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Kierkegaard on Becoming an ‘Individual’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Robert Roberts
Robert Roberts
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky
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Extract

Christianity, whatever else it may be, is a set of emotions. It is love of God and neighbor, grief about one's own waywardness, joy in the merciful salvation of our God, gratitude, hope, and peace. To be a Christian is to have these and other emotions, and so if it happens that I do not love God and my neighbor, if I do not find my sins abhorrent and find joy in my redemption, if I am not grateful, hopeful, and at peace with God and myself, then it follows quite clearly that I am not a Christian, though I was born into a Christian family and reared in the bosom of the Church, am baptized and confirmed and willing in good conscience to affirm the articles of the Creed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 1978 , pp. 133 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1978

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References

page 133 note 1 FSE, p. 95. The abbreviations used in this paper are as follows:

CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton University Press, 1941).Google Scholar

EO, II Either/Or, Volume II, translated by Lowrie, Walter with revisions and a foreword by Johnson, Howard A. (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1959)Google Scholar

FSE For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourselves!, translated by Lowrie, Walter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).Google Scholar

Hong, , I, II, III Seren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers in four volumes, edited and translated by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967, 1970, 1975).Google Scholar

PA The Present Age, translated by Dru, Alexander (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).Google Scholar

PH Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, translated by Steere, Douglas V. (New York: Harper and Row, 1938).Google Scholar

PV The Point of View for My Work as An Author, translated by Lowrie, Walter and edited by Nelson, Benjamin (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).Google Scholar

SD The Sickness Unto Death, preceded by Fear and Trembling, translated by Lowrie, Walter (Garden City, Doubleday and Company, 1941).Google Scholar

WL Works of Love, translated by Howard, and Hong, Edna (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).Google Scholar

page 133 note 2 Let me head off a possible misunderstanding of the expression, ‘have an emotion’. Ordinary talk sometimes calls a person ‘emotional’ when he is subject to rapidly changing or unpredictable or disabling moods and feelings. From there we may come to think of emotions as primarily rather unmanageable passing states, had mostly by ‘impressionable’ people who do not think very clearly and who lack self-command. While chary of legislating against popular usage, yet I want to use ‘emotion’ to refer to something quite different. If we say that a person has a strong sense of justice, we are saying something about his character; that is, something that, at its best, will be true of him year in and year out, through his adult life. The evidence for his having this disposition will be his actions (perhaps going far out of his way to rectify perceived injustices), his perceptiveness (noticing injustices where others do not), and his feelings (grieving where injustice is done, rejoicing at its rectification). Such a sense of justice is an emotion, in my use of the term; it is not a feeling, because it is not an affective event but a disposition; and it is not a mood, because it is governed by the conceptual capacity to distinguish justice from injustice, case by case. Now I take it that Christian love and joy and hope are emotions in this sense, rather than moods or feelings. They are character-traits, dispositions to actions, perceptions, and feelings, which can take up permanent residence in a person's heart; and they are objective or rational in that they are governed by the concepts and beliefs which constitute the story of God's dealings with the world in Jesus Christ. The efforts of ‘emotional’ religion of every shade to call in the Holy Spirit by a ‘worshipful atmosphere’, hymns mellifluous or virile, soft lights and plushy carpets, erotic modulations or magnificent booming bass lines on the organ, pulpit-pounding, poetry, and hypnotic repetition of phrases, are thus one and all a misunderstanding of Christianity. Johannes Climacus speaks of ‘the tumultuous religious address… for emotional people who are quick to sweat and quickly sweated out’ (CUP, p. 494).

page 136 note 1 PV, p. 74.

page 136 note 2 FSE, p. 95.

page 136 note 3 CUP, p. 116.

page 137 note 1 See FSE, p. 45.

page 137 note 2 See CUP, passim.

page 137 note 3 PV, p. 136.

page 138 note 1 See SD, p. 149.

page 138 note 2 PV, p. 134.

page 139 note 1 PV, p. 132.

page 139 note 2 See the account of Hare's, R. M. ‘prescriptivism’ in Warnock's, G. J.Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London: St. Martin's, 1967), pp. 42–47.Google Scholar

page 139 note 3 See Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957)Google Scholar: ‘The moral agent… is the being by whom values exist’ (p. 94). ‘One may choose anything if it is on the grounds of free involvement’ (p. 48). ‘Value is nothing else but the meaning [of life] that you choose’ (p. 49).

