that they are mine in the absence of a reflective I or ego, seems to go too far. Even taking a Brentanian route to argue that consciousness grasps itself per accidens or en parergo at best yields what Brentano called an ‘additional consciousness’ (Bewusstseinsnebenbei), which is still not clearly self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) (1995: 276). Here Zahavi would no doubt respond that implying such a criticism assumes a fixed, substantial notion of the self inherited from the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant, and that his own phenomenological perspective views the self differently as an experiential dimension. It is, however, unclear how this so-called phenomenological notion can be taken as completely severed from the prior philosophical tradition. Support for this claim can be found in Øverenget, who explains how ‘Sartre [. . .] revealed an intrinsic relationship between phenomenology and Kantian philosophy’ (1998: 145), and in Priest, who claims more boldly that ‘damagingly, the doctrine of the pre-reflexive consciousness implies [. . .] Cartesianism’ (2000: 48). Perhaps Cartesian metaphysics does die a long, slow death (cf. Dennett 2003: 242 and Gallagher 2005: 13).



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We must, of course, be very careful about what we are to conclude about the self. Thus, for similar reasons, to argue that pre-reflective states of awareness are unconscious and to go further by maintaining a ‘no self doctrine’, which generally holds that all talk of a self is illusory or delusional, is also claiming more than is warranted. Zahavi’s account does have the benefit of avoiding the infinite regress generated by higher-order theories of consciousness that juxtapose unconscious and conscious states, but how it does this is curious. On this theory the way a mental state becomes conscious or ‘comes to be given as my state’ is found in the claim that ‘first-person givenness is an ineliminable part of what it means for a state to be conscious’ (2005: 26). But do we not have to show first how what is claimed here is possible? Further, can’t this problem also be avoided by arguing that pre-reflective states are intrinsically conscious? Of course, how they are conscious would not be explained and it would also not be clear for whom they are conscious, but perhaps a certain explanatory vacuity must be accepted. THE APORIA OF SELFHOOD Does it make sense to speak of a self in pre-reflective consciousness? In the previous section I have raised concerns serious enough to suggest that an affirmative answer involving a first-person subject is not without its problems. Nevertheless, this has not resulted in advocating a no-self theory. Zahavi rightly observes that the ‘distinction between an egological and a non-egological theory turns out to be too crude a distinction’ (2005: 146). In a similar manner, I would like to suggest that we avoid the dichotomies self/no self, first person/no person, and instead think of pre-reflective consciousness as personally indifferent, or more positively expressed, personally open. Just as Max Scheler attempts to avoid the psychic-physical distinction by maintaining that ‘both act and person are psychophysically indifferent’ and that ‘we are not at all troubled by the old Cartesian alternative, which requires that everything be either psychic or physical’ (1973: 388), I am suggesting that we do not have to succumb to the binary distinction between self or no self. We can instead remain open. Avoiding metaphysical conclusions regarding selves or persons is no small challenge, but it seems that one can remain open to the prospect of selfhood while realising that what reveals itself in pre-reflective consciousness is a complex phenomenon of life that far exceeds the structures of a (presumably human) minimal self. In the ‘Introduction’ to The Phenomenological Mind Gallagher and Zahavi write that ‘the phenomenologist does not get locked up in an

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experience that is purely subjective, or detached from the world’ (2008: 8), and it is for precisely this reason that I think we would do well to conclude that pre-reflective consciousness is personally open, rather than subjectively fixed. Thus, the argument that the ‘sense of self’ given in pre-reflective consciousness is the purely subjective first-person givenness of what it is like to be me is at best a narratively constituted product of reflection (and thus not pre-reflective or originary, but rather derivative), and at worst a metaphysical caprice. It seems that instead of finding ‘a sense of self’, what is given in pre-reflective conscious awareness is a sense of life or a sense of living and this ‘sense’ is not separate or detached from the world – and we do well to note here that the etymological roots of the word ‘self’ reveal the meanings ‘separate, apart’. What a theory of consciousness founded on this sense might involve remains a project of thought; the living has already begun. KIERKEGAARD AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELFHOOD Let us now turn to Kierkegaard. How do we relate Kierkegaard’s rich thinking to this already complex discussion? Regarding reading Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist Hanson makes this very fruitful and suggestive claim: ‘If Kierkegaard is a phenomenologist, then, he is a phenomenologist of love’ (2010: xx). The philosophical import of this claim is in my view fundamentally sound, which is why it is rather surprising to find very little later in the collection that addresses and grounds Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of love. One would especially like to see how Kierkegaard’s thinking exhibits a phenomenology of love in light of those thinkers who actually centre their phenomenology, indeed their philosophy, on the nature of love, and this is of course not Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein and perhaps the most prominent phenomenologist of love writing today, Jean-Luc Marion. One may also think of Emmanuel Levinas in this connection, but since he attacked Kierkegaard’s philosophy without apparently considering Works of Love (as I have argued in Strawser 2008), we may perhaps be justified in glossing over him for now. Surprisingly, however, a somewhat related point can be made regarding those scholars who have written on Kierkegaard’s notion of the self while focusing their attention on the pseudonymous works (cf. Taylor 2000 and Westphal 1996), and unfortunately much of the discussion on Kierkegaard and narrativity since MacIntyre’s After Virtue has occurred without a sustained reflection on Kierkegaard’s philosophy of love. Can we seriously entertain



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the view that we can understand selfhood without considering love? At best such works provide an incomplete vision of Kierkegaard’s notion of self, while at worst they provide a hermeneutically distorted one, since a direct reflection on Works of Love – arguably ‘the central work in Kierkegaard’s entire authorship’ (Pattison 2009: ix) – is lacking. Thus it will have already become clear that when addressing the question of selfhood and the issue of a foundational self in Kierkegaard, I think we do well to consider the view of self expressed in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and related views that can be found in his Edifying Discourses. Before getting ahead of ourselves, however, let us consider directly the question of what Kierkegaard may have thought about prereflective consciousness and its relation to selfhood. Although we all know that Kierkegaard did not use the expression ‘pre-reflective consciousness’, it does not seem unreasonable to equate this with the term ‘immediacy’, inherited from the context of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Using Either/Or as a guide, one can easily follow traditional readings and argue that for ‘A’, the aesthete lacking a name – by which one indirectly understands that he is also lacking a self – immediacy itself does not justify positing a self. In this regard, then, the thesis that pre-reflective consciousness is personally open fits with the fragment of lived experience expressed in A’s papers as edited by Victor Eremita. Further, it also fits neatly with the claim in Johannes Climacus that ‘immediacy is precisely indeterminateness’ (JC, 167/SKS 15, 54), since it is because we have understood pre-reflective consciousness as indeterminate that we have taken it to be personally open. So far so good, but what if we follow the suggestion above and begin our quest for the self with the phenomenology of love, where will this lead? As rightly argued by many Kierkegaard scholars – two of whom are referred to above – the general hermeneutic movement in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works is towards becoming a self. When we read Works of Love, however, it is interesting to find that the movement is away from the self and the struggle is not to become a self, but rather to erase the self that one has taken oneself to be. Thus Works of Love opens by discoursing on the deception of the self (and in our context one should not be deceived in becoming a self that one essentially is not). It continues by expressing the need to wrest self-love out of a person and to become victorious over the self. One might say that the goal is not to be a Victor Eremita, that victorious hermit who wins a self, but rather a Victor Amans, that victorious lover who loses a self or erases the historical, finite self (would this not be the narratively constituted self?) in order to uncover that which can only be expressed equivocally as the

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‘true self’ or metaphorically as the common watermark. As Kierkegaard explains, ‘in each individual there continually glimmers that essentially other, which is common to all, the eternal resemblance, the likeness’ (WL, 88/SKS 9, 93). Further, he writes: In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other – therein we are indeed different. But in being the neighbor we are all unconditionally like each other. Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that marks every human being differently, but the neighbor is eternity’s mark – on every human being. Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity. (WL, 89/SKS 9, 94)

Thus, at least this much should be clear: the reflections in Works of Love lead away from the first personal self and toward the common watermark. How can this view be accounted for phenomenologically? K I E R K E G A A R D ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F L OV E As a research area, the phenomenology of love seems to be as new as it is neglected, but the original work of Jean-Luc Marion in Prolegomena to Charity, The Erotic Phenomenon and In the Self’s Place show the way for future inquiry. If we are to begin by considering Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love, then we must ask whether he performs an erotic reduction in his work. Amazingly, we need look no further than Kierkegaard’s earliest veronymous deliberations on love in Three Edifying Discourses (1843) as well as the parallel discourse in Works of Love on the same theme to find him enacting an erotic reduction, one that leads not only beyond sin, but beyond self as well. These writings, which focus on the theme ‘love will hide a multitude of sins’, may be seen as initiating a phenomenology of love, for readers are entreated to look through the ‘eye of love’ and take on the ‘armor of love’, metaphorical expressions that allude to a shifted perspective leading beyond the natural attitude, which surely sees the multitude of sins as clear as the noonday sun. Prefiguring Marion’s contrast between the natural attitude and the attitude of the lover, Kierkegaard writes in the first discourse: It does not depend, then, merely upon what one sees, but what one sees depends upon how one sees; all observation is not just a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth, and insofar as it is that, how the observer himself is constituted is indeed decisive. (EUD, 59/SKS 5, 69)



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Lovers, of course, are constituted by love, and thus their acts bring forth love. They ‘love up’ (elske op) love – an expression found both here and in Works of Love, where the ‘upbuilding’ is ultimately explained as the ‘uploving’ (WL, 217/SKS 9, 219). One way in which the lover is constituted in perfection is through acts of love that entice love forth and conversely hide sin. In the Upbuilding Discourses on ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ it is obvious that Kierkegaard is developing concerns that will be reworked in Chapter V, Part II, of Works of Love. When read together, one will likely conclude that the later text offers a better organised presentation, as five specific ways of love’s hiding a multitude of sin are outlined. Put briefly, the ways discussed in Works of Love are: (1) not discovering sin, (2) being silent about sin, (3) providing a mitigating explanation for sin, (4) forgiving sin, and (5) loving in order to give occasion to love and not to sin. In the Upbuilding Discourses, however, the primary focus is on (1) not discovering sin, while there is some consideration of (4) forgiveness and a hint of (5) loving forth love. Let us turn our attention now to the first way that love hides a multitude of sins through not discovering them. Discover not sin. It is significant that this way of love is central in the Upbuilding Discourses and identified first in Works of Love, for it involves the lover being originarily constituted by love in the heart, while the other ways – with the exception of (5) which can arguably be interpreted as a variation on (1) – come about derivatively through a sinking into the natural attitude. Further expressing a phenomenology of love, in that Kierkegaard recognises how the intentionality of one’s consciousness of the other will constitute the lived experience of the encounter, he writes: ‘a person’s inner being determines what he discovers and what he hides’ (EUD, 60/SKS 5, 70). For the person constituted in his or her inner being by love, in short the lover, ‘the eye is shut and does not discover the open act of sin’ (EUD, 60/SKS 5, 70). If we relate this to Marion’s phenomenological definition of love, which, however, does not involve a reflection on sin, we might be tempted to say that the invisible gaze of the lover leads to an experience of the other shrouded by the invisibility of sin (Marion 2002: 87). One will, of course, object that this act of loving which hides the multitude of sins is delusional and false, for after all, there are a multitude of sins, and how terrible this actually is! But Kierkegaard writes that ‘the love that hides a multitude of sins is never deceived’ (EUD, 60/SKS 5, 70), and we may ask, following Marion, by what right does the non-lover who does not see what the lover sees – who does not experience the other as lovable – actually claim to see better, when the

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non-lover – the discoverer of sin, one not constituted by love, but at best reciprocity and at worst hatred – does not even see what the lover sees, does not even catch a glimpse of it? Here Marion’s text provides some helpful illumination: By what right does [the non-lover] dare with a clear conscience, to reason as the lover, when he cannot, by definition, share either the vision or the initiative? Evidently, because he is completely ignorant of the phenomenological rule according to which the anticipation of loving first allows one to see at last such and such an other, for the anticipation to love first sees her as lovable and unique, while otherwise she disappears into commerce and reciprocity. (2007: 80)

Thus without the advance of the lover, the other disappears into sin, but ‘it is precisely by having covered the multiplicity of sin in advance that the love covers it’ (EUD, 63/SKS 5, 73). Now, we must recognise that if it were possible to be perfectly constituted in love, to be a perfect lover, to be all-powerful in loving forth love, then the other ways of hiding sin would not be needed. It seems, however, that Kierkegaard recognises this – what we may consider a slipping back into the natural attitude – for in Works of Love he discusses the ways love can hide a multitude of sins when one ‘cannot avoid seeing or hearing’ them. The ways are these: ‘it hides in silence, in a mitigating explanation, in forgiveness’ (WL, 289/SKS 9, 286). As explained above, only the way of forgiveness is included in the Upbuilding Discourses, and in explaining the power of love Kierkegaard writes: ‘Love could forgive seventy times seven times, and sin grew weary of occasioning forgiveness more quickly than love grew weary of forgiving’ (EUD, 64/SKS 5, 74). Initially, one may think that the relationship between love and forgiveness that seems to emerge here is that forgiveness comes from love or that love gives rise to forgiveness. But is this accurate? How does this fit with the earlier deliberation on love not discovering sin to begin with because the eye of the lover ‘love[s] forth the good in the impure, but this eye sees not the impure but the pure, which it loves and loves forth by loving it’ (EUD, 61/SKS 5, 71)? We have a problem here because, for the lover who only sees the other as lovable, there is no occasion for forgiveness since no sins are discovered. Consequently, we must reason that it is not accurate to see love as the occasion of forgiveness since by love forgiveness becomes impossible precisely because there is nothing to forgive. Only when we forget ourselves as lovers, only when we fail to maintain our advance of love, does sin enter the picture and forgiveness become necessary. It is thus clear that forgiveness is a derivative phenomenon occasioned not by



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love, but by the recognition of sin. But through a recovery of love or a repetition of the decisive advance to love we can remove the sin. This is what we must mean when we speak of pure forgiveness even though (perhaps more often than not where forgiveness is concerned) one remains in the natural attitude and invokes a conditional forgiveness within the realm of commerce and reciprocity, but such forgiveness has nothing to do with love. Kierkegaard is clearly focused on pure forgiveness, beyond reciprocity and beyond punishment, as suggested in both Works of Love and the first Upbuilding Discourse, which ends with the admonition that ‘the punishment of sin breeds new sin, but love hides a multitude of sins’ (EUD, 68/SKS 5, 77). This is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the erotic story that Kierkegaard turns to at the end of each upbuilding discourse on love hiding a multitude of sins. It is the story of the sinful woman that the Pharisees brought to Jesus. Towards the end of the second Upbuilding Discourse Kierkegaard writes: ‘and when she had found rest at Jesus’s feet, she forgot herself in her work of love’ (EUD, 75/SKS 5, 84). Is it not the case that when making the advance of the lover, when performing a work of love, that one forgets oneself and the aporia of assurance – which in this context could be understood as wanting to ground or to know the self – fades away? Thus it is only by neglecting love that this aporia arose, but in the end our author finds love in the other, in a woman in a Pharisee’s home, and this love – or better, this lover Jesus – ‘discovered what the world concealed – the love in her’ (EUD, 77/SKS 5, 86). Significantly, at the end of the first discourse readers are also directed to the sinful woman brought ‘face to face with the Savior; but Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground’ (EUD, 67/SKS 5, 77). In Jesus’ face to face encounter with this woman – a crossed phenomenon, if you will (cf. Marion 2007: 103) – Kierkegaard explains how Jesus wrote ‘with his finger on the ground in order to erase and forget’ (EUD, 67/SKS 5, 77). Writing in order to erase – is this not an expression of a reverse irony – not one in which what becomes manifested is not what was said or done, but rather one where what has been said and done becomes unmanifested – an erased phenomenon (cf. Marion 2007: 138), if you will? Shall we not then conclude that the climactic expression of a perfect love erases both sin and self? CONCLUSION What conclusions can now be drawn from this experiment? Is it not the case that Kierkegaard’s works lead us to count as questionable, if

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not foolish, any exploration on the nature of selfhood in which love is absent? And what of the common watermark – is it the true self, and if so, what are the implications of this view? Initially, it seems odd to consider the common watermark as a self, not only because Kierkegaard equates it with the neighbour, but also because it comes about through self-denial and thus appears selfless. Nevertheless, it seems clear enough that Kierkegaard regards this as the essential core of a person, that which makes a human being a person. The implications of this view appear weighty. Not only does positing the common watermark bring into question the attempt to found the core self in pre-reflective consciousness, but it also seemingly undermines the narrative conception of selfhood, for by ‘narrativity’ we can reasonably understand the ‘dissimilarity’ and sinfulness that Kierkegaard calls readers to see beyond. One might object that this focus leads to a metaphysical abstraction and that elsewhere in Works of Love Kierkegaard places greater emphasis on particularity, such as in ‘Our Duty to Love the People We See’. In response to this I would offer that the common watermark does not ultimately disprove the weaker narrative thesis that our understanding of ourselves has a narrative form, but it does suggest that there is something essential beyond narrativity that constitutes who we are. What is it then, according to Kierkegaard, that is beyond narrativity and constitutes who we are? It is love – something that in its total richness is essentially inexhaustible [. . .] essentially indescribable just because essentially it is totally present everywhere and essentially cannot be described. (WL, 3/SKS 9, 11)

Understanding this non-description of love phenomenologically enables us to avoid the abstractions of a mystical theology or metaphysics and instead find in the lived experience of the radical erotic reduction that we are first constituted as lovers, and then only derivatively as selves. Of course, we recognise all too quickly that the erotic reduction must be constantly repeated, for we are always slipping back into the natural attitude. But when repeated and maintained we find that in our face to face encounters the value of the unique other radiates so strongly that not even sin can be perceived. There appears to be a tension between the phenomenology of love and the attempt to found the self. For from within the erotic reduction, who one is is either a derivative question – and to seek an answer one would have to analyse the ‘essentially indescribable’ love expressed in the gaze towards the transcendent other, and thus again ultimately find that ‘the aporia of the self [. . .] never disappears’ (Marion 2012: 288) – or, it is a question that never even arises.

6  Narrativity and Normativity WALTER WIETZKE

In his afterword to Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, Alasdair MacIntyre identifies two types of aesthetes. First there is the type we can associate with one of the main subjects of Either/Or, the aesthete known as A: an agent on some level aware of, and likely compelled by, the claims of the ethical existence-sphere, but who ultimately manages to avoid them through various devices of self-deception. According to MacIntyre, this ‘aesthete [. . .] is a divided self, on the surface [. . .] unable to move beyond immediacy, but in his unacknowledged secret depths already engaged with the ethical’ (2001: 348). In such cases an aesthete is definitely beholden to the demands of the ethical, and so if he ever chooses it, the transition to this form of life will be a rational one. In other words, the choice will be guided by ethical reasons; the aesthete will acknowledge how ethical considerations appeal to his interests and thereby motivate him to make this choice – rather than some wilful ‘leap of faith’ into the unknown. Elsewhere, however, MacIntyre describes another kind of aesthete. This aesthete’s interests are not guided by ethical reasons, and so whatever transition he makes to the ethical cannot be understood rationally. For this agent: 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 I reiterate the claim that, on Kierkegaard’s view, what can be retrospectively understood as rationally justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively. (2001: 344)

With certain qualifications, then, MacIntyre stands by his original claim that an aesthete could convert to the ethical view without any criteria (i.e., reasons) determining him – the old spectre of criterionless choice once again (2000: 39). My own view is that he is still wrong to draw this conclusion. When we examine Kierkegaard’s scattered 95

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­ bservations on conversions between existence-spheres, it is clear he o does not espouse the kind of leap that MacIntyre has attributed to him.1 But I do think MacIntyre’s example illustrates an important point that is sometimes overlooked by Kierkegaardians: a human being’s motivational structure is so designed that it can support good reasons for an aesthetic agent to persist in the aesthetic life. More importantly, this can be done without having to invoke any extra self-deceptive techniques, as A tends to do. What is perhaps unexpected, I think, is that the philosophical position contained in the Judge’s letters supports this conception of motivation and agency. This particular account of the aesthetic also motivates the topic of my paper, which is to discuss the use of narrative theory in justifying ethical views of agency. For this topic I shall limit myself primarily to Anthony Rudd’s recent defences of narrative theory, found both in his paper ‘Reason in Ethics Revisited’ and book Self, Value, and Narrative.2 In both these works (though more explicitly in the former paper) he frames his argument for narrative theory partly as a response to these claims by MacIntyre and partly as a response to John Lippitt. Lippitt had specifically criticised the idea that a narrative conception of the self could do the work of explaining what Rudd calls: ‘the fundamental Either/Or [. . .] between the aesthetic on [the] one hand, and the ethico-religious on the other’ (2008a: 189). In other words, a narrative conception of the self is supposed to be sufficient for explaining the difference between ethical and aesthetic existence – as Rudd understands it, the difference between a life that aims to satisfy the fundamental interest a human being has in leading a meaningful life, and one that attempts to deny this. As I’ll explain below, this thesis can be put even more strongly in that knowledge of the ethical self should be available to motivate any normal human adult. The purpose of this paper is not to question whether a life led in accordance with ethical existence is more meaningful than others, however. I think that even if this claim is true, the fact that a narrative can articulate this life does not necessarily matter to the person who is leading a marginally less meaningful life than that of the ethical. The reason for this is relatively simple: narratives are a basic form of intelligible human activity, and so can support a diverse range of lifestyles. Thus, the first goal of this paper is to qualify the idea that narrative theory can adequately explain how the transition between aesthetic and ethical existence occurs. In my view, most of what justifies the ethical consists in the particular values and practices the Judge associates with that form of existence, and the fact that one does not adopt these values does not immediately implicate her as somebody who flees her ethical commitments through



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self-deception.3 There are good reasons that justify one’s life in the aesthetic. This chapter will begin with a brief account of what a narrative is and why it both deepens our understanding of the self and is important to theories of practical reasoning. I then discuss how narrative theory has been used to justify the ethical existence-sphere over the aesthetic. Following this, I discuss at length how MacIntyre’s second aesthete represents a legitimate existential possibility within Kierkegaard’s work. In doing so I also address the idea that human beings can always access reasons to choose between alternative forms of existence. Taken together, this analysis undermines the claims that narrative theory can effectively explain how a human being makes the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical. I In the concluding chapters of After Virtue MacIntyre tells us that human beings are the types of beings who tell stories, and indeed must tell stories about their lives if they are to achieve any meaningful sense of self-understanding or be able to engage with the world around them (2000: 204–25). Now, an essential characteristic of any story is its temporal form, and this fact is the basis of narrative theory. As Rudd explains: a narrative ‘is not a mere chronicle, a listing of events in a time-order, but a framework for presenting events in a way that makes sense of them’; it shows how a particular action is ‘an intelligible response to your situation for someone with your goals, beliefs, values, motivations, etc.’ (2008a: 191). But these claims are also stronger than they first appear. Narratives, in fact, are an inescapable condition of being a human agent; our life must have this specific temporal form if our activity is to be intelligibly human. There are two additional characteristics of narratives that are essential for us to understand here at the beginning as well. First, given that narratives are a kind of story that we tell about ourselves, the ‘telling’ of this story ends up being done from the perspective of a self-conscious agent (Rudd 2012: 175–7). This might seem uncontroversial, but it does have implications for how an agent relates to what is morally significant and important. Another essential feature of a narrative is that it is constructed through the external circumstances and events of the social world an agent inhabits. Narratives are nested within the practices and institutions of a particular community, which MacIntyre calls ‘traditions’. But more importantly, based on this definition a narrative is a medium (perhaps the medium) for expressing a conception of the

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human good, for, according to MacIntyre, it is a tradition that enriches a community with its raison d’être. For MacIntyre there is no conception of the human good without this reference to the wider practices of one’s social world. Insofar as a human being participates in the good life of her community, it follows that traditions have authority over her. Thus, the narrative by which an agent understands herself in a tradition embodies this relationship, which is her ‘history’. To summarise, then, from the agent’s perspective, the types of activities that make sense for her to do (psychologically speaking) depend on the trajectory outlined by her particular history. This same history also indicates that certain actions are mandatory for her if she is to continue identifying herself by, and participating in, its traditions.4 This account of traditions sustains the very authority that MacIntyre initially believed to be lacking in Kierkegaard, but as many have since pointed out, it is wrong to draw that conclusion.5 I won’t rehearse their arguments here, but suffice it to say that Rudd’s work convincingly shows how the same concepts of tradition and history actually inform the writings of Judge William. Furthermore, the account of tradition and history as normative elements of an agent’s practical life invite the discussion of how one form of existence is more rational than another. For any history will circumscribe a range of activity that makes more sense for an agent to do relative to others. But to show that one form of existence in particular is more rational than any possible alternative, the argument must include another step. To show that the transition to the ethical existence-sphere is rational for any agent – no matter his or her station in life – Rudd identifies it in terms of the human telos: an account of human agency designed to respond to a set of objective human interests. To tell a story about one’s life, then, by reasons derived from the telos makes that life the most rational life possible.6 Rudd revisits an earlier comparison he has made to the irrationality of Flat Earth claims to illustrate. A truly rational agent has to acknowledge that Flat Earth claims are false because modern science completely refutes any possibility of their being true. In similar fashion any human agent will have to acknowledge the reasons supplied by her human telos, since these are also incontrovertible truths about what it means to be a human being. So, just as a Flat Earther is divided against her rationality insofar as her beliefs about science and the natural world (presumably) conflict, so is the aesthete divided against his identity as a practical reasoner. The aesthete ‘has (qua human person) a telos of which he cannot be wholly and literally unaware’ (2008a: 182), which furthermore provides a source of reasons for him to act. This seems to me the key premise in the argu-



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ment: that any human agent is at some level aware of the claims of the human telos – of this special rational commitment that exists by virtue of our humanity. But to put that discussion on hold for the moment (I return to it shortly), we can now formulate an effective response to MacIntyre: a telos functions as the objective fact of the matter that both satisfies the universal human interest in leading a meaningful life and informs a person’s deliberative process, so that choosing the ethical is always a rational decision we can make. Because the reasons of the telos motivate a transition, that transition is, by definition, rational. The association between a narrative and a human telos also effectively responds to some of the objections to narrative theory that Lippitt has made. Among other things, Lippitt claims that narratives are potentially trivial in that anyone can tell some story that makes life intelligible (2007: 37), and that because of this potential triviality narrative intelligibility per se cannot distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic (2007: 41). Yet with the substantive grounding in a telos we can maintain that the narrative the Judge provides more fully accounts for the objective situation of human beings than any aesthetic narrative that one could write. Indeed, without the presumption of a telos the use of narratives would make the Judge’s position rather weak, since a very sophisticated aesthete such as A does have a coherent and intelligible story to tell: he turns his despair and unhappiness into something interesting, thereby sustaining his ‘commitment’ to avoid boredom at every cost. The conception of a telos therefore demonstrates a significant difference between aesthetic and ethical narratives: the demands of a telos require that the ethical narrative (being the most rational) trumps the more interesting one. With the concept of a telos this argument can also meet the objection that narratives are susceptible to self-deception – that is, that one could construct a story about oneself one would like to be true, though it is actually false (Lippitt 2007: 48–50). A telos resolves this problem, again, because it objectively represents concerns and interests that all human agents have. So long as our narrative corresponds to the telos we are not deceiving ourselves about anything fundamental about ourselves.7 Incidentally, both Rudd and Lippitt agree that self-deception is a serious problem for human agency, with Rudd in fact declaring it to be the central problem of the aesthetic: The crucial issue, then, as Kierkegaard sees it, is self-deception. In his picture we all have some implicit, innate knowledge of the ethical (indeed the ethico-religious) but we are inclined to give aesthetic preferences priority over the ethical when they clash with it. Hence we engage in self-deception. (2008a: 199)

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Both accounts of self-deception more or less resemble one another, in that both describe an evasion of a specific object (e.g., one’s relation to the ethical) that is present to one’s self-consciousness. I shall ultimately argue that Kierkegaard’s writings also describe a different form of selfdeception, one in which the object is inoperative for self-consciousness, and for this reason does not imply the same ethical culpability as those described here. Another problem with A that narratives can effectively address is the lack of continuity in his life. As Rudd explains in his recent book, the continuity afforded to one’s life by organizing it in narrative form works to preempt the occurrence of despair A apparently feels (2012: 171). And again, the association between narratives and the telos is particularly helpful for explaining how projects chosen on the basis of reasons given by the latter do provide more stability than A’s goal of pursuing only what is interesting to him at the moment. To summarise the current case for narratives, then, the argument that narrative theory can effectively distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic depends on the fact that the Judge’s narrative endorses a conception of the human telos, which finds further support in the traditions of his community. Several critical observations can be made at this point, however. First of all, on every account so far, A is the ideal case for demonstrating how a narrative can make an existential difference in one’s life, so the primary reason that the narrative argument goes through is that he is already engaged with the ethical in exactly the sense that MacIntyre described above. Whether A wants to admit this about himself or not, some of his interests can only be satisfied by ethical values and practices.8 He is thus susceptible to the reasons of the ethical because he is the type of aesthete who is divided against himself, as the normative demand of ethical reasons has already made their claim on him. After all, the fact that they are available for him in this way is what makes any talk about self-deception intelligible in the first place. That being the case, the normative force of ethical reasons has been established prior to the operation of an ethical narrative: the reasons of the ethical are already in place for A as motivating reasons before he feels compelled to organise his life in a narrative proper to the ethical. And if that is so, the narrative model as presented here does not by itself facilitate the transition to the ethical. That transition has already occurred the moment ethical reasons are operative as actual motives. In other words, the narrative itself does not justify the choice of ethical existence. For various reasons, A happens to be in the existential situation where ethical reasons have made their claim upon him, and the urgency of resolving a deep-seated conflict in his motivational states is



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what justifies the choice. Being the form in which any temporal activity takes place, narratives are ancillary to the whole question of what justifies my choice of the ethical over the aesthetic. The fundamental challenge for narrative theory, then, is whether an ethical narrative is as convincing to less conflicted agents. The next section will take up this question with reference to MacIntyre’s second aesthete, mentioned in the introduction, and argue that: first, the text of Either/Or legitimises this form of agency; and that second, this further weakens the justificatory role that narratives are to play in establishing the importance of the ethical. II In general, I believe that the philosophical views of Judge William and Either/Or taken as a whole support a broader conception of human agency than those specified by the narrative argument presented above. To show this, we must first acknowledge the distinction between normative and descriptive accounts of human practical agency. Now, clearly the Judge intends his letters to communicate good reasons to the aesthete why he ought to adopt a life guided by ethical ideals; in virtually every department Judge William believes that the ethical way of life is preferable to the aesthetic. So in no way do I mean to dispute the fact that he endorses the ethical life as an ideal. Statements such as the following exemplify this belief: ‘only when considered ethically does [one’s life] take on beauty, truth, meaning, continuance; only when a person himself lives ethically does his life take on beauty, truth, meaning, security’ (EO 2, 271/SKS 3, 258). The larger context of these remarks, however, indicates a much more complex picture of human practical activity. The Judge’s broader discussion involves a sophisticated account of how human agents can be motivated to value and adopt a diverse array of ends, which reveals that many aesthetes are functional practical agents who (and this is crucial) are not afflicted by the problems of A.9 This descriptive claim is different from the value judgements that distinguish ethical existence from the aesthetic. While the Judge does think the latter ultimately fails to satisfy human interests, that fact does not mean that every single aesthetic agent suffers from the self-deception and practical conflicts characteristic of A. Aesthetic agency can still be effective agency: such agents can function well enough so that even if a person leads a marginally less meaningful life than what the ethical represents, this does not involve the agent in any serious practical contradiction that compromises her ability to interact practically with her world, pursue ends based on what she

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values, and so on.10 In what follows I offer a sketch of what effective aesthetic agency could look like. The first element begins with the statement: ‘Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously chooses’ (EO 2, 164/SKS 3, 161). This comment suggests that in the absence of the ethical reasons the Judge espouses, other kinds can and will maintain the motivations for the life a person is already leading. A human being always brings a complex structure of motivational states to her practical experience, no matter what the content of those states might be. Moreover, this background inevitably influences the outcomes of our practical deliberation; human beings always approach a practical dilemma with some set of pre-established practical interests.11 A second element lies in the fact that: ‘Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose’ (EO 2, 179/SKS 3, 175). This is a straightforward description of how human agents organise their lives. Perhaps we could say that, just as a person’s activity must have a narrative structure in order to qualify as intelligibly human, so does it seem that all human beings must value something in the world, and organise their lives to reflect their values accordingly. I take both statements together to indicate a formal condition of human agency: that to be an agent means to make certain value judgements regarding one’s station in life, and save for their capacity to represent a coherent, intelligible form of life, these formal characteristics do not restrict the content of one’s values. As the Judge mentions in the same passage, many aesthetic life-views do sustain a coherent and intelligible life: Just as all these life-views have their esthetic nature in common, so they also resemble one another in having a certain unity, a certain coherence, the one particular thing around which everything revolves. What they build their lives upon is something simple, and therefore this life-view is not fragmented as the life-view of those who build upon something intrinsically multiple. (EO 2, 183/SKS 3, 178)

Presumably, such aesthetic views also represent the temporal continuity necessary for a narrative. In all of these passages, then, the Judge’s statements support a form of aesthetic agency that consists in a coherent worldview according to which everything can be evaluated and understood in reference to longterm goals and concerns. In further support of this view, Peter Mehl has also argued that an aesthetic agent must appreciate the authority of her aesthetic projects until a practical conflict necessitates some



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kind of adjudication (2005: 17–18). Indeed, even the Judge recognises this: When an individual considers himself esthetically, he becomes conscious of this self as a complex concretion intrinsically qualified in many ways; but despite all the internal variety, all these together are nevertheless his nature, have equal claim to emerge, equal right to demand satisfaction [. . .] Now if he has what you so often speak of – esthetic earnestness and a little common sense about life – he will perceive that it is impossible for everything to flourish equally. (EO 2, 225/SKS 3, 216)

So, in sum, the difference in content between the aesthetic and ethical is inconsequential to the capacity to be a human agent; even aesthetes have the capacity to make significant qualitative distinctions and value the ends they pursue. This is borne out by empirical observation as well: for all intents and purposes we regularly observe how aesthetic agents organise their lives and pursue ends in careful accordance with what they value. To summarise the discussion so far, we can understand the act of valuing certain aesthetic practices as sufficient expressions (at least) of their psychological and normative authority over individual human beings. That is, from the perspective of the individual aesthetic agent, these practices are worthy of serious engagement. They are important to the person who chooses and pursues them. These are the conditions that make possible what John Davenport (2011: 169) calls a ‘heroic’ aesthete. A suitable example of such a character is an aspiring Olympic athlete: a person who dedicates her life to the single goal of achieving the highest possible success and glory in her chosen field. This person will have to evaluate her long-term goals with the unified and coherent sense of organisation and planning that her ethical counterpart would express in the same activity. In so doing, she may have to sacrifice certain relationships (which could have provided deep, lasting meaning for her life) for her goals, but these are sacrifices that any ethically serious person could be called on to make. In this case, the athlete’s reflective endorsement of a practice demonstrates what Norman Lillegard describes as a ‘life-integrating’ activity, which furthermore depends on having a virtue (2001: 214). A virtue integrates our life within certain values and goods of a community, but a virtue further extends its authority over an individual by stabilising her identity. That is to say, we should assume that our values tend to be stable: normal human beings don’t change their minds about what is important and meaningful to them unless they are faced with good reasons to think otherwise. The most revealing instance of this is when the threat to our values generates an identity crisis in the individual. For example, upon

