Kierkegaard on Selfhood and Our Need for Others 1. Kierkegaard in a Secular Age Scholars have devoted much attention lately to Kierkegaard’s views on personal identity and, in particular, to his account of selfhood.1 Central to this account is the idea that a self is not something we automatically are. It is rather something we must become. Thus, selfhood is a goal to realize or a project to undertake.2 To put the point another way, while we may already be selves in some sense, we have to work to become real, true, or “authentic” selves.3 The idea that authentic selfhood is a project is not unique to Kierkegaard. It is common fare in modern philosophy. Yet Kierkegaard distances himself from popular ways of thinking about the matter. He denies the view inherited from Rousseau that we can discover our true selves by consulting our innermost feelings, beliefs, and desires. He also rejects the idea developed by the German Romantics that we can invent our true selves in a burst of artistic or poetic creativity. In fact, according to Kierkegaard, becoming an authentic self is not something we can do on our own. If we are to succeed at the project, we must look beyond ourselves for assistance. In particular, Kierkegaard thinks, we must rely on God. For God alone can provide us with the content of our real identities.4 A longstanding concern about Kierkegaard arises at this point. His account of authentic selfhood, like his accounts of so many concepts, is religious. It presupposes not 1 For example, John J. Davenport, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to
Kierkegaard (New York: Routledge, 2012); Peder Jothen, Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood: The Art of Subjectivity (Routledge, 2014); Lippitt, John and Patrick Stokes, eds., Narrative, Identity, and the Kierkegaardian Self (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana University Press, 2011); Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford University Press, 2012); Patrick Stokes, The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity (Oxford University Press, USA, 2015); K. Brian Söderquist, The Isolated Self: Irony as Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony (Copenhagen, DK: C.A. Reitzel, 2007). 2 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 168. 3 Ibid., 259; Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 1, Kierkegaard’s Writings, 12.1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 30, 346. 4 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, 177, 216–17; Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard’s Writings 19 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13, 79; for discussion, see Brad Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 127– 28; Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, “The Posited Self: The Non-Theistic Foundation in Kierkegaard’s Writings,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 20, no. 1 (2015): 29–42; Edward F. Mooney, “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and SelfReception: Judge William’s Admonition,” in Either/Or, Part II, ed. Robert L. Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary 4 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995), 5–32; Elizabeth A. Morelli, “The Existence of the Self before God in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death,” The Heythrop Journal 36, no. 1 (1995): 15–29; Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative, 2012, 26–48; Söderquist, The Isolated Self, 137, 155.
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