Kierkegaard on self, ethics, and religion: purity or despair

Many of Søren Kierkegaard's most controversial and influential ideas are more relevant than ever to contemporary debates on ethics, philosophy of religion and selfhood. Kierkegaard develops an original argument according to which wholeheartedness requires both moral and religious commitment. In this book, Roe Fremstedal provides a compelling reconstruction of how Kierkegaard develops wholeheartedness in the context of his views on moral psychology, meta-ethics and the ethics of religious belief. He shows that Kierkegaard's influential account of despair, selfhood, ethics and religion belongs to a larger intellectual context in which German philosophers such as Kant and Fichte play crucial roles. Moreover, Fremstedal makes a solid case for the controversial claim that religion supports ethics, instead of contradicting it. His book offers a novel and comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard, drawing on important sources that are little known.

"The present work reexamines the importance of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55). It argues that many of Kierkegaard's most controversial and influential ideas are more relevant than ever. Specifically, it shows how we can make good sense of ideas such as subjective truth, "the leap" into faith, and "the teleological suspension of the ethical." When properly understood, none of these ideas are as problematic as commentators have long assumed. This book shows that Kierkegaard offers a novel account of wholeheartedness that is relevant to discussions of personal identity, truth, ethics, and religion (particularly after Frankfurt, MacIntyre, C. Taylor, and Williams). Concluding Unscientific Postscript, notably, describes wholeheartedness as subjective truth, and despair as subjective untruth. This account involves an original, adverbial theory of truth in which agents, rather than propositions, are the basic truth-bearers (Watts 2018). For Kierkegaard, wholeheartedness requires living truly by having a coherent personal identity (something he also describes as "purity of heart"). Despair and doublemindedness, by contrast, involve an incoherent identity, which fails to be true to itself"--