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suffering a major injury our aspiring Olympian may very well question who she really is – that is, what purpose she has in going forward in life now that the projects that sustain the meaning of her life have been thrown into catastrophic disorder. With this thought we have come full circle to MacIntyre’s account of how narratives are related to the goods of a tradition. In these cases, the aesthetic practices an agent values are based on the practices of a wider community, and the aspirations of these agents to excel at the goods implicit in these practices have to be understood in narrative form. So, it follows, certain aesthetic practices are capable of sustaining complex narratives. There is a line of objections to my argument, however, that essentially settles on the inherent instability and unsustainability of aesthetic values. Part of the motivation for this claim incidentally derives from the example I just cited above. Because of the threat that an external misfortune poses to one’s identity (e.g., the injury that dashes the Olympian’s career), the Judge reasons that aesthetic projects and practices suffer from a unique internal problem. The problem is not that the aesthete is self-consciously divided against himself or that he suffers from a deficient cognitive state such as self-deception. Rather, Judge William tells us that: the person who says that he wants to enjoy life always posits a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself. (EO 2, 180/SKS 3, 175, italics in the original)

The superiority of the ethical expresses itself in the fact that ethical agents are in control of their lives in ways that the aesthetic seemingly cannot be. That is, the Judge invites us to think of the ethical as the sphere that fully actualises the capacity for autonomy: a position from which the agent legitimately chooses his or her projects.12 Rudd argues that the reason for this lies in the objects of ethical choice: [The Seducer] is committed to a ground-project with ‘aesthetic earnestness’, and may thus have a considerable measure of unity/narrative coherence in his life: he may also seem to be radically autonomous – he acts on the basis, not of passing whims, but of (aesthetic) principles he has consciously chosen. However, he is not constrained in the choice of such a project by the consideration that the project is of overriding worth in itself. For the Judge such a person still lacks autonomy, because the project has been chosen either arbitrarily, or on the basis of contingent desires; not because it is recognized as genuinely worthwhile. (2008a: 195)

The strength of ethical values and practices is that they are meaningful in themselves, regardless of the station one occupies in life. Another



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way to put this point, Lillegard explains, is that aesthetic virtues are based on a deficient socio-historical framework: [A]esthetic virtues are not, as the ethical are, internally connected to a passion or set of passions of a kind more or less adequate for filling out a whole life, dimensionally and chronologically; aesthetic virtues are not generated by or contributory to any rational self-concept or life view, which can be expressed in classical terms by saying that they are not internally connected to prohairesis, with all that implies for the notions of rationality, self-knowledge, and agency. (2001: 225)

So to extrapolate from these analyses, the weakness of aesthetic virtues lies in their inability to protect the agent from the aforementioned catastrophic upheavals; the strength of ethical virtues lies in the stability of the respective practices that maintain them.13 Only those virtues nested within an ethical framework are capable of effectively organising one’s life in a system that can endure beyond external misfortune. Yet the explanatory, pragmatic value of this distinction is not as strong as it initially sounds. For one, the commitment problems associated with the Seducer (and A) are, again, duly noted. Such characters are simply too easy a target for these ethical critiques. The behaviour of these aesthetes calls into question their longer-term ability to commit to their projects, as both would likely abandon them the moment they failed to sustain their interest. But A and the Seducer are different from those who do maintain their aesthetic commitments. Secondly, most likely the Judge’s worldview is more vulnerable than he is comfortable admitting, since no form of life or worldview is immune to structural crises of the sort described above. It’s rather obvious that the practices and institutions that sustain the ethical – the most obvious being marriage – themselves are neither static entities, nor is our commitment to them as unconditional as we might believe it to be. Such items are subject to socio-historical fluctuations and contingencies within our personal experience, which means that an agent’s particular commitment to them could fall into crisis if the aforementioned practices and our commitment to them were to suffer an external trauma. For example, it’s clear that marriage itself has evolved in ways that the Judge probably would never have conceived. This inevitably invites us to ask if it serves the same purpose today as it did for an ethicist in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. Moreover, our personal relation to the institution can undergo a crisis: even though we may promise an everlasting commitment to our marriage partner (in a duly ethical sense), the commitment may still be vulnerable to a fatal shock, perhaps dealt by a cheating spouse, or other sorts of misfortune.14 Given the fact that many ethical practices lack a guarantee

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of stability, why should stability per se serve to prioritise ethical virtues over those of the aesthetic? Shouldn’t we acknowledge that the ethical is vulnerable to the same identity crises as the aesthetic? Furthermore, the flipside of this issue is that the aesthetic is actually more sustainable than an ethicist might think. It seems true in certain cases that various communities can organise themselves around particular aesthetic principles – say, those practices associated with contemporary art – and celebrate certain aesthetic values and practices as legitimate lifestyle choices.15 When we examine this issue merely on an empirical, pragmatic level, then, there is considerable truth to Lippitt’s (2007: 39) observation that the distinction between the aesthetic and ethical simply lies in their being substantively different normative frameworks – not in the structure of the agent’s will or virtuous activity per se. Finally, it’s not a completely settled issue that ethical projects are ‘genuinely worthwhile’ in themselves. There are some occasions where aesthetes do have insights into the ethical that could undermine the Judge’s confidence in his worldview. For example, some of the passages from ‘Diapsalmata’ suggest a cognisance of certain essential details of life that the aesthete has, which are missed by the smug, bourgeois attitude of an ethicist: The most ludicrous of all ludicrous things, it seems to me, is to be busy in the world, to be a man who is brisk at his meals and brisk at his work [. . .] What, after all, do these busy bustlers achieve? Are they not just like that woman who, in a flurry because the house was on fire, rescued the fire tongs? What more, after all, do they salvage from life’s huge conflagration? (EO 1, 25/SKS 2, 33)

This is not mere cynicism. One tangible benefit associated with an aesthete’s ironic detachment, so argues Rick Furtak (2005: 81–5), is that it can explain why anyone would ever be motivated to question or improve ossified social or political conditions.16 On a different note, Jeffrey Turner speculates that the Judge’s position could fail according to the same faults he attributes to the aesthetic – that he may choose to ignore the ways in which he unreflectively conforms to the ethical’s norms.17 Although these examples serve only as a brief sketch, they suggest there are good reasons to question whether the ethical (or ethico-religious) deserves the reputation it seems to own for being the most representative of a meaningful life.18 This final point actually brings to mind a critique that was once raised by Bernard Williams. Williams argued that the attempt to establish an objective account of what a person’s ‘real interests’ are – that is, the interests indicated by the human telos – is likely to be an impossible



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task (1985: 40–3). For, unlike its analogue of what the standards for scientific knowledge should be, a definition of what genuinely satisfies human interests invites a far more diverse and sometimes incommensurable set of explanations. So to phrase this thought as a question for the present analysis, who decides what practices count as overridingly worthwhile in themselves?19 If historical stability and integration of the self within the traditions of a community are two essential criteria for answering these questions, I believe the preceding discussion has demonstrated that some aesthetic values and practices can provide these. Therefore, while I tend to agree with Rudd that a more or less consistent account of the telos exists within Kierkegaard’s work, I am not confident that the rationality of this telos would be readily appreciated by people who are currently obligated by the real normative demands their aesthetic projects make upon them. (Kierkegaard’s terminology aside, this was Williams’ point.) Hopefully the preceding analysis has been able to establish the idea that many people have good reasons to pursue their aesthetic commitments without being self-deceived in the manner described at the beginning. III There is another important objection to my argument yet to consider. As Rudd rightly points out, Kierkegaard is an early (and underappreciated) pioneer of depth psychology (2012: 172). One of the more illuminating examples of this can be found in The Sickness unto Death’s discussion of unconscious despair, which catalogues the ways in which human beings act obliviously to the reasons supportive of the human telos. Specifically, the discussion of unconscious despair describes how some people continue throughout life unaware of the reasons the telos gives us to lead a more secure life in line with ethical ideals. Now, one interpretation of this phenomenon says that the fact that there are objective, teleological reasons that belong to us by virtue of our humanity confirms not only that every human being has a reason to be ethical, but also the stronger claim that human beings have no good excuse not to choose the ethical life. In other words, if one can show that there is a telos that both intrinsically belongs to our human nature and is always capable of motivating us, one can straightforwardly conclude that the aesthetic life is always a kind of self-deception. To fail to live up to features of our human nature is the kind of deception whereby we are deceived as to what our real interests are. This again is Rudd’s position, clearly stated here: ‘it is a fundamental presupposition of Kierkegaard’s whole authorship that the ethical truth, the knowledge of our telos, is already in us. (Though we

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are all also at least partially in denial about that truth)’ (2012: 172). So even if hers does not completely resemble A’s self-deception, the heroic aesthete would still have a false view of what her human nature really requires in order to satisfy her existential needs.20 I have two responses to this. First, there seems to be an inconsistency between this justification of the ethical and the general requirements of having a narrative. For, recall that narratives are constructed from the first-person perspective of a self-conscious agent. Narratives are stories we tell in order to understand ourselves and our existential situation better. So it would seem that the reasons belonging to a narrative, and to which we can hold an agent accountable, have to derive from a narrative an agent knowingly and intentionally constructs through the light of her own self-consciousness. It seems that at every level this occurs, an adequate amount of this light must be on in order for it to pass legitimately as a narrative. Moreover, at this point we can distinguish this type of self-deception from that mentioned earlier in the paper, which is clearly intentional in nature: A’s self-deception ultimately stems from his knowing reluctance to confront his divided personality. He can acknowledge (at some level) that his aesthetic projects cannot satisfy the interests he has in leading a meaningful life. The agent consumed by unconscious despair, again, has no such particular ethical object, the evasion of which defines her psychological status. A second problem is that there are certain idiosyncrasies to The Sickness unto Death that complicate its role in the narrative argument for the ethico-religious. The final section of Sickness explains how Christianity understands all forms of despair (including unconscious despair) as sin. And if despair is sin, then, qua sin, it is intentional defiance: the agent has wilfully acted against the good and is ultimately responsible for this failure. Despair considered as sin supports the notion of self-deception described above, since, qua sin, despair is always intentionally willed. In my view, however, Anti-Climacus’ point in these remarks is more subtle. To begin, it is a basic fact that Christianity is a position one adopts. Christian beliefs are based on dogma that cannot be derived from any natural feature of human experience. Sin belongs to this extra set of beliefs: ‘orthodoxy emphasizes that there must be a revelation from God to teach fallen man what sin is, a communication that, quite consistently, must be believed, because it is a dogma’ (SUD, 96/SKS 11, 209). This distinction between Christianity and the natural state of human experience is a constant theme throughout Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. Only a paradoxical revelation (from God) can illuminate our failures at achieving the good to be a result of our sinfulness. Christian life is thus a qualitatively dif-



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ferent order of experience, in that the Christian agent becomes a qualitatively new being in the conversion process.21 And these claims must always be interpretations partial to the particularly Christian form of life. Anti-Climacus explains: [F]rom a higher point of view, it may be correct to regard paganism as immersed in sin, but the sin of paganism was essentially despairing ignorance of God, of existing before God; paganism is ‘to be without God in the world.’ Therefore, from another point of view, it is true that in the strictest sense the pagan did not sin, for he did not sin before God, and all sin is before God. (SUD, 81/SKS 11, 144–5)

If we understand the religious sphere as that for which God provides the ‘criterion for successful living’, then the conceptual framework associated with that standard will inevitably colour the way we think about our experience. Therefore, the act of converting to Christianity entails the following consequence: even if prior to the transformation the individual genuinely had no cognisance of the reasons supporting her human telos, her post-conversion set of beliefs will probably lead her to view any former experience in which she avoided Christian responsibilities – even if they could not have registered to her preChristian motivational state – as proof of how corrupt her soul really was. Only with the benefit of a new perspective, for example, can she really see how she was ignoring the significance of certain events and experiences all along. In short, a new perspective can and will prompt one to interpret one’s past life and actions differently. As I understand him this is what Anti-Climacus means by his remarks, and it is for this reason that we should not take them as evidence that we all have efficacious knowledge of the human telos and the human good. IV Throughout this analysis I have sought to establish the idea that one can lead a narratively respectable life without relating to the specific content of the ethical. Many aesthetes do take their aesthetic projects seriously, and we have to recognise that the latter provide formidable structural stability to a person’s identity and life. I thus hope to have shown the weight that factors such as values, traditions and virtues have in stabilising one’s identity, even if those factors express aesthetic content. If these claims are correct, Rudd’s narrative argument overstates the extent that an agent is capable of being motivated by the human telos. Knowledge and motivations for the telos need not be operative depending on what one finds important. Yet if one were to insist that they must be operative, it seems one would have no choice

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but to furnish an account of how human agents can detach themselves from the factors from which they receive a meaningful identity and purpose in life, and choose a life guided by a new set of values and practices. The problem with this approach, I believe, is two-fold: For one, it runs against the spirit of much contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship, including the explicit concerns of the present narrative argument. One of the recent concerns many scholars have had is to show how a stable, rational account of self-understanding underlies Kierkegaard’s work, and that Kierkegaardian agents do not arbitrarily change their minds about what is important to them. This concern no doubt arises in part from MacIntyre’s accusation that a criterionless choice lies at the heart of Kierkegaardian moral psychology. With this in mind, another problem is that it brings us right back to the very territory of MacIntyre’s critique. For reasons I’ve discussed, he is wrong to think that Kierkegaard’s work endorses this radical form of conversion. A premise that has been lurking implicitly throughout this paper is that there is a difference between subjective and objective conceptions of rational activity. On the one hand I do recognise the claims put forward by the Judge, Rudd and others that the ethico-religious represents the most meaningful life possible for a human being. The purpose of my analysis has not been to dispute the existence of an objective telos in Kierkegaard’s moral psychology, per se. I think his work (both signed and pseudonymous) tends to advance this idea. On the other hand I hope to have also shown the equal importance of a subjective sense of rational activity for one’s psychological health – as peculiar as that might sound. That is, individuals have to understand that their commitment to a set of values and practices forms a coherent and stable framework for their identity that they cannot reject, lest they subject themselves to a potentially traumatic identity crisis. None of this is to suggest, however, that there is no way to encourage a person to progress towards a higher form of life. What we must recognise is that our explanation of this phenomenon will have to bridge the potential gap that opens between what the individual personally takes to be important in her life, and the demands her telos makes upon her. In the meantime there are two things we can be sure of: narratives are not convincingly suited to this task, and Kierkegaard’s moral psychology will continue to support a diverse range of personalities. N OT E S   1. Such is one of the theses of Ferreira (1991).   2. The present paper will focus primarily on ‘Reasons in Ethics Revisited’,



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since my chapter was conceived as a response to the latter prior to the publication of his recent book. Although Rudd has since modified and expanded his argument I do not think he has substantially changed the particular thesis I address here. In those places where the argument is helped by the most recent work I will include an appropriate discussion. For more on the narrative approach to Kierkegaard, see Davenport 2012, Lillegard 2001 and Turner 2001.   3. For the most part I agree with Lippitt’s observation that the distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic can be understood in terms of substantive moral claims, rather than ‘talk of the ‘narrative structure’ or ‘narrative unity’ of a life’ (2007: 39).   4. See MacIntyre 2000, Chapter 15, for further discussion of these concepts.   5. See, for example, the responses contained in the volume, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre.   6. For example, if ‘there is such a telos, then it becomes possible to argue that a certain way of life may be one that frustrates the realization of that telos’ (Rudd 2008a: 181).  7. One can still object that we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are adequately measuring up to the requirements of our telos, but this claim reflects the more general problem of self-deception rather than one that is unique to narrative theory.   8. Certain passages from the Judge’s letters suggest as much. See: EO 2, 271/ SKS 3, 257–8.   9. Lippitt (2007: 40) also makes this point. I think that Kierkegaard’s work as a whole provides an account of practical agency consistent with this view of practical agency. 10. With this kind of thought I have in mind Michelle Kosch’s interpretation of aesthetic existence, which fails internally on account of its confused approach to human freedom. While the aesthete bemoans his inability to harness his autonomy and engage the world as a free agent, he still has to act, in the very way he claims is impossible, and thereby falls into despair. See Kosch 2006: 141–55. 11. For further discussion of this idea, see Marilyn Piety (2001). Piety argues that human beings’ set of ‘passions’ (i.e., one’s set of motivations and interests) does this work on our deliberative states. 12. Davenport is a notable champion of this view. See in particular Davenport 2001. For reasons of space I hope I may side-step a full discussion of choice as it pertains to autonomy, although I concede its importance to a comprehensive account of Kierkegaardian practical agency. 13. Davenport also agrees that: ‘Values worth caring about are fully intelligible only in terms of a larger ethical framework’ (2011: 168), and that ethical practices have ‘overriding worth in [themselves]’ (2012: 108). 14. Of course, we may respond to the contrary, that the purpose of the marriage vows precisely is to support our commitment when unexpected crises arise. Why declare the absolute, unconditional nature of the commitment

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unless we actually mean it? We can certainly imagine situations (and perhaps think of examples) where a relationship was ultimately saved from one of these breakdowns precisely because the partners ultimately took their vows seriously. My intention here is not to insist on one interpretation over the other – merely to say that one of these events could be enough to complicate any coherent worldview an ethical agent may have had prior to the trauma. 15. If the reader will entertain a personal anecdote, the author can speak from his own experience that certain communities in New York City maintain an aesthetic livelihood in this way. 16. Lippitt (2007: 40–1) makes a similar point. 17. Turner has this problem in mind when claiming that the Judge is probably self-deceived to some degree by the confident tone he adopts in his judgement of those who fail at the ethical life. That is, the Judge is so obsessed by the need to convince A of the aesthetic beauty of the ethical that he overlooks how bored he has become with his own life. See Turner 2001: 49–51. 18. For a slightly contrarian take, Kosch (2006: 146–7) notices that the Judge may not be as critical of the aesthetic as he is usually taken to be: ‘[The Judge’s] claim should be that the lower pleasures of the aesthetic life are replaced in the forefront of the ethical individual’s life by the higher satisfactions of the exercise of virtue. Instead we find him arguing at length that what he himself labels “aesthetic” satisfactions are consistent with and preserved in the life of duty (for instance, in his “aesthetic defence of marriage”).’ 19. To be fair, a substantial portion of Self, Value, and Narrative strives to answer this question. 20. Rudd further suggests (2012: 172) that for these cases where self-­deception has effectively obscured a person’s deep-seated human interests from her self-consciousness, it may be that only psychotherapy can effectively disabuse her of her false views of human interests. 21. Anti-Climacus states: ‘this self takes on a new quality and qualification by being a self directly before God. This self is no longer the merely human self but is what I, hoping not to be misinterpreted, would call the theological self, the self directly before God’ (SUD, 79/SKS 11, 193).

7  The End in the Beginning: Eschatology in Kierkegaard’s Literary Criticism ELEANOR HELMS

I N T RO DU C T I O N The controversy over the role of narrative in Kierkegaard’s philosophy concerns whether it is desirable for a self to be able to produce some kind of life-narrative. Anthony Rudd, extending the work of Marya Schechtman in The Constitution of Selves, insists that while lives have unity beyond the explicit narratives we tell, we should be able to provide articulated narratives when asked (Rudd 2012: 180, 205; Schechtman 1996: 113–19). John Lippitt has argued, on the other hand, that an important feature of selfhood is the recognition that life resists narrative (2007: 45). In other words, Rudd claims it is ethically desirable for a person to shape her life into an implicit or explicit narrative, while Lippitt has raised doubts about the value of pursuing narrative unity (Lippitt 2007: 52). I will propose a third way, showing that while Kierkegaard’s theory of selfhood does include exhortations toward making coherent sense of one’s life, these are always in the context of warnings against any cheap or easy unity. If Kierkegaard can rightly be said to advocate a kind of narrative unity in life, that narrative unity will not be as simple as being able to make sense of one’s life or working to understand how one’s past and future shape one’s present. In order to show what is nevertheless important about narrative for Kierkegaard, I will take the notion of ‘narrative’ unity (a term not used by Kierkegaard, as Rudd notes) to mean ‘literary’ unity – something Kierkegaard does explicitly discuss, especially in his literary critical writings. In these texts Kierkegaard does say that there ought to be a certain kind of unity (a ‘life-view’), but his strongest reproaches are directed at works that have the wrong kind of literary unity – that is, a resolution that the reader simply cannot believe. I will suggest that John Davenport’s ‘eschatological’ 113

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view more successfully balances Kierkegaard’s emphasis on continuity of events through time with his admonitions against coherence too easily won. I will conclude that a self is better understood as a reader – that is, as a good literary critic – than as the author or narrator of her life. N A R R AT I V E U N I T Y I N K I E R K E G A A R D In ‘Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing’, Kierkegaard observes that one cannot tell a story about an ordinary flower and then add, as an epilogue, that the flower is immortal. The immortality of the flower should have been present at each moment in the story as it was told. ‘Otherwise the story must have been different from the beginning and been different as it went along, not merely becoming different at the end’ (UDVS, 10/SKS 8, 126). The eternity should have been grasped through every finite change in the flower’s life because eternity is not something that can be acquired at a certain point (like the flu or a new pair of shoes). It is rather a qualification of one’s existence as a whole.1 This kind of unity seems to be what Rudd is getting at when he writes that having a life with narrative unity means being aware of how one’s past is significant for the present and for one’s future goals (2012: 167). In support of Rudd’s view, we can recall the pseudonym William Afham’s comments in Stages on Life’s Way that the goal of recollection is ‘to maintain for a person the essential continuity of life and assure him that his earthly existence wants to remain uno tenore [uninterrupted], one breath, and expressible in one breath’ (SLW, 10/ SKS 6, 18).2 The strength of Rudd’s emphasis on narrative unity, I think, is the recognition that different aspects of our lives – past and future – are happening all at once in the present, even in choices about how to divide our time in any given hour (2012: 187). The problem with narrative views, especially the strong narrative view endorsed by Rudd in which not only implicit but explicit narratives are desirable, is that such views tend to place too much emphasis on the self-awareness – or effort to achieve self-awareness – of the narrator (see Rudd 2012: 205). One objection might be that such selfawareness is impossible; but more importantly such self-awareness, even if possible, is not desirable.3 Below I will discuss Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘transfiguration’ [forklarelse], a term that Kierkegaard uses both in the context of faith and literary criticism – that is, in discussing the unity of a life lived in faith as well as the unity of a novel. In both cases, the kind of unity Kierkegaard advocates is not something articulated or recognised by a subject, either explicitly or implicitly.



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Transfiguration is instead something new in the event – that is, in the object experienced, not the subject who experiences. For Kierkegaard, ‘transfiguration’ is a kind of continuity with history that is recognised but not brought about by those who observe it. So Christ’s transfiguration is the revelation to Peter, James and John that Jesus is the fulfilment of God’s promises to the Jews through Moses and Elijah. But this fulfilment is at the same time a recontextualisation: what they receive is continuous with – but not the same as – what they had expected. As a familiar example for readers of Kierkegaard, Merold Westphal extends the term ‘transfiguration’ appropriately when he notes that in Either/Or erotic love is not denied in marriage but ‘ennobled’ and ‘transfigured’ (2004: 546).4 Most importantly, the Biblical account describes what the disciples see (Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah) but leaves open the extent to which the observers are able to understand and identify with what they see. In fact, the Scripture text suggests they do not fully understand what they see, since their first thought is for the physical needs of Moses and Elijah (Matthew 17: 2; Mark 9: 2). So the transfiguration considered as an event is not an event that occurs primarily for or in the subjective understanding or responses of those present. While the observers are not irrelevant, the transfiguration is better characterised as an event to which the subjects must respond rather than as the subjective responses themselves. When Kierkegaard discusses the role of the narrator, he tends to emphasise the powerlessness of the storyteller rather than his or her responsibility to unify events into a coherent narrative. For example, in the Postscript Climacus writes: The poet can explain (transfigure) all experience, but he cannot explain himself, because he does not want to become religious and comprehend the secret of suffering as the form of the highest life, higher than all good fortune and different from all misfortune. The rigor of the religious is that it begins with making everything more rigorous, and its relation to poetry is not as a new wishing device, not as a totally new subterfuge that poetry has not dreamed of, but as a difficulty that creates men just as war creates heroes. (CUP 1, 444/SKS 7, 403–4)

In Kierkegaard’s own literary criticism and his discussions of unity in literary works of art, his emphasis is likewise on the work itself, not on how it is understood by its readers or even its author. For example, Kierkegaard writes of Fru Gyllembourg’s work Two Ages that ‘the recollection of Part 1 has a transfiguring [forklarende] effect’ on Part 2 (TA, 30/SKS 8, 31). Here it is the reader who does the recollecting, but the real work of transfiguration is attributed to the novel itself.

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The reader’s task of recollecting – that is, of thinking the two parts together – is rewarded in this particular text because of the unusual continuity of the work, which is one of the features Kierkegaard as a reviewer finds most remarkable in it. He is additionally impressed with the way Gyllembourg’s novel extends its continuity beyond the limits of the text by taking on the background of the whole age (TA, 32/SKS 8, 32). Characteristics of the contemporary world, not just the world of the novel, are given new meaning in light of the literary work. In this context, ‘transfiguration’ means the clarifying of events with respect to one another, which is the expression of continuity belonging neither to the author nor to the reader but to the things that are clarified, whether within the novel or beyond it. As I have already stated, where narrative theories of selfhood diverge most from what I take Kierkegaard’s own view to be is that for Kierkegaard transfiguration implies that the continuity is received from elsewhere; it is on the side of the object, not the subject (the one who experiences it). In the discourse titled ‘One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious – In That God is Victorious’, Kierkegaard’s use of the term forklarelse recalls his description of the still pool in ‘Purity of Heart’. It is the still, purely receptive pool that reflects the image best: Only when he himself becomes nothing, only then can God illuminate him so that he resembles God. When the ocean is exerting all its power, that is precisely the time when it cannot reflect the image of heaven, and even the slightest motion blurs the image; but when it becomes still and deep, then the image of heaven sinks into its nothingness. (EUD, 399/SKS 5, 380)

Kierkegaard goes on to say that there is indeed victory here but that it belongs to the one who struggles only indirectly. It is certainly not a result of the struggle or of the effort put out by the one who now successfully reflects God’s image: Who, then, was victorious? It was God, because he did not give the explanation requested by the one who prayed, and he did not give it as the struggling one requested it. But the one struggling was also victorious. Or was it not a victory that instead of receiving an explanation [Forklaring] from God he was transfigured [forklaret] in God, and his transfiguration [Forklarelse] is this: to reflect the image of God. (EUD, 399–400/SKS 5, 380)

In playing on the words for ‘explanation’ [Forklaring] and ‘transfiguration’ [Forklarelse], Kierkegaard is contrasting something the one who prays could receive – an explanation – with something the one who prays could become. The one who prays is herself ‘clarified’, becoming transparent through stillness and so able to reflect the truth of God’s image.



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The Danish term forklarelse was already in use during Kierkegaard’s time to describe the transfiguration of Christ.5 Frank Kermode argues that the possibility of rewriting the meaning of the past in this way is a specifically Christian idea: The Greeks [. . .] thought that even the gods could not change the past; but Christ did change it, rewrote it, and in a new way fulfilled it. In the same way the End changes all, and produces, in what in relation to it is the past, these seasons, kairoi, historical moments of intemporal significance. The divine plot is the pattern of kairoi in relation to the End. Not only the Greeks but the Hebrews lacked this antithesis [. . .] The notion of fulfilment is essential; the kairos transforms the past, validates Old Testament types and prophecies, establishes concord with origins as well as ends. (2000: 47–8)

Kermode draws in this way on the theological ‘sense of an ending’ (discussing mainly apocalypse) in order to elucidate how a fictional ending relates to the rest of the work. According to Kermode, the most important element of Christian theology for understanding the unity of a literary work of art is the way in which expectations are fulfilled or deferred. A reader of a literary work, like a believer reading apocalyptic prophecies, understands herself to be what Kermode calls ‘in the middest’ – that is, between the beginning and the end (2000: 7). The believer’s sense of the ending defines her view of the present, just as the story of the flower in ‘Purity of Heart’ must be told differently from the beginning if the flower is immortal (UDVS, 10/SKS 8, 126). But because this ending is never completely given in the present, any individual’s expectations regarding the ending are constantly changing. The most important goal at any moment, then, is not the unity of the narrative but the openness of the narrative to disruption and contradiction. The subject hopes that the narrative will make sense but – contra the strong narrative view of selfhood proposed by Rudd – does not actively engage in efforts to draw elements together into any type of unified whole. In the next section, I will elaborate the notion of ‘peripeteia’ (discussed by Kermode) as an analogy for the way in which a subject hopes for coherence and continuity in life but does not take it as her life’s project to bring about such continuity. N A R R AT I V E D I S U N I T Y: P E R I P E T E I A A N D E U C ATA S T R O P H E While some plots move straightforwardly from beginning to end with few surprises, the best works include disappointments and reorientations along the way, which Kermode calls ‘peripeteia’. These digressions depend on the reader’s continuing trust in the ending if they

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are to be effective. Kermode writes: ‘Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route.’ A reader who follows the work through such digressions is ‘re-enacting the familiar dialogue between credulity and skepticism’ (Kermode 2000: 18). The reader believes that, in allowing her expectations to be disrupted, she is finding out something new about reality. Her sense of how she is related to the end must be continuously revised as she comes to understand the expected ending in new ways. These revisions likewise change her understanding of the present situation. Just as there are weak and superficial forms of ‘faith’ in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, however, Kierkegaard notes – and seems almost equally offended by – the way some literary works demand naïve acceptance on the part of the reader. In Either/Or, in the long account of the adventures of Charles and Emmeline in the play The First Love, the term ‘transfiguration’ is used to describe something unlikely, this time unbelievable in a disparaging sense. The play does not warrant the reader’s trust or motivate the right kind of belief: Now comes the most splendid situation in the whole play. It has an aura about it, a transfiguration; it has a festive formality of its own. One could almost wish to see Aunt Judith in the background as a spirit who gazes down at her two pupils. Emmeline decides to confide in the supposed Rinville and to disclose everything. This situation completely exposes Emmeline and Charles. Emmeline’s faithfulness becomes utter parody. (EO 1, 274/SKS 2, 266)

In this review the term ‘transfiguration’ is applied to a turn in which the action becomes extravagant and very unlike real life: ‘Emmeline’s whole nature is a contradiction and therefore cannot be represented spontaneously’ (EO 1, 279/SKS 2, 270). Here as well the term ‘transfiguration’ hints at a resolution to the present action, but in this case one which is unmotivated by the work as a whole and is therefore unbelievable. The play can be considered to have a happy ending, but it does not satisfy expectations aroused earlier in the work: ‘In the end, the mistaken identity is cleared up. It turns out that she now has Rinville instead of Charles’ (EO 1, 277/SKS 2, 268). But ‘Her old love for Charles is drivel, and her new love for Rinville is also drivel; her enthusiasm is drivel, and her rage is also drivel; her defiance is drivel, and her good resolve is also drivel’ (EO 1, 276/SKS 2, 268). Here the author so completely rewrites what has come before that the ending has no relation to the beginning. Whatever logical or aesthetic relationships



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have been developed so far in the work are now completely dissolved in favour of a resolution – a happy ending – in which the reader or spectator is not at all tempted to believe. Attention turns instead to the fact that the ending, while meaningless, is not more meaningless than anything that has gone before: in other words, it is perfectly in keeping with expectations raised throughout the work. This is a cheap ‘transfiguration’ in the sense of a magic trick, where one ridiculous prop is replaced with another equally ridiculous. We can initially understand Kierkegaard’s mockery here as an elaboration of Lippitt’s concern that narrative falsifies, perhaps by its very nature. We know that it is easy for an author to declare that something is resolved, but that is not the same thing as resolving it in real life. In his literary criticism, however, Kierkegaard is saying something more: it is not easy for an author to declare something is resolved in a way that is believable even within the sphere of the literary work. The main criticism above is not that fiction never reaches existence but that some fiction does not live up to its own standards for credibility. In the debate over the role of narrative in selfhood, I think Kierkegaard would want to push the issue back to its roots: what kind of unity is a narrative itself supposed to have? I suggest that John Davenport’s eschatological view is best able to make sense of contrary currents in Kierkegaard’s own writing because it balances unity with disruption. In fact, Davenport insists that the right kind of continuity in both literature and life is fulfilment through disruption – that is, through ‘eucatastrophe’, which he describes as follows: ‘The future state, ultimate outcome, or final end is a victory of the good, an actualization in finite/temporal existence of the infinite/eternal ideal; the created order of existence converges with what ethically ought to be.’ While no human agents can bring about such a victory, it is possible ‘in an incalculable way by divine power, by “miracle” transcending any rational prediction’ (Davenport 2008a: 201–2). Davenport clarifies his view of eschatological fulfilment through a discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, explaining that a good fairy tale requires an ending that ‘provokes genuine surprise, unexpected joy, and a poignant sense of gratitude’ (2008a: 203). Tolkien calls this particular kind of happy ending a ‘eucatastrophe’; it is a ‘turn’, a ‘sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur’ (Tolkien 1966: 86; see Davenport 2008a: 204). Again, we can think of the eucatastrophe as a fulfilment of expectation despite various challenges and digressions, even where obstacles make a happy ending impossible within the limits of what is known. Davenport’s interpretation (which he calls the ‘eschatological’

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reading of Kierkegaard) makes good sense of the need for divine intervention expressed by the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, who knows he can only win the princess ‘by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God, all things are possible’ (FT, 46/SKS 4, 141; quoted in Davenport 2008a: 202). While the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling is often read as a disruption of all ethical norms other than those divinely revealed, Davenport suggests that the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in Fear and Trembling is ultimately a fulfilment of expectation. In light of Kermode’s description above of what it means to be ‘in the middest’, we could think of the sacrifice of Isaac as peripatetic – that is, a suspension in the sense of a digression and return rather than a negation or cancellation of all prior standards. The events described in a novel cannot be simple transcriptions of reality. These would appear incredible even if true, because real life is never experienced as chaotic; a bare list of real events with no narrative structure is untrue to the way we actually experience. On the other hand, if a story is too tidily coherent, the reader experiences it as contrived and implausible.6 The proper balance of contingency and contrivance is essential for belief in a eucatastrophe, and more generally for the relationship of a literary work’s end to its beginning. The ending must fulfil expectations to some extent (that is, it must serve as an end for the beginning already laid out).7 Literary unity demands that once a eucatastrophe happens it must be accepted as part of the story rather than as an arbitrary whim of the author. Without this continuity of content, the eucatastrophe would be an act of what Davenport calls ‘defiant despair’, which he describes as follows: Kierkegaard’s critique of this classical diagnosis in Sickness unto Death is supported by cases like the [that is, Augustine’s] pear theft, in which misappropriation or violation of right is the final end, and by what he calls self-conscious forms of despair. Defiant despair is not weak or fearful of selfhood; rather, it wants to create itself entirely without prior metaphysical direction: it ‘recognises no power over itself’. Hence it tries to bootstrap value into its goals by sheer will, but its resolve is undermined by the arbitrariness of this enterprise. (2007: 364)

The aesthete shows defiant despair when he makes every effort to resist meaning that comes to him from outside himself. We can think for example of the bead of sweat on the professor’s head, which the aesthete claims can substitute for the lecture as a focus of attention. ‘Arbitrariness is the whole secret,’ explains the aesthete (EO 1, 299/ SKS 2, 288). In art, the aesthete claims that the meaning of a work must be generated by the audience rather than discovered in the work: ‘One does not enjoy the immediate object but something else that one



