Kierkegaardian Virtues and the Problem of Self-Effacement

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

This is an interesting paper, well researched and generally well written. I do not, however, think it is yet ready for publication—I recommend that the author be invited to revise and re-submit.

 

 

 

I begin with a general point, and follow with more particular points, by page number. When I think it would be helpful, I also indicate lines number(s)—so, p. 2 line 84 would show up as “2.84.”

 

Throughout, I use “A” for the author, and “K” for Kierkegaard.

 

 

General point: There are a number of points at which A moves too quickly, thereby gliding over problems that needs more attention, or leaving the reader uncertain what is meant. I list the main instances of this I noted just below:

 

   7. Clarify for the reader exactly why K must contend with the self-effacement objection—connect to Martinez's definition given on p. 3 (or the initial statement of the objection on p. 2)—although what makes actions etc. right or good is measuring up to the prototype, one must act not from such a motive but instead act from humbler motives etc.

 

   8.360f. Why would saying concern for salighed is selfish be a reductio? (Especially given the admission below that this "doesn't quite" surmount the objection.)

 

   9. The explanation of how K’s appeal to eternity defeats the egoism objection to eudaimonism, due the “the inherently temporal structure of reward” seems interesting and important, but is unfortunately also not made clear enough to the reader—more explanation is needed.

 

   9, last paragraph. Some clarification needed: at one point acting virtuously tends to secure flourishing, at another it is “identical on some level” to it, and at a third flourishing is outside the causal nexus of acting virtuously—assuming flourishing is the reward spoken of ... and what exactly is encompassed, and what exactly excluded, by "causal nexus"? Perhaps an example or two would help.

 

   Section 5. This section seems to be primarily concerned with self-absorption ... if it is supposed to show how K offers a promising way to address concerns about self-effacement, this should be made more explicit and clear. If not, "Self-Effacement" should be dropped from the section title.

 

 

Particular points:

 

2 and passim: The author (hence, A) slides between “egotistical” and “egoistic.” At some points I thought they were being used interchangeably (although in ordinary English they have a different meaning); at other points I thought perhaps “egotistical” was a genus under which were to fall the species, “egoistic” and “self-absorbed.” This should be clarified for the reader.

 

2.84 The “he” should be “it” since the pronoun is standing in for Kierkegaard’s moral psychology rather than for K himself.

 

4.171. I don’t think “thoughtless” is the right word here … “less calculated,” “less studied”?

 

4.194f. Not sure this is a good analogy--given the doctor's warning, it seems as if running is not something that tends toward health for this person. Maybe just, a person may exercise for the sake of his health, even though on some particular occasions exercise may result in injury?

5.201. Arisotle doesn’t discuss “proper pride” as a virtue. I assume magnanimity (and its unnamed associated virtue) are intended here, but they’re not quite the same as what “pride” or even “proper pride” mean in ordinary English.

 

6, end of section 3. More needs to be said to explain why such intermittent reflection is still a problem.

 

9.445-446. Here the paper seems to depart from what had seemed to be its neutrality on the question of whether K was a virtue ethicist.

 

10.461f. K "cannot mean" ... this is slightly jarring ... cannot mean, IF he is to be able to surmount the objection, right? But this is at this point yet to be seen.

10.468. This is a bit confusing--no "structure" has been mentioned ... This self-absorption? This apparent self-absorption?

 

11.535. Again, I question the "cannot"—one should not mean this, but perhaps K does mean it (and therefore is subject to the objection). What is the textual evidence that he does not mean it? Or, is the point the more modest one that there is a charitable and plausible reading of K according to which he does not mean it?

 

11.542. Earlier A spoke of the “Mirror of the Word” … should it be “Word” here too?

 

12.555. “he is the man” … “he art” is either a mistake, or too cute.

 

12.563-564. Awkward construction. Maybe, “It seems, then, that the best … is something like what Annas promotes”

 

12.571-573. “For Kierkegaard, thinking about ourselves explicitly is something we are ultimately enjoined to overcome, even if we are always doomed to fail.” Provide textual support for this claim.

  

None.

 

Author Response

My thanks for this thoughtful and careful review and useful requests for revision. I have actioned these as follows: 

Clarify for the reader exactly why K must contend with the self-effacement objection—connect to Martinez's definition given on p. 3 (or the initial statement of the objection on p. 2)—although what makes actions etc. right or good is measuring up to the prototype, one must act not from such a motive but instead act from humbler motives etc.

• I have added some material reiterating what the self-effacement objection is, why it is a problem, and why therefore Kierkegaard needs to address it.

 

Why would saying concern for salighed is selfish be a reductio? (Especially given the admission below that this "doesn't quite" surmount the objection.)

• I’ve tweaked this to make it clearer that this is Lippitt’s claim rather than mine, but I have also added a little more to say why we might find that objection intuitively plausible.

 

The explanation of how K’s appeal to eternity defeats the egoism objection to eudaimonism, due the “the inherently temporal structure of reward” seems interesting and important, but is unfortunately also not made clear enough to the reader—more explanation is needed.

• I’ve added some material here to make this point clearer.

 

Some clarification needed: at one point acting virtuously tends to secure flourishing, at another it is “identical on some level” to it, and at a third flourishing is outside the causal nexus of acting virtuously—assuming flourishing is the reward spoken of ... and what exactly is encompassed, and what exactly excluded, by "causal nexus"? Perhaps an example or two would help.

• I’ve simplified this section somewhat and added some additional material to make it clearer, including another return to the hut example.

 

This section seems to be primarily concerned with self-absorption ... if it is supposed to show how K offers a promising way to address concerns about self-effacement, this should be made more explicit and clear. If not, "Self-Effacement" should be dropped from the section title.

• Agreed, and I have modified the section title accordingly.

 

The author (hence, A) slides between “egotistical” and “egoistic.” […] This should be clarified for the reader.

• Agreed, this was sloppy of me; I’ve standardised all uses to ‘egoism’ and ‘egoistic’ throughout.

 

The “he” should be “it” since the pronoun is standing in for Kierkegaard’s moral psychology rather than for K himself.

• Fixed.

 

I don’t think “thoughtless” is the right word here … “less calculated,” “less studied”?

• I’ve elected to keep ‘thoughtless’ here as this is the term I use in the reference that’s redacted here. In that text I do discuss the somewhat paradoxical character of ‘good’ thoughtlessness.

 

Not sure this is a good analogy--given the doctor's warning, it seems as if running is not something that tends toward health for this person. Maybe just, a person may exercise for the sake of his health, even though on some particular occasions exercise may result in injury?

• I’ve added a footnote to defend the analogy.

 

Aristotle doesn’t discuss “proper pride” as a virtue. I assume magnanimity (and its unnamed associated virtue) are intended here, but they’re not quite the same as what “pride” or even “proper pride” mean in ordinary English.

• I’ve removed the reference to Aristotle there.

 

More needs to be said to explain why such intermittent reflection is still a problem.

• I’ve added a half-paragraph elaborating on this.

 

9.445-446. Here the paper seems to depart from what had seemed to be its neutrality on the question of whether K was a virtue ethicist.

• I’ve rejigged this to maintain neutrality. (I’m not saying Rudd is right, just pointing out that what he says is relevant to the claims made here).

 

K "cannot mean" ... this is slightly jarring ... cannot mean, IF he is to be able to surmount the objection, right? But this is at this point yet to be seen.

• Westphal’s point, which I’m citing here, is that it’s just not credible to think Kierkegaard endorses a view that is both immoral and obviously unworkable. So in that sense it’s an appeal to charity as much as anything. I’ve tweaked it to make things clearer.

This is a bit confusing--no "structure" has been mentioned ... This self-absorption? This apparent self-absorption?

• I’ve changed ‘structure’ to ‘point’ which hopefully makes what follows clearer.

 

Again, I question the "cannot"—one should not mean this, but perhaps K does mean it (and therefore is subject to the objection). What is the textual evidence that he does not mean it? Or, is the point the more modest one that there is a charitable and plausible reading of K according to which he does not mean it?

• The latter, and I’ve added some words to make this clearer.

 

Earlier A spoke of the “Mirror of the Word” … should it be “Word” here too?

• Corrected, thanks

 

 “he is the man” … “he art” is either a mistake, or too cute.

• It’s quite deliberate, and is I think just within acceptable boundaries of cuteness.

 

Awkward construction. Maybe, “It seems, then, that the best … is something like what Annas promotes”

• Have amended, thanks

 

“For Kierkegaard, thinking about ourselves explicitly is something we are ultimately enjoined to overcome, even if we are always doomed to fail.” Provide textual support for this claim.

• I’ve added some textual evidence here.

Reviewer 2 Report

On the whole, the author has provided an excellent account of some of the main criticisms that have been levelled against Kierkegaard's ethics and interpretations of Kierkegaard's ethics (as a Christian virtue ethicist, or as one who endorses ethics). These include those of self-effacement, egoism, and self-absoption. The author provides an account of these objections against contemporary accounts of virtue ethics, and shows how Kierkegaard can defend himself against these objections (without committing to whether or not he was actually a virtue ethicist of any form).

I am sympathetic to the author's defense of Kierkegaard. But as a reviewer, my main question regarding the acosm objection (by Adorno, Mackey, Dupre, et al.), is whether or not the author has taken into account the centrality of Kierkegaard understanding the ethic of love as the "middle term" that follows from the requirement to love God. We are to love God; God commands us to love our neighbor; therefore we are to love our neighbor (Hong, WOL, 107); and that this is possible because God is present in our neighbor as the "common watermark" (HONG, WOL, 89). It seems difficult to accuse him of acosmism when there is also the recognition of a genuine human equality between all persons.

My other concerns are minor:

The author has a tendency to slip into an academic and cliched passive voice. Instead of "It is important to note that" USE "Note that:" (LN 396; 419/20; 445)

The discussion of consciousness in Lns 506 - 512 leans towards vagueness (particularly 508-509: "various ways"). Explain.

The last paragraph is somewhat jarring (Lns 598-601). Is the author defending Kierkegaard or challenging him? The entire tenor of this paragraph pulls me out of the text of the article.

Missing reference:
Ln. 603: In P. Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Otherwise, I enjoyed this paper!

I only have some nitpicky concerns on the English:

Ln: 33: Typo? "are they are in themselves"
Ln: 62: What is it to be virtuous in the "right sense"?
Lns: 169-170: Check grammar. This is confusing.
Lns: 189-190: Did Aristotle ever us the language of agency?
Ln: 297: On the "shipwreck of (prob. virtue) ethics" see also "Introduction" of Concept of Anxiety, 1980, 17-18); I think this is relevant.

Ln 539: "way. Continuing..."

Author Response

My thanks for these thoughtful and helpful comments, requests and suggestions. I've actioned these as follows:

 

But as a reviewer, my main question regarding the acosm objection (by Adorno, Mackey, Dupre, et al.), is whether or not the author has taken into account the centrality of Kierkegaard understanding the ethic of love as the "middle term" that follows from the requirement to love God. We are to love God; God commands us to love our neighbor; therefore we are to love our neighbor (Hong, WOL, 107); and that this is possible because God is present in our neighbor as the "common watermark" (HONG, WOL, 89). It seems difficult to accuse him of acosmism when there is also the recognition of a genuine human equality between all persons.

• I’ve added a few lines on this. Of course, in the critiques of Kierkegaard that I’ve mentioned, God as the ‘middle term’ in love is in fact a point of criticism: love of the other is in some sense directed away from the other and towards God, or at best, all love for the neighbour is mediated by and responsive to God’s command. So the charge is in fact that because Kierkegaard puts God ‘between’ us and the neighbour, his ideal of love puts us at one remove from other people.

