Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements

Notes

Introduction Epigraph from The Moment and Late Writings, Kierkegaard’s Writings XXIII, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 340–343. See also from these pages Kierkegaard’s remark that “I do not call myself a Christian; I do not speak of myself as a Christian.” 1. Stanley Cavell, a reader of Kierkegaard at least through the late 1950s, continues Kier­ kegaard’s themes. He writes that I am aware of my words as mine as I abandon them, forgo owning them, as Abraham will be aware of Isaac as belonging to him as he forgoes him, relinquishes him, abandons him. His favorite comedies are of remarriage, where one gives up a marriage and gets it back, a “double movement of faith.” It’s also what Kierkegaard would call “repetition,” giving up the world and getting it back. And it’s what Kierkegaard does in ‘revoking’ what he says at the end of Postscript, say. He gives up ownership of his words there. See Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 103. 2. Cavell writes, “the ‘having’ of a self is being the other to one’s self, calling upon it with the words of others.” “The having of a self is the very opposite of possessiveness—it is the power of receptivity; So the question becomes, on what terms will the self be received?” (Passages, p. 102). 3. See my On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemic, Lost Intimacy and Time (London: Ashgate, 2007). David Possen explores these themes in Søren Kierkegaard and the Very Idea of Advance beyond Socrates (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, forthcoming). 4. I defend this convergence of the Socratic and the Christian, and the downplaying of the contrast between Religiousness A and Religiousness B, in On Søren Kierkegaard. 5. See George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, Theology (New York, Routledge, 2002). Pattison argues that a unifying aim of the authorship is a Socratic pursuit of (Christian) love. 6. I discuss these striking claims in On Søren Kierkegaard. 7. Tyler Roberts, “Criticism as a Conduct of Gratitude: Stanley Cavell and Radical Theology ” (forthcoming). Notes 1. Kierkegaard on the Self I want to thank Jane Rubin, who, over the many years we have taught Kierkegaard together , has helped me develop and refine the interpretation presented here. 1. Blaise Pascal, Pascal Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 28, #89. 2. Ibid., p. 121, #434. 3. Ibid., p. 98, #353. 4. I’m indebted to Jane Rubin for this systematic account of the factors of the self. 5. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay, abridged and modified (London: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 43–44. 6. See Hubert Dreyfus, Thinking in Action: On the Internet, ed. R. Kearney and S. Critchley, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 7. Sickness unto Death, p. 43. 8. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992). 9. Ibid., p. 44. 10. Sickness unto Death, p. 54. 11. Ibid., p. 51. 12. The ultimate despair, Kierkegaard contends, is denying that one is in despair by denying the demand that we express the two sets of factors in our lives in a way that enables them to reinforce each other. This is not the distraction of the present age where one represses the call to be a self. Rather, someone, say, Richard Rorty, in this ultimate form of despair sees that in our religious tradition the self has, indeed, been constituted as having two sets of essential but incompatible factors, but claims that this is merely a mistaken, essentialist view that we can and should opt out of. Since the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the self leads people to despair, we should simply give it up and adopt a vocabulary and practices that are more useful to us now. How can we decide who is right here, Kierkegaard or the pragmatist? I think this is a question we can only approach experientially. In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard tries to show that the Christian claim that the self is a contradiction is confirmed by a purportedly exhaustive categorization of all the ways of being a self available to us and how each fails. The only test is the test of existence. 13. Ibid. 14. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 70. 15. Ibid., p. 71. 16. Søren Kierkegaard...