Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love 9781107058453, 9781107035614

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K ierkeg a a r d a n d t he P ro b le m o f S el f - L ov e

The problem of whether we should love ourselves – and if so how – is an important yet underinvestigated theme in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard argues that the friendships and romantic relationships which we typically treasure most are often merely disguised forms of ‘selfish’ self-love. Yet in this nuanced and subtle account, John Lippitt shows that Kierkegaard also provides valuable resources for responding to the challenge of how we can love ourselves, as well as others. Lippitt relates what it means to love oneself properly to such topics as love of God and neighbour, friendship, romantic love, self-denial and self-sacrifice, trust, hope and forgiveness. The book engages in detail with Works of Love, related Kierkegaard texts and important recent studies, and also addresses a wealth of wider literature in ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of religion. john lippit t is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire. His publications include Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (2000) and The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (2003, second edition forthcoming). He is editor of Nietzsche’s Futures (1999), and co-editor of Nietzsche and the Divine (with Jim Urpeth, 2000) and The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (with George Pattison, 2013).

K ierkeg a a r d a n d t he pro b le m o f sel f - l ov e J o h n L ippi t t

CAMBRI D G E UNI VERS IT Y P RE SS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge C B 2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107035614 © John Lippitt 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Lippitt, John. Kierkegaard and the problem of self-love / by John Lippitt. pages  cm Includes bibliographical references and index. I S BN 978-1-107-03561-4 1.  Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855.  2.  Self-acceptance.  3.  Love.  4.  Self.  I. Title. B 4377.L 5155 2013 198′.9–dc23 2012044899 I S BN 978-1-107-03561-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Sylvie, min elskede, for teaching me so much about the love that hopes all things

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page viii xi

1 Introduction: how should I love myself?

1

2 Cracking the mirror: friendship and the problem of self-love

14

3 Self-love in Works of Love: explicit references

44

4 The problem of special relationships: self-love’s wider context

63

5 Another take on self-love: an excursus on Harry Frankfurt

96

6 Love’s blank cheques: on self-denial and its limitations

110

7 Towards a more positive account of self-love I: trust and hope

136

8 Towards a more positive account of self-love II: self-forgiveness and self-respect

156

9 An immodest proposal: a coda on rehabilitating pride

181

10 Summary and conclusion

190

References Index

193 203

vii

Acknowledgements

This book eventually emerged from a book I originally thought I was writing on the philosophy of friendship. Thanks largely to Kierkegaard, it gradually became clear that the real topic was not friendship but self-love. (Or perhaps this is a matter I should discuss with my therapist.) That earlier project began during a very enjoyable year’s research leave at the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota during 2004/5. A first draft of the book came nearer to completion during a summer fellowship at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, in July 2011. I am enormously grateful to both of these fine institutions for the opportunities for collegial study and discussion of Kierkegaard that they make possible. Particular thanks are due to Cynthia Lund, Gordon Marino, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Bjarne Still Laurberg, Jon Stewart and Pia Søltoft. I would also like to record my gratitude to three further institutions  – the British Academy, the Kierkegaard House Foundation and the University of Hertfordshire – for the financial support that made these visits possible. I have learned from discussions on Kierkegaard and related topics with far more people than I can possibly record here. But I would like to give special thanks to those whose help with elements of the present work has at various points been particularly valuable to me. These include Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Damian Caluori, Dan Conway, John Davenport, Steve Evans, Jamie Ferreira, Joakim Garff, Sharon Krishek, Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Jack Mulder, Sarah Nagell, George Pattison, Linda Radzik, Anthony Rudd, Vanessa Rumble and Patrick Stokes, together with various participants at conferences and seminars at (amongst other places): Baylor University; Columbia International University; Houston Baptist University; St Olaf College; Texas A&M University; Trinity University, San Antonio; the University of New England, New South Wales; and the viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Oslo and Oxford. Also to Brendan Larvor, for his good sense and collegiality  – and for first bringing the Voltaire quote in Chapter 1 to my attention. I am also very grateful for the detailed comments of two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. Their feedback was both encouraging and, where critical, extremely useful in helping to turn an earlier draft into its final form (though there are probably points on which we shall continue to disagree). My sincere thanks also to Anna Lowe and especially Hilary Gaskin at Cambridge University Press: for supporting the project and tremendous patience in waiting for its completion. Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have appeared in print before. Chapters 2 and 4 build upon respectively my ‘Cracking the Mirror: On Kierkegaard’s Concerns About Friendship’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 61 (3) (2007): 131–50; and ‘Kierkegaard and the Problem of Special Relationships: Ferreira, Krishek and the “God Filter”’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 72 (3) (2012): 177–97. The former also draws on a small amount of material from my ‘Can a Christian Be a Friend? God, Friendship and Love of Neighbor’, in Damian Caluori, ed. (2012), Thinking about Friendship: Historical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 180–98. One section of Chapter 3 draws on one part of my ‘Erich Fromm: The Integrity of the Self and the Practice of Love’, in Jon Stewart, ed. (2011), Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, London: Ashgate; while parts of Chapters 6 and 9 are developed from ‘True Self-Love and True Self-Sacrifice’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 66 (3) (2009): 125–38. Finally, part of Chapter 8 draws on one section of ‘Kierkegaard and Moral Philosophy: Some Recent Themes’, in John Lippitt and George Pattison, eds. (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press. My thanks to the editors and publishers of these volumes and journals for kind permission to build on this material in the present work (Springer Science+Business Media BV in the case of International Journal for Philosophy of Religion). I am also grateful for permission to quote from Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, © 1995 Postscript, Inc. Published by Princeton University Press, 1998 paperback edition. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Finally, my grateful thanks, as ever, to my parents, Pat and Ken, for their steadfast love. And I cannot possibly say enough in recognition of

x

Acknowledgements

the help and love I have received from Sylvie Magerstädt. The completion of this book has coincided with a particularly busy and stressful period. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sylvie for her continual support – intellectual, emotional and practical  – and for teaching me something both profound and vital about the love that hopes all things.

Abbreviations

In quoting from Kierkegaard’s works, I refer to page numbers of the following editions. In Danish: SKS

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28 and K1–28, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–.

Where necessary I have referenced: Pap.

Kierkegaard’s Papirer, ed. Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48.

The English translations I have used are from the Kierkegaard’s Writings series. Texts from which I explicitly quote, and the sigla used, are detailed below: CD CUP EO EUD FSE PC PF SUD

Christian Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1997. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols., Princeton University Press, 1992. Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols., Princeton University Press, 1987. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1990. For Self-Examination, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987. Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1991. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1985. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1980. xi

xii TDIO UDVS WA WL

List of abbreviations Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1993. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1993. Without Authority, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1997. Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1995.

For references to Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks, I have cited where possible from the following ongoing translation in eleven volumes: KJN

Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton University Press, 2007–.

References are given to the entry numbers used by Kierkegaard and adopted by both SKS and KJN, rather than to page numbers. I have also cited from the edition in seven volumes known for many years to readers of Kierkegaard in English: JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967–78.

Here I have given both volume and entry number (e.g., JP 3 2425). Unless otherwise stated, biblical translations are taken from the King James Version. The specific edition used is The King James Study Bible, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1988.

ch apter one

Introduction

How should I love myself?

Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he has had to wish that it were possible to teach them to relinquish self-love, he has also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves. (WL 23/SKS 9 30)

Do you love yourself? If that question strikes you as strange or even obnoxious, perhaps that’s because you think of the very idea of ‘self-love’ as narcissistic. On this view, love should be directed at others. Focusing it on oneself is just vain and self-absorbed. Not for you the advice of the kind of self-help guru who would have you repeat ‘I am gorgeous, sexy and vibrant and anyone who spends time with me is blessed’ in front of the mirror every day. Down that road lies the absurdity of the Dutch artist Jennifer Hoes, who married herself in a public ceremony, telling a Haarlem newspaper: ‘I want to celebrate with others how much I’m in love with myself.’1 But if the question seems innocuous, perhaps that’s because you share a commonly held view: that you have to love yourself before you can love others. Only someone sufficiently at ease with themselves is capable of loving other people. For reasons we shall investigate in due course, Harry Frankfurt claims that true self-love is ‘the deepest and most essential … achievement of a serious and successful life’.2 Or perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle: slightly nervous about the connotations of a term like ‘self-love’ but viewing it as a necessary evil. As Voltaire quipped, self-love (amour-propre) ‘resembles the instrument that perpetuates the species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden.’3 The problem of whether we should love ourselves  – and if so how – has a particular resonance within Christian thought. After all, 1 Cited in Furedi 2004: 146. 

  Frankfurt 2004: 68. 

2

1

3

  Voltaire 1972: 35.

2

Introduction

Christian love is often thought of as selfless. And yet the second love commandment in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament tells us that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves.4 So how do we love ourselves? How should we? Philosophers within this tradition – including St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Søren Kierkegaard  – have aimed to tease apart good and bad, proper and improper, forms of self-love. But less theologically minded philosophers – including Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche – have wrestled with essentially the same issue of how properly to love oneself. Further, some have argued that distinguishing such forms of self-love is also crucial for contemporary psychotherapy, as therapists and their clients wrestle with the need to avoid such extremes as narcissistic personality disorder on the one hand and chronically low self-esteem on the other. Self-love, ‘the object of a thousand passing allusions’, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, is a notorious problem in Christian thought, and the tradition is littered with prima facie incompatible claims about it.5 For instance, O’Donovan notes that in the thought of Augustine alone we find such claims as that self-love is ‘the primal destruction of man’, and yet that ‘you did not love yourself when you did not love the God who made you’.6 John Calvin describes self-love as a ‘noxious pest’, while Karl Barth wrily opines that ‘God will never think of blowing on this fire, which is bright enough already.’7 Anders Nygren famously claims that ‘Christianity does not recognise self-love as a legitimate form of love. Christian love moves in two directions, towards God and towards its neighbour; and in self-love it finds its chief adversary which must be fought and conquered.’8 Yet Bishop Joseph Butler expresses the view that men do not have enough regard to their own good, and Kierkegaard, like Augustine, insists – as our opening quote suggests – on the importance of learning to love oneself in the right way.9 In his notable survey of views of the relation between agape and self-love, Gene Outka shows something of the extraordinary range of views of self-love that have been held by Christian thinkers. Self-love has variously been regarded as: ‘wholly nefarious’; normal, reasonable and prudent (and so requiring neither praise nor blame); justified derivatively on the basis of regard for others; and a definite – not merely derivative – obligation to oneself.10 In this book, I argue that the work of Kierkegaard, especially his 4 See Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:25–37. 5 O’Donovan 2006: 2.  6  O’Donovan 2006: 1. 7 Calvin 2008: 451; Barth 1963: 388.  8  Nygren 1969: 217.  9  Butler 1983: 21. 10 Outka 1972: 55–74; for the cited phrase, see 56.

Introduction

3

monumental 1847 text Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger) is highly pertinent to this issue. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard poses a stark and troubling challenge. He argues that the relationships we typically treasure most (romantic love and friendship) are, all too often, merely disguised forms of ‘selfish’ self-love. Yet, I shall argue, Kierkegaard also gives us valuable resources for responding to this challenge of how we can love ourselves, as well as others, well. We shall see this by applying to the self key aspects of the picture of love that emerge from the second part, especially, of Works of Love. These features, I shall suggest, have tended to be largely overlooked in the secondary literature explicitly on Kierkegaard and self-love. Perhaps the central puzzle is this. We have important intuitions that lead us to value the self, such that we tend to think poorly of those who seem to lack all self-respect. (As Kant memorably remarked, ‘one who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’.11) The idea of ‘becoming a self ’ is famously central to Kierkegaard’s thought.12 And one of the pseudonyms who explores it in most detail, Johannes Climacus, is amongst the Kierkegaardian voices for whom there seems to be something fundamental about self-love: Self-love is the ground or goes to the ground in all love, which is why any religion of love [Kjærlighed] we might conceive would presuppose, just as epigrammatically as truly, one condition only and assume it as given: to love oneself in order to command loving the neighbour as oneself. (PF 39/SKS 4 244)

Yet we also have intuitions, equally as important, that lead us to see great value in various kinds of self-giving, self-sacrifice and self-emptying, even on occasion to the point of death. Can we hold these intuitions together? If so, how? The central text for our exploration will be Works of Love. The vital importance of this text for Kierkegaard’s ethics is now widely agreed upon amongst Kierkegaard scholars. For instance, in her excellent commentary on the text, M. Jamie Ferreira claims: Although in the pseudonymous writings one may discern important anticipations of the ethic found in Works of Love, I suggest that they can only be appreciated properly when seen in relation to this work. Without 11 Kant 1996c: 559 (6: 437). In quoting from Kant, I provide the page number of the edition cited, followed by the Akademie pagination. 12 This central theme dominates such major texts as Either/Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness Unto Death.

4

Introduction moving forward to Works of Love, scholarship can only unfairly evaluate Kierkegaard’s various contributions to ethics; yet some of the most popular accounts of Kierkegaard’s place in the history of ethics have been done solely from the limited perspective of the pseudonymous works.13

Works of Love has been the focus of considerable interest in recent years, and the present work seeks to add to those studies that find the questions it raises to be of philosophical as well as theological interest. But before outlining my book’s line of argument, we should consider two possible objections to the procedure I shall be undertaking.

I  Two caveats: self-love, the self and its virtues The first might be described as the ‘ethical evasion’ charge. Should we be asking a question like ‘What is it to love oneself properly?’ at all? Kierkegaard expresses the following worry about ethical and religious filibustering: How many an individual has not asked, ‘What is truth?’ and at bottom hoped that it would be a long time before truth would come so close to him that in the same instant it would determine what it was his duty to do at that moment. When the Pharisee, ‘in order to justify himself ’ asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ he presumably thought that this might develop into a very protracted inquiry, so that it would perhaps take a long time and then perhaps end with the admission that it was impossible to define the concept ‘neighbor’ with absolute accuracy  – for this very reason he asked the question, to find an escape, to waste time, and to justify himself. (WL 96–7/SKS 9 101)

But I think a generalised version of this line is excessively harsh. In a discussion of the Pharisee’s question, Patrick Sheil suggests that, regardless of the motives of this particular individual, ‘there is nothing in the actual words spoken by the Pharisee that reveals his question to be a bad-faith style of question.’14 Sheil illustrates this claim by an example of a person trying to decide which of two or three neighbours he should help first: How about the neighbour that appears to be most neighbourly towards others? It seems reasonable, but wait a minute; what if the neighbour that is not so neighbourly towards others is more likely to become so if and when he 13 Ferreira 2001: 5. Ferreira notes in particular MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard in his A Short History of Ethics. A similar view on the centrality of Works of Love is expressed by Evans 2004: 44. Sharon Krishek (2009) takes a rather different view, which we shall discuss in Chapter 4. 14 Sheil 2011: 81.

Two caveats

5

or she has received our assistance?15 The first neighbour, our initial favourite, may not need the demonstration of neighbourly help as much as this other one.16

Such considerations suggest that not every reflection on what my duty implies in a particular case (or every request for more information) can be dismissed with the haste Kierkegaard sometimes betrays in the face of such questions. Moreover, there is something ironic about this haste, given the importance for Kierkegaard of the virtue of patience, which we shall discuss briefly (after all, who has the time?) in Chapter 7. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s response in such cases is hardly the most loving. The suggestion that opening up ‘an interval, a spare moment’ for such questions involves making ‘a concession … to curiosity and idleness and selfishness’ (WL 97/SKS 9 102), while it might be flagging a significant warning, seems too cynical. Patrick Stokes makes a similar observation in relation to some related ‘troubling claims’ of Kierkegaard’s: In Christian Discourses he insists that there should never be a question about what my duty is but simply about whether I have done my duty [CD 205/SKS 10 214], and that asking such questions about the content of duty is therefore simply an evasion of the demand to do my duty. In For Self-Examination we are told that it is an evasion to continue to try to understand the content of Scripture completely, rather than seeking to carry out those of its demands one has understood, however imperfectly [FSE 32/SKS 13 59–60]. Yet ‘what is my duty here?’ and ‘what precisely does Scripture require of those who believe in its moral authority?’ seem to be perfectly philosophically (and theologically and philologically) respectable questions – even ones that might be essential to practical reason. Kierkegaard seems to betray both an over-confidence in the clarity of scripture and a stunning blindness to the possibilities of genuine moral disagreement.17

The questions ‘How should I love myself?’ and ‘What does loving oneself properly involve?’ are central to this book. Kierkegaard describes Christian love as ‘sheer action’ (WL 98/SKS 9 103), but the contrasts he draws with this – resting satisfied ‘in the delusion of being finished’; dwelling ‘indulgently on itself ’; sitting ‘idle marvelling at itself ’ (WL 98–9/SKS 9 103) – would hardly be fair descriptions of the pursuit of such questions. 15 Kierkegaard’s discussion in ‘Love Builds Up’ (WL 209–24/SKS 9 212–26) – where he argues that the loving person presupposes love in the person he loves – suggests so. See the discussion of this in Chapter 7. 16 Sheil 2011: 81. 17 Stokes 2013: 378–9. See also Stokes 2010a: 117–18.

6

Introduction

My response to a Kierkegaard who suggested that they be ruled offside for the same reason as the Pharisee’s would thus be along precisely the lines Stokes urges here.18 (For this reason, we should not uncritically accept Kierkegaard’s image of love as an arrow that would fall to the ground if it wanted to ‘dwell upon itself ’ [WL 182/SKS 9 182] as meaning that we can never reflect upon our love at all.) There is, however, one respect in which I shall be heeding Kierkegaard’s advice on this point. An approach to these questions that supposed that it could not say anything about self-love until it had first worked out a watertight theory of the self, of personal identity, would, I think, indeed be prone to Kierkegaard’s charge. I shall be assuming that we do have a sense of what the self is, at least to an extent sufficient to be able to make sense of the question of how we may properly love ourselves. It may well be that some of the interesting work currently being done on Kierkegaard’s view of the self (such as the extent to which he is, or is not, an advocate of a ‘narrative’ view of selfhood) might be placed in productive dialogue with parts of the present work.19 But that dialogue itself lies beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that for Kierkegaard selfhood is first and foremost a task, and that ‘proper self-love’ must be understood against this background. It is perfectly possible to consider the normative question of how one can and should love oneself properly without feeling obliged to tackle metaphysical questions as to the exact nature of ‘the self ’. A second issue concerns a claim I shall be making, that proper self-love is a kind of self-relation that involves the cultivation of certain qualities and capacities that it makes sense to describe as virtues. I share the view, argued for by Robert C. Roberts, that Kierkegaard belongs to the mainstream tradition of ‘virtuism’ and that he aims to build up such virtues as hope, trust, the capacity for forgiveness and patience.20 But some Kierkegaard scholars have been very wary of the term ‘virtue’, given the widespread distaste for the term in some Protestant thought.21 Claudia 18 In her response to my paper at ‘Why Kierkegaard Still Matters’, the Sixth International Kierkegaard Conference at St Olaf College in July 2010, Vanessa Rumble encouraged me to tackle this charge head on. I am grateful to Vanessa for her thoughtful comments, questions and provocations on that occasion. 19 See, for instance, Davenport and Rudd 2001; Lippitt 2007; Rudd 2007; Stokes 2010b; Davenport 2012; and Rudd 2012. 20 Roberts 2003. This is not to say that Kierkegaard is committed to ‘virtue ethics’ in any sense that would oppose that approach to, say, deontological approaches to ethics. It seems clear that there are deontological, teleological and virtues-based elements at work in Kierkegaard’s thought. 21 See, for instance, Kirmmse 2001.

Chapter outlines

7

Welz offers a justification of its use that is impressively succinct.22 As Welz notes, there are several ‘arguments (or clichés)’ typically offered against such use.23 These include the worry that ‘virtue implies an element of selfishness’; that the concern with acquiring virtues amounts to a claim to meritoriousness; and that virtue acquisition implies an autonomy that contradicts the Christian claim that man is utterly dependent upon God.24 But, as she rightly adds, ‘one could imagine a theory of virtue as a theory of the constitution of the author of an action, including certain statements on its qualifiability by habit and also on self-perfection, but excluding any statements about meritorious action’.25 The key point is the last one: that one does not need to consider one’s virtues as achievements of one’s own but can rather view them as gifts, the appropriate attitude to which is gratitude. But even this might smack of complacency (‘How blessed I am to be such a loving, caring and compassionate person!’). So, if we think in this way, we must recognise them as gifts of a peculiar sort. In a recent article that argues for Kierkegaard as a kind of virtue ethicist, Mark Tietjen suggests the following definition of a virtue according to Kierkegaard: ‘dispositions to be achieved by works that one must strive to do in response to God’s grace, with the help of God’s grace’.26 I think we can, without violating the spirit of Kierkegaard’s thought, quite reasonably view virtues, understood in this way, as entities to be nurtured and developed.27 It is in this sense that I shall argue that one can view as virtues the kinds of trust, hope and capacity for forgiveness (including self-forgiveness) to be discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Let us turn, then, to the overall argument that this book seeks to make.

II  Chapter outlines In Chapter 2, we begin our enquiry by exploring friendship. I argue that while Kierkegaard is far from the unequivocal enemy of friendship he is often presented as being, he is worried about friendship as an arena in which improper self-love often rears its head. But I claim that a significant part of this concern rests upon an excessive worry that friendship depends upon likeness between the friends. To counterbalance this, I consider what 22 Welz 2007: 268–9.  23  Welz 2007: 284.  24  Ibid. 25 Welz 2007: 269. Welz argues that this position is perfectly consistent with such thinkers as Luther and Schleiermacher. 26 Tietjen 2010: 163. 27 I stop short of the claim that Kjerlighed itself is a virtue. For reasons for caution about such a claim, see Welz 2007: 270–2.

8

Introduction

Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett label the ‘drawing’ view of friendship as an important complement to the ‘mirror’ view prevalent in the literature on friendship. Some defenders of Kierkegaard seem to imply, somewhat grudgingly, that friendship is something that we should be ‘allowed’. But I argue that a more robust defence of friendship than this can be offered, emphasising in particular the ‘drawing’ view’s focus on the way in which I am distinctly responsive both to the other’s interests and world view, and to their way of seeing me. This quality makes it capable of providing an important bridge between love of the self and love of the neighbour. However, I also consider how agapic love of the neighbour might positively inform friendship. Chapter 3 offers a more thorough exegesis of Kierkegaard’s remarks on self-love in Works of Love. Although a considerable majority of these references construe it in negative terms, he certainly recognises a proper self-love as valorised in the second love commandment. I shall argue that for Kierkegaard, as for Erich Fromm a century later, there is a symbiotic relationship between neighbour-love and proper self-love. But we shall also note the emphasis Kierkegaard places upon ‘self-denial’ as ‘Christianity’s essential form’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62), and that such self-denial is a crucial part of what he takes proper self-love to be. Moreover, he tends to connect the negative varieties of self-love with ‘selfishness’, including the ‘disguised selfishness’ that he associates with erotic love and friendship when they do not have neighbour-love at their heart. This will be the basis for important aspects of our critique in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 also explores, crucially, the centrality of love of God to Kierkegaard’s conception of proper self-love. God’s role as the ‘middle term’ in love becomes vital. For Kierkegaard, one’s relation to God, others and oneself are all inextricably linked. Yet, despite first appearances, I argue that the claim is not so much that proper self-love can be reduced to love of God, but that God is the ‘filter’ through which all proper love, including proper self-love, must pass. Kierkegaard also claims that genuinely Christian love will be mistaken for self-love in the negative sense by ‘the world’. Through this discussion, several key worries emerge. Does Kierkegaard’s criticism of both erotic love and friendship overlook what they, at their best, can be? Does he sometimes stray dangerously close to treating humans as being of only instrumental value? Is there a fundamental incompatibility between neighbour-love and ‘preferential’ love that Kierkegaard fudges? Does he overdo the opposition between Christianity and ‘the world’? And how far should we follow him in his praise for ‘self-denial’ or self-sacrifice? I take up these questions in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

Chapter outlines

9

Jamie Ferreira has noted that the alleged inability of Works of Love’s ethic to deal with special relationships is one of the ‘most persistent criticisms’ that have been made of it over the years.28 In Chapter 4, I set the problem of self-love in a wider context by considering an illuminating recent dispute in the secondary literature about Kierkegaard’s view of ‘erotic’ or romantic love (Elskov). This dispute  – between Ferreira and Sharon Krishek – is also significant in so far as it is one important place in the recent secondary literature in which a disagreement as to the nature of proper self-love takes centre stage. We consider two related but distinct charges. First is the problem in its starkest form: does Kierkegaard overlook ‘special relationships’ such as romantic love, viewing all others as indistinguishable neighbours, such that the distinctiveness of any given other is ignored? Many, from Theodor Adorno onwards, have accused him of this.29 Or, if not, does he nevertheless undervalue the moral importance of distinctiveness and special relationships? I shall argue that while the former charge cannot be made to stick, the latter is a more serious problem for his account, though ultimately, I claim, not a fatal one for it. As a way of solving the problem Krishek sees with Kierkegaard’s account – of how neighbour-love and preferential loves can coincide – I argue that we should focus on the idea of God as the ‘middle term’ in love. Building on Chapter 3, we should understand this to mean, in significant part, that the idea of God acts as a kind of filter through which any kind of love – neighbourly as well as preferential – must pass before it is commended. A key advantage of this model is that we do not need to assume, pace Krishek, that the purified versions of any two manifestations of love are identical. While recognising that Krishek raises some important critical questions for Ferreira’s account, I outline a possible response, based in part on Kierkegaard’s idea that, like ‘the law’, neighbour-love is only a ‘sketch’ until brought to fruition in any given manifestation of concrete love. Ultimately, I claim, Kierkegaard’s position can be defended from Krishek’s critique. These points, as well as shedding light on our proper love for particular others, also shed light on our proper relation to ourselves  – and thus advance our understanding of self-love in ways to be developed in later chapters. What, then, of the worry that Kierkegaard treats the self as of purely instrumental value? Perhaps we need to make a more robust defence of the self, its needs and its projects than many commentators have been 28 Ferreira 2001: 89. 

  I briefly discuss such critiques in Chapter 2.

29

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Introduction

willing to do. One recent attempt to do this in the context of self-love is Harry Frankfurt’s in The Reasons of Love. Like Kierkegaard, Frankfurt aims to draw a distinction between proper and improper forms of self-love. In Chapter 5, I outline Frankfurt’s account of self-love. Though I shall highlight some significant difficulties with it, some key themes emerge from a critical discussion of Frankfurt: how love entails commitment, which in turn entails some kind of appropriate self-relation; how it turns out that self-love necessarily points outside the self; and how love (not just for the self but for others) can involve self-interest without being based upon it in a ‘merely selfish’ way. I then consider, in Chapter 6, the suggestion made by Sylvia Walsh that Kierkegaard’s account of self-love is superior to Frankfurt’s on the grounds that the latter lacks a concept of self-denial.30 I argue that the account of self-denial that Walsh attributes to Kierkegaard has very significant problems of its own. First, Walsh (like Ferreira, Krishek and others) relies too heavily on Kierkegaard’s description of improper self-love as ‘selfish’, overlooking forms of such self-love that do not involve selfishness per se. Here I introduce Robert M. Adams’s Bishop Butler-inspired distinction between selfishness and other vices of self-focus such as self-centredness. Second, and more importantly, Walsh offers on Kierkegaard’s behalf such a valorisation of self-denial (e.g., the claim that ‘every demand in the relationship [between two people should be] … placed upon oneself rather than the other’) that one cannot help raising the important question raised by Outka. Does this allow ‘any way to differentiate between attention to another’s needs and submission to his exploitation, and any warrant for resisting the latter’?31 In other words, are there no limits to self-denial and self-sacrifice: do we just write the other a ‘blank cheque’? Several feminist philosophers and theologians have argued convincingly against endorsing a self-sacrifice without limits. I investigate some of this work and argue that this Kierkegaard is one who seems open to some of the criticisms that Paul Ricoeur and others have raised against Emmanuel Levinas, as to whether the self is to remain forever hostage to the other.32 In opposition to Levinas’s insistence on self-emptying obedience in the face of the summons of the other, Ricoeur insists on the need to maintain self-love and other-love in a creative tension. We should apply, I claim, something like Ricoeur’s critique of Levinas to these elements of Kierkegaard. The tendency to concede too much to what we might call the ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard is a problem, I argue, in much 30 Walsh (2009).  31  Outka 1972: 21. 32 Levinas 1997, especially p. 112; Ricoeur 1992: 338.

Chapter outlines

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of the secondary literature, haunting to some extent some otherwise excellent work (including that of Ferreira and Krishek as well as Walsh). A key aspect of proper self-love is missing: what we might call proper self-respect. (I explore this in more detail in Chapter 8.) Let us recap the story so far. Kierkegaard’s official position in Works of Love is that there is such a thing as proper self-love. Accordingly, several commentators have attempted to disentangle a negative from a positive sense of self-love in Kierkegaard. Yet because most of his comments on self-love are about the varieties he condemns, it has proven hard for commentators to tease out in any detail what he means by proper self-love. In Chapters 7 and 8, I return to Works of Love in more positive mode. I argue that in fact there is much to be inferred about proper self-love from Works of Love that commentators have not explicitly addressed. This means that we can offer an account of proper self-love in a broadly Kierkegaardian spirit that is both less skeletal and more attractive than it may at first seem. To begin to make good on this promise, I turn my focus to several related aspects of love that Kierkegaard discusses in the second series of deliberations in Works of Love. The book’s deliberations are typically and ­understandably read with regard to how we treat others. But what ­happens if one applies to oneself aspects of Kierkegaard’s discussion of love for others? In particular, what might it mean to have trust in and hope for oneself? What might mercifulness and forgiveness mean when applied to oneself? In each case, my attempt is to draw on Kierkegaard but also to go beyond what he explicitly says to other relevant literature, in attempting to make a case for the importance within proper self-love of three key virtues: trust, hope and the capacity for forgiveness (of others and oneself ). In Chapter 7, I claim that the deliberations ‘Love Builds Up’, ‘Love Believes All Things’ and ‘Love Hopes All Things’ contribute to this task by enabling us to see the importance of making room for an appropriately grounded trust in and hope for ourselves as a vital counterbalance to the risk of falling into despair. They also bring out the pivotal role of love in enabling us to do so: it is love that trusts, love that hopes. Proper self-love, then, starts to look like the ground in which such trust in and hope for oneself can be nourished. The hope in question has both an eschatological dimension (‘eternal hope’) and a dimension that applies to the quotidian here and now (‘temporal hope’). We shall see that though Kierkegaard prioritises the former, it impacts on the latter in an important way. I suggest, following Luc Bovens, that hope is constitutive of having basic self-worth, a prerequisite for developing genuine self-respect. We already noted the importance of self-respect, and Chapter 8 fleshes

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out our picture of its role in proper self-love in the context of a discussion of self-forgiveness. In this chapter, I consider the nature of the forgiveness that serves as the model for self-forgiveness in Works of Love and the senses in which, for Kierkegaard, forgiveness does  – and does not  – ‘take away’ sin. We need, I argue, a middle ground between an excessive focus on ‘self-denial’ and a cheaply therapeutic view of forgiveness that devalues both ­forgiveness of others and oneself. In light of the important question of how self-forgiveness can do ethically significant work without sacrificing self-respect, I draw on some important recent work on forgiveness and self-respect to argue for a picture of self-forgiveness that retains a role for continuing self-reproach of a certain kind. I argue that as well as recognising the importance of self-respect as part of proper self-love, we need to ­distinguish two kinds of self-respect: recognition and evaluative self-respect. The former emphasises the importance of equal dignity, moral agency and individuality, and finds many echoes in Kierkegaard. While the latter is in prima facie tension with Kierkegaard’s Lutheran concerns about ‘meritoriousness’, I argue that there is a way of understanding this kind of self-respect in an unproblematic way. Finally, I consider the question of when a wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness is appropriate. Is it the case  – as commonly supposed  – that the victim’s forgiveness of the offender is a necessary prerequisite to self-forgiveness? Here I argue that a Kierkegaardian faith in the Christian God diminishes the power of the ‘victim’s prerogative’. From a Kierkegaardian point of view, the ultimate point would be that if God forgives me, the refusal of my victims to do so – while it should certainly be taken seriously and may continue to occasion profound and genuine sorrow and regret on my part  – should not ipso facto prevent me from accepting divine forgiveness and extending to myself the self-forgiveness that this acceptance makes possible. Finally, in the brief Chapter 9, I build upon Chapter 8’s observations about evaluative self-respect to argue for the value of a much maligned concept in the Christian tradition: pride. I argue that it is consistent with the argument so far that pride, understood in a certain way, can be a kind of virtue. Thus, I shall argue, proper self-love requires both a certain kind of humility (‘humble self-respect’) and a certain kind of pride. Overall, then, the book aims to draw upon Kierkegaard’s work, especially Works of Love, to map out some important features of proper self-love. Though I have found Kierkegaard a rich resource in thinking through this topic, there are places where I shall argue that his position has significant flaws, be it through elements he overemphasises (such as

Chapter outlines

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self-denial) or under-emphasises (such as self-respect). I owe much to Kierkegaard, but I shall not hesitate to pay him the respect of finding his position worth arguing with. Thus, while I hope that this book makes a contribution to the secondary literature on Kierkegaard, its primary purpose is to utilise Kierkegaardian resources in order to think about proper self-love. The position I sketch is certainly inspired by Kierkegaard, but I do not claim that it is Kierkegaard’s own.

ch apter t wo

Cracking the mirror

Friendship and the problem of self-love

We can best approach the problem of self-love in Kierkegaard by first considering how it emerges in his critique of erotic love (Elskov) and friendship (Venskab). In this chapter, I shall focus predominantly upon friendship. A number of recent books on Kierkegaard have focused on erotic or romantic love, yet I shall suggest that it is just as revealing to consider the pros and cons of his account of friendship, which is comparatively under-examined in the secondary literature.1 This will set the scene for the more detailed exegesis in Chapter 3 of Kierkegaard’s remarks on self-love in Works of Love, before we turn to Elskov in more detail in Chapter 4.

I  Kierkegaard on friendship Kierkegaard has often been viewed  – wrongly  – as straightforwardly an enemy of erotic love and friendship. In Works of Love, it has often been alleged, he sets up a stark contrast between these natural loves on the one hand, and love for God and neighbour on the other, ultimately arguing that the former should be replaced by the latter. (Kierkegaard considers erotic love and friendship to be ‘natural’ in the sense that human beings naturally incline towards such loves, whereas neighbour-love needs to be commanded [‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’2], and such a command ‘did not arise in any human being’s heart’ [WL 24/SKS 9 32].) Numerous critics, such as Adorno and Løgstrup, have attacked him on such grounds. Adorno claims that for Kierkegaard, ‘the differences between individual men … are, in the Christian sense, of no importance whatever’, and condemns his conception of love as ‘close … to callousness’.3   See, for instance, Hall 2000; Hall 2002; Furtak 2005; and Krishek 2009.   Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27–8. 3   Adorno 2002: 9 and 10. 1

2

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Kierkegaard on friendship

15

Løgstrup judges Works of Love to be ‘a brilliantly thought out system of safeguards against being forced into a close relationship with other people’.4 Moreover, in three far more recent books on the philosophy of friendship, Kierkegaard is still presented as being friendship’s unequivocal enemy. Lorraine Smith Pangle, for instance, informs her reader that ‘Kierkegaard, with bold intransigence, rejects friendship as unchristian’.5 Sandra Lynch repeats the charge that ‘Kierkegaard opposes friendship … to “love of neighbour”’, and claims that he ‘dismiss[es] friendship and [erotic] love altogether, as essentially forms of idolatry or self-love’.6 Mark Vernon is more polemical: he dismisses Kierkegaard’s analysis as ‘one man’s rant’, again claiming that Kierkegaard’s is ‘an outright rejection of friendship as such’.7 (He also reminds us that Kierkegaard’s name means ‘graveyard’, so that he can joke: ‘True to his name, Mr Kierkegaard does his best to bury friendship.’8) All three critics, in other words, make similar charges against Kierkegaard as did his critics of more than half a century ago, Adorno and Løgstrup. Kierkegaard is still commonly presented as holding either or both of the following views. First, since erotic love and friendship are ‘­preferential’, rather than universal, they fail the test of love of the neighbour and should therefore ultimately be dismissed. Second, since one’s beloved or closest friend is simply one neighbour amongst many, one’s love for one’s partner or friend is ultimately no different from one’s love for the stranger. In other words, he has no room for ‘preferential’ love at all. Now, Kierkegaard does indeed claim that ‘the praise of erotic love and friendship belong to paganism’ (WL 44/SKS 9 51) and that ‘Christianity has thrust erotic love and friendship from the throne’ (ibid.). Yet he also describes erotic love as ‘undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness’ and friendship as ‘the greatest temporal good’ (WL 267/SKS 9 266). So what is his position? What are Kierkegaard’s worries about friendship? To what extent are they warranted? And exactly how do they connect with self-love? In sum, these worries are twofold: friendship is by nature ‘preferential’ and is also, Kierkegaard claims, ultimately a form of self-love. But to what 4 Løgstrup 1997: 232.  5  Smith Pangle 2002: 3. 6 Lynch 2005: 35, 181.  7  Vernon 2005: 78, 77. 8 Vernon 2005: 78. All these books have much to commend them. But on Kierkegaard the latter two have in common a surprising feature: the exclusion from the bibliography of the very text on which they base their attack on Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Revealingly, what both cite is the small sub-section of Works of Love excerpted in Michael Pakaluk’s anthology (1991). This sub-section  – amounting to twelve pages in Pakaluk’s book – is just one-third of one of the fifteen deliberations that make up Works of Love (first series, II B). Or, to put it another way (using figures from the most recent Danish edition), seventeen pages of a 378-page book.

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Cracking the mirror

extent should this trouble us? And if there is merit to his concerns, what form would friendship  – and self-love  – need to take in order to avoid these worries? In what follows, I shall offer a brief account of these claims, which will involve introducing one of this book’s major concerns: the need to attempt to draw a distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ forms of self-love but to do so in more detail than hitherto.9 For reasons that will become obvious, our account of the link between friendship and self-love will highlight the need to consider what might be meant by the classical idea upon which Kierkegaard trades, that the friend is a ‘second self ’. I shall argue, as have some of his other defenders, that Kierkegaard is not just an unequivocal enemy of friendship. However, I shall also make a qualified criticism of Kierkegaard, to the effect that an important part of his worry rests on an assumption he shares with numerous other writers: that friendship depends, to a significant degree, upon likeness between the friends. I’ll go on to argue that this focus on likeness has obscured a vitally important element of friendship. This element, which, following Dean Cocking and Jeannette Kennett, I shall call the ‘drawing’ view of friendship, needs to be re-emphasised.10 Once the ‘drawing’ view is on the table, I shall argue, we can see that a significant element – though by no means all – of Kierkegaard’s worry about friendship is misplaced. But the ‘drawing’ view can also help us begin to see what a ‘Kierkegaardian’ friendship – a kind of friendship of which Kierkegaard could approve – might look like.11 More centrally to our project, this will also give us some important clues as to what form ‘proper’ self-love would need to take, which we shall build upon in subsequent chapters.

II  Friendship as preferential Ferreira notes that Kierkegaard’s is an agapic ethic, concerned with ‘commanded love rather than preferential inclination’.12 In Works of Love, he 9 I have chosen to use the term ‘proper’ (as opposed to ‘true’ or ‘legitimate’) self-love. By the choice of this term, I do not mean to deny that ‘proper’ self-love is concerned with the good as well as the right. 10 Cocking and Kennett 1998. 11 Although, as noted, Kierkegaard’s position has often been understood as being an unequivocal rejection of the value of friendship, he explicitly distances himself from this position: ‘If in order to love the neighbor you would have to begin by giving up loving those for whom you have preference, the word “neighbor” would be the greatest deception ever contrived’ (WL 61/SKS 9 68). The idea is rather that we should ‘in erotic love and friendship, preserve love for the neighbor’ (WL 62/SKS 9 69, my emphasis). We shall return to this, in order to begin to unpack what this claim amounts to, in Section V, and investigate this theme in more detail in Chapter 4. 12 Ferreira 2001: 40.

Friendship as preferential

17

repeatedly contrasts the Christian world view with that of ‘the poet’, a figure who eulogises erotic love and friendship: ‘The poet and Christianity are diametrically opposite in their explanations. The poet idolizes inclination …; Christianity … dethrones inclination and sets this shall [i.e. the commanded nature of neighbor-love] in its place’ (WL 50/SKS 9 57). Kierkegaard illuminates the second love commandment  – ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself ’ – by focusing on preference and equality. Neighbour-love is ‘the opposite of preference’: whereas the concepts of the friend and the romantic beloved, by their very nature, distinguish my friend or beloved from those who are not my friend or beloved, nobody – neither stranger nor enemy – is to be excluded from the category of the neighbour; ‘the neighbor … is all people’ (WL 52/SKS 9 58). This connects with equality as follows. When Kierkegaard says that the neighbour is one who is equal before God (WL 60/SKS 9 66), the most important contrast is not between the self and the other, since key to friendship or erotic love at their best is, at the very least, an equal concern for the friend or beloved as well as oneself. Rather, the contrast is between different ‘others’. Neighbour-love insists that I do not exclude any particular other from the scope of my love and care simply on the grounds that he or she is not (unlike my beloved and friends) one to whom I feel preferentially inclined. Thus, as Ferreira notes, ‘the most crucial distinction Kierkegaard makes is between nonpreferential love (Kjerlighed) and preferential love (Forkjerlighed) … between caring that is not restricted in focus and caring that is restricted’, and he is keen that preferential love ‘should not be the determinant of responsibility for the other’.13 So far, so good. But Kierkegaard connects this distinction between preferential and non-preferential love with a more contentious set of claims. Only the neighbour, we are told, is truly ‘what thinkers call “the other”’ (WL 21/SKS 9 29). Why not the friend or beloved? Well, the word neighbour (Næste) is ‘obviously derived from “nearest” [Nærmeste]; thus the neighbour is the person who is nearer to you than anyone else, yet not in the sense of preferential love, since to love someone who in the sense of preferential love is nearer than anyone else is self-love’ (WL 21/SKS 9 28–9, my emphasis). We shall need to look at this claim – that preferential love is a form of, perhaps disguised, self-love – in detail, since it is central both to his argument here and the wider concerns of this book.14 Ferreira glosses 13 Ferreira 2001: 43, 46. 14 Note that Kierkegaard claims it is a mistake to see Christianity as being opposed to erotic love primarily because of its sexual dimension: ‘By the sensuous, the flesh, Christianity understands

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Cracking the mirror

the basic idea as follows. We need the category of the neighbour, according to Kierkegaard, ‘to safeguard the alterity of the other, to be sure that in love we allow the other to be more than an extension of ourself.’15 The claim is that friendship (and erotic love), in so far as they are preferential, are not up to this task. Why does Kierkegaard claim this? And is he right to do so? There are two claims here which, though connected by Kierkegaard, should perhaps be kept apart. The first  – that friendship is preferential and that neighbour-love introduces an impartiality that friendship lacks – seems uncontroversial enough. (To say this, though, is not to deny the possibility that we might have particular duties to those we love in the preferential sense that we do not have to strangers.) But my focus here is on the second claim, which should be broken down into two constituent parts. First (Claim A), that preferential love  – and therefore friendship – is a form of self-love; and second (Claim B), that in friendship the other is simply an extension of oneself. In what follows, I shall argue that Kierkegaard is wrong to infer Claim B from Claim A. In other words, even if he is right that friendship is a form of self-love, this is so in an innocuous sense, such that the worry that he builds upon it – that such friendship therefore treats the other as simply an extension of oneself – does not follow. Indeed, as noted at the outset, by investigating this point, and the ‘drawing’ view of friendship, we can get closer to seeing what a form of friendship of which Kierkegaard could approve would look like. Already, then, we see starting to emerge the need to distinguish between objectionable and non-objectionable forms of self-love: ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ varieties thereof. But precisely how so?