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arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended’ (EO 1, 299/SKS 2, 288). The aesthete admits that the meaning is then ‘something which he arbitrarily imports’ rather than something belonging to the work itself. Its meaningfulness depends entirely on the ironist’s authority, since the content has no internal relation (for example, the pages are read in the wrong order). On this view a particular ending might be unmotivated and implausible with respect to the work as a whole, but the aesthete can exploit her creative power to declare it to be the ending nonetheless. Davenport offers Tolkien’s concept of ‘sub-creation’ as an alternative to these kinds of manoeuvres. Like Kierkegaard, Tolkien distinguishes art from pure imagination, because art includes an additional task of conferring the ‘inner consistency of reality’ on the imaginative perception of images (1966: 68–75). Tolkien’s account is in the end quite similar to Kierkegaard’s, because art functions as a limiting force on imagination. Tolkien distinguishes imagination from art in the following way: Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough – though it may already be a more potent thing than many a ‘thumbnail sketch’ or ‘transcript of life’ that receives literary praise. To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. (1966: 70)

Unlike imagination or simple image-making, art is the process of giving the ‘inner coherence of reality’ to what is imagined. In the passage above, Tolkien writes that this process will entail creating a world in which the image (now an imaginary object or person belonging to a world) is believable. That is to say, ‘Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief’ (Tolkien 1966: 73). Belief is thus inseparable from belonging to a world. That is, we take something to be real to the extent that it has coherence with other states of affairs, both with respect to our own perspective and in relation to other objects in space and time. A believable object must have horizons that situate it in the context of a world. Kermode arrives at the same conclusion in The Sense of an Ending. Although an author has freedom to shape the ‘reality’ of the work, a good author allows herself to be limited by what she has already written as well as by the material elements of the story (for example, the kind of mood a grey sky suggests given our standard associations). Kermode observes in his discussion of Sartre’s La Nausée that Sartre’s

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philosophy of raw freedom is performatively contradicted in the novel form: But there is in practice this difference between the novelist and the young man [in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’] as Sartre sees him: the young man will always be free in just this degree; whether he stays with his mother or not, his decision will not be relevant to his next decision. But the novelist is not like that; he is more Thomist than Sartrean, and every choice will limit the next. He has to collaborate with his novel; he grows in bad faith. (2000: 141)

In a purely aesthetic attitude, by contrast, no particular event or detail limits the others, since it can always be undone the next moment by an arbitrary authorial act. So Tolkien and Kermode both emphasise that belief – the sense that something is real – is a function of ‘inner consistency’, which means that it depends on the relation of presentations to one another. Authorship, then, is that ‘elvish craft’ of showing an invented (secondary) reality with the consistency of primary reality – that is, with a continuity of horizons that reproduces the continuity of the real world. In the last section I will distinguish the roles of the author and reader of works that produce such a role and suggest that a Kierkegaardian self is more analogous to a reader than an author. C O N C L U S I O N : N A R R AT O R O R R E A D E R ? The relationship of a reader to an author always remains one of hope. Petrus Minor emphasises this point especially in his critique of Adler: he concludes that Adler’s claims simply do not show evidence of a unified life-view, and if this view is not already present there is nothing he, the faithful critic, can do about it. As critic, his task is to dress for the ‘climate’ of the work and retain hope until the very end that it will turn out to contain a life-view (BA, 18/Pap. IX B 1, 18–19). The task of the reader is to hope – that is, to charitably anticipate concordance in the midst of disappointment and peripeteia. Only then can the ending of the work be present at every moment, much as love is present not in a single action but underlying all the actions of one who loves: ‘Love hopes all things’, but to hope all things indeed means to presuppose that love, even though it is not seen – indeed, even though the opposite is seen – is still present in the ground, and that it is bound to show itself in the erring person, in the misguided, even in the lost. (WL, 221/SKS 9, 223)

The task of a self, like that of a good literary critic, is in hope to anticipate convergence and fulfilment – that is, eucatastrophe – until



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the last possible moment. But a coherent ending is not something a self directly strives to bring about, either through narrating her own life or by acting to live a unified life that can be meaningfully narrated.8 I think the right thing for Kierkegaard to say about narrative is that a self is one who never has a narrative, either explicitly or implicitly, but who expects to discover narrative unity in the world at every moment. I am not sure whether this way of interpreting Kierkegaard puts me on the side of the narrativists or of those sceptical of the value of narrative. Rudd does conceive of a self as on a ‘quest for its telos’ rather than as a being that achieves that telos. On the other hand, he also sees the narrative of one’s life as something that the self either does or fails to do. As he puts it, we should understand the self to be ‘oriented towards its Good, and as having a potential for flourishing that it, nevertheless, has the capacity to realize or fail to realize’ (2012: 3). But the literary unity described by Kierkegaard is not something for which the self can be said to take ethical responsibility, though perhaps she could be responsible for recognising it when it appears. In this way, the self is more a reader than an author – one who hopes until the last moment that the parts will add up to a whole but who is herself powerless to bring about such a convergence. These distinctions emerge when we better understand the importance of ‘literary unity’ for Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the self. N OT E S 1. In this way the qualification of eternity has the same structure as love, where love is manifest through various loving acts though no single act expresses love (WL, 13/SKS 9, 21). 2. Similarly, in On My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard claims that the movement of his work has been from the poetic to Christianity, but ‘uno tenore’ (OMWA, 6/SKS 13, 12–13); when viewed as a whole, in other words, his work is religious from beginning to end. Kierkegaard’s claim ambiguously applies to his own life and to the narrative arc of his writing in a way that supports Rudd’s interpretation of narrative as describing both one’s life and what one says about one’s life. 3. Rudd clearly thinks self-awareness is an important component of his narrative view. While he insists that this self-awareness need only be implicit, he also claims that for more of it to be made explicit would be better. In other words, Rudd embraces a ‘strong’ narrative view, in which there is a normative goal of consciously understanding one’s life as a story with a unified theme. A person strives for narrative unity by having a unified goal (the Good, according to Rudd), and achieving this goal of unity involves making the ‘largely implicit sense of our past and our future aims’ more

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explicit (Rudd 2012: 205–6). Drawing attention to the importance of active self-reflection, he writes: ‘The narrative intelligibility involved in the ethical life isn’t, therefore, just a matter of having a story that anyone can follow; it is this radically first-personal notion of having one’s own life making sense to oneself as a meaningful unity, something one takes responsibility for, and responsibility for developing further into the future. In this way, one becomes, not just the subject of a narrative, but, in part, the author of the narrative in which one features’ (2012: 169). 4. ‘Everything comes back again, but transfigured [forklaret]’ (EO 2, 271/SKS 3, 258). On the ‘ennobling’ effect of marriage, Westphal cites for example EO 2, 21/SKS 3, 30. Davenport similarly claims that components of the ethical stage must ‘persist yet are also transfigured within faith’ (2008a: 210). The subject’s goals remain finite, ‘But now the meaning of these devotions is transfigured in the new frame of faith: he accepts that successful pursuit of this good is conditional on the miraculous divine response in which he trusts absolutely’ (2008a: 215). The progress of Either/Or calls to mind Hegel’s description of the progress of spirit, where each level cannot be fully understood until it is recontextualised in a higher consciousness. 5. The Danish term used in Kierkegaard’s version of the text of the Gospels themselves (1830 edn) is ‘forvandlet’. However, in the 1847 illustrated edition forklarelse is used in the heading, indicating that the term was already associated with this event in the synoptic Gospels. Thanks to Carl Hughes and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn for their help in tracking down these Danish editions. 6. Writer/police detective Edward Conlon offers this example: ‘The ironies were too blatant: a kid from the ghetto killed playing a pretend-ghetto video game, even though he was a working guy with no criminal record. It was a good story, and I never doubted it was true. It had the swerving humor-horror loop-the-loop that makes the best cop stories among the best stories. Still, it seemed a little showy, too eager to please. My editor would have slapped me if I wrote it – as fiction’ (Conlon 2010: 48). 7. Kermode notes that this need for events to feel uncontrived and the paradoxical fact that the work is crafted mean that a philosophy of pure contingency cannot be expressed in a novel without contradiction. He names Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La Nausée as one whose form undermines its philosophy: Sartre’s character Roquentin experiences his world as purely contingent, but the reader knows that his world is carefully crafted by Sartre. The novel itself has a form, which motivates Kermode to ask: ‘How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world?’ (2000: 143). If it is indeed inevitable, then there are at least some conceivable experiences (such as ‘the world as purely contingent’) that a novel will not be able to express, since the novelist – unlike a Sartrean philosopher – must ‘collaborate with his novel [. . .] He is a world in which past, present, and future are related inextricably’ (2000: 141).



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8. Rudd sometimes describes the self as the protagonist of a narrative, that is, the one who acts in it rather than merely the one who recounts it. See for example Rudd 2012: 185.

8  Forgiveness and the Rat Man: Kierkegaard, ‘Narrative Unity’ and ‘Wholeheartedness’ Revisited JOHN LIPPITT

I N T RO DU C T I O N It is surprising to write a couple of articles and receive a book in response. Yet such has been the flattering reaction to my own modest contribution to the debate about whether or not Kierkegaard should be classed as a ‘narrativist’ in any interesting sense (Lippitt 2005, 2007). Both John J. Davenport (the author of the book in question) and Anthony Rudd have in recent work sought to clarify the conception of ‘narrative’ that they see as operative in Kierkegaard (Davenport 2011, 2012; Rudd 2007b, 2008a, 2012). In doing so, both have revised and qualified their positions in various respects, enabling them to sidestep some worries that talk of ‘narrative’ had sponsored.1 The gap between Kierkegaardian ‘narrativists’ and ‘narratosceptics’ has narrowed considerably: the positions of the former now appear to be much closer to that which Philip Quinn (2001) and I had advocated in the earlier debate. One significant disagreement remaining, however, concerns the desirability of ‘wholeheartedness’ as a key dimension of the ‘narrative unity’ on which Davenport insists. That will be my concern here. DAV E N P O R T ’ S N E W P O S I T I O N O N N A R R AT I V E U N I T Y In what he recognises to be a new account of ‘narrative unity’, Davenport outlines five different levels thereof, each of which is ‘necessary but not sufficient for the ones after it’ (2011: 163). Unity-0 is a prereflective recognition of ourselves as the same subject of consciousness over time. Unity-1 (the unity of ‘planning agency’) ‘is found in the lives of all agents with responsibilities ranging over extended plans’ (2012: 45). In response to an earlier objection, Davenport now explicitly 126



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agrees that the aesthetes of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, such as A and the Seducer, indeed possess both these levels of unity (2012: 47). What they lack, he claims, is unity-2: ‘continuity of cares through willed devotion to ends, persons and ideals’ (2011: 163; cf. 2012: 47–8). It is commitments involving higher-order volitions (in a broadly Frankfurtian sense) which ‘actively sustain the agent’s projects and relationships over time’ (2011: 163; cf. 2012: 47–8). So while aesthetes possess unity-1, they lack unity-2. As A puts it, ‘No part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to’ (EO 1, 293/SKS 2, 282).2 Neither aesthete recognises the existence of any values that have normative authority for their cares (2012: 107; cf. Rudd 2008a: 195). Unity-3 amounts to a version of ‘wholeheartedness’: (a) The agent is fully dedicated to the goals of each of her cares and (b) has no conflicting higher-order volitions; (c) the strong evaluations that ground her different cares are not in any essential conflict, and (d) she makes a reasonable effort to balance their pursuit and reduce pragmatic conflict between them within a single life, while (e) remaining open to learning new values and accepting criticism of her existing cares. (2011: 163, my emphases)

Finally, there is unity-4, a motivating ideal of ‘perfect harmony’ that, in a concession to the ‘mortality objection’, Davenport admits that we will never achieve (at least this side of death, such that here a kind of eschatological faith in post-mortem survival is required). He grants that ‘the narrative structure of practical identity is incomplete in the final analysis because it points towards an eschatological telos in which we can only have faith’ (2012: 166). This introduces the importance of Tolkienian eucatastrophe, on which Davenport has written interestingly elsewhere, and the related importance of hope (Davenport 2008a, 2008b; Lippitt 2014). Davenport’s distinction between these levels of narrative unity helps to clarify some key, but previously opaque, aspects of the narrative realist case. Elements of his account, such as the strikingly realist notion of a narravive (2012: 70–90) will surely prove controversial. But here I shall focus on unity-3 (wholeheartedness). A major issue in this debate has always been how best to describe the kind of shaping of a life that virtually all critics recognise to be necessary to some extent. (The disagreement is about to what extent.) Recall here Quinn’s objection that too strong a concern with narrative unity brings the danger of simplifying by exclusion (both in the proclivity to tell stories about our past that are self-deceptive, and to ‘miss the adventure’ in our futures [Lippitt 2007: 52–8]). Instead, Quinn recommended we ‘welcome plural values into our lives, risking the possibility

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of tragic conflict among them, and [. . .] manage the inevitable tensions as creatively and skilfully as we can’ (2001: 333). Davenport’s new version of unity-3 attempts to recognise worries about monomania (in d) and ‘missing the adventure’ (in e). He acknowledges that ‘the importance of unity-3 does not imply that we should never risk instrumental difficulties due to plural cares; the value of wholeheartedness for a meaningful life only implies that we should not take such risks lightly or unnecessarily’ (2012: 119).3 He further acknowledges: ‘There are also unusual circumstances in which the importance of openness to different values might itself justify tolerating, for a time, conflict among cares that may turn out to be essential conflict’ (2012: 119). While maintaining the narrative unity terminology, this seems to give Quinn and me pretty much what we asked for. However, several questions arise about narrative unity-3. As a preliminary, note that as before, this is a very formal, abstract account. What interests me is whether it is adequate to address practical issues at the level of the phenomenology of a lived life, and this will only emerge at the level of detail. The problem here is that narratosceptic worries about self-deception re-emerge at this point, as I convince myself that I’ve done enough (made a ‘reasonable effort’) and listened enough (‘remained open’). As we shall see, perhaps Davenport would dismiss these concerns as merely ‘pragmatic’ (2012: 111). However, in what follows, I want also to focus on whether Davenport is wise to stick with Frankfurt’s ‘wholeheartedness’ terminology despite, in other ways, going well beyond his position. DAV E N P O R T A N D F R A N K F U R T O N WHOLEHEARTEDNESS Davenport’s account of wholeheartedness differs from Frankfurt’s (1988, 1992, 1999, 2004) in several key respects. First, Davenport’s commitment to moral realism means that for him, the caring central to unity-2 depends on what agents take to be objective values, and so unity at this level requires coherence amongst these values. Davenport is now clearer that he intends ‘wholeheartedness’ (unity-3) as a regulative good, so the relations (and potential conflicts) between an agent’s central cares are crucial. He distinguishes between two varieties of such conflict: ‘instrumental’ and ‘essential’ (2012: 111). The former – such as where two ends compete for limited resources of time or energy – simply requires ‘pragmatic’ resolution, and he denies that a narrative realist owes us an account of how diverse interests and values are supposed to be reconciled with the need for focus that arises from our



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finitude. ‘Essential’ conflict involves inconsistent strong evaluations (in Charles Taylor’s sense) of our goals and pursuits (2012: 109). Davenport acknowledges that this may not be obvious in advance: ‘Sometimes it is only through caring that we can understand well enough the values involved in what we care about to recognize subtle ways in which they are opposed’ (2012: 111). Note, therefore, that there is a pragmatic problem for even ‘essential’ conflict, which is what my earlier question – ‘how do we decide, in the case of all but the most obviously incompatible ends, whether they are harmonious or not?’ (2005: 75) – was an attempt to get at. Davenport develops as follows his account of how we need to go beyond Frankfurt. His own account of wholehearted caring involves both negative and positive conditions. The negative condition is that we need to avoid essential conflict between our higher order volitions and between our specific cares. (As noted above, this is easier specified than achieved.) The positive condition is that we should take sufficient account of what values are worth caring about in our specific circumstances, and should also devote serious attention to each care (2012: 112). This again acknowledges the narratosceptic worry that one might otherwise get wholeheartedness ‘on the cheap’ through lack of imagination or monomania. Thus wholeheartedness as Davenport conceives it plays a regulative role: ‘Instead of teleological unification under a single finite goal, wholeheartedness is normally realized in the practical harmony between the main themes of our life established by our primary cares’ (2012: 115; cf. Rudd 2007b: 545). What he calls the regulative thesis about unity-3 can be stated as does Rudd (whom Davenport cites): In aiming, as I do, at various distinct goals, I have to take into account that these are all things that I am trying to achieve, and that how I set about one project will inevitably be affected by how I set about others. A typical life narrative will not be a story of the pursuit of one single goal, but the story of how the protagonist attempts (successfully or not) to coordinate his/her different projects and goals with one another. So an agent who is committed to making space in his or her life for Work, Family, Leisure, Creativity etc. will do so on the basis of considering them all as valuable aspects of the one life that he or she has to lead, and will therefore have to be concerned with how they all fit together. (Rudd 2009: 64–5)4

Rudd is right to say that finding a balance between work and family life is ‘an absolutely central issue in the lives of very many people’ (2009: 65). But when he adds that ‘to brush it aside with the comment that these are just two distinct “sequences of a person’s life [which] proceed quite independently of each other” would be absurd’ (2009: 65), he

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attacks a straw man, since neither I nor Christman (as I interpreted him) is saying this. Rudd acknowledges in a further footnote that he is unsure whether Christman means to say this about tension between such major commitments as family and career. But if he wouldn’t, that would seem to leave his comment about the separateness of our narratives applying only to minor and trivial concerns. This is more or less analytic; a concern would be minor and trivial for X by definition if X didn’t care enough about it to worry about how to balance it with other perceived goods in his/her life. Anything that we find important enough to care about is something that we have to balance with other goods in thinking about how to live our lives. (2009: 73; cf. Rudd 2012: 187–8)

Slight ambiguities about the meaning of ‘care’ aside, I think Rudd here agrees with what was my point: that the kind of evaluative, backwardlooking reflection and forward-looking planning that matters in human lives does not need to be extended to one’s ‘whole life’ in any literal sense. I can engage in this important aspect of practical reasoning without needing to work out in advance, or give a precise weighting to, how much time I spend in the garden as opposed to watching football. I think Davenport, too, acknowledges this when he says that ‘the synchronic dimension of essential coherence among our identityconstituting cares is compatible with a certain amount of diachronic disunity in our instrumental planning and follow-through’ (2012: 113).5 Insofar as they both more explicitly acknowledge the importance of welcoming a plurality of goods into our lives (Rudd 2012: 215–17), and that a degree of ‘existential risk’ is necessary and desirable in the well-lived life, the gap between Davenport and Rudd, and Quinn and myself, on this point now seems negligible. In this context, Davenport replies to narratosceptic worries about self-deception by stressing that authentic caring requires honesty with oneself, and a ‘rational commitment to avoid self-deceptive stories about one’s practical identity’ (2012: 117), since without this, one is pragmatically inconsistent – and such a self-conception ‘is liable to collapse rapidly under any significant pressure from external reality’ (2012: 118). Though again, he concedes that ‘maybe no one avoids [. . .] completely’ (2012: 118) self-deceptive illusions about their motives. B E YO N D W H O L E H E A R T E D N E S S : L E S S O N S F R O M T H E R AT M A N Notwithstanding the differences between Frankfurt and Davenport sketched above, I would argue that any account derived from Frankfurtian wholeheartedness would do well to take on board David



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Velleman’s critique thereof. This highlights the need for a richer terminological landscape than Frankfurt offers us (and to which Davenport still seems committed). At the very least, we need to make space for a kind of ‘wholeheartedness’ that includes attitudes more naturally described as ambivalence, and the oddness of such a description shows the need to get beyond this terminology. I’ll try to make this case by connecting Velleman’s discussion of Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ with some recent discussions of forgiveness. The Rat Man is the chief protagonist of one of Freud’s most fascinating case histories. The main features of his disorder ‘were fears that something might happen to two people of whom he was very fond – his father and a young lady whom he admired’ (Freud 1955: 158). Early in his treatment he reported to Freud a conversation with a sadistic army colleague about a horrific punishment in which a pot of rats was placed on the victim’s buttocks and allowed to bore their way into his anus. When told of this, Freud’s patient instantly formed the idea (interpreted by Freud as a repressed wish) ‘that this was happening to a person who was very dear’ to him (1955: 167). In fact, two such people: the young woman and – it later emerged – his father. Freud’s diagnosis of the Rat Man’s problem is a ‘splitting of the personality’ resulting from ‘a battle between love and hate raging in [his] breast’ (1955: 191) with respect to both his father and the woman. He both loved and hated them, but rather than experience these emotions as mixed, he repressed the hatred, dividing himself into both consciously loving and unconsciously hating selves. This, for Freud, explains his symptoms, such as his repeatedly doing and undoing an action (for example, the removal and subsequent replacement of a stone from a road down which the woman’s carriage would travel [1955: 190]). Velleman suggests that although it looks at first as if ambivalence is the problem, a closer look reveals that the problem was ‘not so much ambivalence as his response to it’; that is, ‘by repressing his hatred and acknowledging only his love’ (2006: 343). What matters for our purposes is that ‘The Rat Man’s repression [. . .] consisted in a concerted practice of self-misinterpretation’ (2006: 343) For instance, euphemistically describing his regular thoughts of harm befalling his father as mere ‘trains of thought’ (1955: 178) rather than hostile wishes, or displacing his hostile feelings towards his father on to himself or his analyst. This misinterpretation is motivated by ‘the desire to dissociate himself from his own hatred and hostility’ (2006: 344). Velleman claims that the Rat Man suffered ‘not from the disease of ambivalence but from something like Frankfurt’s cure. What made him

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ill was his effort to dissociate himself from one of his emotions, which is just what Frankfurt prescribes for cases of ambivalence’ (2006: 344, my emphasis). In his reply, Frankfurt denies this, claiming that the Rat Man’s problem is that ‘he became ill because he tried to achieve dissociation through repression’ (Frankfurt 2002a: 126), and that Frankfurt’s own prescription – ‘taking a decisive stand against certain feelings’ (2002a: 126) – is wholly different. Frankfurt insists that ambivalence as he uses the term involves not just mixed feelings but a divided will. The Rat Man should have resolved which side he is on: ‘come to stand decisively against the hatred and behind the love’ (2002a: 126).6 But is there really so great a difference here? Velleman explicitly acknowledged that for Frankfurt a person can be wholehearted while retaining conflicting desires, so long as he has decisively identified with one and dissociated himself from the other. Yet he also notes just how strongly Frankfurt expresses this: the process of becoming wholehearted ‘involves a radical separation of the competing desires, one of which is not merely assigned a relatively less favoured position but extruded entirely as an outlaw’ (Frankfurt 1988: 170). Such phraseology makes it difficult to see the difference between Frankfurt’s recommendation and repression. A full justification of this claim would take us too far into Freudian territory: is Frankfurtian expulsion from the self ‘the ultimate aim of repression’ (Velleman 2006: 345 n.48)? But Velleman’s commonsensical story alone convinces me that the distinction between wholeheartedness and repression is far less clear than Frankfurt would have us believe. Velleman makes three important claims. First, that people typically have feelings of love for their parents mixed with feelings of, if not hatred, then residual hostility. Second, a piece of folk wisdom about dealing with mixed emotions: when angry with someone we love, ‘the first step towards dealing with our anger is to let it mingle with, and be modified by, our other emotions toward the same person. Isolating our hostility from our other feelings is a way of not dealing with it, of allowing it to remain undigested, a lasting source of inner strife and outer impulsiveness’ (2006: 346, my emphasis). Yet – third – it is so daunting to allow these emotions to mingle with each other that we often seek alternative strategies: The Rat Man chose to regard his hatred as foreign because he was afraid of letting it into his emotional life, even though doing so was his only chance of domesticating it. All of us are like the Rat Man at least to this extent, that we feel threatened by various emotions that would introduce conflict into our lives. We consequently wish that our commitments were not tinged with regret, that our projects were not fraught with doubts, that our loves were



Forgiveness and the Rat Man 133 not complicated by hate. We wish [. . .] we could be wholehearted. (2006: 346, my emphasis)

But Velleman doubts this wish is ‘healthy’, insofar as we may simply be aiming to defend ourselves against our own emotions: ‘Hence our affinity for Frankfurt’s ideal may not indicate that he’s right about the constitution of the self; it may indicate no more than our own defensiveness’ (2006: 346) Sympathetic to this, I stick with my earlier view that the kind of willingness to live with a degree of paradox can be a better option. This dovetails with Marya Schechtman’s objection – which I still endorse – that ‘the work of shaping a life is less of a task of micromanagement’ than Frankfurt implies, and that it is ‘less about directly settling conflicts than about establishing safe boundaries within which these conflicts can be allowed to play themselves out’ (2004: 426). I’m not sure whether, in his new position, Davenport agrees with this or not. But as regards Kierkegaard, it seems clear that a willingness to live with a degree of paradox and creative tension has at least as much claim to be considered ‘Kierkegaardian’ as does a picture that places perhaps too great a reliance on Purity of Heart. Though in fact, I shall suggest later how the Rat Man can actually pass the ‘purity of heart’ test. In his discussion of proper self-love in The Reasons of Love, Frankfurt again insists that the ambivalent person cannot decide ‘once and for all’ which side of his competing desires he is on, and so remains ‘volitionally fragmented’ (2004: 92). This ambivalence allegedly thwarts proper self-love, since there is ‘no final unequivocal truth, no straightforward fact of the matter’ (2004: 93) concerning whether or not, say, Søren really loves Regine. Consequently, Søren ‘is as radically ambivalent concerning himself in this matter as he is concerning her’ (2004: 93). But Frankfurt’s insistence on a ‘once and for all’ decision seems untrue to the complexity of matters of love – and life.7 And it’s curiously at odds with a footnote in which he seems to recognise a version of this worry. Frankfurt says: ‘being wholehearted does not entail having a closed mind. The wholehearted person need not be a fanatic. Someone who knows without qualification where he stands may nonetheless be quite ready to give serious attention to reasons for changing that stand. There is a difference between being confident and being stubborn or obtuse’ (2004: 95). While a welcome recognition of the complexity of life, this leaves plenty unclear. What, if anything, would lead someone from giving the alternative stance ‘serious attention’ to actually changing his mind? Would such a person still count as ‘wholehearted’? If so, what would justify that description? For if he does change his stance, then clearly his decision wasn’t ‘once and for all’.

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Interestingly, Rudd seems some distance from Frankfurt on this point. First, in a response to Nussbaum’s claim that the ethical life requires flexibility and openness to unimagined possibilities (part of the ‘moral blindness’ worry), Rudd agrees, responding that it is a common mistake to think that narrative theories require us to map out a detailed plot for our lives in advance and then grimly stick to that, forcing whatever events happen to occur into that pre-conceived framework. On the contrary, in narrating our own lives, we are making up our stories as we go along, weaving the contingencies of life into a design that keeps changing in previously unpredictable ways as we do so. (2012: 217)

So much the better for narrative theories. But we are some considerable distance here from Frankfurt’s ‘once and for all’ stipulation. What Rudd is saying is that we should resist ‘wholeheartedness’ thus understood. Indeed, in his final chapter, Rudd gives an account that I think amounts to what a narrativist should say on this point. At the outset, Rudd acknowledges the self-deception objection: that any ‘realistic’ account of the self and its orientation to the Good (the main theme of his book) must ‘take account of our tendencies to self-deception and fantasy, our pervasive failures of self-knowledge’ (2012: 228). For this reason, he goes on to explore the importance of the unconscious for the project of balancing ‘self-shaping’ with ‘self-acceptance’. One kind of ‘bad’ story one might tell about oneself – and thus on Rudd’s account a ‘failure of self-knowledge’ – is one where although none of the facts is falsified, the story ‘fail[s] to make the connections that would make true sense of one’s life; and may instead make connections that obscure that sense’ (2012: 232). This, I suggest, serves as a good description of the Rat Man, or anyone who, faced with two conflicting feelings both of which are significant for self-understanding, takes Frankfurt’s advice and identifies with one feeling, ‘extruding as an outlaw’ the other. Such a person is precisely failing to make connections that would make ‘true sense’ of his life. Rudd is rightly troubled by accounts of the unconscious wherein the purpose of psychotherapy is simply to bring to the surface repressed feelings so that, aware of them, we might better control them. This ‘makes it sound as though one’s unconscious is an alien being dragging one around despite oneself’: a ‘dangerous misunderstanding’ (2012: 236). Rather, inspired by Jung, Rudd suggests that instead of identifying myself with a conscious ego, ‘the ego needs to learn from the unconscious, not just about it’; or ‘the ego may need to let itself be shaped by the unconscious, rather than just learning how to shape it’ (2012: 239). Frankfurt’s advice to stand ‘decisively against the hatred and behind the love’ is prone to the charge that the I with which



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such a person identifies is ‘stunted’ and needs ‘to grow and change, by opening itself up to what it had deformed by excluding’ (2012: 236).8 Rudd’s discussion of Schechtman’s example of the Fifties Wife – whose higher order will identifies with her role as housewife and mother, but who is haunted by her repressed desires for higher education and career – offers an interesting parallel to the Rat Man. I find Rudd’s advice greatly superior to Frankfurt’s. If the Fifties Wife finds herself haunted by fantasies of setting fire to the house, poisoning her husband’s food or thrashing the children, the point ‘is not that she should act on these fantasies, but that she should take them seriously as symptoms, see them as telling her that she is experiencing her life as intolerably narrow and oppressive’ (2012: 247). What she should do about it is a matter for ‘conscious and self-critical exploration’, not simply a matter of standing firm in favour of her higher order commitments. She needs somehow to ‘take in what she has repressed, though in a form which enables it to be integrated with a less one-sided version of what she finds of real value in her family life’ (2012: 247). This is a good example of what Rudd describes as ‘the need for a delicate balance between the need to recognise and accept our natures as having their own stubborn realities; and the need to take active responsibility for their shaping’ (2012: 244). Similarly, imagine a version of the Rat Man whose aggressive fantasies against his father are a frustrated way of expressing his unconscious resentment of his father’s controlling nature. The challenge for him is how to recognise this honestly; take it up into his sense of self; and work to recognise what in these feelings of hatred is good (the desire for greater independence of his father?). In such a case, we could agree with Rudd’s verdict on the Fifties Wife: that the basic reason why she should integrate her conflicting desires is ‘not just that she will feel unhappy if she doesn’t, but that she will be leading an objectively worse life if she fails to do so’ (2012: 248). Perhaps a defender of ‘wholeheartedness’ might insist that there is still a sense here in which something with that name can play a role as a regulative ideal. But insofar as this is true, we have gone so far beyond Frankfurt’s use of the term, that I can see no real merit in retaining it.9 Moreover, I believe that the proper role of successful psychotherapy here is to lead a person from feeling unmanageably torn to feeling manageably torn: still, perhaps, a kind of ‘ambivalence’. I wonder whether Rudd’s greater openness to psychoanalytic insights might partially explain why ‘wholeheartedness’ appears nowhere in his index, whereas it still plays a central role in Davenport’s account.10 If Davenport agrees with the views I have drawn on Rudd to express above, I suggest that he would be better off abandoning the term.

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Earlier I suggested that the ‘Kierkegaardian’ accounts that Davenport and Rudd have each offered may be putting too great an emphasis on Purity of Heart.11 Without resiling from that view, I want now to suggest that even if one did make the concerns of that discourse central, the Freud-Velleman advice to the Rat Man (as opposed to Frankfurt’s) can still be judged as ‘willing the good in truth’. Note that this parallels Velleman’s claim that while at first it looks as if the Rat Man’s problem is ambivalence, the problem is in fact his response to it. Fully acknowledging his feelings as a mixture of love and hatred (and working through them – but without prejudging the destination of that process) at first looks like ambivalence, but in fact amounts to ‘willing the good in truth’. It is crucial to see that such an attitude to his mixed feelings is not an instance of the ‘doublemindedness’ Kierkegaard condemns. The Rat Man would not be ‘will[ing] the good only to a certain degree’ (UDVS, 64/SKS 8, 172).12 On the contrary, the Rat Man who moves from being unmanageably to manageably torn between his mixed feelings can be said to be fully ‘willing the good in truth’. Recognising his ambivalence towards his father cannot accurately be described as willing the good partially along with something else, as it is not a question of ‘love good; hate bad’. Rather, he is relating to the situation truthfully. By contrast, failing to address his mixed feelings in this way would be a version of the ‘evasion’ that Kierkegaard condemns (UDVS, 82/SKS 8, 188). Just willing the love, while excluding (repressing?) the hate, would not be ‘willing the good in truth’. In light of all this, I still think that ‘wholeheartedness’, even as a regulative ideal, is a term apt to mislead. In further support of this, I want now to turn to a brief discussion of the capacity for forgiveness, a central theme in Kierkegaard’s thought (see Lippitt 2013: 156–180). I shall argue that the grammar of forgiveness raises further doubts about ‘wholeheartedness’. In Frankfurt’s classic example of drug addiction, the addict who is trying to kick the habit can label the competing desire as an ‘it’, ‘the addiction’, alien from himself.13 But in the case of forgiveness, the recommended radicality – ‘extruding as an outlaw’ – is just as inappropriate as in the Rat Man case. I’ll argue that built into the very nature of an important variety of forgiveness – both of others and oneself – is an important attitude that a ‘wholeheartedness’ account cannot readily accommodate.



