Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue

PART I

After Virtue and Either/Or

1

Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy

PETER J. MEHL

Summary

Kierkegaard is considered in light of the contemporary debate over rationality and relativism, especially as it pertains to his understanding of human moral existence. He is interpreted as providing a philosophical anthropology as a basis for affirming responsible personhood. The Kantian and, more briefly, the Hegelian and Aristotelian influence on his views are discussed, and it is argued that Kierkegaard draws on these to formulate a view of the universally human as the potential possessed by each individual which is to be actualized. This view is distinguished from, yet encompasses, the human being as subjective actuality which is relative to each individual, and as empirical actuality, which is peripheral and variable. Finally, his view of essential humanness is interpreted as formulated by employing a radical empiricism of the lived-experience of actually searching for a meaningful perspective on human praxis, a method that draws on a comprehensive conception of rationality.

Introduction

Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981:39–41) recent interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard’s ethical perspective as a last irrational and desperate attempt to support the failing Enlightenment project of justifying morality is a distortion of Kierkegaard’s overall position. Kierkegaard does not claim that only a radically irrational act of choice can justify an ethical life. While MacIntyre, I believe, is right in his claim that Kierkegaard inherits a crisis in the Enlightenment’s attempt to ground morality within the autonomous rationality of consciousness, it is a mistake to portray Kierkegaard as simply accepting this crisis as insurmountable and then presenting a completely irrational and relativistic view in ethical issues. The tendency to interpret Kierkegaard in this manner, however, is widespread among philosophers who either have only scant acquaintance with his writings or read him with preconceived portraits in mind.¹ All too often Kierkegaard is seen through the eyes of Neo-orthodox theology or Sartrean Existentialism. As Mark Taylor (1975:18) points out in his study: the two major trends of thought to which Kierkegaard gave rise—Neo-orthodoxy and Existentialism—have more often than not inhibited rather than advanced an adequate understanding of Kierkegaard’s own ideas. Neither of these modern orientations accurately depicts Kierkegaard’s position. The former have focused discussions of his writings on the dramatic teleological suspension of the ethical and the leap of faith, while the latter, as a result of Sartre’s influence, have focused on notions of an anxiety of freedom without any direction and a self which develops itself out of nothing.

Following in the footsteps of more recent and more accurate and comprehensive interpretations of Kierkegaard, I will argue that Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with providing a philosophical anthropology as a basis for a coherent and reasonable approach to moral praxis, while, at the same time, acknowledging the modern awareness of the historical relativity of human life and understanding. In this effort I will be looking not at his views concerning the limitations of ethical existence, but at his defense of it. And here I will be concerned with his anthropology and its epistemological roots. Kierkegaard, I will argue, is preeminently concerned with formulating a perspective from which the individual as an active moral agent can be comprehensively grasped. His concern is not so much with critical ethical reflection as with the basic constitution of human moral existence, that which undergirds and is the possibility for ethical analysis. Thus he becomes primarily concerned with philosophical anthropology and its relation to moral, and finally, religious praxis.

A central question in such a practical philosophy, as MacIntyre (1981:112) puts it, is what sort of person am I to become? And, as he further notes, this question is "in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life." Kierkegaard’s philosophy seeks to clarify conceptually this existential issue of personal becoming, and thus it first seeks to understand what it means to be a human agent, a person. The difficulty here, as Kierkegaard sees it, is that such an issue inevitably involves more than conceptual clarification; it involves not simply answering such a question, but actually becoming engaged in the answer, taking up the solution into one’s life. This means, according to Kierkegaard, that some effort must be made to get the reader to focus on the status of his or her own life, on his or her own self-determining decisions. And it is this emphasis in Kierkegaard’s writings that has caused his philosophy to be read as one of irrational subjectivism.

In addition, there is Kierkegaard’s further emphasis on the attempt to take seriously the relativity and limitations of human life and understanding. This emphasis has caused his philosophy to be misconstrued as a relativism that provides the individual with no general philosophical orientation in life-activity. However, Kierkegaard’s insistence on the temporality of human existence and understanding does not result in a position that has no claims to objectivity at all. Rather, it takes him back to actual lived experience as a starting point for formulations which, I will argue, revolve around links between a descriptive theory of humanness and a normative theory of value. His psychological or anthropological conceptions have direct bearing on his practical concerns. What is true [of Kant and Hume] is also true of Diderot, of Smith, and of Kierkegaard. All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. This claim of MacIntyre’s (1981:52) is plainly mistaken in Kierkegaard’s case. In his effort to straddle the peculiarly modern distinction between fact and value, Kierkegaard’s views center precisely on, as MacIntyre puts it, a "notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos. MacIntyre’s (1981:40–41) insistence that Kierkegaard employs a traditional concept of the ethical (a concept derived from Kant and the wider Protestant culture) is largely correct, but that he offers not rational defense of it is not. In fact, it is more accurate to say that it is the historical background which MacIntyre sees such moderns as Kant and Kierkegaard rejecting—in MacIntyre’s (1981:52) words the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism—that Kierkegaard explicitly draws on as a basis for his teleologically oriented practical anthropology. As Gadamer (1981:47–48) points out in an autobiographical note: What Kierkegaard had taught us and what we then called ‘existential’ (existenziell), found its prototype in the unity of ethos and logos that Aristotle had thematized as practical philosophy, and especially as the virtue of practical rationality."

But then, having refuted irrationalist readings of Kierkegaard, the central question becomes: is Kierkegaard successful in his effort to reappropriate such classical and more objectivist themes and find a way through relativism? Is he finally a victim or an exorcist of the Cartesian anxiety over firm foundations for knowledge and action? This question comes down to how Kierkegaard justifies his position, to what he finally appeals in support of his view of the human agent and why he thinks such an appeal is valid. To answer this question, one first has to understand his philosophy, and it is precisely here, as I have mentioned, that all too often he has been misconstrued. Because of his effort not to deny the subjectivity and relativity of human experience, Kierkegaard has been and continues to be the subject of much philosophical name-calling—subjectivism, relativism, irrationalism are all charges that have been leveled against him. I want to argue that in no simple sense are these labels applicable.

Situating Kierkegaard Philosophically

Kierkegaard’s whole philosophical effort could be said to be motivated by what Richard Bernstein (1983:16-20) has labeled the Cartesian anxiety, the anxious concern to find a stable and reliable rock upon which we can secure our thought and action. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard (1941:275) reveals this central focus of his philosophy in a personal note: The youth is an existing doubter. Hovering in doubt without a foothold for his life, he reaches out for the truth—in order to exist in it. Having inherited the failing Enlightenment project of justifying morality (not to mention religious faith), as well as Hegel’s historicism, Kierkegaard turns inward to personal existence as well as toward the history of philosophy and of Christianity to see if some means for charting life might not be found. He is convinced that neither Kant’s critical idealism nor Hegel’s absolute idealism is beyond the reach of the skeptical powers of disciplined reflection; neither offers that stable rock upon which the ethico-religious concerns of the individual can be given a firm foundation. As James Collins (1983:21) says of Kierkegaard: This unshakable support was to be found neither in the physical world of the scientists nor in the purely logical constructions of the philosophers. In fact, as regards pursuits of objective knowledge, that is, empirical knowledge, there is good evidence in Kierkegaard’s writings of an adherence to a form of critical empiricism. As Robert Perkins (in Crites, 1972:22n.) said in a symposium on Kierkegaard:

The only authors he refers to with approval in epistemological matters are Hume and Greek skeptics. All objective knowledge for Kierkegaard is empirical, and it is in every sense an approximation. . . . There is no element of the a priori. Objective knowledge is an approximation, but more like Hume’s skepticism than Kant’s synthetic a priori.

Where then is Kierkegaard to find his sure point of departure? Is it, as many authors on Kierkegaard seem to think, that he simply gives up on the possibility of finding such a point and formulates his whole philosophical perspective by leaps and bounds? Kierkegaard’s practical philosophy is not a faith philosophy, a philosophy simply built on personal belief; it is a philosophy that follows Kant’s distinction between the knowing subject (objectivity) and the moral agent (subjectivity). It is built upon a sort of radically empirical examination of human existence, the concrete process of personal existing, and issues in a coherent philosophical anthrophology. As Stephen Crites (1972:23) says: Hegel and Kierkegaard, in their divergent ways, took precisely the Kantian formulation of free, self-active, self-productive praxis as opposed to objective knowledge as such, for the point of departure from which they constructed their most highly developed conceptions. Kierkegaard then follows the German Idealists in centering on the reality of the subjective, but this means for him the personal self-reflexive relationship one has to one’s actual becoming, and not Hegel’s excessively abstract speculations about absolute Spirit. And to counter Hegel’s extremely idealistic views of the becoming of the human person, Kierkegaard draws not only on Kant but on Aristotle as well.

Historically Kierkegaard employs numerous sources; the above three seem crucial. In spite of certain fundamental disagreements with Hegel, he draws heavily on Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit to formulate his anthropology. As Crites (1972:66) notes, Kierkegaard’s dialectic of selfhood really amounts to the construction of a new ‘phenomenology of spirit’ alternative to Hegel’s. It is, however, less well known that Kierkegaard draws on Aristotle’s philosophy in the construction of his perspective on human being. In fact, one might argue that it was Kierkegaard’s contact with Aristotle, via Trendelenburg’s revival of Aristotle, that helped Kierkegaard center on the crucial difference between ideal being and actual being—a difference which he thought Hegel wrongly ignored.² Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s main source, I think, is Kant’s ethical thought, especially his later views found in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Kierkegaard, like Kant, is primarily concerned with issues fundamental to ethics: what does it mean to be a person, and what is the relation among freedom, reason, and personhood? Like Kant, he is concerned with presuppositions applicable to any possible ethical life; he rarely discusses material rules for conduct. It is thus worthwhile to review not only Kant’s position, but also briefly the influence of Aristotle and Hegel. I will begin with Kant.

In this later work, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant significantly shifts away from the more formalistic and rationalistic position articulated in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, and it is this shift that Kierkegaard vigorously affirms.³ As is well known, Kant wants to demonstrate that ethics can be grounded in the autonomous rationality of the individual in such a manner that ethics will in no way be heteronomous. In other words, ethics will be dependent on nothing but practical reason. As a result Kant finds himself forced into a position where the free will and the moral will, that will that follows the dictates of practical reason, are one and the same. As he says (1981:23) in the Grounding, the will is nothing but practical reason. . . . The will is a faculty of choosing only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as being practically necessary, i.e., as good. And further on: a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same (1981:49). Numerous problems are then raised: in what sense is one obligated to be moral if the free will is the same as the moral will, for obligation seems to presuppose real choice? Or, how is this position to be reconciled with the plain fact that individuals do not always follow the dictates of practical reason and yet are freely choosing not to?⁴

To attempt to solve these problems Kant resorts to his distinction between the intelligible or noumenal world and the sensual or phenomenal world. The individual belongs then to two worlds: in the noumenal world reason and freedom coincide, and the moral will rules. In the phenomenal world, however, the individual confronts himself as a sensual being with irrational desires, enmeshed in social conditions—as a being shaped by various determinations. The experience of moral obligation occurs when the phenomenal world encounters the noumenal one, when the body, inclination, natural appetite encounters the mind, reason, or moral will. The moral will triumphs, is autonomous, when it controls and represses the concrete self. Although this explains how obligation is possible, it seems to leave the moral will without the necessity Kant desires. In addition, it seems to presuppose some third element through which the encounter between the sensible and the intelligible occurs. As the individual is also a creature of the sensible world, he or she is able to turn away from what practical reason dictates; he or she is able to choose to be determined by the phenomenal self, that is, to be heteronomous. But if one chooses, then one is already free. This possibility, Kant realizes, is necessary if obligation is real. But then in what sense is the categorical imperative categorical?

