Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair by Roe FremstedalVanessa RumbleRoe Fremstedal. Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 280. Hardback, $99.99. Paperback, $32.99.Fremstedal’s impressive synthesis of the anthropological, ethical, and religious dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought draws on the fruits of his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In each of the two volumes, Fremstedal argues for key points of agreement between Kant and Kierkegaard, and he proposes a precise and differentiated account of the way in which the anthropological assumptions of each thinker (a) undergird and shape their respective ethics and (b) pave the way for a religiosity that not only builds on but actively fortifies moral agency. The result, Fremstedal claims, is a rendering of Kierkegaard as by no means averse to the demands of systematic thought. Fremstedal’s Kierkegaard rejects the existence of “epistemic, objective evidence for or against faith” while nonetheless adducing “practical and subjective grounds” (252) for earnest ethical striving and religious faith. In addition to Fremstedal’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s debt to Kant, this book contains a finely drawn analysis of and response to the contemporary scholarship on ethical issues posed by (or to) Kierkegaard’s texts, drawing on the work of Rudd, Davenport, Helms, Stokes, Piety, and others, contributing thereby to the integration of Kierkegaardian ethics in larger discussions of moral psychology.Fremstedal’s stated aim is to provide both (i) the historical context for Kierkegaard’s authorship and (ii) a detailed consideration of Kierkegaard’s potential contribution to contemporary philosophical debates. With regard to (i), Fremstedal’s thirteen chapters offer considerably more than he is able to telegraph in the introduction. Fremstedal’s rough-and-ready appraisal of Kierkegaard’s relation to J. G. Fichte’s Ethics; his expert distillation of [End Page 513] the bearing of the Pantheism Controversy on the account of the “leap” in Postscript (173); and the alacrity with which he charts Kant’s, Jacobi’s, and Kiekegaard’s varying takes on the notion of “reason” (Vernunft/Fornuft) in its relation to “understanding” (Verstand/Forstand) all provide invaluable orientation and grist for further analysis. His discussion of the Pantheism Controversy lends support to his reading of the Postscript’s “leap” as indicating unavoidable discontinuities in “the transition from one normative domain to another” (179) rather than an espousal of fideism.What follows is a summary of Fremstedal’s central chapters on Kierkegaard’s ethics (chapters 2–9), with a particular focus on a key, contentious aspect of the former’s reading. Since the 1981 publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Kierkegaard scholars queued up to defend the Danish philosopher against MacIntyre’s claim that Kierkegaard depicts the commitment to moral existence as criterionless. In Davenport and Rudd’s anthology, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, Peter Mehl’s essay encapsulates the standard response: “Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with providing a philosophical anthropology as a basis for a coherent and reasonable approach to moral praxis,” a concern that is hardly compatible with a conception of morality as pure subjectivism (“Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” in Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, ed. John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd [Chicago: Open Court, 2001], 4).Like Mehl, Fremstedal believes Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology offers the best defense against MacIntyre’s charge of irrationalism. He grounds his account of Kierkegaard’s anthropology in The Sickness unto Death, citing Anti-Climacus’s depiction of the synthesis of finitude and infinitude as establishing the “fundamental tension between facticity and freedom,... constitutive of our human nature” (20). He parses the supervening relational task placed on the self (Selvet) as twofold: (a) recognition of the conjunction of the given and the chosen in the actual self and, crucially, (b) the evaluation and ranking of the “first order” motivations and inclinations of the actual self with a view to forging a coherent self, namely, the “pure” or “whole-hearted” self that is to evade despair and guide ethical striving. (Fremstedal nods here to work by Davenport and Stokes.) Fremstedal highlights the limitations of the “given” self by reminding...