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B E YO N D W H O L E H E A R T E D N E S S : L E S S O N S F R O M FORGIVENESS AND SELF-FORGIVENESS Consider first the case of forgiveness of others. Christopher Bennett has distinguished between two metaphors for forgiveness: ‘wiping the slate clean’ and ‘turning the other cheek’. As well as ‘redemptive’ ­forgiveness – which can be warranted by a wrongdoer doing enough (through apology; contrition; making amends) to ‘wipe the slate clean’ – Bennett points to ‘personal’ forgiveness which depends more upon forgiver than wrongdoer. This can be granted without the wrongdoer’s prior repentance, sometimes in the hope of inspiring it. Such ‘turning the other cheek’ ‘involves having sufficient [moral] confidence in your own status [. . .] that you are prepared to make yourself vulnerable to further insult in order to reach out to the wrongdoer in some way – for instance in the hope of encouraging his return to the moral community’ (2003: 139). But such forgiveness does not imply that the slate has been ‘wiped clean’, and can be offered in such a manner as ‘to make it clear that I do not regard [the wrongdoer] as vindicated or excused’: the relationship re-established is ‘tentative’, even ‘mistrustful’ (2003: 141). (Consider the case of forgiving a spouse their adultery.) The important point is that there can be a kind of forgiveness that continues to incorporate blame. It is possible to ‘put the wrong behind you’ without accepting that the slate has been wiped clean, as if the wrong had never occurred. We need such a conception of forgiveness to address the valid concern that it is possible to forgive too easily. (The endlessly betrayed spouse who always readily forgives their partner’s adultery strikes us as lacking proper self-respect.) The wholeheartedness/ambivalence distinction will not do justice to such cases. If forced to describe such a situation using one of these terms, ambivalence would be the better option, as these will be cases about which we are likely to have recurrent doubts. An analogous situation holds in the case of self-forgiveness. Akin to Bennett’s forgiveness that retains blame, Robin Dillon has independently argued that we need to allow for a kind of self-forgiveness that retains room for continuing self-reproach. Here we need to hold together two thoughts. The first is the undesirability of constant selflaceration for the sake of it. Yet the second is that, just as we worry about the lack of self-respect of the person who repeatedly grants forgiveness too easily, so are we even more suspicious of the person who forgives himself with excessive ease. Such letting oneself off the moral hook is not just weakness of will, but a violation of moral integrity. As Dillon argues, self-condemnatory attitudes ‘express one’s judgement, in

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light of standards that are important to one’s moral self-identity, that some central aspect of oneself is reprehensible’. One cannot overcome those attitudes without renouncing the judgement and the standards on which they are based. And ‘when those standards are central to one’s normative self-identity [. . .] renouncing them would be a failure to respect oneself and a sacrifice of moral integrity, which would give one additional grounds for self-condemnation’ (2001: 57–8). Yet Dillon argues that holding ‘a complex view of oneself that is shot through with ambivalence’ is perfectly consistent with forgiving oneself. This is because: Self-forgiveness does not require extinguishing all self-reproach, for it is not really about the presence or absence of negative feelings and judgments; it’s about their power. Forgiving oneself means not that one no longer experiences self-reproach but that one is no longer in bondage to it, no longer controlled or crippled by a negative conception of oneself and the debilitating pain of it, no longer alienated from oneself, so that one can now live well enough. This is possible even if one retains a measure of clear-sighted selfreproach, overcoming it without eliminating it. (2001: 83, my emphases)14

This parallels Velleman’s recommendation to the Rat Man. Frankfurt’s reply would probably be that this is not enough to count as ambivalent in his sense: our self-forgiver’s will would have to be divided, and provided he has resolved ‘once and for all’ to forgive himself, then he counts as wholehearted. But what sense can be made of such a ‘once and for all’ resolution in a concrete case like this? For those doubts that I will feel, in any actual such case of self-forgiveness conceived as a difficult moral task, are in significant part doubts about whether my (higher order) will to forgive myself is warranted. Thus the options seem to be, first, a case where my iron will to forgive myself comes down ruthlessly on any moments of self-doubt, which are judged as weaknesses, and ‘extruded as outlaws’. Or, second, where the will is in some sense divided (that is, where I sometimes doubt my higher order resolution to forgive myself). The latter sounds truer to genuine cases of self-forgiveness as a moral task. But such an internally torn will does not have to be debilitating. Dillon’s description is apt: ‘it is not really about the presence or absence of negative feelings and judgments; it’s about their power’. The first option – the iron will trampling self-doubt – sounds like the attitude that was so damaging to the Rat Man. In short, what I am claiming is that ‘wholeheartedness’ is quite the wrong term to describe the ‘manageably torn’ nature most of us feel in such cases of forgiveness and self-forgiveness. ‘Ambivalent’ would be a better term (presumably why Dillon – like Freud’s translator before her [1955: 239] – picks it). The point is that in such cases – unlike that



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of Frankfurt’s addict – in forgiving myself, I must continue to view that ‘inner opposition to the will’ – to continue to blame myself – as mine, as part of me.15 If I don’t, then for Dillon’s reasons, I let myself down qua moral agent. This leaves Davenport with the following question. Is there room for this kind of ambivalence within his new variety of wholeheartedness? Some of his account suggests so.16 But then doesn’t this suggest that the descriptors simply can’t do justice to the complexity of the landscape, and that what we need is a richer terminological toolkit? The real task, I suspect, is to work out what forms of ambivalence really are a threat to our ‘existential coherence’, and which we need actively to embrace. GOLDIE ON SELF-FORGIVENESS In his recent, posthumously published book, the leading narrativist Peter Goldie has explicitly discussed self-forgiveness, arguing that a narrative sense of self is precisely what we need to understand why selfforgiveness is valuable. I have no problem with much of what Goldie has to say about ‘the narrative sense of self’,17 but though his discussion of self-forgiveness is illuminating, it is interesting that he elides precisely the problem I drew upon Velleman and Dillon above to highlight. For Goldie, self-forgiveness is one way in which we apply ‘narrative thinking’ about our future (such as ‘planning, forming policies, and making resolutions’ [2012: x]). Goldie’s discussion of self-forgiveness is strongly influenced by Charles Griswold, who holds that self-­ forgiveness is possible, but that it falls short of paradigmatic forgiveness (2007: 113). For Goldie, the central difficulty that self-forgiveness faces is that paradigmatic forgiveness is dyadic; a moral relation between two people. He argues that the solution to this difficulty ‘lies in the narrative sense of self, and in the way in which one can think of oneself as another’ (2012: 102). Narrative thinking about my past is dyadic in the sense that it involves me now thinking about me then (2012: 106).18 Looking back on an occasion in which I have made a cruel joke behind a friend’s back (Goldie’s example), me now views myself as a character in a narrative, in which I now judge as boastful and disloyal what struck me then as witty and sophisticated. As a result of this, I experience remorse. In such a circumstance, the first four of Griswold’s conditions for forgiveness are met: we have an offence against another for which I judge myself responsible; reactive (negative) emotions thereto; a narrative account of what I did, and why, which makes my actions intelligible; and contrition for the wrong. When we turn from thinking about the past to thinking about the future, Goldie argues, we

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see that the fifth condition is also met: commitment for change (and taking serious steps to live up to this commitment). Thus: Engaging in narrative thinking of myself in the future, imagining myself acting on the self-governing policies that I have now adopted because of my regrets for what I did in the past, I can now conceive of myself in future episodes, acting as I now know I should. And I now feel, external to the narrative, emotions that express my satisfaction, through strong reflective endorsement, with my self-governing policies. In the long run, my aim is that these policies will become embedded in my character and personality traits, so that the policies no longer need to be conscious, explicit parts of my self-governance. By then my commitment for change will have been fully met. (2012: 108)

At this point, all the conditions allowing self-forgiveness are in place. I may continue to have reactive negative emotions when I recall my misdeed, ‘but meeting the conditions of self-forgiveness means that one need no longer have continuing reactive attitudes towards one’s continuing self, such as shame, self-contempt and self-loathing’ (2012: 108). Our earlier discussion has put us in a position to see what is right, and what potentially problematic, in this description. Prima facie, what Goldie is commending sounds consistent with wholeheartedness. But what is the status of the continuing reactive attitudes towards oneself? Goldie is right that we don’t want a debilitating remorse or self-reproach. This undesirable result is perhaps most likely brought about by an attitude of globalised self-condemnation (‘I’m vicious, good-for-nothing scum!’). But as Goldie also acknowledges, it does not follow from this that there is no room for me now to continue to see me then as blameworthy, and to experience the appropriate emotions about this. And the fact that me now and me then are the same person makes this something other than third person observation: it makes all of shame, remorse – and self-forgiveness – both possible and (in the right circumstances) appropriate. But Goldie’s account will be incomplete unless we add to it our important earlier emphasis: that me now’s continuing to blame me then is an important dimension of responsible self-forgiveness. Goldie’s way of putting this risks making it sound as if my continued negative emotions when I recall my misdeed are a regrettable remnant of reflection on the past that I haven’t – yet – quite been able to shake off (2012: 147). (Recall Rudd’s criticism of Freud on a related point.) But in fact, such a reaction – of continued ‘ambivalence’? – is a crucial part of what distinguishes responsible from irresponsible self-forgiveness. And finally, note that this ‘pro-ambivalence’ view appears to be



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Kierkegaard’s. The importance of self-forgiveness to which Kierkegaard is fervently committed is no easy matter in which the slate is wiped clean as if no wrong had been committed. In precisely the discourse on which Davenport and Rudd set such store, Kierkegaard stresses the importance of repentance as ‘a quiet daily concern’ (UDVS, 18/SKS 8, 133). This supports the idea that self-forgiveness is for him not a one-off – he is sternly critical of ‘momentary repentance’ (UDVS, 17/ SKS 8, 132) – but rather more like the process we drew on Dillon to describe. He insists that one’s guilt should not be totally forgotten. On the contrary, ‘it is a gain to gain inwardness to regret the guilt more and more fervently [. . .] Of repentance it must be said that, if it is forgotten, then its strength was nothing but immaturity, but the longer and more deeply it is preserved, the better it becomes. The more closely one views guilt, the more appalling it looks, but repentance is most pleasing to God the farther away on the path of good it catches a glimpse of the guilt’ (UDVS, 18–19/SKS 8, 133–4, my emphases). If that is so, then what pleases God is something very different from ‘wholeheartedness.’ N OT E S  1. In regard to some of the ‘narratosceptic’ objections outlined in this volume’s introduction, see, for instance, Davenport’s distancing from MacIntyre’s use of literary narrative as a guide to human life and his explicit recognition of the ‘incompleteness thesis’ about literary depictions of lives (2012: 52–9); the revision of talk of one’s ‘whole life’ to mean talk about something like the general shape of the most important values in one’s life (more of which below); and Rudd’s acknowledgement that the inextricably ethical nature of the ‘narrative unity’ with which the Judge confronts A had been downplayed in his earlier work (2012: 170). The defence of moral realism in both writers is also more explicit than before.  2. Davenport quotes this passage in support of his view, but somewhat selectively. A’s discussion at this part of ‘Crop Rotation’ is about the interrelationship of forgetting and recollecting. He insists that forgetting is an ‘art’ and that the ability ‘to forget depends upon how one remembers’. Immediately after the passage Davenport quotes, A adds ‘on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment’ (EO 1, 293/SKS 2, 282).   3. Though how clear is it what this claim amounts to, given legitimate disagreements as to what constitutes a reasonable appetite for risk?   4. At this level, I have no quarrel. But there is room for significant misunderstanding here. In an immediately following footnote, Rudd alleges that I previously claimed that the need to manage one’s time gives only an ‘utterly trivial sense’ to the idea of a unified life. Instead, he points out

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that our finitude and temporality mean we are faced with various tough choices in attempting to marry the demands of work, family life and so on (2009: 73). In fact, I have no problem with such an uncontroversial claim. Far from denying that we need to weigh up such goods, I explicitly said, in my discussion of John Christman, that ‘Christman’s point here, I take it, is not that I do not need to decide how to balance the demands of work and family commitments, for example, in my life’ (2007: 46). There has never been a disagreement between Davenport, Rudd and myself on the importance of such reflection. Rather, I took Christman’s point to be ‘that I should not necessarily feel any obligation to bring each and every aspect of my life under one grand narrative. For example, my life is ethically none the worse for the fact that I have given little if any thought to the question of how to “unify” my life qua gardener with my life qua soccer fan. (Except in the utterly trivial sense that I can’t tend the roses while at the game.) Yet any account of my “whole life” – unless that phrase turns out to mean vastly less than it promises – will have to take such factors into account’ (2007: 46–7, first emphasis added). It is only in the above parenthesis that I used the phrase ‘utterly trivial’. It is now clearer that for both Rudd and Davenport, what my ‘whole life’ actually means is something like ‘those aspects of my life which constitute goods between which I have to find a sensible balance if my life is to constitute living in the light of, and “for”, the good’. Fine: but then can we not find a less misleading phrase? My explicit point was precisely about the unclarity of what talk of one’s ‘whole life’ amounts to (2007: 47). Such an over-egged phrase threatens to obscure what is valuable about this evaluative, reflective retrospective and planning dimension of practical reason. In this sense, the proffered meaning does indeed turn out to offer less than it promises. Charles Taylor’s talk of ‘the shape of my life as a whole’ (1989: 50) is perhaps better, provided we emphasise ‘shape’.   5. That said, Davenport’s important warning (2012: 120) about not confusing Quinn’s valorisation of listening to plural internal ‘voices’ with the rationalising of insincerity that C. S. Lewis warns against in The Screwtape Letters is well-taken.   6. Relatedly, Frankfurt claims elsewhere: ‘Wholeheartedness does not require that a person be altogether untroubled by inner opposition to his will. It just requires that, with respect to any such conflict, he himself be fully resolved [. . .] he must be resolutely on the side of one of the forces struggling within him and not on the side of any other’ (1999: 100).   7. This ‘once and for all’ stipulation is precisely what sponsored the ‘moral blindness’ worry I raised in Lippitt 2007.  8. Compare here Rudd’s criticism of Freud’s remarks on Goethe’s Faust: Frankfurt’s advice looks to me like another instance of ‘the hubristic ego, attempting to impose its own narrow vision of order on what it may too quickly dismiss as mere chaos’ (Rudd 2012: 238).   9. Rudd certainly sees Jungian integration as an important complement to



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the ethical understanding of the self he seeks to develop, and views this integration as an ethical or evaluative goal (2012: 245). But for the reasons sketched above, I think it would be misleading to describe such integration as a quest for Frankfurt-inspired ‘wholeheartedness’. 10. Rudd does mention ‘wholeheartedness’ en passant (2012: 46, 105), but it is not a central element of his account. 11. I do not have space to explore this here, but in judging what is ‘Kierkegaardian,’ suppose instead we took our measure from Kierkegaard’s three late discourses on the lily and the bird (WA, 1–45/SKS 11, 7–48). What is commended there – to take joy in ‘today’ and to view as irrelevant ‘tomorrow’ or ‘the day after tomorrow’ (WA, 38/SKS 11, 42) – seems to leave little room for a focus on narrative unity. 12. I take it that this is the only kind of doublemindedness discussed by Kierkegaard of which the Rat Man could plausibly be accused. He is clearly not willing the good for the sake of reward (UDVS, 37ff./SKS 8, 149ff.), out of fear of punishment (UDVS, 44ff./SKS 8, 156ff.) or out of self-wilfulness (UDVS, 60ff./SKS 8, 169ff.). 13. In some psychotherapeutic addiction treatments, clients are explicitly encouraged to do so. 14. I have argued that a closely related view can be found in Kierkegaard (Lippitt 2013). 15. This is not at all the same thing as ‘only partially repent[ing] of some error’ (Davenport 2012: 112). I trust I have said enough above to show why being manageably torn should not be conflated with being ‘halfhearted’ or ‘doubleminded’ in an ethically culpable sense. 16. See especially his recognition of the importance of ‘infinite resignation’ (2012: 145–9). 17. Goldie distinguishes between a ‘narrative sense of self’ and a ‘sense of a narrative self’ (2012: x, 117–49), arguing that there is no interesting form of the latter. In this sense, his position – metaphysically neutral about personal identity (2012: 125–7) – is distinct from Schechtman (whom he explicitly criticises), Davenport and Rudd. 18. Not that this means there are literally two people: self-forgiveness would be impossible were me now not the same person as me then.

9  The Virtues of Ambivalence: Wholeheartedness as Existential Telos and the Unwillable Completion of Narravives JOHN J. DAVENPORT N E W Q U E S T I O N S F O R N A R R AT I V I S T S In recent years, narrative interpretations of selfhood in Kierkegaard’s works have provided a fertile basis for approaching a range of issues in moral psychology that are important in their own right. It is interesting how much these debates have started to focus less on Kierkegaard interpretation and more on developing Kierkegaard’s insights to make headway on some of the perennial questions of philosophical anthropology. Anthony Rudd and I have defended ‘narrative realist’ accounts of selves that draw on Kierkegaard for inspiration. Likewise, several papers in this volume challenge these narrative theories on their merits, and especially as ways to understand ethical and religious ideals. I cannot do justice to the rich range of new questions raised in these contributions, but I will focus on three in particular. These are Walter Wietzke’s suggestion that a rich conception of the human telos rather than narrative form is doing the heavy lifting in recent Kierkegaardian narrativist theories; John Lippitt’s argument that forms of ambivalence incompatible with wholeheartedness may be needed both in coming to terms with psychic conflict and in forgiveness; and Eleanor Helms’ claim, supported by Kierkegaard and Kermode, that we can only hope for endings that yield a coherent story – in both artworks and real human lives. I am indebted to all three for these challenging questions about the adequacy of my own conception of practical identities as ‘narravives’, that is, living processes of accumulating meaning-relations with a narrative-like temporal structure that partly precede explicit ‘telling’ or reflective explanation. In what follows, I will address Lippitt’s suggestions first before turning to Wietzke’s critique and finally to Helms’ redeployment of the ‘eschatological’ interpretation of existential faith as a paradigm for 144



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narratival completion in general. Wietzke’s challenge is deepest in its potential dangers for narrativist readings of Kierkegaard (and selfhood in general), because it holds that a controversial conception of our telos is needed to ground the superiority of the ethical life-orientation defended by the Judge in Either-Or II. Thus it implies that the demands of narrative unity do not help explain or justify the telos involved in the ethical stage – which I have characterised as including ‘existential autonomy’ (the type of self-governance needed for responsibility for one’s character), but which may also include flourishing or a robust kind of first-personal life-meaning. To respond adequately to this profound challenge requires showing that narrative coherence among cares is integral to our natural telos. But it will help to begin with Lippitt’s arguments because they will help me clarify the unity-3 coherence that I still label ‘wholeheartedness’, though it is significantly developed from Frankfurt’s rough notion. VO L I T I O N A L U N I T Y W I T H E M OT I O N A L A M B I VA L E N C E Lippitt gives a faithful account of wholeheartedness as I have reconceived it. He puts pressure on the distinction between pragmatic and essential conflict, and questions the usefulness of ‘whole life’ talk when wholeheartedness is understood as a second-order value or regulative good. But I will pass straight to the Rat Man example, where Lippitt develops a key objection from David Velleman. This protagonist in one of Freud’s most interesting case histories suffered from trying to become wholehearted, which he did through repressing feelings of hatred towards his father and only accepting his feelings of love as his own. Lippitt is not convinced by Frankfurt’s response that repression of negative affects is the wrong way to achieve wholeheartedness, because in ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’ Frankfurt says that volitional identification contrasts with mere preference-ordering; it rejects certain desires (or by implication emotions) entirely as deserving no ‘place in the order of preference at all’ (Frankfurt 1988: 170). For, as Velleman argues, Frankfurt’s claim that wholeheartedness involves ‘extrud[ing] entirely as an outlaw’ some first-order motives is a recipe for harmful (neurosis-causing) repression even if that is not Frankfurt’s intention (Velleman 2002: 102). Now Velleman is mistaken here, though the fault is partly Frankfurt’s for never offering an adequate account of what constitutes volitional states (with agential ‘authority’) as opposed to emotions and desires that merely have certain psychic strengths. The concept briefly outlined

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in this quoted paragraph is actually detailed in Frankfurt’s earlier essay, ‘Identification and Externality’, which I believe was more on the right track than his several later attempts to explain volitional identification. Here Frankfurt notes that he can block the famous regress objection to his initial account in ‘Freedom of the Will’ only if states that identify us (in his sense) with first-order motives – that is, higher-order volitions – are not themselves mere attitudes that we could either alienate or identify with (1988: 65). They cannot by default start as wanton or neutral psychic states that passively move us to some degree; rather, they must have their authority built into the kind of state that they are instead of deriving it by endorsement from some further mental attitude, as default-wanton states do. Thus higher-order volitions are qualitatively different from desires understood as ‘brute’ preferences (just wanting something for no evaluable reason); for their authority is part of their constitution. Similarly, we solve conflicts between mere preferences by considering which has more power to influence us (or relative strength), whereas we solve uncertainties about which of two incompatible first-order motives to identify with (and sometimes conflicts between higher-order volitions themselves) by rejecting one of them ‘altogether’. Frankfurt adds, without explanation, that ‘Conflicts between conscious and unconscious desires are typically of this kind [. . .]’ (1988: 66). The proof of this distinction is that, when deciding which motive to identify with (and hence which higher-order volition to form or keep), it would be crazy to revert to the rejected option just because the chosen option proved inaccessible or difficult (1988: 67). But when only brute preferences are at issue, it is entirely natural and reasonable to revert to our ‘second-best’ option when the first is unavailable. Higher-order volitions thus cannot be mere desires ranked in simple preference order. As I have explained elsewhere, this shows that what Frankfurt means by ‘extruding as an outlaw’ or ‘radical separation’ is what Charles Taylor meant by ‘strong evaluation’. Thus Frankfurt’s analysis in ‘Identification and Externality’ suggested that the inherent authority of higher-order volitions comes at least partly from their embodying strong value-judgements, though unfortunately Frankfurt’s later subjectivism concerning the values of objects of our cares conflicts with this earlier analysis. Understood this way, the Rat Man’s dis-identifying with or ‘alienating’ the hostilities towards his father left over from childhood would involve strong evaluation of these hostile feelings as vicious or unworthy or inconsistent with his values – which would require squarely facing these feelings and, notably, also acknowledging them as part of him in the sense of first-order personality (the systematic connections between first-order psychic states including



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temperament that are often analysed in terms of ‘personality traits’). Velleman, like several other distinguished scholars in moral psychology who have critiqued Frankfurt, is misled by the ambiguity of the term ‘alienation’. It has another more familiar meaning (also intrasubjective) in the psychoanalytic tradition, where it refers to a sense of distance or non-recognition of some mental phenomenon as a real part of one’s psychic profile, for example when one is ‘living in denial’ (motivated by self-defensive instincts in reaction to terrible loss), or in repression due to trauma and resulting shame, or in the most extreme cases, dissociation between different personas operating in the same mind. Alienation in this sense is (a) an essentially emotional dynamic, usually involving very painful affective phenomena such as shame, and (b) essentially an adaptive response, or way of trying to cope with distress arising at least in part from external causes of frustration that seem unmasterable to the agent. Both these features indicate that psychoanalytic alienation is not associated with personal autonomy, and feature (b) suggests impairment of autonomy, given that ‘adaptive preferences’ and similar ‘sour grapes’ phenomena are commonly regarded as heteronymous (Dworkin 1988) or even as resulting from some form of oppression (Khader 2011). This explains why any conception of ‘wholeheartedness’ that seemed to recommend psychoanalytic alienation of some emotions should strike us as dubious. Frankfurt instead recommends volitional wholeheartedness, which will sometimes require volitional alienation of some first-order motives that do not fit with our deepest convictions. But without an account of volition’s qualitative difference, his references to ‘love’ and the ‘heart’ bred confusion. I have argued that we can repair these deficiencies in his hierarchical model of personal autonomy: the phenomenon of ‘projective motivation’, or resolve to set new ends and firm up our striving for goals in light of objective value-judgements, explains how a psychic state can both motivate (guiding the formation of specific intentions) and bear inherent personal authority. Volitional identification thus amounts to an evaluation-guided effort to shape our motives. But a deficiency of my book on the will (Davenport 2007) is that it ended up without the planned chapter(s) on emotions. I can hardly remedy that omission here, but a few quick and rough suggestions may help. First, I support the more cognitivist approaches to emotions as including spontaneous perceptions or perhaps ‘construals’ of values in situations (Roberts 2003; De Sousa 1987) as opposed to non-­cognitivist accounts. For Kierkegaard’s portrayal of Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or I helps teach us that the natural functions of emotions are

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(a) to disclose values in persons, events and the world at large and (b) to express those values for what they are (cf. Stocker 1996). When emotions are made to serve other purposes than this expressive telos, they can become sentimental (see Pugmire 2005) or serve as defencemechanisms (which Sartre mistakenly took to be their main function, rather than a deficient mode). Second, as a result, emotions provide one of the main inspirations for projective willing by operating as a route of access to values worth caring about – worth dedicating energies to defend, promote and/or communicate to others. Values revealed by emotional responses often ground caring. Third, emotions tend to unfold in processes with a temporal structure approximating towards narrative form (Goldie 2000: 13); because these processes are often mostly sub-reflective, they tend to be intimately involved in what I’ve called the associative connections that build up in personal narravives beyond the reach of our planning (Davenport 2012: 80–1). Fourth, certain emotions usually tend to go with caring about one type of object versus other types. A doctor is naturally happy to see her patient recover; a musician tends to be entranced by an especially intricate or difficult piece of music (especially in the genre of her specialty); a political reformer is likely to feel more than average indignation at injustices; and a scientist may experience heightened curiosity about the workings of nature. Perhaps this is because these practitioners are especially attuned to the values to which their personal projects and relationships are most responsive. Our attention to objects of care through willed effort tends to bring their features into clearer relief for us, though it may also bring us to appreciate new values that were previously ‘off our radar’ (Davenport 2007: 523–7). Fifth, this is closely related to the fact that certain emotions may be intentionally cultivated (or rooted out) as part of one’s particular cares; for example, constant irritation with young children does not go well with the calling of elementary education. Identifying with certain emotions is involved in devotion to many types of social roles, practices, projects and relationships they involve; for instance, friendship means feeling joy rather than envy for our friend’s good fortune. Certain emotions are integral to our goals, either as parts of them or as necessary means to them. But links between volition and emotion may also be due to social scripts for certain events and roles (a military commander is not supposed to cry, but a daughter must weep at her father’s funeral). And this is a juncture where many problems arise, some of which are relevant for cases like the Rat Man’s. In my view, then, emotions have a complex relation to the volitional



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phenomena that make personal autonomy possible; they do not come with agential authority built in, as do decisions and efforts of will that respond to (apparent) objective values; but their responsiveness to value makes emotions more than mere preferences. Emotions are, in short, more inherently apt for volitional uptake. Thus the natural tendency in the Romantic tradition, which we see also in Kierkegaard, to refer to these phenomena together in terms of ‘passionate’ engagement with actuality. But we need to distinguish them analytically, even if in real experience it is hard to draw a neat line between emotion and projective volition. Given all this, I can answer Lippitt’s critique as follows. First: assuming that the Rat Man’s love and hatred refer to emotional processes, he needs to achieve a unified set of higher-order volitions by facing this conflict and deciding where he stands. Second: moreover, a narrative conception of this volitional coherence better explains why agents like the Rat Man would fear their emotional conflict and seek to escape it by repression: the need for volitional unity impacts emotions that are in tension with one or more of our cares. Third: but emotional conflict does not amount to volitional conflict; there may be conditions in which emotional ambivalence is the only way of faithfully expressing the different values disclosed to us in our experience of another person or situation over time. Lippitt’s description of a ‘manageably torn’ Rat Man confirms that this is what he has in mind: in accepting his emotional ambivalence, he is ‘relating to the situation truthfully’ (p. 136). For volitional unity-3 to be sustainable, we need our emotions to register the goods and bads that are really there; therefore sometimes mixed feelings are actually needed for a volitionally unified narravive. And fourth: the range of values disclosed and expressed by well-functioning emotions will always be wider than those which we take up volitionally as grounds for our projects, relationships and commitments; there will be values that we acknowledge but do not make into deep personal concerns of ours, and values that stand in some tension with ones that have become the basis of even our deepest commitments. This is normal and healthy within limits, given the nature, functions and relationships among the will and our emotional capacities to respond to a plural and wide range of values. However, fifth: repression is a distortion of emotion; it tries to deny or ignore the importance of certain emotional experiences rather than coming to terms with the values they reveal or distort. Repression substitutes for doing the hard work of determining whether these emotions are actually warranted, and if so, whether one’s commitments should alter in that light or not. If the agent decides that some of his or her emotions should ultimately be ‘extruded as outlaws’,

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this could only be on the ground of discerning that their apparent basis was mistaken – in which case such radical rejection would heal rather than disturb the psyche. T H E 5 0 S W I F E A N D N A R R AT I V E I N T E G R AT I O N T H RO U G H F O R G I V E N E S S In sum, I agree that Frankfurt failed to distinguish clearly between wholeheartedness and repression; but they can be separated, though only with a workable distinction between emotions and volition. I may have to concede that, in this light, the term ‘wholeheartedness’ is not the best. I really need something like ‘whole-willed-ness’, but we are stuck with division or ambivalence of ‘heart’. I also agree with Velleman that Frankfurt was wrong to look for the ultimate source of our autonomous agency in a ‘personal essence’ established by volitional necessities (Velleman 2002: 91–2). But that was always more than wholeheartedness required (Davenport 2013). Moreover, Velleman’s critique of Frankfurt’s ‘motivational essence’ is different from mine: he argues that a ‘crowd man’ may exemplify autonomy, though his total conformism renders him ‘inauthentic’ (Velleman 2002: 97). I agree that one can act in personally autonomous ways most of the time without necessarily being an authentic person (in the existential sense). But the complete conformist is neither: for either he lacks higher-order volitions, or they are not based on strongly evaluative attitudes that adequately track axiological reality as opposed to mere convention. Autonomy is more than self-control in the service of some end, or even a single overriding end. It also requires sources that put us in touch with genuine goods, rather than manipulating us or coercing us to feel, think, or believe in certain ways. These complex source-conditions, which especially bear on the education and influences that shape us in our youth, are another crucial revision of Frankfurt’s model, beyond my conditions of projective motivation and strong evaluation. If your strong evaluations and subsequent efforts to pursue goals that you deem valuable (and to shape aspects of your personality in the process) largely result from brainwashing and implanted memories, then you are still not autonomous. This brings me to deep matters involved in Rudd’s discussion of the 1950s wife – a staple example in the autonomy literature since Marilyn Friedman’s challenge to Frankfurt’s hierarchical model (Friedman 1986; cf. the ‘Taliban woman’ case in Oshana 2006). Here’s my briefest solution: this type of agent’s higher-order volitions are manipulated by an oppressive culture that teaches her to despise her own creative



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potentials and become subservient to others. The emotions welling up from her subconscious that oppose the docile and narrow role with which she identifies point to something ‘authentic’ because they flow from alternative sources which can recognise important goods that are incorrectly denied by the ideology that seeds her conscious reflections. The lesson of such cases is not, as Friedman and Irving Thalberg suggested, that forces of the id or prereflective promptings of spontaneous urges are more authentic indicators of our true self (Thalberg 1978/1989) – though this diagnosis has been revived by Jonathan Lear (2011). Rather, the explanation is that (a) we probably have some natural capacities to become aware of certain goods (especially when exposed to evidence or examples of them) that only the most extreme influences can totally occlude, and (b) even when such awareness remains tacit rather than reflectively articulated, some of the agent’s emotions may be able to respond in kind. Thus emotional attunement to values not only provides crucial input for the will; it can also help us overcome impairments arising from other sources of our agency, especially those which inculcate false or overly narrow beliefs about values.1 Thus the problem for which some types of emotional ambivalence may be a constructive antidote is not volitional unity-3 but dysfunction in sources of evaluative insight and information that stem from oppression or trauma. A narratively stable set of life-ambitions and devotions cannot be built on distorted grounds, because the truth that one has been misled or manipulated will tend to ‘out’ in time. This analysis might also appear to furnish an answer to Lippitt’s toughest objection concerning forgiveness: ‘personal forgiveness’ of a wrongdoer who has not yet repented and thus cannot yet be trusted, or self-forgiveness that retains some reflexive blame for our misdeed is a volitional resolve that retains emotions in some tension because the negative ones keep us attentive to further potential for wrongdoing in the other or ourselves. But while that is on the right track, it is too simple by itself. I generally agree with Lippitt about the types of forgiveness, the dangers of forgiving too easily, the possibility of pre-emptive forgiveness of another person in hopes of reaching out to him for reconciliation (a theme much-stressed by Kierkegaard in Works of Love), and the importance of self-forgiveness under certain conditions (see Lippitt 2013, Chapter 8). For serious wrongs, some continuing sense of selfblame is needed for remorse to be real, even if it has faded into the background and is not the occurrent focus of my attentions, making room for more constructive thoughts (as Kierkegaard’s remarks on repentance in The Concept of Anxiety also suggest [CA 116–17/SKS 4,

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418–19]). But it seems harder to retain blame and resentment as active emotions in a relationship if I am really forgiving another person, as opposed to simply ceasing to dwell on feelings of resentment or setting aside desires for revenge. This may be one reason why remorse and restorative actions by the wrongdoer are so important for most cases of forgiveness, and even anticipatory forgiveness done from neighbour-love seems incomplete without this eventual response from the other. This asymmetry may be explained by the direct way in which I experience narrative unity (at different levels) or its opposite in my own life, for which I’m also more directly responsible. I can forgive another person without wishing to keep a sense of her guilt fresh; but in my own case, I must retain a sense of guilt for past wrongs as touchstones to remind me of my weak points and inspire me to restorative action. This is what Captain Kirk means in Star Trek: The Final Frontier when he rejects an offer to achieve an inauthentic peace of mind through forgetting all his ‘pain and guilt’; for they are a crucial part of what ‘make us who we are.’ Our past wrongs and our responses to them are quite significant nodes woven into our narravive; we should not want to be entirely ‘free’ of them because that would be to lose significant parts of ourselves. In short, an ethically informed identity is always in part making amends for its past, whatever its current pursuits, especially when it attains whole-willed-ness. As finite and flawed beings, the best autonomy we can attain may thus actually require profound forms of mixed feelings about ourselves. E P I C N A R R AT I V E S T R U C T U R E A S I N T E G R A L T O THE EXISTENTIAL TELOS This response to Lippitt may seem to make it harder to answer Walter Wietzke’s wider-ranging objection, because I have clearly accepted that conceptions of narrative development and unity cannot do all the work in explaining the superiority of the ethical over aesthetic lifeorientations in Kierkegaard’s account of the stages. More generally, in addition to narravive, we need conceptions of willing, emotions, character, epistemic sources of access to values, ethical normativity itself, and ultimately even time-passage to give an adequate account of personal autonomy. Wietzke argues that a conception of the natural human telos is another independent ingredient. He explicitly critiques Rudd’s analysis, arguing that but for an ethically defined telos, and A’s resulting engagement with ethical considerations (without which he could not be self-deceiving), simply comparing their narrative



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structures would not reveal the superiority of ethically-oriented over aesthetic life: ‘the reasons of the ethical are already in place for A as motivating reasons before he feels compelled to organize his life in a narrative proper to the ethical’ and so ‘narrative itself does not justify the choice of ethical existence’ (p. 100). This is an equally basic challenge to my view, because I have also held that narrative unity-2 and ultimately unity-3 distinguish the ethical orientation from all forms of aesthetic life-views and demonstrate the superiority of ethical life for realising the telos of selfhood. In my view, even without bringing in the religious requirements of faith, that telos as understandable on the basis of immanent (non-revelational) knowledge is partly defined in terms of distinctive forms of narrative continuity. My past work has not been sufficiently clear on this key point, and I thank Wietzke for prompting me to clarify it (however briefly) now. I have referred to the sort of telos I defend as an existential telos to indicate that it is not a kind-essence but refers instead to the radical individuality of (finite, mortal) personhood (Davenport 2007: 432). Kierkegaard’s conception of selves in The Sickness unto Death requires this distinction: personhood is not an animal kind, and individual persons are not merely material instances of a substance (Davenport 2013). The individuality of persons is rooted in their temporalised free will and alterity (unpossessibility or, from the perspective of faith, being created in the image of God), and so their existential telos involves the development of what Kierkegaard calls ‘spirit’. Nevertheless, incarnate persons share a natural function rooted in their transcendent form, and are capable of flourishing in ways that always involve their biological form as well. Yet this highly formal telos needs further specification; all of the following are possible first steps in that direction: 1. effective agency, i.e. planning agency that experiences enough interpersonal recognition and success in outward control of one’s affairs to avoid demoralization and instil a sense of basic competence. 2. personal autonomy, i.e. planning agency, plus the exercises of ‘spiritual’ volition that form and sustain cares, leading to narrative unity-2 in our practical identity, along with kinds of interpersonal influence and cognitive powers that furnish minimally sound bases for willing. 3. wholeheartedness, or purity of heart, understood as volitional unity-3 as explained above. 4. existential authenticity, i.e. full personal autonomy (wholeheartedness) plus critical originality in the articulation of one’s ends, the integrity to stick by one’s devotions in the face of difficulty, and the

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sincerity to express openly the values on which they are based (see Davenport forthcoming). 5. a robustly meaningful life, i.e. a narravive with fully sustainable and cumulatively developing themes that give it a sense of integrating the richest types of first-personal significance that are possible for human persons through engagement with real values in social contexts of interpersonal recognition. I see these as increasingly demanding first-level specifications of our existential telos, so that the last one includes everything implied by the former conditions but not the converse. Now an ideal answer to Wietzke’s challenge would show that a) our existential telos demands a kind of unity that is essentially narratival in form; and b) that the logic of narrative structure itself points towards this type of narrative unity involved in our telos, rightly understood, as its highest type. The biconditional formed by a)↔b) would show that the telos is essentially narratival, not conceivable independently of ideals of narrative unity. While an argument for this biconditional would need evidence from empirical psychology (and more space than I have here), it would be easiest to make this case if the last option (5) is the correct characterisation of our existential telos: we do not function perfectly according to our ‘quasi-nature’ as persons unless we achieve a life that is fully engaged with the highest values to which our minds have access, and the most demanding ones promotable or expressible by our actions. For the accumulating sense of the meaningfulness of one’s activities, passive experiences and relationships over a lifetime recommended by (5) suggests narratival structure more directly than do self-governance, planning, caring, or integrity in sticking to one’s principles and sincerity in expressing one’s values. Though I have argued that all these volitional phenomena make most sense when understood as aspects or qualifications of a narravive, the developmental connections and thematic continuities that make for a unified narrative are directly linked to robust significance. In brief defence of (5) then, let me clarify this conception of our existential telos. A life that is fully meaningful to the one living it has a sense of encompassing breadth; it is the opposite of the nagging sense that something more profoundly significant is missing in our life. As Susan Wolf argues, first-personal ‘meaning arises from loving objects worthy of love’; caring deeply is not enough if the target is trivial or fleeting, like smoking pot or doing crossword puzzles all day (Wolf 2010: 8–9). What Charles Taylor means by a sense of ‘fullness’ that comes from engaging with the transcendent goods provides one partial