III  Friendship as self-love We need to approach this in stages. First, we need to make our preliminary consideration of the phenomenon of self-love. Even if it were true that friendship is a form of self-love, this would only be objectionable if self-love per se were objectionable. But is it? According to Kierkegaard, the answer is ‘No’. Ferreira argues that Works of Love draws upon a distinction between ‘selfish’ and ‘proper’ forms of self-love, and what Kierkegaard is opposing is the former, not the latter.16 In line with a selfishness [det Selviske] … self-love is sensuousness. Christianity has misgivings about erotic love and friendship simply because preferential love in passion or passionate preference is actually another form of self-love’ (WL 52–3/SKS 9 59, my emphases). 15 Ferreira 2001: 43, my emphasis.  16  Ferreira 2001: 31–2.

Friendship as self-love

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long tradition of Christian thinkers, he notes that the second love commandment, with its ‘as yourself ’, itself presupposes ‘that every person loves himself ’ (WL 17/SKS 9 25). Properly understood, he insists, the commandment insists on loving oneself ‘in the right way’ (WL 22/SKS 9 30). A distinction therefore needs to be made, Ferreira argues, between ‘proper self-love’ (WL 18/SKS 9 26) – which Kierkegaard endorses, and argues that Christianity endorses  – and ‘selfish self-love’ (WL 151/SKS 9 152), and it is only the latter that should be condemned. (Indeed, he even insists that loving oneself in the right way and loving the neighbour ‘fundamentally … are one and the same thing’ [WL 22/SKS 9 30].) According to Ferreira, the essence of this distinction between selfish and proper self-love is to be found in the kind of love of self that is ‘exclusive’ and ‘at odds with the good of the other’, and that which is ‘inclusive’ and which ‘both encompasses the good of the other and is the measure of the good of the other’.17 It is the measure of the good of the other in the sense that the ‘as yourself ’ of the commandment sets up proper self-love as the model for proper love of others. This is a good start. However, as this book proceeds, it will become clearer that we need to say far more than this to grasp the distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ self-love. For instance, we shall see, the term ‘selfish’ alone will not do as a point of contrast to ‘proper’ self-love, not least because there are forms of ‘improper’ self-love that do not involve selfishness, strictly speaking. We shall return to this in Chapter 6. What Ferreira does enable us to see is this: if there is such a thing as ‘proper’ self-love then what matters is not merely whether friendship is a manifestation of self-love per se, but whether it is a manifestation of proper or improper self-love. And, as we shall see, both here and in Chapter 3, Kierkegaard is sometimes less careful than he could be about respecting this distinction. How does Kierkegaard argue for the claim that ‘passionate preferential love’ (WL 53/SKS 9 60) is a form of self-love? A key part of the argument seems to be to do with exclusivity: Just as self-love selfishly embraces this one and only self that makes it selflove, so also erotic love’s passionate preference selfishly encircles this one and only beloved, and friendship’s passionate preference encircles this one and only friend. For this reason the beloved and the friend are called, remarkably and profoundly, to be sure, the other self, the other I – since the neighbor is the other you, or quite precisely, the third party of equality. The   Ferreira 2001: 35.

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Cracking the mirror other self, the other I. But where does self-love reside? It resides in the I, in the self. Would not self-love then also start loving the other I, the other self? One really does not need to be any great judge of human nature in order with the help of this clue to make discoveries about erotic love and friendship that are alarming to others and humiliating to oneself. The fire that is in self-love is spontaneous combustion; the I ignites itself by itself. But in erotic love and friendship, in the poetic sense, there is also spontaneous combustion. (WL 53–4/SKS 9 60)

The central claim, then, seem to be something like this. Love of my beloved and my friend, like love of myself, tends towards excluding love for all those others who are not my beloved or friend. This is a trap into which love of the neighbour does not fall  – since everyone is my neighbour. Moreover, the beloved and friend are called (‘profoundly’, and therefore, presumably, truthfully) the ‘other self ’. The idea here, in regard to friendship, seems to be that I see in my friend some reflection of myself, such that love for my friend is a kind of disguised love for myself. Furthermore, the reference to the neighbour as the ‘first you’ signals the need to relate to the other ‘as a genuine other’, as Ferreira puts it, not just as some sort of reflection of myself: ‘another me’.18 Only the neighbour, then, is ‘what thinkers call “the other”, that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested’ (WL 21/SKS 9 29). ‘Selfish’ – or, better, improper – self-love is where the other is seen simply as an extension of the self, in which the other’s alterity is not respected. In a nutshell, then, Kierkegaard’s real objection is to the way in which we often turn the other into ‘another me’. All this raises at least two questions. First, the basis for the exclusivity charge in the case of myself is pretty obvious. Likewise, in the case of ‘erotic love’, to anyone familiar with the myths of romantic love, according to which there is one person for each of us: our ‘soul mate’. (Versions of this myth are, of course, found in sources as diverse as Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium and excited chatter at the water cooler about how last night’s date might finally be ‘the one’.) But we might well wonder why Kierkegaard lumps erotic love and friendship together here, since this idea of exclusivity seems to jar with our ordinary understanding of friendship. Certainly, not everyone could be my friend, but I can surely have more than one of them. We need to clarify, therefore, why the claim of exclusivity is made in the case of friendship (‘this one and only friend’).   Ferreira 2001: 52, 8.

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21

Second, exactly what is meant by the idea that the friend is the ‘other self ’? We shall need to investigate the origin and possible meanings of this phrase, which will enable us to consider whether the apparent meaning Kierkegaard attributes to it – which is what enables him to make the ‘selfishness’ charge – is warranted. Let us address each of these points in turn. First, why talk of friendship in terms of exclusivity? III.1  Friendship and exclusivity Kierkegaard’s reasons for doing so become less surprising the more we examine the philosophical literature on friendship. Quite prevalent in that literature is what Sandra Lynch describes as a ‘highly idealised’ view of what friendship involves.19 Lynch notes that some of the most influential views in the philosophy of friendship, which tend to focus on relationships between virtuous men, view friendship at its best as being characterised by ‘complete union of feeling on all subjects’.20 For Cicero, for example, man ‘is ever on the search for that companion, whose heart’s blood he may so mingle with his own that they become virtually one person instead of two’.21 He defines friendship as ‘complete sympathy in all matters of importance, plus goodwill and affection’.22 Clearly, the number of people with whom this is possible is likely to be small. The apotheosis of this view, however, comes in Montaigne, in his eulogy for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie. In such a friendship – which, Montaigne claims, was ‘so entire and so perfect that … it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries’ – the two friends share a perfect harmony in world view: ‘our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.’23 Of de la Boétie’s death, he writes: ‘I was already so formed and accustomed to being a second self everywhere that only half of me seems alive now.’24 Against such a background, it becomes easier to see why Kierkegaard conjoins the friend with the lover: for instance, why he talks about ‘when the lover or friend is able to love only this one single person in the whole world’ (WL 55/SKS 9 62, 19 Lynch 2005: x. 20 Lynch 2005: x, 35. On the tendency for women to receive rather short shrift in classical accounts of friendship, and the centrality of traditionally ‘male’ qualities such as autonomy, self-mastery and self-reliance therein, see, for instance, White 2001: 15–16. On the point that this is not just a problem for the classical tradition, see Lynch 2005: 75–6. 21 Cicero 1991: 108 (xxi.81).  22  Cicero 1991: 87 (vi.20). 23   Montaigne 1991: 188, 192.  24  Montaigne 1991: 197.

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my emphasis). Passages such as these from Montaigne also make it easier to see why Kierkegaard would make the following charge: erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself off from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I. (WL 56/SKS 9 62–3)25

Similarly, in his discussion of friendship in The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis claims that ‘every real friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion.’26 How so? The shared enthusiasm Lewis sees as central to friendship easily degenerates into a coterie or ‘mutual admiration society’, such that misguided, uncharitable or downright perverse enthusiasms are protected against criticism from those outside the group.27 It is not deafness to outside opinions itself that matters, for Lewis: why should those who share an enthusiasm for, say, Wordsworth’s poetry trouble themselves greatly about the views of those who find it of no interest? But what does worry him is when this ‘partial indifference or deafness to outside opinion’ leads to ‘wholesale indifference or deafness’ and thus ‘corporate pride’.28 The ‘pride’ of friendship can be manifested in highbrow or vulgar ways, but in one way or another, it is about exclusion: ‘Everyone who is not in the circle must be shown that he is not in it.’29 The overall point is this. The ‘pride of friendship’ is ‘almost inseparable from Friendly love’.30 Both Kierkegaard and Lewis see that friendship must exclude, in so far as it is preferential. Yet what Lewis shows, perhaps more clearly than does Kierkegaard, is the way in which the slope is slippery: ‘From the innocent and necessary act of excluding to the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness.’31 At the bottom of this slope, ‘[t]he common vision which first brought us together may fade quite away. We shall be a coterie that exists for the sake of being a coterie; a little self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy, basking in the moonshine of our collective self-approval.’32 (Compare William Hazlitt’s description of friendship as ‘a flattering mirror’ in which we see ‘our virtues magnified and our errors softened’.33) And when friendship takes this form, a close relation of the 25 We shall return to the idea of ‘self-esteem’ in Chapter 3. 26 Lewis 1960: 80.  27  Lewis 1960: 78–80.  28  Lewis 1960: 81, 83. 29 Lewis 1960: 85.  30  Lewis 1960: 86.  31  Ibid. 32 Ibid. For more on the seductive attraction of cliques, see Lewis 1965. 33 Hazlitt 2004: 236.

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kind of mutual intoxication we saw Kierkegaard describe above, the threat to non-preferential love of the neighbour is obvious. We might well object, though, that friendship does not have to fall into the trap of mutual intoxication more commonly associated with a certain kind of romantic love. And nor is romantic love necessarily so doomed. We shall briefly return to this in Section V.3. But there is surely a legitimate concern at the heart of Kierkegaard’s and Lewis’s comments, so we shall return to this again in Chapter 4, where we shall discuss in more detail what we should and should not take from Kierkegaard’s position. III.2  The friend as ‘second self ’ Let us turn to the second issue, the idea of the friend as a ‘second’ or ‘other’ self. Kierkegaard anticipates the objection that since for ‘the poet’ erotic love and friendship inhere in (selfless?) devotion to the beloved or true friend, the charge of self-love must be misplaced. ‘But how can devotion and unlimited giving of oneself be self-love?’ he asks on the poet’s behalf. His answer: ‘when it is devotion to the other I, the other self’ (WL 54/SKS 9 61). As noted, then, his view seems to be that erotic love and friendship are forms of self-love in so far as the friend is an extension of the self.34 But in what sense? Several philosophers  – most famously Aristotle, but also Cicero, St Thomas Aquinas and Montaigne, amongst others – describe the friend as a second or other self. (Indeed, though Aristotle is typically credited as the original source of this phrase, it has been suggested that it may go back as far as a saying of Pythagoras.35) But there is little doubt that the most famous description of the friend as a ‘second self ’ is that in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is important to note that Aristotle’s discussion is closely linked to his treatment of friendship as being rooted in likeness or similarity. In this context, I shall consider the charge (made recently by Lynch) that many philosophical accounts of friendship (including 34 Kierkegaard’s concern that friendship often manifests disguised (selfish) self-love echoes some of St Augustine’s remarks in the Confessions. Augustine, reflecting back on his misery at the death of a friend in his youth, claims to have come to realise that, contrary to what he thought at the time, the creature he had loved most was in fact not the lost friend, but himself: ‘my own wretched life was dearer to me than the friend I had lost’ (1961a: Book iv, ss. 6, 77). As Peter Brown puts it, the young Augustine ‘was an imperialist in his friendships. To be a friend of Augustine’s, meant only too often becoming a part of Augustine himself ’ (2000: 52). For more on the connections between Augustine, Kierkegaard and other Christian writers on this topic, see Lippitt 2012. 35 See White 1992: 19.

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Aristotle’s) place an excessive focus on similarities rather than differences between friends. Not enough has been said about what a focus on differences would add. We can begin to fill this lacuna by arguing for the importance of supplementing the so-called ‘mirror’ view of friendship derived from Aristotle with the ‘drawing’ view argued for by Cocking and Kennett. Although near the start of his discussion Aristotle mentions the idea of opposites attracting, shortly afterwards he asserts that ‘every friendship … is in accordance with some likeness’ and later repeats that ‘like is friend to like’.36 Perfect or complete friendship  – as opposed to his two lower varieties of friendship, those of pleasure and utility  – occurs between ‘good people alike in virtue’.37 Moreover, Aristotle claims that in relationships between lovers, it is likeness in character that is most likely to sustain a relationship once ‘youth fades’.38 He does recognise the possibility of friendships between unequals but overall concludes that ‘equality – and likeness – is friendship, and especially the likeness of those alike in virtue.’39 Friendship between men with contrary needs, such as the rich and poor, is treated as mere utility friendship.40 In discussing friendships between unequals and those that are not alike, Aristotle’s predominant focus is on problems that are likely to arise from these dissimilarities. And of people unalike in virtue, he asks: How could they be friends if they neither approved of the same things nor enjoyed and disliked the same things? For not even with regard to each other will these pertain, but without this … they cannot be friends, since they are incapable of sharing in a way of life.41

Ceteris paribus, the picture seems to be that the more alike two people are, the better are their chances of a lasting friendship. Cicero expresses similar ideas. He talks of sharing ‘the one element indispensable to friendship, a complete agreement in aims, ambitions and attitudes’, claims that ‘the man who keeps his eye on a true friend, keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself’ and adds that ‘there is nothing that so attracts and draws anything to itself as likeness of character does friendship.’42 36 Aristotle 1998: 1156b, 1165b.  37  Aristotle 1998: 1156b. 38 Aristotle 1998: 1157a.  39  Aristotle 1998: 1159b. 40 Aristotle 1998: 1159b. In such a case, if I am richer than you, but you are especially witty and good fun to be with, you may find my friendship useful (in so far as I bestow some of my wealth on you), but I gain too, in so far as I gain pleasure from your amusing company. See Aristotle 1998: 1158a–b. 41 Aristotle 1998: 1165b. 42 Cicero 1991: 85 (iv.15), 88 (vii.23), 98 (xiv.50), my emphases.

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Kierkegaard seems to buy into this general idea. He claims that: In erotic love and friendship, the two love each other by virtue of the dissimilarity or by virtue of the similarity that is based on dissimilarity (as when two friends love each other by virtue of similar customs, characters, occupations, education, etc., that is, on the basis of the similarity by which they are different from other people, or in which they are like each other as different from other people). Therefore the two can become one self in a selfish sense. (WL 56/SKS 9 63)

But is this always true? Noting the prevalence in the philosophy of friendship to emphasise ‘shared concerns, shared character traits, even complete fusion on all matters’, Lynch argues that such conceptions of friendship fail precisely to take sufficient account of the alterity of the friend. She claims that ‘the friend in traditional concepts of friendship becomes an impossible idea – a reflection of oneself and perhaps even of one’s own narcissism – but never a challenge or threat; that is, never a genuine other.’43 Aristotle’s focus on similarity makes it natural for him to introduce his much-celebrated metaphor of the friend as a mirror of the self. Perhaps the clearest expression of this is in the Magna moralia, where we are told: we are not able to see what we are from ourselves … as then when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is, as we assert, a second self. If, then, it is pleasant to know oneself, and it is not possible to know this without having some one else for a friend, the self-sufficing man will require friendship in order to know himself.44

The overall idea is that I can see myself in the mirror of my friend only because my friend is in the critical respects like me. Is Aristotle guilty of Lynch’s charge of placing an excessive focus on similarity? Here Aristotle commentators disagree, not least because they disagree on exactly which aspect of the ambiguous phrase ‘another self ’ should be emphasised. Smith Pangle puts the issue thus: ‘As another self, is the friend loved mainly as a reflection or extension of oneself, or as a separate being with different qualities? Again, as another self, is he loved as belonging to oneself, or as a true, independent end?’45 Resolving this aspect of Aristotle interpretation is beyond the scope of this book. But to 43 Lynch 2005: 82. 44 Aristotle 1984: 1213a. Some Aristotle scholars claim that this text is probably not genuinely by Aristotle. But in so far as, in the present respect, the text encapsulates an idea to be found in texts of less dubious authenticity, it seems reasonable to utilise it here. 45 Smith Pangle 2002: 152.

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see more clearly the problem at issue here for our purposes, consider an important section of Works of Love, the deliberation ‘Our Duty to Love the People We See.’ There, Kierkegaard insists on the duty to love people ‘as they are’ (WL 166/SKS 9 167), ‘to love precisely the person one sees’ (WL 173/SKS 9 173). What is at stake here is as follows: in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar. (WL 164/SKS 9 164, emphasis in original)

One obvious instance of this is romantic infatuation, neatly described by John Armstrong as ‘using another person as a prop in a fantasy about ourselves’.46 But there are manifestations of this in friendship too, not only when we reduce the friend to someone who is useful to us in some way but also when we see or focus on only what we have in common with the friend, those aspects of ourselves that they ‘reflect’. The mirror can be a symbol of narcissism as much as of self-revelation. In all such cases, the worry is that what we are loving is what Ferreira calls ‘the self-generated image of the other person’, which is ‘not the same as loving the actual other person at all’.47 In other words, we fail to relate to the friend as a genuine other. We overlook the idea that the other cannot legitimately be reduced to our preconceived idea of him or her.

IV  Cracking the mirror: the ‘drawing’ view of friendship To avoid this potential problem, I suggest that what Cocking and Kennett call the ‘mirror’ view of friendship derived from Aristotle needs to be complemented by what they call the ‘drawing’ view. The ‘drawing’ view, I claim, shows something about why a friendship in which there are important differences between friends can have a value that friendships of perfect unity, harmony and likeness would lack. (Mutatis mutandis, something similar applies to romantic love.) A. W. Price suggests: ‘A potential aspect of my personality may respond to an aspect of yours not by mimicking it, but by complementing it. Lives are shared through exchanging as well as embracing thoughts.’48 The ‘drawing’ view puts some useful flesh on 46 Armstrong 2002: 79. We might also recall Stendhal’s view of love as a process of ‘crystallisation’, which consists, in Troy Jollimore’s words, of ‘a projection of fantasy onto the beloved that obscures, rather than reveals, her true nature’. Stendhal 2004; Jollimore 2011: 47. 47 Ferreira 2001: 109.  48  Price 1997: 271.

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the bones of this intuition. And, as mentioned earlier, it goes some way towards dispelling Kierkegaard’s concern that friendship might involve a form of improper self-love. Cocking and Kennett criticise both the ‘mirror’ view of friendship (in which what marks companion friendship is the great extent to which we see ourselves in the friend) and what they call the ‘secrets’ view (in which companion friendship is marked by the extent to which we are prepared to disclose ourselves to our close friends). For their ‘drawing’ view, characteristic of being a close friend of another is being ‘receptive to being directed and interpreted and so in these ways drawn by the other’.49 Their claim is that people can be companion friends ‘precisely with respect to the ways in which they are dissimilar’, such as where each provides a useful corrective to the other.50 Consider the example of: two friends, one of whom is deeply cautious and the other rather reckless. These friends recognize the contrast between their characters, and this contrast plays a significant role in structuring their relationship. The cautious one knows that she could never resemble her friend in recklessness, yet she is attracted by this aspect of his character. The reckless one, while remaining quite reckless, regards with affection his friend’s caution. Far from being extrinsic to the friendship these dissimilar features are features in respect of which they are friends and which govern much of the interplay between them.51

For Cocking and Kennett, the really significant feature of companion friendship is not similarity of interests but being ‘responsive to our interests being directed by each other’.52 To illustrate what they mean by ‘responsiveness’ and ‘direction’, consider another example: my friend Iris asks me to the ballet and on account of this interest in the ballet being Iris’s interest I willingly accept this invitation. I may never have had any real interest in ballet yet I do not go begrudgingly or out of any sense of obligation. Rather I am happy to be moved directly by her interest in choosing to spend the evening this way; I am happy to attend the ballet with her when I would certainly not be interested, or in this way interested, if I was asked by someone else, say, for example, a new colleague or my elderly aunt.53

Of course, there could be other reasons to accept the invitation from someone other than a friend. As they allow, if I don’t know many people 49 Cocking and Kennett 1998: 503. 50 Cocking and Kennett 1998: 507. 51 Ibid.  52  Cocking and Kennett 1998: 508. 53 Cocking and Kennett 1998: 504.

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at work, the colleague’s offer might be tempting as a way of getting to know him better; or I may feel a sense of duty to my aunt, who loves ballet but doesn’t get out much. However, Cocking and Kennett’s point is that in these latter cases, my motivation is something other than the fact that the ballet is the other’s interest. In other words, the claim is that characteristic of close friendship is a willingness to accept such an invitation because it is the friend’s interest: ‘one can be disposed to be interested in pursuing certain activities that one otherwise would not be, simply on account of one’s friend.’54 Proponents of the ‘mirror’ or ‘similarity’ view might respond to this by pointing out that, in such a case, I might develop an interest that I never previously had: having gone along just because of Iris, I might find that I really enjoy the ballet, such that it starts to become a genuine interest of mine too. In this sense, then, I will become more like Iris: our similarity will increase. But while this is of course possible, Cocking and Kennett rightly claim that it isn’t the possibility of increased similarity that matters. It is just as likely that my latent interest in the ballet might not take off. If Iris never asks me again, I may do nothing to seek out the ballet for myself and yet have no regrets about having shared her interest for an evening or two. If this is right, then what matters is not similarity – actual or potential – but ‘the distinctive kind of responsiveness to the other’.55 A second key feature of Cocking and Kennett’s view of friendship is how we come to see ourselves through our friends’ eyes. In another of their examples, if Judy ‘teasingly points out to John how he always likes to be right’, John might come to recognise and accept this as a feature of his character: ‘seeing himself through Judy’s eyes changes his view of himself ’.56 But suppose that as well as the bare recognition of this the close friend’s interpretation of one’s traits or foibles impacts on how that trait manifests itself: Within the friendship John’s liking to be right may become a running joke which structures how the friends relate to each other. John continues to insist that he is right; however, his insistences are now for the most part treated lightheartedly and take on a self-consciously ironic tone. And John may be led by Judy’s recognition and interpretation of his foibles to more generally take himself less seriously. Thus John’s character and self-conception are also, in part, drawn, or shaped by his friend’s interpretations of him.57 54 Ibid.  55  Ibid. 56 Cocking and Kennett 1998: 505. 57 Ibid., my emphasis.

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Cocking and Kennett claim that having ‘one’s interests and attitudes directed, interpreted, and so drawn … is … both typical and distinctive of companion friendships, yet has been largely neglected in philosophical literature on the subject’.58 This addresses a key feature of friendship that the ‘secrets’ and ‘mirror’ views do not: ‘It is not that I must reveal myself to, or see myself in, the other, to any great extent, but that, in friendship, I am distinctively receptive both to the other’s interests and to their way of seeing me.’59 Noticing this has several advantages. One advantage of the ‘drawing’ view is that it places centre stage the fact that friendship is relational in a way that the ‘mirror’ view does not. Second, and relatedly, I mentioned earlier that Aristotle discusses those with contrary needs, such as a friendship between a poor man whose wit endears him to a rich man from whom he hopes to gain financially (that is, a relationship in which pleasure and utility are traded). But some relation of contrary need is present in pretty much any friendship. (Once again, a similar point applies to romantic love.) What the ‘drawing’ view underlines is that even amongst those Aristotle would class as the virtuous, people’s characters develop in part by the ways in which they are drawn to, and by, their friends. In other words, this is an entirely natural part of more than just friendships of utility or pleasure. Third, at the end of his discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the importance of mutual influence within friendship. ‘For each class of persons, whatever existing is for them – that for the sake of which they choose to live – is what they wish to engage in with their friends.’60 Each group of people spends their time on ‘whatever thing in life they are the most fond of ’.61 Thus the bad influence each other for ill and the good influence each other for good, ‘since they copy each other in what they find pleasing’.62 But only in a very minimal sense does such mutual positive influence depend upon likeness. Although two such friends must be, in some sense, ‘good’, nothing prevents their being good in radically different ways. For this reason, talk of ‘likeness’ in virtue can be misleading. Why should we place all the emphasis on the friend’s similarity? In an influential discussion of Aristotle on friendship, John Cooper reads the mirror image as follows: ‘even an intimate friend remains distinct enough to be studied objectively; yet because one intuitively knows oneself to be fundamentally the same in character as he is, one obtains through him an objective view of oneself ’.63 But why 58   Ibid.  59  Ibid. 60 Aristotle 1998: 1172a. 61 Ibid.  62  Ibid.  63  Cooper 1980: 322.

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not, following Cocking and Kennett, suggest that it is ‘at least as plausible to suppose that one might gain self-awareness from the friend’s objective presentation of dissimilarity to oneself ’?64 To use the earlier example, it is by your friend’s presentation of what it is to be cautious that you see how reckless you are. In other words, your friends may well enhance your self-awareness and self-understanding, but there is no reason to suppose they necessarily do this in virtue of their likeness to you. I am suggesting, then, that Cocking and Kennett are right that having one’s interests and attitudes ‘directed, interpreted, and so drawn’ is a feature of friendship that has been largely yet surprisingly overlooked in the bulk of the philosophical literature on that topic. So how does this address Kierkegaard’s concern? We have noted that a key part of Kierkegaard’s worry about friendship qua preferential love is that it is typically a form of improper self-love: thinking of the friend as a ‘second self ’ threatens to fail to respect the friend’s genuine alterity. This does seem to be a danger faced by the ‘mirror’ view, and any account of friendship that places the primary emphasis on the way in which my friend is ‘like me’. But Kierkegaard expresses this view of friendship in large part because of his tacit assumption that I prefer my friends in virtue of their likeness to me. Moreover, some major commentators seem to follow him in this. Thus Ferreira: ‘Preferential love in the form of erotic love and friendship involves a preference for what is like us and an aversion to what is unlike us.’65 Whereas if the ‘drawing’ view is on the mark, then this conclusion is too hasty. I have argued that the ‘mirror’ or ‘likeness’ view tells only part of the story. The ‘drawing’ view – which focuses not just on ways in which we are different from our friends, but on ways in which we are drawn to and by, and in some cases changed by, the friend precisely through the ways in which we differ – does not face the danger in question.

V  Neighbour-love in friendship By way of spelling out in more detail what the ‘drawing’ view brings to the table, I want in the final main section of this chapter to do four things. First, to suggest that just as we can ‘work outwards’ from our natural love of ourselves, so we can work outwards from friendship, to love of the neighbour. This is perhaps not something Kierkegaard would deny, but neither is it something he emphasises. The second and third points are   Cocking and Kennett 1998: 512.   Ferreira 2001: 47.

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related. One of Kierkegaard’s central claims is not – pace Lynch – that preferential love needs to be eliminated, but that the selfishness in preferential love needs to be eliminated.66 Yet, as we have seen, Kierkegaard tends to paint a rather unflattering portrait of friendship when it is not permeated by neighbour-love. I will suggest – the second point – that some of the distinctions Kierkegaard draws between neighbour-love and such friendship are unfair, since the best forms of ‘pagan’ friendship are much less graspingly self-serving than Kierkegaard’s picture implies. And yet – the third point – since I do recognise the vital importance of neighbour-love, I shall close by considering some important features that friendship would need to avoid in order to be the kind of friendship of which Kierkegaard could approve. We shall see that these are features that the ‘drawing’ view also encourages us to avoid. This also enables us, fourthly, to see something of how agapic neighbour-love can positively inform friendship. V.1  From friendship to neighbour-love? One important implication of our discussion so far is that all genuine love should be love of a distinct individual.67 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the neighbour as the ‘first you’, a ‘genuine other’, nicely brings out the important difference between loving someone as a particular individual and loving someone as an instantiation of some property. This is important because our talk of love of the neighbour all too easily fails to respect this division: ‘the neighbour’, far from being this particular person here, very easily becomes an instantiation of the general category ‘neighbour’. There is a crucial difference between seeing the neighbour as this specific flesh-and-blood individual and seeing them as an instance of the category ‘he or she who must be helped’. But to love at all, Kierkegaard effectively points out, involves seeing the person who is the object of one’s love as an irreplaceable individual, and this is just as true when that person is one’s neighbour as when he or she is one’s romantic beloved or friend.68 However, here is where friendship qua preferential love has an important role: not just as something that is allowed but as something that may well form an important bridge between love of self and love of neighbour. In 66 Ferreira (2001: 46) and Evans (2004: 208) both make this point. Lynch claims that Kierkegaard’s view is that ‘Since friendship is preferential, it is by definition selfish’ (2005: 35). 67 Rick Furtak points out that this is Kierkegaard’s major criticism of Plato’s idea of love. See Furtak 2005: 103. 68 This irreplaceability is perhaps most obvious of all in the case of love of oneself: a factor that plays a significant role in Harry Frankfurt’s account of self-love, as we shall see in Chapter 5.

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apparent contrast to Kierkegaard’s approach, St Augustine seems to use the term friendship (amicitia) to describe unrestricted love of neighbour: Friendship must not be restricted within narrow limits. It should embrace all people to whom love and affection are owed, although it will be stronger towards some, less so to others and it should extend as far as our enemies for whom we are commanded to pray. And so there is no one to whom we do not owe affection on account of the fellowship of our shared nature, even if our love is not mutual. But it is right that we should particularly love those who love us in return with a holy and chaste love.69

As well as recognising the importance of a love of particular others, this seems to suggest that friendship is also in a sense the inspiration for love of neighbour. The model seems to be that one aims to extend friendship as far as one’s finite, sinful and thus imperfect nature allows. Moreover, the second sentence in particular hints at the idea later developed by John Henry Newman: that the particular love of friendship has the potential to act as a bridge towards love of neighbour. Newman implies that it is in the arena of such ‘preferential’ loves that the virtues needed for charitable love of neighbour, such as patience and hope, are forged: by trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness with kindness, by dwelling on their excellences and trying to copy them, thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity which, though, small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even over-shadow the earth.70

Part of the idea here seems to be that it is easier, more ‘natural’, to see the friend as an individual than it is the neighbour, perhaps given the potential of the latter all too easily to become a more abstract category. And on the ‘drawing’ view, the reason this is so is because of those aspects which she distinctly, and perhaps uniquely, draws out of us.71 But just as we can work outwards from our natural love of ourselves to love of others – the ‘as yourself ’ of the second love commandment – so, as Augustine and Newman suggest, we can work outwards from our natural love of our 69 Augustine, Epistle 130.13, cited in White 1992: 203–4. 70 Newman 1868: 55. For a similar account, see Vacek 1994: 327–8. 71 Thus C. S. Lewis: ‘In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets’ (Lewis 1960: 61). But what is true of a given friend is surely also true of myself: it may take Susie, specifically, to bring out aspects of myself that Karen cannot (while Karen brings out aspects that Susie cannot). It is for this reason that Lewis suggests that ‘true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to be a real friend’ (Lewis 1960: 61).

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friend to love of the neighbour.72 Compare here Lewis too, who claims that friendship is not ‘a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out’ but rather ‘the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them.’73 V.2  Friendship and the ‘virtues of the pagans’ Relatedly, we should now consider that the nobler varieties of friendship, even if not permeated by Christian neighbour-love, can still reach greater heights than Kierkegaard tends to allow. I shall aim to support this claim by briefly considering two important claims Kierkegaard makes about the necessity of neighbour-love: that friendship (qua preferential love) ‘contains no moral task’ and that friendship is a form of being for oneself, which excludes self-denial. At its best, I argue, ‘pagan’ friendship can easily avoid these charges. V.2.1  Friendship as a ‘moral task’ One of the ways in which Kierkegaard distinguishes Christianity’s view of love from that of ‘the poet’ is as follows: erotic love and friendship, as the poet understands them, contain no moral task. Erotic love and friendship are good fortune … It is a stroke of good fortune … to find this one and only friend. At most then, the task is to be properly grateful for one’s good fortune. But the task can never be to be obliged to find the beloved or to find this friend. (WL 50–1/SKS 9 57, emphasis in original)

This is related to the later claim that ‘love is qualified as a matter of conscience only when either God or the neighbour is the middle term, that is, not in erotic love and friendship as such’ (WL 142/SKS 9 144, my emphases). Now, the main point of the deliberation from which this second quote comes (‘Love Is a Matter of Conscience’) is to emphasise 72 This touches upon a deep theological point which can hardly be settled here, namely whether we consider what is ‘natural’ to be thoroughly corrupted through sin, or whether, in a more Catholic mode, we consider grace to perfect nature. For an interesting account of the conversation possible between Kierkegaard and Catholicism on this and related topics, see Mulder 2010. It is worth noting that Newman’s point is supported by some recent empirical evidence to the effect that it is through their friendships that small children first become genuinely concerned about the ‘otherness’ of another person. See Layard and Dunn 2006: 36 and Dunn 2004. 73 Lewis 1960: 89–90. This might in turn remind us of George Bernard Shaw’s quip that (romantic) love is ‘a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else’ (cited in Jollimore 2011: 48).

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that Christianity makes every human relationship a matter of conscience: it emphasises the obligation to love all, not just those to whom we feel a preferential inclination. Yet Kierkegaard claims that: Christianity has not changed anything in what people have previously learned about loving the beloved, the friend, etc., has not added a little or subtracted something, but it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole … This it has done by making all love a matter of conscience, which in relation to erotic love and friendship etc. can signify the cooling of passions just as much as it signifies the inwardness of the eternal life. (WL 147/SKS 9 148–9)

The final point here seems to address the concern that, for ‘the poet’, talking of preferential love in terms of conscience is likely to seem like a ‘watering down’ of the passion that inspires him. But isn’t Kierkegaard setting up a false dilemma by presenting an either/or between his imagined poet and Christianity? Why not remember a third contributor to our discussion: the pagan thinker? What of his view of friendship? After all, ‘what people have previously learned’ about friendship has come very largely from that source.74 If we do so, I shall argue, we can see that even if ‘the poet’ views friendship as containing ‘no moral task’ and is suspicious of thinking of friendship in terms of conscience, the same is certainly not true of such thinkers. The danger of thinking of friendship in terms of inclination is that one can very easily give the impression (as Kierkegaard sometimes does) that friendship on its own is fickle and can be rescued from such fickleness only by a good healthy dose of neighbour-love. But it does not follow from the fact that my relationship with a particular friend is one of preferential inclination that sustaining this relationship contains ‘no moral task’. And even if paganism has ‘no intimation’ of neighbour-love (WL 44/SKS 9 52), many a ‘pagan’ thinker seems to have recognised this ‘moral task’. 74 Although there are significant differences between ‘pagan’ and early Christian views of friendship (see for instance Konstan 1997: Chapter 5, especially p. 165), there is no doubt about the enormous impact of the former on the views of Christian writers in the early centuries of the Church. Augustine is a particularly interesting example. Scholars typically note the use by early Christian writers on friendship of the phrase ‘second self ’: White, for instance, claims that this is as ‘common in Augustine’s writings as it is in Cicero’s’ (1992: 194). She also notes Augustine’s ‘continued attachment [after his conversion] to such ideas as unity and shared interests’ (White 1992: 189) in his writings on friendship; the fact that – like several others – he continues to use the term amicitia as well as caritas (1992: 190); and that he ‘continued to refer with approval to Cicero’s definition of friendship as “agreement about matters human and divine together with benevolence and affection”’ (Ibid.). Another significant fourth-century Christian, Gregory of Nazianzus (discussed in detail in White 1992: Chapter 4), ‘does not hesitate to express himself in language that echoes the pagan tradition’ (Konstan 1997: 165).

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Carolinne White points out that a key feature of Pythagoras’ influential view of friendship, for instance, was ‘loyalty in all circumstances’.75 This is nicely illustrated by the following anecdote: Lysis and Euryphamos were two Pythagorean friends who happened to meet when Euryphamos came to worship at the temple of Juno and Lysis was just coming out of the temple; Lysis promised to wait outside until his friend had also worshipped the goddess. But when Euryphamos had finished in the temple he was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he forgot that Lysis was waiting for him and he left the temple by a different gate. Lysis, however, a paragon of fidelity, remained waiting for his friend for the rest of the day, that night and most of the following day until Euryphamos was reminded of Lysis and his promise and went back to the temple to release him.76

Whatever one makes of this – and it is far from clear that the Lysis of this anecdote would win first prize in a practical wisdom contest – it seems that one charge that could not be levelled against him is fickleness. The message is clear: friendship demands loyalty. Similarly, the alleged fickleness of inclination also contrasts with Euripides’ idea that ‘one of the most important criteria of true friendship is that it perseveres in adversity’:77 sometimes, according to other stories of the time, even up to the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s friend. Consider, for instance, another story of Pythagorean friends, Damon and Phintias, referred to by Cicero, Plutarch, Ambrose and Jerome, amongst others.78 The gist of this story is that Phintias, wrongly accused of plotting against the tyrant Dionysius, is sentenced to death. Accepting the charge despite his innocence, he asks only for the rest of the day to arrange his and his friend Damon’s affairs (as friends, they held their property in common). Dionysius agrees on condition that Phintias finds someone to stand as surety for his death, and the latter offers Damon, who agrees. Yet rather than abscond Phintias returns as promised. So impressed is Dionysius by the friends’ mutual loyalty that he releases them both. (He asks that he too might become their friend, but they refuse.) Furthermore, the important moral dimension to pagan friendship also comes out in a point discussed by Cicero and Plutarch, amongst others: the problem of how to distinguish a flatterer from a true friend, and the related ideas, taken up by later Christian writers such as St Basil the Great and St Jerome, that flattery destroys friendship and that true friendship 75 White 1992: 18. 76 Ibid.  77  White 1992: 20. 78 See White 1992: 18–19; Konstan 1997: 114–15.

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thus demands a degree of frankness.79 In Chapter 4, we shall see that Kierkegaard offers a similar idea in his suggestion of how love can be challenging. All this shows that even if Christian neighbour-love does introduce as a new idea that we have a duty to love everyone, the idea that outside Christianity friendship contained ‘no moral task’, and was not a matter of conscience, is certainly false. In other words, even if Kierkegaard’s poet ‘belongs to paganism’ (WL 44/SKS 9 51), there is far more to pagan friendship than dreamed of by this poet. We can agree with Ferreira’s interpretation that insisting that we should love the beloved or friend qua neighbour is ‘Kierkegaard’s way of reminding us that a man can no more take advantage of his wife [or friend], because she is his wife [or friend], than of another neighbor’.80 Just as we ‘cannot make a sex object out of our wife or husband’, so we cannot take advantage of our friend’s goodwill or generosity, since ‘each remains a neighbor, an equal before God’.81 However, we can agree without endorsing the idea that this latter is the only good reason one could have for not taking advantage of a friend. What the category of neighbour ‘makes new’ is the extension of the duty to love to everyone, but it certainly does not follow from this that neighbour-love is necessary to make friendship a matter of conscience, or something with a ‘moral task’. If Ferreira is right, therefore, that Kierkegaard’s real objection is to ‘the relationship that does not have conscience at its heart’, then that does not in and of itself rule out the best pagan friendships.82 V.2.2  Friendship as ‘being for oneself ’ Consider, though, the second charge. Ferreira summarises it as follows: Having a friend (or lover) is a proper love of self; loving the friend (or lover) as ‘another self ’ is legitimate, an appropriate way of being for oneself; but although it is proper and good, it is still a way of being for oneself and is to be distinguished from neighbor love, which is a way of being for another.83 79 Plutarch’s treatise is entitled ‘How to Discriminate a Flatterer from a Friend’. On Plutarch, see Konstan 1997: 98–105; on Plutarch, Basil and Jerome, see White 1992: 39, 74, 81 and 140. Cicero argues that ‘flattery is far sorrier [than frankness], for by failing to call wrongdoing to account, it lets a friend fall to his ruin … It is an essential part of true friendship … to offer and receive admonition; but it must be offered courteously, not peremptorily, and received with forbearance, not with resentment. By the same sign, we must maintain that there is no danger more deadly to friendship than servility, sycophancy, flattery’ (Cicero 1991: 111–12 [xxiv.89–xxv.91]). For a discussion of the pedagogical relevance of this point, see Larvor, Lippitt and Weston 2011. 80 Ferreira 2001: 91, my additions in parentheses. 81 Ferreira 2001: 92.  82  Ferreira 2001: 93.  83  Ferreira 2001: 62.

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It is this ‘being for oneself ’ element, presumably, that leads Kierkegaard to suggest that jealousy is present in friendship (as well as erotic love): ‘place as a middle term between two friends the neighbor, whom one shall love, and you will immediately see jealousy’ (WL 54/SKS 9 60–1). Kierkegaard’s suggestion that jealousy might always be present in friendship (and erotic love), even when it doesn’t ‘show’ itself (ibid.) comes uncomfortably close to arguing, as C. S. Lewis teasingly puts it (in another context), that ‘the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden’.84 And it is worth contrasting this claim of Kierkegaard’s with Lewis’s very different view of friendship as ‘the least jealous of loves’.85 However, in light of the ‘drawing’ view, Ferreira’s gloss on what Kierkegaard is saying might prompt the following worry. Even on the ‘drawing’ view, which recognises the friend as a genuine other and appreciates how she helps me ‘grow’, the focus is still on how she helps me grow. In other words, the focus is still on the self: my character, virtues, etc. This may be proper self-love, but it is still proper self-love. One can understand the temptation to claim that neighbour-love is needed as a way of being for another. But can we really draw the distinction between friendship and neighbour-love in this way? First, we should avoid the temptation to think of self-love and other-love as mutually exclusive categories, for reasons we shall discuss in later chapters. So the assumption apparently behind the above objection – that self-focus necessarily or automatically reduces the ability, energy or time available for other-focus – should be resisted. Second, if friendship is still ‘being for oneself ’, how does this explain the pagan who is prepared to die for his friend? On Kierkegaard’s picture, ‘Christianity’s essential form’ is ‘self-denial’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62), but ‘wherever the essentially Christian is absent, the intoxication of self-esteem is at its peak’ (ibid.): and  – remember  – ‘erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem’ (ibid.). How does such a picture explain the possibility of the self-sacrificing pagan friend? He has ‘no intimation’ of neighbour-love, and yet, on the above view, this is precisely what he would need in order for this action to make sense. What needs to be shown, as before, is that the self-love involved in dying for one’s friend is of the ‘selfish’ or ‘improper’ rather than the ‘proper’ variety. I find it hard to see what convincing reasons Kierkegaard could give to demonstrate this. (As we shall see in Chapter 3, the answer he offers – in terms of self-wilfulness – is less than convincing.) Ferreira’s earlier definition of   Lewis 1960: 60.   Lewis 1960: 61; see note 71 above.

84

85

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this distinction  – according to which, in ‘selfish’ self-love, the friend is seen as simply an extension of the self, and in which his alterity is not respected  – hardly seems adequately to describe the person who is prepared to die for his friend. In short, it seems we can say, at the very least, that neighbour-love is not absolutely necessary for ‘being for another’. The noblest kind of pagan friendship surely does include ‘being for another’ – perhaps out of gratitude and appreciation for what one’s friend has done for you or ‘drawn’ out of you. It is far from obvious that this kind of self-love is either selfish or in any other way ‘improper’. V.3  A friendship based on neighbour-love? What, though, would a friendship which had neighbour-love at its heart look like? First and foremost, for Kierkegaard, such a friendship would need to have God as ‘the middle term’. Whereas ‘worldly wisdom’ holds love to be a relation between persons, ‘Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person  – God  – a person, that is, that God is the middle term’ (WL 107/SKS 9 111). This view has its precedents in early Christian views of friendship. For instance, Paulinus of Nola insists that in a Christian friendship it is imperative that Christ is honoured above all else, since ‘a friendship not built on Christ is not founded on a rock.’86 Similarly, Augustine insists, ‘no friends are true friends unless you, my God, bind them fast to one another through that love which is sown in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.’87 Ronald Green and Theresa Ellis note that a key aspect of God being the ‘middle term’ in a love relationship is that it prevents ‘worshipful idolatry of the beloved’.88 The equivalent to be avoided in friendship, perhaps, would be the kind of mutual intoxication between friends to which Montaigne – a precursor of Kierkegaard’s ‘poet’? – seems to have fallen prey. But there are other ways in which such a friendship needs to avoid being a manifestation of improper self-love. To illustrate in more detail what this might mean, we can draw on remarks Kierkegaard makes in 86 From a letter of Paulinus, cited in White 1992: 153. 87 Augustine 1961a: Book iv, ss. 4, 75. One potentially fascinating theme from his Christian predecessors that Kierkegaard does not take up in any detail, however, is the possibility of a ‘friendship with God’. On this idea in the early Christians, see Konstan 1997: 167–70; on the idea in St Thomas Aquinas, see Waddell 2002. For a useful general discussion of this, expanding on a theme which he finds in Anders Nygren as well as in Aquinas, see Vacek 1994: Chapter 9. Vacek claims that friendship with God is ‘what grace primarily brings about’ (1994: 321), and that salvation ‘is the gift of and growth in a philia relationship with God’ (1994: 324). 88 Green and Ellis 1999: 362.

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one of the most powerful deliberations in Works of Love. Once again, we shall see, the ‘drawing’ view is helpful. In ‘Love Does Not Seek Its Own’, Kierkegaard describes two characters who he labels ‘the rigid, the domineering person’ (WL 270–1/SKS 9 269) and ‘small-mindedness’ (WL 271–3/SKS 9 269–70). These illustrate recognisable human tendencies that, if thought of in relation to friendship, show the dangers of failing to attend to those elements of genuine openness to the friend as ‘other’ that the drawing view emphasises. Consider each in turn: The rigid, the domineering person lacks flexibility, lacks the pliability to comprehend others; he demands his own from everyone, wants everyone to be transformed into his image, to be trimmed according to his pattern for human beings. Or he does what he regards as a rare degree of love, on a rare occasion he makes an exception. He seeks, so he says, to comprehend a particular human being, that is, in an altogether definite, specific – and arbitrary – way he thinks of something definite about this person and then insists that the other shall fulfil this idea. Whether this is exactly the other person’s distinctiveness or not makes no difference, because this is what the domineering person has supposed about him. If the rigid and domineering person cannot ever create, he wants at least to transform – that is, he seeks his own so that wherever he points he can say: See, it is my image, it is my idea, it is my will. (WL 270/SKS 9 269)

Fairly obviously, such a ‘domineering’ nature manifests a form of improper self-love. In whatever sphere such a person operates, Kierkegaard continues, his nature is ‘domineeringly refusing to go out of oneself, domineeringly wanting to crush the other person’s distinctiveness or torment it to death’ (WL 270–1/SKS 9 269). Here, then, painted in primary colours, is a picture of what friendship can decay into if it does not contain a genuine openness to the friend’s alterity. Similarly ‘small-mindedness’: The small-minded person has clung to a very specific shape and form that he calls his own; he seeks only that, can love only that. If the small-minded person finds this, then he loves … This small-minded alliance is then praised as the highest love, as true friendship, as true, loyal, honest harmony. One refuses to understand that the more they hold together in this way, the further they distance themselves from true love … small-mindedness itself actually imagines that its miserable invention is the truth, so that it is even honest friendship and genuine sympathy to want to muddle and mess everyone into a likeness to oneself. (WL 272–3/SKS 9 270–1)

In short, both these passages powerfully illustrate not only the dangers inherent of thinking of friendship only in terms of ‘likeness’ but also,

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indirectly, the value of a conception of friendship characterised by a genuine openness to having one’s interests and attitudes ‘directed, interpreted, and so drawn’ by the friend. More centrally for our overall concerns, these passages also illustrate improper forms of self-love that any manifestation of proper self-love would need to avoid. There is one final set of questions we should briefly explore in this section. Think back to our earlier discussion of the drawing view of friendship. A question that might be raised about this is as follows. Is the way in which we are drawn to the friend’s differences a kind of magnetic attraction, or does it involve a more active volitional projection?89 The worry about the former option is that if that were all that were going on, being ‘drawn’ to the friend would seem troublingly passive. While not wishing to deny that we are sometimes ‘drawn’ to our friends in this way, the second option is more what I was aiming above to draw on Cocking and Kennett to suggest. Construed a certain way, their example of accepting Iris’s invitation to the ballet illustrates how I may be drawn to an experience not because I feel some desire for it or recognise in it some lack in myself. (These feelings may be present, but not necessarily.) An alternative is what John Davenport has called ‘projective motivation’, which in this case means that my will can formulate a goal that is not based on an already existing motivational state.90 This offers an additional dimension to how the alterity of the other can play a deeper role in friendship. This focus on the friend’s alterity is a key element of Richard White’s account of friendship. For White, friendship includes, in dialectical tension, ‘solidarity’ and alterity. By the former term, he means something akin to the likenesses discussed earlier, ‘a basic sharing of values and perspectives and a similar sense of what is important and what is worth doing’.91 But the alterity of the friend is also essential to friendship, contrary to the remarks from Kierkegaard discussed earlier. In friendship, ‘the specific difference of the other person’s individual history and thinking about the world remains absolutely important.’92 If there is anything in Kierkegaard’s suggestion that the category of the neighbour is best placed to draw our attention to this alterity, then such a focus enables us to see another dimension of how agapic love of neighbour might positively inform friendship.93 We can link the drawing view 89 I am grateful to John Davenport both for raising this question and for some suggestions that have influenced this section. 90 See Davenport 2007. 91 White 2001: 27.  92  White 2001: 28. 93 For a fuller account of this, see Lippitt 2012.

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of friendship to a Christian view of love in that the latter offers a version of the former’s insight on a perhaps deeper level. The Christian realises his vulnerability and dependence. And yet, Christianity teaches, he is loved. In sheer gratitude for this, he loves others, following the command to love his neighbours as himself. This recognition challenges the classical view of friendship in so far as it ditches what White calls ‘the underlying ideals of self-sufficiency and sovereign self-containment’ predominant in such a view.94 For both Aristotle and Cicero, flourishing requires self-sufficiency and so there is a serious question as to whether the flourishing person needs friends.95 An even stronger insistence on self-sufficiency is found in Seneca. In response to Aristotle and Cicero’s question, Seneca insists that the wise man can do without friends, since the ‘Supreme Good calls for no practical aids from outside; it is developed at home, and arises entirely within itself.’96 Just as if he lose a hand or eye ‘he will be satisfied with what is left’, so he ‘endures the loss of a friend with equanimity’,97 and like the sculptor who can replace one lost statue with another, so a lost friend is similarly replaceable.98 Friendship is desirable but not necessary. The wise man desires friends ‘if only for the purpose of practicing friendship, in order that his noble qualities may not lie dormant’.99 Our attachment to friends is based not on need but on excess: I make friends in order ‘to have someone for whom I may die, whom I may follow into exile, against whose death I may stake my own life’.100 So both Kierkegaard and Seneca are troubled by ‘selfish need’ in friendship.101 But aren’t there genuine needs that can’t be dismissed merely as ‘selfish’, and don’t we underplay these at our peril?102 The Christian tradition in general has shown a far greater willingness than this to admit our mutual vulnerability and interdependence. In this sense, I suggest that it fits better with a contemporary view of friendship 94 White 2001: 32. 95 Aristotle 1998: ix.9. On Cicero 1991, compare viii.30 with xiv.51, where he somewhat grudgingly acknowledges that it ‘may not be quite right for friends never to have any needs at all’ (such as for advice or help from each other). 96 Seneca 1991a: 122. 97 Compare also the epistle ‘On Grief for Lost Friends’, which Seneca opens thus: ‘I am grieved to hear that your friend Flaccus is dead, but I would not have you sorrow more than is fitting. That you should not mourn at all I shall hardly dare to insist; and yet I know that it is the better way’ (1991b: 125). Towards the end of this epistle, Seneca compares the loss of a friend with the loss of a tunic. A contemporary Seneca’s prospects for a job at a university counselling service would seem limited. 98 Seneca 1991a: 120.  99  Ibid. 100 Seneca 1991a: 121.  101  Seneca 1991a: 123. 102 I shall return to these and related questions in Chapters 4 to 6.

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such as White’s than it does with the above elements of the classical view. White draws on feminist writers such as Marilyn Friedman to suggest that friendship, in so far as it concerns a deep involvement with another person, ‘is only possible through the intimacy and emotional disclosure to the other that expresses a giving of oneself ’.103 This ‘deep involvement’ is behind White’s suggestion that being friends with someone in the best sense ‘involves a level of profound trust that allows me to reveal some of the deepest and possibly most troubling aspects of myself, while requiring me to put aside at least some of my own personal beliefs and priorities’.104 He thus notes that the commitment to another person signified by friendship involves ‘adopting a more tentative relationship to one’s own ideas and commitments’ than is emphasised in the classical tradition.105 Friends typically help us to clarify or deepen our ideas and thoughts but will also typically ‘force us to rethink some things that we may have taken for granted’.106 Again, this is perhaps not an aspect of friendship Kierkegaard would deny, but neither is it something that he emphasises. Moreover, if, as White suggests, friendship is about mutual recognition, one’s self ‘is not developed in isolation but in our ongoing relationships with other people, especially with our friends who know us best. Thus the duties of friendship, such as availability, caring, and nurturing, are duties that we owe to someone else insofar as we are committed to that person.’107 The contrast with the likes of Seneca could hardly be starker. So, although alterity has tended to be downplayed in the classical, and classical-inspired, accounts of friendship that seem most to have influenced Kierkegaard’s thinking on the topic, this is a great loss. For in the best friendships it is a deep ethical respect for the other’s alterity that is infused in and expressed by the profound trust I give to my friend and receive in turn.108 And if there is anything in Kierkegaard’s suggestion that the category of the neighbour is best placed to draw our attention to this alterity (recall his focus on the ‘first you’), then this feature of friendship is likely to be enhanced by the recognition that one’s friend is, first and foremost, one’s neighbour.109 103 White 2001: 30; cf. Friedman 1993. 104 White 2001: 36, my emphasis. 105 White 2001: 37.  106  Ibid. 107 White 2001: 40. 108 I owe this way of putting things to Davenport. 109 We shall return to and expand upon the theme of the compatibility of neighbour-love and preferential love in our discussion of Elskov in Chapter 4.

Conclusion and implications

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VI  Conclusion and implications In this chapter I have argued that while Kierkegaard is far from the unequivocal enemy of friendship he is still commonly presented as being, a significant part of his concern about friendship being a manifestation of improper self-love rests upon an excessive worry that friendship depends upon likeness between the friends. By considering the ‘drawing’ view as an important complement to the ‘mirror’ view of friendship, we enrich our understanding of friendship. In particular, the ‘drawing’ view’s focus on the way in which I am distinctly responsive both to the other’s interests and world view, and to their way of seeing me, shows friendship not just as something a Kierkegaardian should be ‘allowed’. Rather, it is capable of providing an important bridge between love of the self and love of the neighbour. Yet we have also suggested, in the section immediately above, reasons in support of what I take to be Kierkegaard’s overall view, that friendship needs to be positively informed by agapic love of neighbour. Crucially, we have also seen some important implications for self-love specifically. As we noted, Green and Ellis have suggested that one manifestation of improper erotic love involves ‘worshipful idolatry of the beloved’. And, earlier on, in discussing Montaigne, I pointed out the dangers of a similar mutual intoxication in friendship. It is in part because there is a potentially narcissistic equivalent in self-love – a kind of self-intoxication – that we need to distinguish between proper and improper forms of self-love. We have noted the need to build upon yet go beyond Ferreira’s distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘selfish’ self-love, and we shall continue this task in Chapters 4 and 5. But before getting there – and in part to show further the need for such a discussion – we turn in the next chapter to a more thorough exegesis of Kierkegaard’s remarks on self-love in Works of Love.

ch apter th ree

Self-love in Works of Love Explicit references

How is the term ‘self-love’ explicitly used in Works of Love? We shall shortly see that, used in an unqualified sense, it certainly appears to be a negative term for Kierkegaard. Yet, as we noted in Chapter 2, he is also quite adamant that the second love commandment presupposes that we love ourselves and that, properly understood, this is how things should be. The key task then becomes to try to work out in more detail what this ‘proper’ self-love looks like and how we are to distinguish it from the default, negative meaning of the term. By addressing the key references to self-love in the text, this chapter will build upon the provisional answer sketched to these questions during Chapter 2 to argue that despite first appearances, self-love is not an exclusively negative term for Kierkegaard. And, in order to understand what proper self-love is for Kierkegaard, we shall need to ask what the role of God is within it. The chapter will sketch a provisional answer to the latter question. However, a more complete answer to the question of what proper self-love is will require us to look beyond the explicit references to self-love in the text to the task of applying to the self that picture of love that Kierkegaard develops throughout the work, paying particular attention to some key deliberations of the second series.1 Throughout this chapter, we shall see emerging several themes that will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. On occasion, Kierkegaard seems quite explicit about what constitutes proper self-love. For instance, in ‘Love Is the Fulfilling of the Law’, he asserts that: ‘To love God is true self-love’ (WL 107/SKS 9 111). This falls broadly within the Augustinian tradition of thought on Christian love, according to which proper self-love and love of God must coincide. For Augustine, created beings, necessarily incomplete owing to the Fall, desire 1 Works of Love is divided into two ‘series’, of five and ten deliberations respectively (plus a preface, a prayer and a conclusion).

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their own completeness. Proper self-love seeks the good of the self, but that good can only be found in God. As Augustine puts it in On the Trinity, The man who knows how to love himself, loves God; while the man who does not love God, though he retains the love of self which belongs to his nature, may yet properly be said to hate himself, when he does what is contrary to his own good … It is therefore a fearful delusion, by which, though all men desire their own advantage, so many do what only works their ruin.2

Oliver O’Donovan has shown just how complex is Augustine’s picture of self-love. Nevertheless, the central claim is very clear: ‘Perfect self-love is achieved only when God is loved to the fullest extent.’3 Kierkegaard claims both that to love oneself is to love God, and that to be loved is to be helped to love God (WL 107/SKS 9 111). On this view, then, presumably proper self-love is both to love God and to help oneself to (continue to) love God. But will this do? Is loving oneself properly simply to be equated with loving God? Or can we say more about proper self-love than this? For starters, how are we to unpack these rather gnomic remarks? Let us back up a little and look in more detail.

I  Wresting open the lock of self-love One can find plenty of prima facie evidence for the idea that self-love is a wholly negative term in Works of Love. In deliberation II A (‘You Shall Love’) Kierkegaard claims that ‘it is Christianity’s intention to wrest self-love away from us human beings’ (WL 17/SKS 9 25), and the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself ‘as with a pick, wrenches [vriste] open the lock of self-love and wrests [fravriste] it away from a person’ (WL 17/SKS 9 25). Self-love is portrayed as wrestling with the commandment as Jacob wrestled with God.4 The commandment ‘penetrates into the innermost hiding place where a person loves himself; it does not leave self-love the slightest little excuse, the least little way of escape’ (WL 18/SKS 9 26). As a result of this struggle, we are told, self-love will recognise it is weaker than the commandment. 2 Augustine 1948. Carter Lindberg notes that the view of Bernard of Clairvaux several centuries later is in many respects similar. In his sermons on the Song of Songs and On Loving God, Bernard offers a Christian version of the Platonic ‘ascent of love’ according to which ‘the return to God occurred in stages that rose from self-love to spiritual love of God initiated by “the carnal love” of Christ, i.e., the Incarnation. Self-love is seen here as natural to creation, but this eros can be satisfied only in God’ (Lindberg 2008: 81). 3 O’Donovan 2006: 92.  4  Genesis 32:24–32.

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What breaks self-love, ‘opens the lock’, is having struggled with ‘this phrase that does not want to teach a person that he is not to love himself but rather wants to teach him proper self-love’ (WL 18/SKS 9 26).5 So again, what is this ‘proper self-love’? It must be radically different from the wholly negative way that Kierkegaard has used the term in the text thus far. At this point we get no more than a hint: ‘Christianity presupposes that a person loves himself and then adds to this only the phrase about the neighbour as yourself. And yet there is the change of eternity between the former and the latter’ (WL 18/SKS 9 26).6 Kierkegaard then moves on to considering why I can’t love a person more than myself. The result of this shift is a discussion of preferential love (erotic love and friendship) as ‘secretly self-love’ (WL 19/SKS 9 27) – again, clearly in the original, negative sense – and thus no substitute for commanded love of neighbour. (This discussion is open to the qualified objections raised in Chapter 2.) Through the use of a similar phrase to the ‘change of eternity’, Kierkegaard next hints that this proper self-love is related to love of God: ‘There is only one whom a person can with the truth of eternity love more than himself  – that is God’ (WL 19/SKS 9 27). He notes that we are not told to love God as we love ourselves, but with all of our heart, soul and mind; we must love God ‘unconditionally in obedience and love him in adoration’ (WL 19/SKS 9 27). Proper self-love is explained in terms of both love of neighbour and love of God. In the former case, we are told that a proper understanding of the second love commandment says: ‘You shall love yourself in the right way’, and in the absence of such proper self-loving, one cannot love the neighbour either (WL 22/SKS 9 30). Again, we might ask, what is this ‘right way’? At this point in the text, the answer is confusing: ‘To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbour correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing’ (WL 22/SKS 9 30). But how is that? ‘When the Law’s as yourself has wrested from you the self-love that Christianity sadly enough must presuppose to be in every human being, then you have actually learned to love yourself ’ (WL 22–3/SKS 9 30). This sounds as if the very act of ridding oneself of self-love in the negative sense (which, as we shall see, Kierkegaard standardly associates with ‘selfishness’) leaves, as a remainder, proper self-love! And that claim, without further qualification, 5 The phrase to which Kierkegaard refers here is the ‘as yourself ’ of the commandment. 6 On this presupposition of Christianity’s, see the 1839 journal entry (WL 396/KJN 2/SKS 18 EE: 98) and the note from the draft of the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843 (WL 399–400/Pap. IV B 148), including the specific reference to Augustine.

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sounds rather dubious. As we shall see later in Chapter 6, there are vices of self-focus other than selfishness, and, as numerous feminist theologians have argued, there are also deeply problematic forms of self-sacrifice. Next, in an initially baffling inference, Kierkegaard follows the previous quote with the following: ‘The Law is therefore: You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbour when you love him as yourself ’ (WL 23/SKS 9 30). What does this mean? Is a symbiotic relationship between neighbour-love and proper self-love being suggested? In a comment on this passage, Ferreira cites a 1948 review by one David Roberts, who claims that ‘Kierkegaard was exactly a century ahead of Fromm in insisting that love for mankind (the neighbor) is conjunctive with self-love, which is the opposite of selfishness.’7 How then might Erich Fromm’s discussions of love shed light on this passage? I.1  Kierkegaard and Fromm First, note that Fromm denies that love is something ‘caused’ by an object. Rather, it is ‘a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain “object”.’8 (That is, the object of love actualises in the one who loves what is already there in potentiality rather than being its efficient cause.) Love is a ‘passionate affirmation’ of such an object: ‘an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object’.9 Interestingly, Fromm is suspicious of the Kierkegaardian idea that erotic love and friendship are ‘natural’ (rooted in ‘drives and inclination’ [WL 44/SKS 9 51]) whereas universal love (or ‘brotherly’ love as Fromm tends to call neighbour-love) is beyond what is merely natural. Fromm further glosses this ‘lingering quality’ as ‘a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves’: indeed, he claims that ‘exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.’10 The romantic myth of only one other we can love encourages a kind of love which is ‘not love but a sado-masochistic attachment’.11 Fromm asserts: Love for one person implies love for man as such. Love for man as such is not … an abstraction coming ‘after’ the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific ‘object’; it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.12 7 Ferreira 2001: 269 n13. 8 Fromm 2001: 98.  9  Fromm 2001: 99. 10 Ibid.  11  Ibid.  12  Ibid.

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In other words, Fromm claims that brotherly love is the ‘most fundamental’ type of love. On one level, this echoes Kierkegaard’s idea that many varieties of love can be traced to a common point of origin: Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has ever seen, so also does a person’s love originate more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. (WL 9–10/SKS 9 18)

However, on another level – the crucial matter of God being the ultimate source of this love – the two thinkers are in profound disagreement. But what of self-love specifically? We noted that for Kierkegaard, as for much of the Christian tradition, the idea of loving oneself properly is implicit in the second love commandment. For Fromm too, the self is as much a proper object of love as any other.13 This has implications, he claims, for ‘the affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom.’14 If one possesses the ‘readiness’ to love of which Fromm speaks, one possesses it in relation to oneself: ‘if he can only “love” others, he cannot love at all.’15 It is on this basis that Fromm argues that self-love is something quite distinct from selfishness: indeed, he claims (as Roberts noted), selfishness is the very opposite of proper self-love. For Fromm, selfishness is a kind of greediness, and greed is a ‘bottomless pit’ that can never be filled.16 The selfish person is consumed with a restless, never satisfied anxiety ultimately resulting from dissatisfaction with himself. Ditto the narcissist: according to Fromm, narcissism too is ‘an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love’.17 Thus Freud was wrong to claim that the narcissist has withdrawn love from others and directed it onto himself: according to Fromm, he loves neither others nor himself.18 It is for this reason that Fromm claims that ‘Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites.’19 Fromm argues that psychological observation simply does not support the thesis that love for oneself and love for others stand in contradiction to each other.20 We shall investigate this important thought in a 13 There is a further question here as to whether I can have such an apparently generic relation to myself. On this question Kierkegaard, in such works as The Sickness Unto Death, is arguably more probing than Fromm. Compare too our reference to self-love as a unique instance of the ‘problem of special relationships’ later in this chapter and in Chapter 4. 14 Fromm 2001: 99.  15  Fromm 2001: 100. 16 Ibid.  17  Ibid.  18  Ibid. 19 Fromm 1995: 47, emphasis in original. 20 Fromm 1995: 46.

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different context in Chapter 6. But Fromm also has a more basic logical point, which parallels Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the ‘as yourself ’ of the second love commandment. Fromm rejects Paul Tillich’s suggestion that the term ‘self-love’ would be better replaced by a phrase such as ‘natural self-affirmation’ or ‘paradoxical self-acceptance’ on two grounds. First, the term ‘self-love’, understood as a virtue rather than a vice, very clearly expresses the idea that ‘love is an attitude which is the same toward all objects, including myself ’; ‘I am a human being too.’21 Second, Fromm acknowledges that the term has a history rooted precisely in the second biblical love commandment and the subsequent tradition.22 He understands the commandment to imply that ‘respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other being.’23 Ultimately, ‘an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.’24 Notwithstanding the differences between Kierkegaard and Fromm, it seems from the quote in the previous section that inspired this excursus on Fromm that this inseparability of proper self-love and neighbour-love is a key part of Kierkegaard’s point too. The issue is related to a question that Ferreira raises as pivotal to Works of Love. Does concern for others come ‘only after or independently of the self ’s project of gaining subjectivity (or being in the right relation to God)’ or is it ‘a necessary and constitutive part of the self ’s project of becoming a self (before God)’?25 In other words, does ‘becoming a self ’ merely allow or actively require concern for others? The answer, Ferreira argues, is the latter. But, as Fromm has suggested, this works in both directions. If loving my neighbour as myself involves – amongst other things – taking seriously his interests and not putting my own above his simply on the grounds that they are mine, then loving myself properly means recognising that I too am a neighbour. Without such a realisation, I might make of myself a mere ‘doormat’. The key is to recognise this without allowing this recognition to tip over into inappropriate self-assertion or self-aggrandisement. As our discussion proceeds, it will be important to keep the ‘doormat danger’ in mind, as we encounter a tendency to overplay the ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard, in which the self ’s assymetrical responsibility for the other potentially allows the self to be tyrannised by the other’s demands. 21 Fromm 1995: 45n, 46.  22  Fromm 1995: 46. 23   Ibid.  24  Ibid.  25  Ferreira 2001: 7.

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Some support for this interpretation is given by how Kierkegaard continues: ‘Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he has had to wish that it were possible to teach them to relinquish self-love, he has also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves’ (WL 23/SKS 9 30, my emphasis). This is an important twist, in so far as it states that proper self-love needs to be taught. This is somewhat contrary to the instinctive nature of what he seemed to claim about self-love earlier and seems to contradict the earlier apparent claim that if we strip away improper self-love we discover, underneath as it were, proper self-love.26 The examples of improper self-love with which Kierkegaard continues are instructive. We encounter ‘the bustler’ who ‘wastes his time and powers in the service of futile, inconsequential pursuits’; ‘the light-minded person’ who ‘throws himself almost like a nonentity into the folly of the moment and makes nothing of it’; ‘the depressed person’ who ‘desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself ’; the person who ‘surrenders to despair because the world or another person has faithlessly left him betrayed’; and the one who ‘self-tormentingly thinks to do God a service by torturing himself ’ (WL 23/SKS 9 31). So, wasting one’s life on trivialities, depression, despair and spiritual masochism are all presented as instances of the failure to love oneself properly. Moreover, helping people to avoid these problems is part of the purpose of teaching, or trying to clarify, proper self-love. Note, in passing, that none of these seems well described by the term ‘selfishness’, which has seemed to many to be the hallmark of what Kierkegaard counts as improper self-love. His reference to the above as examples of ‘selfishly not willing to love oneself in the right way’ seems unconvincing (WL 23/SKS 9 31, my emphasis). (We shall return to this in Chapter 6.) I.2  ‘Self-esteem’ These examples bring us to the topic of ‘self-esteem’ (Selvfølelse). Avoiding such attitudes as the above might typically be considered, in contemporary therapeutic parlance, to be part of healthy self-esteem. But self-esteem is another term Kierkegaard tends to use in a negative sense. In Works of Love, the key reference comes in a key discussion of the idea that self-denial is ‘Christianity’s essential form’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62). Self-denial is ‘the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62). When the ‘essentially Christian’   I am grateful to Patrick Stokes for discussion of this point.

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is not present, ‘the intoxication of self-esteem is at its peak’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62), a peak that Kierkegaard describes as ‘the admired’. He seems to have in mind the kind of mutual admiration society into which romantic love or friendship (as eulogised by Montaigne) can fall, as discussed in Chapter 2. As we noted there, erotic love and friendship are presented as the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself off from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually become one self, one I. (WL 56/SKS 9 62–3)

How can this be? Because in preferential love ‘there is a natural determinant (drive, inclination) and self-love, which selfishly can unite the two in a new selfish self. The spirit’s love, in contrast, takes away from myself all natural determinants and all self-love’ (WL 56/SKS 9 63). However, further light is shed by an additional note on self-esteem in the journals: To be married, to have children, to be a public official and have subordinates – in short, to have a lot of people sharing in one’s life and giving it point is, of course, a heightening of self-esteem. People complain about being lonesome and therefore get married etc. – but is this love; I should say it is self-love. Most of what people of this kind say about believing in God and feeling God close to them is simply illusion, an intensified self-esteem and sense of vitality that they confuse with religiousness. They believe themselves to be, as they say, the object of the fatherly care of providence. Ultimately it is nothing more nor less than a sense of coziness in life, that their lives would be missed, which in a certain sense they feel every moment of their lives. (WL 473–4/KJN 3/SKS 20 NB 2: 263, my emphasis)

So, if an individual aims to give his life meaning through others in relation to whom he stands in a superior relationship (such as head of the household or someone’s boss), this is self-love (in a negative sense) because its motive is heightening one’s own self-esteem. Given the full range of possible motives for marriage, parenthood or career, it seems overly suspicious, to say the least, to suppose these dubious motives are invariably at work.27 The judgement about what ‘people of this kind’ say about their God relationship is mere assertion. In short, Kierkegaard here seems to fly in the face of the advice he elsewhere gives about love ‘believing all 27 Mike W. Martin points out that there can be justified, as well as unjustified, self-esteem, and that the former is an aspect of self-respect (1996: 102). We shall return to the important theme of self-respect in Chapters 6 and 8.

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things’ (WL 225–45/SKS 9 227–45) in the sense of offering the most charitable interpretation available. (We shall discuss this important debate in Chapter 7.) However, there is perhaps a deeper point at the heart of this apparently hasty judgement. Kierkegaard’s comment seems to support the psychotherapist Albert Ellis’s concern that if (as Kierkegaard here assumes) self-esteem is based on achievements or ‘position’, then it involves a merely conditional self-acceptance. (I’m valuable because I am a good father, scholar or teacher; because I’m clever, kind or attractive. And so on.)28 The deeper worry, then, is the ‘naughty little bird … the restless mentality of comparison’ discussed in one of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses on the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. This bird, by encouraging a lily to compare itself with other, allegedly more beautiful lilies, leads to the lily’s uprooting (to pursue its freedom) and thus its withering and demise as a result of overlooking its nature. What we are to learn from this, Kierkegaard tells us in that discourse, is ‘to be contented with being a human being and not to be worried about diversity among human beings’ (UDVS 170/SKS 8 269–70).29 Note the similarity of Kierkegaard’s point here to Ellis’s: being contented with being a human being is to all practical purposes identical to offering oneself what Ellis calls ‘unconditional self-acceptance’.30 For Kierkegaard, my value derives from my being a creature of God rather than from my specific achievements, character or virtues. However, while we can see the value of recognising the ‘­common watermark’ (WL 89/SKS 9 94) of our humanity, as opposed to focusing on particular characteristics, roles and achievements, there is a danger of overcompensation here. Such an emphasis is in prima facie tension, at the very least, with some of Kierkegaard’s emphases on the importance of individual distinctiveness, a topic to which we shall return in Chapter 8. Let us return to the Works of Love passage on self-esteem discussed above. The context of this passage is that it glosses the following sentence: ‘Christianity has misgivings about erotic love and friendship simply because preferential love in passion or passionate preference is actually another form of self-love’ (WL 53/SKS 9 59). This in turn comes in the context of an argument that Christianity’s opposition to erotic love is 28 Ellis 2005. 29 It is also worth noting, given the contrast repeatedly drawn in Works of Love between Christianity and ‘the poet’, that the little bird is here described as ‘the poet, the seducer, or the poetic and the seductive in the human being’ (UDVS 169/SKS 8 269). 30 Ellis 2005: 19.

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not that the latter is a drive (sexual desire). In Christianity, Kierkegaard claims, ‘sensuousness’ (det Sandselige) does not mean sexual desire but selfishness (det Selviske). Contrary to how it appeared earlier (in the comparison with Fromm), Kierkegaard next seems to equate selfishness with self-love, as he immediately goes on to say, ‘Therefore, self-love is sensuousness’ (Altsaa det Selvkjerlige er det Sandselige) (WL 53/SKS 9 59). In other words, all of the following seem to be run together: self-love, sensuousness, selfishness and self-esteem. So that if passionate preferential love (erotic love and friendship) harbour disguised forms of self-love, we can also say that they harbour disguised forms of selfishness and self-esteem. Similarly, Kierkegaard goes on to use self-love as a negative term when he adds that ‘if passionate preference is essentially another form of self-love, then one sees here again the truth of the venerable fathers: “that the virtues of paganism”’, which lauds erotic love and friendship as love but has no glimmer of neighbour-love, ‘“are glittering vices”’ (WL 53/SKS 9 60). I.3 

‘Self-willfulness’

Kierkegaard seems to anticipate his reader’s likely scepticism at the conflation of self-love, selfishness and self-esteem. He says: Even if passionate preferen[tial love] had no other selfishness in it, it would still have this, that consciously or unconsciously there is self-willfulness [Selvraadighed] in it – unconsciously insofar as it is in the power of natural predispositions, consciously insofar as it utterly gives itself to this power and assents to it. However hidden, however unconscious the self-willfulness is in this passionate giving of oneself to its ‘one and only object’, the arbitrariness is still there. The one and only object was certainly not found by obedience to the royal Law ‘You shall love’, but by choosing, yes, by unconditionally selecting one single individual. (WL 55/SKS 9 61–2)

The claim continues: When the lover or friend is able to love only this one single person in the whole world (which is a delight to the poet’s ears), there is an enormous self-willfulness in this enormous devotion, and in his impetuous, unlimited devotion the lover is actually relating himself to himself in self-love. (WL 55/SKS 9 62, my emphasis)

Here we might recall the objections we raised to this line of reasoning in our discussion of friendship in Chapter 2. But, in addition, note that the only reason we have been given to support Kierkegaard’s claim here is that the person concerned chose the lover or friend. (By this reasoning,

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perhaps arranged marriages are fine?) But how accurate is this? How much choice is really involved in falling in love or beginning a friendship? Isn’t it more a dialectic of choice and compulsion rather than just the former (or the latter)?31 Not for the first time, it appears that Kierkegaard is using the term ‘self-love’ as a kind of shorthand for ‘self-love in the negative sense’.32 For consider the italicised phrase above. Since in The Sickness Unto Death relating itself to itself is what a self is in the business of doing, the only reason we are given for finding this objectionable is the very term ‘self-love’. In other words, we have no grounds to object to what the lover does unless we have grounds to object either to self-love per se (which can’t be right given the possibility of proper self-love) or to the particular kind of it that he manifests. Ferreira similarly notes that there are places where Kierkegaard seems to disparage all self-love but suggests that ‘given the affirmation of “proper self-love,” and the unfortunate prevalence of the “selfishness in self-love” … there may often be an implicit “selfish” modifying Kierkegaard’s comments about it’.33 But here we encounter a bit of a complication, as Kierkegaard introduces two further kinds of self-love: ‘unfaithful’ (troløse) and ‘devoted’ (hengivne) (WL 55/SKS 9 62). The task of self-denial  – a central concept in this deliberation (first series, II B)  – is twofold. For unfaithful self-love, ‘that wants to shirk, the task is: devote [hengive] yourself ’; for devoted self-love, ‘the task [Opgave] is: give up [opgive] this devotion [Hengivenhed]’ (WL 55/SKS 9 62). Presumably this means something like the following. Unfaithful self-love is that in which love for the other is fairly obviously selfish, simply a superficial cover for self-love (in the negative sense), perhaps such as in the case of an Aristotelian utility-friendship. In this case, the problem is that the devotion is insufficient. Devoted self-love provides a more complex case. This is an ostensibly deeper kind of love, akin to the kind of sentiment that ‘pleases the poet indescribably’: the lover who says ‘I cannot love anyone else, I cannot stop loving, I cannot give up this love, it would be the death of me, I am dying of love’ (WL 55/SKS 9 62). Why dismiss this? Here Kierkegaard’s argument seems to depend upon the assertion that there is an ‘enormous self-willfulness’ in devotion (WL 55/SKS 9 62). Without the ‘essentially Christian’ (that is, self-denial), the ‘intoxication of self-esteem is at its peak’, a condition 31 Again I am grateful to Patrick Stokes for discussion, and for this way of putting the point. 32 Similarly with the claim that follows: ‘Self-denial wants to root out this self-love, this self-willfulness, by means of eternity’s you shall’ (WL 55/SKS 9 62). 33 Ferreira 2013: 338.

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that, as noted above, he associates with erotic love and friendship. Again there is more assertion than argument here. As we noted in Chapter 2, it does capture some dangers inherent in erotic love and friendship. But, as we also noted there, hardly these at their best. Whatever the quality of his reasons, we can conclude that Kierkegaard’s view of such devotion is that, though it may well be deeper than ‘unfaithful’ self-love, it still fails to please ‘self-denial’, precisely owing to the – perhaps hidden – presence of self-willfulness within it. Self-denial, then, is emerging as an increasingly central theme, a contrast being set up between the alleged selfishness of erotic love and friendship as disguised self-love (on the one hand) and Christianity as ‘self-denial’s love’ (on the other). We shall thus need to investigate the concept of self-denial in more detail, a task we shall undertake in Chapter 6. The onslaught continues. The ‘selfish self ’ arising from erotic love and friendship even at their most apparently devoted fails a crucial test: ‘As yet neither one is the spirit’s definition of self’ (WL 56/SKS 9 63). Which is what? We only get a clue. Unlike erotic love and friendship, ‘It is only in love for the neighbour that the self, who loves, is defined as spirit purely spiritually and the neighbour is a purely spiritual specification’ (WL 56–7/SKS 9 63). Kierkegaard repeats the assertion that what one loves in the beloved and the friend is not the neighbour, but ‘the other I, or the first I once again, but more intensely’ (WL 57/SKS 9 63). Further, he adds that self-love ‘is reprehensible’ (WL 57/SKS 9 63) – so much so that strength in numbers is required. That is, if we pretend to be loving each other when we are in fact loving ourselves, a Faustian pact can be struck with each other, such that ‘in this alliance [we] find the strength for the self-esteem of self-love’ (WL 57/SKS 9 63). (Presumably, his claim would be that this normally takes place on an unconscious, self-deceived level.) Strict self-love is self-deification; erotic love and friendship (‘as the poet understands it’ [WL 57/SKS 9 63]) are ‘idol-worship’ (WL 57/SKS 9 64). But now comes an important move. As we noted at the outset, a key part of the answer to what Kierkegaard means by proper self-love is given by the crucial introduction of God: the Christian love commandment commands loving God above all else, and then loving the neighbor … in love for the neighbor, God is the middle term. Love God above all else; then you also love the neighbor and in the neighbor every human being. Only by loving God above all else can one love the neighbor in the other human being. (WL 57–8/SKS 9 64)

And it is by thus loving the neighbour qua neighbour that one avoids negative self-love.

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II  The centrality of God to proper self-love It is unsurprising that for Kierkegaard the intrinsic value of love for God is paramount. However, the picture here also seems to be of love for God as a kind of filter through which the ‘selfishness’ of our loves can be strained and ‘purified’. Loving God ‘above all else’ somehow guarantees that the sediment of selfishness (and related problems) found in our erotic loves and friendships is left behind, so that the residue that makes it through is (relatively) pure. Some questions, then. Does this filter work for self-love too? Is Kierkegaard’s idea that if we run self-love through the filter of love for God, the residue that remains will be what constitutes proper self-love? In the deliberation ‘Love Is the Fulfilling of the Law’ (WL 90–134/SKS 9 96–136), the link between love of God and self-love is intensified to the point where it becomes prima facie an identity-relation. Kierkegaard explicitly introduces a central idea to Works of Love that the above has implicitly assumed: that God is the ‘middle term’ in love-relationships. ‘Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person – God – a person, that is, that God is the middle term’ (WL 107/SKS 9 111, emphasis in original). The impact of this on self-love is specified thus: ‘To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved’ (WL 107/SKS 9 111, emphasis in original). This indeed suggests proper self-love is now to be equated with loving God. (C. Stephen Evans and Robert C. Roberts gloss this quotation thus: ‘For Kierkegaard a relation with God is the greatest good a person can have, and thus anything that contributes to such a relation has incomparable value.’34) Hence the question which we raised earlier: Is the claim that there is nothing more to proper self-love than loving God? That the answer to the person troubled by how he ought to love himself is simply: ‘Love God! You should do this and nothing more’? I don’t think so. First, I do not think that talk of God as the ‘middle term’ commits Kierkegaard to the implausible claim that God or Christ is constantly the explicit object of the believer’s thought. In his illuminating study of interest (interesse) in Kierkegaard’s thought, Patrick Stokes has argued that Kierkegaard often uses the term in a manner reminiscent of Sartre’s ‘non-thetic consciousness’: a ‘self-awareness implicit in or attendant upon each moment of consciousness without forming part of   Evans and Roberts 2013: 221.

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its intentional, thetic content’.35 I believe that this is also the way in which God often functions as the ‘middle term’ in love-relationships, and I shall suggest in Chapter 4 that neighbour-love may play a similar role in various manifestations of preferential love.36 Certainly, variations on the theme that ‘to love God is true self-love’ (WL 107/SKS 9 111) are repeated several times on the same page.37 But the central message is a contrast between those who do and those who don’t recognise that God is the filter through which all forms of love must pass: the ‘middle term’ in all love-relationships.38 Given this emphasis, the point with regard to proper self-love seems to be not that there is nothing more to it than loving God, but that whatever other properties it needs to have, it must pass through the ‘God filter’. So the overall context of Kierkegaard’s discussion does not warrant the claim that he is arguing for a simple identity-relationship between proper self-love and love of God. Perhaps this can be clarified by relating the discussion here to Kierkegaard’s discussion of neighbour-love. How does this image of ‘God as filter’ relate to that kind of love? After all, in ‘Our Duty to Love the People We See’, Kierkegaard has discussed the idea found in 1 John, to the effect that: If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.39

Here the idea seems to be that ‘brotherly’ or neighbour-love is necessary in order properly to love God. But combined with the main idea we are discussing – that love of God is necessary properly to love oneself and others – the inescapable point seems to be that love of God, neighbour and self are all inextricably linked. It is simply not possible to offer a temporal priority between loving God and loving the neighbour: both arise holistically. An earlier reference in the same biblical text hints at this: ‘God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’40 35 Stokes 2010a: 56. 36 Indeed, if it were any other way, how could one be loving the neighbour (or oneself ) rather than using the neighbour (or oneself ) in order to love God? Again, thanks to Patrick Stokes for discussion of this point. 37 And elsewhere, see WL 109/SKS 9 113 and WL 114/SKS 9 118. 38 See, for instance, WL 112/SKS 9 116, where Kierkegaard’s point is that what I am arguing here about self-love also applies to erotic love and friendship. 39 1 John 4:20–1.  40  1 John 4:16.

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At this point, Kierkegaard claims as a corollary from his earlier discussion that genuinely Christian love will be mistaken for self-love (in the negative sense) by ‘the world’. This explicitly introduces a major theme: the contrast and potential conflict between ‘God’ and ‘the world’ on what love means. Kierkegaard presents the ‘worldly’ view as follows. It views self-love as merely ‘sagacious’ (WL 119/SKS 9 122) and what it calls love as more noble. Yet Kierkegaard claims it doesn’t really understand what love is – and consequently misunderstands self-love. The by-now-familiar charge is repeated again: ‘the world’ erroneously praises as love erotic love and friendship, which are really disguised (negative) self-love. This same point is repeated again later, when ‘someone who has fallen in love’ is unqualifiedly described as ‘a self-lover’ (WL 240/SKS 9 241).41 And, in a related 1849 journal entry, the same charge is directed at maternal love, which is ‘simply self-love raised to a higher power’: a ‘beautiful figure’, to be sure, but ultimately an instinct that we share with the animals (JP 3 2425/SKS 22 NB 12: 92). Failing to see this, while the ‘worldly’ view is critical of solo self-love, it praises as love what is really just collective self-love: an ‘alliance in self-love’ (WL 119/SKS 9 122) which does not prioritise God. It is important to note that the problem is not that such self-love is entirely selfish. On the contrary, ‘The alliance also requires sacrifice and devotion … it requires that he sacrifice a portion of his own self-love in order to hold together in the united self-love’ (WL 119/SKS 9 122–3). However, it also requires ‘that he sacrifice the God-relationship in order to hold together in a worldly way with the alliance that excludes God or at most takes him along for the sake of appearance’ (WL 119/SKS 9 123). By contrast, we are told, what God means by love is a self-sacrificing love that sacrifices everything in order to make room for God. It is ‘superficial’ to say that one will be loved provided one is loving. More likely, one will be accused of being self-loving because one ‘will not love people in the sense in which they, self-loving, love themselves’ (WL 120/SKS 9 123). Consequently, both ‘noble, self-sacrificing, magnanimous, human love’ and Christian love will meet resistance, but whereas the former will be dismissed as ‘foolishness’, the latter will be ‘hated, detested and persecuted by the world’ (WL 120/SKS 9 123). Here we see emerging another important theme – rejection by the world – also to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.   See also WL 428–9/Pap. VIII2 B 71: 6.

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The centrality of God to proper self-love

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The suspicion of (at least unqualified) erotic love and friendship is repeated in ‘Love Does Not Seek Its Own’ (WL 264–79/SKS 9 263–77), with the claim that there is ‘no mine and yours in love [Kjerlighed]’ (WL 265/SKS 9 264). While recognising that erotic love and friendship amount to a ‘revolution in self-love’ (WL 266/SKS 9 265), in which ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ are replaced with ‘ours’, Kierkegaard argues that this replacement is less radical than it first appears: ‘ours is for the community exactly the same as mine is for the solitary one’ (WL 266/SKS 9 265). So erotic love and friendship ‘as such are only enhanced and augmented self-love’, even though erotic love is ‘life’s most beautiful happiness’ and friendship ‘the greatest temporal good’ (WL 267/SKS 9 266). The ‘revolution of self-love is by no means profound enough from the ground up; therefore self-love’s original contentious distinction between mine and yours still lies dormant within us as a possibility’ (WL 267/SKS 9 266). Once again we can see the point by recalling the shared self-absorption of some romantic lovers and Lewis’s cosy little ‘coterie’ of cliquish friends discussed in Chapter 2. Though once again we also recall our worry that this judgement on unqualified erotic love and friendship may be excessively harsh. Kierkegaard goes on to say that the person in love (en Forelsket) ‘is still seeking, in a certain, most often unconscious way, his own’ (WL 268/SKS 9 267). But here the question is whether he is doing so in any way to which we should object. Again, he claims that the ‘mine’ and the ‘mine and yours’ only disappears entirely for ‘self-denying love’. But should it disappear entirely? Kierkegaard here explicitly refers to the biblical idea that the person ‘who loses his soul will gain it’ (WL 268/SKS 9 267) but insists that erotic love and friendship amount to ‘a keeping of the soul’ (WL 268/SKS 9 267). But do we really want to endorse Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘the one who truly loves knows how to do only one thing: how to be tricked, to be deceived, to give everything away without getting the least in return – see, this is what it is not to seek one’s own’ (WL 269/SKS 9 267–8)? What is emerging here is the importance of questions about the limits of self-sacrifice to be discussed in Chapters 4 to 6. Earlier, in ‘Love Is the Fulfilling of the Law’, Kierkegaard has claimed that from the Christian point of view, nothing else but this ‘love that sacrifices everything’ is true love: The God-relationship is the mark by which the love for people is recognized as genuine. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-relationship do not lead the other to God, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers’ earthly life, is still not true love.

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Self-love in Works of Love This the world can never get into its head, that God in this way not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love but really becomes the sole object of love, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God, and conversely, and so on. The merely human view of love can never go beyond mutuality: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its true object  – God. The love-relationship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love – but the love is God. Therefore, to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped. (WL 120–1/SKS 9 124)

We are getting into controversial territory here. Famously, some of what Kierkegaard says here makes it sound as if human beings are of only instrumental value. God ‘becomes the sole object of love, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God, and conversely, and so on’ (WL 121/SKS 9 124). Unlike ‘merely human’ love, which can ‘never go beyond mutuality’, Christianity teaches that the true object of love is God. So ‘to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped [to love God]’ (WL 121/SKS 9 124). Hence the charge of some commentators, such as Peter George, that Kierkegaard articulates an entirely solipsistic, inward-looking ethic that misses the point about what constitutes genuinely social human interactions.42 As we have noted, self-sacrifice emerges as a key theme in numerous deliberations. But not just any kind of self-sacrifice will do. In a passage in this deliberation, Kierkegaard discusses self-abasement, in the form of a young girl who worships her lover, ‘craving only one thing of him, that he inhumanly should demand everything of her, and in that situation highly praising his love’ (WL 125/SKS 9 128). In such ways, those who have ‘forgotten’ God debase themselves before temporal authorities. Yet Kierkegaard describes such people as ‘vain’ (WL 126/SKS 9 129). Why? Perhaps because of the ‘flattering mirrors’ of erotic love and friendship we discussed above and in the previous chapter. If the girl gets carried away by her eulogies to her lover, she might indeed even be able to convince herself that any attention from him validates her: a not uncommon subtext of circumstances in which domestic violence is taken, sometimes by both perpetrator and victim, to be a manifestation of love.43 Finally, in the last deliberation of the second series, on the work of love involved in praising love, true love is again described as ‘self-denial’s love’   See George 1998.   On this point, see also the discussion at the end of Chapter 7, Section I.

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(WL 369/SKS 9 363) and associated with love of neighbour (WL 374/SKS 9 367). But here the neighbour is ‘the ugly’ (WL 373/SKS 9 366) and is contrasted with ‘the beautiful’: the beloved and the friend (WL 373/SKS 9 366). The point here is that Kierkegaard’s praise of Christian love (of neighbour) contrasts with Socrates’ praise of the beautiful (in Plato’s Symposium): ‘the love that loves the beautiful is not the true love, which is self-denial’s love’ (WL 372/SKS 9 365). Once again, the discussion depends in significant part upon Kierkegaard’s characterisation of erotic love and friendship as discussed above. Kierkegaard is also worried about external manifestations of self-denial that are liable to be praised and esteemed. (In a supplementary journal note, he claims: ‘He who is to speak of self-denial’s love does not need to take great pains to appear to be a self-lover, because the world must regard him as a self-lover if he is the one who truly loves’ [WL 470/KJN 4/SKS 20 NB 2: 177].) This leads him to conclude that praising love requires inward self-denial as well as outward ‘self-sacrificing unselfishness’ (WL 365, 374/SKS 9 359, 367). The overall picture, then, is once again of radically different modes of valuation between God and the world such that the latter will mistake as self-love what is in fact (according to Kierkegaard) nothing of the sort.

III  Summary and recap We have seen that a majority of Kierkegaard’s references to self-love in Works of Love construe it in negative terms, but that he recognises a ‘proper’ self-love which he takes to be that valorised in the second love commandment. We suggested that for Kierkegaard, like Fromm after him, there is a symbiotic relationship between neighbour-love and proper self-love. But we also saw the emphasis Kierkegaard places upon self-denial as ‘Christianity’s essential form’ and that such self-denial is a crucial part of what he takes proper self-love to be. Moreover, he tends to connect the negative varieties of self-love with ‘selfishness’, including the ‘disguised selfishness’ that he associates with erotic love and friendship when they do not have neighbour-love at their heart. In Section II we noted the more explicit centrality of love of God to proper self-love. God’s role as the ‘middle term’ in love becomes vital. We suggested that the claim is not so much that love of God and proper self-love are identical but that the idea of God is the ‘filter’ through which all proper love, including proper self-love, must pass. (This suggests an image whereby we try to leave behind ‘selfishness’ and its cousins as a residue.) Kierkegaard also claims that genuinely Christian love will be

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mistaken for self-love in the negative sense by ‘the world’. At this point several key worries emerge. First, does Kierkegaard exaggerate his criticism of what erotic love and friendship can be? We raised one objection to his line in Chapter 2 when we noted that pagan friendship – a kind of friendship which does not have ‘neighbour-love’ at its heart – can, at its best, easily avoid two of Kierkegaard’s main criticisms. (This objection is, however, consistent with a claim I would also want to endorse  – again, recall Chapter 2 – namely that a friendship [or instance of romantic love] permeated by neighbour-love is ceteris paribus superior to a friendship [or instance of romantic love] that is not so permeated.) In Chapter 4, we shall consider another objection: that there is a fundamental incompatibility between neighbour-love and ‘preferential’ erotic love such that the model of this that Kierkegaard commends is conflicted to the point of incoherence. We shall also consider a prominent defence of Kierkegaard on this point, namely that he is not condemning erotic love and friendship, per se, but merely stressing the importance of their having neighbour-love at their heart. This objection is related to a cluster of other worries. Does Kierkegaard sometimes stray dangerously close to treating humans as being of only instrumental value? Does he overdo the opposition between Christianity and ‘the world’? And how far we should follow him in his praise for ‘self-denial’ or self-sacrifice? We shall return to these questions in subsequent chapters. But let us place them in context by turning to a more general question of which the question of self-love is one part: what we might call the problem of ‘special relationships’.

ch apter f ou r

The problem of special relationships Self-love’s wider context

The problem of ‘special relationships’ might be put like this. Even if we value neighbour-love, can we really reduce any of erotic love, friendship or self-love to manifestations of neighbour-love alone? Am I really permitted only to have the same relation to my spouse, closest friends or  – especially  – myself that I have to my neighbour? And is Kierkegaard really committed to this implausible-sounding position? Kierkegaard’s Works of Love has often been accused of being unable to deal adequately with special relationships. The charges against Kierkegaard typically take one of two forms. Sometimes he is said to overlook special relationships, viewing all others as indistinguishable neighbours, such that the distinctiveness of any given other is ignored. The distinct individual is absorbed into a commanded imperative. On this view, we are commanded to have the same relationship to our spouse, closest friends and even ourselves that we have to a neighbour who is a stranger. Or – a weaker charge – he is sometimes said to undervalue the moral importance of distinctiveness and special relationships. This debate has recently re-emerged in a fresh form in an interesting disagreement between M. Jamie Ferreira and Sharon Krishek in two valuable recent books on Kierkegaard and love.1 It will be instructive to set the problem of self-love in a wider context by considering this disagreement. Although I am largely sympathetic to Ferreira’s overall account, her defence of Kierkegaard against these charges presents the Dane as less radical (and thus less objectionable) than his critics allege. But this comes at a price: some key passages are insufficiently addressed. This part of Krishek’s critique of Ferreira is very valuable. Yet overall, I argue, Krishek ends up unfairly condemning a key aspect of Works of Love. Krishek valorises ‘self-concerned, natural and spontaneous’ desires but leaves largely   Ferreira 2001, 2010; Krishek 2009.

1

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unanswered the question of which of these we should endorse, and why.2 The problem Krishek sees with Works of Love is that there, Kierkegaard allegedly gives a conflicted account of ‘preferential’ loves according to which, despite his intentions, neighbour-love and romantic love in fact cannot coincide. (A similar problem would haunt the co-presence of neighbour-love and proper self-love.) As a way of addressing this objection, I suggest that we should focus on the idea of God as the ‘middle term’ in love. As suggested in Chapter 3, we should understand this to mean, in significant part, that God acts as a kind of ‘filter’ through which any kind of love – neighbourly as well as preferential – must pass before it is commended. A key advantage of this model is that we do not need to assume, pace Krishek, that the purified versions of any two manifestations of love are identical. I shall argue that Krishek has an excessively strong reading of what Kierkegaard means by saying that two loves are ‘the same’. This leads her unnecessarily to conflate equality of value with equality of treatment. Finally, while recognising that Krishek raises some important questions for Ferreira’s defence of Kierkegaard, I outline a possible response. This is based on the idea that, like some of what Kierkegaard says about ‘the law’, neighbour-love is only a sketch until brought to fruition in any given manifestation of concrete love. I supplement this with some illustrations Ferreira gives of how Kierkegaard’s account ‘preserves the concrete’, including the recognition of concrete differences between particular others. Ultimately, I claim, this aspect of Kierkegaard’s position in Works of Love can indeed be defended from Krishek’s critique. As will emerge over the course of our discussion, the nature of self-love is integral to this disagreement. I shall return to this in a final section in which I shall question whether both commentators don’t at times concede too much to the ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard and whether a fuller defence of self-love, the self and its projects, might be necessary.

I  Kierkegaard’s advocate: M. Jamie Ferreira on the problem of ‘special relationships’ Ferreira discusses dimensions of our problem in several places. For instance, she considers in some detail the image of ‘blindness’ towards distinctions between individuals used in Works of Love. Does commending such blindness towards the neighbour endorse ‘an abstract relation to another whose   Krishek 2009: 117.

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distinctiveness is irrelevant and who is effectively interchangeable’?3 The key question is, as noted earlier, whether the ‘particular individuals’ of whom Kierkegaard speaks ‘are seen as distinctive people embedded in a context of distinctive relations rather than particular abstract, representative, and interchangeable individuals’.4 Ferreira argues that the purpose of the imagery of being ‘blind’ to dissimilarities and distinctions is to ensure that we do not ‘contract the scope of the commandment; such blindness guarantees that no one can be excluded’.5 The worry is the one we encountered in Chapters 2 and 3: that preference ‘for characteristics that are similar to ours, or the kind we value, can lead to exclusion’.6 Here she notes the following passage: ‘If you hold together … with some other people of a particular class and with a particular condition in life … the things of this world will … tempt you comparatively in showing partiality’ (WL 78/SKS 9 84). But here is this passage in full: If you hold together (for alliance is not of the good) with some other people of a particular class and with a particular condition in life, even if it is only with your wife, the things of this world will tempt. Even if in your eyes they do not mean much, they tempt you comparatively in showing partiality, they tempt you perhaps for her sake. (WL 78/SKS 9 84, my emphases)

The references to a person’s wife – omitted by Ferreira – are revealing. There is a clear implication in the full passage that preferential love can itself be precisely the source of the blindness to kinship which concerns Kierkegaard. Ferreira says that Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘the neighbour is the common watermark, you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity’ [WL 89/SKS 9 94] – which has often been taken to be an excessive emphasis on the ‘essence’ of human nature – looks different when taken in the context of his rejection of what George Eliot calls ‘love of the clan’.7

In a footnote, Ferreira explains that Eliot’s objection is to opposing the ‘clan’ to the rest of mankind. But while this is fine as far as it goes, it has not addressed our question about either overlooking or underestimating the moral importance of ‘natural’ bonds such as friendship, marriage and family. We would all presumably agree that the tribalism that bothers Eliot is not Christian. But Ferreira’s account underplays the fact that Kierkegaard

3 Ferreira 2001: 54.  5 Ferreira 2001: 55. 

  Ibid.   Ferreira 2001: 56. 

4 6

  Ibid.

7

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here sees precisely spousal love – not just such ‘clannish’ tribalism – as the threat to neighbour-love. Even if Ferreira succeeds in showing that Kierkegaard does not intend that we view the neighbour as an abstraction this is nevertheless consistent with the conclusion that his account of how natural affections be transformed in the light of neighbour-love leaves much to be desired.8 This account is underdeveloped. Ferreira claims, quite reasonably, that ‘Kierkegaard’s dismissal of the relevance of “distinctions” warns against the limits of preference but does not entail the rejection of preferential relations. The point … was to “preserve neighbor-love” in erotic love and friendship.’9 But it is one thing to acknowledge space for preferential relations, quite another to show how this preservation is to be performed. And the worry is that Kierkegaard falls at this latter fence. Ultimately, I think Kierkegaard can be defended here. But for the time being, while Ferreira is right that we can reject the charge that Kierkegaard ignores special relationships, the more nuanced charge that he undervalues their moral importance is still very much alive. Ferreira considers the charge that ‘in Kierkegaard’s ethic of love others are not able to be loved directly, for themselves’ in the context of her discussion of the idea that God is the ‘middle term’ in our relationships with others.10 Consider the following passage: As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-relationship do not lead the other to God, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers’ earthly life, is still not true love. This the world cannot get into its head, that God in this way not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love but really becomes the sole object of love, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God, and conversely, and so on. The merely human view of love can never go beyond mutuality: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its true object – God … Therefore, to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped. (WL 120–1/SKS 9 124)

Ferreira asks precisely the question that will be on most readers’ lips: ‘What does it mean for God to be the “sole object of love”, so that the wife’s beloved is not the husband but God?’11 She interprets this as meaning 8 Ferreira 2001: 62.  10 Ferreira 2001: 71. 

  Ibid.   Ibid.

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that ‘God should remain the judge of what true love is.’12 In other words, ‘God’s view of what is “good” is the standard for what we should do for the other or want the other to do for us.’13 What does it mean for God to be the ‘middle term’? On Ferreira’s view, it is that ‘as soon as one leaves out the God-relationship, the participants’ merely human definition of what they want to understand by loving, what they want to require of each other … becomes the highest judgement’ (WL 112/SKS 9 116). Is this too pessimistic and mistrustful about human nature? Even if God gives a crucial measure that would otherwise be lacking, it does not follow that without that measure, the ‘merely human’ will descend into the lower rather than ascend to the higher possibilities of human nature. Here Kierkegaard’s colours seem to be nailed to a particular theological mast, taking a stance opposed to the idea that grace completes nature. While this is unsurprising from within the Lutheran tradition, it is not a position we are obliged to endorse.14 Ferreira reads the idea of God as the middle term as not being ‘in any way prejudicial to genuine and direct love of neighbor or beloved’ provided one shares Kierkegaard’s twin theological assumptions.15 First, that ‘God is love and so represents what true love is.’16 Second, that we are creatures: ‘we all belong to God.’17 In other words, God’s love both provides the model for our love and sets limits on how we can love. But these limits do not ipso facto damage proper, genuine, direct love of our neighbours, friends or beloveds. Rather, the point is that ‘the relationships among human beings ought [never] and may never be such that the one worships and the other is the one worshipped.’18 That is, the beloved must never take the place of God in our lives. However, in the passage quoted earlier on how God is ‘the sole object of love’, Kierkegaard certainly seems to be saying something stronger. Ferreira also offers a deflationary reading of Kierkegaard’s notorious discussion of ‘hating’ the beloved. She reads the passage about the New Testament demand of being willing ‘out of love and in love to hate the beloved’ (WL 108/SKS 9 112) as meaning simply the following. Suppose 12 Ibid.  13  Ibid. 14 This question is at the heart of Jack Mulder’s thoughtful discussion of the differences between Kierkegaard and Aquinas on the ‘order of love’ (whether or not we should prioritise those closest to us). See Mulder 2010: 67–97. 15 Ferreira 2001: 72. 16 Ibid.  17  Ibid. 18 Ferreira 2001: 73–4, citing WL 125/SKS 9 128. I have amended the translation here for the sake of clarity. Thanks to an anonymous reader for bringing the relevant ambiguity to my attention.

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what my beloved asks of me is inconsistent with what God asks of me. Then my refusal effectively to put her ahead of God means that she (in so far as she fails to understand God as the ‘middle term’), ‘will see as hate [my] refusal to always give what … she asks’.19 (This claim would be more plausible if we substituted ‘will’ with ‘might’.) In other words, I am not being told actually to hate my beloved. Rather, what is being demanded of me is ‘being willing, when appropriate, to “seem” as if to hate the other, or being willing, when appropriate, to be hated by the other’.20 Ferreira’s interpretation makes Kierkegaard appear less extreme than do some commentators (as we shall see with respect to Sylvia Walsh’s valorisation of ‘double danger’ in Chapter 6). But Ferreira arguably makes Kierkegaard more palatable than the text fully warrants. And even though her Kierkegaard is less extreme than some, she still makes an important concession: ‘Perhaps Kierkegaard exaggerates what he calls the “collision” between two conceptions of love, “the divine conception and the merely human conception”.’21 Ferreira returns to the problem of ‘special relationships’ in her discussion of the deliberation ‘Love Is a Matter of Conscience’. Her strategy remains the same: to attempt to defend Kierkegaard from the persistent criticism that he gives an inadequate account of such relationships. Ferreira continues to maintain that for Kierkegaard preferential loves are not excluded: it is simply that neighbour-love needs to be preserved at the heart of erotic love and friendship. But again, her reading of Kierkegaard seems to gloss over some problematic passages. Let me explain. Ferreira notes the following crucial passage: Christianity has not come into the world to teach this or that change in how you are to love your wife and your friend in particular, but to teach how you are to love all human beings universally-humanly. It is in turn this change that Christianly changes erotic love and friendship. (WL 142–3/SKS 9 144)

She connects this with a slightly later passage: Christianity has not changed anything in what people have previously learned about loving the beloveds, the friend, etc., has not added a little or subtracted something, but it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole. Only insofar as a change of inwardness in erotic love and friendship results from this fundamental change, only to that extent has it changed these. (WL 147/SKS 9 148)   Ferreira 2001: 74, my emphasis.   Ferreira 2001: 75. 21   Ibid., citing WL 110/SKS 9 114. 19

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To the second passage, Kierkegaard immediately adds: ‘This it has done by making all love a matter of conscience’ (WL 147/SKS 9 148). We might wonder whether this second passage obscures precisely the question at issue. One of the key questions is precisely what difference is made to erotic love and friendship by the idea that the lover or friend is ‘first and foremost the neighbour’. So it becomes crucial to ask what is this ‘change of inwardness’ of which Kierkegaard speaks? Ferreira reads the two passages as follows: ‘the only radical change involved is the change of making love, even when it includes erotic love and friendship, a “matter of conscience”.’22 She explicitly denies that Kierkegaard is requiring us to forgo the ‘natural drives and inclinations’ of erotic love and friendship.23 (Provided, I assume, that they are not inconsistent with central Christian teachings.) But this underlines the importance of her next question. What should we make of ‘the admittedly “strange, chilling inversion” by which “in loving the beloved we are first to love the neighbour”’ (WL 141/SKS 9 142)?24 Ferreira seeks to justify Kierkegaard’s position here by insisting that ‘what it means to say that someone is “first and foremost the neighbour” is that with respect to each person we must consult with our conscience.’25 What this turns out to mean is that since the other belongs primarily to God, not ourselves, a man can no more take advantage of his wife, because she is his wife, than of another neighbour. We cannot make a sex object out of our wife or husband; we cannot emotionally or physically abuse our spouse because, however intimate and specific the relationship is, each remains a neighbour, an equal before God. The apparent abstractness of the claim, ‘Each one of us is a human being and then in turn the distinctive individual that he is in particular, but to be a human being is the fundamental category’ [WL 141/SKS 9 143] is meant to guarantee the fundamental respect appropriate to our equality before God. The ‘first, then’ language is not meant to be taken as a temporal qualifier. There is no instant at which we are only the abstract determinant ‘human being’; we are always in some kind of special relation, even if it is only the relation of being someone’s child.26

Ferreira claims that Kierkegaard’s central point is that ‘the Christian change in all love’ is that love becomes a matter of conscience.27 Thus, although ‘Christianity makes a change in erotic love and friendship’, this 22 Ferreira 2001: 90.  23  Ferreira 2001: 90–1. 24 Ferreira 2001: 91.  25  Ibid. 26 Ferreira 2001: 92, my emphasis.  27  Ibid.

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change is simply that it introduces conscience and thus it does not involve ‘preventing them from being erotic love and friendship’.28 Will this do? As it stands, I don’t think so. First, to say that Christianity introduces conscience is to take a quite unfair view of the possibilities of, for instance, pagan friendship, as argued in Chapter 2. As we noted there, conscience is a significant feature in many such accounts of friendship. To ‘take advantage’ of one’s friend or spouse is to fail qua friend or spouse. It is not only to fail qua neighbour. So the category of neighbour is not strictly necessary to explain what is objectionable about such advantage-taking. Second, what of the claim that erotic love and friendship are unchanged ‘externally’ by the crucial ‘internal’ change Kierkegaard mentions? This requires closer scrutiny. Ferreira’s interpretation leaves an important question unanswered. She notes the important claim that Christianity only recognises ‘only one kind of love, the spirit’s love’ (WL 143/SKS 9 145), ‘but this can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love’ (WL 146/SKS 9 147–8). From this point of view, we should not speak of different kinds of love but different manifestations of this one form of love. Ferreira claims: Neighbor love, Kjerlighed, is not a ‘higher’ love that should replace or be added to erotic love and friendship … the goal is to preserve love for the neighbour in erotic love and friendship … Nonpreferential love is to ­‘permeate’ all expressions of love – to transform them – yet not in the sense of adding something to them, as if you could love the beloved or friend adequately by yourself.29

But exactly what is the difference between such love ‘permeating’ our natural loves and being an ‘addition’ to them? In what follows I shall offer my own answer to this question. But I shall do so by first considering Krishek’s recent criticism of Ferreira.

II  Sharon Krishek on Kierkegaard, Ferreira and special relationships The central focus of Krishek’s book is Elskov, erotic or romantic love.30 Although appreciative of significant elements of Kierkegaard’s account of 28 Ibid.  29  Ferreira 2001: 94. 30 The main burden of Krishek’s book is to argue for the value of a view of (romantic) love inspired by the account of faith found in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. In this discussion, I shall be concerned only with one small part of Krishek’s overall project: her argument that Kierkegaard’s account of the relationship between neighbourly love and preferential love in Works of Love is

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love in Works of Love,31 Krishek argues that there is a fundamental confusion, contradiction or inadequacy in that text’s account of the relationship between neighbour-love and romantic love.32 A difference with Ferreira on the nature of proper self-love is an important part of her account. I shall focus here exclusively on her critique of Works of Love and of Ferreira’s attempted defence of that text. I shall argue that, in this part of her account, Krishek is unfair to Kierkegaard for two related reasons. First, I think she misunderstands the implications of his claim that Christianity recognises only ‘one kind of love’. Second, I think she wrongly assumes that Kierkegaard’s commitment to equality of value commits him to assumptions about equality of treatment. Krishek draws attention to a key passage in the very first deliberation of Works of Love, part of which we have already quoted in Chapter 3. Here Kierkegaard claims that human love originates in God’s love: Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love. Just as the quiet lake invites you to contemplate it but by the reflected image of darkness prevents you from seeing through it, so also the mysterious origin of love in God’s love prevents you from seeing its ground. (WL 9–10/SKS 9 17–18)

This enables Krishek ‘cautiously’ to sketch the following picture: Love is a driving power implanted in us by God, but it is hidden. It is the basis for all the possible manifestations of love; but in itself, this seriously flawed. Thus my disagreements with Krishek in what follows should certainly not be taken to imply that my overall view of her valuable and suggestive book is negative, any more than my criticisms of Ferreira above are intended to detract from the overall excellence of Ferreira’s commentary on Works of Love. As will become clearer in later chapters to anyone who has read Krishek’s book as well as my own, there is substantial agreement between us, on such matters as that Kierkegaard recognises something important in his praise for self-denial, but that he exaggerates its centrality. 31 For instance, that God is the source of love and that self-denial and neighbour-love are of great importance. 32 Krishek seems to equivocate as to which of these claims she wants to make. As Ferreira puts it in a review of her book, ‘it is unclear what the status of the criticism is. At times it seems that Krishek is uncovering an inconsistency in Works of Love; at other times, it seems that she is suggesting an inadequacy. In the first case, her work would be put forth as a corrective of Works of Love (admittedly informed by Kierkegaard’s own better insights in Fear and Trembling), while in the second case it would serve as a complement to Works of Love’s inadequate presentation of romantic love. In the first case, her charge would be that Works of Love contains an irresolvable tension; in the second case, her charge would be that Works of Love contains a lop-sided emphasis on self-denial’ (Ferreira 2010).

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Krishek thus interprets Kierkegaard as seeing four ‘levels’ of love. First, God as the source of love. Second, love itself, as the ‘mysterious power’ placed in us by God and which is the ‘hidden ground of our works’. Third, the ‘manifestations’ or ‘works’ of love themselves. And fourth (but only sometimes), their fruits.34 Drawing on Ferreira, Krishek claims that Kierkegaard is often ambiguous as to whether Kjerlighed refers to the first of these, the second, or the neighbour-love we are commanded to manifest.35 Krishek uses Kjerlighed to refer only to ‘the love placed in us by God’, seeing it as the ‘hidden ground’ of any possible manifestation of love: romantic, as well as neighbourly. Beyond this, she then notes the distinctions, now standard in this literature, between erotic love and friendship (‘special loves’) as preferential, and neighbour-love as non-preferential, the latter rooted in equality and based on ‘self-denial’. In her subsequent discussion, Krishek implicitly assumes that the opposite of ‘self-denial’ is selfishness, a term that she doesn’t fully unpack.36 What she does say strikes me as problematic. She cites a passage in which Kierkegaard contrasts ‘immediacy’ and ‘eternity’: What a difference there is between the play of feelings, drives, inclinations and passions, in short, that play of the powers of immediacy, that celebrated glory of poetry in smiles or in tears, in desire or in want – what a difference between this and the earnestness of eternity, the earnestness of the commandment in spirit and in truth, in honesty and self-denial! (WL 25/SKS 9 33)

On the back of this, she claims: ‘It seems reasonable to assume that Kierkegaard considers those elements (“feelings, drives, inclinations and passions … the powers of immediacy”) to constitute the selfishness that distinguishes between preferential love and neighbourly love, because they are indeed concerned exclusively with the self and its gratification.’37 But 33 Krishek 2009: 110–11.  34  Krishek 2009: 111. 35 Ibid., citing Ferreira 2008: 107. 36 This is far from uncommon. ‘Selfishness’ is central to the discussion of several commentators (including Ferreira 2001; Krishek 2009; Walsh 2005; and Welz 2008). But none of these commentators is explicit about what they mean by the term – and nor is Kierkegaard. I shall argue for the importance of distinguishing between selfishness and other forms of improper self-focus, such as self-centredness, in Chapter 6. 37 Krishek 2009: 114.

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Kierkegaard’s overall point here surely cannot be to condemn ‘feelings, drives, inclinations and passions’ per se. Indeed, part of the process of Christian ‘upbuilding’ is that one becomes the kind of person in whom the passion of neighbour-love is manifested. I think Krishek here misreads the passage from which she quotes. The context of this passage is Christianity’s ‘apparent contradiction’ that love is a duty (WL 24/SKS 9 31). This view ‘did not arise in any human being’s heart’ (WL 24/SKS 9 32) and is thus foreign to the pagan who has not been ‘spoiled’ by the delusion that he is a Christian in virtue of living in Christendom (WL 25/SKS 9 32). Just before the passage Krishek quotes, Kierkegaard says, ‘Love had existed also in paganism, but this obligation to love is a change of eternity  – and everything has become new’ (WL 25/SKS 9 33).38 The difference to which Kierkegaard is alluding, then, is between the passions (etc.) of a Christian (on the one hand) and being controlled by ‘the powers of immediacy’ in ‘smiles or tears’, such that one’s ‘immediate’ ‘desires’ and ‘wants’ are in control of one (on the other). In other words, it is not ‘feelings, drives, inclinations and passions’ per se that are the problem. It is being controlled by the wrong ones, or in the wrong way. Since the discussion is about what has been altered by love being commanded (‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’), the question that matters is as follows. Now that love is commanded in this way (and is not just a matter of natural inclination), what difference does this make to our feelings, drives, inclinations and passions? How do they need to change from their ‘pagan’ state? One might think of much of Kierkegaard’s writing (including Works of Love) as a series of attempts to ‘educate the heart’ in the light of this ‘new’ state of affairs. Or – more precisely – to educate the heart in light of rediscovering this newness in the midst of ‘Christendom’, a world that has forgotten how ‘new’ and radical true Christianity is. In sum, the key point is not that feelings, drives, inclinations and passions’ per se are the problem. The problem is rather not developing any such feelings, drives, inclinations and passions beyond a ‘pagan’ world view. Kierkegaard’s position is not that passions, etc. are necessarily ‘concerned exclusively with the self and its gratification’.39 So what difference does this commanded neighbour-love make? In aiming to defend her interpretation, Krishek continues: ‘this fits well with the 38 Cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17. 39 As Ferreira notes in her review, Krishek ‘seems to ignore the fact that the text of Works of Love provides a number of critical affirmations of our drives and inclinations and needs, places where Kierkegaard tries to correct a negative “misunderstanding” about our drives and inclinations; he rules out a misplaced “either/or”’ (Ferreira 2010).

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logic that differentiates between preferential love and neighbourly love: … Kierkegaard defines neighbourly love as self-denial’s love … and this, quite reasonably, must oppose the kind of love that is focused on the self ’.40 But we need to be careful here: much depends upon exactly what ‘focused on the self ’ means. Such language threatens to obscure the important fact that there is often an inextricable link between proper self-love and love of others such that these cannot be teased apart. As Troy Jollimore notes, the mere fact that a putative lover’s love is interested – the fact that he takes pleasure in the various aspects of his beloved and of the relationship, that he wants the relationship to continue and the beloved to flourish in part because its continuing and her flourishing enhance his life and well-being – has, in itself, no interesting implications as to whether or not his love is genuine.41

Relatedly, Alasdair MacIntyre suggests, We do indeed as infants, as children and even as adolescents, experience sharp conflicts between egoistic and altruistic impulses and desires. But the task of education is to transform and integrate those into an inclination towards both the common good and our individual goods, so that we become neither self-rather-than-other-regarding nor other-rather-than-self-regarding, neither egoists nor altruists, but those whose passions and inclinations are directed to what is both our good and the good of others. Self-sacrifice, it follows, is as much of vice, as much of a sign of inadequate moral development, as selfishness.42

In other words, a vital part of proper self-love may involve combining the good for oneself and the good for others in a way that makes talk of ‘self-sacrifice’, ‘self-denial’ and egoism versus altruism pretty unhelpful. Sally B. Purvis gives a good example with respect to a mother’s love for her baby: ‘the mother’s need may be to feed the child, comfort her, rock him, etc.’.43 Daniel Russell makes a similar point about self-respect, which we will later argue is an important part of proper self-love. Taking as an example the lawyer Atticus Finch’s decision to defend Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Russell notes that evading this unpopular decision would be unthinkable for Atticus. Why? Because, he tells his young daughter, it would betray everything he believes in. But to ask whether he does this out of respect for himself or respect for Tom sets up a false opposition. Having goodwill towards and acting to help a man 40 Krishek 2009: 114.  41  Jollimore 2011: 129. 42 MacIntyre 1999: 160.  43  Purvis 1991: 27.

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whom he sincerely believes to be innocent is part of who Atticus is. Thus, ‘the line between respecting oneself and respecting others no longer seems very sharp.’44 There is no practical difference between Atticus’s acting out of respect for himself and acting out of respect for Tom: both the action and the reason for the action are the same. Moreover, Robert M. Adams makes a related point about how the good for me can be deeply interrelated to the good for my community: Self-love can be positively rather than negatively related to community. Fully accepting my own membership in a good community involves accepting my own good as a project, both as a common project of the community and as part of the common good. At the same time my good is a project that a good community regards, and expects me to regard, as mine to care about in a special way (though not necessarily more than about the good of others or in isolation from the good of others). Being willing to be special to myself in this way is appropriately responsive to my place in communities (not to mention my place in the universe). This is a relatively unalienated and unselfish way of taking my own good as a project. Are you tempted to feel guilty (as some people do) about ever pursuing your own good when it competes at all with the good of others? Then ask yourself whether you really think a society that did not have your good too as part of a common project would be an excellent society.45

What this enables us to see is twofold. First, that Krishek is on to something important: we should not valorise a conception of proper self-love that obliges us to get ‘beyond’ the self – transcend all its desires – completely. But, second, that the idea of ‘self-denial’ needs to be treated very carefully. We shall turn to this task in Chapter 6. Qualifying her earlier remarks somewhat, Krishek recognises that the second love commandment itself means that Kierkegaard’s position cannot be that ‘inclinations and desires and everything connected to the well-being of the self are to be eliminated when one is to love properly (that is, in the neighbourly way)’.46 She goes on to recognise the need ‘to distinguish between at least two different ways of relating to the self, between two kinds of self-love: the kind of self-love referred to in the commandment, and the kind of self-love Kierkegaard considers as selfish’.47 Krishek’s subsequent treatment of the problem is an attempt to qualify the position of Ferreira. Krishek agrees with Ferreira on several key points. First, that the distinction we need is between proper and selfish self-love. Second, that proper self-love (the kind that can be ‘applied to 44 Russell 2005: 119.  45  Adams 2006: 110. 46 Krishek 2009: 114–15.  47  Krishek 2009: 115.

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our relationship to the neighbour’) is based on ‘respect’ and ‘wishing the good for ourselves’.48 She cites approvingly Ferreira’s distinction, noted in Chapter 2, between ‘a “selfish”, exclusive love of self, which is at odds with the good of the other, and a “proper”, inclusive love of the self, which both encompasses the good of the other and is the measure of the good of the other’.49 Krishek asks a good question as to whether merely not being at odds with the good of the other is sufficient to give Ferreira the distinction she wants: Taking this [not being at odds with the good of the other] as our guiding rule does not explain … why passionate romantic love … should be considered by Kierkegaard to be selfish … After all, from the point of view of one’s neighbour there is nothing offensive (in terms of respect and wishing his well-being) in loving one’s beloved passionately … Kierkegaard’s objection to preferential love goes beyond a strictly blatant violation of the good of the neighbour.50

She then goes on to modify Ferreira’s account by distinguishing not two (as Ferreira does) but three kinds of self-love: (a) Selfish self-love: self-love which is ‘at odds with the good of the other’: it involves ‘using the other as a means for one’s selfish satisfactions or acting towards achieving one’s own good regardless of the effect it has on the other’. (b) Proper qualified self-love: a ‘restricted’ form of self-love which is that to which the commandment refers. This is ‘understood in terms of respect and wishing one’s well-being, in a narrow sense of “well-being” (that is, a well-being stripped of most of its “embodied” aspects, such as responsiveness and sensitivity to inclinations, desires and preferences)’. (c) Proper unqualified self-love: ‘Acting to fulfil one’s well-being, in a broader sense of “well-being” (which includes sensitivity to the self ’s inclinations, desires and preferences), with a constant consideration of the good of the other. That is, fulfilling one’s own “self-focused” concerns so long as they are not “at odds with the good of the other”.’51

Will this give us the distinction that we need? I don’t think so. For exactly what is Krishek claiming about self-love and neighbour-love in (b)? She says this is the kind of self-love referred to in the commandment. But if that were so, then the way in which I should love my neighbour (when I love him as I love myself ) would be in a ‘restricted’ way in which I do not 48 Ibid.  49  Ferreira 2001: 35, cited in Krishek 2009: 115. 50 Krishek 2009: 115.  51  Krishek 2009: 116.

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wish him to respond to his inclinations, desires and preferences (because in such ‘qualified’ self-love I have denied my own). That hardly sounds plausible. Krishek aims to argue that self-love (b) and (c) are not ‘in harmony’: Neighbourly love, which in [Kierkegaard’s] understanding is self-denial’s love, can work well with self-love only when self-love is understood in the manner of b). Of course, this does not mean that self-love in the manner of c) should be ruled out; but as long as self-denial is the dominant structure of the love which Kierkegaard advocates here, self-love in the manner of c) – that is, self-love which is concerned also with the gratification of one’s self-focused wishes (even if it does not come explicitly at the expense of the other) – should at least be set aside as marginal or secondary.52

I shall argue in Chapter 6 that Kierkegaard does overplay the concept of self-denial, and so I think that there is definitely something valuable in this aspect of Krishek’s critique. However, not all of one’s ‘self-focused’ concerns can be valorised – even when they are not at odds with the good of the other. For instance, a desire for vainglorious honour and prestige may dominate a person’s life. Even if nobody else loses out as a result of such self-focus, that hardly justifies it. Krishek has not told us enough about which self-focused concerns are in, which are out, and why. She asks whether Kierkegaard allows for ‘an affirmation that unapologetically takes into consideration self-concerned, natural and spontaneous desires, or does he, ultimately, consider this aspect of the self to be “selfish”?’53 Surely the answer to this question depends upon which such desires Krishek has in mind. The potential conflict between personal loves and morality has been much discussed.54 Even if we reject Kierkegaard’s more extreme oppositions to ‘the world’, it would still be perfectly in order for him to claim that these desires need to be in accordance with the good and with Christian teaching. There are forms of preferential love that will pass this test and forms that will not. A major part of Krishek’s charge against Kierkegaard here seems to be that the love valorised in Works of Love is too spiritualised, at the expense of our nature as embodied creatures. But the love valorised in Works of Love does not deny our embodiment, as the centrality of the parable of the Good Samaritan to that text makes clear. It is crucial that the Samaritan binds the injured man’s wounds and pays for his stay at the inn, rather 52 Ibid.  53  Krishek 2009: 117, my emphasis. 54 For a good recent example, see Jollimore 2011: Chapter 7, especially the discussion of the film The English Patient (1996, dir. Minghella).

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than just – as Ferreira nicely puts it – throwing him ‘spiritual reading for his stay in the ditch’.55 Krishek claims that the ambivalence to preferential love at the heart of Works of Love is largely overlooked in the secondary literature. Citing Sylvia Walsh’s concession that Kierkegaard ‘does not seem to recognize any ability on the part of natural love to love unselfishly’, she rejects as inadequate Walsh’s attempt to dissolve the tension by claiming that although we love our significant others ‘differently’, ‘this difference is not essential, since we love them fundamentally as we love others, that is, as a neighbor’.56 Walsh’s way of putting this, without any further explanation, does seem to want to have its cake and eat it. Walsh is certainly on to something: the idea that the beloved must be first and foremost the neighbour. But she claims that such neighbourly love is, for Kierkegaard, ‘the decisive factor in the transformation of erotic love that rids it of selfish exclusivity and establishes equality in love while preserving special relations’.57 And Krishek’s question is, effectively, how does it do this? How can we rid ourselves of what Kierkegaard calls ‘selfishness’ ‘without this resulting in the elimination of the special, preferential loves that we want to keep’: our preferences, desires and inclinations towards those we love preferentially?58 Relatedly, ‘how can the same love (neighbourly love) be at the same time equal and special? If neighbourly love should be directed equally at everybody, what does this love look like when it is directed at those special people in our lives? Is this love still the same? What then makes this special love special?’59 At this point, Krishek tackles Ferreira (‘my most important opponent’) head on.60 She notes Ferreira’s claims that ‘preferential love … should not be the determinant of responsibility for the other’ and that ‘Love of neighbor is distinguished from preferential love precisely because neighbor is the category of equality before God and preferential love does not do justice to equality’.61 The warning here is against exclusion: the only problem with preferential love being the danger it poses in this respect. 55 Ferreira 2001: 34. I am assuming here that Krishek’s talk of ‘embodiment’ is not merely a coy reference to our sexual desires. 56 Walsh 1988: 248, cited in Krishek 2009: 119. 57 Walsh 1988: 241, cited in Krishek 2009: 119. 58 Krishek 2009: 120.  59  Ibid. 60 Ibid. Note that Krishek sees Ferreira as an ‘opponent’ in something like the limited way that I am treating Krishek herself as an opponent here: on one specific (yet important) point. As will become increasingly apparent, there is much of Ferreira’s position that Krishek both acknowledges and builds upon. 61 Ferreira 2001: 46, cited in Krishek 2009: 120; Ferreira 2001: 44, cited in Krishek 2009: 121.

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But, Krishek asks, how do we unpack this? Can preferential love really be ‘subsumed under neighbourly love without compromising either the meaning of preferential love (as preferential) or the rigorousness of the “commitment to human equality”?’62 If neighbour-love (presented by Kierkegaard as essentially non-preferential) is ‘the essential model for love’, what does this imply for ‘the essential element of preferentiality in special loves’?63 How can this avoid contradiction? Surely not making exceptions rules out the possibility of a ‘hierarchy in the way in which one loves’? ‘If taken seriously … the “radical commitment to equality”, that Works of Love posits as the ground for any form of love, implies the exclusion of preferential love.’64 Relatedly, Krishek claims, ‘One can love one’s beloved “above all others” and yet be sensitive and responsible and caring for one’s neighbour and help him in his need. There is no contradiction here. Kierkegaard, however, insists that there is. Note that he couples “above all others” with “in contrast to all others”: in his view, to love someone “more” necessarily entails blindness towards the rest.’65 How should we respond to this? The early passage in which Kierkegaard seems to run together these two distinct ideas (WL 19/SKS 9 27) is indeed unfortunate. But this conflation – if that is what this ambiguous passage really does intend66 – is not central to his point, and his overall position in Works of Love does not need such a conflation. Perhaps Kierkegaard’s real worry is the slippery slope from ‘above all others’ to ‘in contrast to all others’, as we shall shortly suggest. Discussing an annoying neighbour in the flat upstairs whom she does ‘not really like’, Krishek recognises that neighbour-love requires her to ‘care about him, to see him as an equal human being, to feel compassion towards him and to help him if he is in need’.67 Thus, she claims, preferential love does not ipso facto blind her to this duty. That is surely true. But I do not find in Kierkegaard the necessity claim that Krishek attributes to him. To say that ‘preferential’ love involves loving one other ‘in contrast to all others’ is indeed an exaggeration. But perhaps what Kierkegaard is really doing is warning of a ‘­slippery slope’ danger similar to that which, in Chapter 2, we saw 62 Krishek 2009: 122.  63  Ibid. 64 Ibid.  65  Krishek 2009: 123. 66 It is ambiguous whether Kierkegaard intends merely to list two distinct ideas or to conflate them, as Krishek seems to assume. The passage in question reads as follows: ‘The same holds true of friendship as of erotic love, inasmuch as this, too, is based on preference: to love this one person above all others, to love him in contrast to all others [at elske dette eneste Menneske fremfor alle Andre, at elske ham i Modsætning til alle Andre]’ (WL 19/SKS 9 27). 67 Krishek 2009: 123.

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C.  S.  Lewis note in his discussion of friendship in The Four Loves. The worry concerns the ‘­wholesale indifference or deafness’ to outside opinion into which friendship at its most cliquish can descend.68 José Ortega y Gasset signals this as a feature of romantic love: ‘the world does not exist for the lover. His beloved has dislodged and replaced it.’69 This is certainly one of Kierkegaard’s worries, yet, as we noted, Lewis shows that a perhaps more subtle version of the same danger is present in friendship: ‘From the innocent and necessary act of excluding to the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness.’70 At the bottom of this slope, ‘[t]he common vision which first brought us together may fade quite away. We shall be a coterie that exists for the sake of being a coterie; a little self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy, basking in the moonshine of our collective self-approval.’71 What Kierkegaard is worried about is precisely that, and its romantic equivalents (where, as Ortega suggests, the danger is typically heightened). This does indeed seem like a genuine threat to the love of other neighbours. Even if we are not thus made ‘blind’ (in a negative sense) to our neighbours, we can nevertheless be led to downgrade their importance. I think this downgrading comes out in Krishek’s own example, when she says, loving my friend preferentially does mean that the well-being of my friend is of a more focused concern to me, and sadly – since we are limited creatures (in time and abilities) who cannot dedicate our maximal efforts to everyone – it also means that I choose my friend (by virtue of my preference which gives my friend his special status) above my neighbour.72

Further, Kierkegaard is alleged to be ‘unwilling to accept the appropriateness of treating the friend and the neighbour in such a different manner’.73 I shall comment shortly on why I disagree with this final claim. As to the example, whether what Krishek claims is true or not depends on the details. I am troubled by her talk of a ‘hierarchy’ in love, based on preference. Her idea seems to be that, ceteris paribus, I will choose my beloved or friend over a stranger, and that it is normally right and proper so to do. But ceteris paribus conditions are always artificial: the particulars of the circumstances are always important to deciding what is demanded of us. If the choice is between the upstairs neighbour asking me to the pub when I have already committed to a friend, then I can certainly politely turn 68 Lewis 1960: 81.  69  Ortega y Gasset 1957: 50. 70 Lewis 1960: 86.  71  Ibid. 72 Krishek 2009: 123.  73  Ibid.

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down his offer, explaining my prior commitments. No moral dilemma or failure in neighbour-love has arisen here. However, if the neighbour gets in first, I accept his offer and promise to meet him later, but then receive an offer from my friend (whose company I expect to prefer), then I do not see what justifies breaking my promise to the neighbour: the mere fact that I prefer the company of my friend is certainly not sufficient justification to break my promise. (Would Krishek claim otherwise? Under what conditions does her ‘hierarchy’ apply? On the answer to this depends the extent to which we disagree on this point.) The overall point, though, is that Ferreira is right that preference cannot be the only ‘determinant of responsibility for the other’.74 But here is the crux of the matter. Krishek claims, ‘The result of the demand to love in the same way (in the neighbourly, non-preferential, equal way) all the different objects of love in our lives, then, is that we leave no real room for the (existing) differences between preferential and non-preferential loves.’75 This does not follow. Kierkegaard is not committed to the claim that we must love identically each of the objects of love in our lives. Indeed, this cannot be what he means: for instance, it is surely implausible to think that for Kierkegaard my love for God should be identical to my love for my annoying upstairs neighbour. In support of this general point, the following sentence is often quoted: ‘Your wife must first and foremost be to you the neighbor; that she is your wife is then a more precise specification of your particular relationship to each other’ (WL 141/SKS 9 143). Thus, Evans, for instance, claims that ‘Kierkegaard is not making the absurd claim that a wife must treat her husband exactly as she would any other man.’76 But shortly after the above quote, Kierkegaard is even more explicit about this: ‘the wife and the friend are not loved in the same way, nor the friend and the neighbor’ (WL 141/SKS 9 143), even if he does add that this difference is not ‘essential’. So the object itself makes a difference to the nature of the love, but Krishek has not shown that this is inconsistent with Kierkegaard’s claims. (The case can perhaps most clearly be seen via self-love: I necessarily have a relationship to myself that I cannot have with any ‘other’.77) The fact that everyone is my neighbour does not mean that the nature of the love for my friend or beloved, as opposed 74 Let me emphasise that I am not here denying that commitment to my beloved, say, might prevent me sometimes, even often, from paying attention to other neighbours (Krishek’s point about our limitations). Both an ethic of total impartiality and an ethic that recognises the value of partial loves come at a price. My view is that we need to recognise the value of both – commitment to the neighbour, and commitment to the specific beloved – muddling on as best we can, given our limitations. 75 Krishek 2009: 124.  76  Evans 2004: 205.  77  More on this in Chapter 5.

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to the annoying guy upstairs, is identical. When Krishek asks what a neighbourly manifestation of preferential love looks like, she explores an important issue, but, I suggest, in a misleading way. Her precise questions, we noted above, are ‘If neighbourly love should be directed equally at everybody, what does this love look like when it is directed at those special people in our lives? Is this love still the same?’ But these are, I think, the wrong questions, for reasons I shall now seek to explain.

III  The God filter I submit that Kierkegaard’s position is not that a love identical in the case of each individual other person should be ‘directed equally at everybody’. Rather, part of what is meant by God being the ‘middle term’ is, as suggested in Chapter 3, that ‘God’ is a kind of filter through which each of our loves needs to be passed.78 A major component of this filter is that the other is ‘first and foremost the neighbour’. The model I have in mind is as follows. Each distinct, individual love (whether preferential or not) needs to pass the ‘God filter’ test. For instance: does my love for Sylvie merely serve my selfish desires? Does my friendship with Joe require me to act in a way that I know to be inconsistent with the good? Is the specific demand this stranger makes on me inconsistent with what Christianity teaches? And so on. If a given love does pass the test, then it has been ‘purified’ (up to a point) in the sense that it has been stripped of its ‘sinful’ elements.79 Two caveats are necessary here. First, to say the above is not to deny that our judgements on these matters are always going to be defeasible. Self-deception will remain a constant danger. What is being commended is the kind of test necessary for any given love to count as (relatively) ‘pure’: nothing is being claimed about the infallibility of any such test. Relatedly  – and this is the second point  – I don’t mean to imply by a phrase like ‘stripped of its sinful elements’ that for Kierkegaard the filter gets rid of original sin. However, even if all human actions and intentions have the taint of original sin, this does not imply that there is no point in asking of some specific relationship whether my reasons for entering it are particularly selfish, self-centred or otherwise problematic. 78 More fully: for Kierkegaard, God is both the object of our love and (in a sense to be discussed in Section IV below) offers the pattern for our loves. 79 Kierkegaard writes: ‘love the beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love for the neighbor be the sanctifying element in your union’s covenant with God’ (WL 62/SKS 9 69).

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This model has the significant advantage that, with regard to Krishek’s objection to Ferreira, there is no reason to suppose that, once it has gone through the filter, any given instance of ‘purified’ romantic love (or friendship) would be identical to Samaritan-like love of a stranger in need. As we have seen, what worries Krishek is precisely this: that the Kierkegaard of Works of Love is committed to the identity of such loves. Now, the point of the filter is to rid any given manifestation of love of its harmful ‘impurities’. But we would not suppose that the ‘purified’ residue of two different liquids run through a filter would be identical. In the same way, my love for my beloved remains importantly different from my love for the annoying guy upstairs – even after each has passed through the filter. On this model, then, Krishek’s question – what makes special loves special? – does not arise. It arises only if we assume that Kierkegaard is committed to the idea of the ‘sameness of the love itself ’.80 One can understand what has led Krishek to this assumption, given Kierkegaard’s remark that Christianity recognises ‘only one kind of love, the spirit’s love’ (WL 143/SKS 9 147). But exactly what kind of ‘sameness’ is at issue here? The loves are ‘the same’ only in a relatively weak sense: the passage in which Kierkegaard uses this phrase is not concerned with metaphysical identity. Rather, the emphasis is on ‘the spirit’s love’ as that on which Christianity focuses its attention: The worldly or merely human point of view recognizes a great many kinds of love and is well informed about the dissimilarity of each one and the dissimilarity between each particular one and the others … With Christianity the opposite is the case. It recognizes really only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, and does not concern itself much with working out in detail the different ways in which this fundamental universal love can manifest itself. (WL 143/SKS 9 147)

In other words, to say that Christianity ‘recognizes really’ only the spirit’s love is to say that Christianity is interested above all else in this key common denominator in all commendable manifestations of love. Read against the background of the differences in proper manifestations of love which, as we noted above, Kierkegaard recognises, this passage can best be read as making a point about emphasis: where Christianity needs to focus its energies, given that erotic love and friendship are ‘natural’. ‘The spirit’s love’ might be found both in my love for my romantic beloved and my love for a stranger, but this does not imply that the common denominator is all that there is in these manifestations of love. They will be very different in practice and in detail. My love for my beloved and my love for the   Krishek 2009: 126.

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homeless stranger – once through the ‘filter’ – are ‘the same’ love only (but importantly) in the sense that they are both free of the relevant impurities. Recall here also our point about ‘non-thetic’ consciousness in Chapter 3. There, we drew on Stokes’s work to suggest that God does not have to be the constant object of intentional thought in order to function as the ‘middle term’ in love-relationships: God can be implicit in each moment of consciousness without forming part of its intentional content. Similarly, I do not see that the idea that my beloved is ‘first and foremost’ my neighbour commits Kierkegaard to the claim that ‘Sylvie qua neighbour’ is the explicit content of my thought in relating to my beloved. Here, too, the idea that she is my neighbour can be implicit in each aspect of my relation to her, without this being part of the explicit intentional content. This is typically the way that neighbour-love plays a role in various manifestations of preferential love. As I have suggested, I think Krishek’s mistake is to assume that the equality of value on which Kierkegaard insists (since all neighbours are equal before God) implies the need for an equality of treatment which makes it impossible to distinguish my love for my beloved from my love for the stranger. But Kierkegaard, I submit, neither conflates these two kinds of equality nor draws this inference: he is committed to equality of value, but that does not imply that he needs to be committed to identity of treatment. So, provided her love is purified in the relevant way, Kierkegaard would be quite happy for Krishek to love her husband in a different way to that in which she loves a stranger. Note that on the view I am defending here, love for the stranger  – a manifestation of love we typically think of as being non-preferential  – also needs to go through the ‘God filter’. And this seems right: it is no good the Samaritan robbing another passer-by in order to pay for the injured man’s stay at the inn. So, although Kierkegaard thinks we are ‘naturally’ constituted such that preferential loves are most likely to threaten ‘purified’ neighbour-love (and so focuses his energy there), I think he would endorse the view that non-preferential love is not ipso facto ‘pure’.

IV 

‘Preserving the concrete’

To flesh out the claims above, let us now consider, in a bit more detail, how Kierkegaard ‘preserves the concrete’ or the specifics of particular ‘special relationships’. We can usefully draw on Ferreira in doing so.81 81 One important difference between Ferreira’s reading of Works of Love and that of several other commentators is that according to her, the decisive shift in the text comes not  – as many

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Key to this are the moves Kierkegaard makes in those deliberations chiefly concerned with the second part of the third deliberation’s distinction between ‘law’ and ‘love’.82 Ferreira notes that Kierkegaard describes ‘the distinction between “the law” and “love” as a contrast between a[n artist’s] “sketch” and its fulfilment in the “work”.’83 Moreover, Kierkegaard adds that the sketch ‘remains “indefinite” until the work is finished, when we can say that ‘there is not the slightest indefiniteness, not of a single line nor of a single point’ (WL 104/SKS 9 108). Is it not reasonable to suppose that something similar is at work between the category of the neighbour  – the ‘common watermark’ of humanity that troubles those critics who accuse Kierkegaard of excessive abstraction – and the specific, concrete aspects and manifestations of love with which, Ferreira argues, the bulk of the book is concerned?84 The ‘You shall love’ of the commandment and the very category of the neighbour is given to us in the parts of the first series concerned with clarifying the concepts and scope of the commandment. But, according to Ferreira, such clarification of scope is only a preliminary to an increasing focus on concreteness.85 Perhaps then, supplementing my ‘God ­filter’ imagery above, neighbour-love is not only the liquid that ‘permeates’ other liquids (such as romantic love, friendship and self-love) in their ‘purified’ form, but is – to switch metaphors – only a ‘sketch’ until it is brought to fruition in any given manifestation of (‘purified’) love. And some such manifestations will be examples of romantic love, Krishek’s central concern. This second metaphor (of sketches and fully realised artistic works) is one dimension of the centrality of ‘vision’ in this deliberation (amongst others). Ferreira suggests: ‘probably the most decisive positive discussion of ethics as a kind of seeing is found in this fourth deliberation, where to be ethical is to see the other just as he or she is, in all his or her distinctive claim – between the first and second series, but between III B and IV in the first series. From this point on, she claims, the discussion is reoriented ‘toward the concreteness of “actuality” and what is “seen”’ (Ferreira 2001: 98). 82 Ferreira 2001: 100.  83  Ibid. 84 It is worth noting Kierkegaard’s imagery here. Similar to the ‘common watermark’ image is that of a silhouette: ‘just as there is always something indefinite in the shadow, so also there is something indefinite in the silhouette of the Law, no matter how accurately this is carried out’ (WL 104/SKS 9 108). 85 Ferreira claims that the tripartite second deliberation constitutes ‘law’: ‘the description of a rule for determining the category “neighbor” – “all” has the force of “no exceptions”. The purpose of these chapters is not to delineate the character of a substantive response to the other but to delimit a category by stipulating that no one can be excluded from this category on the basis of difference or dissimilarity … The analysis of the rule (the sketch or the skeleton) is not meant to give us a complete picture of his view of love’ (Ferreira 2001: 102, my emphasis).

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concreteness.’86 If it is right that this is central to Kierkegaard’s overall purpose, then it follows that one’s lover cannot just be one’s neighbour, and there are further reasons to resist Krishek’s objection to the alleged lack of enthusiasm with which Kierkegaard embraces concreteness or ‘special’ loves. Ferreira argues that Kierkegaard preserves this concreteness in several ways. First, he urges us to avoid becoming victims of our own fantasies. He urges us to love the person we see, not ‘the self-generated image of the other person’;87 ‘an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be’ (WL 164/SKS 9 164, emphasis in original). Second, ‘loving the person one sees’ does not imply being utterly blind to their faults. Love can be challenging as well as accepting, but it can do this only if it loves the actual person it sees.88 In this context, Ferreira draws our attention to Kierkegaard’s reminder of Christ’s comment on Peter in the wake of the latter’s betrayal. He did not say, ‘Peter must first change and become another person before I can love him again.’ No, he said exactly the opposite, ‘Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything, will help him to become another person.’ Therefore he did not break off the friendship in order perhaps to renew it if Peter would have become another person; no, he preserved the friendship unchanged and in that way helped Peter to become another person. (WL 172/SKS 9 172)

Third, Ferreira claims that the message that God’s love should be the model for ‘true human love’ implies that the latter, like the former, should focus on ‘concrete differences’.89 She draws our attention to part of the following passage: With what infinite love nature or God in nature encompasses all the diverse things in existence! Just recollect what you yourself have so often delighted in looking at, recollect the beauty of the meadows! There is no difference in the love, no, none – yet what a difference in the flowers! Even the least … little flower disregarded by even its immediate surroundings, the flower you can hardly find without looking carefully – it is as if this, too, had said to love: Let me become something in myself, something distinctive. And then love has helped it to become its own distinctiveness, but far more beautiful than the poor little flower had ever dared to hope for. What love! First, it makes no distinction, none at all; next … it infinitely distinguishes itself in loving the diverse. Wondrous love! For what is as difficult as to make no 86 Ferreira 2001: 106.  87  Ferreira 2001: 109. 88 Ferreira 2001: 110–11.  89  Ferreira 2001: 112.

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distinction at all in loving, and if one makes no distinction at all, what is as difficult as making distinctions! (WL 269–70/SKS 9 268, my emphasis)

He then goes on to contrast such love with that of ‘us human beings – rigid, domineering, cold, partisan, small-minded, capricious’ (WL 270/SKS 9 268), wondering what would become of the beauty of the meadows under such attitudes. This is a crucial passage for the dispute between Ferreira and Krishek. I have quoted more of it than either of them, for reasons that will shortly become apparent. Quoting part of the same passage and referring to Ferreira’s discussion of it, Krishek objects: ‘The problem with this model of love is not that it implies sameness in the object of love (or, in Ferreira’s terms, blindness to differences and concreteness)  – but rather that it implies the sameness of the love itself.’90 I have resisted this conclusion above, so I need now to explain what I think is wrong with Krishek’s reading of this specific passage. If we focus only on the phrase ‘no difference in the love’, we could indeed reach Krishek’s conclusion. But we need a more careful reading of the whole passage, and I argue that such a reading takes us much closer to Ferreira’s position. It seems clear that the intention of the overall passage is that the love described ‘makes no distinction’ in the sense that it finds everyone to be of equal intrinsic value. Yet the passage also clearly implies that this love celebrates differences and acts accordingly. (This is Ferreira’s point.) If this love is the model for our love, then the point seems to be this. Let us start with the conclusion Ferreira draws: ‘genuine human love, emulating divine love, should love the differences and build up differentially, responding to different needs.’91 This is fine as far as it goes – but we need to say more. The italicised passage  – which, interestingly, neither commentator cites – draws our attention to two distinct difficulties. First, that of making no distinctions. This is difficult because of our natural preferences for our beloveds and our friends. Second, that of making distinctions having made no distinctions! Understanding this is trickier. But it seems to be a reference to precisely the tension that Ferreira thinks Kierkegaard is trying to hold together and that Krishek thinks is the crux of the problem. The point is this: having committed myself to making no distinctions (because everyone is my neighbour), I now need to make distinctions (because what is required of me to bring out the ‘beauty’ in this neighbour [say, my beloved] is different from what is required to bring it 90 Krishek 2009: 126. 

  Ferreira 2001: 112–13.

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out of that neighbour [say, the homeless stranger begging for cash]). Is this ‘the same love’? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that these two different manifestations of love are both permeated by neighbour-love. But no in the sense that my actions and intentions towards the stranger and towards my beloved will be very different, and appropriately so, even though they are both permeated by neighbour-love. Once again, I am not sure what kind of ‘sameness’ Krishek thinks is implied here. I submit that when Kierkegaard talks of ‘making no distinctions’, he no more implies the ‘sameness’ of any two manifestations of love in any problematic sense than does Krishek herself every time she uses the phrase ‘romantic love’. It would be unfairly harsh to charge Krishek with the view that because she brings two different manifestations of love – Sue’s love for her husband, Bill’s for his wife – under the same heading (romantic love) that she is therefore claiming that these two manifestations of love are metaphysically identical. Clearly they are not. These two manifestations of love do not possess numerical identity, like George Orwell and Eric Blair. Nor are they even qualitatively identical, as if they were two carbon atoms in different substances. They are ‘the same’ only in the sense that they have significant common features. On my ‘God filter’ view, both Bill’s love for his wife and Sue’s for her husband are manifestations of love both of which contain components – if ‘purified’  – of both neighbour-love and romantic love. But the main point of the above passage is precisely that each distinct manifestation of love is importantly different from others, notwithstanding the various features they may share. Nevertheless, it is not thereby unreasonable, in common parlance, to call our two instances of love ‘romantic love’. Why, then, does Krishek assume that Kierkegaard should be criticised for implying ‘sameness’ in a similarly weak sense when he claims that Christianity ‘recognizes, really only one kind of love’, which as we have argued means, in this context, simply that neighbour-love should permeate all manifestations of love? Consider the following analogy. Suppose a guest wants a mixture of grapefruit juice and orange juice but does not like the ‘bits’ contained in the only cartons of such juice that I have. I can get rid of the ‘impurities’ by passing both juices through an appropriate filter. Both the grapefruit juice (neighbour-love) and the orange juice (romantic love) will make it through the filter; both will be contained in the liquid in its ‘purified’ form (a specific manifestation of romantic love in which the beloved is simultaneously viewed as my neighbour). Krishek is held captive by the picture that romantic love and neighbour-love are more like oil and water than these

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two juices: she cannot seem to see how the one can permeate the other. To push the liquid analogy a bit further, this seems to be because she is worried that neighbour-love ‘dilutes’ romantic love. But as far as I can see, she has provided no compelling reason to support this assumption. Moreover, in further support of an alternative picture, we can draw on a point made by Patrick Stokes. In line with those critics who are concerned about ‘the neighbour’ just being an abstract category, Stokes acknowledges that ‘the ideal needs the concrete for authentic moral concern to be possible.’92 He notes the concern of Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus about ‘fantastic feeling’ becoming ‘a kind of abstract sentimentality that inhumanly belongs to no human being, but inhumanly, so to speak, sentimentally participates in the fate of one or another abstraction, for example, humanity in abstracto’ (SUD 31 [translation slightly amended]/SKS 11 147). In other words, sympathy with, say, ‘the poor’ – an amorphous abstraction – is ‘not directed at persons … but only at the idea of persons’.93 However, there is another side to this coin: ‘the concrete too needs the ideal.’94 Stokes refers us to the account from The Sickness Unto Death of moral vision as a holding in tension of the concrete and the ideal, the actual and the imagined. In our apprehension of the other, the actual person before us is unified in our vision with the ideal claims they make upon us, neither element dissolving or collapsing into the other … we see not a person and a moral demand, but a person who constitutes, in their concrete specificity, a moral demand in themselves.95

Similarly, I suggest, with the beloved and the neighbour. Here I see not a beloved and a neighbour but a person who constitutes, in their concrete specificity (one dimension of which is that she is my beloved), a neighbour.96 If the concrete did not have this ideal (that my beloved is my neighbour as well as my beloved), there would be no guarantee that the various dangers of erotic love and friendship against which Kierkegaard warns might not come into play. That, I submit, is Kierkegaard’s position, and it is a far from unreasonable one.97 92 Stokes 2010a: 140.  93  Stokes 2010a: 139. 94 Stokes 2010a: 140.  95  Stokes 2010a: 141. 96 Jollimore points out that writers on love sometimes seem to presuppose that we want to be appreciated by our lovers either for what is distinctive about us as persons or for what is universal. His question – why not both? – is apposite here. See Jollimore 2011: Chapter 6, especially p. 134. 97 I discuss in more detail the question of how loving God above all else can be compatible with loving our friends as individuals, for their own sakes, in Lippitt 2012, drawing on Robert M. Adams’s account of how genuine love for creatures can be a reflection of trusting love for God.

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V  Beyond the ‘Levinasian’? We have seen that both Ferreira and Krishek recognise the importance of self-love in their discussions. But in this final section, I shall suggest that both commentators, in my view, tend to concede a little too much to the ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard: a tendency, against his important insight to the contrary, sometimes to imply that the other should be prioritised over the self in such a way that the self is purely instrumental for, even sometimes held ransom by, the other. In Krishek’s case, this is a relatively minor slip, since it is precisely such an ideal of total selflessness that she – sensibly – wants to avoid endorsing. Considering this will bring to light a question that is important for this project (as well as Krishek’s): in what way can the self be properly valued in the context of neighbour-love? What do I mean by the ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard? The asymmetry between the self and the other in Levinas’s view comes out particularly clearly in the following remarks: I am responsible for the other, without waiting for his reciprocity, even if it should cost me my life. Reciprocation – that is his business. It is precisely to the extent that the relation between the other and me is not reciprocal that I am in subjection to the other; and I am ‘subject’ essentially in this sense. It is I who support everything.98

Compare here his earlier remark that ‘goodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself.’99 This asymmetry has been subject to considerable criticism from Paul Ricoeur and others: we shall briefly consider Ricoeur’s critique in Chapter 6. Ferreira’s ‘official’ position is that there is an important difference between Kierkegaard and Levinas on this point.100 She argues that whereas Levinas claims that ‘one must love the neighbor more than the self ’, Kierkegaard insists on the equality between self and other.101 Kierkegaard’s commitment to the equality of all leads to the position that I should neither forget myself in the way Levinas commends nor love the other more than myself. Yet Ferreira also seems keen to show that the difference between them is not so stark and highlights some passages where Kierkegaard sounds at his most Levinasian (‘In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you – it does not concern you … You 98 Levinas 1990: 161.  99  Levinas 1969: 247. 100 See, for instance, Ferreira 1998a: 41–59.  101  Ferreira 1998a: 51.

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have only to do with what you do unto others, or how you take what others do unto you’ [WL 383–4/SKS 9 376]102). Both affirm our ‘infinite debt’ to the other and are concerned that it must not be ‘diluted or mitigated’.103 But what about the opposite concern, that this debt might be exaggerated, as in ‘martyr complex’ cases and related instances of excessive or inappropriate self-sacrifice (to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6)? Ferreira’s discussion of this is other-focused: when Kierkegaard denies that we should love another more than ourselves, he is denying ‘a particular kind of willingness to do or give whatever the other asks for when it is a “harmful thing”’.104 But doesn’t focusing exclusively on the other miss something important about the valorisation of proper self-love? Similarly, Ferreira’s discussion of the limits of self-sacrifice notes ‘a duty to maintain the self in order to have something to give to the other’.105 Am I then of only instrumental value? (This does sometimes seem to be Ferreira’s position: ‘we can … derive our responsibility to ourselves from the responsibility to the other, who needs our support.’106) Ultimately, I would argue that we need to be more robust in the defence of proper self-love than Ferreira sometimes seems willing to be. (The importance I shall attach to self-respect in later chapters amounts to a willingness to bite Levinas’s bullet and declare that one does have a right to a ‘place in the sun’.) For instance, if ‘fulfillment of the commandment to love an other implies, requires, genuine love of self ’, can such love be achieved by viewing oneself simply as one neighbour amongst many?107 Or must such genuine self-love also encompass a specific relation to one’s own self and its projects that one cannot have towards any other? I think that Krishek, like myself, would want to answer this second question in the affirmative. Yet in her discussion of the third kind of self-love, her (c), ‘proper unqualified self-love’, with its talk of a ‘constant consideration of the good of the other’, perhaps Krishek also concedes too much to a broadly ‘Levinasian’ view of the other. Certainly, her account of what neighbour-love demands seems exaggerated with respect to many such cases. When I love the neighbour, she claims, I indeed deny myself by focusing my entire attention on the neighbour. I thus see him as an equal and discern the infinite value pervading him 102 Cited in Ferreira 1998a: 54, Ferreira’s emphasis. 103 Ferreira 2001: 125.  104  Ferreira 2001: 131. 105 Ferreira 2001: 135, my emphasis.  106  Ferreira 2001: 136. 107 Ferreira 1998a: 52.

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The problem of special relationships by virtue of his being a human being with a whole world of his own: a world full of emotions and dreams and sorrows and hopes. To be capable of seeing this is not easy. Too often we are so preoccupied with ourselves, with our world … that we do not, cannot, genuinely see the neighbour, let alone care about him. The first movement is therefore necessarily the one of self-renunciation, self-denial. We are obliged to deny ourselves, to empty ourselves, to clear our sight and widen our horizon so that we can truly see the neighbour: see him as an equal, as a human being just like ourselves, as infinitely valuable.108

Should we accept this picture? First, note that it is not clear that anything as strong as ‘self-emptying’ is necessarily required in order to see the neighbour. Don’t I at least sometimes achieve this genuine ‘seeing’ when I am truly and genuinely moved, say, to give generously to a charity appeal?109 Yet I can do this at the same time as recognising that I need to feed, clothe and otherwise take care of myself, so the claim about devoting my ‘entire attention’ to the neighbour in such an act of seeing smacks of hyperbole. Note that in this passage we move from talk of what is alleged ‘too often’ to be the case to talk of the movement of self-denial as being necessary. But a subset of cases (‘too often’) cannot legitimate a necessity claim (unless Krishek means that this movement is necessary in only that subset of cases and then what about all the rest?). Though she does not mention him, here is one of the points at which Krishek’s account of neighbour-love does seem too ‘Levinasian’.110 I think that the overall position Krishek advocates here is best understood along the lines of what Ferreira has called love’s ‘vision’, a position that invites comparison with Iris Murdoch.111 Murdoch takes it as a given that our default state is one of egoism and illusion. Commenting approvingly on a key idea she finds in Schopenhauer (and Plato, and Christianity), she agrees ‘that we are ruthless egoists and that the world which we take as all-important and real is a valueless and unreal world’.112 Consequently Murdoch stresses the difficulty of stepping outside our own perspective to engage empathetically with the position of another (‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego’), and commends 108 Krishek 2009: 152, second emphasis mine. 109 Compare Stokes’s description of ‘you’ (as opposed to ‘me’) in the thought experiment that begins and ends his book (Stokes 2010a, especially pp. 1–2). 110 See Ferreira 1998a: 52–3 and the comments on the difference between Kierkegaard and Levinas above. 111 I am grateful to an anonymous reader for pressing me to make this comparison explicit, and to qualify my critique of Krishek on this point. 112 Murdoch 1992: 72, emphases in original.

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love (‘an exercise of the imagination’) as being precisely that which enables us to do so (‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’).113 But, as Jollimore points out, Murdoch tends to be overly pessimistic about the default state of human beings (and thus, he claims, to overrate the capacity of love). Murdoch, heavily influenced by Freud, is ‘deeply pessimistic about the human situation, holding that human beings are constantly subject to self-delusion and are therefore rarely if ever able to achieve unclouded epistemic contact with the world’.114 I wonder if Krishek is not flirting with a similarly excessive pessimism in the passage quoted above. I do not of course wish to deny that fully to occupy another’s position is difficult (and perhaps, strictly speaking, impossible). But I think that much of what both Murdoch and Krishek want us to attempt  – in Krishek’s words, to see the neighbour ‘as an equal and discern the infinite value pervading him by virtue of his being a human being with a whole world of his own: a world full of emotions and dreams and sorrows and hopes’ – may be achieved by respect, properly construed. I am unclear whether Krishek would agree. Krishek does not say precisely what she means by respect, but she certainly gives it a secondary place to love. Recall her discussion of ‘proper qualified self-love’, that ‘restricted’ form of self-love which, she claims, the commandment endorses and which is to be ‘understood in terms of respect and wishing one’s well-being, in a narrow sense’.115 I suspect this relative downgrading of respect might be because what she has in mind is what Kantians have called ‘recognition’ respect, defined by Robin S. Dillon as respect for ‘a being with the dignity that, on the Kantian view, persons as such have’.116 In fact, this, taken seriously, might actually inspire a kind of awe in the face of the other that gives Krishek what she – rightly – wants to acknowledge. But later in this book I shall further suggest that this is but one kind of respect, another – ‘evaluative’ respect – requiring us to pay far more attention to the particularity of the other: in other words, to do that which thinkers such as Murdoch and Krishek associate with love. Respect (and self-respect) deserves more careful attention in the context of love (and self-love). Recognition respect explicitly includes caring about persons to the extent of ‘helping them to pursue their ends and to satisfy their wants and needs’.117 And we should not overlook the possibility that, as Kant insists is the case, respect is itself a feeling. As Dillon 113 Murdoch 1970: 52; Murdoch 1997: 215, 216. 114 Jollimore 2011: 153. On the difficulty Murdoch would have in rebutting such objections, given her heavy reliance on an appeal to experience, see Widdows 2005: 159–61. 115 Krishek 2009: 116.  116  Dillon 2001: 66.  117  Dillon 1992a: 73.

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suggests, ‘respect is not intrinsically dispassionate: cherishing, venerating, and revering are forms of respect that involve profoundness of feeling, treasuring, love.’118 My point, for present purposes, is simply that what it takes to love one’s neighbour varies from circumstance to circumstance, and, because of this, the extent to which it requires empathetically seeing in detail from another’s viewpoint applies to different degrees in different circumstances. But this means that because acting on respect (in a manner fully consistent with self-respect) is sometimes the appropriate way of loving one’s neighbour, Krishek’s account of neighbour-love in such terms as ‘self-emptying’ amounts, in these cases, to an exaggeration. In this section, I have argued that the best way to understand the description of neighbour-love Krishek gives in the above passage is in terms of Kierkegaard’s proto-Murdochian conception of ‘love’s vision’. However, we should be careful not to exaggerate what such vision demands of us (as I think both Murdoch and Krishek sometimes do). Further, I have suggested that part of what Krishek is trying to maintain can be offered by respect, properly understood. Just as respect for the other is part of love for the other, so I shall suggest in later chapters that self-respect is a vital part of self-love. We should also keep the point about the importance of love’s (and respect’s) ‘vision’ and its capacity to take us outside ourselves separate from the Levinasian claim that the other always has priority over me, that the other’s demands always trump my own. We should not be criticised for recognising the possibility that, because we are neighbours too, our own claims have some moral weight. (On this, Krishek and I are in full agreement.) But this suggests that we may need a fuller defence of self-love than hitherto offered. I noted at the start of this chapter that the problem of self-love is part of a cluster of problems which collectively we can label the problem of ‘­special relationships’. I have argued that Kierkegaard does not reduce erotic love, friendship or self-love to neighbour-love alone, in any sense that commits him to the implausible position that my relation to my spouse or friend is identical to that to a stranger. The same will apply to my relation to myself. If Ferreira is right that the story of the Good Samaritan is supposed to show that ‘a loving response is distinctively responsive to particular needs’, this will certainly apply no less in the case of proper   Dillon 1995a: 301. See also the introduction to this collection, pp. 16–17.

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self-love.119 Both conceptually and normatively, I cannot just treat myself as ‘one amongst many’. One question raised earlier was whether proper self-love needs to encompass a specific relation to one’s own self and its projects that one cannot – in principle cannot – have towards any other. The specificity of our self-relation in the context of self-love will be one of the central topics of our next chapter.   Ferreira 2001: 93.

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Another take on self-love

An excursus on Harry Frankfurt

In the previous chapter we raised worries about the self being treated as of purely instrumental value and raised the possible need to make a more robust defence of the self ’s needs and projects. One recent attempt to do this in the context of self-love is Harry Frankfurt’s in The Reasons of Love. Frankfurt is a thinker whom several (most notably John Davenport) have recently connected with Kierkegaard in numerous ways. Like Kierkegaard, Frankfurt aims to draw a distinction between proper and improper forms of self-love. In this chapter, I shall outline Frankfurt’s account of self-love. Though I shall highlight some significant difficulties with it, some key themes will emerge from a critical discussion of Frankfurt. First, how love entails commitment and commitment entails some kind of appropriate self-relation. Second, how it nevertheless turns out that self-love necessarily points outside the self. Third, a point already touched upon, how love, not just for the self but for others, can involve self-interest without being based upon it in a ‘merely selfish’ way. I shall then consider a suggestion made by Sylvia Walsh that the problem with Frankfurt’s account is that it lacks a concept of self-denial. In Chapter 6, I shall argue that the account of self-denial that Walsh attributes to Kierkegaard has very significant problems of its own, before drawing upon some recent work in feminist thought to sketch some of the considerations that need to be borne in mind in offering a satisfactory account of self-denial or self-sacrifice. Self-respect will emerge as an important theme. Self-love – the topic of its third and final chapter – plays a crucial role in Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love. Contrary to what he anticipates will be most people’s intuitions, Frankfurt claims that it is, in fact, the purest form of love. True self-love is, he claims, ‘the deepest and most essential – and by no means the most readily attainable – achievement of a serious and successful life’.1   Frankfurt 2004: 68.

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Frankfurt clearly expects his reader to find this claim surprising, even shocking, essentially because many people consider that ‘the propensity to self-love is both ubiquitous and essentially ineradicable’ and that this is a ‘grievously injurious defect of human nature’.2 On this view, self-love is so ‘natural’ that it can hardly be judged an achievement to possess it. Rather, the achievement is precisely to get beyond it. Frankfurt associates this view with Kant, and the title of this chapter, ‘The Dear Self ’, comes from a quote from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. At the beginning of the second section of that text, Kant is discussing the opacity of human motivation. Famously, for Kant, performing an action which is motivated by nothing more than desire or inclination has no moral worth. Why should I be given any moral credit for doing something just because I feel inclined to do it? For instance, if I am a naturally generous or kind person, why should my generosity or kindness be judged as meritorious when all I am doing is acting on this natural inclination? Kant wonders whether ‘true virtue can really be found anywhere in the world’ and suggests: From love of humankind I am willing to admit that even most of our actions are in conformity with duty; but if we look more closely at the intentions and aspirations in them, we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this that their purpose is based, not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial.3

What worries Kant, in other words, is an improper sort of self-love. Indeed, after making what for him is a crucial distinction, between actions done from duty (which he claims have moral worth) and actions done merely in accordance with duty (which he claims do not), Kant remarks that some philosophers have denied the reality of the disposition to act from duty ‘and ascribed everything to more or less refined self-love’.4 Kant here associates self-love with ‘the frailty and impurity of human nature’ and describes it as a ‘covert impulse’.5 It is precisely this point on which Frankfurt wants to challenge Kant. The latter’s view of self-love is, Frankfurt charges, ‘significantly out of focus’.6 But we need not get involved in a detailed discussion of Kant’s views on self-love specifically, since, as we already know, Kant is but one representative of a long tradition of scepticism or downright hostility to 2 Frankfurt 2004: 71. 3 Kant 1996b: 62 (4: 407). I quote here from a different edition of the Groundwork to that used by Frankfurt. 4 Kant 1996b: 61 (4: 406).  5  Ibid. (4: 406–7).  6  Frankfurt 2004: 77.

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certain varieties of self-love. Thus the following challenge which Frankfurt directs at Kant has a target wider than Kant alone: what is so embarrassing or so unfortunate about our propensity to love ourselves? Why should we regard it with any sort of righteous sorrow or distaste, or presume that it is somehow a dreadful obstacle to the attainment of our most proper goals? Why should we think of self-love as being at all an impediment to the sort of life at which we ought reasonably to aim?7

Here Frankfurt explicitly cites the second love commandment – commanded by someone ‘whose moral authority compares quite favourably to Kant’s’8 – that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves, making the by now familiar but important point that this presupposes that we love ourselves. Thus, Frankfurt, like Kierkegaard, recognises that the commandment sets up self-love, at least of a certain kind, as an ideal that should guide the conduct of our lives. Yet perhaps this already reveals that Frankfurt has no right to expect us to be shocked by his valorisation of self-love. As we noted in Chapter 1, far more positive views of self-love than the one Kant expresses in the above passages can easily be found, in folk wisdom, philosophical and theological writing on love. Frankfurt is not so much of a lone wolf as he implies. What then is distinctive about his view of self-love? Frankfurt’s emphasis, unsurprisingly to experienced readers of his work, pertains to will and volition. He distinguishes self-love as he understands and commends it (call this Frankfurtian proper self-love) with self-indulgence, the latter being characterised as being moved by whichever of one’s inclinations or desires happens to be strongest at a given time.9 In his various discussions of love, Frankfurt gives a central role to the love of parents for a small child, and The Reasons of Love is no exception. Good parents take care not to indulge their child, not to give the child whatever he or she happens to want simply because the child wants it. ‘Rather, they show their love by being concerned about what is genuinely important to their children – in other words, by aiming to protect and advance their children’s true interests.’10 Frankfurtian proper self-love follows essentially the same model. It is shown by a person ‘protecting and advancing what he takes to be his own true interests, even when doing so frustrates desires Ibid. In fact, Kant’s view of self-love is more nuanced than Frankfurt’s discussion of it acknowledges. Kant explicitly makes room for a more positive variety of self-love, ‘rational self-love’, rooted in ‘benevolence towards oneself ’, which in the Critique of Practical Reason he contrasts with ‘self-conceit’ (Kant 1996a: 199 [5: 73]). For a helpful discussion of the importance to Kant of loving and respecting the self well, see Grenberg 2005, especially Chapters 1 and 6. 8 Frankfurt 2004: 77.  9  Frankfurt 2004: 78.  10  Frankfurt 2004: 79. 7

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by which he is powerfully moved but that threaten to divert him from that goal’.11 In this sense, Kant’s real worry about the ‘dear self ’, on Frankfurt’s reading, is that it wants to be indulged, not truly loved. This leads Frankfurt into a closer analysis of the nature of self-love, in which he applies to it the four ‘conceptually necessary features’ that he has earlier in the book argued to be essential to any form of love. These are: (1) ‘a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved’, that is, however, (2) ‘ineluctably personal’.12 The lover (3) ‘identifies with his beloved’ in the sense of taking the beloved’s interests as his own, so that if those interests are served he benefits; if they are not, he suffers. Finally, loving (4) ‘entails constraints on the will … Love is not a matter of choice but is determined by conditions that are outside our immediate voluntary control.’13 A consideration of these characteristics leads Frankfurt to argue that self-love ‘is in a certain way the purest of all modes of love’.14 It is so not because it is especially noble but because it is ‘most likely to be unequivocal and unalloyed’.15 Let us explore each of these features in more detail. I shall consider (2) to (4) first, since (1) takes us to the heart of a matter that will occupy us, in one way or another, for the rest of this chapter. By ‘ineluctably personal’, Frankfurt means essentially that the beloved is non-fungible. When a second child is born to a couple whose three-year-old child has died in a road accident, it would be monstrous to say that the second child has ‘replaced’ – made up for, without remainder – the first.16 Similarly, Frankfurt argues, in the case of self-love, it is ‘even more obvious’ that we view ourselves as non-fungible: ‘suppose someone comes to believe that another person resembles him closely. The similarity will hardly tempt him to love the other person as he loves himself.’17 We do not love ourselves because we possess characteristics ‘that might be possessed equally by others’.18 What of (3), taking the interests of the beloved as one’s own? Frankfurt takes the relevance of this to self-love to be obvious: ‘For someone who loves himself, needless to say, his own interests and those of his beloved are identical. His identification with the interests of his beloved obviously 11 Ibid.  12  Ibid. 13 Frankfurt 2004: 80; Frankfurt discusses this point in more detail in ‘Autonomy, Necessity and Love’ (1999: 135–6). 14 Frankfurt 2004: 80.  15  Ibid. 16 The same is true of our love of animals. Consider the callousness of the person who mused, of the vet bill my parents paid for their labrador’s injured leg, ‘Couldn’t you have bought another one, with all the money you’ve spent on that one?’ 17 Frankfurt 2004: 81.  18  Ibid.

