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  • Kierkegaard on the Transformative Significance of Depression
  • Ryan S. Kemp

I

Philosophy has its fads. While this inevitably sounds like an insult when applied to a discipline that fancies itself both aged and ageless, it needn’t be. Some topics are more important than others, and in those rare cases in which contemporary interest coincides with timeless significance we should be grateful. The discipline’s recent interest in so-called transformative experience is, I contend, one such case.1 L. A. Paul has been a focal figure in this movement, with her work exploring the reasons people have (or don’t have) to undergo momentous life changes.2 Though Paul does not help herself when she takes the case of “becoming a vampire” as her working example,3 there is no question that the phenomenon she investigates—a decision to make a change that cannot fully be understood or appreciated before it occurs—is of central human importance. This phenomenon is fascinating for several reasons but perhaps chiefly because, on its surface, it does not appear to be the kind of decision a person has the motivational resources to make.

In a recent essay I argue—against Paul—that people never have a considered reason to undergo a “radical self-transformation.”4 Radical transformation involves a change in what I call a person’s “foundational value,” one that anchors and orients all of an agent’s lower-order values. In a more Kantian idiom, it is the “supreme maxim” against which all of [End Page 553] an agent’s lower-order maxims are judged and understood.5 That essay, along with others that more directly engage the post-Kantian tradition, attempts to both articulate some of the puzzles inherent to such accounts and draw attention to the debate’s historical precursors, particularly in figures like Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.6 As scholars of nineteenth-century European philosophy are well aware, the transformative experience debate is not original to contemporary analytic philosophy.

The question of radical transformation arises in Kierkegaard’s discussion of the so-called life stages: the aesthetic, ethical, and religious orientations he develops throughout his corpus. Taking Either/Or (1843) as one of my primary sources of evidence, I argue that Kierkegaard does not think people have a considered reason to change orientations. Either/Or is best read as a case study in aesthetic ingenuity, an example of how a person who arranges his life around a certain kind of reflective pleasure can ultimately, if not tragically, succeed. 7 This analysis is one of many recent discussions of this question.8 Though there are several explanations for why the issue has [End Page 554] gained traction, perhaps the most important has to do with Alasdair MacIntyre’s treatment of Kierkegaard in After Virtue. 9 In an early chapter of that now classic text, MacIntyre appeals to Either/Or to make a case for Kierkegaard’s arationalism. He claims that Either/Or supports such a case by exposing the argumentative impotence of ethics (represented in the letters of the pseudonym “Judge William”). By showing that people like A do not have a reason to be ethical, Kierkegaard invites the reader to regard ethics as something chosen in the absence of objective reasons.

With few exceptions, contemporary commentators have rejected MacIntyre’s reading, arguing that—in reality—ethics, and its champion Judge William, are the true victors of Either/Or. Rob Compaijen’s recent book, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, Williams and the Internal Point of View, is the latest salvo in this debate.10 It distinguishes itself by placing a new spin on an old answer. Like most recent commentators, Compaijen argues that A has a reason to be ethical. Unlike recent commentators, he argues that this is something that A himself can acknowledge; he has psychological (or “internal”) access to his own desire to live differently. Working from an internalist account of what it means to have a reason,11 Compaijen claims that A would, after careful consideration of his motivations, conclude that he has a reason to become ethical. The [End Page 555] primary factor in this decision is his depression. A wants to get rid of...

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