In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant (1960:19) admits that a free will and a moral will are not one and the same; the human will, as he puts it, is an absolute spontaneity; it is transcendentally free. The self is now conceived as having a will that is radically free, and is then caught between the commands of practical reason, rational self-dertermination: freedom, and the attractions of sensible desire, nonrational determination: bondage. The will that is categorically obligated is not the will of the rational person qua rational person, but it is the will of the person as rational and responsible, as accountable to the self as rational being. The notion of will now has two meanings: Wilkür, the will as the faculty of choice, and Wille, the moral will, the dictates of practical reason. It is the mark of the human personality (it is the meaning of personhood) that Wilkür has the capacity to adopt Wille as its determining ground. "The predisposition to personality in man, [is man] taken as a rational and at the same time accountable being (Kant, 1960:21). And this, Kant (1960:21) stresses, is not the same as the individual as simply a rational being: [F]rom the fact that a being has reason it by no means follows that this reason, by the mere representing of the fitness of its maxims to be laid down as universal laws, is thereby rendered capable of determining the will (Wilkür) unconditionally, so as to be practical of itself; at least not so far as we can see."

What is needed in order that the will behave in accordance with practical reason is this aspect of the self which Kant calls the predisposition to personality. This predisposition to personality, it now seems, is as fundamental as personality itself, as the Wille, for only when the Wilkür functions in its capacity to adopt Wille as its determining ground is there good character. Only when this occurs do we actually have a rational and responsible being, a genuinely free personality. Kant (1960:22–23) now makes the importance of the predisposition to personality explicit:

The predisposition to personality is the capacity for respect for the moral law [Wille] as in itself a sufficient incentive of the Wilkür. This capacity for simple respect for the moral law within us would thus be moral feeling, which in and through itself does not constitute an end of the natural predisposition [to personality] except so far as it is the motivating force of the Wilkür. Since this is possible only when the Wilkür incorporates such moral feeling into its maxim, the property of such a Wilkür is good character. The latter, like every character of the Wilkür, is something which can only be acquired; its possibility, however, demands the presence in our nature of a predisposition on which it is absolutely impossible to graft anything evil. We cannot rightly call the moral law, with the respect which is inseparable from it, a predisposition to personality; it is personality itself. But the subjective ground for the adoption into our maxims of this respect as a motivating force seems to be an adjunct to our personality, and thus to deserve the name of a predisposition to its furtherance.

This subjective ground, I submit, is really nothing other than the will as transcendentally free and capable of standing in relation to Wille. It is Wilkür in its capacity to take account of whether it has actually adopted Wille. And although this capacity belongs to Wilkür by nature, it must be chosen by Wilkür. One only really becomes a person if one grasps oneself as transcendentally free and as held accountable for one’s adopting of Wille. To be a person I must choose to continually pattern my action in relation to the prescriptions of practical reason; only in so doing am I actually a rational and responsible being, and only thus a genuinely free being.

While the essence of the personality is the Wille, it is not necessarily the actuality of the person. Wille is a possibility, an incentive, which Wilkür can reject. The cost of this rejection, however, is the rejection of oneself as a person, for the very meaning of personhood is rational responsibility: freedom. And in this sense Kant seems to be saying that the Wille is categorical for the individual. Yet the key point, it now seems, is that the self as transcendentally free can reject itself as actually free; it can disregard its capacity to respect Wille and thus lose itself as a person. Either one can choose to let oneself be determined; one can give oneself up to heteronomy, the whims of desire, the fates of the situation. Or one can choose freedom, that potential for rational and responsible self-determination inherent in one’s nature, one’s predisposition to personality. From here the distance to Kierkegaard is not far, for this is the heart of his Either/Or as well.

The main difference between this later position of Kant’s and his earlier position is this emphasis on the notion of the predisposition to personality, the subjective ground of the capacity to be moral and the necessity of the individual grasping him- or herself as having such a predisposition. Practical reason is not the whole of the human personality taken as moral agent. The capacity to stand in relation to Wille, to maintain it as the concrete guide of the Wilkür, is also crucial. Practical reason is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for personhood; what is needed is to grasp oneself as a transcendentally free being that stands in relation to Wille, and is thus a rational and a responsible being. All of which is to say that ethics is dependent on the predisposition to personality, on the individual’s natural capacity to recognize and actually adopt Wille as a sufficient incentive for Wilkür, as the fulfilment of personhood.

It would seem that for Kant there is now a sense in which there is an ought at the heart of his description of humanness, at the heart of what the human being is. There is a basic unity between the noumenal and the phenomenal aspects of the self, something which Kant earlier seemed to deny was possible.⁵ And it seems that it is by virtue of the Wilkür, which contains a natural predisposition to personhood, and stands as a third party in relation to Wille and to desire that the linkage takes place. Although Kant never fully worked out this more triadic view of the human person, a view which sees an ethical imperative within which, for the individual as radically free, is a telos that he or she must continually strive to actualize, it is precisely this view that Kierkegaard focuses on.

Kierkegaard’s practical philosophical anthropology is centered on the belief that responsible freedom is at the heart of what it means to be a person. To Kierkegaard’s mind, it is the destiny of every individual to become spirit, spirit being rational and responsible self-determination. To quote Kierkegaard (1972:267): Personality manifests itself as the absolute which has its teleology in itself. This theme, of course, is at the heart of German Idealism. As Marx (1972:7), a most diligent student of German philosophy, pointed out, the troubling thing about Kant is the antagonism between is and ought, but with Hegel the ought lies in reality itself: if previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, they now became its center. But we have seen how even the later Kant was moving more toward the idealistic understanding of human reality as defined by its relation to a potential moral telos: human freedom—and thus maybe the later idealists were influenced by this aspect of Kant’s philosophy.

In any event, it is necessary to look briefly at the Hegelian influence on Kierkegaard. At the heart of Hegel’s idealism is a vision of Being as determined by Rational Spirit, Geist. Behind the phenomena of human history there is a phenomenology of Spirit, an active and rational dialectical process of organic development with a definite end. As Richard Bernstein (1971:18) puts it:

Hegel is claiming that if we take a world historical perspective, we will see that there is an inner logos to the seemingly chaotic multiplicity of events. This logos has a teleological form. There is a narrative or story to be discovered in history—this is the epic of the ways in which Geist is realizing itself, moving from freedom and self-determination as an abstract idea to its concrete embodiment in human institutions.

Essentially the same dynamic takes place at the level of each human life: an individual as a vehicle of Geist is propelled through various stages toward the actualization of him- or herself as rational self-determination, toward concrete freedom. For Hegel this dialectical path has a certain necessity. While one may experience oneself as freely choosing one’s destiny, from the perspective of Geist one is fully determined; the individual’s potential is his or her necessity. Kierkegaard, I think, agrees that the existential development of the individual has such a dynamic dialectical path as his or her destiny, but this destiny is not a necessity: it is a possibility. This is because the individual as fundamentally free can choose or disregard him- or herself as having a capacity for personhood, as spirit. And yet it seems that Kierkegaard concurs with Hegel (and with Kant), that freedom is one’s highest interest, it is the heart of what it means to be spirit, but (and here is the rub) actually to become spirit, actually to maintain oneself as responsible freedom is exceedingly difficult. While for Hegel this interest of spirit is reached when the individual realizes that he or she is essentially Geist, for Kierkegaard such a realization is just the beginning of the arduous task of actually being spirit, for the individual is temporal; the individual exists.

There is good evidence that for support in his polemic against Hegel’s excessive idealism, Kierkegaard draws on the realism of Aristotle. George Stack has done an extensive study of this line of influence. Stack points to an influence deriving from both the Metaphysics and from the Nicomachean Ethics. As regards the first source he cites (1977:77–78) Aristotle’s view that

[though] there is a universal teleology pervading the development of beings, the process of development from potentiality to actuality is non-necessary. To be sure, he does hold that there is a ‘natural’ tendency for beings to have their potentialities realized or (in the case of men) to realize their potentialities. [But] whatever has potentialities is perishable and, hence, contingent. As Aristotle expresses it in his Metaphysics: everything that is potential may fail to be actualized. Therefore, that which is capable of being may both be and not be.

As regards the second source, Stack cites (1977:92, 100–103) Aristotle’s account, in the Nicomachean Ethics, of proairesis (deliberate choice) as involving both desire and phronesis (practical reasoning) purposely directed toward an ethical telos, as affording a surer test of character than our actions, and as the foundation for the development of character through repeated praxis. If all these points are accurate views on Aristotle, then I would agree that Kierkegaard concurs with him at many points. Like Aristotle in the Metaphysics, Kierkegaard employs contingency in his anthropology: like Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, Kierkegaard employs teleological and aretaic views in his understanding of the dynamics of personhood. Stack’s study, to my mind, indicates that there is much evidence to counter claims that Kierkegaard has given up on formulating a philosophically sound view of the universally human as it is oriented in moral praxis.

Another point where Kierkegaard was influenced by Hegel should be mentioned. Hegel’s emphasis on Geist as only coming to light within the concrete drama of human history so the workings of Geist take place only through the material of the actual world is, in a way, affirmed by Kierkegaard. As Hegel (1953:31) confidently states this view, the drama of human history is based in need, instinct, passion, private interest, even opinion and subjective representation. These vast congeries of volition, interests, and activities constitute the tools and means of the World Spirit for attaining its purpose, bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.

For Kierkegaard, as we will see, this amounts to saying that one’s concrete and relative existence, one’s given particularity, is as much an expression of universal humanness as is the call to responsible freedom. For Kierkegaard the temporal, the relative is to be seen as an essential element of the universally human. This aspect, what Kierkegaard refers to as the aesthetic side of the human being, is that which one is immediately, or as MacIntyre (1981:50–51) puts it, man-as-he-happens-to-be prior to ethical enlightenment.

Kierkegaard’s View of Human Moral Existence

To return to Kierkegaard, what exactly is his reasoning concerning this inner transcendent center of responsible choice that constitutes the heart of what it means to be a person? For Kierkegaard, Kant’s difference between autonomy and heteronomy is almost exactly what he concretely formulates as the difference between the ethical life and the aesthetic life. I say almost because for Kierkegaard the phenomenal self, the aesthetic life, is absorbed and transformed by the ethical life—not repressed and denied. Still, the Either/Or that runs throughout Kierkegaard’s thought is that of either choosing to disregard one’s essential self, one’s self as the power of responsible freedom, or, as Kierkegaard puts it into the mouth of his ethical protagonist Judge William, to choose thyself.

To choose oneself means, first and foremost, to choose that predisposition to personality referred to by Kant, and thus to apprehend oneself as having a potential for personhood. In this choice one is not choosing merely another possible incentive, an element of oneself as a particular empirical being with contingent desires and interests, but the power of responsible freedom itself, the ability to sustain a self-conscious relationship to the material content of one’s thought. John Cobb, Jr. (1979:106), in an early book, succinctly characterizes what Kierkegaard speaks of as spirit. The individual becomes conscious of him- or herself as having a subjective center [which has] no given character of its own other than that of being in each new situation concretely responsible for the soul’s total response. This transcendent, responsible center is the ‘personal I’.

It is this center, this power for personhood, that Kierkegaard takes as his Archimedean point. As he sees it, to have such a center is founded on the power to have a relationship to oneself, to take account of oneself, to know how it actually stands with oneself. Such a power is a pervasive condition of human subjectivity. Having such an ability, Kierkegaard seems to believe, implies responsible personhood, for with it I am impelled to answer to myself; I continually find myself able to take account of my intention.⁶ To Kierkegaard’s mind, one can pursue a life that consciously denies this certainty, but paradoxically one can only do so by virtue of the fact that one has this certainty, thus implicitly reaffirming as well as contradicting it. While everything that I know about the objective world, even myself as an object in that world, may be uncertain, only an empirical possibility, the question of how I stand in relation to what I may know I am able to discern with certainty; my intention I can know. Kierkegaard refers to this subjectively apprehended relation as one’s ethical reality, or one’s "real