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need not contend with the discrepancies, the uncertainties, or the hesitations that inevitably occur in other sorts of love.’19 Consider two points here. First, we can question whether loving someone really does entail ‘taking their interests as your own’ – literally identifying with them – as opposed to taking their interests seriously, factoring them into your life and so on. I have two reasons for preferring this weaker formulation. As previously noted, there is a form of ‘taking your interests as my own’ that is psychologically unhealthy in so far as it involves making myself a ‘doormat’ in relation to you, and whatever proper self-love is it surely does not include this. Also, it may be more praiseworthy to support the beloved’s interests when one does not identify with them oneself.20 Second, consider a related but distinct point, insufficiently acknowledged by Frankfurt. There are people who we might say love themselves in the right spirit, but incompletely. Frankfurt does acknowledge a related point to this, in noting the existence of extreme cases  – the ‘wantonly indifferent, or severely depressed, or mindlessly self-indulgent’  – who ‘do not care at all about themselves’.21 But what I have in mind is not so much these extreme cases, nor the variety of improper self-love Frankfurt does acknowledge (self-indulgence). Rather, I am thinking of those  – ­discussed with particular insight by certain feminist thinkers  – whose sense of their own identity is insufficiently clear for it to be true to say that they ‘need not contend with the discrepancies, … uncertainties, … or hesitations that inevitably occur in other sorts of love’. On the contrary, such ‘­discrepancies’ and ‘hesitations’ can arise in the case of self-love too. Perhaps such a person would count, for Frankfurt, as ‘ambivalent’ rather than ‘wholehearted’, a distinction to which we shall return. For the time being, I merely trail these objections, but we shall return to them in more detail later. This second point connects with a possible objection to Frankfurt’s gloss on (4), the constraints love places on the will. Here Frankfurt assumes that ‘We are moved more naturally to love ourselves, and more heedlessly, than we are moved to love other things’, and that this inclination is ‘exceptionally difficult’ to overcome.22 This parallels Kierkegaard’s assumption about our ‘natural’ loves, but again it can be questioned in the cases of people whose problem is precisely that they find themselves difficult to love. 19 Ibid. 20 Recall our discussion of the ‘drawing’ view of friendship in Chapter 2, especially the example of Iris. 21 Frankfurt 2004: 84.  22  Frankfurt 2004: 81.

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Let us return to (1). What does Frankfurt mean by ‘disinterested’? This may seem an odd word to use in the context of love. Indeed, in his earlier essay ‘On Caring’, Frankfurt expresses reservations about this term. (We should note that Frankfurt views love as a particular mode of caring.23) He uses the term ‘disinterested’ in opposition to being motivated by prudence. In other words, it refers to the absence of any ulterior aim in the lover’s concern for his beloved. However, Frankfurt worries that the term might sound ‘colorless and lacking in personal warmth’, as love typically involves ‘a kind of passion and urgency that disinterestedness appears to preclude’.24 The contrast drawn in Chapter 1 of The Reasons of Love helps with this clarification. There, Frankfurt claims that ‘Love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it’, contrasting this with a case in which someone cares about social justice because it diminishes the likelihood of riots.25 Similarly, we might also think of the employer who cares about his employee’s health, say, only qua employee, on the grounds that healthy workers tend to be more productive workers. To say that I have a disinterested concern for my beloved, then, is to say that there is no impure, merely instrumental agenda to my caring for her. ‘For the lover, the condition of his beloved is important in itself, apart from any bearing that it may have on other matters.’26 But we need to say more here. John Davenport’s recent discussion of Frankfurt clarifies some important matters pertaining to our concerns.27 As Davenport notes, Frankfurt claims that though it typically involves strong feelings and beliefs, ‘the heart of love’, as he uses the term, is neither affective (‘having feelings of a certain type’) nor cognitive (that is, judging or appreciating the inherent value of the beloved) but volitional.28 And for Frankfurt volitional love is, as Davenport puts it, ‘“active” in much the same way that Kant believed the will to be active in resisting temptation for the sake of duty or treating persons as ends’.29 Whereas love is passive, for Frankfurt, ‘when the lover is motivated by an expectation that obtaining or continuing to possess the object of his love will be beneficial to him … his love is conditional upon his attribution to his beloved of a capacity to improve the condition of his life.’30 Passive love is, therefore, notes Davenport, at least formally egoistic. Whereas this is not true of active, volitional love, since love ‘need not be based upon self-interest … Loving of any variety implies conduct that is designed to be beneficial to 23 Frankfurt 1999: 165.  24  Frankfurt 1999: 167. 25 Frankfurt 2004: 42.  26  Ibid. 27 See Davenport 2007, especially Chapter 13. 28 Frankfurt 1999: 129.  29  Davenport 2007: 470. 

  Frankfurt 1999: 133.

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the beloved object. In active love, the lover values this activity for its own sake instead of for the advantages that he himself may ultimately derive from it’.31 But the crucial question is whether, in most actual instances of love, this distinction can be drawn in anything other than a formal or theoretical sense. To explore this, recall first our point in Chapter 4 that in many – perhaps most – cases self-interest and the interests of others may be practically impossible to tease apart. As Robert M. Adams points out, self-regard of various kinds is ubiquitous in human motivation: The class of self-regarding motives is very wide  – so wide that they are probably involved in almost all our actions. Desiring a relationship for its own sake – whether one desires the continuance of one’s marriage, or to be a good parent or friend to so-and-so – is always a self-regarding motive, inasmuch as the relationship essentially involves oneself. Likewise conscientiousness is a self-regarding motive, inasmuch as it is a commitment to act rightly oneself.32

Second, in addition to this contingent yet important fact, a key aspect of love may make drawing this distinction impossible in principle. To love someone involves a commitment to them. Davenport suggests, in line with what he calls the ‘existential tradition’ (which he supports in partial correction of Frankfurt), a sense of ‘commitment’ according to which ‘committing is an act with the same intentional content as promising or contracting: the agent binds himself to do, say, or deliver something.’33 This entails a ‘backward-looking consideration’ for my future actions and decisions: I have a prima facie duty to keep my promise to you because I promised. Crucially, Davenport notes, Commitments of this most primordial kind are volitional in nature; although they are commitments to something or someone outside the self, they also involve a reflexive or intrasubjective relation-to-self. The agent binds herself not to others (as in promises) but, rather, to herself, forming the sort of higher-order volitional disposition that proves central to caring, on Frankfurt’s account.34

(The reference to a higher-order volitional disposition is to my desires or cares about my desires or cares. For instance, in Frankfurt’s much-discussed example, an unwilling drug addict may want his next fix but desperately 31 Davenport 2007: 470.  32  Adams 2006: 100.  33  Davenport 2007: 473. 34 Ibid. Actually, promises might also have this relation-to-self dimension: consider Nietzsche’s account of the ‘sovereign individual’ as the animal with ‘the prerogative to promise’. Nietzsche 2007: second essay, especially Sections 1–2.

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not want to want his next fix. Having ‘second order volitions’ is, for Frankfurt, essential to being a person.35) If Davenport is right, and love entails such commitment (and I think he is), then some kind of appropriate self-relation is necessary in any kind of love. Now Frankfurt himself recognises this point when he notes: love is in a certain way reflexive. Insofar as a person loves something, the fact that he cares about it as he does requires that he must care similarly about how he acts in matters that concern it. Because love entails that the lover has certain volitional attitudes toward the object of his love, it also entails that he has the corresponding volitional attitudes towards himself. In the very nature of the case, he cannot be indifferent to how what he does affects his beloved. To the extent that he cares about the object of his love, therefore, he necessarily cares about his own conduct as well. Caring about his beloved is tantamount, then, to caring about himself. In being devoted to the well-being of his beloved as an ideal goal, the lover is thereby devoted to an effort to realize a corresponding ideal in himself – namely the ideal of living a life that is devoted to the interests and ends of his beloved.36

But would we be right to read this as meaning devoted only to her interests and ends (and to his own only in so far as they are hers)? An earlier passage suggests so: to leave the dear self behind it is not necessary, as [Kant] supposes, to renounce all interests. We need not render ourselves volitionally pure. We can keep our interests, as long as they are disinterested. What is essential for leaving the dear self behind is not that the will be pure or impersonal, but only that it be selfless.37

If this is indeed Frankfurt’s line, then it is problematic. First, I think the term ‘selfless’ is best avoided  – as does Frankfurt himself, according to what he says elsewhere. In his essay ‘On Caring’, one of Frankfurt’s reasons to prefer the term ‘disinterested’ to ‘selfless’ is that the scope of the latter is ‘insufficiently inclusive. What is essential to the lover’s concern for his beloved is not only that it must be free of any self-regarding motive but that it must have no ulterior aim whatsoever.’38 But whatever term we choose, there is a problem here. In claiming that ‘we can keep our interests, as long as they are disinterested’, Frankfurt is claiming that we can avoid egregious selfishness if we take an entirely ‘disinterested interest’ 35 See Frankfurt 1988: 11–25.  36  Frankfurt 1999: 138–9. 37 Frankfurt 1999: 134–5. 38 Frankfurt 1999: 167. I have reasons other than this for wanting to avoid the term, as will become clearer in Chapter 6.

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in the well-being of the beloved. But is this coherent? Frankfurt attempts to make sense of this (albeit by obscuring the distinction he attempted to draw above) as follows: ‘The appearance of conflict between pursuing one’s own interests and being selflessly devoted to the interests of another is dispelled once we appreciate that what serves the self-interest of the lover is nothing other than his selflessness’, which in turn depends upon ‘caring selflessly about the well-being of a beloved … Accordingly, the benefit of loving accrues to a person only to the extent that he cares about his beloved disinterestedly, and not for the sake of any benefit that he may derive either from the beloved or from loving it.’39 But this is hardly an adequate answer to our scepticism above (and in Chapter 4) about how in practice these may be teased apart. There is an epistemological worry about how we could ever know that our motives were so ‘pure’. But there is also a perhaps deeper point. The general picture painted above by the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ love might remind us of the distinction, central to Lewis’s The Four Loves, between need-love and gift-love.40 Lewis describes the typical examples of each as follows. Gift-love is ‘that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing’; need-love ‘that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms’.41 But Lewis expands the latter idea to incorporate any need for nurture, attention, company or ‘completion’. While these can clearly have odious manifestations, such as a perverse and selfish craving for attention, Lewis insists that he ‘cannot deny the name love to Need-love’.42 Crucially for our purposes, he says that not to feel need-love ‘is in general the mark of the cold egoist’.43 Presumably his concern is an unwarranted sense of independence from others.44 Now, Frankfurt too does not deny the word ‘love’ to passive love, but it certainly has a secondary place in his hierarchy. He is clearly committed to some version of the gift-love/need-love distinction: caring, and thus love, in his preferred sense is not instrumental, nor is it focused on any part of one’s own good.45 But this means that Frankfurt does not seriously 39 Frankfurt 2004: 61. 40 This distinction is also, of course, vital to Nygren in Agape and Eros, and Lewis’s book was in significant part a response to Nygren’s theology of love. 41 Lewis 1960: 1.  42  Lewis 1960: 2.  43  Lewis 1960: 3. 44 In an insightful discussion of pride, Gabriele Taylor notes this as a feature of the ‘arrogantly proud’. See Taylor 2006. 45 See, for instance, the discussion of selflessness in ‘The Importance of What We Care About’ and of active and passive love in ‘Autonomy, Necessity and Love’ (Frankfurt 1999, especially p. 133). I am grateful to John Davenport for discussion of this point.

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entertain the possibility that a failure to recognise our requirement for ‘need-love’ or passive love might be a failure to recognise the kind of creatures that we are.46 And if this is indeed true of us, then what becomes of the distinction Frankfurt is trying to draw? It is worth noting that Lewis says that he started off aiming to disparage need-love and praise gift-love, before he realised that matters are more complicated than he originally envisaged. And if we follow this shift in Lewis’s thinking, we may well end up with the view that need-love, as well as being a genuine form of love, aims at what is truly good for us. Man’s love for God, especially, says Lewis, is ‘largely’ and often ‘entirely’ need-love. Indeed, ‘our whole being by its very nature is one vast need’ for God.47 Kierkegaard expresses a similar view in the very first deliberation of Works of Love. Observing one’s reluctance to be described as a ‘needy person’, he responds: Yet we are saying the utmost when we say of the poet, ‘He has a need to write’; of the orator, ‘He has a need to speak’; and of the young woman, ‘She has a need to love’. Ah, how rich was even the neediest person who has ever lived, but who still has had love, compared with him, the only real pauper, who went through life and never felt a need for anything! This is precisely the young woman’s greatest riches, that she needs the beloved; and this is the devout man’s greatest and his true riches, that he needs God. (WL 11/SKS 9 18–19)48

The point here is twofold. First, I suspect that talk of ‘disinterested interest’ is typically self-deception.49 But second, love – not just self-love, but love for another – can properly involve self-interest (and not only in Frankfurt’s ‘disinterested’ sense) without being based upon it in a ‘merely selfish’ way. The wider point here is that most actual loves are more complex in nature than Frankfurt’s rather formal distinctions seem able to accommodate. In further support of this claim, consider Frankfurt’s comparison 46 I think that Kierkegaard would argue that what has led Frankfurt to this position is an excessive concern with autonomy. Again, see especially ‘Autonomy, Necessity and Love’. 47 Lewis 1960: 3. 48 Similarly, in one of his discourses on ‘The woman who was a sinner’ from Luke’s gospel, Kierkegaard says this: ‘If someone were to say: Yet there was something self-loving in this woman’s love; after all, in her need she still basically still loved herself. If someone were to talk that way, I would answer: Naturally, and then add, God help us, there is no other way, and then add, God forbid that I would ever presume to want to love my God or my Savior in any other way, because if there were literally no self-love in my love, then I would no doubt be only imagining that I could love them without standing in need of them – and from this blasphemy may God preserve me!’ (WA 142/SKS 11 278) 49 Sylvia Walsh (2009) convincingly suggests that this would be Kierkegaard’s judgement. See also Davenport’s argument against Frankfurt on this point (Davenport 2007: especially pp. 446–7).

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between self-love and parental love. We have noted that in several of his discussions of love Frankfurt claims that the love of parents for their small children helpfully illuminates the nature of self-love. The former kind of love is, he claims, ‘comparably (though not equally) pure’.50 Further, Parents generally care about the good of their small children in a way that is exclusively non-instrumental. They value it only for its own sake. This is also characteristic of the way in which people are devoted to their own good. In neither case is it usual for the lover to anticipate or to intend that his efforts to protect or to advance the interests of his beloved will be useful in bringing about some further benefit as well.51

I suggest that this is false in both cases. In the case of self-love, I do not wish to question that it is indeed usual to hold one’s own good as something of intrinsic value, but I do want to question the ‘only’. Many of us, surely, have a deep desire and need to be part of causes ‘larger than ourselves’, such that our self-love does indeed have an instrumental, as well as an intrinsic, value. Indeed, matters get very complicated, in that this ‘self-transcending’ dimension might be part of what ‘our own good’ actually is. So again, self-love is not as pure and unalloyed as Frankfurt suggests. In the case of parental love, Frankfurt has a strong tendency to idealise this kind of love (while being perhaps too pessimistic or cynical about the potential of romantic love at its best).52 ‘Pushy’ parents, who are forever making comparisons between their children and those of others, to some extent aiming to live vicariously through the successes of their children, are regrettably more common than Frankfurt seems prepared to admit. This can start very early.53 Such parents hardly match Frankfurt’s rather idealised picture, in which the parent’s ‘interest in the child is entirely disinterested. It can be satisfied completely and only by the satisfaction of interests that are altogether distinct from and independent of his own. 50 Frankfurt 2004: 82. 51 Frankfurt 2004: 83, first emphasis mine. 52 In Chapter 2 of The Reasons of Love, Frankfurt says: ‘It is important to avoid confusing love … with infatuation, lust, obsession, possessiveness, and dependency in their various forms. In particular, relationships that are primarily romantic or sexual do not provide very authentic or illuminating paradigms of love as I am construing it. Relationships of those kinds typically include a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern, but that are so confusing that they make it impossible for anyone to be clear about just what is going on’ (Frankfurt 2004: 43). 53 Consider, for example, the hideously tasteless beauty contests for little girls so well satirised in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. See also Kierkegaard’s remarks on the limitations of parental love at WL 349–50/SKS 9 343.

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The interest that moves the devoted parent is unquestionably personal, but it is also utterly selfless.’54 So what is the nature of genuine self-love, for Frankfurt? His answer is that the heart of self-love is the same as any other form of genuine love, and this, as we have seen, is that ‘the lover cares about the good of his beloved for its own sake.’55 At the core of self-love is ‘a disinterested concern for whatever it is that the person loves’.56 But here things start to get more complicated, and Frankfurt seems at least partially to anticipate the above objection that he is drawing too sharp a distinction between self-love and love for others. His account of self-love now starts to point outside the self in a certain sense. For self-love ‘is necessarily derivative from, or constructed out of, the love that people have for things that are not identical with themselves’.57 This follows from earlier claims in The Reasons of Love, related to the key Frankfurtian theme of ‘the importance of what we care about’. In Chapter 1, he claims: It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance … The totality of the various things that a person cares about – together with his ordering of how important to him they are  – effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live.58

In other words, there is a necessary connection between loving oneself and loving the things that one cares about, the things that give one’s life meaning. Thus, Frankfurt is forced to acknowledge the possibility that ‘it cannot be quite correct after all to regard self-love as a condition in which the lover and the beloved are strictly the same. A person cannot love himself except insofar as he loves other things.’59 This is an important concession. But there are further complications. Another involves a central Frankfurtian concern already alluded to: the way in which the self may be divided against itself such that it is impossible to say what a person really loves. Frankfurt’s term for this is ‘ambivalence’, whereas the orientation of the will he commends is ‘wholeheartedness’. Resolving the conflict posed by an ambivalent, divided will requires not the eradication of one or other of the competing desires or loves, but the higher order will. Resolution requires that the person concerned ‘become finally and unequivocally clear as to which side of the conflict he 54 Frankfurt 1999: 134.  55  Frankfurt 2004: 85. 56 Ibid.  57  Ibid. 58 Frankfurt 2004: 23. Davenport has argued that Frankfurt fails to show that caring (and thus loving in his sense) is possible without commitment to believing in the objective value of the beloved person or thing. See especially Davenport 2007: Chapters 13 and 14. 59 Frankfurt 2004: 86.

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is on’.60 The will is no longer divided once he has ‘placed himself wholeheartedly behind one of his conflicting impulses, and not at all behind the other’.61 The person – ‘as an agent who has become volitionally unified’  – is now poised ‘to withstand its assault upon him’.62 Consider a conscientious dieter: sticking to a diet does not require no longer wanting the chocolate fudge cake but being able to resist the urges one recognises will be felt in the interests of the higher-order desire to lose weight. Ambivalence, by contrast, is when the person cannot decide ‘once and for all’ which side he is on and so remains ‘volitionally fragmented’.63 Ambivalence thwarts proper self-love since there is ‘no final unequivocal truth, no straightforward fact of the matter’ concerning whether or not, say, Harry really loves Sally.64 Consequently, such a person ‘is as radically ambivalent concerning himself in this matter as he is concerning her’.65 Frankfurt’s insistence on a ‘once and for all’ decision seems untrue to the complexity of matters of love. After all, it is curiously at odds with a footnote in which he seems to recognise some version of this worry. There, he says that ‘being wholehearted does not entail having a closed mind. The wholehearted person need not be a fanatic. Someone who knows without qualification where he stands may nonetheless be quite ready to give serious attention to reasons for changing that stand. There is a difference between being confident and being stubborn or obtuse.’66 Fair enough, but what this leaves unclear is what, if anything, would lead from the person giving the alternative stance ‘serious attention’ to actually changing his mind and whether such a person would still count as ‘wholehearted’. If so, what would justify this description? For if he does change his stance, then clearly his decision was not ‘once and for all’ after all. I have argued elsewhere that ambivalence has more (and wholeheartedness possibly less) to be said for it than Frankfurt allows.67 I shall not repeat those arguments here. But this unclarity about wholeheartedness matters in the present context since Frankfurt identifies genuine self-love with wholeheartedness: ‘To be wholehearted is to love oneself.’68 The ‘inner harmony of an undivided will’ allows us a certain kind of freedom, he claims. Yet, at the very end of his account, Frankfurt effectively acknowledges that this is a kind of moral luck, as he advises those who Frankfurt 2004: 91.  61  Ibid.  62  Frankfurt 2004: 92. 63 Ibid.  64  Frankfurt 2004: 93.  65  Ibid. 66 Frankfurt 2004: 95. 67 See Lippitt 2007. For a complementary argument, see Velleman 2006, especially his discussion of Freud’s Rat Man case at pp. 342–7. See also Lippitt 2013. 68 Frankfurt 2004: 95. 60

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find themselves utterly incapable of wholeheartedness not to lose their sense of humour.69 What verdict should we deliver, then, on Frankfurtian proper self-love? In the foregoing, I have offered a number of objections to Frankfurt’s account. In so doing, some important themes for our wider discussion have emerged. I have suggested that self-love is less ‘pure’ than Frankfurt suggests, in so far as there is more room within it for uncertainties, hesitations and self-doubts than Frankfurt’s picture allows. I have queried the usefulness of the distinction between ‘active’ volitional love and passive love, suggesting that the distinction it sponsors between self-interest and the interests of others may be impossible to tease apart in practice, and perhaps even impossible to do so in principle, given the nature of commitment. This again suggests that self-love is less ‘pure’ than Frankfurt claims. Even on his own account, it transpires that self-love necessarily points outside the self: it is ‘necessarily derivative from, or constructed out of, the love that people have for things that are not identical with themselves’. I have suggested that, just as Lewis’s ‘need-love’ may reveal something important about our nature as human beings, so might passive love, in which case it deserves more respect than Frankfurt’s account seems to give it. Also, we noted that love (not just for self but for others) can involve self-interest without being based upon it in a ‘merely selfish’ way. Sylvia Walsh has criticised Frankfurt’s idea of self-love as inferior to Kierkegaard’s on the grounds that the former lacks a concept of self-denial.70 In the next chapter, I turn to consider Walsh’s account of Kierkegaardian self-denial. I shall aim to show that such a view has deep problems of its own. I shall then draw on the work of several feminist philosophers and theologians, as well as Paul Ricoeur’s critique of Levinas, to argue against the overemphasis on self-denial that we sometimes find in Kierkegaard. A key aspect of proper self-love is missing in accounts that overemphasise this: proper self-respect. 69 Frankfurt 2004: 100. 70 Walsh (2009). In fact, some sort of self-denial seems presupposed by the passages from ‘Autonomy, Necessity and Love’ I quoted above.

ch apter si x

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On self-denial and its limitations

I  Kierkegaard and self-denial In the recent secondary literature on Kierkegaard, it is probably a book by Sylvia Walsh that has gone into most detail on the concept of self-denial (Selvfornægtelse or Selvfornegtelse) in Kierkegaard’s ‘second authorship’.1 Walsh devotes careful attention to a still relatively neglected portion of Kierkegaard’s work. So, a discussion of Walsh’s exegesis in this section will allow us to raise and investigate some important questions in more detail than we have hitherto. But, as will become apparent in this section, there are crucial questions about the concept of self-denial raised, but not answered, by this account. Walsh discusses the related topics of ‘dying to the world and self-denial’, along with their ‘positive’ correlates, ‘new life, love and hope in the spirit’.2 In a journal entry, Kierkegaard claims that ‘the essentially Christian is always the positive which is recognizable by the negative’ (JP 4 4680/SKS 24 NB 25: 32). And the central thesis of Walsh’s book is that for Kierkegaard Christianity involves an ‘inverse dialectic’ involving the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’. As Walsh summarises this, ‘in inverse dialectic the positive is known and expressed through the negative, what appears to be negative may be indirectly positive (and vice versa), and the positive and the negative, Christianly understood, are always the inverse of the natural, human, worldly, and pagan understandings of these terms.’3 On this view, Christian living involves a kind of life that no human being would naturally choose: a life consisting of repentance, sorrow, shame, .

1 Walsh 2005. Walsh focuses upon the 1847–51 texts in Kierkegaard’s authorship, a body of work that of course includes Works of Love. As Walsh notes, the Danish term translated as ‘self-denial’ is spelled in these two different ways in Kierkegaard’s authorship and is sometimes translated as ‘self-renunciation’ or ‘self-abnegation’. Walsh connects, though does not identify, the idea with that of ‘self-annihilation’, the recognition that ‘before God one is nothing or can do nothing by oneself ’ (Walsh 2005: 174n1). 2 Walsh 2005: 79–112.  3  Walsh 2005: 8.

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sacrifice, suffering, abasement, poverty, weakness, failure and adversity. Yet these negative characteristics are, for the Christian, aids towards willing the good and afford new, transfigured versions of life, hope, faith, selfhood and – crucially for our purposes – love. What, then, more precisely, is the role of self-denial in this story? Walsh makes much of Kierkegaard’s assertion that self-denial is ‘Christianity’s essential form’ (WL 56/SKS 9 62). She sees him as effectively defining Christian love in terms of self-denial, a key part of which is unselfishness: Christian love is self-denying love. Proper self-love is achieved inversely through the renunciation of selfishness; love of others is expressed by the transferral of one’s own desires and love of oneself to the neighbor through self-sacrifice and a willingness to endure any amount of ill for the neighbor’s sake; and love of God is shown by inwardly realizing one’s nothingness before the divine and becoming an instrument in the deity’s service.4

The relation between love and self-denial is an especially good instance, Walsh argues, of the ‘inverse dialectic’ referred to above. Kierkegaard aims to ‘correct’ the tendency of his contemporaries to assume the ‘commensurability [of Christian love] with the universally human forms and understandings of love’.5 Walsh tells us that part of becoming a self: is learning to love oneself in a Christian manner … but as in everything Christian, the positive is known and expressed through the negative and must be viewed as the inverse of the merely human or natural conception of this quality. Therefore, Christian love must be distinguished from the merely human conception of love and understood in terms of its dialectical expression in self-denial or self-renunciation.6

With these claims about the centrality of self-denial in mind, consider the explanation of such love in the penultimate lengthy quote above. (I shall comment on proper self-love as ‘the renunciation of selfishness’ in the next sub-section.) Walsh’s gloss on ‘love of others’ should trouble us. Through self-sacrifice, we ‘transfer’ our own desires and self-love properly to the neighbour. But it is far from obvious how this is consistent with the command to love ourselves: on the face of it, being prepared ‘to endure any amount of ill’ for my neighbour sounds uncomfortably close to loving the neighbour instead of myself, falling prey to Gene Outka’s ‘blank cheque’ objection. Outka raises two excellent questions, related to the worry raised with respect to Levinas in Chapter 4: whether agape allows ‘any 4 Walsh 2005: 79. 

  Walsh 2005: 80. 

5

6

  Walsh 2005: 79.

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way to differentiate between attention to another’s needs and submission to his exploitation, and any warrant for resisting the latter’.7 In other words, are there no limits to self-sacrifice? Do we just write the other a ‘blank cheque’? We shall return to this problem in Section II, but we should keep Outka’s questions in mind as we consider the rest of Walsh’s gloss on Kierkegaardian self-denial. Walsh argues that in his later literature (including Works of Love), Kierkegaard holds that Christian self-denial takes two forms. The first of these involves rooting out all ‘selfishness’ and ‘worldliness’; the second involves submitting to the world’s rejection of oneself. Let us consider each in turn and how they are connected. I.1  Selfishness and worldliness An important element of Christianity, on this view, involves ‘the killing of every selfish desire in oneself, every drive to conquer and succeed in the world’.8 Walsh notes that in For Self-Examination Kierkegaard claims that it is only through selfishness that the world has power over a person: You must die to every earthly hope, to every merely human confidence; you must die to your selfishness, or to the world, because it is only through your selfishness that the world has power over you; if you are dead to your selfishness, you are also dead to the world. (FSE 77/SKS 13 99)

As already noted, it is in Works of Love that ‘the correlation between love and self-denial in Christian existence is established’.9 Part of the issue exercising Kierkegaard, we have seen, is the danger of confusing or conflating Christian love (and the self-denial it involves) with ‘purely natural, pagan and universal human conceptions of them’.10 But Walsh continues further as follows: ‘The common practice is to regard erotic love as the highest form of love and Christian love as the highest expression of eros.’11 On Kierkegaard’s view, according to Walsh, while Christian love is indeed the highest form of love, it is ‘qualitatively different from, even the opposite of, merely human love’.12 7 Outka 1972: 21, my emphasis. 8 Walsh 2005: 90. Cf. Arnold Come’s claim that the point of Works of Love is that love of neighbour is part of the essential suffering to which a Christian is called in the abandonment of the selfish for the good. ‘It is only in this trilateral relationship that one is reconciled to God in forgiveness, that the self finds (is given) itself in the “like-for-like” from God’ (Come 1997: 214). 9 Walsh 2005: 93.  10  Walsh 2005: 94. 11 Ibid.  12  Walsh 2005: 95.

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There are several objections we should mention here. First, note the assumption that there is, clearly and unequivocally, a ‘natural’ standpoint of human beings (which, we have seen, is supposed to include self-love) and the conflation of the natural, the pagan and the ‘universal human’. It is true that one finds in Kierkegaard passages on ‘natural man’ such as this: ‘The infinite, the eternal, hence the true, is so alien to the natural man that with him it is as with the dog, which can indeed learn to walk upright for a moment but yet continually wants to walk on all fours’ (WL 244/SKS 9 245). But a tendency to simplify the complexity of the opposition by lumping disparate views together should leave us unsatisfied, as should uncritical references to such unclarities as ‘the ordinary values of human life’.13 More specifically, for our purposes, perhaps we should pause  – indeed, perhaps we should have done so before now  – over the claim that self-love in particular is ‘natural’. Adams, for instance, denies that this is so, for self-love ‘is not an instinct. Self-love is something a child is normally taught by its elders.’14 (Consider such instructions as ‘Eat your greens; they’re good for you.’) Adams points out: ‘None of us invented for ourselves the concept of our own happiness or good, which plays an essential part in self-love.’15 Second, in so far as Walsh takes the ‘natural’ standpoint to be one of selfishness, exactly what constitutes a ‘selfish’ desire? Walsh, like Kierkegaard, does not give us any detail as to what she takes ‘selfishness’ to be. This lack of clarity raises a number of issues. First, in a manner quite typical of the secondary literature, Walsh seems to use it as an inappropriately broad catch-all term. In places, she conflates the terms selfish and unselfish with egoistic and unegoistic desires and acts. But it is notoriously difficult to classify such acts with any confidence. For instance, as we noted with regard to Frankfurt, into which category do we put parental concern? Does it manifest the ‘selflessness’ Frankfurt sees in parental love, or an egoistic concern for the continuation of one’s own genes? (Recall Kierkegaard’s related remark about maternal love in Chapter 3.) Annette Baier raises some further examples: Is our pleasure in each other’s company, and our preference for a life that gives us opportunities to get some such pleasure, egoistic or nonegoistic? Is it egoistic to wish to have the respect of others? … Is the desire for revenge, even when we must bring the temple down on ourselves as well as our enemies, egoistic? Is patriotism a clear case of extended egoism, or is ‘selfless patriotism’ a possibility?16 13 Walsh 2005: 88.  14  Adams 2006: 106. 15 Ibid.  16  Baier 1992: 142–3.

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We could add still further examples. Are we to take it that anyone with a project, or any commitment at all to their own flourishing, is ‘selfish’? If so, this seems seriously to underestimate the importance of projects in a meaningful human life, a point that Kierkegaard elsewhere seems to recognise.17 According to many virtue theorists, possession of vices is damaging to the self, such that avoiding these vices and developing the countervailing virtues is in the given individual’s interest. This looks like a certain kind of ‘success in the world’: is it therefore ‘selfish’? Again, would any concern about one’s eternal ‘happiness’ (Salighed)  – a central concern of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript  – count as ‘selfish’ self-love? If I am to root out all selfishness, I’d better have a clearer idea of what this thing is that I’m supposed to be rooting out. However, it is not hard to see why ‘selfishness’ might be chosen as the opposite term to proper self-love. Indeed, Christian love is often described as ‘selfless’, a term to which ‘selfish’ looks like a natural antonym.18 But what does ‘selfish’ mean? Consider two dictionary definitions: ‘lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure’.19 ‘caring too much about oneself and not enough about others’ and/or ‘(of behaviour or attitude) motivated by self-interest’.20

These fit with the link between selfishness and exclusivity made in Kierkegaard’s critique of erotic love and friendship. They also begin to bring out what we might call the grasping, acquisitive element of selfishness. But even such basic definitions are enough to suggest that merely avoiding selfishness in this sense would not be sufficient to be able to claim properly to love oneself. The mere fact that I love and care about others as well as myself – thus avoiding the exclusivity charge – does not necessarily make my self-love ‘proper’. In order to see why not, we should note two things. First, as we noted in Chapter 3, the term ‘selfishness’ does not seem to capture many of the examples Kierkegaard himself uses 17 This is a major theme, for instance, of several of the essays in Davenport and Rudd 2001. It is a point on which several of the contributors to that volume seem to see Kierkegaard and MacIntyre as being at one. 18 For reasons that are hopefully becoming increasingly clear, I think that ‘selfless’ is in fact a rather poor choice of term to capture Christian agapic love. 19 Taken from the online Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Available from www.askoxford.com/­ concise_oed/selfish?view=uk (accessed 8 September 2011). 20 See the online Collins English Dictionary. Available from www.collinslanguage.com (accessed 8 September 2011).

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of ‘improper’ self-love in Works of Love. None of ‘the bustler’ who ‘wastes his time and powers in the service of futile, inconsequential pursuits’; ‘the light-minded person’ who ‘throws himself almost like a nonentity into the folly of the moment’; ‘the depressed person’ who ‘desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself ’; or the person who ‘surrenders to despair’ (WL 23/SKS 9 31) seem well described by this term. If we are tempted to describe the would-be suicide as selfish – on the grounds that he is thinking solely of himself and not of others affected by his suicide  – I suggest we should be given pause in reaching this conclusion by considering the important distinction between selfishness and self-centredness, which brings us to the second point. Adams has recently made this distinction, arguing that there are vices of self-focus  – such as self-centredness  – that are quite distinct from selfishness.21 One can still be inappropriately self-centred despite lacking the ‘grasping’ or acquisitive quality attributed to selfishness above. For instance, I can give my time and hard-earned money to others (and thus manifest unselfishness, conquering ‘selfish desire’) while still falling foul of the vice of self-centredness. For suppose the thought of what a wonderful, kind and generous person I am is still looming too large in my thoughts? Adams notes that self-centredness ‘is not in general to be understood in terms of what one wants’.22 To illustrate this, he gives an example of a father playing basketball with his young daughter. As Adams sets this up, the father desires that all of the following apply: they have fun; they take the activity seriously; and they do their best at it. The father genuinely wants both his daughter and himself to enjoy themselves, so his concern is not selfish (in the sense of exclusive), as he genuinely cares about his daughter and her enjoyment. But Adams points out that this description applies equally to two possible cases. In the first, the father thinks about what a good father he is being; how good he is at basketball for a man not as young as he once was; and how he wishes his father had done this with him. In the second, the father thinks about how much his daughter enjoys basketball; how good at it she’s getting; and what a ‘neat kid’ she is.23 Why, ceteris paribus, do we think less of the father in the first case than in the second? The answer lies not in his being selfish but in his being too self-centred. In both cases, Adams suggests, we may presume that the father desires all of the following: to be a good father; his daughter’s 21 Adams 2006: 95–111. 22 Adams 2006: 103, my emphasis. 

  Ibid.

23

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physical and social development; and that the father–daughter relationship is good and healthy. The difference between the two cases is rather a difference in focus. In wanting a largely relational complex of ends essentially involving oneself it is possible for one’s interest to be centred overwhelmingly on one’s own role in the complex, or much more on other persons, or other features, involved in it. Self-centredness, as its name suggests, is typically a perversion in this sort of centering.24

We can extrapolate from this distinction. Various vices of self-preference (Adams’s term) or self-focus (mine) – such as self-centredness, arrogance and vanity – can and should be distinguished from selfishness.25 And yet, if we recall the centrality to Kierkegaard’s thought of ‘becoming a self ’, we need to make room for a proper kind of self-focus too. A third point concerns Walsh’s claim about eros: ‘the common practice is to regard erotic love as the highest form of love and Christian love as the highest expression of eros.’26 It is unclear what justifies the claim that this practice is ‘common’. The relation of agape and eros in the Christian tradition is a long and complicated story, to which I cannot hope to do justice here. But we can note that there are competing views within this tradition, and it is far from clear that the context within which Kierkegaard was writing would have been as Walsh describes. In her treatment of the history of self-love in the Christian tradition, Darlene Fozard Weaver notes the centrality of eros to classical and medieval accounts of the relation between God and humanity, but adds that with the Reformation comes a shift ‘to an emphasis on God’s agape and subsequently, to agape as the norm for Christian life’.27 There is a tendency in Lutheran thought to set up agape and eros as complete opposites, and Walsh seems to place Kierkegaard squarely in this tradition.28 I am not sure this is justified.29 But even if she is right to do so, we cannot just beg the question in Kierkegaard’s favour: 24 Adams 2006: 104, my emphases. 25 I prefer the term ‘self-focus’ to ‘self-preference’ since it is not clear that the person who looms too large in their own thoughts necessarily prefers themselves to others. Consider, for instance, the kind of person who is always worried about the impression they have made on others. The kind who, making an innocuous remark that is forgotten by others within minutes, spends the rest of the evening worrying excessively about the impression they have made on others. (‘Is it possible that what I said could have upset him? Oh dear, what will he think of me now?’) Such a person is self-centred in a psychologically unhealthy way, but such an attitude is perfectly consistent with a – sometimes near pathological – desire to put the preferences of others above their own, always giving way or retreating into the background. We shall return to such cases in Section II. 26 Walsh 2005: 94.  27  Weaver 2002: 5. 28 The most famous twentieth-century example of this tendency is Nygren 1969. 29 See, for instance, Mulder 2010: 94–5.

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we should recognise the existence within Christian thought on love of a very different, predominantly but not exclusively Catholic, tradition. Weaver notes that contemporary Catholic accounts of love still have a role for eros, ‘still tend to construe love as mutuality, and often draw upon Trinitarian accounts of God [i.e. that God is persons in relation]’.30 So, in summary, Walsh’s claim looks questionable, given Kierkegaard’s Lutheran heritage. And if we are not just to beg the question in his favour, a case against the alternative tradition would need to be made. Let us return more explicitly to Walsh’s attempt to distinguish between selfish and proper self-love. Her account of this is, I think, a bit misleading and also leaves important questions unanswered. First, note that she suggests that self-love is mastered by redoubling (Fordoblelse): ‘by the duplication of oneself in the neighbor’.31 Pagan love has a version of this, but Walsh repeats the familiar charge that it makes the beloved one’s ‘second self ’ or ‘other I’ and is thus a form of disguised selfish self-love.32 In supposed contrast: Christian redoubling involves duplicating oneself in the other in such a way that love for oneself is transformed into love for the other. Every demand in the relationship is placed upon oneself rather than the other, and what one would have desired for oneself, one desires for the other. In Christianity one regards the other not as an ‘other-I’ but as an ‘other-you’ who is distinct from oneself and who is loved not on the basis of his or her personal attractiveness (preferential love) but because the beloved is a spiritual being like oneself.33

This is not clear. First, in saying that love for oneself is transformed into love for the other, does Walsh mean to imply that one ceases to love oneself? That is certainly the impression given by such a phrase,34 but as noted all along, Kierkegaard is opposed not to self-love per se but only to improper manifestations thereof. We should never lose sight of the twin facts that there is supposed to be such a thing as proper self-love and that Kierkegaard commends it. The problem here echoes a problem we saw with respect to Frankfurt. Talk of ‘transformation’ suggests that a clear dividing line can be drawn between self-love and love of others. But, as we already noted in Chapter 5, that seems wrong. Here is a further reason 30 Weaver 2002: 6. Interestingly, Robert J. Daly has recently argued that Christian sacrifice should also be understood in explicitly Trinitarian terms. See Daly 2009. 31 Walsh 2005: 96. 32 Recall the argument against this view of pagan friendship in Chapter 2. 33 Walsh 2005: 96–7, my emphasis. 34 And by references to ‘self-hatred’ (Walsh 2005: 80).

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to think so. In his famous sermon ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, Bishop Butler argues that benevolence (which he treats in this context as having another person’s happiness as its object) can be a source of pleasure or happiness to me, and further asks: ‘Is desire of and delight in the happiness of another any more a diminution of self-love, than desire of and delight in the esteem of another? They are both equally desire of and delight in somewhat external to ourselves: either both or neither are so.’35 Adams notes the plausibility of Butler’s thesis that the happiness or good of other persons is ‘among the ends best suited’ to contribute to one’s own happiness.36 The happiness of others contributes significantly to mine; its absence (as when I am genuinely distressed by news reports of a famine or earthquake) significantly diminishes it. Since this indeed seems plausible, and if (as Chapters 4 and 5 have suggested) an appropriate concern for one’s own happiness or flourishing is a significant element of proper self-love, we should not concede that self-love needs to be ‘transformed into’ love for the neighbour, since love for the neighbour might well be part of proper self-love. It is simply not the case that we necessarily need to choose between self-love and love of others – nor in many cases can we possibly do so.37 Second, consider the claim that ‘Every demand in the relationship is placed upon oneself rather than the other.’ What would this mean in practice? Consider a wife and mother who, every day, as well as working full-time as a cleaner, collects her kids from school immediately after work and rushes home to cook the family’s dinner. Then, after putting the kids to bed, she makes a start on cleaning her own house, a job that is never complete, until she is ready to collapse exhausted into bed at 11 p.m. and begin the whole process all over again the following day. Suppose that, throughout all this, her husband is relaxing in front of the TV, complaining at 7 p.m. about the fact that dinner isn’t ready yet, since he has arranged to meet his friends in the pub at 8 p.m. Most of us, I suspect, whether Christians or not, could sympathise with the wife if she told her husband (lovingly, of course) where to get off.38 I ask again: do we 35 Butler 1983: 50–1.  36  Adams 2006: 96. 37 See Daly 2009: 235–6 for a beautiful description of how love for oneself and love for another can come to be fused. 38 From this perspective, Kierkegaard seems to be moving in a troubling direction in such passages as this: ‘when the quiet woman meekly bears all her husband’s difficulties and moods and indignities, perhaps his unfaithfulness … if she is to be found anywhere, this meek woman, there is to be seen only a happy marriage, only a beloved husband and wife who is happy in her home, happy with her husband. Yet blessed is she – if she is not happy in her husband, she nevertheless is blessed in her meekness’ (UDVS 244/SKS 8 343). This passage (in a different translation), is cited by Patrick

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seriously want to commend the idea that ‘every demand in the relationship is placed upon oneself rather than the other’? Is there no role for reciprocity in Christian love? To put Outka’s earlier question rather more bluntly: must the Christian be a doormat? In Section II, we shall see why the answer has to be ‘No’. Third, it is unclear exactly what Walsh intends to say about the ‘other-you’ of Christian love. If the point is to relate to the other as a genuine other, with a personality, needs, hopes, fears and desires of their own, this will hardly be advanced by desiring for the other ‘what one desires for oneself ’. For how are we to interpret this? Presumably not too literally: if I desire nothing more than a new BMW, then presumably the idea is not that I instead wish that for you. That would look precisely like treating you as ‘another me’, not a genuine other, since your desires may not be remotely the same as mine.39 More plausibly, then, perhaps the idea is that I wish for you some more general good: good health, psychological flourishing or – surely the most likely candidate, given much that Kierkegaard says in Works of Love  – that you have a healthy God-relationship.40 But note that, in so far as I would wish these for any and every human being, this again looks like it falls short of the idea of caring about you as a genuine other who has specific needs and hopes of your own. And while we can all agree that Christian love does not only respond to those we find attractive (in the ‘preferential love’ sense), it is not clear that loving ‘because the beloved is a spiritual being like oneself ’ will really do.41 It is also true, as we have seen, that Kierkegaard refers to the ‘common watermark’ (WL 89/SKS 9 94) of ‘inner glory’ (WL 87/SKS 9 92) that human beings possess in virtue of being God’s creatures. But as he is also at pains to point out, this cannot be understood in abstraction: our neighbours Sheil, who claims that ‘Kierkegaard is so confident that subjectivity can be the measure of all things that for him, the injuries actually do disappear if one refuses to suffer’ (2010: 211). Sheil attempts a partial defence of Kierkegaard against the charge that ‘Kierkegaard’s style of Christianity could potentially be used to deter people from agitating for higher wages, better healthcare, and so on’ (2010: 212). The recommendation is that I view the discourses as directed at me, not others: ‘I have no right to decide on behalf of others that pain is good for them. But I can decide that for myself, and in so doing I may reduce the particular agony of thinking that my suffering has no meaning’ (Ibid.). But I don’t think this works: if everyone has a duty to resist oppression, then that includes me. We would not admire Rosa Parks if, ‘meekly’, she had left this resistance up to others. 39 Here I am reminded of the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer buys Marge a bowling ball as a birthday present, on the grounds that this is what he would have wanted. 40 Note that this last alone, important though it is for Kierkegaard, won’t do. Recall Ferreira’s point that it is essential to the parable of the Good Samaritan that the Samaritan bound the stranger’s wounds and paid for his stay at the inn. See also Ferreira’s critique of Løgstrup (Ferreira 2001: 76–83). 41 Walsh 2005: 97.

