Research Activity

Current Research Activity (September-December 2009)

The "Single Individual" and the Eschatological Boundaries of the Self

In both his pseudonymous and veronymous works, Kierkegaard often speaks of "the Single Individual" as the entity that will be subjected to the "judgment of eternity" and make an "accounting" of itself in its totality. This should not surprise us given Kierkegaard's orthodox Lutheran commitments and primarily religious motivations. But it is also often overlooked that, as Martin and Baressi (2003) have noted, the modern question of personal identity emerges out of specifically soteriological concerns, especially those raised by the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Indeed, Locke himself sought an account of identity compatible with the justice handed out on "the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open" (Locke, 1731: 294). But in Kierkegaard's relational account of selfhood, what - if anything - delineates the boundaries of the "single individual" that is subjected to this eschatological judgment? What determines what the individual is to take ultimate responsibility for? Is there a limit, or is the self - as in Levinas - a point of infinite responsibility? Or is it that Kierkegaard's wariness of anything that looks like evasion of moral responsibility means the question about the limits of our culpability cannot legitimately be asked?

 

Recent Research Activity (February 2008 - August 2009)

Minimal vs. Narrative Selves

It's generally accepted that Kierkegaard offers a post-Cartesian, non-substantialist account of selfhood, but what sort of account? Several commentators have sought to recruit Kierkegaard to the cause of "Narrative Identity," and there is much in Judge William and Anti-Climacus' talk of teleologically-qualified selves acquiring "histories" that might suggest the Kierkegaardian self is constituted by a specifically narrative form of continuity. But as John Lippitt has recently argued (Lippitt, 2007), there are reasons to be wary of this move, and narrative identity theory itself is not without problems: such theories often seem to offer a construal of 'narrative' that is either too strong (confusing life and art) or too weak to be particularly informative. Hence narrativists like Marya Schechtman have tried to find a middle path through these extremes (Schechtman, 2007).

Moreover, there seems to be some form of personal unity prior to the self's narrative organisation across time, even if such unity is only momentary. Indeed, it can be argued that there has to be such a pre-existing basic unity of selfhood, for only such a minimally-unified self can organise itself into a state of narrative coherence across time. Hence writers such as Dan Zahavi (2007), Shaun Gallagher (2000) and Antonio Damasio (1999) have drawn, in somewhat different but cognate ways, a distinction between the temporally-extended "narrative/autobiographical self" and the "core/minimal self" (prior to any temporal extension and associated with the phenomenal sense of 'ipseity' or 'mineness'). The minimal self can exist without the narrative self, as demonstrated in cases such as Korsakoff's Syndrome, but not vice versa.

Such a distinction has not, to date, been noted in Kierkegaard by those who read him as a narrativist. However, in both the second volume of Either/Or and in The Sickness Unto Death we find references to an eternal, "naked, abstract self", identified with freedom and eternality, and distinguishable from both social roles/relations and, apparently, the individual's psychological history and personality. Is this a counterpart to the contemporary "minimal self"? If so, how does its presentation differ in these two works, particularly with reference to this self's "eternality"? What exactly might this eternal "core" self might be for Kierkegaard, if not a Cartesian ego or immaterial soul?

 

Recent Research Activity (February-December 2008)

The Persistence of Selves?

Traditional accounts of personal identity have, implicitly or explicitly, concerned themselves primarily with questions of “re-identification” across time: how do we know that the person stage encountered at t2 is the same self as the person-stage encountered at t1? In other words, they seek to identify the persistence conditions – if any – of selves across time. Neo-Lockean or “Psychological Criterion” accounts of personal identity have particularly looked to relations of psychological continuity (memory, dispositions, commitments, etc) to constitute these persistence conditions.

At first blush, the ontology of self articulated in The Sickness Unto Death looks like a form of neo-Lockean identity model, albeit of a very peculiar type. For Anti-Climacus, the self is not to be found among the physical, psychological and social continuities that characterize human beings, but instead is constituted by a particular way in which the human relates to itself. We could therefore say that the persistence conditions of Anti-Climacan selves are that they continue to relate to themselves in this self-constituting manner.

