Thinking through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World

Introduction: Kierkegaard's Existential Anthropology and the Search for Self

Introduction: Kierkegaard’s Existential Anthropology and the Search for Self This book is a critical evaluation of Søren Kierkegaard’s vision of the normatively human and the tactics he uses to defend that vision. It is, to use more contemporary language, an examination of his image of human flourishing and the sorts of epistemic strategies he employs to justify it. But it is more than simply an explication of Kierkegaard’s thought. I will consider his thought in light of contemporary descriptive and normative accounts of human beings and their moral and religious life. In this light I will argue that Kierkegaard’s central claims cannot be maintained or, better, cannot be maintained with the strength that he asserts.Yet much remains engaging in Kierkegaard’s thought, especially when it comes to questions of our existential identity. Kierkegaard still has important truths for us today. So in the first place my argument is about selected aspects of Kierkegaard ’s thought and recent interpretations of it. My main focus is his more philosophical and especially his more psychological writings or, as they are often called, his pseudonymous authorship. Indeed, I have chosen to structure this work around three main pseudonyms: Judge William , Climacus, and Anti-Climacus. Using these “authors,” I make a sustained effort to sympathetically reconstruct certain of Kierkegaard’s core claims regarding selfhood and its effort to gain existential orientation; I explicate the most accurate and plausible interpretation that I can. I draw 01.intro.1-12/Mehl 2/14/05 2:07 PM Page 1 on several recent studies of Kierkegaard’s thought, especially those who are clearly defenders of his thought. In particular, I have been influenced by John Elrod’s (1975) study of the pseudonymous writings, and more recently , the valuable studies of C. Stephen Evans (1995, 1997, 1998), Edward Mooney (1996), Anthony Rudd (1993), John Davenport (2001), and John Davenport and Anthony Rudd (2001) are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) present in my reading of Kierkegaard.1 In the second place, this book is a constructive argument about problems and prospects for Kierkegaard’s existential project in light of certain strands in contemporary, especially pragmatic, thought. It is an effort to think through Kierkegaard today and to consider what existential identity in a pluralistic world might look like.The contemporary thought that I draw on and find most persuasive is unified by an effort to philosophically address the matters that Kierkegaard addressed: issues of selfhood, our identity and well-being, our moral and social life, existential issues, and religious visions and strategies for defending such matters. The writings of Owen Flanagan (1991, 1996), Hilary Putnam (1981, 1987, 1992, 1995), Alasdair MacIntyre (1966, 1984, 1987, 1999), Charles Taylor (1989, 1992, 2002), Jeffrey Stout (1988, 1989), Thomas Nagel (1986), Richard Rorty (1979, 1982), and Basil Mitchell (1980) have influenced my views here and provide much of the background for my critical analysis of Kierkegaard . All these writers address broad normative concerns with philosophical clarity; they address “matters of meaning.” All these philosophers , to various degrees, are exploring implications of postmodern philosophical sensibilities for normative thought, especially for a vision of who we are and might aspire to become, for our spiritual or existential identity. Central to their concerns is our “contemporary moral confusion” and ways to address it; they are aware that we have a plurality of normative perspectives and that no perspective stands as the uncontested horizon for our lives. MacIntyre, Mitchell, and Taylor are all arguing (in their unique ways) that if we are to restore intelligibility and rationality to our moral attitudes, we must restore more classical theistic visions of human life. In some ways these efforts parallel Kierkegaard’s. On the other hand, Putnam, Rorty, Stout, Nagel, and Flanagan all (again, in unique ways) think that our situation is not so drastic and that instead of wholesale restoration we can practice a selective retrieval,2 a sort of “moral bicolage ”—Jeffrey Stout’s term (1988, 294)—within and among the various traditions that provide our resources for thinking and acting. They offer more modest alternatives to the argument for restoration; they affirm moral seriousness but within a pluralistic perspective. Reading Kierkegaard through their eyes leads me finally to a modified and more modest 2 Introduction 01.intro.1-12/Mehl 2/14/05 2:07 PM Page 2 Kierkegaardian vision of existential identity. (An existential identity, as I use the term...