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are the actual persons we see (WL 154–74/SKS 9 155–74), concrete, specific individuals, and, as Edward Vacek puts it, ‘our neighbours deserve a love that is directed directly [and, we might add, specifically] to them.’42 (Compare here Frankfurt’s point about the importance of viewing both our beloveds and ourselves as non-fungible.) It seems, then, that Walsh’s account of ‘proper’ self-love – which, she claims, means ‘to love oneself in the same way one loves one’s neighbor when one loves that person as oneself, namely, without selfishness’ – leaves many questions unanswered.43 One reason for this is the level of generality at which this account seeks to operate. The above definition brings us no closer to understanding exactly what ‘loving oneself without selfishness’ actually means. For instance, is the working mother I mentioned above being ‘selfish’ in asking her husband to get off his butt and help? By what criteria are we to make such judgements? According to Walsh, Kierkegaard thinks that Christianity ‘seeks to transform every love relation into sacrificial love, to teach both the lover and the beloved to help each other to love rather than to seek to be loved through their relation to one another’.44 The key question here is exactly what is meant by ‘transforming every love relation into sacrificial love’. Does she mean to claim that such love become sacrificial in such a way that I always and invariably put the other ahead of myself? First, surely this depends upon the demands they are making of me. It would be absurd to commend that one should undertake enormous risks to oneself in order to bring about small benefits to another. I may courageously risk my own life in order to save that of another, but, as Adams puts it, ‘seriously endangering one’s life to rescue a child’s favorite toy is not an act of virtue but of folly.’45 Second, Walsh’s gloss seems to present my only value as an instrumental one: ‘Christian transformation consists finally in being made wholly an active power in the service of God or love.’46 But if I have some intrinsic (and not just instrumental) value, then there are surely some forms of self-sacrifice that are inconsistent with a basic self-respect that is an essential part of proper self-love.47 So, on this view, being ‘an active power in the service 42 Vacek 1994: 266.  43  Walsh 2005: 97. 44 Walsh 2005: 99, emphasis in original.  45  Adams 2006: 81. 46 Walsh 2005: 99, my emphasis. 47 We shall investigate self-respect in more detail later, but for the time being, let Robin Dillon’s stand as a working definition: ‘a complex of multi-layered and interpenetrating phenomena – all those aspects of cognition, valuation, affect, expectation, motivation, action, and interaction that compose a mode of being in the world whose heart is an appreciation of oneself as having morally significant worth’ (Dillon 2001: 65).

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of God or love’ might actually preclude certain kinds of self-sacrifice, such as the wife who is a doormat to her husband. Kierkegaard’s commitment to such basic self-respect is at least implicit in the examples he gives, as discussed in Chapter 3, of those who do not love themselves properly: those who waste their lives pursuing trivialities, ‘light-minded’ followers of fads, would-be suicides and those who succumb to despair (WL 23/SKS 9 30–1). The interesting question is then similar to that raised by Outka’s ‘blank cheque’ objection: what limits are placed on self-sacrifice – a much louder theme in Kierkegaard, especially in his later works – by recognising the importance of self-respect as part of proper self-love?48 In view of my brief comments on Kierkegaard and Levinas in Chapter 4, it is worth noting that a similar question arises in Paul Ricoeur’s criticism of Levinas in Oneself as Another. Ricoeur criticises as ‘hyperbole’ Levinas’s view of the demands placed on the self by the encounter with the face of the other.49 Walsh’s Kierkegaard seems uncomfortably close to Levinas’s talk of ‘persecution by the other’ and the ‘substitution of the I for the Other’. As Levinas puts it in Otherwise Than Being, ‘Under accusation by everyone, the responsibility for everyone goes to the point of substitution. A subject is a hostage.’50 According to Ricoeur, the already stringent demands made by the other in Totality and Infinity are in the latter text ratcheted up by ‘the extreme – even scandalous – hypothesis that the Other is no longer the master of justice … but the offender who, as an offender, no less requires the gesture of pardon and expiation.’51 Distinctions between the other as ‘the master who teaches’ and the executioner or persecutor have all but disappeared. Yet, as Richard Kearney memorably puts it, ‘not every other is innocent and not every self is an egoistic emperor.’52 Ricoeur’s case is that what he calls ‘conscience’ requires a degree of ‘self-esteem’ and ‘self-attestation’: ‘if the injunction coming from the other is not part and parcel of self-attestation, it loses its character of injunction, for lack of the existence of a being-enjoined standing before it as its respondent.’53 In other words, without a self one is able and willing to affirm, the call of the other cannot be heard or responsibly recognised. As Erin Lothes Biviano puts it, Ricoeur is arguing that Levinas’s model ‘makes the self 48 We shall explore the importance of self-respect to proper self-love in more detail in Chapter 8. Unfortunately, Walsh does not consider such questions: indeed, there is no entry in her book’s index under ‘self-respect’. 49 Ricoeur 1992: 337.  50  Levinas 1997: 112. 51 Ricoeur 1992: 338.  52  Kearney 2003: 67. 53 Ricoeur 1992: 355, my emphasis.

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excessively passive, minimising the conscientious interaction between self and other that grounds moral action … If action derives from the command of the other alone and originates solely in the other, … one’s moral agency is … brutalized.’54 In this sense, then, for Ricoeur, both self and other are primary: the self is also an ‘other’. (Compare the idea that I too am a neighbour.) In opposition to Levinas’s insistence on self-emptying obedience in the face of the summons of the other, Ricoeur insists on the need to maintain self-love and love of others in creative tension. Otherwise, we end up in a position close to Nygren, whose unlovable self knows agape as God’s love for all but is paradoxically excluded from offering this love to itself.55 My suggestion is that Kierkegaardians need to apply something like Ricoeur’s critique of Levinas to these elements of Kierkegaard. (I shall build on this general line of argument in discussing self-respect in more detail in Chapter 8.) Walsh’s exegesis has helpfully highlighted some elements of his thought from which we should distance ourselves. I.2  Self-sacrifice and rejection by the world Further problems are in store when we turn to the second, and truly distinctive, aspect of Christian self-denial.56 Kierkegaard claims that ‘what Christianity calls self-denial specifically and essentially involves a double danger; otherwise the self-denial is not Christian self-denial’ (WL 194/SKS 9 193). What makes Christian self-denial truly distinctive involves being rejected by ‘the world’ and bearing this rejection in the right spirit. How so? Here is how ‘merely human’ self-denial is glossed: ‘give up your self-loving desires, cravings and plans  – then you will be esteemed and honored and loved as righteous and wise’ (WL 194/SKS 9 194). Specifically Christian self-denial, on the other hand, calls upon you to ‘give up your self-loving desires and cravings, give up your self-seeking plans and purposes so that you truly work unselfishly for the good – and then, for that very reason, put up with being abominated almost as a criminal, insulted and ridiculed’ (WL 194/SKS 9 194, my emphasis). If need be, one should (after the pattern of Christ) freely choose to be executed as a criminal. ‘The world’ regards such ‘abandonment’ as ‘obtuseness or lunacy’ (WL 195/SKS 54 Biviano 2007: 135–6.  55  Biviano 2007: 138. 56 I shall not here discuss how Walsh distinguishes her position on how consistently or otherwise Kierkegaard holds to this view over the course of his authorship from that of other commentators. Those interested in this debate should see Walsh 2005: 104–12.

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9 194): it can comprehend only ‘sagacious’ self-denial. Kierkegaard insists that this rejection by the world is essential for it to count as Christian. He further describes Christian self-denial thus: ‘when a person denies himself and, thrust back by the world precisely because the world shuts itself to him, he must now seek the confidential relationship with God’ (WL 195/SKS 9 195), because he has found in the world not support but opposition (WL 196/SKS 9 195). This leads him to conclude that ‘all self-denial that finds support in the world is not Christian self-denial’ (WL 196/SKS 9 195). This is in turn taken to be a gloss on the Church Fathers’ idea that the virtues of paganism are glittering vices. So what is the ‘double danger’? Merely human self-denial ‘without fear for oneself and without regard for oneself … venture[s] into danger’, but only of a particular, limited kind, namely the danger ‘where honor beckons the victor, where the admiration of contemporaries and onlookers already beckons to the one who simply ventures’ (WL 196/SKS 9 195). In Christian self-denial, by contrast, the contemporaries and onlookers ‘have or want to have no idea that there is honor to be gained … the derision of the onlookers awaits the courageous one whether he wins or loses’ (WL 196/SKS 9 195, my emphasis). In other words, the claim seems to be that ‘merely human’ self-denial has one eye on the praise and admiration with which it will be greeted, whereas Christian self-denial will not be admired because the world cannot recognise the danger it courts as danger. Thus, Walsh summarises Kierkegaard’s position as follows: In the first form of self-denial one gives up selfishness and worldliness in order to work disinterestedly for the good, but disinterested devotion is not really possible unless one’s renunciation of selfishness and worldliness extends to the inner motivation or expectation that informs one’s outward expressions of sacrifice. In purely human forms of self-denial one gives up one’s selfish desires for the sake of the community, for example, but with the expectation of some positive reward in return. But the expectation of a positive reward for sacrifice is not consistent with altruism. The true expression of self-denial in the first form thus depends upon one’s willingness to express self-denial in the second form. Without the frame of mind that informs the second form, self-denial is not Christian.57

As part of her case against certain other commentators that this position is central to Works of Love, not just his later writings, Walsh approvingly 57 Walsh 2005: 103–4. Note that the introduction of the term ‘altruism’ is Walsh’s. I would share MacIntyre’s reason to suppose that the introduction of such terminology is unhelpful: see the quotation from MacIntyre in on p. 74.

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cites Anti-Climacus, who claims that ‘Magister Kierkegaard has shown (at the end of Part One of Works of Love) what is to be understood by Christian self-denial, that there is Christian self-denial only when there is double-danger, that the second danger, the danger of suffering because one denies oneself, is the decisive qualification’ (PC 222/SKS 12 217, my emphasis). More questions arise than I have space to tackle here, but let me focus on two related points. First, isn’t it simply unfair to present non-Christians as only ever denying themselves because they seek praise and admiration? It seems far too cynical to claim that ‘worldly’ self-denial always seeks such a reaction. There is no good reason to suppose that the non-Christian fireman who rescues a child from a burning building is always and inevitably motivated by the praise and admiration he will receive (to his face if he survives, posthumously if he doesn’t). This serves, perhaps, as a concrete example of Ferreira’s claim that Kierkegaard exaggerates the ‘collision’ between divine and human conceptions of love.58 Second, why should we suppose that rejection by the world is an essential element of Christianity? Walsh claims that for Kierkegaard, ‘Christians who get through life without any opposition should be suspicious of themselves.’59 And this seems a fair gloss on some of Kierkegaard’s claims (see WL 193–4/SKS 9 193). But one’s ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfægtelse) might not take the form of opposition from the world. (Thus, Luther: ‘God can make a wisp of straw as heavy as a hundred hundred-weight of corn, so do not despise those who have only small temptations.’60) And there is a converse problem that we should not overlook: the Christian who takes their rejection by the world as proof that they are right with God and doing their Christian duty. (‘The world hates me; all must be well with my God-relationship.’) Kierkegaard does claim that ‘the world’ can’t understand why the Christian actively ‘wants to make himself doubly unhappy: first by not satisfying … [innocent and permissible] desires and next, for his reward, by being ridiculed by the world’ (WL 204/SKS 9 202). But surely ‘the world’ has a point. For there is an important difference between admiration from others not being one’s motive for doing good and assuming that being reviled and spat upon by the world is an ‘indirect indication’ that one’s God-relationship is healthy. A negative reception from the world is not indirect indication of this: if it were, we could take Hitler and Stalin as our spiritual heroes. The serious worry is that using opposition 58 Ferreira 2001: 75.  59  Walsh 2005: 103. 60 Cited in Podmore 2011: 219n59.

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from the world as such a litmus test plays into the hands of someone with a martyr complex.61 In a footnote, Walsh distances herself from the position on opposition from the world taken by Ferreira. But the position of Ferreira’s Kierkegaard seems to me far more defensible. On Ferreira’s view, such opposition is neither necessary nor sufficient for love to count as genuinely Christian.62 Let us briefly consider her position. In arguing against Løgstrup’s infamous criticism of Kierkegaard in The Ethical Demand, Ferreira notes how Kierkegaard insists that the model for our love should be God’s love for us. We learn what love is from how God loves us. And God’s love for us is pure gift: it is not dependent upon any specific reaction or response. If this is our model or ideal, then it would be quite unreasonable to infer that the quality of our love depends upon what reaction (such as hatred or rejection) we get from its recipients.63 As Ferreira puts it, ‘The model of God’s love for us does not warrant an understanding of a gift in which its character is lost if the receiver recognizes it as a gift or appreciates it.’64 Just as gratitude is an appropriate reaction to God’s love for us, so ‘the genuineness of our love for another does not preclude the other’s loving us.’65 Ferreira also connects this with the concrete imitation of Christ, noting that ‘Kierkegaard tells us repeatedly that imitation of Christ has more to do with bringing about justice than with subjecting ourselves to self-sacrifice for its own sake.’66 I suggest that, ironically, an excessive focus on self-denial might well be counted as another vice of inappropriate self-focus. Indeed, is it not another manifestation of the ‘self-centredness’ to which Adams drew our attention? If ‘the only content of love for the neighbour is … the negative one of “self-denial”’, then rather than one’s focus being on what one can actively do for the neighbour, the focus of neighbour-love would actually be oneself: the importance of denying oneself.67 (As we shall 61 Compare the following thought. Kierkegaard remarks: ‘We praise it as a characteristic of true love – the more sacrifices a person makes, the more he loves the object of his love. But this, too, is still a form of self-love, for the sacrifices remind a person of himself ’ (WL 484/JP 3 2426/SKS 22 NB 12: 95). He seems to mean this in the context of erotic love and friendship. But why could this not also apply to neighbour-love? 62 See Walsh 2005: 177n29. 63 That this is the ideal is, I think, consistent with the idea that we are creatures whose loves will always contain an element of need. I shall not argue this case here, but I think that some of Iris Murdoch’s work on the idea of perfection and the value of unachievable ideals (see especially Murdoch 1970) would be valuable in making such a case. For a helpful discussion of this, see Widdows 2005: Chapter 4. 64 Ferreira 2001: 79.  65  Ibid. 66 Ferreira 2001: 82.  67  Ferreira 2001: 76.

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see in Chapter  8, a version of this problem re-emerges in considering self-forgiveness.) We should not paint ourselves into such a corner.68 The danger here is well brought out by Fromm in his discussion of ‘neurotic “unselfishness”’. This is: a symptom of neurosis observed in not a few people who usually are troubled not by this symptom, but by others connected with it, such as depression, tiredness, inability to work, failure in love relationships, and so on. Not only is unselfishness not felt as a ‘symptom’; it is often the one redeeming character trait on which such people pride themselves. The ‘unselfish’ person ‘does not want anything for himself ’; he ‘lives only for others,’ is proud that he does not consider himself important. He is puzzled to find that in spite of his unselfishness he is unhappy, and that his relationships to those close to him are unsatisfactory. Analytic work shows that his unselfishness is not something apart from his other symptoms but one of them, in fact often the most important one; that he is paralysed in his capacity to love or enjoy anything; that he is pervaded by his hostility towards life and that behind the facade of unselfishness a subtle but not less intense self-centredness is hidden. This person can be cured only if his unselfishness too is interpreted as a symptom along with the others, so that his lack of productiveness, which is at the root of both his unselfishness and his other troubles, can be corrected.69

The effect of such self-centredness on others is damaging, particularly in such a mother on her children. Fromm claims that the children are adversely affected by the mother’s ‘hidden hostility towards life … and eventually they become imbued with it themselves’: precisely the opposite of the mother’s intentions.70 Though they are not without scriptural justification, those passages in which Kierkegaard sets up a hard and fast opposition between Christianity and ‘the world’ seem to come uncomfortably close to a form of Manicheanism.71 The picture of the ‘Christian striver’ in such passages makes such a figure a highly isolated one, and the possibility of a 68 After all, why should I be benevolent, kind or compassionate? The answer surely cannot be ‘because I thereby show myself to be self-sacrificing’. James Wallace has argued that such qualities are virtues in significant part because their expression supports the self-respect of those on the receiving end, in so far as their intrinsic worth and importance as persons is affirmed (1978: 152–8); see also Dillon 1995b: 24. 69 Fromm 1995: 48, first emphasis mine. 70 Fromm 1995: 49. 71 In finishing her study with some mild criticisms of Kierkegaard (Walsh 2005: 160–3), Walsh notes that several commentators have judged his last writings in particular to be ‘radically negative and world-denying’. However, she insists that ‘such a culmination would represent not the logical conclusion of his central vision but rather an abrogation of it’ (Walsh 2005: 160).

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community of Christians is radically underplayed.72 I side with Anthony Rudd in judging some of Kierkegaard’s late writing as being at odds with orthodox Christianity. The desire to escape from a hated world, Rudd notes, is ‘hardly compatible with a belief in its divine creation’ and thus ‘heretical’.73 And one thing that has taken us down this wrong road, I submit, is an excessive valorisation of self-denial. How, then, should we address this issue?

II  Varieties of self-sacrifice: some insights from feminist thought In this section I shall make a few suggestions as to distinctions we need to bear in mind in attempting to steer a middle course between improper self-love and improper, excessive, self-denial. In doing so, we shall look to some insights from feminist philosophy and theology. In a classic article from over fifty years ago, Valerie Saiving Goldstein argued that men and women are prone to different types of sin: men to pride, women to ‘triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence … in short, under-development or negation of the self ’.74 The view of pride as the ultimate sin, and the valorisation of self-sacrifice in response, may be a perfectly appropriate diagnosis and cure for males, but disastrous for females, since the proposed cure simply reinforces what is, for Goldstein, woman’s besetting sin.75 Later feminists, such as Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, have suggested that ‘Women have a tendency to give themselves over to others to such an extent that they lose themselves. Thus they squander their distinctive personal abilities … a one-sided call to a self-sacrifice … may ironically reinforce women’s sins.’76 A major part of the worry here 72 This is one of Karl Barth’s key objections to Kierkegaard: see Barth 1965: 6–7. Doubtless Kierkegaard’s position is tied up with his intense dissatisfaction with the state of the institutional Church in Denmark. For a helpful overview of Kierkegaard’s complex relationship to the Church, see Holm 2013: 112–28. 73 Rudd 1993: 168. Walsh notes this passage, and although she points to her own Chapter 5 as a refutation of a second, related claim of Rudd’s (that in his later writings Kierkegaard abandons the doctrine of salvation by grace), it is interesting that she offers no argument against his first claim. 74 Saiving Goldstein 1960: 109. 75 Pope Gregory famously attributed to pride (superbia) the position as the most deadly of the sins, a view built upon by St Augustine. For a useful brief history, see Dyson 2006, Chapter 1. We shall return to pride in Chapter 9. 76 Andolsen 1981: 74. Andolsen notes (1981: 72–3) that the work of feminist ethicists is foreshadowed in the work of Martin D’Arcy, in so far as he sees the dangers in self-abnegation and views self-regard as a component of agape. See D’Arcy 1956.

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is that this makes normative for women a set of values that ensure their subordination – and in some cases even leads to a blind eye being turned to abuse.77 But the danger with this, as Sarah Coakley notes, is the production of crude stereotypes of both genders (men are arrogant; women are oppressed into submissiveness).78 Kant makes a point related to our central concern here that I think we may read in non-gender-specific terms. In a discussion of ‘proper self-esteem’, he notes that ‘timorousness’ is a twin danger to self-conceit and that the wrong kind of humility can be dangerous: ‘This humility can … have injurious consequences … For it brings timorousness and not courage with it, if a man believes that owing to the defectiveness of his actions they never comply with the moral law, from which inertia arises thereafter, in that he ventures to do nothing at all.’79 Yet feminists such as Goldstein and her successors shed important light on the role of self-denial and self-sacrifice in Christian thought and practice. Beyond the gender stereotypes, the worry that one can sin by ‘failing to establish oneself as a self ’, as Weaver puts it, seems a very important observation.80 And for all the emphasis on self-denial in some of his works it also contains an important echo of Kierkegaard. As he puts it at one point, ‘You shall preserve love and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love’ (WL 43/SKS 9 50). And recall the following important observation in The Sickness Unto Death: ‘The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed’ (SUD 32–3/SKS 11 153). Excessive self-sacrifice or self-abnegation can potentially be at least as big a worry as the more commonly attacked forms of improper self-love. At its height  – Kant’s remark leans in a similar direction  – it threatens agency itself.81 Thus we cannot accept any version of ‘self-denial’s love’ that goes as far as this. This shows the value of the project Ruth Groenhout pursues: to offer a classification of kinds of self-sacrifice, noting their relation to selfhood. As a Christian feminist, Groenhout argues that important though the dangers are against which several of her fellow feminists have warned, ‘self-sacrifice 77 A related point could be made about racial and other kinds of prejudice and oppression. On this point, see, for instance, Meyers 1995: 218–48. 78 Coakley 2001: 208.  79  Kant 1997: 130 (27: 350). 80 Weaver 2002: 69. 81 Gabriele Taylor makes a related point about the vice of acedia or sloth, which is ‘an obstacle to leading any sort of life at all, and so an obstacle to functioning as an agent’ (2006: 30).

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is an important part of feminist theory in general’ and that ‘any feminism worth its salt will have to incorporate some notion of self-sacrifice into its theoretical apparatus.’82 The key questions concern what kinds of self-sacrifice, and the meanings and purposes of it. Groenhout’s taxonomy builds upon the typology of possible meanings of kenosis in the Christian tradition discussed by Coakley. Coakley notes a ‘sliding-scale of meanings’ of kenosis ‘from “risk” to “self-limitation” to “sacrifice” to “self-giving” to “self-emptying”  – and even to “annihilation”’.83 Groenhout argues that this list is too broad: the incarnation, atonement and resurrection of Christ can hardly be captured adequately by the term ‘risk’, and, at the other end of the spectrum, outright ‘annihilation’ of the self is incompatible with orthodox Christianity.84 Further, ‘sacrifice’ is insufficiently determined to occupy a definite place on the list and is better thought of as a general category of which the others are sub-categories.85 But most of the middle ground, she suggests, is promising territory, especially if we add in between self-limitation and sacrifice the giving up of prerogatives to which one’s nature entitles one. Each progressively demands more of the self. Let us explore this. Groenhout reads self-limitation as retaining a definite continuity of selfhood: ‘The limitations imposed are imposed by the self, implying that the self retains some sense of robust identity.’86 Also, though self-limitation can be performed for others (such as when a poverty-striken single parent denies herself food so that her children may eat), it can also be done in the interests of a higher good which has no real reference outside the self ’s ends at all (such as denying oneself tasty but high-fat foods in a bid to lose weight). In so far as there is no necessary reference to the other, then, we do not seem yet to be very close to kenosis proper. More likely to be other-directed is ‘giving up prerogatives that are due one on the basis of one’s nature’.87 What Groenhout has in mind here is that a sense of a core self or identity is retained, but what is owed to that self is temporarily set aside. She doesn’t give examples, but I suggest the following: a worker employed by a charity undergoing cash-flow problems 82 Groenhout 2006: 296. I am grateful to Steve Evans for bringing this article to my attention. 83 Coakley 2001: 203. Coakley is reviewing the uses of the term kenosis made by other contributions to the volume of which her essay is a part. But it is clear that she recognises this range of possible meanings as symptomatic of the range over which the term is used in scholarly discussion about kenosis more generally. 84 As will become clear, by ‘annihilation’ Coakley and Groenhout have in mind something very different from the Kierkegaardian sense of ‘self-annihilation’ discussed above. 85 Groenhout 2006: 298.  86  Groenhout 2006: 297, my emphases. 87 Ibid., my emphasis.

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might temporarily forgo the salary to which he is legitimately entitled in order that the charity’s good work may continue. This seems to me to slide into what Groenhout calls self-giving, where, unlike with mere self-limitation, we have ‘some measure of giving up self-determination’.88 This is also necessarily directed towards the other, since ‘to give of oneself is not possible unless there is a recipient’.89 And so we reach full-blown self-sacrifice, in which ‘in some significant way the self is actually lost’.90 Groenhout suggests this is again best understood as operating over a range, starting with ‘some sort of denial of the self ’ which can still be a giving up of one part of the self for the sake of another part of the self. This is puzzling, since without further explanation (which she does not offer) it is unclear how this differs from the more modest kind of self-limitation. Perhaps what she has in mind is something like a lifelong monastic vow of celibacy, since here I would be renouncing part of my former life for ever, in the interests of a good I now perceive as higher. (Whereas, in the diet case, once our dieter hits 150 pounds, he will celebrate by allowing himself a large chunk of brie.) At its height, however, self-sacrifice involves giving up the self, or life itself, altogether, for some other person(s) or good. This teleological aspect is important as it distinguishes self-sacrifice from mere self-destruction or self-annihilation. This distinction, and a related point about how self-sacrifice can easily slide into self-annihilation, is crucial for Groenhout’s analysis. She notes that, ‘The paradox of kenotic self-emptying arises because the self that is emptied must continue to exist as a self to be emptied.’91 Self-annihilation – in the sense being criticised – fails this test. But as an example of how it can be mistaken for self-sacrifice, Groenhout cites the following passage from Simone Weil:92 I cannot conceive of the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am … I must withdraw so that he can see it. I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves … It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed, but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.93 88 Groenhout 2006: 298.  89  Ibid. 90 Ibid.  91  Groenhout 2006: 301. 92 Groenhout notes that there is another side to Weil that emerges when her focus is on others rather than herself (Ibid.). 93 Weil 1952: 88–9, cited in Groenhout 2006: 301–2.

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What we see here is precisely the kind of self-annihilation – mixed with something uncomfortably close to self-hatred – about which feminists are rightly concerned. In this passage, Weil presents herself as intrinsically unlovable, a view that seems based on a sense of herself as lacking intrinsic value. In doing so, she fails to pay sufficient attention to the ‘as yourself ’ of the second love commandment. The view of herself as merely an obstacle to God’s being able to be alone with his creation fails to recognise herself as a valuable part of that creation. In contrast to this, Groenhout argues, proper self-sacrifice ‘must emphasize the worth of the self that is emptied out’.94 What this suggests is twofold. First, that the self which is to be in some sense sacrificed is, and must be recognised as, something with intrinsic value: ‘the self-emptying that Jesus models for us originates in recognizing that, since the self is precious, emptying it really is a sacrifice.’95 Healthy self-sacrifice requires recognition of the worth of the self. As Robin Dillon puts it, ‘it is possible to give up pursuing my self-interest, even to give up myself, in a self-respecting manner  – knowing what I am worth and so knowing the extent and meaning of my sacrifice’.96 Moreover, it is because such a self desires its own flourishing that the sacrifices are genuine sacrifices. Merely squandering the self is therefore morally objectionable. Adams suggests, ‘In many contexts children who take an effective interest in their own good are “being good”, and children who don’t are letting the side down, damaging a project in which others have invested much.’97 This seems right – and not only in the case of children. The second point follows from this: that proper self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice for its own sake but rather needs to be oriented towards the good. In the absence of Christianity’s claims about its salvific power, Christ’s death on the cross is arguably just tragic.98 And here we return to our earlier discussed put-upon wife and mother. If the above is right, then nobody should commend themselves for their self-sacrifice if what they have done is made themselves into a doormat for their oppressors. This is so in large part because by failing to resist oppression we contribute to the advance not of the good but rather its opposite. Readers familiar with the secondary literature in Kantian ethics may have recognised in our earlier discussion a close relative of our put-upon 94 Groenhout 2006: 302. Compare here the concern Kierkegaard expresses in the 1844 discourse ‘Against Cowardliness’ about ‘a hatred of oneself that wrongs the person himself so that he is merely inventive in increasing his own torment. But hatred of oneself is still also self-love, and all self-love is cowardliness’ (EUD 374/SKS 5 358). 95 Ibid.  96  Dillon 1995a: 302. 97 Adams 2006: 107.  98  Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:12–20.

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wife and mother: the ‘deferential wife’ discussed in a classic paper by Thomas E. Hill.99 Hill explores the territory we are exploring here: the idea that ‘servility can be as much a vice as arrogance’, in significant part because ‘each person has duties to himself as well as to others’.100 These duties include ‘to avoid servility to the extent that one can’.101 Hill understands servility as the absence of a certain kind of self-respect. Here is his description of the ‘deferential wife’: This is a woman who is utterly devoted to serving her husband. She buys clothes he prefers, invites the guests he wants to entertain, and makes love whenever he is in the mood. She willingly moves to a new city in order for him to have a more attractive job, counting her own friendships and geographical preferences insignificant by comparison. She loves her husband, but her conduct is not simply an expression of love. She is happy, but she does not subordinate herself as a means to happiness. She does not simply defer to her husband in certain spheres as a trade-off for his deference in other spheres. On the contrary, she tends not to form her own interests, values and ideals; and, when she does, she counts them as less important than her husband’s … No one is trampling on her rights, she says; for she is quite glad, and proud, to serve her husband as she does.102

Note the similarity of this to the example we used to illustrate Walsh’s assertion that Kierkegaard’s ideal is that ‘Every demand in the relationship is placed upon oneself rather than the other.’ The problem with this and other examples of servility, Hill argues, is ‘a failure to understand and acknowledge one’s own moral rights’; the servile person ‘does not understand what his rights are, how they can be waived, and when they can be forfeited’.103 (In a later paper, Hill expanded this account to consider cases where self-respect manifests not just recognising one’s rights or merits but developing and living by ‘a set of personal standards by which one is prepared to judge oneself even if they are not extended to others’.104) Such rights can only be given up if one is uncoerced, and in the full knowledge of what one is doing.105 To this I would add ‘and if one’s reasons advance the good’. In his earlier paper, Hill argues that there are at least two kinds of servility, resulting from either misunderstanding or putting too low a value on one’s rights.106 With regard to the latter variety, Jeffrie Murphy, whom we 99 Hill 1995a: 76–92.  100  Hill 1995a: 76. 101 Hill 1995a: 77.  102  Hill 1995a: 78, final emphasis mine. 103 Hill 1995a: 82. Hill discusses two further examples of servility, the Uncle Tom and the Self-Deprecator (1995a: 77–8). 104 Hill 1995b: 120.  105  Hill 1995b: 88.  106  Hill 1995b: 85.

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shall encounter in our discussion of forgiveness in Chapter 8, registers a related concern about the danger a lack of self-respect brings for morality: If it is proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel indignation when I see third parties morally wronged, must it not be equally proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel resentment when I experience moral wrong done to myself? Just as the psychopath who feels no guilt, shame, or remorse for the wrong he does can be said to lack a true appreciation of morality, so too can the person who feels no indignation or resentment be said to lack a true appreciation of morality. Morality, in short, is not simply something to be believed; it is something to be cared about. This caring includes concern about those persons (including oneself ) who are the proper objects of moral judgment.107

Similarly, for Hill, the ultimate problem with the servile person is that ‘he does not satisfy the basic requirement to respect morality.’108 We could see all this as a non-religious way of registering a point akin to Kierkegaard’s idea that love must have conscience at its heart.109 If this must be true of the variety of love that is proper self-love, then one thing implied by it – and love’s ‘like for like’ – is the need to ask whether I am being fair to myself, or advancing the good, by my actions. The answer in the ‘human doormat’ case is clearly no. A related theological point would be that Kierkegaard commends proper self-love in part because of his view that creation is a gift. To fail to value the self would amount to refusing this gift.110 Finally, we can return to Adams for a more specific point, and an important one in a society of increasing life expectancy. He notes how we admire ‘those whose commitment to their own well-being sustains them through a long and painful struggle to recover from a potentially disabling injury’, and how old age ‘can set a context in which caring for oneself necessarily looms larger in one’s concerns, and we do admire people whose loyalty to their own good helps them to care for it sensibly and gives them 107 Murphy 1982: 505.  108  Hill 1995b: 87. 109 See WL 135–53/SKS 9 137–54 and Ferreira 2001: Chapter 6. 110 I am grateful to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn for discussion of this point. See also Come 1997. But what of the possible objection that following Christ means being willing to follow his example up to the point of being prepared to die: self-sacrifice in the most literal sense? Although as we saw from his earlier remarks, Kierkegaard does think there are circumstances in which the Christian must be prepared literally to martyr himself – a proposal consistent with what I am arguing here – he also urges that to think one needs to follow Christ as far as death can be to misunderstand the Atonement. The ‘comfort of Redemption’, he tells us, is that Christ substituted himself in my place. ‘I no longer stand in that place; I have left it and someone else stands in my place … I stand saved beside this other one, beside him, my Redeemer, who put himself completely in my place’ (WA 123/SKS 11 258–9).

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the will to go on in that context’.111 Moreover, for the elderly and frail, ‘caring for oneself may become not only a very large part of what one can do, but also a large part of what other people desire of one.’112 The person who values their life sufficiently to maintain it in such circumstances hardly deserves our ire for being either selfish or self-centred. This is a good illustration of Adams’s more general point that ‘easily recognisable excellence in caring for one’s own good is often overlooked because moral perception is distracted by worries about selfishness.’113 This last point also enables us more clearly to say what is wrong with the view from Weil discussed above. Daniel Russell suggests that ‘having a blind spot about one’s own value is a defect in one’s understanding of values, and is therefore incompatible with the possession of practical wisdom.’114 More precisely, we can say that what Weil’s view sorely lacks is a deep and firm commitment to oneself (one’s interests, judgements, values, goals and development) as being worthy of love and respect. Note how this underlines the importance of a reflective and evaluative element: not just any kind of self-commitment (such as the unreflective ‘me, me, me’ attitude of the selfish child) will do.115 Of course, Groenhout’s (or any other) taxonomy will hardly give us an easy set of techniques that guarantee appropriate behaviour in any circumstances: practical wisdom will still be needed. But such observations on proper self-sacrifice arising from feminist thought do remind us of the need not to lose sight of the importance of proper self-love in our deliberations about self-sacrifice and self-denial. The Christian tradition – perhaps including Kierkegaard – has tended to warn more forcefully of the dangers of improper self-love than of improper self-sacrifice. But either, taken to an extreme, can be both practically disastrous and incompatible with the Christian ideal.116 Several of the points I have been concerned with here are brought out very lucidly in the work of Charles Taylor.117 An adequate conception of 111 Adams 2006: 106.  112  Ibid. 113 Adams 2006: 105. 114 Russell 2005: 108. Cf. Robin Dillon’s point that self-respect is respect for something with moral worth, and so to fail to recognise this amounts to ‘a kind of moral corruption’ (1992b: 135). 115 Cf. Russell 2005: 109. Dillon notes as the ‘most mature stage of Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care, that I am, in and of myself, worthy of my own care and of the care of others, that it is morally appropriate for me to care for myself, indeed that I sometimes ought to care for myself ’ (1995b: 301). 116 It should perhaps also be repeated that the valorisation of self-sacrifice for its own sake might be especially damaging to women, given the prevalence of gender stereotypes to which the Christian tradition must admit that it has made a significant contribution. 117 See, especially, Taylor 1989; 1991; 2007.

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self-love needs to take into account the fact that we are self-interpreting beings whose sense of ourselves is intimately related to our purposes. Yet we are also dialogical creatures, immersed in ‘webs of interlocution’ such that in an important sense we cannot be selves on our own.118 The ideas that my own self-interpretation matters, that I have projects and a sense of myself as leading a life (in other words, that I live by commitments that I have made my own or appropriated) and the centrality of love of the good to the ethical and religious life are all elements of proper self-love.119 And, as we noted, this love of the good is threatened if I make myself a mere doormat in your interests, as certain more extreme forms of self-sacrifice and self-denial seem to commend. However, notwithstanding my criticisms of Kierkegaard’s more extreme valorisations of self-denial, in Chapters 7 and 8 I shall argue that Works of Love (and related works) is a valuable source for developing the practical wisdom referred to above. There is much to be inferred about proper self-love from its deliberations on ostensibly different topics: for instance, on the roles of hope for and belief in oneself; and on what mercifulness and forgiveness could mean when applied to oneself. We turn next to developing these ideas. 118 Taylor 1989: 36. 119 Far more deserves to be said on the potential connections between Kierkegaard and Taylor. But this will have to wait for another occasion.

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Towards a more positive account of self-love I Trust and hope

There are several related aspects of love discussed by Kierkegaard, especially in the second series of deliberations of Works of Love, which commentators have not to my knowledge explicitly connected with self-love. Understandably, these deliberations are typically read with regard to how we treat others. But what if we also read them with the issue of proper self-love specifically in mind? Accordingly, the question guiding this chapter and the next is: what happens if one applies to oneself aspects of Kierkegaard’s discussion of love for others? In particular, I shall consider what strike me as key virtues discussed in Works of Love: trust, hope and forgiveness.1 In each case, my attempt is not only to draw on Kierkegaard, but also to go beyond what he explicitly says to other relevant literature, in attempting to make a case for the importance within proper self-love of these three key concepts discussed in Works of Love. We shall see that the three overlap and are interdependent in some important and interesting ways. In the present chapter, I focus on the roles of trust and hope. Perhaps a justification is needed for this approach. It might be objected that to read the text this way – with respect to proper self-love – is to read it against its primary focus. After all, Works of Love is primarily about love of God and neighbour, and most of what Kierkegaard says focuses on the ‘outward’ manifestations of love. But although there is some prima facie merit to this objection, it is not compelling. We have already suggested that love of self and love of others are not to be construed as opposites and are sometimes inextricably linked and interdependent. If that is right, then although Kierkegaard’s primary emphasis is not on self-love, there is nothing to stop us from reading what he says about ‘outward-facing’ love

1 An account of proper self-love might also be enhanced by an investigation of additional virtues discussed elsewhere, such as in the Upbuilding Discourses (e.g., fuller discussions than are possible here of gratitude, patience and humility). But this is beyond the scope of the present work.

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with the question of what constitutes proper self-love in mind. That is all that I am proposing here. In this chapter, I shall argue that we can see the two discourses ‘Love Believes All Things’ and ‘Love Hopes All Things’ as having the following relevance to self-love. Taken together, they suggest that one should never lose belief or hope in one’s ability (through God’s grace2) to will and act in the light of, and for, the good. Thus, one should not succumb to despair. Each discourse sets up two opposing attitudes to ambiguous evidence: love’s attitude of trust versus mistrust; love’s attitude of hope versus despair. Let us consider each deliberation in turn.

I  Trust: ‘Love Believes All Things – and Yet Is Never Deceived’ The theme of love’s relation to trust is sounded as early as the first sentence of the first deliberation of Works of Love: ‘If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love’ (WL 5/SKS 9 13). And the contrast between love’s attitude of trust and one of mistrust is central to the second deliberation of the second series. But really to get to grips with this discourse we need first to consider the one that precedes it: ‘Love Builds Up’ (Kjerlighed obygger).3 Here Kierkegaard claims that to build up is to do so from the ground up (fra Grunden af) (WL 211/SKS 9 214), and that, spiritually speaking, this ‘ground and foundation’ (Grund og Grundvold) (WL 215/SKS 9 218) capable of bearing the building is precisely love. He goes on to say that the work of love in building up requires either implanting love in the other’s heart, or presupposing love in that heart (WL 216/SKS 9 219). Since only God can do the former, it must be the latter. Hence, ‘The one who loves presupposes that love is in the other person’s heart and by this very presupposition builds up love in him – from the ground up, provided, of course, that in love he presupposes its presence in the ground’ (WL 216–17/SKS 9 219, emphasis in original). In this way, the loving person ‘draws out the good’; love ‘loves forth’ (opelsker) love (WL 217/SKS 9 220). Love’s presupposition effectively builds up precisely what it presupposes to be there. (Compare a mother 2 This qualifier is crucial, in light for instance of Kierkegaard’s assertion in the Conclusion that ‘the first thing you learn when you relate yourself to God in everything is that you have no merit whatsoever’ (WL 385/SKS 9 378). 3 The Danish term is, of course, the same as that used in the ‘upbuilding’ discourses (Opbyggelige Tale).

