Kierkegaard, in general.

The soul is so complex that any psychology we can manage is necessarily a useful reduction. So it goes with Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s modes of living. As a reduction, it has its gaps and its irrelevancies with regard to any number of situations.

But the reader of Kierkegaard, like the reader of Freud, is furnished with a set of terms and symbols that can be used to construct his guiding narrative. And it comes out in fiction: Walker Percy built character dynamics in The Moviegoer on the model of Either/Or, and Rob from High Fidelity made a Kierkegaardian journey whether or not Nick Hornby had the Danish philosopher in mind when he wrote the novel.

Here’s how the Kierkegaardian story goes. The protagonist, usually a young man, lives an aesthetic life, meaning that he is oriented towards feeling and experience. Much of his effort goes toward avoiding boredom. He keeps life interesting primarily through art and relationships with women. In these relationships, he is faithful only to the experience of the relationship, not to the woman as a human being. Ethically, this is bad behavior—but the protagonist does not see himself ethically. At some point in the story, he commits to relationship over experience, often through marriage. By doing this, he enters the ethical mode of living. He finds an unexpected security in this mode, and a certain restlessness that has always plagued him subsides.

This is, of course, only a framework, and it’s probably better to say that Kierkegaard didn’t invent this story so much as treat it comprehensively.

But beyond the ethical, there is the religious. In Fear and Trembling, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous characters writes of “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is the idea that God can require an unethical action from a believer for some purpose unknown to the believer, and the believer must lay some ethical commitment on the altar of faith, as Abraham did when he took Isaac up Mt. Moriah. Some theologians have found Kierkegaard’s description of the situation to be problematic, to say the least, and I must say that I have my doubts about its theological validity. Nevertheless, Fear and Trembling is a good book. (I’ve tried to describe it as Kierkegaard’s attempt to make the simple truths that faith people know complicated enough that even intellectuals can understand them.)

I find that Kierkegaard’s writing is not anything that I would try to defend as truth, but it does provide a wealth of material for reflection and self-examination. Also, once you get his rhythm, reading Kierkegaard can actually be entertaining, as he’s one of the few philosophers with a decent sense of humor.

Two final things: it should be obvious by now that I haven't read enough of Kierkegaard's later writings, and I am currently wondering about the connection between the certain sort of Protestant who is drawn to Kierkegaard and the certain sort of Protestant that is drawn to MacIntyre. I welcome comments on either point.