It’s well known that Søren Kierkegaard was quite worried about the trends of the “present age.” He thought that individuals were losing themselves to abstractions, aestheticizing self-conceptions, and ambivalent comparisons with others. In Two Ages, he called his a “reflective” and “passionless” age. Kierkegaard intended his pseudonymous intellectual project—itself chock-full of abstraction, aesthetes, and ambivalences—to get readers to recognize their own alienated relationship to themselves. By means of his brilliant literary gifts and his keen sense for depth psychology, Kierkegaard hoped to create narrative personae readers could identify with. Once achieved, this identification could allow readers to see the shortcomings of their own lives and relationships to self in the mirror of Kierkegaard’s authors. Then individuals might be more prepared to take the “leap,” as he called it, and lead their lives passionately and from the inside.
But this wasn’t all that Kierkegaard was up to. To be sure, he aimed at renewing the challenge and appeal of Christianity at a time when—he felt—its animating spirit was being eclipsed. Additionally, he wrote several hundred pages as a pseudonymous philosopher named Johannes Climacus about quite abstract philosophical issues such as the nature of truth, the relation between subject and object, the metaphysics of time and world history, modal theory, and moral psychology. It’s a plausible surmise, then, that he wanted to show the dependence of philosophy on Christian theology, since the philosophical interventions don’t initially seem crucial to the literary project of leading readers to question and deepen their inner life. In fact, when I’ve taught Either/Or, my students complain that Johannes the Seducer and Judge Wilhelm’s philosophical excurses strike them not just as illegible, but as digressions from the most interesting features of the text. These pieces of evidence might incline us to the view that Kierkegaard had a couple different aims in mind with his authorship, which don’t always harmonize. (To wit: one of Kierkegaard’s most notorious critics, Theodor Adorno, argued that the pseudonymous authorship failed both as philosophy and as literature.)
However, I want to pursue an alternative interpretation here that I believe is instructive for doing public philosophy today. The hypothesis consists of two parts.
The first is this: Kierkegaard’s philosophical efforts are part and parcel of his representation of selfhood in the present age. An important assumption of this interpretation is that philosophy—the philosophical point of view—is, as a matter of fact, a medium through which individuals relate to themselves and the world in modern society. What does it mean to relate to one’s own life philosophically? Since philosophy involves a back-and-forth process of analyzing particular cases under general concepts and enriching general concepts with particular cases, a philosophical point of view facilitates a practice of self-interpretation that allows us to compare our experiences and impressions with others’. This point of view seems necessary for the therapeutic effect of dislodging petty narcissism, naming and responding creatively to our feelings and reactions, and occupying the universalizing moral perspective through which we consider what any social member would judge to be normatively right (e.g., as a member of the kingdom of ends or as a calculator of utility).
On the other hand, this same philosophical medium incites us to conceive of ourselves and others merely as instantiations of general categories. As our concepts expand over our lifetimes and through history’s learning processes, we gain more and more tools for reflecting the phenomena of human life as so many instances of types. While this increase in knowledge has undeniable advantages, Kierkegaard observes a correlated process: a tendency to elide the significance that the individual’s own life has for them. For Kierkegaard, the first-person perspective is of “infinite significance” for each person, where the modifier “infinite” minimally implies that our finite concepts are not adequate for grasping why our own life matters to us. As I read Kierkegaard (though I am far from alone in this), his critical engagement with philosophy is not intended to show its inherent poverty and dependence on theology. Instead, Kierkegaard argues that philosophy in the present age has a dangerous tendency to speak about categories that are proper to the first-personal perspective—such as freedom and moral value—as if they were objects perceptible from an objective, third-personal point of view. His criticisms of philosophy are meant, simultaneously, to point out the paradoxes that philosophers fall into when they confuse these perspectives and, therapeutically, to recall the reader to their own first-personal awareness of their freedom and moral responsibility.
For example, Kierkegaard’s personae frequently regard efforts to conceive the specificity of modern morality in contrast with medieval Europe or Ancient Greece as “ridiculous” and “comical.” Kierkegaard detects a basic ethical confusion in these philosophical misadventures. Individuals are trying to establish what is significant about their moral decisions and commitments with reference to what is significant about the age—as if the general direction of history could somehow be informative for deciding, here and now, who to be and how to act. Kierkegaard is ferreting out an underlying assumption here that my existential commitments can only be justified if they are intelligible as general commitments that any reasonable person ought to have. This conviction, I would think, articulates the core danger of taking the philosophical point of view on oneself, since it transposes justification standards for third-personal claims onto one’s first-personal relationship to self. (See Fear and Trembling for Kierkegaard’s starkest contrast between these two justificatory standards.)
Suppose we accept the diagnosis that in modernity, we tend to take this “comical,” philosophical view of ourselves. That still leaves us wondering why this problem has become particularly pressing in our time. Here, then, is the second part of my interpretive hypothesis: Kierkegaard provides a distinctive, compelling explanation of this phenomenon. Notably, Kierkegaard does not argue that the breakup of tradition and the disembedding of religion and morality lead inexorably to ethical confusion. (In fact, he seems to reaffirm the distinction between faith and morality.) Further, although Kierkegaard could in principle accept sociology’s “disenchantment” hypothesis, he does not have to rely on the growth of instrumental rationality to explain the prominence of the disinterested, objectifying perspective. Marx’s conception of alienation, or the Marxist idea of reification, may have held some appeal for him, but he doesn’t need to ground his views on their social philosophy.
To reiterate, it is possible that Kierkegaard could have endorsed some aspects of these modern social theories; there are, as scholars have noted, some conceptual kinships here. But Kierkegaard’s explanation is, to my eyes, simpler and less controversial. That our knowledge about the world seems to be increasing; that we are tempted to view ourselves as participating in human progress; that since overall (it may seem) things are better for human beings than they used to be, we ourselves must be better—these impressions are sufficient to explain the preponderance of the third-personal perspective over the first-personal. If human beings usually prefer a flattering self-understanding to searching self-examination, then modern societies provide more extensive and intensive occasions for misapplying contented judgments about humanity in general to oneself. Moreover, if our well-being and ethical orientation stem from identification with what we take to be the progressive features of our society, we have an incentive to double down on the moral superiority of our form of life. This feel-good feedback loop not only makes it harder to live from the inside, then, but also disincentivizes social criticism. I take it this is one key reason why Kierkegaard juxtaposed the individual and the social life of “Christendom” so polemically.
So: why is there so much philosophy in Kierkegaard’s efforts to reacquaint readers with the first-personal perspective? My hypothesis is that today we have become philosophical people, and the danger this poses to the significance our own lives hold for us can’t be fixed simply by telling ourselves that we shouldn’t be philosophical about first-personal matters. Kierkegaard shows us, philosophically, the impasses and discontents that leading one’s life from the philosophical point of view entails. If his diagnosis is right, then we have something to emulate as public philosophers. Where today does philosophy threaten to eclipse its rootedness in an individual’s sense of their own infinite significance? And how might we practice philosophy differently to illuminate the dangers our discipline courts?
