In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In this chapter I’m going to take my lead from two essays by Alastair Hannay that have been reprinted as the first two chapters of his recent collection Kierkegaard and Philosophy. The earlier of the two was originally called “Kier­ kegaard’s Philosophy of Mind,” and the latter first appeared as “Kierkegaard and What We Mean by ‘Philosophy.’”1 Accordingly, I will first say a few things about the importance of taking a humanistic approach to the study of mental phenomena, and then I will proceed to discuss the philosophical significance of Kierkegaard’s writing style. The logical relation between these two topics ought to become clear as I go, if it is not already obvious to a reader familiar with Kierkegaard’s work. Whether or not he would have wanted us to remember him as a philosopher, Kierkegaard can be seen as making what Hannay calls “contributions to a ‘thickened’ philosophy that takes fuller account of the ways in which we find ourselves in a world and of our ways of responding to these.”2 Not only do his writings address some of the central problems of philosophy, but they also challenge us to reevaluate our standard ways of approaching these problems. If contemporary philosophers hesitate to view Kierkegaard’s work as pertinent to their concerns, this is just another sign that the discipline of philosophy, as it currently exists, is in need of a Kierkegaardian thickening if it is to survive in a form that is worthy of its own name. Part 1—Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Mind There is a lot of talk in philosophy of mind about the “hard problem” of consciousness , or “the problem of experience.”3 Within this context, Thomas Nagel has famously argued that the “subjective character of experience” is not 5. Love and the Discipline of Philosophy RickAnthonyFurtak 60 · Rick Anthony Furtak adequately captured by scientific explanations that assume that we obtain “a more accurate view of the real nature of things” only as we “move in the direction of greater objectivity.”4 Regarding certain objects of inquiry, it makes sense to eliminate personal bias and to rely upon highly restricted techniques of measurement. But when we are trying to understand love and other varieties of meaningful human experience, this is a dubious move: by abstracting away from the viewpoint of a specific person, we may lose touch with the phenomena we are ostensibly talking about. Nagel is concerned about this tendency to adopt what he calls the view from nowhere, since “there are things about the world . . . that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint”—for instance, “the pursuit of objectivity with respect to value runs the risk of leaving value behind altogether.”5 Of course, the unacknowledged source of this distinction between the outer and the inner is Kierkegaard, whose insistence upon the validity of the first-person perspective “goes against the grain of most recent philosophy of mind.”6 But even those Anglophone philosophers who have taken an interest in “the view from within” have generally failed to recognize that they could benefit from a serious engagement with Kierkegaard’s writings. Nevertheless, as the field of consciousness studies continues to expand its horizons, it is likely to find itself moving in this direction sooner or later. Kierkegaard shows us why objectivity, so often conflated with accuracy or rationality, might sometimes be a misguided ideal; and he helps us to understand how it is that love can provide us with a kind of insight that isn’t available from the vantage point of dispassionate cognition. Even if it were possible to ascend to a God’s-eye point of view on human experience, we would find it impossible to breathe in that atmosphere: the sort of thing that it matters for us to know is visible only from the vantage point of a person who is engaged in the business of living on earth.7 It ought to go without saying that this business is an unscientific one. If it were the case that research in the natural sciences could make any discoveries that would clarify mental or spiritual life, Kierkegaard writes, then “I’d be the first to get my hands on a microscope.”8 His aim is not to disparage biology or physics, but to point out that the sort of thing he cares about as a moral psychologist does not yield to scientific investigation. The target of his criticism in this journal entry...

Share