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analysis of robust meaning (Taylor 2007: 5–16). Yet I do not conceive full meaning as the completion of a ‘lack’ but rather as a sense of discovering activities of types that most fully employ the potentials of personality, engaging our latent capacity for ‘nobility’. Thus, while it is a perfectionist ideal, it is not a maximising ideal (as if we could identify a maximum quantity of life-meaning); rather it concerns a qualitative level of meaning that could be reached in different ways. It is also not a directly pursuable good. The first-personal meaningfulness of a life to the agent living it is largely a by-product of pursuing goods and relations with other persons for their own sake, which is why our ultimate end is not eudaimonia according to our natural kind. As Wolf says, meaning depends on connection with something ‘other than oneself’, (2010: 19), and thus the ‘things one loves doing [or serving] must be good in some independent way’ (2010: 27). The most meaningful fulfilment depends on devotion to ‘something whose value extends beyond its value for us’ as satisfying our subjective desires (2010: 29) – yet this is missed by the aesthetic agent Wietzke describes as having a coherent life-view and personal narrative. If his willed commitment to aesthetic values gives the heroic aesthete some continuity type-2, then he has effectively taken the crucial step towards appreciation of goods in their alterity or independence from his given inclinations. This requires that the objective significance of such values is at least partly appreciable by other persons (with the relevant experience), which in turn shows that the full significance of aesthetic or pre-ethical goods depends on their (actual or potential) relations to the common goods of persons. Ethical norms and ideals arising from the importance of these common goods provide a standard for assessing other goals and ways of pursuing them, and thus a deeper basis for linking our cares together and guiding their development over time. So our existential telos includes more than a mere aggregation of the distinct lines of effort and concern that make for unity-2. The meaningfulness-to-us of the ongoing cares and projects established by our central commitments is qualitatively raised through the complex form of coherence among them that I have called unity-3. It is further enhanced by the sense of novelty, creativity and greater attention to articulating plural values that defines existential authenticity. And even then, further layers of meaning are added by the cumulative modifications made by associative connections, ironies, unexpected wonders, varieties of experiences and the haunting sense they generate that yet more significances always lie beyond our grasp. This interpretation of our telos suggests that the most robust level of life-meaning requires the highest level of narrative integration, as per,

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a) our telos is the polar opposite of the sense of existential emptiness that T. S. Eliot tried to capture in his poem about the ‘Hollow men’ who circle around an ugly tree for no reason, going nowhere. But what of the converse, b) does narrative integration also necessarily give rise to such robust meaning? Wietzke’s aesthetic hero may achieve narrative continuity-2 for some time, but are there higher sorts of diachronic holism that require characters who engage innovatively with the highest values and develop their cares over time in light of resulting experiences and compounding layers of thematic connections across different settings in their narravive? Perhaps a defence of this idea that narrative form is only completed in such robust meaning could begin from the fact that the earliest stories in human culture after the cosmogonic myths are heroic epics, which attempt to portray essential features of human personhood. In such stories, the hero undertakes a series of tasks involving journeys and contests, culminating in a great quest to achieve some goal vital to the common good. Like our early adolescent awakening to selfhood, the epic story begins in media res, and the preliminary tasks are necessary to discovering the need for the main quest. The hero undergoes a series of tests, often involving adversaries; receives guidance and aid; and develops better resources of character and strength of will as a result, even if he ultimately faces impossible odds.2 Most epics (such as the Odyssey, the Aenead, Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings) also require the hero to descend into an underworld from which he emerges transformed, because this is also a necessary descent into the self, a journey of self-discovery. Thus, contrary to critics of narrative identity theories for whom ‘the quest’ is a childish oversimplification of the grey areas and tensions of a mature human life, epics actually have plots that are full of postponements, digressions, complicating subplots, indirection and subtle flaws even in the best characters. In this way, epics are like meaningful human lives. In fact, normally in epic narratives, only an indirect route towards the ultimate goal stands any chance of working, and often this is a key point the hero must learn along the way. But for involuntary diversion from a direct attempt, he would have met a swift demise. And sometimes the forward march seems to stop completely in what literary theorists call a ‘pastoral truancy’, where the hero recovers and discovers new values through previously unknown wonders. Most of these pastoral episodes are not mere traps to escape, like the Island of Circe or the Lotus Eaters, or the siren-like Willow in Tolkien’s Old Forest. Instead, the hero receives vital insight and aid during his truancies: for example, Frodo benefits enormously from the apparent ‘delays’ in



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his quest caused by stopping with Tom Bombadil, later in Lórien, and finally with Faramir in Henneth Annûn. Much of the meaning that the hero experiences in his development depends on apparent digressions, on obstacles that divert rather than give way, and the settings discovered along this crooked path. Even more of the meaning depends on companions met along the way; often without them, he could not overcome at all (even Beowulf ultimately fits this pattern in his final contest with the dragon; he is no lone Nietzschean superman after all). In these ways, heroic epics teach us that life-meaning is more about the journey, in all its variegated aspects, than the destination. When the descent into the underworld/inner self is actually more important than the prior goal (think of Bilbo’s descent in The Hobbit), epics show us that self-discovery and self-shaping are process-goods that can only be realised in directly pursuing other noble ends beyond these. Epic form thus aspires to the most complex and layered kind of narrative unity, showing the connections between the elements needed for a noble life. It thus suggests that the particularly strong narrative unity of a heroic life depends on the same conditions that give rise to lives of the most robust personal meaning (which is thesis b). For the development of epic narrative is driven by continuities in theme that arise from responding to a call, accepting burdens. The hero’s commitment deepens as the plot advances through all the fits and restarts and reroutings; what may seem at first like a change of purpose is shown to be a better specification or articulation of the ultimate goal. Probably this is what MacIntyre meant when he wrote that our telos, ‘the good life for man’, is partly constituted by seeking a better understanding of what ‘the good life for man’ really is (1984: 219). Of course, real human life can be rich in stable and growing meaning without being focused on anything like a quest of epic proportions; but it still requires kinds of thematic unity we find in (effective) heroic epics. The protagonist of a life-story may begin as careless rather than heroic, but she must discover something noble, inspiring, or precious and worthy of preserving if she is to experience anything more than narcissistic self-attention and entertaining distraction, which end in boredom and the hollowness that contrasts with a sense of integrity maintained over time. Yet even if the protagonist achieves unity-2 by heroic commitment to a (narrowly conceived) pre-ethical goal, its dependence on a wider set of common goods and ideals of justice becomes apparent: the dedicated pursuit of some artistic work, or scientific discovery, or historical research, or even family-raising, depends on a wider set of shared goods and communities they sustain, which bring the regulative ethical norms to salience. Epic narrative thus helps us to see that

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all our personal projects and loves must be rooted in commitment to ethical goods that can regulate and integrate our first-order cares. The devoted aesthete with unity-2 lacks this deeper undercurrent of spiritual strength on which the stronger unity of epic narratives depend. T H E H I G H E S T N A R R AT I V E U N I T Y I S R E C E I V E D B Y G R AC E , B U T M U S T B U I L D O N G O O D WO R K S This sketch of a two-sided response to Wietzke’s challenge suggests that ethical commitments yield a more meaning-generating form of narrative development in life because ethical values have a transcendental significance: their importance becomes salient through earnest engagement with other sorts of values. Of course, an agent who recognises this may not yet have any motive or personal goal that ethical goods can promote: ethical reasons may remain external to her present ‘motivational set’. On my reading of Kierkegaard, we can projectively motivate ourselves to care about such reasons; this is a further point of disagreement which I will not try to resolve here. But it leads to a question raised by Eleanor’s Helms’ wonderful contribution, which concerns the limits of even the most heroic will. I am largely sympathetic with most of Helms’ points, though a few clarifications are needed. In particular, it should now be clear why ‘peripeteia’ are necessary to the complex unity of epic form as a paradigm of unity-3. Helms’ claim that the reader must be open to disruption of expectations and new discoveries is verified in the winding arc of the epic hero’s indirect trajectory. By analogy, the peripeteia in a real human narravive need not be random wanderings from one spontaneous interest to the next source of stimulus; they can be part of the hero’s ongoing attempt to articulate her true goals: ‘Her sense of how she is related to the end must be continuously revised as she comes to understand the expected ending in new ways’ (p. 118). I seem to differ from Helms only on holding, with Rudd, that we have substantial abilities to work to bring about ‘coherence and continuity in life’ through a developing understanding of what our projects and cares should be. For Kierkegaard’s silentio, the strong form of unity-3 brought about through infinite resignation is something that human persons can achieve through their own volitional efforts and choices – even if from a fully Christian perspective, even the ability to will the Good in truth (i.e. purity of heart) depends on accepting grace. We are not limited merely to hoping for an ending that will give retrospective unity to our narravive, although caring about finite and fragile goods in the temporal world means that our practical identity is necessarily affected



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by the success or failure of our endeavours, the external results of our strivings. This explains our need for religious faith in an eschatological good that is beyond our ability to plan or bring about. From my perspective then, the miraculous kind of ending (or ‘turn’) that gives our life a continuity ‘received from elsewhere’ (p. 116) refers to what I have called unity-4. But, while this ultimate fulfilment through ‘eucatastrophe’ enables a level of narravive unity in which we can only have faith, such an ending would not be unifying or experienced as adding ultimate meaning to our story if we had not already worked towards unity-3: ethical willing purified in infinite resignation must precede and be preserved in faith. Helms’ own analysis indicates this by noting cases in Kierkegaard’s work where an apparently happy ending seems utterly artificial because the prior arc of the narrative has not prepared for it. The flower’s immortality is ad hoc; Emmeline’s character lacks volitional coherence and so the conclusion of her romance has ‘no relation to the beginning’. So Helms is entirely correct that ‘Literary unity demands that once a eucatastrophe happens, it must be accepted as part of the story rather than as an arbitrary whim of the author’. But for it to make sense as integral to the story, the miraculous good must build on the ethical efforts of the protagonists, fulfilling their earnest strivings and related emotions of deepest hope. This is why a happy ending for a merely aesthetic character is not experienced as a eucatastrophe, but only as an interesting ‘coincidence’, or a comic turn of chance (FT 83–6/SKS 4, 173–6). In real life, as in literary narrative, the joyful unity of fulfilled faith also depends on the self’s efforts to achieve volitional wholeheartedness through ethically grounded striving: unity-4 preserves unity-3 within it. Although much of this is implicit, because an ethical hero must be ‘outwardly’ focused on goods independent of her own fulfilment, unity-3 also requires the ability to articulate a sense of what our life amounts to, as Rudd has said (see Helms, pp. 123–4, note 3). So we are not merely passive witnesses to the final religious unification of our narravive. Similarly, even pre-eucatastrophic experiences of religious ‘transfiguration’, which Helms rightly describes as unanticipated events that deeply affect the characters beyond their power to control, require an active response. Sitting above my desk is a small copy of Lewis Bowman’s haunting image of Christ’s transfiguration; it depicts an event beyond depiction that had a meaning and effect transcending the apostles’ ability to comprehend it. And yet they had to struggle with it, to try to work out what it meant and how it had changed them. The shocking experience of transfiguration cannot lead to a more unified narravive without the hero’s active participation as well. If the receiver

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merely quails or hides or reacts in demonic rebellion, the miraculous opportunity afforded by transfiguration may be lost. All that said, I am indebted to Helms for pointing out the significance of transfiguration-moments in religious narratives. Transfigurations may occur at multiple points along a person’s path prior to the eucatastrophic fulfilment, which is a more complete transfiguration (closer in that way to the final transfiguration of death). Epic narratives often feature such moments, but the epic genre is too limited by its immanent, human-centred focus to portray correctly their deeper religious significance. That is why the epic hero’s story can end in tragedy without the consolation of faith (consider Beowulf). Epic form has presented unity-3 in its strongest light, offering it as a paradigm for a noble human existence even without faith. But ultimately the significance achievable through ethical striving to the point of infinite resignation is not enough. We still feel something still missing in such a life, something in which we can only have faith through response to revelation and transfiguring experiences. And this reveals that our existential telos transcends unity-3 in the ethical stage, and really lies in unity-4. N OT E S 1. This also explains the case of Huck Finn recognising Jim’s humanity against his own ‘better judgment’ (much discussed since Arpaly 2003). 2. I base this structure loosely on W. H. Auden’s analysis in his essay on Tolkien and quest heroism (Auden 1962). But Auden’s analysis includes fairy-tale quests and thus does not focus explicitly on epic form.

10  Non-Narrative Protestant Goods: Protestant Ethics and Kierkegaardian Selfhood MATIAS MØL DALSGAARD

How are selfhood and narrativity related in Kierkegaard’s thought? The present paper is concerned with this question. More precisely I shall try to describe how ‘the good life’ or ‘the good way of being’ of the individual self in Kierkegaard is or is not related to narrativity. My approach to the question of selfhood and narrativity in Kierkegaard is normative rather than theoretical: I shall not so much discuss Kierkegaard’s ‘theory of the self’ as Kierkegaard’s ‘ethics of the self’ and how this ethics relates to narrativity. By narrativity, I mean the individual’s ability to give a more or less unified and comprehensive account of who he or she is: what kind of life he or she is living (with what past and what future) and how present activities fit into the overall narrative of his or her life. I do not work with a rigid definition of ‘narrativity’ but link the notion to the ability to give an account of oneself and of one’s situation. This ‘weak definition’ should suffice for the particular discussion of this chapter, which will consider how the very capacity to narrate oneself relates to Kierkegaard’s ethics of the self. TAY L O R ’ S H E R M E N E U T I C A L A P P R OA C H Methodologically my investigation of the Kierkegaardian self adheres to the ‘historical-hermeneutical-ethical’ notion of self and selfhood that is found in Charles Taylor’s thought. Taylor is often viewed as one of the modern fathers of the ‘narrative turn’ in thinking on the self. For Taylor, being a self means to live and to fail or succeed vis-à-vis historical notions of the good. In the introduction to Sources of the Self Taylor writes about his project and philosophical standpoint: I want to explore various facets of what I will call the ‘modern identity’. To give a good first approximation of what this means would be to say that it

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involves tracing various strands of our modern notion of what it is to be a human agent, a person, a self. But pursuing this investigation soon shows that you can’t get very clear about this without some further understanding of how pictures of the good have evolved. Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes. (Taylor 1989: 3)

Following this line of thought I have previously investigated what I call ‘the Protestant Self’ (Dalsgaard 2012). I have investigated the notions of being and failing or succeeding as a self (or as a human being) within the Lutheran Protestant tradition. The purpose of this investigation has been to consider in general how certain modern notions of ‘successful’ or ‘authentic’ selfhood are conditioned by this tradition. I have also tried to show how Kierkegaard’s notion of the self belongs in this tradition. This chapter adheres to the same historical understanding of selfhood as being shaped by historical traditions, and of Kierkegaard’s particular view of selfhood as being shaped by the Protestant tradition. Unlike what, for example, Anthony Rudd (2012: 144 n.52) has argued, I consider the Protestant notions of the good in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of self to be so deeply intertwined that the Kierkegaardian self cannot meaningfully be analysed or understood without taking its Protestant heritage into consideration. If one claims that inscribing selfhood in a historical tradition – and to analyse selfhood in terms of a tradition’s ‘picture of the good’ as Taylor puts it – is to ‘narrativise’ the self, then I might represent a narrativist view on the self. But what concerns me is the fact that the very tradition in question, that is, the Lutheran Protestant tradition, contains notions of the good that can hardly be described as ‘narrative goods’. This tradition puts tasks on a person that put him in a position where not he, but ultimately God – a God who is, furthermore, a God who is not operating at the level of human reason and understanding – is the one ‘narrating’ or knowing the narration of a person’s life. KIERKEGAARD’S GOOD Two dimensions of the Christian Protestant tradition’s notion of the good for human life in particular – dimensions that are logically connected to each other – appear to play a defining role in Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘the good way of living for humans’. One is the demand for completeness, that is, the demand for a full and unified will. The other is the Protestant rejection of good works, which is fundamentally a rejection of the idea that someone is capable of making himself good or of making his will good. A person is an unsolvable problem to himself:



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He does not will truly, and he does not have the resources to fix his corrupted will – or at least it remains uncertain how the will is supposed to become whole and good. The problem of the will – in general referred to as the problem of fully willing to be oneself or fully willing to live one’s life – is present in most of Kierkegaard’s work. In particular one could mention the critique of the aesthete in Either/Or and the analysis of what being and willing to be oneself means in The Sickness unto Death. We also have the analysis of the obedient mind in the upbuilding texts on the lily and the bird. The complete will is here being understood as unconditional obedience vis-à-vis the life one has been given – an obedience that we observe and learn from the non-reflexive, ‘simple minded’ (enfoldige) lily and bird. And we find the famous words in the ‘occasional discourse’ (or Purity of Heart) that purity of heart is to will one thing – or in Danish simply to ‘will one’ (at ville eet). The purity of the heart is the unified will, whereas despair – the fallen state of sin – is the state of the divided or fragmented will. The sinner does not will fully; he lives in opposition to the life and self he has been given. The problem of ‘good works’ on the other hand shows itself in a number of different and not so straightforward ways in the authorship. In general one can say that it shows itself through the insistence upon existential uncertainty, that is, the insistence that Christianity is not something that the Christian can ‘get over with’ through certain kinds of activities. The tasks Christianity assigns to humans cannot be fully answered and met either through certain kinds of moral conduct or through philosophical speculation or anything else. Whereas Luther was primarily fighting against ‘works’, Kierkegaard’s fight is primarily against certain modes of rationality, in particular the ‘speculative thinking’ of his age. In the Postscript and in Philosophical Fragments we find the most elaborate philosophical accounts in Kierkegaard’s work of why faith – and Christian life – essentially is not something that can be solved or captured in thinking. Faith is facing a paradox, a ‘cross for the thought’, and the leap of faith is an existential act different from and not (necessarily) consequent upon the act of thinking or reflection. Whereas Luther was primarily fighting works (that is, not the works as such, but the notion that they could be known as good with any certainty – here of course the main enemy being the indulgence industry of the Papal Church), he basically shared the negative notion of human reason vis-à-vis the tasks of faith that we find in Kierkegaard. For instance, in the opening lines of his commentary on Romans, Luther writes:

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The sum and substance of this letter is: to pull down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and righteousness of the flesh (i.e., of whatever importance they may be in the sight of men and even in our own eyes), no matter how heartily and sincerely they may be practiced, and to implant, establish, and make large the reality of sin (however unconscious we may be of its existence). (Luther 1961: 3)

‘Wisdom’ – which would in general mean pagan (Greek, Aristotelian) philosophy – is of the flesh. It is a human capacity, and no human capacity, be this capacity intellectual or related to good works, helps the human being before God or in terms of God’s justification. The insistence upon sin in this sense is a consistent insistence upon a fundamental human incapability in matters of true existential and religious importance. T H E H I S T O RY O F T H E G O O D W I L L Considered historically, the problem of the will and the rejection of the idea that human skills or capacities should be adequate for purposes of justification and salvation appear to be part of the same problem. At least, this will be my claim, and I shall in the following indicate what I consider a reasonable history of the will – in order to add perspective to the tasks of the will as they come about in Kierkegaard. The very definition of person as will – as this comes about in early Christianity in opposition to the definition of person-as-reason which had been the standard in classical Greek thought – implies that a person is not himself capable of completing the most fundamental religious tasks. Will becomes relevant because one does not know or understand, but still has to follow God. The Biblical God is a God whose thoughts and ways are not human thoughts and ways (Isaiah 55: 8). This God calls for obedience, not for understanding. And when the human will in early Christianity becomes conceptualised (voluntas) and problematised, first and foremost in Augustine’s Confessions, it is as the ‘organ’ for obedience and not for cognition or understanding. Will, in other words, and the act of will, become relevant and required within the framework of a certain kind of cosmology – namely, the cosmology of the Biblical tradition. In opposition to the Greek model where human and cosmic reason were considered to be of the same nature, in Biblical cosmology human reason is not congruent with God’s reason. Therefore humans cannot rely on reason in their relation to God. This understanding of the nature and origin of the human will as defined within the Christian tradition is presented by Albrecht Dihle in



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his famous Sather Lectures, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity. I follow Dihle in this present brief history of the will. He writes: Yahveh’s [. . .] thoughts, plans, arrangements, and intentions, are certainly wise, salutary, perfect or – to use a philosophical term – perfectly rational, but they are far beyond the understanding of man. Thus will is the only means man has of responding to God’s intention as it is made clear in his orders and commandments. (Dihle 1982: 17)

Dihle argues that no classical Greek concept for human action was adequate for the description of the kind of action, that is, obedience, that was required of humans vis-à-vis­ the Biblical God. In classical Greek thought human action was primarily described in rational terms, and if not rational, then as the opposite – irrational, emotional, passionate and so on. Such a distinction between rational and irrational is not present and, more importantly, not relevant in the Biblical understanding of obedient or disobedient action: [T]he Old Testament provides no possibility of distinguishing, by means of terminology and without information given by the particular context, between human intention resulting from intellectual activity and intention originating from instinct or emotion. No layer of Biblical Hebrew offers psychological terms to denote the difference. (Dihle 1982: 17)

When Greek thought met the Biblical tradition in early Christian theology and Christian philosophy, a new terminology was required in order to describe the kind of human action required of the Christian. A new philosophy needed new concepts. (This is a very abbreviated version of Dihle’s argument, of course.) The existing terminology of Greek anthropology and philosophy was inadequate for describing the Christian act of obedience or disobedience before God. Will – first as the Latin voluntas – was introduced as a concept, and this concept did not distinguish between the rational and irrational in human conduct. Rather it aimed at describing the full orientation of the person in ­obedience – or in disobedience. The concept of will aims at a total description of a person’s orientation. In this sense, a person is his will (this is expressed clearly in Augustine’s reflections on the will in Confessions Books VII–VIII). As a concept of action, the will is less refined than what was found in the classical Greek tradition. Aspects of what was later called will were distinguished in Greek by terms like boulesis, prohairesis, hekousion, thelema, thelesis, but no unifying notion of the will existed in ancient Greek. The will – still following Dihle – had not yet been ‘discovered’. When the will was finally ‘discovered’ in early Christian philosophy, it was not so much a discovery as it was a new way of describing humanity – of describing a person in his totality and in his entire orientation in obedience or lack thereof.

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When I claim that the definition of humans as will and the Lutheran rejection of good works are part of the same question, it is because the demand for obedience that – on this account – results in the definition of humans as will is the demand for a ‘blind obedience’. This obedience is to a God whose reason is not human reason, and a person has no means by which he can control the grace of this God. (Max Weber in essence makes the same observations in his description of the Biblical ‘disenchantment’ of the world [Schluchter 2009].) But furthermore, when the will is not a faculty among other faculties in man, but instead a description of a person in his totality, then humanity as such becomes problematic, and a person becomes a problem to himself, in a manner which was not the case in the Greek model where reason competed with emotion or passion. When someone fails in the Biblical model, he, and nothing other than he, is the problem. When one fails in the Greek model, it is not the person as such who fails, but reason that loses to emotion. And his reason is fundamentally considered to be good and congruent with the divine or cosmic world order. Again, humanity is not as such a problem in the Greek model, but the good that a human is (reason) can become corrupted by something evil (emotion, passion, desire, matter, flesh). N O N - N A R R AT I V E I D E A L S Where does this leave us in terms of considering the relationship between selfhood and narrativity in Kierkegaard? Of course it can be called a ‘grand Biblical or Christian narrative’ that one responds to a God whose thoughts and ways are not human. But still, the requirement to human ‘will-action’ within this tradition is something other than narrating or knowing. Willing is an act in and with the full person, and with a person who does not really know. I suggest that we read Kierkegaard’s work on the will in this context. Such a reading might not eliminate theoretical claims that the human being has a tendency to narrativise or necessarily lives by narratives. But what I am concerned with is how the ‘good will’ or the ‘good way of being a human being’ within Kierkegaard’s Christian Protestant perspective cannot be described sufficiently through categories of narrativity. Identifying the character of the ‘good will’ or the ‘good way of being’ in Kierkegaard is, however, no simple task and can only be done indirectly. Most of Kierkegaard’s authorship is negative in the sense that it primarily describes failed attempts at meeting the Christian standard of the good. The philistine, the aesthete, the ethical character and the different variations on these characters and their outlook on life (their



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livsanskuelser) all embody failed ways of living vis-à-vis the Christian ideal or standard. They only negatively and indirectly point to the Christian good. This methodological negativity is primarily prevalent in the pseudonymous authorship. In the non-pseudonymous or ‘upbuilding authorship’ we do, however, find more direct indications of what it would mean for the individual person to live or actualise the Christian good. For instance, I consider the description of joy in the discourse The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air to be such a description of the actualised Christian good, or of the actualised good will. What is characteristic of joy as described in this discourse is that the state of joy – which we should learn from the bird and the lily – is characterised as an unconditional obedience that is not dependent on any specific self-narrative on the part of the joyful. Joy is a wholehearted will to be (oneself) in the present regardless of the self-narratives of the joyful. In joy one rather forgets one’s self-narratives, concerned as these are with one’s past and future. Kierkegaard is referring here to Matthew 6 which reads: ‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them [. . .] Therefore do not worry, saying “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” [. . .] So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today’ (Matt. 6: 26–34). Kierkegaard then explains the state of non-worry for tomorrow as the state of joy: ‘What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself [. . .] being truly present to oneself, is this “today”, this to be today, truly to be today’ (WA, 39/SKS 11, 43; trans. modified). This joy that is ‘to be truly present to oneself’ is to be learned from the lily and the bird. Because the lily and the bird are never ‘living for tomorrow’, but always only today carrying out their tasks – of singing and flowering. The reason why the lily and the bird are never living for tomorrow, is that they are not making plans for themselves, but only and fully living God’s plan. They are in other words not self-narrating as the human being is, but are rather being narrated by God. They fully embody the three interconnected qualities – joy, obedience and silence – which are the main concepts of the discourse. This they do and can do because they are not self-reflexive creatures as the human being is. It is on this account the basic flaw – the first sin – of the human being that it does not only listen to and follow God’s plan, but self-reflexively makes plans for itself. The human being is more occupied with its own plans than with God’s plan. For the human being, existing in time, the failure to be ‘truly today’ due to the worry of tomorrow is not any incidental

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failure, nor a disease that can be cured, but the basic human condition. The simple and unified will of the lily and the bird is an ideal that is unattainable for the existing human being, but that is being preached nonetheless, first by Jesus and now by Kierkegaard (and, of course, by so many other Christian preachers). In other words, the ‘ought’ that is being preached does not imply a ‘can’. It is an ought that is upbuilding, it has an upbuilding effect on the person who hears or reads the sermon, but it does not presuppose that the listener in any straightforward sense can become like the bird or the lily. This ideal of a unified will following a plan that is not its own ­invention – and maybe not even understandable on its own terms – is related to the Biblical cosmic model of a God whose thoughts and ways are not human thoughts and ways but who nevertheless demands obedience from the human being. What this means in terms of the nature of the joy that is being demanded, that is, the non-worried obedience, is that this joy is not dependent on the account that the person himself is capable of giving of his life. As an ideal, joy transcends what the person can account for. The person is not joyful because his life follows a certain trajectory or narrative, but – ideally – in his given life unconditionally. The Christian hope, I would argue, could also be mentioned as an example of the transcendent nature that the Biblical cosmic model lends to human phenomena. Hope, the real Christian hope as described in The Sickness unto Death which is essentially a book on hopelessness, that is, despair, is a hope in spite of everything. It is a hope, not for another life, but for this very life despite its pain and seeming hopelessness. Speaking in Kierkegaard’s idealistic vocabulary, this hope is an import of possibility into a given necessity, an import of the infinite into the finite. It is a hope that even this finite and troublesome life is a part of God’s plan, a God whose plans are not known, but which one should nevertheless trust. The paradoxical and the absurd shows itself in such idealised phenonema in as much as they are not dependent on the human understanding or account of life. Hope and joy have their existence despite what is – humanly speaking – understood or accounted for. It might be possible to argue for the relevance of a transcendent account of such human phenonema also outside a Biblical cosmic model. Joy, hope, trust, love, courage and like phenonema might require some notion of transcendence or of the infinite if they are to be accounted for meaningfully at all. This would be my suggestion. But this is a different kind of discussion that I shall not pursue here.

11  Narrativity, Aspect and Selfhood MICHAEL J. SIGRIST

I Contemporary discussions about narrativity and selfhood commonly make reference to Alastair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and to the work of Charles Taylor from the seventies and eighties, especially Sources of the Self. Paul Ricoeur’s writings on the subject also figure prominently, and more recently, Marya Schechtman’s The Constitution of Selves has powerfully shaped the terms of the debate. Each of these philosophers defends a narrative model of personal identity as an alternative to physicalist or embodied theories, on the one hand, and psychological theories on the other. These latter approaches have tried to understand selfhood either by appeal to a self-identical subject (be it the body, brain, or soul) persisting through change and time, or by appeal to some appropriate sort of causal sequencing. On either model, selfhood is something given at a time, whereas the narrativists – as I’ll call them – claim that selfhood is the sort of thing that can only occur over time. Being a self requires having a life and it’s impossible to have a life all at once. Taylor, echoing Martin Heidegger, refers to the ‘inescapable temporal structure of being in the world: that from a sense of what we have become [. . .] we project our future being’ (Taylor 1989: 47). Schechtman draws on Christine Korsgaard’s idea that just as being a self at any given time is a unity of many parts – desires, values, interests, goals – it is equally a unity of such parts over time (Korsgaard 1996). My past and future are parts of me. Narrativists claim that the best model we have for understanding how a self holds itself together in this way over time is found in narratives. In this paper I connect this narrativist thesis to the role that death plays in Heidegger’s account of selfhood in Being and Time (Heidegger 2001). My claim is that to be a self is to be an event with the kind 169

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of temporal structure expressed in narratives. Furthermore, since we humans do not just happen to be selves but take ourselves to be selves, selfhood entails taking oneself up in terms of this temporal structure. Death is the ground for this particular mode of temporality that Dasein – Heidegger’s term for the way that we exist – is. Death is not just the ending of a life, but that by virtue of which one’s life as whole is one’s own. An example will help to clarify what the narrativists are getting at. Suppose I find myself at the local market purchasing some mussels. What makes it such that I am the same person now as the person who, that morning, developed a desire for mussels and began planning on them for dinner? On the narrativist model, I am the same person due to the fact that my having formed the desire for mussels this morning renders what I am doing now (purchasing the mussels) intelligible, not just to a third-party observer, but to myself. To be a self is to have one’s present structured by one’s past and future in this way. I left home for the store in order to purchase mussels because I developed a hunger for them this morning and so that I can prepare them for this evening’s supper. These ‘in order to’, ‘because’ and ‘so that’ relations are not causal, but narrative relations. An effect, once it is fully in effect, becomes independent of its cause. Once the ball has been struck by the bat, it is a matter of indifference to the ball’s trajectory what happens to the bat. That is not the case with my mussel dinner. If I were to forget about my earlier intention for a mussel dinner, or if I were to forget about planning for dinner, I would no longer understand what I am doing in the market at that moment, and in that case, I would no longer be buying mussels at all (I would be standing in the market holding a bag of mussels confused about what was going on). At the moment in the story when I am standing in line at the market to check out, my intention earlier that morning to have mussels for dinner is not a cause of that evening’s mussel dinner, but an important part of the story of that dinner.1 Buying mussels is a small episode in a life, but many narrativists maintain that in addition to structuring episodes in a person’s life, narratives are also the right model for understanding life as a whole. MacIntyre and Taylor both argue that this notion – a whole life – is implied by our moral existence. As MacIntyre puts it: ‘without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete’ (MacIntyre 1984: 202). MacIntyre’s point, echoed in Taylor, is that our moral lives are oriented towards more than being good now, in the past, or in the future, but towards being a good person



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as such in a way that means as a whole. For this there must be some idea about how life as a whole hangs together with narratives providing the model. Not all narrativists, however, connect the wholeness of a life to moral achievement. Schechtman and David Carr, for instance, stress coherence, not goodness. Carr invokes Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the Zusammenhang des Lebens in this connection, which Dilthey likened to the way that the parts of a melody hold together in light of the whole piece (Carr 1986: 57). For both Schechtman and Carr, the parts of my life make sense not just in terms of other parts but in terms of the whole. There is a close connection in the narrativist approach between being a self and having a sense of oneself. While not every theorist agrees with this point (Goldie 2012), the general idea is that I would not be able to do many of the things that I do – and hence would not be the person I am now – if I did not have a sense of myself as the same over time. For example, if I were giving a lecture but suddenly lost any sense of why I was there, who I was, or the point of my being there, I would become unable to continue. In other words, I would be unable to be a lecturer at that moment without a sense of myself as having been and continuing to be one as well. Notice that the sense of self in question here is primarily practical – it is a practical requirement for my being able to continue doing what I am doing, regardless of how the metaphysics might cash out. Taylor argues that most theorists who render identity in terms of psychological continuity portray that continuity too passively, failing to emphasise that my past and future are not things that have happened or will happen to me, or things that I experience, but are primarily things that I have done, am doing and will do (Taylor 1989: 49). As Schechtman also argues, personal identity belongs more to practical philosophy than metaphysics. Finally, as Schechtman has also stressed, selfhood is something that comes in degrees. Being a self over time is not an all or nothing affair. This follows from accepting coherence and practical agency as conditions for selfhood. Coherence, after all, is a matter of more or less, and the projects an agent sets out to realise meet with varying success. Schechtman argues that this comports better with our untutored, prephilosophical approaches to selfhood than the well-defined specialty area of metaphysical philosophy that has traditionally been in charge of personal identity (Schechtman 1996). For example, when, making our way through life, we confront issues of identity, we are typically confronted with questions like, Do I still want this career? Am I a good father? Why did I used to like that band? And so on. Personal identity, Schechtman explains, is not a question of how to re-identify a person