The author has a tendency to slip into an academic and cliched passive voice. Instead of "It is important to note that" USE "Note that:" (LN 396; 419/20; 445)

• Amended

 

The discussion of consciousness in Lns 506 - 512 leans towards vagueness (particularly 508-509: "various ways"). Explain.

• I’ve removed the sentence in question.

 

The last paragraph is somewhat jarring (Lns 598-601). Is the author defending Kierkegaard or challenging him? The entire tenor of this paragraph pulls me out of the text of the article.

• I’ve taken out the final line to try to soften the impression of challenging Kierkegaard. My concern here is twofold: to remain agnostic about whether Kierkegaard is or is not a virtue ethicist (what the paper does is show that if he is one, he both needs to, and can, deal with the objections that have been raised against virtue ethics), and to address the worry that this is all quite anachronistic. I’ve found that any attempt to discuss Kierkegaard in the context of 20^th and 21^st century debates tends to upset people who think Kierkegaard should only be read historically.

 

Missing reference: Ln. 603: In P. Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest. (New York: Oxford University Press).

• Fixed, thanks!

 

Reviewer 3 Report

The author seeks to show whether the general critique of so-called virtue ethics is applicable to Kierkegaard's ethical considerations. At the same time, s/he does not settle the question of whether Kierkegaard's ethics can be read in the paradigm of virtue ethics, but presents the existing discussion in the literature on the subject and treats the whole question rather hypothetically from a metaethical perspective. The main contribution of this article is to show not only that Kierkegaard's ethics defends itself against the objections leveled against virtue ethics, but also that, on the basis of Kierkegaard's reflections, it is possible to find arguments to overcome some of the objections leveled against virtue ethics in general.

Overall the article is well written, the thesis is clearly presented and developed, and the structure of the text is logical. The author refers extensively to the literature on the subject and discusses the results that exist on the topic undertaken. The author is well acquainted with Kierkegaard's work and comments on it in an interesting way.   However, from my perspective of reading Kierkegaard's ethical reflections, the main problem with this article is that the author treats Kierkegaard's ethics in a way that is too unifying, that is, s/he views all of Kierkegaard's existential-ethical reflections as a single entity. Yet Kierkegaard makes a clear distinction between the first ethics (bourgeois, immanent) and the second ethics (Christian, transcendent) - and these are two completely different visions for him. Firstly, the author does not distinguish between the fact that every human being is a subject of ethical action and the fact that, in Kierkegaard’s works, there are different existential attitudes within which people, due to their degree of advancement in ethical development, are different ethical subjects. In a certain concrete situation, the aesthetic, ethical and religious subject will act in different ways. The objections to virtue ethics that the author invokes and juxtaposes with Kierkegaard's considerations hit their mark insofar as the ethical decision-making process of a person at the aesthetic level of existence is concerned, i.e. someone who is ethically unstable and unable to represent virtue ethics in principle  - but these objections miss their mark when applied to the ethical person who would not have such dilemmas at all in the situations analysed by the author. I understand that the author adopts a metaethical perspective and considers the whole issue from this point of view, but it would be useful to briefly describe the meanderings of Kierkegaard's ethics and to methodologically present his or her own point of view on the issue. Otherwise, the author's considerations may give the impression of being chaotically embedded in Kierkegaard's thought.

Minor remarks:

- line 25 - perhaps it should be “wordlessly” instead of “worldlessly”?

- lines 37-38 – statement "... to debunk such a reading, drawing upon texts from Works of Love through to the Upbuilding Discourses... " – chronologically, most of the upbuilding discourses precede “Works of Love”, so such a statement can be misleading. Moreover “Works of Love” can be included into the broader body of Kierkegaard’s signed works very often referred to in the literature as religious/upbuilding/edifying discourse. Perhaps, then, it would be appropriate to write “Works of Love and other upbuilding/ edifying discourses” where upbuilding/edifying discourses is written with a lower case letter, as it is a general name (as the author puts it in line 44) - not a title.

