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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Using the terms more or less interchangeably, in accordance with their pre- theoretical use in everyday language. I’m certainly not using ‘character’ in the derivative moral sense in which we accuse someone of ‘lacking character.’ Seigel (2005) p. 317. 2. Aristotle (1975) p. 120. 3. See for instance Urmson (1988) p. 92. 4. Aristotle (1975) p. 120. 5. Aristotle (1975) p. 121. 6. Williams (1981) p. 14. 7. My thanks to Poul Lübcke and Paul Muench for pointing this objection out to me. 8. Korsgaard (1996) pp. 247–8. My defense of what Korsgaard would reject as a form of romanticism depends largely on a belief that the dichotomy between an action’s being either passively impelled or actively chosen is not exhaustive, precisely because the distinction is more ambiguous than it may appear. 9. This seems to be what Mooney has in mind in his claim that, for Kierkegaard, asking ‘what will my response now be?’ in reaction to an evaluatively- structured apprehension of a morally obligating situation (such as coming across a roadside accident) can constitute an ‘acting in reflecting.’ Though the phrase ‘acting in reflecting’ may sound somewhat un-Kierkegaardian, I think it is entirely compatible with Kierkegaard if we take it that this refers to an Aristotelian deliberation on the appropriate means of responding rather than a deliberation on whether I should respond. Mooney (1996) p. 67. 10. Aristotle (1975) p. 41: ‘Now we deliberate not about ends but about the means to ends. For neither does a doctor deliberate whether he should make people healthy, nor an orator whether he should persuade, nor a statesman whether he should enact good laws and enforce them, nor anyone else about whatever the end may be, but positing an end, each of them considers how and by what means that end can be brought about.’ This has seemed puz- zling to many. Surely, I can deliberate about whether or not to become a doctor, orator or statesman? Don’t people at the start of their careers do this all the time? But the point is surely that once we have posited the end, it remains static relative to the means which it presents and which can be assented to or vacated on the basis of deliberation. The prior deliberation on whether to be a doctor takes place relative to some other fixed end (‘I want a career where I help people,’ ‘I want to use my talents in a noble profession’ and so on). 11. Outside of these continents, his reception has been more sporadic. The history of Kierkegaard reception in Japan is a distinctive one; see 184 Notes 185 Mortensen (1996). In Australasia, Kierkegaard remains a marginal figure, although I suspect his work is somewhat more popular than his near- total exclusion from university syllabi would suggest. See McDonald (2009). 12. Poole (1998) p. 62. 13. Merold Westphal notes that it is tempting to say that ‘if Kierkegaard were writing today he would use the term “phenomenology” where he actu- ally uses “psychology” ’ but argues that such a substitution creates as many questions as it solves. Nonetheless, we can remain within Kierkegaard’s ter- minology while maintaining that his psychology is developed phenomeno- logically or is fundamentally phenomenological in character. See Westphal (1987a) p. 40. 14. This is Kinya Masugata’s description of Kierkegaard (playing on Kierkegaard’s description of Socrates) as quoted in Mortensen (1996) p. 100. 15. Despite its rich descriptive value, Kierkegaard’s psychology, as Westphal notes, ‘is a clinical psychology. Its starting point is sickness, its goal diag- nosis and therapy. It is theory for the sake of therapy.’ Westphal (1987a) p. 40. 16. Rudd (2001) p. 140. 17. Russell (1959) p. 305. Russell dismisses Sartre’s project by comparing it to what, to him, seems like a gross absurdity: ‘It is as though one were to turn Dostoevsky’s novels into philosophic text-books.’ Most Kierkegaardians and a great many others (including an increasing number of Analytic philoso- phers) would, I suspect, be entirely comfortable with approaching an author like Dostoevsky in such a way. 18. I’m grateful to a comment of Anthony Rudd on an earlier version of this work for helping me to see this. 19. For one specific use of the insights developed by this approach to make useful interventions into contemporary debates, see Stokes (2006). 20. Hannay (1998). 21. For a discussion on this topic, see Furtak (2008) esp. pp. 59–66. 22. Poole (1998) pp. 58–60. 23. ibid. p. 64. 24. Strawser (1994) pp. 639–40. 1 The Interesting and the Interested: Stages on a Concept’s Way 1. Variants on the lexeme occur in the Samlede Værker with the following frequency: interessant, 59, interessante, 45, interessantere,6,interessantes,2, interessanteste,9,Interesserethed,9,Interesseretheden,2,Interesseløshed,3,Inter- esseløs, 8. It is notable that Interesserethed(en) (‘interestedness’) occurs almost exclusively in the Climacan writings. 2. Nordentoft notes that Kierkegaard’s use of the word changes over time, although he does not outline how (except to say that ‘Concern’ [Bekym- ring] occupies the same conceptual space as interesse in the Upbuilding Discourses). Nordentoft (1978) pp. 84–5. 186 Notes 3. Although it is not the sense which is examined in the present work, Kierkegaard does use the ‘vested interest’ sense of the term critically in a journal entry from 1854, where he berates the ‘practical world’ for lacking ‘a concept of or respect for uninterestedness, disinterestedness [Uinteresserethed, Interesseløshed] (JP, 549/Pap. XI2 A 124 n.d. 1854). 4. Koch (1992) p. 25. 5. Heiberg (1861) p. 371. 6. Koch (1992) p. 28. 7. ibid. p. 42. 8. ibid. p. 50. 9. ibid. p. 34. 10. ibid. p. 44–8. 11. Kant (1997) p. 63n. 12. Kant (1951) p. 41. 13. Kant (1997) pp. 41, 43. 14. Kant (1951) p. 44. 15. ibid. pp. 45–6. 16. Schopenhauer (1966) pp. 186, 196. 17. Kant (1997) p. 54. 18. ibid. p. 63n. 19. ibid. p. 25n. 20. ibid. pp. 63–4. 21. Wood (1990) p. 143. 22. Hegel (1977) p. 194. 23. ibid. p. 240. 24. Wood (1990) p. 152. 25. From The Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony are notably absent from Kierkegaard’s overviews of his authorship in The Point of View For My Work As An Author and ‘A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Whatever historical and philosophical value these works may have (and however much Irony in particular prefigures crucial Kierkegaardian themes), Kierkegaard clearly came to regard Either/Or as the start of the Kierkegaardian program. 26. Watkin (2001) pp. 231–32. 27. Davenport (2001a) p. 85. 28. Frankfurt (1988) p. 17. Importantly, the aesthete may well have what Frank- furt calls ‘second-order desires,’ without these actually becoming volitions. The aesthetic curiosity that Judge William ascribes to his friend would be quite consistent with the aesthete forming a desire to desire marriage and sta- bility, just to see what this is like, without actually willing that such a desire become his effective desire. The work of self-construction is done by the self- identification implicit in volition, rather than the fact of second-orderness itself. 29. Koch (1992) p. 49. 30. A point Mooney makes in similar terms: Mooney (2007) pp. 9–10. 31. Cross (1998) p. 146. 32. ibid. p. 148. 33. In the Postscript, Climacus interprets de silentio as ‘a reflecting person who, with the tragic hero as terminus a quo, with the interesting as Confinium and Notes 187 the religious paradigmatic irregularity as terminus ad quem, continually, as it were, runs up against the understanding’s forehead’ (CUP, 1:262/SKS 7, 238). In other words, this particular use of det interessante is to be understood as the result of the impossibility of representing the ‘existence-collision’ which is the object of de silentio’s inquiry (CUP, 1:261/SKS 7, 238). De silentio must, according to Climacus, be presented as holding to this unusual interpreta- tion of the interesting as he must remain essentially detached. If he did not posess the detachment of the interesting, he would be merely an aesthete, whereas were he fully involved in the religious categories he describes, he could say nothing about them. 34. Malantschuk (1993) p. 67. 35. Koch (1992) p. 125. 2 The Structure of Consciousness 1. As C. Stephen Evans notes, the self’s relatedness to ‘the other’ does not necessarily have to be towards God and can be directed towards other indi- viduals, the family, the nation-state, and so forth (for more on this topic, see Chapter 6). However, he stresses that this does not negate the ultimately theological grounding of the ontology of Sickness, or the role of God as the foundation of authentic selfhood (the attainment of which is the ethical task that arises from the ontology). Alastair Hannay takes a much stronger posi- tion. In rejecting the interpretation of the Sickness ontology that a self can only escape despair by conceiving of itself as divinely established, Hannay argues that the established nature of selfhood means that despair is always already a flight from the divine. Rather than being an ontological malaise that can only be cured by a turn towards God, despair is an ontological malaise occasioned precisely by a turning away from God. See Evans (1997) pp. 8–9; Hannay (1994) p. 11. See also Dreyfus’ recent revision of his earlier understanding of the nature of the other to which we relate: Dreyfus (2008) and Hannay’s reply: Hannay (2008a).
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