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In his recent biography, Alastair Hannay characterizes Concluding Unscientific Postscript as “an itinerary for personality.”1 Kierkegaard himself says of Postscript that “what is new is that . . . here we have personality.”2 Personality is a moral status one works to attain. This is true as well of subjectivity. Each demarcates an ideal that calls on me to respond in a way that truly recognizes what I am and can be. In this way, subjectivity and personality are moral concepts or ideals. In its classical sense, moral philosophy addresses the question how one should live. It takes persons to be answerable to norms and to be proper objects of our praise and blame. Persons inherit pictures of what life should or could be, and respond to these in attitudes of attraction or distain. They take a stance toward values, toward the virtues and vices enclosed in portraits of a life’s unfolding.3 One might defiantly reject the thought that value makes demands that we must answer. But such a move toward nihilism or despair is itself a normative response, a response that evaluates value. In this light, the ethics of Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or II, or the tangle of ethics that Johannes de silentio describes in Fear and Trembling are contrasting moral orientations. And a Christian stance becomes a moral stance, a stance toward value bequeathed and toward the donor of that value. By taking Postscript subjectivity as a moral ideal, I depart from the view that Kierkegaardian subjectivity must be either a Cartesian state of consciousness or a special place from which one can know. We have instead an ideal, a moral status to interpret, revise, and realize. Postscript’s theme of subjectivity maps out and embodies the drama of realizing personality. There are three angles from which we can view this unfolding drama. First, we can watch personality become realized in the text as it models aspects of 3. Postscript Ethics: Putting Personality on Stage EdwardF.Mooney 40 · Edward F. Mooney what human life can be. Various characters or figures—Socrates, the subjective thinker, the assistant professor, the declaiming parson—personify moral themes. This allows us to resonate with ideas in the way we resonate with figures on a stage. Second, we can take in the fact that Postscript subjectivity or personality makes existential demands on its readers. The text shows us aspects of personality and urges us to embrace some and disavow others. Third, we can step back to extract from this itinerary for personality a rough set of conditions that constitute the possibility and fulfillment of personality. This is to entertain and assess a set of philosophical claims about personality. To begin to see how Postscript works, let’s trace the subtle process that puts personality on stage. Part 1 Seeing Titles as Tableaux Is Postscript a treatise? It has an impressive table of contents, a seven-page spread of chapters, parts, divisions, appendices, and numerous subdivisions. But Climacus is a humorist.4 The look of sober organization might be tonguein -cheek. Consider the title: Alastair Hannay’s fresh translation (found in his Kier­ kegaard Biography) sparkles and makes us think: Concluding Unscholarly Addendum to Philosophical Crumbs.5 Here we have scaffolding for a theatrical tableau. “Unscholarly Addendum” sounds quite close to “inconsequential afterthoughts .” “Crumbs” sounds inconsequential, too. Are these mere crumbs? Picture them as remains falling from the table of a royal impresario, who with dramatic flourish turns them into fodder for an acquisitive mind. But why should scholars read unscholarly afterthoughts, or dive after crumbs? Well, they might be magically transformed into something nourishing. Alternatively, we might read the title retrospectively: what we took to be the nourishing promise of a treatise turns out to be mere crumbs. The subtitle, “A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Compilation—An Existential Contribution,” is equally unsettling if we expect a treatise. Mimicry, or miming , suggests theater or the stage, a place where feeling, emotion, or mood (that is, pathos, passion) can unfold, and unfold contrapuntally (that is, dialectically). Johannes Climacus might be the impresario directing this “mimic-patheticdialectic compilation” staged as comedy, tragedy, satire, or farce. This complex “compilation” is also “An Existential Contribution.” We can picture the contribution of an actor delivering up the living flesh and blood and spirit of the character assigned. That would be an existential sacrifice of one’s talent, skill, and dedication toward the fulfillment of a scripted personality. Perhaps we have a lesson to take offstage, as well. Taking in the...

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