- lines 76-77 – it is not clear what the author means by Sylvia Walsh's use of the term “selfishness” as an argument against interpreting Kierkegaard’s ethics as virtue ethics. A more detailed description is needed here, including a reference to Walsh's text. It would also be better to put this remark in a footnote, as it breaks up the continuity of the author's argument here.

- lines 79-80 – capital letters when listing the three main objections to virtue ethics do not seem useful here.

- line 205 – the word “because” is repeated twice in the sentence "...to our benefit but because simply because it..."

- lines 217-219 – I would move the comment in parentheses to a footnote, as it again disrupts the flow of the author's argument.

- lines 328 and 329 – quotations from Kierkegaard's works are given without page references.

- line 644 - the author of the book in question is Patrick Stokes, not Michael Stocker, as the bibliographic description suggests

Author Response

Thanks for these thoughtful and insightful comments and recommendations. I've actioned these as follows:

 

However, from my perspective of reading Kierkegaard's ethical reflections, the main problem with this article is that the author treats Kierkegaard's ethics in a way that is too unifying, that is, s/he views all of Kierkegaard's existential-ethical reflections as a single entity. ...

• I’ve added a footnote specifying that the Kierkegaardian ethics addressed here, and the ones that critics like Adorno etc. called into question, are the religious ethics as enunciated primarily in signed works such as Works of Love, the signed discourses etc, and not the ‘ethical stage’ ethics of pseudonyms like Judge William. This is a useful stipulation and I’m grateful you pushed me to clarify this. However, I don’t think I’d agree that for Kierkegaard, even outside the ‘aesthetic’ sphere, there are perfected moral agents “who would not have such dilemmas at all in the situations analysed by the author,” agents who always and reliably act ethically in a spontaneous way. That, I agree, is an ideal that’s implicit in Kierkegaard’s ethics, but as a (mostly) orthodox Lutheran he also believes we’re so utterly corrupted that we can’t reach such a state.

line 25 - perhaps it should be “wordlessly” instead of “worldlessly”?

• ‘worldlessly’ is the correct word (essentially just used here as a synonym for ‘acosmic’)

lines 37-38 – statement "... to debunk such a reading, drawing upon texts from Works of Love through to the Upbuilding Discourses... " – chronologically, most of the upbuilding discourses precede “Works of Love”, so such a statement can be misleading. Moreover “Works of Love” can be included into the broader body of Kierkegaard’s signed works very often referred to in the literature as religious/upbuilding/edifying discourse. Perhaps, then, it would be appropriate to write “Works of Love and other upbuilding/ edifying discourses” where upbuilding/edifying discourses is written with a lower case letter, as it is a general name (as the author puts it in line 44) - not a title.

• Fixed

- lines 76-77 – it is not clear what the author means by Sylvia Walsh's use of the term “selfishness” as an argument against interpreting Kierkegaard’s ethics as virtue ethics. A more detailed description is needed here, including a reference to Walsh's text. It would also be better to put this remark in a footnote, as it breaks up the continuity of the author's argument here.

• I’ve removed this line.

lines 79-80 – capital letters when listing the three main objections to virtue ethics do not seem useful here.

• Changed to lower case.

 

 line 205 – the word “because” is repeated twice in the sentence "...to our benefit but because simply because it..."

• Fixed.

lines 217-219 – I would move the comment in parentheses to a footnote, as it again disrupts the flow of the author's argument.

• Amended

lines 328 and 329 – quotations from Kierkegaard's works are given without page references.

• The citation is given at the end of the sentence.

 

line 644 - the author of the book in question is Patrick Stokes, not Michael Stocker, as the bibliographic description suggests

• Amended