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or person-stages over time, but a question of how to characterise that person over time in terms of the ‘beliefs, values, desires, and other psychological features [that] make someone the person she is’ (Schechtman 1996: 2). II The major elements of the narrative theory of selfhood then are the following: being a self presumes having a life. Lives only happen over time, where having a self means that the moments of one’s life hold together over time within a narrative part/whole structure. Taking stock of these features, it should be apparent why, on the face of it, Heidegger would be friendly to the theory. I will argue that not only do we find important commonalities between Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time and the narrative theory of selfhood, Heidegger has something important to add to the debate over narrative identity. While most of the discussion in the narrativity debates has focused on whether selves are structured by some sort of special narrative content, value, or emotional import, I argue that selves are narrative by virtue of a formal temporal structure. Heidegger was the first to articulate this formal temporal structure even while himself never explicitly making the connection to narrative. Two features that are central to the narrativist theory – that selfhood is primarily a practical, not theoretical, matter, and that it is essentially temporally articulated – are also at the heart of Heidegger’s exposition of Dasein. Heidegger’s primary thesis in Being and Time is that Dasein’s being is defined in terms of a unique mode of time, and moreover, that Dasein has this structure because Dasein interprets itself in this way. Many of the features of Dasein’s existence that follow from this thesis strongly resemble a narrativist model of selfhood. First, Heidegger is clear that Dasein is a self-interpreter. Dasein is distinguished from all other kinds of beings ‘by the fact that, in its very being, that Being is an issue for it’ (Heidegger 2001: 32). Further, Dasein’s possibilities are not just given to it. Dasein must take up, that is, interpret, its possibilities in the process of working to realise them. These possibilities are fundamentally temporal, for whether Dasein is acting or thinking, the enactment of possibilities takes time. In taking up its possibilities, Dasein emerges from its past and projects itself into a definite future, foreclosing on other possibilities in the process. Therefore Dasein is not merely in time but exists, as I have put it, over time or, as Heidegger himself sometimes says, Dasein self-temporalises. Dasein self-temporalises itself within a world structured by possibili-



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ties that exhibit in order to . . ., because of . . . and so that . . . relations, just the sort of relations I earlier claimed went into the make-up of narratives. In this self-projection, Heidegger claims that Dasein is answerable to a norm of constancy or coherence: ‘Self-constancy is a way of Being of Dasein’ (Heidegger 2001: 427). He writes that in the face of the dispiriting routines of one’s ‘they-self’ Dasein’s has the ability to ‘pull itself together from the dispersion and the disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”’ which results in ‘the existentiell constancy which, by its very essence, has already anticipated every possible moment of vision that may arise from it’ (Heidegger 2001: 442–3). On the narrativist reading, the central concepts of Division II of Being and Time – authenticity, being-towards-death, guilt, resoluteness, historicity – are best understood through the norms of selfauthorship. Thus narrativists read Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) as meaning narrative resolution (see Fisher 2010: 247). Of course, in striving to maintain self-constancy and authenticity, Dasein must face its guilt, finitude, time and mortality, but these are the enabling constraints, the confrontation with which define the story of Dasein’s project of authentic selfhood. As Charles Guignon, an influential advocate of the narrativist reading of Heidegger, puts it: ‘In contrast to the dispersal and endless “making-present” of everydayness, such a life is authentically futural to the extent that it clear-sightedly faces up to the inevitable truth of its own finitude and lives each moment as an integral component of the overall story it is shaping in its actions’ (Guignon 2000: 89). III Despite these appearances, there are other, deeper elements that, a number of influential commentators maintain, make a full adoption of the narrativist interpretation of Being and Time impossible. Many narrativists, as I have said, claim that selfhood is organised around an end or good. On some conceptions, this end or good is interpreted as some one goal or purpose, such as finding love, becoming President, or completing a masterpiece. For others, the end or good is not literally some one purpose, but a quality of character that defines one’s whole life, like becoming a good person or having lived a full life. Still others require only some sort of formal coherence among the elements of one’s life, or, even more minimally on there being narrative added-value in the progression of one’s life (Velleman 1993 and 2003). Achieving this good in some sense completes one’s life, and in that sense the narrativists seem committed to viewing life as organised around a kind of

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closure. Furthermore, since so long as one is alive there is always the potential that a good life turns bad, or a coherent life falls apart, we cannot say for sure what kind of life one has led until one’s life is over. If so, then Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time would lend further support to a narrativist interpretation. However, anti-narrativist interpreters can point out that while Heidegger does emphasise how Dasein’s self-projection is oriented towards self-constancy (and hence the sort of temporal structure and coherence key to narratives), Heidegger just as forcefully stresses that Dasein is never equal to the possibilities it assumes for itself and that it is characterised by an essential incompleteness, undecidability and nothingness. Contrary to the idea that Heidegger’s analysis of death supports a narrativist interpretation, the analysis seems to rule out the narrativist’s idea of closure. Tony Fisher summarises the antinarrativist reading this way: ‘Heidegger’s existentialism fundamentally undermines a narrativist reading: in being-towards-death we should recognize that no practical project can answer the question of who Dasein is. Ontologically viewed, Dasein is fundamentally undecidable in its being [. . .’ (Fisher 2010: 248). In other words, death means the impossibility that anything like closure is open to Dasein. This is further evident in the character of the ‘not yet’ and the ‘nullity’ that Heidegger associates with the guilt that structures Dasein’s being in its being-toward-death (see Heidegger 2001: 328–33). William Blattner says that we should understand the ‘not yet’ character of Dasein’s being as naming the fact Dasein’s projection forward into its possibilities is itself possible only on condition that these possibilities are not attained, calling this Heidegger’s ‘Unattainability Thesis’ (see Blattner 1996: 107). To the extent, then, that closure presumes orientation around an end which is at least in principle achievable, narrative closure cannot be the sort of end or principle around which Dasein’s existence is organised. It’s worth mentioning that this criticism of closure is not new and not restricted to contemporary readers of Heidegger. Sartre, for example, reads Heidegger as supporting the sort of closure I describe above by interpreting the latter’s analysis of death as an attempt to ‘interiorise’ the always-potential threat that death poses to the pursuit of one’s projects (see Sartre 1956: 680–707). Yet Heidegger was careful to distinguish between death – in an existential sense – and demise (see Heidegger 2001: 301–4). Demise is what happens to Dasein when its life ends, but being-towards-death is a constant state of Dasein and death itself is not the end of Dasein’s biological life but the collapse of its world. If this is correct, then Heidegger actually agrees with Sartre, analysing



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death not as a possibility to be realised but as the always imminent possibility of the impossibility of being anything at all. Living authentically in anticipatory resoluteness of death thus means the opposite of what Sartre presumed Heidegger had meant, and something much nearer to Sartre’s own view of the matter: we resolutely anticipate death not as a possibility to be appropriated and inscribed into the meaning of one’s life, but as the constant threat to that meaning. Hence, on this view, Dasein’s existence, far from being modelled on narrative structures, is in constant revolt against the delimitations any such structure would impose. The argument just elaborated can be summarised as follows: while death might be the end of one’s life or world, it cannot be a part of, or hence, the completion of, one’s life or world. This entails that Dasein is essentially incomplete. But now I return to a question raised earlier: even if Dasein cannot actually be complete, what reason do we have to reject completeness as an ideal, or as something akin to Kantian regulative ideas? After all, very few moral perfectionists would argue that moral perfection is an actually attainable goal, but as an ideal, perfection does not need to be achievable to be effective. The Unattainability Thesis says that coherence or completion are not attainable, but this could leave open the possibility that they operate as constitutive norms. Fisher summarises the proponent of this thesis as saying: ‘Dasein may not be “attainable” in a substantive sense [. . .] but there is nothing to stop it from attaining a sense of completion through the realization of a project upon which it has been authentically resolved, and with which it now identifies itself’ (Fisher 2010: 251). Fisher himself does not endorse this idea, but he does acknowledge that the Unattainability Thesis might be compatible with versions of narrativism that stipulate coherence and completion as constitutive norms. However, there are in fact reasons to be sceptical of this compatibility. Narrativists claim that narratives are implicit in our self-concepts. But, as Bernard Williams explains in one of his final papers, there is a crucial difference between narrated lives and real lives: characters in a narrative are not really living at all in the sense ‘that they have no future [. . .] all of them is already there’ (Williams 2009: 310). The coherence and unity that characters in a narrative enjoy only obtains because their lives have, as it were, already been written. Of course, as Williams acknowledges, characters in a narrative typically do not know their future, but that is ‘for the boring reason that that is how they are represented’ (Williams 2009: 310). While the characters in a narrative are themselves usually portrayed as being in no better position than we are at knowing what the future holds, the author of the narrative knows

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their future and it is for this reason that she is able to select the episodes and persons in a character’s life that matter in terms of the overall ‘style’ (as Williams puts it) of that character. It’s not an accident that Tolstoy opens War and Peace with the soiree at Anna Scherer’s home, where we meet Pierre Bezukhov for the first time. Pierre is undoubtedly one of many seemingly inconsequential misfits out in St Petersburg that evening, but Tolstoy’s omniscient authorial position allows him to know that this particular misfit is about to receive news that will drastically change his life circumstances and alter his character, thereby making him worth our dramatic attention. This difference between narrative and real lives threatens to undermine the feature that, according to defenders of narrativism like Schechtman, Taylor and MacIntyre, make narrativism compelling, viz., how well it comports with the way that identity figures in our practical lives.2 Narrativists claim that as we make a life for ourselves, we draw on narrative ways of thinking and orient ourselves in a narrative manner. But if Williams and the other anti-narrativists are right, narratives are exactly the wrong place to look for models of practical identity and agency. For the central assumption of practical agency is freedom or openness: if deliberation and resoluteness are to matter at all, it must be because my future is somehow up to me in the sense that it depends upon the results of my deliberations and the steadfastness of my resolutions. There is a general incompatibility, on a practical level, between action and an already determined – or written – future. Even if one were to become convinced that one’s actions were not free but pre-determined, one would be unable to make any practical use of that conviction. Our lives are not written for us and we are not compelled to act as if they were. Far from being a presupposition of practical agency, the narrativist thesis is practically inert. This general point about practical irrelevancy extends to other features of the narrative model as well. Narrativists claim that coherence and closure are norms that, whether realisable or not, function as constitutive aims of selfhood. But this is not right. Consider the case of Sophocles’ Ajax: Ajax’s suicide is completely coherent with his personality profile, and it does lend a kind of macabre closure to his life, but Ajax himself has no concern for coherence or closure as he plans his death. Ajax kills himself because he can longer live with his shame. We, outside of the narrative, can comment upon the kind of unity that his sense of honour imposes on his life, making sense of both of his early valour and later ignominy, but Ajax does not need to reflect upon that unity or even be aware of it – he lives it. Readers and authors ask, What will happen?, but agents ask themselves, What should I do?



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IV Earlier I discussed ways that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time seems to share several features with the narrative theory of identity, but in the previous section I presented arguments for why the comparison should be rejected. That section ended with an argument against the narrativist theory in general, concluding that narratives are unsuitable for understanding selfhood on a practical level or from an agent’s point of view. Even if human lives, from the outside, can be described in terms of something like narrative coherence, agency does not need to make use of a narrative self-conception, and therefore selfnarratives cannot be the basis of practical identity. The narrativist views I have so far presented take narrative to be based somehow in the substance of what it means to be a self. I think that this is a mistake, and in this respect at least I am in agreement with the anti-narrativists. However, my primary thesis in this paper is that it is not essentially in terms of their substance that selves share in narrative, but in terms of their formal structure. The reason I have introduced Heidegger into the centre of the discussion about narrativity and selfhood is that it was Heidegger who first clarified the formal temporal structure that defines both selfhood and narrative. It was also Heidegger who insisted that this temporal structure is not just appropriate for a philosophical study of selfhood, but is at the core of every self’s self-understanding of itself as well. Now, in the essay by Williams that I discussed in the previous section, Williams admits that, given how, on his analysis, narrative plays no role in agency or practical identity, it seems like ‘magic’ that our lives – in retrospect or from the outside in biographies – should fit so well into narratives (Williams 2009: 312). But it’s not magic at all, on the Heideggerian theory I am sketching. Lives fit so well into narratives because lives and narratives share in the same temporal form. A key feature that selves and narratives share, discussed several times already, is the fact that neither simply take place in time but over time. If the comparison holds, then asking whether someone is the same person at different times is like asking whether two events are part of the same story. Heidegger’s contribution – as I’ll detail in just a moment – was to see that when we consider time in this context we are not really inquiring into measured, objective time, but rather into what he calls a ‘primordial’ or ‘authentic’ time, a time inherent to the life in question and not just the medium in which it exists. Authentic time I believe is best modelled on what linguists call verbal aspect. Tense and aspect are two different ways that languages encode time.

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Tense marks when an event occurs relative to the time of utterance. If I say ‘Suzy ate the fly,’ you understand that Suzy ate the fly at a time earlier than the time at which I am speaking. Aspect, on the other hand, refers to the internal temporal constitution of an event, its temporal shape relative to a temporal point of view (hence the term, ‘aspect’). The sentences ‘Suzy ate the fly’ and ‘Suzy was eating the fly’ are both in the past tense but differ in aspect, since the first says that the eating was finished, while the second says that it was still under way (see Comrie 1998: 3). Tense can mark indifferently states or events, whereas aspect only marks events or actions. I can know something now or in the past, but I cannot have been knowing or be knowing now since knowing is a state, not an event, activity, or in general anything I have done or that has happened (although I did learn). Aristotle is generally given credit for being one of the first philosophers to pay attention to the distinctive function of aspect in language.3 Importantly, Aristotle’s recognition of aspect informs his discussion of the metaphysical concepts of potentiality (dynamis), movement (kinesis) and actuality (energeia) (see Kenny 1963 for an overview of the significance of aspect to Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics). Movement, or kinesis, is especially important for the purposes of this paper. Kinesis expresses only motions (events or actions) that culminate in an end, or movements in which something comes into being, and thus kinesis always involves potentiality (dynamis). Kinesis can be contrasted with energeia: a motion qua energeia is wholly complete at each moment. For example seeing is an energeia, according to Aristotle, since it ‘seems to be at any moment complete, for it does not lack anything whose coming into being later will complete its form’ (Aristotle 2009: 187/ 1174 a13–17). Hence, to be walking to somewhere is to move in the sense of kinesis, but just walking to nowhere in particular is an activity or energeia. Linguistic aspect has recently drawn the attention of philosophers of action as an important way to think about the structure and intelligibility of actions (See Steward 1997; Hornsby 2012; Thompson 2008). Central to the concerns of these philosophers is the distinction between events and processes, which, when applied to agents, is typically marked as a distinction between ‘activities’ and ‘actions’. These distinctions reflect those between kinesis and energeia just discussed. Both activities and actions (in the specific sense now intended) take place over time, but they exhibit different temporal properties. While an activity takes place over time, it happens, as it were, all at once and with no internal stopping or end point. For example, walking necessarily happens over time, but once I am up and walking I am doing it all at once. The logical form of an activity can be represented as follows:



Narrativity, Aspect and Selfhood 179 When φing, and when φ is an activity verb, then if I am φing it follows that I φ’d.

A process or action, by contrast, happens over time but never all at once and involves a natural end point or completion. To wash my hair, I grab the shampoo, lather, rinse – each of these is part of the hair washing but none of them constitutes a hair washing by itself. Moreover, while an activity like seeing stops only when I shut my eyes, actions are self-individuating and have internal limits. The hair washing is done when my hair is washed, regardless of whether I wash a second time, or stop at the lathering stage. Importantly, while a process or action is under way, it is never complete, which entails that a completed process cannot obtain in the present. The logical form of a process is as follows: When ψing, and ψ is a process verb, then if I am ψing, I have not ψ’d.4

Actions and processes are characterised by what Aristotle called ‘potentiality’ (dynamis). Potentiality, in Aristotle’s sense, needs to be distinguished from mere possibility. If I am sitting then I am possibly standing, and if I am running than I am possibly walking, but sitting is not on its way to, or part of the process of, standing, just as running is not on the way to, nor a part of the process of, walking. But nailing a strut into a wall is part of the process of building a house, and when I lather, my hair is on its way to being washed. It makes sense in these cases to say that the house is ‘not yet’ built, and that my hair is ‘not yet’ washed, in such a way that the finished house and my washed hair are not, during the nailing and lathering, mere possibilities, but already real somehow as potential. A final remark: there is an important difference between hair washing and house building. In washing my hair, nothing new comes into being – my hair goes from unwashed to washed. Change of this sort, which involves one contrary replacing its opposite, presumes a persisting self-identical subject undergoing the change. When a house is built, however, something new comes into being. Aristotle called this sort of change ‘substantial change’, and it involves, not a self-identical persisting subject, but matter coming into form. I claimed that verbal aspect provides an illuminating model for understanding the major features of original temporality. One place where this becomes clear is in Heidegger’s analysis of the ecstatic nature of authentic time. Heidegger’s analysis can be usefully compared with Edmund Husserl’s. Heidegger had been Husserl’s student, and had edited the latter’s groundbreaking lectures on time consciousness

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(Husserl 2008). Among other things, Husserl endeavoured to show that time as we experience it is not originally successive, where the present replaces the past and is in turn replaced by an oncoming future, but rather that the past and future are non-successively part of the ‘living present’. The ‘living present’ is a multi-dimensional intentional complex comprised, Husserl argues, of a retention reaching into the past, a primal impression of the present and a protention directed into the future. Heidegger’s ‘ecstatic’ temporality echoes this analysis. Most obviously, the three ‘ecstasies’ of Dasein’s temporality correspond to Husserl’s rentention/primal impression/protention model: ‘We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the “ecstasies” of temporality’ (Heidegger 2001: 377). As for Husserl, the three moments of original temporality are not cut off from one another but unify to constitute the temporal coherence of being-there, Dasein. There are, however, important differences. Husserl came to argue that the moments of time were unified by the self-­constituting activities of a persisting absolute consciousness with absolute being, yet Heidegger repeatedly claims that Dasein is nothing (a claim which invited derision from uncharitable readers like Paul Edwards (Edwards 2004)). But if we interpret the nullity that Dasein is in terms of verbal aspect, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of movement and potentiality, it is apparent that Heidegger is substituting this nullity as the basis of original time for Husserl’s absolute consciousness. Whereas for Husserl the ever-changing movement of temporal consciousness requires the presence of a persistent, self-identical absolute consciousness, Heidegger’s understanding of how the moments of time hold together more closely resembles Aristotle’s theory of substantial change – change organised around a nullity that, all the same, is. These remarks on the relation of verbal aspect to Aristotle’s theories of movement, potentiality and time establish a framework for responding to the objections to the narrative theory of selfhood covered in the earlier section. Consider the objection that the ‘not yet’ or open nature of Dasein precludes the kind of closure and completeness required by narrative. This objection is based on the assumption that openness and completeness are mutually exclusive, but as the explanation of process qua movement (kinesis) has shown, that is not always the case. To the contrary, the ‘not yet’ determination of any process or action only makes sense in reference to its end or completion. Lighting the stove, heating the oil, chopping the onions – together these activities are only part of the incomplete action of cooking given the end which has ‘not yet’ been realised, that is, the finished meal. So when Heidegger writes that ‘as long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstand-



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ing, which Dasein can be and will be [. . .]’ this is compatible with and in fact presupposes that the end itself, that is, death, already itself belongs to Dasein as what ‘limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein’ (Heidegger 2001: 276–7). Hence Dasein, in analogy to other kinetic movements, can only exist if determined by an end which, all the same, can never be with it co-presently, namely, death. (This is why Heidegger can acknowledge, along with Epicurus, that death is never present where I am, and yet also insist that I am essentially defined by my relation to death.) There’s one important way, however, that the analogy with Aristotle’s theory of natural kinesis breaks down. For Aristotle, natural movement is determined by an end that is given by nature. Acorns can only develop into oak trees. No such pre-determination could pertain to Dasein. Some philosophers say that Dasein gives itself its end, which it is also free to abandon or alter, thereby naming the source of Dasein’s radical freedom and Angst (see Haugeland 2000). If this were all there were to the matter we would have to decide in favour of the antinarrativists since it would mean that Dasein is essentially incomplete in ways different from how I have suggested. But this option makes it hard to understand Heidegger’s repeated insistence that Dasein must relate to itself as a whole or totality if it is to understand itself at all. More to the point: while Dasein does give itself its own end, those particular, substantive ends are to be distinguished from the fact that Dasein ends. It is this that I will end, as opposed to some specific, self-given end, which is – so I claim – what ‘death’ names for Heidegger. Dasein no more chooses that it will die than it chooses whether to be with others or to be in the world. Dasein’s possibilities are finite, and among other things this means that Dasein’s choices are made within the context of a finite, that is, mortal, life. Mortality itself is not something that Dasein strives to achieve (as one might strive for closure), but that by virtue of which its achievements have meaning. This is part of the explanation for why, in the case of Dasein, potentiality is prior to actuality. Dasein can be anything at all only so long as it understands itself primarily in terms of its potentiality-for-being – Williams is correct that openness (one’s freedom as an agent) precludes a particular closed future. But a particular closed future is different from the formal determination that one’s future is closed, the latter being what death names for Heidegger. Consider this analogy: when one embarks on a career, despite the many changes, interruptions and unexpected outcomes that happen, one is always in the process of making a career. In making a career, one need have no determinate idea in mind about how it will go, and even when one does, a career rarely conforms to that idea. So it is not

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the substantive notion of a particular career goal that is necessary for the intelligibility of any given moment of one’s career (many developments in a career are completely unexpected). Instead, the moments of one’s career have meaning given that this career will, one day, be at an end. Missing that opportunity for a promotion or landing that important client would matter much less, if at all, were there always another opportunity or another potential client still to come. Likewise, Dasein understands that it is not just living, but living a life, the partitive expressing the fact that the moments of Dasein’s life are understood by Dasein itself as parts of a whole circumscribed and limited by death. Existenz, Dasein’s mode of being, is determined by the purely formal determination that it will end, that is, die. If death is the formal, rather than substantive, end of being a self, then it cannot – as the opponents of the narrative view have rightly argued – play the role of an ending typically found in literary narratives. But this is not a problem for the narrative theory of selfhood. It only poses a problem for those who would conflate narratives as such with literary narratives. The kind of closure opponents of the narrative view seem to have in mind is what Noël Carroll has called erotetic (Carroll 2007). Narrative closure, as Carroll analyses it, names the resolution to questions that the narrative itself gives rise to, and thinkers since Sartre have rightly been critical of the idea that we live our lives in an attempt to generate and answer such questions. According to the literary model, narrative closure is part of the content (the questions the narrative poses and answers) of a narrative but I have stressed that narrative describes instead the form of selfhood, and that, following Heidegger, this narrative form is constituted by being-toward-death. The importance of form for defining narrative is perhaps most clearly rendered in the theory of narrative that Arthur Danto has developed. According to Danto’s analysis, narratives are not defined in terms of what they are about but in terms of the formal properties and truth conditions of the sentences of which they are comprised. In particular, Danto argues that a narrative sentence is distinguished by the fact that the truth-conditions for the event it describes do not obtain until some future point in time (Danto 1985: 161–70). For example, it is true to say that the first battle of the American Revolutionary War occurred in Concord, Massachusetts on 18 April 1775, but the truth conditions for that sentence did not fully obtain until later, when that initial skirmish indeed turned out to have been the start of what developed into a major war. A narrative happens whenever this formal condition is satisfied, whereby an earlier event becomes what it is after some later event has determined it so.



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Why should we accept this as a sufficient account of narrative? It is standard to acknowledge that narratives differ from chronicles (for examples, see Goldie 2012: 7–8; Williams 2002: 233–70; and Danto 1985). A chronicle lists events in temporal order, but narratives require more than temporal sequencing. One popular idea is that a narrative selects from among the set of events that comprise any chronicle a restricted set that focuses attention on some interest-relative perspective. This has led some thinkers to conclude that narrative representations are always to some degree mis-representations which tell us more about the interests of the story tellers than the events portrayed (see White 1980). There are two problems with this theory. First, as Danto explains, the truth conditions of narrative accounts are not imposed upon already fully-constituted facts but are conditions intrinsic to those facts themselves. At the end of Casablanca we either witness the beginning of a beautiful friendship or we do not, and however that turns out does not seem to be an interpretation imposed upon an already fully-constituted relation between Rick and Louis but a fact about that relationship that will reveal itself over time. Second, narratives usually do more than describe – they explain. When Sophocles tells the story of how Ajax’s misplaced pride led to his downfall, he is explaining those events by appeal features internal to them. That is quite different from the way I might mis-represent my rival by choosing only to convey facts about her that portray her in a negative light. Another influential account for how narratives hold events together has been offered by David Velleman: ‘A story [. . .] enables its audience to assimilate events, not to familiar patterns of how things happen, but rather to familiar patterns of how things feel’ (Velleman 2003: 19). ‘How things feel’ Velleman likens to a cadence or rhythm – the ‘musclememory of the heart’ – which can be explained as events fitting into familiar emotional patterns. This would be problematic for some of the claims I have been defending, especially my claim that death, narrativity and selfhood are all related. For death, given its utterly contingent nature, could only by accident play the role of an emotional ending to a life, and likewise, such emotional valence, while important to selfhood, could hardly be interpreted as constitutive of it. Yet while there is a lot that is useful in Velleman’s account, it is unlikely to be the whole story when it comes to narrative since it does not seem that emotional valence is a necessary condition for narrativity. I could tell a very fine story about the penny under my bed – how it got there, where it might end up, who had touched it – but that story would lack the emotional import Velleman is talking about while satisfying the formal conditions put forth by Danto. Danto’s formal criteria then are more universal

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than accounts based on content like Velleman’s while being able to account for the explanatory power of narrative as well. But I still need a final answer to Williams’ objection that however well narratives might describe our lives from the outside, we do not draw on narratives in practical deliberations and therefore narrative plays no role in practical identity. Williams’ objections can be interpreted as a practical version of Galen Strawson’s experiential criticism of narrativity and selfhood. In a much discussed series of writings, Strawson claims to experience no affective or sympathetic connection to earlier periods of his life (Strawson 2004, 2009 and 2011). He admits that he is the same human being he has always been, but he distinguishes being a human being from being a self. Being a self entails having a sense of oneself, and Strawson claims that, in his own case at least, his sense of himself extends only as far as the current moment of his life. Strawson allows that perhaps not everyone is like him, and that there are people who really do experience strong and enduring intra-temporal connections, but, he maintains, he is clearly a self and he lacks that diachronic sense and so that diachronic sense must not be necessary for being a self. My reply to both Williams and Strawson is that it is a mistake to assume that, if human life is to have a narrative structure, that structure must be apparent within one’s life as something that one can experience. I am proposing that narrative, as the form of life’s movement, stands to life somewhat in the same way that Kant’s subject stands to experience, viz., as the form of representation – or, in my argument, life – in general (Kant 1996: 385/B404). Hume looked within, found no self, and concluded that there was no reason to believe in such a thing. Kant replied that the self was the very form of looking itself. I am arguing something similar about narrative. Now, I do believe, along with philosophers like Peter Goldie and Schechtman, that significant portions of one’s life and common modes of self-experience do involve self-concepts that are best described as narrative, but I do not need to insist on the point (Goldie 2012). I can also agree with Williams that the kinds of things an author worries about to ensure that the elements of her story hold together in a meaningful way are not the kinds of things that we, the agents of our lives, typically consider. But to have a sense of oneself at all as having a life one must have a sense of oneself in terms of a life as a whole, that is, as mortal, and this, I have argued, is sufficient to establish that narrative fits human lives and humans selves. My argument, following Heidegger, has been this: while beingtoward-death means that no self is ever whole or complete at any given moment, this does not mean – as the discussion of aspect made clear



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– that selves do not understand themselves in terms of wholeness. In fact, it is only in terms of the whole that any given moment of my life is intelligible and meaningful to me. The wholeness of life, moreover, takes on the same temporal form that defines narratives, which is why our lives fit so well into narrative structures. Hence, narrativity and mortality, while not necessarily parts of our lives, name the form of human life in general and are responsible for the fact that there is any meaning in life in the first place. N OT E S 1. For a useful discussion of the similarities and differences between causal and narrative accounts of events, see Goldie 2012: 14–21. 2. On which, see Schechtman’s chapter in the present volume. 3. For examples in Aristotle where he discusses aspectual distinctions, see Metaphysics 1048b 18–36; De Anima 417 a30–b2; Nicomachean Ethics 1140 a 1–24 and 1173 a15–1175a 20. 4. These formulisations are adapted from Thompson 2008.

12  The Senses of an Ending KATHY BEHRENDT

I N T RO DU C T I O N : T H E S P E C I A L - E N D S H Y P OT H E S I S One might suppose that life’s end is of special importance to narrativist views of the self, even if the specific nature of that import is opaque. Many philosophical discussions of the narrative self touch upon the end of life.1 End-related terms and concepts that occur in these discussions include finitude, completion, closure, telos, retroactive meaning-­ conferral, life shape and a closed beginning-middle-and-end structure. Those who emphasise life’s end in non-philosophical narrative contexts are perhaps clearer on its significance. The end is thought to play a key role in the story of a life, securing or enhancing the life narrative’s meaning or value, and thereby warranting special treatment and attention. Call this thought ‘the special-ends hypothesis’. I wish to test the applicability of the special-ends hypothesis within philosophical narrativist accounts of the self. I will examine narrativist claims pertaining to the end of life, taking seriously the specific terms they deploy, and considering the contexts in which they occur. Superficially it seems that narrativists endorse the special-ends hypothesis, overtly or by implication. But as perspective is gained on the broader theoretical context in which the concepts are situated, this apparent support diminishes. Ultimately, for most narrativists, the end of life has no special role to play in securing or enhancing the meaning or value of life as a whole. This is a noteworthy and somewhat surprising result for several reasons. One reason is the aforementioned prevalence of end-related concepts within narrativist discussions, which regularly draws our attention to this particular point in the life narrative. Another reason concerns the importance of endings within literature, combined with 186



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the literary heritage of the narrative self in philosophy. Ever since Alasdair MacIntyre compared the beginning-middle-and-end structure of literature to the structure of a life – in particular, drawing an analogy between the end of a story and the death of a person (1984: 212) – the ground was laid for narrativists to suppose that the end plays a particularly important role in life, as it does in literature. Comparing life to stories has incited talk of final chapters, conclusions or dénouements in life. To paraphrase Gisela Striker, having got to a certain point in the opera, we want to see it through to the end, not because we want to watch yet more opera, but because the end has its own place in the work as a whole (1988: 325–6). A final reason that the end of life seems important to narrativists concerns an alleged obstacle to their view. This is the ‘mortality problem’, which treats life’s end as the position from which we must (yet cannot) grasp the unity of our lives. Once again, it is the end of the life narrative that is singled out for special attention, though in this case on the grounds that it poses special problems for narrativists. My argument that the end has no special place in narrativist views does not, as it stands, amount to a criticism of those views. In some cases, it clarifies aspects of some narrativist approaches to the self, and helps steer critics away from uncharitable interpretations. But it also serves as a caution to those with narrativist sympathies to not confuse the fact of life’s ending with its value. More generally, it is intended to refine our understanding of a set of concepts that have currency beyond philosophical narrativist debates. BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END STRUCTURES The most elementary observation concerning endings in relation to narratives is that (conventional, linear) stories have beginnings, middles and ends. It is a basic narrativist point that lives also have this structure. The putative beginning-middle-and-end structure of stories and lives does not, in itself, mark out endings as generally of most concern to us. Nor is there empirical support for such a view; while some have singled out endings for special consideration in literary theory,2 others have fought for the relative importance of beginnings3 and even of middles.4 Likewise, attempts to specify any one time-period of life as that which the majority consider the most important have proven dubious.5 The special-ends hypothesis, however, does not entail the strong claim that endings are of supreme importance overall – only that they play some indispensable and unique role. But observations concerning

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the beginning-middle-and-end structure of narrative and life do not suffice to serve this weaker claim either. Amongst narrativists, MacIntyre in particular has highlighted the beginning-middle-and-end structure of both lives and stories in the context of distinguishing narrative unity from non-unified, non-­ narratives. This distinction is in turn embedded in his proclamation that ‘the notion of an ending like that of a beginning has its sense only in terms of an intelligible narrative’ (1984: 213). Such observations are too general to suggest the presence of a nascent special-ends hypothesis. It is unclear that endings play a necessary role in narratives for MacIntyre (as opposed to merely being a typical feature). Indeed, the most we can take from MacIntyre’s words about the relation between ends and intelligible narratives is that only if something is both intelligible and a narrative can an ending take place. In any case, MacIntyre’s discussion of beginning-middle-and-end structure provides little information as to why and in what way any given element in the structure has any vital role to play in narrative. In the absence of this, the potential value of endings to narratives remains obscure. This is not a failing of MacIntyre’s analysis (and we will return to his view, examining more robust elements of it). It is simply an indication that advocates of the special-ends hypothesis must look beyond such general observations about beginning-middle-and-end structure in life as in stories; support must be sought from accounts that more clearly connect life’s end with life’s meaning or value. FINITUDE The many arguments for the importance of finitude and mortality in human life may seem relevant here. Narrativists and narrativist-sympathisers, such as MacIntyre, Striker, Richard Wollheim and Martha Nussbaum have all argued for a connection between a finite life and meaningful life. The sentiment is in each case something to the effect that ‘it is our particularity and finitude that gives our lives significance’ (MacIntyre 1979: 6). But, and irrespective of their strength, such arguments do not aid the special-ends hypothesis. To value life’s finitude is not necessarily to find anything of particular significance near the end of a life. Profinitude stances – as found amongst narrativist supporters or elsewhere – promote the value of mortality because (to list a few key arguments) only in a finite life can we form categorical long-term goals and desires,6 or have choices at all,7 or have love and friendship relationships with others,8 or occupy a certain role in history,9 or simply appreciate the



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everyday goods in life.10 These putative benefits of mortality do not depend on our achieving an ending that warrants special attention or stands as remarkable in its own right. Pro-finitude arguments need not and do not recommend any particular sort of life-ending over any other; a life that ends on virtually any terms is preferable to immortality. In sum, any value to be extracted from the fact that life ends ought not to be confused with the ending itself having any special role to play. Although there is an understandable pro-finitude propensity amongst narrativists, the special-ends hypothesis garners no support from such arguments. COMPLETENESS Thomas Long, conducting a MacIntyrean-based narrative analysis of the needs of terminal patients, claims that they think it ‘necessary to complete the[ir] story’ (1986: 88). He adds – echoing MacIntyre’s claims about intelligible narratives – that only those with a narrativist outlook can view death as an end per se (1986: 80). Life experienced as a narrative rather than a mere chronicity allows us to view death as ‘an end rather than simply that personally unique event through which (apparently) no one lives’ (1986: 80). ‘Completion’ is thus imperative, and linked to elevating the end of a life above the status of unique merely in the sense that we happen to undergo it only once. But wherein lies the distinctness of narrative completion? Long is not forthcoming, but others have more to contribute. Noël Carroll, speaking of literature and film, focuses on the feeling of completeness that closed narratives provoke, which ‘is a matter of concluding rather than merely stopping or ceasing or coming to a halt or crashing [. . .] There is nothing left to be done that hasn’t already been discharged’ (2007: 2). Hayden White, discussing historiography, distinguishes between annals and chronicles on the one hand, which merely terminate, and narratives, which conclude (1980: 23). I claimed that pro-finitude arguments don’t directly support the special-ends hypothesis, because the most they provide are grounds for favouring a life that terminates. The special-ends hypothesis may find more support from White, Long and Carroll’s sense of an ending, which distinguishes narrative completion from mere termination. However, ‘completion’ is ambiguous, as Long, Carroll and White each in his own way acknowledges. There are several reasons why we may strive for a situation in which ‘there is nothing left to be done’, not all of which are pertinent to the special-ends hypothesis. I may, for instance, wish to complete a chess game or climb Mount Everest.

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I may also hope to complete the Times crossword puzzle or complete my collection of DVDs of the films of Yasujiro Ozu. In the case of the crossword or DVDs, obtaining the final word or disk may result in something mildly psychologically satisfying, or more materially valuable – features which fall far short of capturing the significance of endings implied by the special-ends hypothesis. Failure to complete does not generally severely undermine the value of the elements already within the incomplete set. By contrast, in the case of the chess game or the mountain climb, the value of the existing portion of the incomplete item or event is for many tied to its completion: unless it is completed, the purpose and/or structure of the existing ‘portion’ is considerably compromised. We might sum this up by saying that in some cases the ending is crucial to the integrity of the whole. Additionally, for some things or events, anything from amongst the entirety could stand as the missing portion – the ending can be more or less like other parts that are already there, and interchanged with them. This is the case for the crossword and the DVD collection; my missing any given DVD or word would render the set incomplete. A partial analogy can be drawn with paratactic structure in certain poems: briefly, a repetitive structure in which individual thematic units can be switched with one another with no loss of coherence overall – the units do not ‘follow’ from one another and ‘the coherence of the poem will not be dependent on the sequential arrangement of its major thematic units’ (Smith 1968: 99). Although the poem will eventually stop, nothing dictates that one stanza over any other belongs at the end. By contrast, in the case of the mountain climb or the chess game, not just anything from amongst the entirety could stand as the missing end. The ending is unique, not in the contingent sense of its being the final one in a series of happenings, but in that it is non-substitutable by other elements in the series. In sum, in some cases the ending may be non-interchangeable with other elements that lead up to it. ‘Completion’, insofar as it applies to narratively-construed lives, requires further refinement in order to be more like the mountain climb or the chess game, and less like the crossword or the DVDs: ‘complete’ should be distinct from the merely comprehensive. Something about the end should render it first, crucial to the value or integrity of the whole, and/or second, unique in the sense of non-interchangeable with other elements of the whole. It may be too demanding to insist that both these features obtain, but if we can secure at least one we may move closer to a conception of life’s end that has real currency for the special-ends hypothesis. We find elements of the second feature –



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­ on-­interchangeability – in narrativist discussions of the shape of a life, n and the first – integrity – in discussions of closure. I shall look at each in turn. THE SHAPE OF A LIFE Part of what may distinguish the sense of completion sought is embedded in the ordering of events. If the ending is non-interchangeable with other events, it may be because events in life have their place in a certain order. We can try to get at the specialness of endings by pursuing this thought further. Jean-Luc Godard is famously purported to have said that a film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order. As far as analogies between art and life go, many narrativists would disagree. Their disagreement would be grounded in views about the shape of a life. While it is almost certainly true that some people collect life-experiences like so much Meissen porcelain – in no particular order and with no specific end in mind beyond the eventual acquisition of all that there is to be had – these paratactically-structured lives are arguably remote from narrativist models. Talk of shape suggests that not just the breadth but also the arrangement of life experiences is significant. This is implicit in Striker’s opera analogy: in addition to experiencing all the opera’s acts, we expect to view them in a certain order. Paratactic poetry, experimental novels and the films of Godard aside, narrativists generally assume that the analogy is being drawn between human life and relatively conventional works of fiction or drama, in which the desire to reach the end is combined with that ending being determined by the overall structure of the work, about which we will also have certain hopes and expectations as formed by canonical standards. Attention to the overall structure seems to elevate matters beyond the mere comprehensiveness of life experience. We may, for instance, be compelled to ensure, as much as is possible, that our final experiences are of the sort that belong there as opposed to elsewhere; they have features that are unique or distinct or particularly appropriate to the end of a life. This in turn has the potential to form the basis of any value that the end of life may have for the whole. Biology and culture place their own constraints on the ordering of certain life events. Within these confines, though, there is considerable scope for different arrangements: struggle and success, hardship and reward, pursuit, acquisition and loss, may all come at different times in different lives. We are rarely indifferent as to when.11 And (to adapt a

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point from David Velleman), even if narrativists cannot agree amongst themselves as to which particular configuration of life-events is superlative, the fact that they express a preference at all indicates that configuration is an issue for them.12 This reflects the need to move beyond mere comprehensiveness of experiences, and to consider the nature of events relative to given times in life. However, it then raises the question of why any events/experiences qualify as the right ones for the end of life over any others. A deflationary answer is that we simply have a penchant for specific patterns, valuing certain life shapes – and by implication certain types of ending – for their own sake. Velleman perpetuates the deflationary answer by treating difference in life-shape preferences as more-or-less subjective and inexplicable. He speculates that certain preferences are more widespread than others – for example, given the choice between two lives of equal overall well-being, most would choose the one in which the moments of well-being are concentrated nearer to the end than the beginning (Velleman 1993: 331). But he does not offer any reasons for this alleged phenomenon, beyond the rather circular explanation that we tend to prefer the life that gets better because it makes for a better life story, in the sense that it is the story of a better life (1993: 331). In the absence of a robust explanation for shape preferences, we are left with a picture of a given shape and, by extension, a given type of ending, as a primitive desideratum. We need to move beyond shapepreferences per se, in order fully to surpass mere comprehensiveness. CLOSURE ‘Closure’ may be the concept we seek here. It is a recurring term within the narrativist literature, and is less ambiguous than ‘completeness’, clearly evoking the conclusive over the merely comprehensive. A number of philosophers have attempted to elucidate closure qua aesthetic-literary concept. Whether their claims carry over to life narratives is a further question to be addressed. Both Velleman and Noël Carroll tackle the concept of closure when analysing Aristotle’s statement that the ending of a plot is that which nothing else need follow. On the face of it, Aristotle’s point doesn’t take us beyond completion in the sense of comprehensiveness; endings are distinguished by the fact that there is simply nothing left wanting (in the story or analogously in the life). This does not mark out the ending per se as crucial to the rest or unique in its own right. In an effort to go beyond this, Carroll, speaking of literary and filmic works, offers



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a causal-erotetic theory of closure: the ending provides closure when it answers the questions that the work evokes; it is in this sense that nothing is left wanting at the end. Velleman has a somewhat different take on the matter. He says that an ending provides closure when it resolves an emotional cadence. Notably, this emotional resolution applies to the work in its entirety: ‘the conclusory emotion in a narrative cadence embodies not just how the audience feels about the ending; it embodies how the audience feels, at the ending, about the whole story’ (2003: 19). Reasons have been given on both sides of the debate as to whether narrative closure and narrative relations themselves are primarily causal or emotive in nature.13 But despite their differences, Carroll and Velleman’s views on closure have in common the treatment of the end as resolving something about the whole narrative (thus qualifying as an ending proper, and not an accidental cessation of events); in this way they exemplify the first feature of completion mentioned above – that of supplying integrity to the whole. Nonetheless, neither Carroll’s nor Velleman’s account of closure is ultimately of much use to the supporter of the special-ends hypothesis. Carroll’s strictly aesthetic account of narrative closure does not carry readily over into life. Even some who support narrative views of the self reject what they regard as strained analogies with fictional representations.14 Explanatory closure in particular is viewed as a singularly aesthetic notion with no counterpart in the vast richness of an actual life.15 What’s more, the credentials of the analogy itself have been thrown into doubt: as Velleman notes, some great fictional works do not achieve or even strive for closure (though he does go on to add that they are not necessarily the sort of great books one enjoys reading; 2003: 10). And narratives that do culminate in an explanation or resolution of the whole of the preceding events can appear contrived. In life, where epistemic and practical obstacles are greater, such a resolution seems all but impossible.16 It demands an implausible degree of control over one’s ending, and an unlikely level of insight into the questions that one’s life story has raised. Causal explanations for significant life events are often frustratingly elusive, as Peter Goldie points out, arguing that the common complaint that life-narratives are self-deceiving is especially applicable to those narratives that seek answers to all life’s questions (2011: 3; 2012: 164ff.). For all these reasons, it seems charitable not to assign the causalerotetic sense of closure the task of aiding the special-ends hypothesis. Perhaps we would fare better with Velleman’s emotional-closure alternative. It is arguably more suited to the business of end-of-life

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concerns. Goldie expressly favours Velleman’s view over Carroll’s for this purpose, when presenting his own account of narrative thought in human life (2011, and 2012: Chap. 7). He notes that satisfying the desire for emotional closure ‘is especially pressing when people need to come to terms with traumatic events in their lives’ (2011: 15). Assuming that facing the end of life qualifies as one such occasion, perhaps emotional closure can supply the special-ends hypothesis with the appropriate sense of a meaningful resolution. Unfortunately, there are also problems with this proposal. Although Goldie borrows from Velleman’s aesthetic account of closure, he significantly modifies the scope of its application in life. Emotional closure, like narrative itself, for Goldie, applies only to isolated parts of a life and not whole swathes, let alone life in its entirety. We select certain parts of life for narrative activity on the grounds of their ‘narrative appropriateness’ (2012: 166) – the especially interesting, important, or traumatic events in our life, which, as such, prompt us to analyse and often re-evaluate our cognitive and emotional responses to them. These sets of events are not conjoined by any meta-level thematic relations, nor do they by any means comprise a whole life, contrary to the views of many narrativists we have encountered thus far. In sum, Goldie’s sense of closure, though plausible in its own right, cannot contribute to the integrity of the whole life, since lives are not conceived of as narrative wholes. Another potential shortcoming of emotional closure is identified by its own proponents. Goldie notes that emotional closure can be achieved in the absence of clear, rational-cum-causal understanding of events (2012: 167). This raises the spectre of self-deception, in that emotional closure may displace rational understanding. Goldie is relatively optimistic about the extent to which self-deception actually occurs, but his optimism may be fuelled by his commitment to small-scale narratives. Emotional closure, like causal-erotetic closure, has more potential to deceive when applied to an entire life. Velleman echoes this concern when he suggests that emotional closure for whole narratives can be achieved at the expense of rationality; we can mistake a resolution of our feelings about something for the understanding of how or why something happened, thereby deterring further inquiry. For that reason, suggests Velleman, we ought to keep narrative out of the courtroom (2003: 22). We might ask whether, by the same reasoning, we ought to keep narrative out of the hospital room or hospice as well. We may be especially susceptible to emotional closure at the end of life, but it is far from clear that this is a frame of mind that should be encouraged if we think it may interfere with the understanding of events.17



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These considerations regarding self-deception do not debar emotional closure from forming the potential source of life’s integrity, embodying (to paraphrase Velleman) how one feels about the life as a whole. But they do hinder the self-respecting narrativist from endorsing emotional closure qua the lynchpin of the special-ends hypothesis: she should be hesitant to grant a key role to something that runs counter to rationality or regularly threatens to do so. A N T I C I PAT O RY C L O S U R E A N D T H E P R O B L E M O F M O R TA L I T Y Even if we set aside the obstacle of self-deception, and accept, pace Goldie, that narrative can unify a whole life and not just segments of it,18 closure (emotional or causal-erotetic) encounters another obstacle from a different direction, alluded to at the outset of this paper. This is the problem of mortality – a problem that has received some attention in literature on the narrativist self.19 Mortality, it is thought, threatens the very possibility of achieving the cognitive or emotional resolution of a life narrative. The subject may seek a final perspective on her life as a whole. But this is available only from some (mythical) external, post-life position. Death itself cannot be incorporated into a narrative of a life, from the position within a life, and so one’s own life narrative necessarily remains open and incomplete. Those averse to the analogy between life and literature have found much fodder for repudiating it, within the problem of mortality. Contrary to MacIntyre’s blithe proclamation that the end of a life is like the end of a story, there is, it is argued, no opportunity in life to close the volume after the final sentence, and to ruminate on its meaning and arrive at a settled response to the whole. Goldie escapes this problem by reducing closure to something that has application only at isolated times in a life, with no special place at the end of a life. But he exacerbates the problem for those committed to whole-life narratives by corroborating the depiction of narrative closure as essentially a retrospective activity, requiring temporal distance. In the end, this alleged aspect of closure is the source of both the strength and weakness of the mortality problem. Mortality is often presented as primarily a temporal problem: one’s state of consciousness can be an intentional object of consideration for oneself only in retrospect;20 therefore one’s entire life cannot be an object of consideration for oneself unless it is, per impossible, entirely in the past at the time of consideration. Note that the problem of mortality – qua problem – presupposes something like the special-ends hypothesis. For, even if we accept the reasoning so far, there must be

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more to the problem of mortality than the temporal dilemma, which still affords us the possibility of gaining perspective on most of our life, save for the very end. This is only of concern if we think something crucial is lost in missing that end. Stephen Mulhall suggests that nothing less than a unified narrative is at risk in an uncompleted self-narrative. The problem of mortality forces the authentic narrating self to conceive ‘of the self as simultaneously demanding and resisting subsumption in a unified narrative’ (2009: 194). The question then is, what is the nature of this demand for a unified narrative, and why is the fulfilment of it dependent on (and therefore thwarted by the apparent impossibility of) grasping one’s own ending? In response to the problem of mortality, John Davenport suggests a number of solutions (each tied to different versions of the problem). Not all of these proposed solutions are compatible with the specialends hypothesis.21 But one that is involves what Davenport describes as making an end (2012: 159). The ending, for many, is not entirely unpredictable, and the closer one approaches it the more accurately one can speculate as to what will happen. In such cases one can, albeit with an acknowledged degree of fallibility, arrange one’s thinking and actions accordingly, thereby effecting a prospective sense of closure. Adapting a phrase of Davenport’s, I will call this ‘anticipatory closure’. If viable, it undercuts the time-lag issue that anchors the mortality problem; one’s ending needn’t be retrospectively-positioned in order for one’s life as a whole to be an object of concern. This proposed solution to the problem of mortality does not in itself make claims about the value of anticipatory closure. As said, both the problem of mortality and the seriousness with which some narrativists regard it presupposes that we must grasp the meaning and import of all of our life, including the end. Anticipatory closure may provide the means for achieving this, but we are still lacking an explanation as to why the ending is imperative here. Narrative unity and completeness are often claimed to be at stake, but exactly how so needs spelling out. Arguably, there is no better candidate for this task than MacIntyre. It is his narrativist account that underlies much of the discussion of the mortality problem. And, with its emphasis on telos and whole-life narrative unity, it apparently fortifies the idea that unity and endings are inextricably linked. TELOS Upon MacIntyre’s agential and goal-oriented scheme, what we do now is partly determined by and explicable in terms of what we want or



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expect later. Narrative activity is not in this case restricted to isolated pockets of especially narratable events; it is fundamentally embedded in larger webs of such episodes, which can be expanded outwards, ultimately to span the entire life.22 The expansion is also a progression: narrative life is a movement towards a final telos, morally and thematically-unified by an over-riding quest for the good (MacIntyre 1984: Chap. 15). This teleologically-oriented view of narrative shows what, if anything, is especially important about the end of our life, as well as leaving that ending vulnerable to the problem of mortality. Or rather, it does so if we understand MacIntyre (as some of his commentators do) as saying that life narrative moves towards ‘culminating experiences or events’ (Christman 2004: 703) or a ‘single culminating purpose’ or task that one was ‘born to do’ (2004: 704), the fulfilment of which will yield a ‘grand narrative’ (Lippitt 2007: 46). Narrative on this grand, culminating scale is implicitly presented as the only alternative to the mere chronicity of randomly or merely-causally linked states of affairs: ‘Without the thought that events have an implicit temporally-located conclusion or telos towards which they are leading – events cannot be narratively emplotted, merely temporally sequenced’ (Stokes 2012: e92). This ‘grand narrative’ interpretation strongly suggests a robust sense of closure is at play – one that renders endings vital to the integrity of the whole life and, perhaps, non-substitutable by other events in life. This in turn gives weight to the special-ends hypothesis since, clearly, an ending in this sense has the capacity to secure meaning for the life as a whole. We can also account for the perception that the mortality problem is indeed a problem; if life has, at least ideally, an expanding teleological structure such that the achievement of the final goal may coincide with the end of life, then being deprived of the opportunity to grasp and reflect on the whole of one’s life including the culmination of such an achievement would (like failing to finish the game of chess) indeed undermine the value of the whole. If it is the ‘ending that confers a form of meaning on the whole sequence of events’ (2012: e92), and we cannot incorporate that ending into our narrative, then much, if not all, is seemingly lost. However, there are problems with this particular in-road to substantiating the special-ends hypothesis and validating concerns about mortality. It represents an implausible picture in its own right and a potentially uncharitable interpretation of the MacIntyrean position on endings. Indeed, some of the above glosses on narrative telos are, notably, provided by critics of the project.23 Their concern is that the teleological picture is a dubious one as regards many if not most human

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lives; most of us do not invest the meaning of an entire life into a final, over-riding goal. Recent critical debate has exposed the uncharitability of interpreting MacIntyre too narrowly on these matters. It is true and relatively uncontroversial that for MacIntyre there is a level of narrative at which we can make sense of our lives as a unified whole. However, this commitment does not in itself accord any privileged place to the end of life as the special locus of such unity and meaning. Telos can be construed as a perpetually-applicable unifying principle rather than an individual, chronologically-final state of affairs.24 And the teleological impulse, when it makes an appearance in recent narrative views of the self, is often cashed out in more moderate terms, as a means to incorporating the outcome of future goals into the existing system in a way that minimises internal conflict.25 Those who do espouse both narrativity and teleology emphasise that this effort towards unity is ongoing. The end of a life has no special status within the whole field of intentions and actions that comprise a life. It is just one amongst many possible futuredirected areas of concern, in the continuing effort to unify action. This ‘agent-process’ understanding of telos, as I will call it, has been deployed by defenders of the MacIntyrean view against the abovementioned anti-narrativist assertion that most lives do not aim towards single ultimate goals – a point that the MacIntyrean can happily concede, upon the present interpretation. The agent-process interpretation has the further benefit of putting telos in this context back in touch with its Aristotelian roots. An agent’s telos in the classical sense is better expressed by verbs than by nouns, according to Julia Annas (1993: 34). In its ‘noun’ incarnation telos involves aiming at a single ultimate goal or set of goals, where those goals are in turn construed as ‘objects or states of affairs’ (1993: 36). In its verb formation, it is instead suggestive of ‘an end or goal not in the sense of the thing aimed at but in the sense of the agent’s aiming at that end’ (1993: 34). Rather than being a thing or event taking place at the end of one’s life, it is an organising principle that guides one’s entire life – what Annas (prefiguring Anthony Rudd) has likened to the contemporary notion of a ‘life plan’ (1993: 38). This is in keeping with MacIntyre’s own characterisation of telos as the quest for, rather than the acquisition of, the good. Upon this analysis, no emphasis need be placed on the chronological end of life as the point at which unity might be either obtained or obstructed. The mortality problem only applies to death in the context of something like a grand narrative account; only in some such context can so much emphasis be placed on the end of life as the point at which unity is almost in reach, and yet ultimately denied. There is no loss on



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a comparable scale for those who do not view events or experiences at the end of life as having a potentially special status relative to events or experiences that take place elsewhere throughout a life. Likewise the proposed solution to the problem – that of anticipatory closure – is rendered redundant. Yes, we may imaginatively project ourselves into the future and ruminate on what we suppose will be our life in its completed state, but doing so with accuracy and precision is a much less pressing demand. As Rudd writes, there’s a non-mysterious sense in which we can and ought to imagine our life as a whole, in order to make coherent decisions in the present. But there is also considerable scope for contingency and error. In cases where we get our future (including, by implication, the end) wrong, the worst that happens is that we fail to get the unity we want or expect, not that unity is lost altogether (2007b: 544). R E T R OA C T I V E M E A N I N G C O N F E R R A L The believer in the special-ends hypothesis may at this point make one last-ditch effort to garner support for it from within the narrativist camp. Setting aside the MacIntyrean forward-looking picture of narrative, she may instead appeal to the largely backward-glancing depiction of narrative value and relations, as found in Velleman 1993. Narrative relations, for Velleman, are specifically present in the capacity of an event at one given time in a life to alter the meaning or import of events at another time (for example, the time and sacrifices involved in preparing to climb Mount Everest are redeemed if and when I reach the summit – not just because of the value of reaching the summit but because it is a direct outcome of the past effort). This sort of meaning conferral can occur at virtually any time in life beyond the very early stages, and can be prospective as well as retrospective. Nothing about this account of narrative relations entails that events at the end of life have some unique or enhanced ability to confer meaning on earlier ones. But supporters of the special-ends view may exploit Velleman’s discussion of narrative relations in order to bolster the familiar point that the end of life is significant because it represents the final opportunity for any meaning adjustments in our favour – for redeeming past efforts or rectifying past errors. The last chance, in short, to get the unity we want. There is no denying that, upon the view that meaning conferral can be retroactive, the ending of a life represents the final opportunity to reconstitute the meaning of that which precedes it. What follows from this? Once again, we must distinguish between a phenomenon

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that essentially involves the fact that life ends, from one in which the ending has a special status or function. In order for the end-qua-lastchance to be special in the way the special-ends hypothesis wants it to be – enhancing or rectifying the whole life – at least one of several other things would also have to hold: end-of-life events would have to have at least as much if not more power than others to alter meanings of past events (so as not to render hollow the conviction that narrative relations may be significantly reinforced at the end of life); and/or it would have to be the case that we generally refrain from attempting to affect past meanings until the end (so that narrative relations/unity can generally be established only near the end of life). Regarding the first of these possibilities, there is no suggestion in Velleman that the reach of retroactive meaning conferral is significantly greater nearer the end of (an average to long) life than at other times. Indeed, there is some indication that it is weaker. Velleman indicates that events in life are amenable to radical meaning alteration in rough proportion to how early in life they occur. The import of events of one’s youth can remain undetermined until the distant future. By contrast, events in old and even middle age occur in the ‘determinate context of one’s past’ and their meanings are relatively fixed (1993: 341). Far from having a greater scope of retroactive meaning impact, then, it would seem that events at the end of a decently-long life have a reduced range, relative to the whole of a life, as one accrues an increasing store of relatively recalcitrant life events. Regarding the second possibility – that of withholding attempts to influence the meaning of past events until late in life – Velleman does not address this directly. However, his views on the recalcitrance of later experience suggest that to leave such matters until the end is a recipe for failure. In any case, Velleman portrays lives in which the web of meaning-conferral amongst events is ongoing. And this seems plausible if for no other reason than because, notwithstanding the role of agency in conferring retroactive meaning, so much of the situation is not in our control, and so there is no question of our withholding – deliberately or otherwise – our participation in it. Unless we were to withdraw hermit-like from the world, we will throughout life be caught up in a series of meaning-adjustments. Withholding participation in such relations until the end of life is not an option. In all, Velleman’s retroactive meaning conferral is an ongoing process, and generally less dramatic and efficacious the later in life one finds one’s self. The end is not the time to augment existing narratives or compensate for absent ones.



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CONCLUSION If advocates of the special-ends hypothesis aspire to support from philosophical narrativist accounts of the self, they are destined to be disappointed. The view that the end of life is a potentially special site for the enhancement or reparation of a life narrative receives little corroboration from narrativist accounts that directly or implicitly broach the topic of the end of life. Within those accounts, the end is treated either as no better or considerably worse a time for reaping the benefits of self-narrative. The concepts of retroactive meaning-conferral, finitude, completion, closure, shape, telos and beginning-middle-and-end structure, all might appear to reinforce the view that life’s end is, or has the potential to be, special to the meaning or value of the whole. But the role these notions play in the views in which they appear, when examined in detail, does little to substantiate the special-ends hypothesis. One potentially positive outcome of this analysis is a weakening of the force of the mortality problem for narrativists. But this goes together with a call to narrativist supporters from any discipline to exercise caution in deploying the various concepts surrounding the end of life – a call that can be extended beyond narrativist bounds, given that some of the concepts are not merely academic but enter into the common socio-cultural discourse. We must be careful to recognise that these concepts need not imply any special directives concerning how, from within a narrative framework, we ought to view the end of life, as distinct from how we ought to view any other time in life. N OT E S   1. Talk of end-related matters is, not surprisingly, more often found amongst those strains of narrative view that accept the ‘whole life unity thesis’ (Stokes 2012: 92). Prominent accounts of the narrative self that reject or disregard holism – such as Marya Schechtman’s or Daniel Dennett’s (see Schechtman 2011: 402–3) – do not tend to discuss or allude to matters surrounding the end of life narrative.   2. Kermode 2000.   3. Nuttall 1992; Richardson 2008; Said 1975; Watson 1978.   4. Ruprecht 2010.   5. Velleman 1993: 331–2 and n. 8.   6. Williams 1973.   7. Wollheim 1984.   8. Nussbaum 1989.   9. MacIntyre 1979. 10. Blackburn 2007.

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11. Slote 1983; Velleman 1993. 12. See Velleman 1993: 395 n. 8. 13. Velleman 2003; Currie 2010: Chap. 2. 14. Davenport 2012; Goldie 2011 and 2012. 15. Christman 2004; Goldie 2011; Lamarque 2007. 16. See Hermione Lee’s entertaining critique of various literary biographers’ attempts to recount the death of their subjects in a manner that emulates the literary style or content of the authors’ works (Lee 2005). 17. See Scarre 2012. 18. See n. 1 above. 19. See Behrendt 2007; Davenport 2012; Lippitt 2007; Mulhall 2009. 20. ‘One can be conscious of oneself only as one was, not as one is; the self’s necessary capacity to direct its attention to itself as well as to that which lies beyond it is realized, and is only realizable, in time, and hence is essentially incapable of bringing the whole of itself (including its present state) into self-consciousness’ (Mulhall 2009: 191). 21. Indeed, Davenport’s first solution involves capitulating to the notion that completion of one’s ground projects is not central to their value; it is being engaged in, not finishing, that matters. But this is a neo-Epicurean solution that attempts to alleviate the badness of death qua deprivation by leaving it less to deprive us of (see Luper-Foy 1987). Completion of individual projects, and of life qua an overall project, is not a goal here and therefore cannot be thwarted. 22. Rudd 2009: 64 and Stokes 2012: 90–1. 23. Such as Christman 2004; Lippitt 2007. 24. Rudd 2007 and 2009 give an extended version of this counterargument. 25. See Rudd 2007 and 2009, and Schechtman 2008.

13  The End? Kierkegaard’s Death and its Implications for Telling his Story GEORGE PATTISON

In Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, I sought to read Kierkegaard in the particular context of modernist literature, politics, philosophy and religion that spanned the period from late romanticism through to existentialism. Inevitably, this is a categorisation that is difficult to define precisely, either historically or conceptually. Nevertheless, we can see many of the diverse movements and figures of the modernist breakthrough as sharing a concern to achieve a decisively unambiguous life, piercing through the superficial compromises of bourgeois society, looking reality in the face, and affirming the truth of  iving personality. In this situation, values of honesty, authenticity and self-commitment come to the fore, and it is easy to see how Kierkegaard could be received both as a pioneer of the modernist tendency and also as a defining representative of its essential idea. Even if Georg Brandes and others complained of the pre-modern cocoon of religiosity in which his thought remained entangled, we have only to think of the early Kierkegaard’s passionate search for ‘the Archimedean point’ that would bring unity to his scattered self – to find the idea for which he could live and die – or such Kierkegaardian tropes as either/or, ethical resoluteness, willing one thing, or ‘the moment of vision’. Whether or not these are separable from the religious context in which Kierkegaard himself developed them, it is easy to see how they point towards the secular quest for unambiguous life that we can discern in, for example, J. P. Jacobsen’s Niles Lyhne, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Dr Stockmann, and on, in the twentieth century, to political decisionism and at least some versions of the culture of existential authenticity. Even apart from the question as to the role of religion, this emphasis on the pursuit of an unambiguous life would nevertheless seem to offer less than the full truth regarding Kierkegaard. Don’t many readers feel that Kierkegaard is at his best precisely when he appears before 203

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us as an exponent or else an analyst of irony, anxiety, humour, fear and trembling, silence and other ‘ambiguous’ conditions, that is, states of mind or forms of life of which the meaning or the truth do not lie on the surface, just waiting to be skimmed off, as it were, but which open up to reveal an inner infinity of potential meanings? Kierkegaard would emphasise that for God all things are possible, but his account of human existence showed that it too was a condition in which possibility was effectively inexhaustible. Not least, this is because the factors of freedom and temporality that he discerned as central to the constitution of the human subject seem – in combination – to make any final, unambiguous accounting of human life impossible. Such an accounting would, of course, be possible for God, but that is not something to which we human beings, from our sublunary point of view, have access (a point that Kierkegaard identifies as one of the basic confusions of speculative philosophy). Yet if the heroic, authentic and unambiguous ‘modernist’ Kierkegaard is not the whole Kierkegaard, it does reflect one current in his writing. Not only the young Kierkegaard on the cliff-tops of Gilleleie but the mature Kierkegaard of the late 1840s and 1850s is still attempting to draw up a final ‘accounting’ on his life and literature, and if the text published under the title ‘The Accounting’ is, in Kierkegaardian terms, a model of brevity and concision (PV, 3–13/SKS 13: 9–19), the journals reveal page after page in which he attempts to form his protean writings into some kind of unitary whole. If there is a ‘whole truth’ of Kierkegaard, then, it must somehow accommodate both a more than usually forceful search for unambiguous life with a recognition of the irresolvable non-finality and therefore ambiguity of the human condition in general and Kierkegaard’s own life and authorship in particular. One way of focusing these issues is to consider the question of Kierkegaard’s death. Amongst the reasons for choosing this focus is that Heidegger’s account of how the readiness to ‘run towards’ death provides a measure of the human being’s capacity for authentic existence not only made the question of death pivotal to twentieth-century understandings of what an unambiguous life might mean but was also widely perceived as part of Heidegger’s inheritance from Kierkegaard himself. In other words, Kierkegaard came to be read as anticipating Heidegger in making the confrontation with death a decisive element in giving human existence a defining telos – in the double sense of both conclusion and purpose. I have elsewhere questioned this supposed affinity between Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian approaches to the question of death (although I do not exclude the possibility that Heidegger might have



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believed he was radicalising an approach he found in the Danish thinker), but my purpose here is not to examine the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s death found in his writings.1 Instead, I want to focus on how Kierkegaard’s own death has been written up in the secondary literature and I want to do so not least because Kierkegaard’s life-story has entered into the reception history of his thought in a way that whilst not unparalleled (we see something similar in the case of, for instance, Nietzsche) is exceptional.2 There are obvious reasons for this, including his own emphasis on the need for thought and, most importantly, faith to find existential expression in life. Again the motif of the quest for an unambiguous life would seem to require that there should be no split between a person’s thought/faith and their life. A truth for which one can live and die is not primarily characterised in terms of its intellectual coherence or factual correctness (although those might be supplementary conditions for a truth that was really worth living and dying for) but in terms of the fact that one really can and does live and die for it. When Kierkegaard is read, as he was read by those in the line of literary and philosophical modernism, as a proponent of the quest for unambiguous life, then it seems not inappropriate to expect that his life will show us the truth of his thought – and, if this expectation is also filtered through a certain reading of Being and Time, then his death would seem to offer an exceptionally privileged vantage-point from which to appraise the meaning and aim of both his life and his thought. As I hope to show, this has in fact often been held to be the case. And, again, we have to acknowledge that Kierkegaard himself – one half of Kierkegaard, at least! – gave an impulse to this kind of reading. The doctor who examined him on his admission to hospital wrote that ‘He considers his illness to be fatal. His death is necessary for the cause upon the furtherance of which he has expended all his intellectual energies, for which alone he has labored, and for which alone he believes he has been intended [. . .] Through his death [. . .] his struggle will retain its strength, and, as he believes, its victory’ (Garff 2005: 782–3). But if we consider the quest for unambiguous life as illuminating only one side of Kierkegaard’s life and work, then this will mean that his death cannot in this way provide insight into the whole, no matter how focused he himself became in relation to it or what value he himself ascribed to it. Even when the entirety of a person’s will is committed in the moment we might call the moment of final self-offering, that cannot (I suggest) resolve all the issues that have been at play in their life, let alone their thought. The implications of these comments for a narrativist approach to identity and, in particular, for claiming Kierkegaard as ­exemplifying

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such an approach in either or both of his life and work should, I hope, be clear. Commenting on Alastair MacIntyre’s narrative view of the self, Anthony Rudd has written that ‘narrative just is the form in which self-conscious agents make themselves intelligible to themselves as beings that act in time’ (Rudd 2012: 178). Rudd claims that this also involves ascribing a teleological character to human life, that is, that the whole narrative of a human life is directed towards a defining goal or end. Indeed, he thinks that acceptance of this principle will lead many critics of narrative theory ‘to concede that the understanding of human action necessarily has a narrative form, because human action is essentially teleological’ (2012: 183). Their real worry, he suggests, is not that a human life has a certain narrative dimension but that particular narrative episodes can add up ‘to understanding a whole life as a narrative’ (2012: 183, my emphasis). But although Rudd himself acknowledges that, in some sense, this may be a finally unattainable ideal, he nevertheless proposes that we should seek to maximise our sense of self as constituted in and by the narrative of our lives and that this is integral to living a good life. My contention here is that this unattainability has more dramatic implications than Rudd acknowledges, since it retrospectively undermines the narrative thesis as such. If the end of the story is necessarily missing or if a range of alternative endings are all equally plausible, what sort of story is it? I shall return to these critical reflections at a later point, but turn now to what I am proposing should be regarded as a misplaced tendency in Kierkegaard biography, a tendency that is both rooted in the modernist and narrativist approaches I have been discussing and that has also played its part in shaping and nurturing them. Biographies of Kierkegaard differ widely in how they narrate his life. They differ less widely but still significantly in how they narrate his death, often resorting for these final pages to citing the salient facts of his illness, last conversations and burial. Yet they are remarkably similar in the extent to which they see his death as, somehow, appropriately bringing his life to its predetermined end. This is a life that did not just finish: it is a life that was accomplished. In this respect we may say that Kierkegaard biographies typically have a strongly teleological structure, driving towards the ‘attack on “Christendom”’ and its author’s final collapse and death as if towards an end that is both terminus and consummation. The examples I have chosen are each very different in their ideological commitments and overall interpretation of Kierkegaard’s life. The first, perhaps provocatively, is the Nazi philosopher and Nietzsche specialist, Alfred Bauemler, the second the Anglican Kierkegaard-translator and



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biographer Walter Lowrie, and the third the more sceptical and psycho-analytically oriented biographer Josiah Thompson. Nevertheless, despite these differences they all share a strongly teleological approach to Kierkegaard’s death, as we shall now see. In 1934, the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National-Socialist Monthly) published a special issue devoted to questions of culture. This included articles on Iran and Zoroastrianism, Meister Eckhart, Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Bauemler’s article ‘Thoughts on Kierkegaard’ stated that, along with Nietzsche, the Dane was one of the only two men of the nineteenth century who acted. By ‘acted’, Bauemler clearly meant something more than getting out of bed, engaging in colonial adventures, or rushing to the barricades. Seen from where we are now, the nineteenth century seems to have been a very active century: war and peace, the industrial revolution, democratic movements and imperial expansion provide many-faceted examples of people acting. Bauemler’s implication, however, is that for all their occasional revolutionary or imperialist glamour, such ‘actions’ are essentially the application of existing intellectual and social paradigms. What distinguished Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was the deliberate provocation they offered to a whole world-order; they had the courage to step outside the presuppositions of their age and ‘act’ solely on the basis of their own will. Even though their action had the form of literary activity, their way of being writers was very different from those Kierkegaard called ‘premise-authors’. These are authors of the average variety, who, no matter how gifted, offer only what the age itself requires of them. It is always a matter of new and newer tasks, proposals, gestures, intimations, indications, projects and everything that never amounts to more than a beginning, arousing nothing more than an impatience incapable of service. Such a one calls for no perseverance because he has none. He is satisfied with being regarded as ‘stimulating’ and is proud to be so – without sensing that he thus remains a mere premise-author who never comes to a conclusion or end. (Bauemler 1934: 71, my translation)

‘Essential’ authors, by way of contrast, know their conclusion before they begin to write and, in the case of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both knew from the beginning that this would expose them to misunderstanding and rejection. This, Bauemler argues, is what gave their respective bodies of writing such impassioned force – a force so great that it ended by destroying them. But far from seeing in this a sign of their neurotic personalities (as, he says, the literary Philistines are likely to do), Bauemler sees it as evidence of utter commitment to their vocation. ‘The concentration, the clarity, the force of both life and work grew with each step forward, the tempo got faster, and finally reached

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the point of rage – and then comes the moment when, on October 2nd 1855, Kierkegaard collapses on the street in Copenhagen and is brought to the Fredericks Hospital where, some weeks later, he dies’ (1934: 72, my translation). This is not only paralleled by Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin, but in both cases it is a matter of the bow breaking as a result of the exceptional stress placed upon it. All of this is a sign that they were both men of ‘spirit’. Not, Bauemler hastens to add, in the customary sense of idealistic philosophy, but according to Nietzsche’s own definition of spirit as ‘life that cuts into itself’ or Kierkegaard’s ‘spirit is: whatever power a person’s knowing has over their life’. ‘What is being talked about here is the spirit that cuts into itself and inflicts pain, that only affirms when it has once denied, that is a matter of force and not an instrument of sophisticated enjoyment’ (1934: 72, my translation). Running through a number of parallels between the two authors, and noting a number of key biographical and thematic points in Kierkegaard’s development, Bauemler comes to what he sees as the main point, that is, the attack on the Church in the pamphlets entitled The Moment. This, he says, is not part of the authorship, It is a direct attack, an attack of unheard of forcefulness against an embourgeoised version of Christianity, against habitual Christianity, against a clergy that vanishes behind its stipendiary office, against thoughtless baptism and Church-going. With a spring like that of a tiger, Kierkegaard pounces upon a world that calls itself Christian but actually falls short of paganism. (1934: 84, my translation)

One doesn’t learn any new ‘thoughts’ from such an attack, Bauemler concludes, ‘The Moment is Kierkegaard’s act and is to be understood entirely as praxis. [In it] Kierkegaard sacrifices himself’ (1934: 84, my translation). And it is in this way that Kierkegaard became the only man of the nineteenth century before Nietzsche to act. My objections to Bauemler’s account are not that he was a Nazi, but have to do with the exceptionally clear way in which he represents what I have called the teleological approach to Kierkegaard’s biography. But this is also shared by many who are far from sharing Bauemler’s political philosophy. Published four years after Bauemler’s article, Walter Lowrie’s massive biography (its length greatly extended by the sheer scale of quotations contained in it) also sees Kierkegaard’s death as a sacrifice that marks the culmination of his whole life’s work. Just looking at the division and chapter headings of Lowrie’s work is instructive for how he sees his subject. The main divisions of the book are ‘Childhood’, ‘Youth’, ‘Early Manhood’, ‘Intellectual Maturity’, ‘Becoming a Christian’ and, Part 6, ‘The Corrective – The Sacrifice’.