Yet if we take such a form of self-relation as constituting selfhood, we run into a series of problems even more severe than those that have bedeviled neo-Lockean personal identity theory. Most seriously, Anti-Climacus claims that selves can apparently be lost, yet if selves can be lost and regained this opens up problems of re-identification and transitivity: how can the same self cease to exist and then come back into existence? How can a point in the life of a human be “appropriated” into a self at t1, not appropriated at t2 and re-appropriated at t3?

Part of the answer might be to differentiate Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood from the neo-Lockean one with respect to the question of time and persistence, focused through Kierkegaard’s discussion of the “eternal” element in the self. Does Kierkegaard have a traditional account of selves as things which persist across time? Or is Kierkegaard’s understanding of selfhood as a first-personal, ethical/eschatological problem such that the question of persistence cannot be raised? What would the implications of this be for a Kierkegaardian response to the questions posed by neo-Lockeans?

Temporal Alienation and Loss of Presence

We take it as a brute fact of life that time only “flows” in one direction – so much so, in fact, that even philosophers have largely ignored the question of the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes to the past and future (we’d rather have a given quantity of good in our future than in our past, for example). However, in Reasons and Persons (1984), Derek Parfit argues that despite their ingrained nature these asymmetrical attitudes to time are irrational and should be dispensed with. Parfit sketches a figure he calls “Timeless”, a self whose attitudes to past and present are perfectly symmetrical. We might find Timeless’ form of life alien, disquieting and hard to imagine, but Parfit insists this is no impediment to recommending such a form of life.

Yet “Timeless” is not the first figure in philosophy to violate our usual asymmetrical attitudes to time. In Either/Or, we are presented with a series of portraits of the aesthete as a figure suffering from a form of temporal alienation: the aesthete apparently uses recollection and imagination to range freely across the past and future, while somehow hoping for the past and recollecting the future. The Kierkegaardian aesthete therefore calls into question the normativity of temporal directionality, a normativity that Judge William tries to supply with an ethical account of time. In that he’s not alone either – for instance, the British Idealist J. Ellis McTaggart argued for certain asymmetries on broadly ethical grounds. But McTaggart bases this normativity upon the very asymmetrical attitudes to time that the figure of the Kierkegaardian aesthete calls into question. Does Judge William do any better in trying to ground the normativity of a one-way temporal orientation? Or does he merely give us a new form of punctual time? To make the directionality of time normative, do we need a specifically eschatological conception of time, as offered in The Concept of Anxiety?

What’s Missing in Strawson’s Episodic Selfhood?

In a series of important papers, Galen Strawson has argued that humans have a range of “temporal temperaments”: some people are “Episodics”, who experience their self – understood as the mental thing that’s having this experience right now – as something with no significant temporal extension, while others are “Diachronics” whose self-experience includes a sense that the self (not merely the human being) they are now existed in the past and will exist in the future.

In Kierkegaard’s writings we find extended, philosophically-structured descriptions of the phenomenon of experiencing co-identity with representations of one’s past and future selves. This section of the project therefore seeks to use Kierkegaard’s description of cognitive “contemporaneity” (samtidighed) to fill out the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, and explore the implications of Kierkegaard’s normatively-laden model of self-experience for Strawson’s account.

Self, Imagination and Time

Philosophers have long noted that we often ”identify” less strongly (implicitly or explicitly) with our near-future selves than our far-future selves (e.g. Parfit, 1984). This blunt psychological fact throws up significant problems for our intuitions about personal identity and responsibility. Some philosophers have attempted to determine under what conditions we can and cannot so identify with our past and future selves, seeking some affective quality in memory that can sustain our identification (such as Schechtman’s “empathic access” [Schechtman, 2003]). Others have denied that there is any sense of identification with the self we encounter in our memories of the past and apprehensions of the future; there is nothing internal to these experiences that makes the self figured in them any more me than anyone else (Strawson, 1997; Giles, 1997).

Once again, Kierkegaard’s notion of contemporaneity seem to be a useful input into these discussions. But does the mode of subjective thinking Kierkegaard variously calls “interested”, “contemporaneous” and “earnest” really secure “co-presence” with the temporally distant selves we remember/imagine? If so, how? Does it give us a reason to care equally about our temporally close and distant selves? Can this model cope with situations of radical changes in our character and concerns across time? What are the limits of this capacity for Kierkegaard?

Concurrent Research Activity

• Co-presence with death and the ontological status of the dead in Works of Love and “At a Graveside”
• The “Borddandsen” craze in the socio-religious context of Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen