John Lippitt

Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative

As part of the widespread turn to narrative in contemporary philosophy, several commentators have recently attempted to sign Kierkegaard up for the narrative cause, most notably in John Davenport and Anthony Rudds recent collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue. I argue that the aesthetic and ethical existence‐spheres in Either/Or cannot adequately be distinguished in terms of the MacIntyre‐inspired notion of ‘narrative unity’. Judge Williams argument for the ethical life contains far more in the way of substantive normative content than can be encapsulated by the idea of ‘narrative unity’, and the related idea that narratives confer intelligibility will not enable us to distinguish Kierkegaardian aesthetes from Kierkegaardian ethicists. ‘MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians’ also take insufficient notice of further problems with MacIntyres talk of ‘narrative unity’, such as his failure to distinguish between literary narratives and the ‘enacted dramatic narratives’ of which he claims our lives consist; the lack of clarity in the idea of a ‘whole life’; and the threat of self‐deception. Finally, against the connections that have been drawn between Kierkegaardian choice and Harry Frankfurts work on volitional identification, I show something of the dangers involved in putting too much stress on unity and wholeheartedness.

Making sense of nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein

The aim of this paper is to make sense of cases of apparent nonsense in the writings of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Against commentators such as C. Diamond and J. Conant, we argue that, in the case of Wittgenstein, recognising such a category of nonsense is necessary in order to understand the development of his thought. In the case of Kierkegaard, we argue against the view that the notion of the absolute paradox of the Christian incarnation is intended to be nonsensical. However, we recognize that Kierkegaards discussion of Christianity uses a similar methodology to a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation. We maintain that by making sense of their respective views on nonsense and paradox we are able more fully to appreciate their position on, and approaches to, ethics and religion

A funny thing happened to me on the way to salvation: Climacus as humorist in Kierkegaard's concluding unscientific postscript

Original article can be found at : http://journals.cambridge.org/ --Copyright Cambridge University Press DOI : 10.1017/S0034412597003806

Either Kierkegaard/or Nietzsche : moral philosophy in a new key

[1] For two thinkers so commonly mentioned in the same breath, it is surprising that there have been so few full-length studies comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In this book, Tom Angier brings into dialogue the two figures who are, he controversially claims, ‘the most significant moral philosophers of the nineteenth century’ (p. 1). But there is no doubt in whose corner Angier is holding the towel: the book sets out to support his contention that ‘Kierkegaard both anticipated, and subjected to detailed critique, Nietzsche’s central arguments and views in moral philosophy’ (p. 1). [2] Angier’s discussion is divided into two parts, consisting of three and two chapters respectively. Chapter 1 investigates the Nietzschean ‘sovereign individual’, whose most explicit appearance is at the start of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. Based on the idea that the sovereign individual is akin to a Kierkegaardian aesthete, chapter 2 explores Kierkegaardian arguments for the superiority of the ethical life to the aesthetic life in Either/Or. Chapter 3, primarily through a reading of Fear and Trembling, shows why Kierkegaard sees the need to go beyond the ethical life to the religious. By this point, Angier thinks he has justified the conclusion that Kierkegaard’s position is ‘sufficiently well-founded to overcome its main rival within the history of philosophy . . . Nietzschean sovereign individuality’ (p. 66). In part two, he offers two ‘case studies’: on truth (chapter 4) – on which topic Kierkegaard is again claimed to trump Nietzsche – and communication (chapter 5), in which contemporary work on narrative is used both to offer an interesting twist on a tradition of reading Fear and Trembling, and to argue – once again – for the superiority of a Kierkegaardian position to that of Nietzsche. A brief conclusion discusses equality and power in the two thinkers. [3] Rather than give the prominence that the secondary literature often gives to the rather shadowy notion of the Übermensch, it is a promising aspect of Angier’s reading of Nietzsche that he treats the ‘sovereign individual’ as Nietzsche’s ideal. Introducing the ‘hyper-existentialist’ interpretation of this (in which the individual is presented as creating out of nothing, apart from any culture or history, his own table of values) and a rival ‘biologistic’ interpretation (in which Nietzsche’s fatalism is stressed, and where, as Brian Leiter puts it, each person hasContents: Preface Introduction: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche vis-A -vis the analytic tradition. Part 1 Kierkegaard contra Nietzsche: Foreword Kierkegaards challenge From aestheticism to ethics From ethics to religion. Part 2 Truth and Communication: Foreword Truth Communication. Conclusion: equality and power Recommended reading Bibliography Index.

Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self

Freedom and Narrative Identity: Hegel and Kierkegaard on the Self Woburn Room 7b. Jeffrey Hanson (Australian Catholic University) Marrying the Ideal and Actual: Kierkegaard’s Religious Aesthetic and the Self

Jest as Humility: Kierkegaard and the Limits of Earnestness

This chapter argues that jest [Spog] - an apparently marginal and comparatively overlooked feature of Kierkegaard’s treatment of the comic, humor and irony - has far greater significance than is normally realized. It argues that jest is the expression of an existentially important kind of humility. To see this, we need to understand the relation between jest and earnestness (especially, how jest reveals the limits of earnestness for humans qua finite creatures) and the link between this and the important Kierkegaardian category of “infinite resignation.” The chapter then explores the dangers of the “spirit of comparison” discussed in Kierkegaard’s 1847 discourses on the lilies and the birds. It argues that jest addresses these dangers through expressing a particular kind of humility, one typified by a recognition of our dependence and a focus on others, rather than underestimating ourselves or not exaggerating our abilities or importance. Finally, it suggests that the relationship between such humility, “eschatological trust” and hope sheds new light on how best to understand Kierkegaard’s claim that awareness of a “way out” must be present if a use of the comic is to be ethically “legitimate.”

Self-knowledge in Kierkegaard

This document is a draft of a chapter that has been published by Oxford University Press in Ursula Renz, ed., Self-Knowledge: a history, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ISBN 9780190226428, eISBN 9780190630553.

The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

John Lippitt, The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), ISBN: 978-0-415-70720-6 (pbk), eBook ISBN: 978-1-315-67369-1

Can a Christian Be a Friend? God, Friendship and Love of Neighbor

Christian thought and friendship have had a sometimes stormy relationship. In the first part of this essay, I shall draw on St Augustine, Kierkegaard and C. S. Lewis to outline some key reasons for suspicion of friendship within the Christian tradition. I shall briefly discuss Kierkegaard’s distinction between love of the neighbor and ‘preferential’ loves such as friendship, his worry that friendship is exclusionary and often a form of disguised self-love, and the related claim that the category of the neighbor is required in order to recognize genuine alterity. We shall see that Kierkegaard’s concern about friendship’s exclusionary nature is echoed in Lewis’s remarks about the ‘pride’ of friendship. Moreover, his worry about friendship as disguised self-love is itself an echo of some of Augustine’s comments in the Confessions. But while Kierkegaard is not the unequivocal enemy of friendship that he has often been portrayed as being (see, most famously, Adorno [1940]), neither is he as close a friend of it as he might have been. His insufficiently critical inheritance of the classical view of the friend as a ‘second self’ leads to a failure to see the true potential of friendship within the Christian life. In the second part of the essay, to illuminate this claim, I shall first discuss friendship’s inspiration for, and potential as a bridge towards, love of neighbor.

Irony and the Subjective Thinker

…[S]ome image of Socrates is indispensable to our philosophical thinking. Perhaps we may say that today no philosophical thought is possible unless Socrates is present, if only as a pale shadow. The way in which a man experiences Socrates is fundamental to his thinking. — Karl Jaspers1