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Within this last part, the chapter headings offer a preview of how the narrative moves towards its dramatic denouement: ‘Loading the Gun’, ‘The Explosion’, ‘Hallelujah’. This is how Lowrie himself relates this sixth part to what has gone before. It cannot be asserted too emphatically that the line of division between this period [from June 1852 to Kierkegaard’s death] and the foregoing is not a formal one drawn arbitrarily by the biographer for the sake of concluding his book with a sixth part, but that it marks a real and very striking difference in comparison with the period immediately preceding it as well as with the whole previous course of S. K.’s life. (1938: 487)

However, Lowrie goes on, this difference is not that Kierkegaard has changed his opinions or direction. On the contrary, ‘the thoughts which hitherto had chiefly engrossed him continued to engross him more and more’. What is different is that ‘his mind was so intensely concentrated upon these essential thoughts that they became his only thoughts’ (1938: 487) – which, as Lowrie goes on to add, makes Kierkegaard in some respects less interesting in this period. But if he is less interesting, this is compensated for by a new intensity. In this regard Lowrie works towards his finale by reintroducing the now long-deceased figure of Kierkegaard’s father, so that the consummation of Kierkegaard’s life becomes the ultimate resolution also of his conflicted relation to his father. S. K. described his father as a man of iron will; a prodigious example of it. No one would think of describing Søren in such terms at any period of his life so far as we yet have followed it [. . .] And yet now it is exactly applicable, and in an entry of September 23, 1855, he is evidently thinking of himself when he says: Only a man of iron will can become a Christian [. . .] A Christian is a man of iron will who no longer desires his own will, but with the passion of his contrite will – fundamentally changed – desires the will of another. (1938: 489)

And this, Lowrie adds, ‘is an expression for the purity of heart he sought after: “to will one thing”’. And so it is a new S. K., setting out to do battle with Christendom, whom Lowrie now describes: Incredible as it may seem to the reader who has followed this story so far – and all the more to one who has read all the voluminous Journals and become impatient with the endless discussions which led to no decision, and with the perpetual relapses from decisions which seemed to have been made – it is none the less true that during the whole period we are now concerned with there is no trace of indecision, no weighing of alternatives, no hint even that any decision has to be made. For S. K. had made up his mind, had clearly envisaged his task in relationship to God, and from this time forth there was no wavering. (1938: 489)

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‘Here,’ says Lowrie, ‘we see a man whose whole nature is sharpened – even hardened in a way – by the intensity of his preoccupation with the task he looks forward to as God’s appointment for him, the task of being a “corrective”, which means also, as he knows full well, to be a “sacrifice”. This is not interesting, but it is awe-inspiring’ (1938: 490). It is entirely in keeping with this interpretation that, a hundred pages later, Lowrie concludes his work with an extract from the journals headed ‘The Sacrifice, the Corrective’ in which Kierkegaard, drawing on the analogies of a cook using a pinch of spice or an artist using a touch of colour to perfect their respective works, speaks of how God uses ‘a little touch of red’, ‘a man who must be sacrificed’ in order ‘to impart a particular taste to the rest’: ‘These are the correctives,’ Kierkegaard adds (Lowrie 1938: 588). And, as we have seen, Lowrie regards Kierkegaard as having been in no doubt that his own mission in relation to the reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom was to offer himself as just such a sacrifice. Here too, then, the life moves towards its ineluctable telos, an end that is also a consummation. Lowrie’s biography was, of course, also something of a hagiography. That cannot be said of Josiah Thompson’s Kierkegaard – ‘a critical biography of the philosopher who has been called the father of Existentialism’, as it is called on the cover, already signalling both that this is a critical work and that it is not treating Kierkegaard as a religious hero (as Lowrie did) but as a philosopher. We don’t have to read very far into Thompson’s work to discover that he also reads Kierkegaard as a pathological case, for whom the Diapsalmata of Either/Or are essentially a piece of self-description. Nor does Thompson see any decisive breakthrough to authentic Christianity. On the contrary, the radical Christianity of the later Kierkegaard is seen as fundamentally repeating the nihilism of ‘A’. When, in summer 1855, Kierkegaard speaks of the Christian as ‘a stranger and an alien’ in the world, Thompson comments: This phrase [. . .] carries us back, for ‘stranger’ was the word Franz Welding applied to Kierkegaard as a boy, and Kierkegaard later used it to describe himself as an adult. To Judge William, his young aesthete friend appeared as ‘a stranger and an alien’, and later Johannes de Silentio applied the same phrase to his ‘knight of infinite resignation’. Thus an epithet which had been applied to so many of Kierkegaard’s fictional characters trapped in the ‘still life’ of despair was now awarded to the Christian. The world-weariness and ennui that Kierkegaard earlier denigrated he now honored as the very essence of Christian suffering. Himself a spectral and solitary figure, Kierkegaard now embraced the estrangement he had fled as a youth. (1974: 214)



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This leads Thompson to reflect on the very final journal entry, the note in which Kierkegaard describes how the aim of human life is to be brought to the point of utter world-weariness and suffering and yet still to be able to believe that God does this through love. ‘These words,’ says Thompson, ‘are the logical outcome of Kierkegaard’s life [. . .] Alienation is [. . .] man’s primordial and necessary state’ (1974: 215). And, he continues, ‘Having tried to make his home in the world but finding it ultimately uninhabitable, Kierkegaard finally forsakes it, not in the ambiguous guise of poet or ironist, but unequivocally as a religious enthusiast’ (1974: 216). Obviously, Thompson’s idea of a religious enthusiast is very differently conceived and valued from what we saw in Lowrie, but they do have this in common: that they both see Kierkegaard’s final development as, in effect, closing the circle and repeating the essential issue in Søren’s relation to his father. Thompson writes: [H]ere, as with everything in his life, there is a remarkable congruity. For it had been his father’s morbid Christianity that had destroyed his youth and innocence. Now, in the autumn of his life, his thoughts return to his father. He remembers the old man twice daily in his prayers [. . . and] he feels in these years as if his father’s will were becoming his own [. . .] Christianity had been the vehicle through which the old man passed on a fundamental estrangement. Now, finally, this estrangement finds its consummation in Kierkegaard’s life and thought. Without friends or acquaintances, his life running out, he hurls the death’s-head of Christianity at the world. (1974: 216)

Three very different biographies, with three very different evaluations of the final ‘Attack’, but all agreeing that this is not to be seen as an arbitrary outburst but rather as the consummation of Kierkegaard’s life, the goal towards which the whole – his relation to his father, his developing conception of Christianity – had been moving. And all, therefore, see his death in the middle of the Attack as somehow integral to it and to its meaning both to Kierkegaard and to us. This is not just the logical outcome of a certain way of thinking about Christianity, it is the outcome of a whole life-project. I suggest that the conception of life underlying these three different biographies – and many others – is fundamentally flawed. Of course, there is something immensely appealing and culturally deeply-engrained in thinking about death as the telos of life. Within the Christian West it is an idea that received considerable impetus from the idea of martyrdom, which is precisely the idea that some Christian biographers of Kierkegaard – picking up on leads in his own writing – use to explain the relationship between the Attack and his death (and, of course,

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Kierkegaard himself had from the late 1840s onwards been repeatedly preoccupied with the question of martyrdom and whether this might be what he himself was being called to).3 This was further reinforced by centuries of Christian teaching and practice relating to ‘the good death’: that ‘preparing to meet our maker’ is not just the final phase of human life, but a step towards its ultimate moment of truth, when who we really are and have been will be revealed. It is no coincidence that saints’ days are celebrated not on the anniversary of the saint’s birth, but of his or her death. This is the beginning of his or her true life, the authentic ‘birthday’ – again a thought not unknown to Kierkegaard himself. In modern times, even as Christianity began to lose its imaginative gip on Western culture, the Christian idea of martyrdom was reinforced or, rather, given a new lease of life by the modern experience of warfare and the interpretation of death in battle as ‘the supreme sacrifice’. In this connection it is no coincidence that it was in the decade after the First World War that Heidegger developed his conception of authentic existence as being based on an anticipatory resoluteness in the face of death: only the unflinching recognition of our mortality enables us to see the truth of the kind of beings that we are. The point is strengthened if Dan Dahlstrom is correct in contending that the term Vorlaufen, translated as ‘anticipation’ by Robinson and Macquarrie and which literally means something like ‘running-ahead’ or ‘running towards’, was also a term familiar to Heidegger’s generation in the context of troops going over the top and running towards enemy lines, into the ‘storm of steel’ to use the vivid phrase of Heidegger’s friend Ernst Jünger.4 Contemporary discourse and ritual relating to death in battle continues in this line. The Christian martyr and the soldier killed in battle thus deeply inform the cultural meme that shapes our attitude to death and, especially, when we find ourselves thinking of death as not just the end but the consummation, the telos of human existence. Even in an entirely secular and non-heroic mode, such a tendency to see life as somehow being consummated in death lives on in popular beliefs about how a dying person sees the whole of their life flash past before them in an instant, a belief for which (as far as I know) there is no clinical evidence. But how else might we think of death? One significant alternative is that propounded by Simone de Beauvoir in her essay on her own mother’s death, ‘a natural death’ in medical terms. But de Beauvoir comments, ‘There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation’



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(1969: 92). Death, on this view, is radically contingent, without any intrinsic relation to the meaning of a person’s life. We just happen to die, no matter what kind of lives we’ve been leading.5 Or, as de Beauvoir’s contemporary Vladimir Jankélévitch put it, dying is always extraordinary (1977: 7). But if this is right, then death cannot provide an especially privileged vantage point either from which to orientate oneself towards Being à la Heidegger or from which to retrospectively interpret the meaning of a human life in the manner of so many of Kierkegaard’s biographers. Death is an arbitrary and meaningless occurrence that, so far from bestowing meaning on life, dissolves all possible configurations of meaningful life – as Heidegger himself initially argues before coming up with his idea of anticipatory resoluteness (2001: 293–9). Of course, it is not self-evident that anticipatory resoluteness itself is able to do the work Heidegger expects of it. Lévinas, who had some experience of these things (over 10,000 prisoners died in the camp in which he was held during the war), is implicitly rebutting Heidegger when he insists that the uncontrollable sob of the dying will always undermine any would-be authentic freedom for death (1983: 60). John Davenport sees Heidegger’s idea of anticipatory resoluteness as developing a Kierkegaardian insight but, in Kierkegaardian terms, ‘knowledge’ of any future event can only ever be knowledge of possibility not of anything actual, and the point of meditating on death is to direct us back to what actually confronts us and is actually demanded of us now, in this present day (a point to which I shall later return). More generally, what Kierkegaard calls the uncertainty of death is not just a matter of when death will come or how we might comport ourselves in our final moments but the quiet relativisation of all possible narratives we may tell about ourselves or that others may tell about us. Had Marshal Pétain, the defender of Verdun, died in 1939 he would doubtless have been accorded a state burial as one of France’s greatest sons; that he lived on to become the leader of the Vichy government and died as an imprisoned war criminal completely transformed how he would be remembered. Dickens’ Sydney Carton, on the other hand, redeemed a wasted life through his final heroic sacrifice – but what if, for some inexplicable reason, the revolutionary authorities had rescinded the death sentence? Who is to say that he might not have reverted to drunkenness and idleness or, perhaps, succumbed to an infatuated pursuit of Lucie to the point of ruining her life with Charles! Stranger things have happened. Nor is it just a matter of the subject’s relation to their own death. The person I am can be significantly affected by the happenstance that someone with whom I was unreconciled dies before

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reconciliation has been attempted by one or other of us. No matter how subtle its literary expression, what Davenport calls ‘authenticity in the face of death’ is, I suspect, a Romantic consolation for which the existentialist stress on absurdity (that Davenport accuses of exaggeration) is a humbling but necessary corrective.6 Although Georg Brandes is one of the sources of the modernist tendency against which I have been arguing in this paper, he himself offers a good statement of the inconclusiveness of Kierkegaard’s death. It has been said that he died at the right time. When one talks like this, however, one is looking at his life aesthetically. His last appearance was a fifth act, and what remains for a tragic hero to do after the fifth act except to die? [But] I cannot regard Kierkegaard’s life or death as a work of dramatic art. A genius who dies at the age of 42 never dies at the right time for his world. I wish he could have lived.7

Yet Brandes then goes on to offer a fairly unambiguous account of what would have happened had he lived, namely, that he would have been pushed by the inexorable logic of his own thought to a more radically secular position. To use an analogy made by Brandes himself, Kierkegaard would have discovered that the new world on which he had landed was not the old world of Christian faith but the new world of Nietzschean liberty – unless, Brandes notes, he had swung the other way, back to the ‘dark abyss’ of Roman Catholicism. This last is, of course, a suggestion that some Catholic writers have also embraced – albeit in more positive terms!8 Kierkegaard’s own writings might offer reasons as to why both these suggestions are implausible – but who knows? Perhaps even a moderately gifted novelist could, given a couple of hours, come up with not a few alternative plot-lines for Kierkegaard’s future development. In any case, Bauemler, Lowrie and Thompson have already given us a range of options in considering the meaning of the Attack: an assault on bourgeois mediocrity, an act of Christian self-sacrifice, or a relapse into the neurosis he has never fully shaken off; but the fact that Kierkegaard died in the middle of it contributes nothing essential to how we are to interpret it. Had he lived longer and outlived the Attack, it might still have been read in any of these ways, depending, of course, on what actually did happen next. And had he died in the late 1840s, we would be telling a very different story again.9 Perhaps, then, the telos of Kierkegaard’s life was to produce works from which he himself subsequently deviated – a construction that could also be said to apply to many other writers and artists. I am not arguing that it is the simple absurdity of death that makes every possible narrative we might tell about a human life a more or less arbitrary fiction, merely that death cannot be used to give to human existence a telos it doesn’t



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have. Death is always extraordinary. And if it does provide some kind of telos, it is not to be sought for here but at another, transcendent level that is not perhaps accessible to any philosophy. And I would add that our continuing susceptibility to thinking of death as telos, a susceptibility reinforced by the kinds of ways of narrating Kierkegaard’s death I have been describing, makes us also susceptible to religious, cultural, political and military value-systems that, so far from enhancing our capacities for life, lead us to devalue the lives we are living for the sake of a death we will never experience. Certainly Kierkegaard, like Heidegger, regarded the thought of death as a ‘serious’ or ‘earnest’ thought. But where Heidegger is led by this serious thought to the idea of an authentic freedom for death, Kierkegaard seems more concerned by what he calls the ‘retroactive’ power of the thought of death, that is, how it affects the way in which we are now living. As he himself sums up the outcome of reflecting on death: ‘Death says “Maybe today” [that is, as in the New Testament parable, who knows whether their life might come to an end tonight]; but seriousness says: “Whether it is today or not, I say: This very day”’ (TDIO, 85/SKS 5: 454). In other words, what really concerns seriousness is not death but the demand that we live well today, committing ourselves to works of love. Even here, however, and although Kierkegaard clearly believes that it is in principle possible to distinguish between what is of love and what is merely the product of selfish selfconcern, it will only with great difficulty be possible to know whether or not we are indeed acting in, according to, and from the spirit of love. The final decision is – as in Christian terms it always has been – eschatological, that is, rooted in the judgement of God. Or, to put it in terms more appealing to a secular culture, such a final decision, which would also be the start of a truly unambiguous life, must always be a matter of hope. And here Kierkegaard, in his many voices, is consistent: that whilst life continuously frustrates and obscures the movement of love, to the point at which it is easy to become cynical and disillusioned, we must at all times and in the face of every contrary evidence go on hoping in the possibility of love: ‘love hopes all things and is never put to shame’ (WL, 246/SKS 9, 246). It is only this hope – not death – that lifts the veil of ambiguity. N OT E S 1. Both the question of Heidegger’s dependence on Kierkegaard and of the latter’s own understanding of death are extensively addressed in Pattison 2013.

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2. In this regard it is not coincidental that the first major monograph on each thinker was written by Georg Brandes, who, in responding to criticism of his approach to Nietzsche, replied that ‘my first thought with regard to a philosophical book was by no means to ask whether what it contains is right or wrong: I go straight through the book to the man behind it. And my first question is this: What is the value of this man, is he interesting, or not? If he is, then his books are undoubtedly worth knowing’ (Brandes 1914: 61). 3. Cf. the previously cited remarks noted by his doctor. 4. Dahlstrom made this comment in discussion following a seminar presentation at Christ Church, Oxford on 9 February 2011. 5. In this connection it is worth noting that, against the trend of the modernist readings we have been considering, de Beauvoir actually takes Kierkegaard as a defining example for what she calls the ‘ethics of ambiguity’. 6. See Davenport 2012: 157–65. For further discussion of the issues raised here see Pattison 2013: 52–6, 75–9. 7. Brandes 2013: 236. 8. Roos 1952 remains a very fair summary of ‘Catholicising’ and ‘anti-Catholic’ tendencies in Kierkegaard. 9. I am sympathetic to Sylvia Walsh’s view that it is this period, say from 1847 to 1851, that represents the high point of the authorship, at least in theological terms (and, to a certain extent also, the quality of the writing). See Walsh 2006: 159.

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Index

accretion objection, 32, 33, 35, 41–4 aesthetes, 95–7, 99–100, 109, 120–1, 127, 155 Judge William, 99, 112n Lippitt, 106 MacIntyre, 95–9, 100, 101–7 Rudd, 7–8, 104 Afham, William, 114 agency, human practical agency, 197–8 ‘agent process’ interpretation, 197–8 alienation, 146–7 Altshuler, Roman, 6 ambivalence, 8, 131–40, 144–60 Annas, Julia, 198 anticipatory closure, 195–6, 199 anticipatory whole, 30–45, 35 Anti-Climacus, 108–9, 112n, 115 Aristotle, 1, 10, 50–3, 178–81, 192 articulation constraint, 14 Athenagoras, 1 Augustine, 30, 31–2, 44 Confessions, 30 authenticity, 23–4, 47, 175, 214 Bauemler, Alfred, 207–8 beginning, middle and end structures, 187–8 Behrendt, Kathy, 10 Bennett, Christopher, 137 Blattner, William, 174–5 Brandes, Georg, 203, 214, 216n Brentano, Franz, 86 Camus, Albert, 25–6 ‘Myth of Sisyphus, The’, 25–6 Carr, David, 66, 171 Carroll, Noël, 182, 189, 192–3 Christianity, 9, 108–9, 210–12, 214–15 Christman, John, 130, 142n

closure, 10, 173–4, 176, 180–3, 186, 192–5, 196–8 co-authorship, 24 completeness, 189–91 Conlon, Edward, 124n consciousness ‘additional consciousness’ (Brentano), 86 pre-reflective self-consciousness, 7, 79–80, 89 sameness of consciousness, 12–13 context, 32, 36, 171–2 Dalsgaard, Matias Møl, 9 Danto, Arthur, 41, 182–4 Dasein, 6, 9–10, 30, 36–8, 44n, 82, 85, 169–85 Davenport, John death, 67, 196, 202n, 213–14 eschatological view, 113–14, 119–21, 124n eucatastrophe, 8, 119–21 eudaimonism, 52–3 and Frankfurt on wholeheartedness, 8–9, 128–30 heroic aesthete, 103 Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, 4, 95 de Beauvoir, Simone, 10, 212–13 death, 6, 35–6, 36–8, 44n, 169–85, 195–6 Davenport, 67, 196, 202n, 213–14 death objection to narrative identity, 3, 9–10, 65–8, 127, 195–6 Heidegger, 9–10, 204–5, 212, 213 Kierkegaard, 203–16 depth psychology, 107–9 Derrida, Jacques, 83, 85 desire, 39–40 despair, 108–9 destiny, 16, 23–6

229

230

Narrative, Identity and Kierkegaardian Self

diachronic whole, 7, 22–3 ‘Différance’, 83 Dihle, Albrecht, 164–5 Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, The, 165 Dillon, Robin, 137–8 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 171 Dreyfus, Hubert, 55 emotions, 147–8 emotional valence, 183–4 Enlightenment Project, 57–8 erotic reduction, 78–94 eschatological view, 127 Davenport, 113–14, 119–21, 124n in Kierkegaard’s literary criticism, 113–25 essential conflict, 128–30 ethical choice, 104, 152–3 existence, 97–101 selfhood, 4 views of agency, 96–112 eucatastrophe, 8, 9, 119–21, 122–3, 159 and peripeteia, 117–22 eudaimonism, 52–3, 56, 61n, 155 fictionalising tendency, 15 Fifties Wife (Schechtman), 135, 150–2 Fischer, John Martin, 35–6, 41 Fisher, Tony, 174–5 fission problem, 29 Flat Earth belief, 98 forgiveness Lippitt on, 8–9, 126–43, 144–5, 145–52 and self-forgiveness, 137–9 Frankfurt, Harry G. and Davenport, 8–9, 128–30 desires, 39–40 ‘Freedom of the Will’, 146 ‘Identification and Externality’, 146 ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, 145 Reasons of Love, The, 133 and Schechtman, 133 and Velleman, 130–6, 145–6, 150 volitional unity, 72, 145–7, 150 wholeheartedness, 8, 9, 126–43, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 39, 130–6 Friedman, Marilyn, 150–1 Furtak, Rick, 106

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 83 Truth and Method, 83 Gallagher, Shaun, 84, 87–8 Phenomenological Mind, The, 83–4, 87–8 Gallie, W. B., 68 genre, 3, 15, 16 God, 9, 31, 53–6, 65, 164–6, 204, 210 Godard, Jean-Luc, 191 Goldie, Peter, 15, 42, 139–41, 143n, 193–4, 195 good, 50–3, 53–60, 97–8, 123, 134, 163–4 ‘grand narrative’ interpretation, 10, 196–8 Griswold, Charles, 139–40 Guignon, Charles, 173 Gyllembourg, Thomasine, 115–16 Haar, Michel, 82 Hanson, Jeffrey, 88 Haufniensis, Vigilius, 73–4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Frederich, 124n Heidegger, Martin, 5, 6–7 anticipatory whole, 30–45 Being and Time, 82, 169–85, 205 death, 9–10, 204–5, 212, 213 phenomenology, 80–1, 82–3, 85 temporal unity, 9–10, 30–45, 169–85 ‘Untainability Thesis’, 174–5 Helms, Eleanor, 8, 9, 144–5, 158–60 hope, 8–9, 58, 69, 117, 122–3, 151, 159, 168, 190–1, 215 Hume, David, 184 Husserl, Edmund, 70, 71, 80–1, 179–80 Logical Investigations, 81 immanence, 47–62 instrumental conflict, 128–30 Iranaeus, 1 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 213 Johannes Climacus, 89 Johannes the Seducer, 147–8 Judge William on the aesthete, 99, 112n on the good, 4, 54–5 human practical agency, 8, 98, 101–7 MacIntyre’s narrative intelligibility, 57–60



Index 231

narrative self-constitution approach, 63–4 self-deception, 96 time and eternity, 73 judgement, 73–4, 75, 215

Works of Love, 55, 73, 88–90, 90–3, 94 kinesis, 10, 178–81 Korsgaard, Christine, 169 Kosch, Michelle, 111n, 112n

Kamm, Frances, 69, 76n, 77n Kant, Immanuel, 31, 44, 184 Kermode, Frank, 8, 117, 118, 120, 121–2, 124n Sense of an Ending, The, 121 Kierkegaard, Søren bivalent temporality, 72–4 death, 203–16 good, 162–4 MacIntyre’s criticism of, 46 as phenomenologist, 78–94 phenomenology of love, 90–3, 94 Protestantism, 9, 161–8 and religion, 64–5, 73, 75, 108–9, 117, 161–8, 203, 206, 208–16 works Concept of Anxiety, The, 73 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 115, 163 Either/Or: Christianity, 210; ‘Diapsalmata’, 106; emotions, 147–8; good, 4, 54–5; human practical agency, 101–7, 127; MacIntyre’s narrative intelligibility, 57–6; narroscepticism, 63–4; prereflective self-consciousness, 89; self-deception, 95; time and eternity, 73; transfiguration (forklarelse), 115, 118, 124n; unity-1, 127 Fear and Trembling, 120 journals, 210 Moment, The, 208 ‘Occasional Discourse, An’, 56, 59–60, 64, 73–4, 114, 133, 163 On My Work as an Author, 123n Philosophical Fragments, 163 Purity of Heart, 56, 59–60, 64, 73–4, 114, 133, 163 Sickness Unto Death, The, 47, 64, 107, 108, 120, 153, 163, 168 Stages on Life’s Way, 114 Two Ages, 115–16 Upbuilding Discourses, 89, 90, 91–3: ‘One who Prays Aright’, 116; ‘Strengthening the Inner Being’, 64

Lamarque, Peter, 15–16, 19 Lannstrom, Anna, 50–1 Levinas, Emmanuel, 213 Lewis, David, 12–13 life diachronic shape of, 18–19, 24, 191–2 and literature, similarities between, 11–28 reading of, 20 trajectory of, 17–19 Lillegard, Norman, 103, 105 lily and the bird (Kierkegaard’s discourses on), 9, 163, 167–8 Lippitt, John on the aesthete, 106 forgiveness, 8–9, 126–43, 144–5, 145–52 narratosceptic, 113, 119, 126–43 psychotherapy, 8 self-deception, 39, 99 triviality objection, 99 wholeheartedness, 8–9, 126–43, 144–5, 145–52 Locke, John, 1, 12–13, 14 Long, Thomas, 189 love, 88–90 and sin, 90–3 Lowrie, Walter, 208–10 Kierkegaard, 210–11 MacIntyre, Alasdair on the aesthete, 95–9, 100, 101–7 After Virtue, 3, 4, 46, 101 co-authorship, 24 criticism of Kierkegaard, 46 discussion of Either/Or, 57–60 ethical selfhood, 4 genre, 3 narrative intelligibility, 3, 57–60 self-choice, 4 special-ends hypothesis, 188 teleology, 49, 56–60, 157, 170–1, 196–8 Malpas, Jeff, 40 Marion, Jean-Luc, 91, 91–2 Mehl, Peter, 102–3 memory, episodic, 34

232

Narrative, Identity and Kierkegaardian Self

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 83 Phenomenology of Perception, 83 ‘mineness’, 82 minimal self, 71–2, 86 Mink, Louis O., 68–9, 69 Minor, Petrus, 122 mortality objection see death objection to narrative identity motivational essence, 8, 43, 145–6, 150 Mulhall, Stephen, 196 Murdoch, Iris, 49 narrative autobiographical, 13–14, 16, 19, 21, 24–6 epic structure, 152–8 and future, 35, 38 introduction to, 2–3 and phenomenal time, 7, 69–71 and self-harm, 23–6 unresolved, 17 narrative disruption and reorientation, 8 narrative disunity, 117–22 narrative form in real life, 16–23 narrative holism, 63–77 narrative integration through forgiveness, 150–2 narrative intelligibility, 3, 57–60 narrative self-constitution approach, 1–4, 6, 11–28, 32–4 Judge William, 63–4 Schechtman, 6, 38–40, 71, 169, 171–2 narrative time, 63–77 narrative unity, 4–5, 13 based on good works, 158–60 Davenport, 126–43 Kierkegaard, 114–17 received by grace, 158–60 Rudd, 114 and wholeheartedness, 126–43 narrator or reader, 122–3 narroscepticism, 7–9 Either/Or, 63–4 Lippitt, John, 113, 119, 126–43 negative condition, 129–30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 207–8, 216n numerical identity, 1–2 Nussbaum, Martha, 134 Okrent, Mark, 82 Øverenget, Einar, 82, 86

Parfit, Derek, 2, 13, 22, 77n Pattison, George, 10 Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, 203 peripeteia and eucatastrophe, 117–22 phenomenology, 13 Heidegger, 80–1, 82–3, 85 Kierkegaard, 78–94 of love, 90–3, 94 Plato Republic, The, 51, 51–2, 56, 59 Symposium, The, 52 preferences, 192 Priest, Stephen, 81–2, 86 Protestantism, 9, 64–5, 161–8 psychological continuity approach, 6, 12–14, 16–23, 29–45 psychotherapy, 8, 112n Quinn, Philip, 126, 127–8 Rat Man (Freud), 8, 39, 130–6, 138, 143n, 145–50 and forgiveness, 126–43 Velleman, 130–6, 145–6 reality constraint, 14 reductionist view of identity, 2, 22 repression, 149–50 retroactive meaning conferral, 199–200 Ricoeur, Paul, 2–3, 46, 65, 66, 70, 77n, 83 Rudd, Anthony on the aesthete, 7–8, 104 depth psychology, 107–8 ethical choice, 104, 152–3 human practical agency, 7–8 Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, 4, 95 narrative and future, 35, 38 narrative unity, 114 psychotherapy, 8, 112n ‘Reasons in Ethics Revisited’, 97, 110–11n Self, Value and Narrative, 96 self-acceptance, 6–7 self-conscious agent, 97, 112n, 123–4n self-deception, 39, 44–5n, 99–100, 112n self-shaping, 6–7, 113 synthesisation, 6–7 teleology, 6–7, 44n, 107–8, 109, 110–11n, 141–3n, 206 wholeheartedness, 129–30, 134–6, 141–3n, 199



Index 233

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39, 47–8, 80–2, 86, 121–2, 124n, 174–5 Being and Nothingness, 81–2 Nausée, La, 121–2, 124n Transcendence of the Ego, The, 81 Schechtman, Marya Constitution of Selves, The, 3, 11–28, 34, 113 context, 32, 36, 171–2 Fifties Wife, 135 and Frankfurt, 133 narrative self-constitution approach, 6, 38–40, 71, 169, 171–2 past and future, 34, 41, 171–2 phenomenal unity, 6 self-control, 47 and Strawson, 34, 71 telling a story, 3 Scheler, Max, 87 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 47–8 self ‘experiential approach’ (Zahavi), 72 self-acceptance, 6–7, 47–62, 134 self-choice, 4 self-conscious agent, 97, 108, 112n, 123–4n self-control, 47 self-deception, 39, 99–100, 108, 128, 134, 193–5: Either/Or, 95; Judge William, 96; Lippitt, 39, 99; Rudd, 39, 44–5n, 99–100, 112n self-forgiveness, 139–41 self-harm, 23–6 self-knowledge, 134 self-misinterpretation, 131–6 self-narration, 14, 20, 38–40 self-shaping, 6–7, 9, 47–62, 113, 134 self-understanding, 39, 177 Setiya, Kieran, 33 signature narrative thesis (Davenport), 3, 78–94 Sigrist, Michael J., 9–10 sin, 108–9 Slors, Marc, 66 special-ends hypothesis, 10, 186, 188, 199–200 Stokes, Patrick, 7, 197 Strawser, Michael, 7 Strawson, Galen, 4, 33, 34, 39, 71, 184 Striker, Gisela, 187 structural isomorphism, 22 synthesisation, 6–7

Taylor, Charles, 46, 57, 71, 154–5, 161–2, 169, 170–1 Sources of the Self, 161–2 teleology, 6–7, 29–45, 196–9 MacIntyre, 49, 56–60, 157, 170–1, 196–8 Platonic, 6–7, 46–62 Rudd, 6–7, 44n, 107–8, 109, 110–11n, 141–3n, 206 telling a story, 3 temporality bivalent, 72–4 ecstatic, 179–80 past and future, 29–45, 34, 41, 171–2 temporal unity, 9–10, 30–45, 169–85 temporal whole, 32–4 time and eternity, 73 Thalberg, Irving, 151 Thompson, Josiah, 210–11 Three Edifying Discourses, 90 Tolkein, J. R. R., 8, 119, 121, 122, 127, 156–7 ‘On Fairy-Stories’, 119 transcendence, 47–62 transfiguration (forklarelse), 8, 114–17, 118–19, 159–60 Either/Or, 115, 118, 124n triviality objection, 3, 11, 26–7, 99 Turner, Jeffrey S., 64–5, 106, 112n ‘Unattainability Thesis’ (Heidegger), 174–5 unity, 13, 66 unity-0 (Davenport), 126 unity-1 (Davenport), 126, 127 unity-2 (Davenport), 127, 128, 153, 155, 157–8 unity-3 (Davenport), 9, 127, 128–43, 149, 153, 155, 158–60 unity-4 (Davenport), 9, 127, 159–60 Velleman, David closure, 192–4 emotional valence, 183–4 fragmentation objection, 39 and Frankfurt, 130–6, 145–6, 150 motivational essence, 43, 145–6, 150 preferences, 192 Rat Man, 130–6, 145–6 self-understanding, 39 special-ends hypothesis, 199–200

234

Narrative, Identity and Kierkegaardian Self

verbal aspect, 177–80 Vice, Samantha, 16 volitional unity, 72, 145–7, 145–50, 150 Vorlaufen (Heidegger), 212 Watts, Isaac, 71 Westphal, Merold, 115, 124n White, Hayden, 189 wholeheartedness, 3–4, 8–9, 144–60 Frankfurt, 8, 9, 126–43, 150 Lippitt, 8–9, 126–43, 144–5, 145–52

Rudd, 129–30, 134–6, 141–3n, 199 Wietzke, Walter, 7–8, 9, 144–5, 152–8 Williams, Bernard, 43, 54–5, 106–7, 175–6, 177, 184 Wolf, Susan, 154–5 Zahavi, Dan, 65, 71–2, 80–8 Phenomenological Mind, The, 83–4, 87–8 Subjectivity and Selfhood, 80, 85, 85–6