page 139 note 4 Personality, says William, Judge, ‘is not lawless, neither does it make laws for itself, for the definition of duty holds good, but personality reveals itself as the unity of the universal and the particular’ (EO, II, p. 268)Google Scholar. His point seems to be that the distinction between good and evil, if it is to have genuine ethical significance, must both be independent of the individual (‘universal’) and at the same time exhibited in the individual's thoughts, emotions, and actions. See also WL, pp. 121f.

page 140 note 1 PH, p. 206. In WL, Kierkegaard says that Christianity has stamped upon men ‘the imprint of kinship between man and man, because kinship of all men is secured by every individual's equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ, because Christian doctrine… teaches him that God has created him and Christ has redeemed him’ (p. 80).

page 140 note 2 PV, p. 127.

page 140 note 3 For a rather detailed discussion and critique of a Heideggerian theologian on this point, see my Rudolf Btdtmann's Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1976), pp. 27ff 50ff, 74f, and 288ff.Google Scholar

page 141 note 1 See Hong, I, §968.

page 141 note 2 PV, p. 128.

page 142 note 1 That ‘the individual’ is not in itself a Christian concept is evident from Kierkegaard's attributing to Socrates the first, and even the only decisively forceful, use of it. See PV, p. 136.

page 142 note 2 Apology, 36c, W. H. D. Rouse translation.

page 143 note 1 PA, p. 68.

page 143 note 2 PA, p. 84; SD, p. 167; FSE, p. 169.

page 143 note 3 FSE, p. 109; PH, p. 186f; WL, p. 138f.

page 143 note 4 PA, p. 43.

page 144 note 1 See WL, pp. 80ff, for an analysis of the attitude Kierkegaard calls ‘distinguished corruption’.

page 144 note 2 PV, p.56.

page 145 note 1 PV, p.81.

page 145 note 2 PA, p.53.

page 146 note 1 It is this insight, and the fear that perhaps all ostensibly moral actions could be explained away in these terms, that leads Glaucon and Adeimantos (Republic, Book II) to challenge Socrates, with the myth of Gyge's ring, to show some reason why a person might do justice ‘for its own sake’. The ring comes into the possession of a shepherd, who soon finds that when it is turned round its wearer becomes invisible, providing him the opportunity for undetected evil at his pleasure. With all the social sanction for ‘justice’ thus lifted, the shepherd goes on an immoral rampage for pleasure and profit. The philosophical question is whether this is not a perfectly rational thing to do; and the assumption is that if it is, if immediate desires are the only rational motives for doing ‘good’ and refraining from ‘evil’, then morality is, wholesale, a sham. So Plato is anxious to establish that it is not rational, under any circumstances, to be unjust, and his argument concludes (Book IV, Book IX) that injustice is a form of weakness, disease, ugliness. A person who understands the soul can no more desire to be unjust than one who understands the body can desire to have blood cells leaking through his kidneys. Kierkegaard, by contrast, is not so much interested in theoretically establishing the propriety of acting from genuinely moral motives, as he is in analyzing the psychological conditions for so acting and maieutically prodding people to realise these conditions in their lives.

page 147 note 1 PA, p. 53.

page 147 note 2 PA, p. 79.

page 149 note 1 For an account of how one theologian carries out this operation see Roberts, op. cit., chapters 8–11.

page 149 note 2 See ibid., chapter 3.

page 149 note 3 PV, p. 135; see Hong, II, §1998; and FSE, p. 90. So far is a person from saving himself by becoming an individual, that this is a way of guaranteeing one's sense of the need for salvation: ‘… the one who never himself becomes an individual is easily tempted to consider himself a most meritorious man’ (PH, p. 215).

page 151 note 1 FSE, p. 55.

page 151 note 2 PV, p. 134.

page 152 note 1 WL, p. 61.

page 152 note 2 See PH, p. 197.

page 152 note 3 See Hong, III, #2952.

page 152 note 4 See Papirer X5 B 208, quoted in translators' footnote, WL, p. 357.