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who enables a child to become trustworthy by trusting him – rather than, say, wrapping him in cotton wool, fearing the dangers to which he might succumb so much that she fails to take the risk of trusting.) Moreover, ‘the more perfect the loving one presupposes the love to be, the more perfect a love he loves forth … there is no other relationship in which there is such a like for like, in which the result so accurately corresponds to what was presupposed’ (WL 219/SKS 9 221). This, then, is crucial background to understanding what it means to claim that love ‘believes all things’: to presuppose that love, even though it is not seen – indeed, even though the opposite is seen – is still present in the ground, even in the misguided, even in the corrupted, even in the most hateful. Mistrust [Mistroiskhed] takes away the very foundation by presupposing that love is not present – therefore mistrust cannot build up. (WL 221/SKS 9 223)

Being ‘trustworthy’ (tilforladelig) and loving is crucial in the person who can build up (WL 222/SKS 9 225). And this has an important corollary: ‘the trustworthiness of one who loves is this – that even when you doubt yourself, doubt that there is love in you … he is the loving person who presupposes it’ (WL 224/SKS 9 226). At the end of the deliberation, Kierkegaard hammers the point home: ‘to be loving means: to presuppose love in others’ (WL 224/SKS 9 226; cf. also WL 223/SKS 9 225). Trust is centre stage. But what about the obvious counter-examples to my suggestion above that one might enable a child to become trustworthy by trusting him? Some children – indeed, some adults – seem not to repay the trust placed in them. Doesn’t life give us plenty of evidence that one’s trust can be misplaced? It seems precisely to address such objections that the deliberations ‘Love Believes All Things’ and ‘Love Hopes All Things’ are written. In the former, Kierkegaard sets the distinction between trust and mistrust in the following context: Light-mindedness, inexperience, naiveté believe everything that is said; vanity, conceit, complacency believe everything flattering that is said; envy, malice, corruption believe everything evil that is said; mistrust [Mistroiskhed] believes [tro] nothing at all; experience will teach that it is most sagacious not to believe everything – but love believes all things. (WL 226/SKS 9 228)

Mistrust is thus not malice: rather than believing the worst, as malice does, mistrust convinces itself that its refusal to trust is merely shrewdness or ‘sagacity’ (Klogskab) (WL 226/SKS 9 228). Recognising the possibility of

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being deceived, it ‘believes nothing’, assumes that no conclusion is possible and thus withholds trust rather than taking what it sees as an unwarranted risk. But, Kierkegaard claims, mistrust’s ‘shrewd secret’ is in fact ‘a misuse of knowledge’ (WL 227/SKS 9 229). How so? Actions and intentions are always amenable to different interpretations. My new colleague appears to be genuinely open and friendly, but suppose his invitation to dinner is actually a ploy to sell me a dodgy timeshare? Mistrust concludes from this fact that one should withhold one’s trust, and that this follows as a necessary consequence. But this, Kierkegaard points out, is not so. Such an inference on my  – on mistrust’s  – part reveals something not so much about the facts of the matter (‘knowledge’) but about my outlook (‘what dwells in you must become disclosed’ [WL 227/SKS 9 229]): ‘The deception is that from knowledge (the pretense and falsity are that it is by virtue of knowledge) mistrust concludes, assumes and believes by virtue of the disbelief inherent in mistrust, whereas from the same knowledge, by virtue of belief, one can conclude, assume, and believe the very opposite’ (WL 227/SKS 9 229).4 Moreover, the love that appears to contrast with sagacity is not mere naivety: ‘when love believes everything, it is by no means in the same sense as light-mindedness, inexperience, and naiveté, which believe everything on the basis of ignorance and inexperience. No, love is as knowledgable as anyone, knows everything that mistrust knows’ (WL 228/SKS 9  230). Trust or mistrust is often justifiable by the same evidence in roughly equal measure; which way we go is an existential choice. (‘[W]hen knowledge in a person has placed the opposite possibilities in equilibrium and he is obliged or wills to judge, then who he is, whether he is mistrustful or loving, becomes apparent in what he believes about it’ [WL 231/SKS 9 233].) And even when the judgement is less finely balanced, we are free to choose in the most generous – loving and trusting – way possible.5 Patrick Sheil glosses this point memorably when he notes that in Works of Love what Kierkegaard encourages is not only a slowness to judge but a certain slowness to ‘realize’ – however quietly such realization may ‘dawn’ – what other people are like. Reluctance 4 Anthony Rudd convincingly argues that the deliberations ‘Love Believes All Things’ and ‘Love Hopes All Things’ are committed to the epistemological scepticism about objective certainty found in the Fragments and Postscript. See Rudd 1999. 5 Rudd suggests that Kierkegaard is well aware of obvious rejoinders, such as questions about the degree of generosity we are supposed to extend to notoriously egregious cases such as Hitler or Stalin. Or circumstances in which Sally accuses Fred of rape, and Fred claims this is slander: how can I think well of both Fred and Sally? Rudd argues that even in such cases, ‘I need not be forced to condemn anyone in my heart as simply evil’ (Rudd 1999: 135).

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Towards a more positive account of self-love I to ‘see’ people in their true colours, or as they really are – this is what is being celebrated. Willingness to recognize that since we are not yet at the end of time we may still be pleasantly surprised by our neighbours – this is being heartily … commended to us.6

However, Kierkegaard would be likely to criticise even this way of putting things for having over-hastily drawn the conclusion (‘what other people are like’) that he would have us resist. We might here recall Iris Murdoch’s classic discussion of someone aiming to reconsider a judgement they come to see as less charitable than it might have been. Murdoch famously discusses a mother who believes her son has married ‘beneath him’: a ‘silly, vulgar girl’ (D), whom she views as ‘unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement’.7 But the mother (M) of Murdoch’s example has the generosity of spirit to see beyond her own prejudices and aims to ‘look again’: M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead this can make it clear that the change is not in D’s behaviour but in M’s mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.8

Murdoch sees this shift in vision as a moral phenomenon, perhaps motivated by love or justice.9 In such discussions, she envisages moral change as a process that takes real effort and requires the forming of appropriate habits. A related point is that made by Albert Hirschman, to the effect that trust is a good that increases its strength by common use. Hirschman describes trust as one of those moral resources ‘whose supply may well increase rather than decrease through use; … they do not remain intact if they stay unused; like the ability to speak a foreign language or to play the piano, these moral resources are likely to become depleted and to atrophy if not used.’10 This line of thinking goes some way towards explaining why the default attitude of trust Kierkegaard seems to be commending might be considered desirable. But we should note, as does Annette Baier, that 6 Sheil 2011: 105–6.  7  Murdoch 1970: 17. 8 Murdoch 1970: 17–18. Compare Kierkegaard’s observation in one of his 1843 discourses on ‘Love will hide a multitude of sins’: ‘It does not depend, then, merely upon what one sees, but what one sees depends upon how one sees; all observation is not just a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth, and insofar as it is that, how the observer himself is constituted is indeed decisive’ (EUD 59/SKS 5 69). 9 Murdoch 1970: 18, 23. 10 Hirschman 1984, cited in Baier 1992: 168n59.

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only when trust is to some extent already present can its foundations be built upon: Only if trust is already there in some form can we increase it by using what is there to contrive conditions in which it can spread to new areas. Good parents do this when they use the trust that the child already has in them, and in their eyes and gestures, to teach trusting and trustworthy habits of speech, which then become involved in so many other cooperative practices where trust is present.11

Note the similarity of this reasoning – using trust in order to cultivate its growth  – to Kierkegaard’s in claiming that love presupposes love in the person loved. Trust, by its very nature, makes one vulnerable. Kierkegaard is interested in the valorisation by ancient sceptics such as Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus of the suspension of judgement for ultimately ethical reasons. As Johannes Climacus puts it in the Fragments, the sceptic’s reasoning is that ‘if I can only avoid drawing conclusions, I shall never be deceived’ (PF 82/SKS 4 281). This sounds just like mistrust as described above. But the ancient Greek figure whom Kierkegaard most admires – himself in one place described as a ‘skeptic’ (JP 4 4285/SKS 24 NB 24: 84) – is of course Socrates. And Socrates ‘stakes his whole life’ (CUP 201/SKS 7 185) on the immortality of the soul even though he knows he cannot demonstrate its truth with any certainty. In contrast to Socrates, who is in this way exemplary of existential faith (and the inherent trust therein), the classical sceptic is, in Rick Furtak’s words, ‘ultimately portrayed in Kierkegaard’s writings as a coward, someone whose only way of coping with his own unrealistic demand for assurance is to avoid the risk of believing anything’.12 Fine. But our nagging questions won’t go away. Even if we accept Kierkegaard’s point that life requires us to sustain convictions despite our inevitable uncertainty about them, and even if we accept the idea that this is a good reason not to make ‘mistrust’ one’s default attitude to life, doesn’t ‘sagacity’ have a point? In other words, how is the trust inherent in ‘believing all things’ different from just being gullible? Don’t we need some kind of criteria for deciding when trust is warranted and when it isn’t? Aurel Kolnai offers a view somewhat akin to Kierkegaard’s but with a rider. He suggests, ‘Casting one’s bread upon the waters’ may be highly problematic from the practical and sometimes from the moral point of view; but inasmuch as it 11 Baier 1992: 169. 

  Furtak 2013: 137.

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Towards a more positive account of self-love I springs from, and reveals, virtue, it is a very high virtue indeed. It expresses that attitude of trust in the world which, unless it is vitiated by hare-brained optimism and dangerous irresponsibility, may be looked upon not to be sure as the very starting point and very basis but perhaps as the epitome and culmination of morality.13

(This distinction again seems akin to the importance for Kierkegaard of the idea that it is love – and not just naiveté – which ‘believes all things’.) And yet, Offering trust ‘in advance’ may increase the objective trustworthiness of the recipient.14 [A person] ‘gambles’ on this hope, which inevitably involves a risk. He may do so wisely (‘calculated risk’) and then highly morally, or in a less well founded way (still with a definitely moral intent), or frankly unwisely, which yet may not involve, but may easily blend with, immorality and deserve moral reproof.15

How are we to tell the difference? Does Kierkegaard even recognise such a difference?16 And if we recognise such a difference, should love really believe all things, or should it not just rather give the benefit of the doubt (where doubt, and not certainty, is indeed what it is)? Less beautiful, perhaps, but also more plausible. Nothing I say here should be taken to endorse the idea that, in each and every circumstance, unthinking trust is the way to go. For a society to organise itself on such a basis would obviously be deeply problematic: there are real problems surrounding the issue of trust to be addressed.17 But this is not the place for them. It is beyond the scope of this study, and I suspect that of any possible study of this sort, to be able to answer all the possible objections about trust – in governments and institutions as well as in interpersonal relations – that may be raised. Baier suggests: 13 Kolnai 1973–4: 105. 14 Compare here our earlier point about the mother who trusts her child. 15 Kolnai 1973–4: 105. 16 Baier puts the point more forcefully: ‘Trust is always an invitation not only to confidence tricksters but also to terrorists, who discern its most easily destroyed and socially vital forms. Criminals, not moral philosophers, have been the experts at discerning different forms of trust’ (1986: 234). Compare her later observation that ‘it would usually be foolish, in one’s attitude toward a given person on a given matter, not to mix trust on some matters with doubts and prudent checkups on others’ (Baier 1992: 122). 17 For example, any judicial system will require some kind of answer to the question of when trust in the accused is warranted and when it is not (though even here, we recall the importance of the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ rule). Kierkegaard recognises this in the following contrast: ‘Let the judge appointed by the state, let the servant of justice work at discovering guilt and crime; the rest of us are called to be neither judges nor servants of justice, but on the contrary are called by God to love’ (WL 293/SKS 9 290). That said, this passage surely begs some important questions about the proper relationship between love and justice in our everyday lives.

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even if we lack any useful rules for individuals on when to give and when to withhold trust, we are not entirely without guidelines on how to design roles for individuals that will help them avoid the worst forms of untrustworthiness, or of oppressively burdensome trust, or of overly vulnerable trusting. But it will be the historians, the constitutional lawyers, the international lawyers, the administrative scientists, the economists, the sociologists, the anthropologists, the ethologists, and the psychologists who will have the information that will inform any trustworthy rules of thumb of this sort – philosophers in their armchairs need plenty of books on their desks that are not purely philosophical and they need colleagues in other disciplines correcting their thoughts if they are to get very far in formulating such indirect guidelines for trusting – guidelines, that is, on the design of social roles that provide the circumstances of appropriate trust.18

There may be questions, of course, as to whether Baier’s trust in historians, constitutional lawyers and all the rest is well founded. The purpose of my discussion here is not to solve these real problems about trust but simply to suggest that Kierkegaard is right that we should make an important space for loving trust of others and to add what I take to be an implication Kierkegaard does not explicitly draw out, namely that we should also make space for a degree of self-trust in an account of what it is properly to love oneself. The kind of self-trust that is appropriate, we shall see, is one that is bound up in some important ways with related features, such as hope and forgiveness. Drawing further on Baier’s work on trust can help us with this task. First, we should note that the problems of trust between persons that give rise to the most detailed discussions of trust in the philosophical literature are less likely to arise in the case of self-trust. Baier understands trust as ‘reliance on another’s good will, perhaps minimal good will’.19 It seems reasonable to suppose that in the majority of cases I can more safely assume my own goodwill towards myself than I can that of a random stranger towards me. (Certainly Kierkegaard seems to assume such ‘natural’ self-love throughout most of his discussion of our topic.)20 Baier argues that trust typically ‘grows up slowly and imperceptibly’: ‘Trust can come with no beginnings, with gradual as well as sudden beginnings, and with various degrees of self-consciousness, voluntariness and expressness.’21 This is related to her claim that (other than in exceptional 18 Baier 1992: 153–4.  19  Baier 1986: 234. 20 However, we should also note, recalling our related discussion in Chapter 6, the existence of cases of people whose problem is that they are unable to trust themselves – more of which shortly. 21 Baier 1986: 240.

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cases22) I cannot make myself trust by an act of sheer will.23 The injunction ‘Trust me!’ ‘is for most of us an invitation that we cannot accept at will – either we already do trust the one who says it, in which case it serves at best as reassurance, or it is properly responded to with, “Why should and how can I, until I have cause to?”’24 This latter response sounds like sagacity – precisely what Kierkegaard wants us to get beyond. But if Baier’s plausible claim is right, how can we do so? I suspect that Kierkegaard would be in basic agreement with Baier on the impossibility of getting to a position of trust by sheer will: trust involves both active and passive elements.25 It is for precisely this reason that he stresses that it is only love – understood as a kind of God-given force within us – that is able to trust. The same logic would apply, I think, to the kind of self-trust that is a part of proper self-love. Suppose I have let myself down too often in some aspect of life: I recognise my own sin or akrasia and feel unable to trust myself in that aspect of life ever again. Contrary to many contemporary self-help gurus (‘Believe in yourself! Trust yourself! You can be anything you want to be!’), Kierkegaard’s position, it seems, would be that I simply cannot pull myself up by my own bootstraps in the sense of a single isolated act of will. Only that love which ‘loves forth’ love – that ‘person’s love’ that ‘originate[s] even more deeply in God’s love’ (WL 9/SKS 9 17) – can overcome these doubts. And part of its way of doing so might be to encourage me away from my tendency to need to prove to myself, beyond doubt (there goes the sceptic in me again!), that I am indeed trustworthy. The re-establishment of my ability to trust myself may be less conscious than that. Baier puts nicely a related point: ‘Trust is a fragile plant, which may not endure inspection of its roots, even when they were, before the inspection, quite healthy.’26 Similarly, when such a plant has had a narrow escape, I may need to learn not to check the roots on a daily basis. And, as a result of not doing so, the plant may again – ‘slowly and imperceptibly’ – start to flourish again. How to bring this about? That sounds like a job precisely for the love that believes all things. But consider the following worry. If ‘love believes all things’, the obvious danger is extreme complacency. By ‘believing all things’ – manifesting 22 See especially her discussion of promising (Baier 1986: 245–6). 23 Baier 1986: 244n10. Recall again Murdoch’s stress on the difficulty M might face in reorienting her vision of D. 24 Baier 1986: 244. 25 Compare here Ferreira’s illuminating work on the relation between imagination and volition in Kierkegaard’s thought. See Ferreira 1991 and 1998b. 26 Baier 1986: 260.

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an attitude of trust as opposed to mistrust or malice towards myself – I can interpret my actions, thoughts and intentions in the light most generous to myself. Consider for instance the following thought, applied to oneself: ‘We human beings have a natural fear of making a mistake – by thinking too well of another person. On the other hand, the error of thinking too ill of another person is perhaps not feared, or at least not in proportion to the first’ (WL 232/SKS 9 233). Au contraire, it might be retorted, with respect to ourselves. Common notions of sin and Kierkegaard’s tendency, as noted in previous chapters, to focus on ‘selfishness’ might suggest to us that ‘thinking too well’ of a person is all too likely when that person is oneself. However, our earlier discussion of the kind of ‘sin’ to which feminist theologians have drawn our attention suggests that sometimes the problem is precisely the opposite. The ostensibly banal yet practically important conclusion seems to be that some will think too well of themselves, others too ill, and one and the same person may well have these opposed tendencies in different contexts. With regard to oneself, we can say, at the very least, that one needs to strive to get right the balance between trust and mistrust. For the naturally self-critical, more of the attitude of trust commended by this discourse is a key part of what is needed in proper self-love. If, as we have been arguing all along, part of the message of the second love commandment is that I am a neighbour too, then an implication of God’s love for me is that I should not exclude myself from those to whom I apply this trustful attitude. For we have not been offered any convincing explanation of why I should have standards for myself that are so much harsher than those I apply to others. There is an important corollary to this, which the article by Rudd referred to earlier can help to bring out. For the person prone to a damagingly harsh self-criticism, the exhortation ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself!’ is not enough. Talking in general terms, Rudd suggests: ‘If, having become aware of the possibilities of doubt, we are to continue to believe or to trust, then that is by virtue of a refusal to accept the possibilities of doubt that we know to exist.’27 Applied to the present context, this underlines the importance of the fact that properly to love oneself – in the sense of continuing to trust oneself against the temptations to mistrust or even outright malice towards oneself – is in a sense an act of will. But it is something that for many will be hard; that, if achieved, must be continually renewed; and that requires a certain surrounding climate in order to take root and to flourish. (In this sense, developing the capacity for proper   Rudd 1999: 133.

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self-love could itself be a work of love, a loving duty of self-care.) So, while we can say that one cannot trust oneself or another by a single isolated act of will, a climate of love may strengthen one’s capacities for such loving self-trust. We might understand this in terms of the importance of developing self-confidence. This is one of four overlapping attitudes discussed by Mike W. Martin as constituting what he calls ‘care self-respect’ (a part of what I mean by proper self-love). By self-confidence he means ‘faith in our ability to pursue and achieve goals’, and he claims that it is particularly important in sustaining love-relationships: ‘We can most effectively help a lover or spouse … when we are confident in our ability to help.’28 This surely needs qualification in so far as the confidence needs to be well grounded. (No matter how confident I am in my ability to rewire the electrics in my house, by doing so I will not be helping my partner at all, given my complete incompetence as an electrician.) But, thus qualified, there is something in Martin’s suggestion that (well-grounded) self-confidence is ‘one of the most important gifts we can offer a spouse’.29 This can best be seen if we consider its absence. A lack of self-confidence makes it much easier to become preoccupied with our own problems to the cost of those we love (the ‘self-centredness’ threat again), whereas self-confidence ‘frees us to attend to a partner’s needs’.30 But this brings me to a point on which I disagree with Rudd. He sees Kierkegaard as commending generosity to others but ruthlessness with oneself: ‘For anyone else, I should make all the excuses I can, not hold them to be corrupt or evil. But with myself, I should be ruthless, allow no such excuse.’31 However, this falls foul of the recognition that I too am a neighbour. Earlier, Rudd has commented on the ‘suspiciously high level of generality’ of Kierkegaard’s discussion, but I think he risks the same error here.32 This general advice – be generous to others, harsh on oneself – has a certain prima facie plausibility in light of the worry that people tend to be overly generous to themselves. But it looks highly dubious in the light of specific cases. I once knew someone who worked in a shelter for battered women and who told me of a case of a woman whose regularly violent and abusive boyfriend on one occasion held her over the balcony of the fifteenth floor of a block of flats, threatening to let her go unless she apologised for her failure to clean the apartment properly. The woman subsequently explained to her counsellor that the reason her boyfriend did this 28 Martin 1996: 101.  29  Martin 1996: 102. 30 Ibid.  31  Rudd 1999: 135.  32  Ibid.

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was to show her how much he loved her and to help her become a better person. As far as I can see, this woman’s – monstrously perverse – judgement was perfectly consistent with the general advice described above. It is in cases like this that the importance of the ability to recognise oneself as a neighbour too becomes starkly clear. Baier suggests, ‘One thing that can destroy a trust relationship fairly quickly is the combination of a rigoristic unforgiving attitude on the part of the truster and a touchy sensitivity to any criticism on the part of the trusted.’33 This seems to me no less true in the self-trust case, especially with regard to self-forgiveness. A ‘rigoristic’ failure to forgive myself for my transgressions (either against others or myself ) can be as damaging to my ability to trust myself as the tendency to let myself off the hook too easily. We should stress the importance of striking a balance between being too merciful or ‘lenient’ on the one hand and excessive ‘rigorousness’ (WL 377–8/SKS 9 370–1) on the other. (This point also needs bearing in mind in cases of self-forgiveness, to be discussed in Chapter 8.) Pace Rudd, I would prefer therefore to follow Kolnai’s advice, who recommends that ‘we may do well to consider the verses of the mediaeval “Monk of Heisterbach” … Sonne dich an Gottes grosser Huld; Hab’ mit Allen – auch mit dir – Geduld. (“Bask in the sunshine of God’s great bounty; have patience with all – including thyself ”).’34 From trust, we next turn our attention to hope.

II  Hope: ‘Love Hopes All Things – and Yet Is Never Put to Shame’ What, for Kierkegaard, does it mean to hope? His primary answer, we shall see, relates to the ‘expectancy of an eternal salvation’ – one’s own and that of others. But we shall also see that there is a more quotidian variety of hoping and not giving up hope that is important to him. In this section, we shall consider both dimensions. Love, we are told, ‘takes upon itself the work of hope [Haab]’ (WL 248/SKS 9 248). Hope is ‘to relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good’ (WL 249/SKS 9 249), and to ‘hope all things’ is the same as ‘to hope always’ (WL 248/SKS 9 248), never to give up hope.35 Hope’s nemesis is despair, which has access to the same knowledge. Since it is possible (says despair) that sincere enthusiasm can become weary, fervent believers lose their faith and the morally upright go off the 33 Baier 1986: 238.  34  Kolnai 1973–4: 106. 35 Contrast this with the aesthete A’s verdict in ‘Rotation of Crops’: ‘Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically’ (EO I 292/SKS 2 282).

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rails, ‘therefore despair, give up hope, above all do not hope in any human being or for any human being!’ (WL 254/SKS 9 253–4). But hope reminds us that the opposite is also possible. The prodigal son can still be saved; the enemy can become a friend; love that has gone cold can once again burn brightly. ‘Therefore never give up on any human being; do not despair, not even at the last moment – no, hope all things’ (WL 254/SKS 9 254). As with trust, part of Kierkegaard’s point is that when obliged to judge in the wake of ambiguous evidence, which way we go is an existential choice, and our tendencies reveal something important about our character.36 With regard to proper self-love, Kierkegaard is explicit in Works of Love that the hope he commends includes hope for oneself. ‘No one can hope unless he is also loving’, and in so far as he is loving he ‘also hopes for others’.37 But ‘in the very same degree to which he hopes for others, he hopes for himself, because this is … the eternal like for like that is in everything eternal’ (WL 255/SKS 9 255). In other words, again, I am a neighbour too. Conversely, ‘love is … the middle term: without love, no hope for oneself; with love, hope for all others – and to the same degree one hopes for oneself, to the same degree one hopes for others, since to the same degree one is loving’ (WL 260/SKS 9 259).38 The overall position would seem to be that proper self-love includes a hope for oneself that is inextricably linked to one’s love for others.39 The person who lovingly hopes all things ‘lovingly hopes that at every moment there is possibility, the possibility of the good for the other person. This possibility of the good signifies ever more glorious progress in the good, from perfection to perfection, or rising from a falling, or a rescue from being lost, etc.’ (WL 253/SKS 9 253). In other words, to lovingly hope all things can take the form of hoping that someone with a right relation to the good and the eternal continue on that path (‘from perfection to perfection’) or that someone who has fallen away from the good, or who was never properly related to it, mends their ways 36 ‘[W]hen knowledge in a person has placed the opposite possibilities in equilibrium and he is obliged or wills to judge, then who he is, whether he is mistrustful or loving, becomes apparent in what he believes about it’ (WL 231/SKS 9 233). As with ‘mistrustful or loving’, so ‘despairing or hopeful’. 37 Contrast here Augustine, who states that one hopes specifically for one’s own eternal happiness: ‘hope has for its object only what is good, only what is future, and only what affects the man who entertains the hope’ (1961b: 8). 38 Kierkegaard takes an identical position with respect to faith in the discourse ‘The Expectancy of Faith’ (EUD 10/SKS 5 20). A related dimension of ‘eternity’s like for like’ is that ‘to despair over another person is to be in despair oneself ’ (WL 256/SKS 9 256). 39 Sheil suggests that this might be related to the idea for which Kierkegaard argues in Purity of Heart (or ‘An Occasional Discourse’), that only the good is truly a unity. ‘To hope for something – if it really is only one thing for which one hopes – is necessarily to hope for the good’ (Sheil 2011: 109).

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(‘rising from a falling’; ‘rescue from being lost’). Note again that although Kierkegaard’s primary focus here is on the other, there is no reason why this hope cannot also be applied to oneself: indeed, in his most extended discussions of the concept of hope, to which we shall shortly turn, it is clear that for Kierkegaard it should. But what kind of hope is Kierkegaard concerned with? Robert C. Roberts suggests that ‘Hope [for oneself ] is a construal of one’s future as holding good prospects.’40 This echoes Kierkegaard’s definition of hope as relating oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good, fear as the equivalent relation to the possibility of evil (WL 249/SKS 9 249). But such hope could be interpreted in a ‘finite’ or eschatological sense. I shall argue below that, despite initial appearances, Kierkegaard is committed to both. He tells us that ‘to hope is composed of the eternal and the temporal, and this is why the expression for hope’s task in the form of eternity is to hope all things, and in the form of temporality to hope always’ (WL 249/SKS 9 249). A central distinction in Kierkegaard’s various discussions of hope is between ‘earthly hope’ on the one hand and ‘eternal’ or ‘heavenly hope’ on the other. Kierkegaard’s primary interest is in the latter, and at one point he seems to be defining hope in this way: ‘hope pertains to the possibility of the good, and thereby to the eternal’ (WL 251/SKS 9 251). William McDonald puts a key aspect of the distinction as follows. The future ‘is conceived as the finite temporality of life yet to come. The ego expects hope’s fulfilment within this life-time. For the Christian, on the other hand, hope is eternal; and when the eternal is grasped within time, hope is expressed as expectancy of the future, understood as possibility.’41 This sheds some light on the important observation in ‘Love Hopes All Things’, in the context of a discussion of ‘the eternal’, that ‘anyone who refuses to understand that the whole of one’s life should be the time of hope is veritably in despair, no matter, absolutely no matter, whether he is conscious of it or not’ (WL 252/SKS 9 251). Outside Works of Love, several commentators have noted that Kierkegaard’s most extended discussions of hope occur in the three discourses on expectancy (Forventning) from 1843 and 1844: ‘The Expectancy of Faith’, ‘Patience in Expectancy’ and ‘The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation’.42 Roberts agrees with McDonald that although the word hope 40 Roberts 2007: 148. 41 McDonald (forthcoming). As will become clear later, I don’t think it is fair to dismiss all kinds of ‘earthly hope’ as being to do with ego-fulfilment. 42 For instance, McDonald notes that ‘The most frequent occurrence of the word “hope” is in Works of Love, followed by Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, then Christian Discourses … But the most

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(Haab) is only rarely used, that is Kierkegaard’s real topic in these discourses.43 Moreover, as Roberts also notes, the way that Kierkegaard discusses the matter shows that hope is ‘a formed disposition of the person of faith’.44 Some examples will – hopefully! – clarify this point. In ‘The Expectancy of Faith’, Kierkegaard presents the future  – that over which hope must triumph – as a ‘dangerous enemy’. The very ability to do battle with it shows something impressive about human beings, a something that is ultimately bound up with self-knowledge: The ability to be occupied with the future is … a sign of the nobility of human beings; the struggle with the future is the most ennobling. He who struggles with the present struggles with a particular thing against which he can use his total energy. Therefore, if a person had nothing else with which to struggle, it would be possible for him to go victoriously through his whole life without learning to know himself or his power. He who battles with the future has a more dangerous enemy; he cannot remain ignorant of himself, since he is battling with himself. The future is not; it borrows its power from him himself, and when it has tricked him out of that it presents itself externally as the enemy he has to encounter. (EUD 18/SKS 5 27)

Yet the future can be conquered ‘by the eternal’ which, as ‘the ground of the future’, is the way in which the future ‘can be fathomed’ (EUD 19/SKS 5 28). An ‘expectancy of the future that expects victory’ (the latter term being understood as ‘that all things must serve for good those who love God’ [EUD 19/SKS 5 28]) is what conquers the future, and what has been conquered ‘can no longer disturb’ (EUD 19/SKS 5 28–9). This is ultimately because the believer’s expectancy is ‘not in the world but in God’ (EUD 24/SKS 5 32). In this sense, hope is the opposite of anxiety, understood as ‘a sense of insecurity with respect to one’s future good’.45 Similarly, in the 1844 discourse ‘Patience in Expectancy’ on the faith of the long-widowed Jewish prophetess Anna, Kierkegaard observes, How often it is said that no one is to be considered happy before he is dead, but how seldom is a troubled person heard to say that one should not give up as long as one is living, that there is hope as long as there is life – and consequently there is always hope; for the immortal who expects an eternity. (EUD 214/SKS 5 214) sustained discussions of the concept of hope occur in discussions of expectancy [Forventning] … We find extended discussions of expectancy in “The Expectancy of Faith,” “Patience in Expectancy,” and “The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation”’ (McDonald, forthcoming). 43 Roberts 2003: 188. 44 Roberts 2003: 189. This highlights the importance of the difference between what Stan van Hooft calls merely ‘episodic’ hope and hopefulness as ‘a character trait that marks a person’s way of being for significant lengths of time, if not their whole life’ (2011: 50). 45 Roberts 2003: 191.

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The same idea is echoed in a second 1844 discourse, ‘The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation’, in which that expectancy is the criterion (Maalstock) by which the believer ‘will always understand himself in temporality’ (EUD 260/SKS 5 257). This expectancy puts everything else into perspective: it ‘will reconcile everyone with his neighbour, with his friend, and with his enemy in an understanding of the essential’ (EUD 265/SKS 5 260). Roberts glosses this in terms of the appropriate emotions and virtue-terms: ‘alienating emotions will be replaced with their reconciling opposites: judgemental anger with compassion and a contrite sense of solidarity with fellow sinners, contempt with a generous sense of the difficulty of achieving excellence one may have achieved oneself.’46 As the title of the first of these 1844 discourses already suggests, there is a crucial link between hope and patience for Kierkegaard.47 Here there is an important distinction between earthly and eternal hope. In the former sense  – Roberts’s examples include gardening and a person hoping for grandchildren – calculating times and weighing probabilities makes sense. But Anna’s expectancy of the Messiah is of a quite different order: Because Anna’s hope is in God, whose time is his own … and is on no human or finite schedule, and is absolutely trustworthy, such calculations of probabilities and times are not appropriate. Her patience is ‘infinite’, which is to say there are no conditions under which, if she is true to the logic of the situation, she will become impatient for the Messiah to come, or suppose that the Messiah has delayed too long, or that it is too late for him to come, or that he will, after all, not come.48

It is this that makes sense of Kierkegaard’s claim that the person who hopes can never be deceived, ‘because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal’ (WL 250/SKS 9 250). Of course, human frailty means that one may have doubts, such that someone like Anna needs to ‘tap decisively the resources of infinite patience’.49 But such doubts amount to falling short of true expectancy as a result of falling back into the kind of attitude to patience more appropriate to earthly hope than to its eternal variety. 46 Roberts 2003: 197. 47 For good discussions of patience as a central Kierkegaardian virtue, see Rudd 2008 and Pattison 2002: 47–50. 48 Roberts 2003: 200–1. Compare here MacIntyre: ‘The medieval exponents of the virtue of patience claimed that there are certain types of situation in which the virtue of patience requires that I do not ever give up on some person or task, situations in which, as they would have put it, I am required to embody in my attitude to that person or task something of the patient attitude of God towards his creation’ (1985: 202). 49 Roberts 2003: 201.

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Clearly then, Kierkegaard’s ultimate concern is with the Christian eschatological promise, and the hope that is the most important part of proper self-love is ‘eternal hope’. The self is such that it needs this eternally valid goal and criterion (EUD 263/SKS 5 259). Moreover, a focus on earthly hope might be the gateway to seeing the importance of this eternal hope. In Romans 5, Paul says, ‘we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.’50 Paul discusses this in the context of his eschatology, and, in discussing this passage, Roberts suggests that a suffering ‘can become a viscerally moving symbol of the present world’s unfitness to satisfy my deepest needs’.51 Relatedly, Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches stress that our growing knowledge of what we lack necessarily affects that for which we hope.52 They also point out the dependence of specifically Christian hope on ‘the undeserved gift’ of our having been forgiven by God, and thus ‘we discover an essentially receptive element within it’.53 But too hard and fast a distinction between earthly and eternal hope would be misleading. Hauerwas and Pinches’s point that a growing knowledge can affect that for which we hope is true not only of eschatological hope. Consider Luc Bovens’ example of an academic who desires to win a certain prize in order to advance his career but who comes over time to see this as relatively unimportant. Following Bovens, we may say that ‘Through hoping we spend a certain amount of mental energy on the projected states of the world and we may come to realize that what we were originally hoping for is not worth hoping for after all.’54 In this sense, hope can advance our self-understanding in the here and now.55 This is the upside of the fact that ‘earthly’ hopes can be disappointed. Likewise, several passages in Works of Love make clear that for Kierkegaard the focus of hope as a work of love is not exclusively eschatological. Kierkegaard is also interested in the more quotidian concerns of not giving up hope in the here and now for those who have gone off the rails. We noted earlier the examples of hope he gives, such as sworn enemies becoming friends and the restoration of love to a relationship. This suggests that he might share Bovens’ judgement that one reason 50 Romans 5:1–5, Revised Standard Version. I have switched translations here because I think the RSV renders the points that follow more clearly than the King James Version. 51 Roberts 2007: 160. 52 Hauerwas and Pinches 1997: 121. 53 Hauerwas and Pinches 1997: 121, 122. 54 Bovens 1999: 673.  55  Bovens 1999: 676.

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hope has value is because the ‘mental imaging’ it involves provides certain ‘pleasures of anticipation’ which can be ‘especially important in times of hardship’ and that such anticipation can apply to the ‘finite’, and not only the ‘eternal’, dimensions of our lives.56 Relatedly, a mounting body of evidence gives testimony to the value of hope in clinical settings, and we should also note its importance in the concentration-camp experiences reported by Viktor Frankl which provided the foundation of his method of ‘logotherapy’.57 Any attempt to fight the camps’ ‘psychopathological influence on the prisoner’, Frankl reports, ‘had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing to a future goal to which he could look forward’.58 The loss of such hope proved fatal, the observation of which ultimately led to Frankl’s conclusion that ‘Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.’59 For all the difference between ‘earthly’ and ‘eternal’ hope, Kierkegaard does note that they ‘grow up and play together in childhood as peers (Ligebørn)’ (UDVS 113/SKS 8 215). In the following passage from Works of Love, while the gulf between them is greater, the connection is expressed in terms of another happily nurturing image: If eternity were to assign the human being the task all at once and in its own language, without regard for his capacities and limited powers, this is the wondrous thing, that this greatest of powers, eternity, can make itself so small that it is divisible in this way, this which is eternally one, so that taking upon itself the form of the future, the possible, with the help of hope it brings up temporality’s child (the human being), teaches him to hope (to hope is itself the instruction, is the relation to the eternal), provided he does not arbitrarily choose to be severely disheartened by fear or brazenly to despair – that is, to withdraw from the upbringing by possibility. (WL 252–3/SKS 9 252)

Though focusing only on what Kierkegaard would count as earthly hope, Bovens echoes him in arguing that hope is part of love. Bovens construes 56 Bovens 1999: 675. Compare here the work of the psychologist Martin Seligman on the value of optimism, e.g., Seligman 2009. 57 For a useful discussion of ‘hope in the clinic’ in the context of what it means to understand hope as a virtue, see van Hooft 2011: Chapter 3. Van Hooft reports that ‘patients with even the most dire injuries or serious medical conditions will enjoy better outcomes if they hope for such outcomes … Hopeful patients live longer. Hope can lead not only to resilience in the face of suffering, but also to amelioration of the malady that is causing the suffering. In the field of palliative care, where patients are dying without any prospect of cure, hope is said to be an essential ingredient in the achievement of a “good death”’ (van Hooft 2011: 66); Frankl 2004. 58 Frankl 2004: 81. 59 Frankl 2004: 117. On the fatal possibilities of the loss of hope, see, for instance, Frankl’s discussion of F. (2004: 82ff.).

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hope as involving belief, desire and a degree of ‘mental imaging’, that is, devoting mental energy to the imagined possible state of the world for which one hopes.60 He argues that part of what it is to love someone is to expend mental energy hoping that a state of affairs beneficial to their well-being will come about. (Compare what Kierkegaard says about the centrality to love of helping someone to love God [WL 107/SKS 9 111], as discussed in Chapter 3.) Similarly, Bovens interprets expending mental energy on hopes and fears for one’s own well-being as constitutive of having self-worth, and that such self-worth is a prerequisite for developing genuine self-respect.61 We shall return to the topic of self-respect in Chapter 8, in our discussion of forgiveness. But notice that trust, hope (for the here and now) and forgiveness are connected in an important way. In Chapter 6, in our discussion of the Simone Weil passage, we expressed concern about how dangerously close to self-hatred Weil strays. In a discussion of why it is important that wrongdoers avoid self-hatred, Linda Radzik argues that such a person ‘must also make it the case that he can view himself as someone who can be trusted to perform morally acceptable actions in the future, which helps explain why personal reformation – “a change of heart” – is usually seen as so important to atonement.’62 Note that such personal reformation requires both trust in and hope for oneself. Moreover, this trust – and hope – must be appropriately grounded: ‘It is not enough to convince herself or others that she is trustworthy. She must actually become trustworthy.’63 And here is where self-contempt and self-hatred are so dangerous: ‘A person who feels self-contempt is hampered from seeing himself as capable of improvement. He instead regards his alienation from other people and himself as the proper order of things rather than as a problem that he can and must fix. Hatred suggests an inclination to destroy its object.’64 How might we aid such a person? We might heed Kierkegaard’s advice (and encourage them to heed it with respect to themselves): ‘Even if the one who loves was unable to do the slightest additional thing for others … he still brings the best gift, he brings hope’ (WL 258/SKS 9 258). In Kierkegaard goes further: ‘The true expectant person keeps company with his expectancy every day. It arises earlier in the morning than he himself, is up and about sooner, goes to bed later in the evening than he himself; the inner being, to whom expectancy belongs, does not need as much sleep as the outer being’ (EUD 222/SKS 5 221). 61 Bovens 1999: 677, 681. Bovens is interested in the balance between hope and fear, viewing the former as a corrective to excessive risk-aversion, the latter as a corrective to excessive risk-proneness (1999: 672). That element is absent from Kierkegaard’s discussion of hope. 62 Radzik 2009: 83.  63  Radzik 2009: 85.  64  Radzik 2009: 90. 60

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other words, a well-grounded trust in and hope for oneself is key to the right kind of self-love. (This, like true expectancy, is likely to require a kind of patience.) And, once again, it matters that it is love that brings this message to the sufferer: ‘If there is no love, hope would not exist either; it would just remain lying there like a letter waiting to be picked up’ (WL 259/SKS 9 258).

III  Summary Although Kierkegaard’s official position in Works of Love is that there is such a thing as proper self-love, because most of his comments on self-love are about the varieties he condemns, it has proven hard for commentators to tease out in any detail what he means by proper self-love. I’ve suggested that we can start to flesh out a fuller account of what proper self-love might mean for Kierkegaard by drawing on some of the deliberations in Works of Love on the virtues of trust, hope and forgiveness. ‘Love Builds Up’, ‘Love Believes All Things’ and ‘Love Hopes All Things’ contribute to this task by enabling us to see the importance of making room for an appropriately grounded trust in and hope for ourselves as a vital counterbalance to the risk of falling into despair. They also bring out the pivotal role of love in enabling us to do so: it is love that trusts, love that hopes. Proper self-love, then, starts to look like the ground in which well-founded trust in and hope for oneself can be nourished. The hope in question has both an eschatological dimension (‘eternal hope’) and a dimension that applies to the quotidian here and now (‘temporal hope’). We have seen that though Kierkegaard prioritises the former, it impacts on the latter in an important way. Finally, we drew on Bovens to suggest that such hope is constitutive of having basic self-worth, a prerequisite for developing genuine self-respect. We have already noted the importance of self-respect, especially in Chapter 6. We shall flesh out our picture of its role in and relation to proper self-love in the next chapter, where our central topic is forgiveness.

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Towards a more positive account of self-love II Self-forgiveness and self-respect

Kierkegaard’s popular reputation as the ‘melancholy Dane’ – one obsessed with anxiety, despair and sin – can easily obscure the importance of forgiveness in his thought. Yet forgiveness is a vital theme in the second series of Works of Love – and elsewhere. In his discourse ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’, Kierkegaard claims that ‘surely no king who rules over kingdoms and countries, no Croesus who possesses everything, and no philanthropist who feeds the hungry possesses anything as great or has anything as great to give away or anything as needful to give away as the person whose forgiveness someone else needs’ (TDIO 13/SKS 5 394). We shall see shortly something of the importance of the forgiveness of sins in The Sickness Unto Death and other texts. And, as Ferreira puts it, ‘It could easily be argued that the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation are at the heart of the deliberations in the second series [of Works of Love]’.1 In general, we should note that Kierkegaard endorses the New Testament view that our having been forgiven means that we must be prepared to forgive others: ‘God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you’ (WL 380/SKS 9 373).2 In Purity of Heart he describes the failure to see that accepting myself as forgiven means that I should forgive others as an instance of ‘double-mindedness’ (UDVS 70–1/SKS 8 178).3 A recent study by Simon Podmore has also aimed to show this centrality of forgiveness to Kierkegaard’s thought.4 While Podmore’s focus is on the centrality of the forgiveness of one’s sins by God (how, as he puts it, the ‘Wholly Other’ reveals itself as the ‘Holy Other’), my interest here, while certainly set against this background, is primarily on the 1 Ferreira 2001: 169. 2 Cf. Matthew 6:14–15; see also Matthew 18:21–35. 3 For a moving account of such a recognition in the life of someone guilty of manslaughter, and its relevance to her own process of self-forgiveness, see Landman 2002: 253–4. 4 Podmore 2011.

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possible role of acceptance of forgiveness and self-forgiveness as part of proper self-love.5 In this chapter, I want to argue for the need for a middle ground between the excessive focus on ‘self-denial’ discussed in Chapter 6 and a ‘cheaply therapeutic’ view of forgiveness that diminishes the value of both forgiveness of others and self-forgiveness.6 Looking beyond but, I think, still staying broadly with the spirit of Kierkegaard, I shall bring him into dialogue with some important recent work on forgiveness, drawing in particular on the work of Robin Dillon on self-respect, to argue for a picture of self-forgiveness that retains a role for continuing self-reproach of a certain kind. We might be troubled by the idea of self-forgiveness as an aspect of proper self-love. After all, don’t we sometimes let ourselves off the hook too easily? If love is, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, a ‘lenient interpreter’ (WL 294/SKS 9 291), is it really acceptable to be so lenient with oneself? Is this sufficiently ‘rigorous’? As Charles Griswold puts it, self-forgiveness ‘all too easily degenerates into self-interested condonation or excuse making’.7 However, if condoning or excusing is what it is, then it is not genuine forgiveness. And, as we noted with regard to ‘selfishness’ in Chapter 6, we should also be alive to the opposite problem. As Griswold also notes, it is likewise possible to be too hard on oneself. And for an interesting reason: a person’s refusal to forgive herself might be problematic ethically as well as psychologically, betraying ‘an objectionable sort of pride in being outstandingly principled, in never buckling under the weight of one’s humanity’.8 We shall return to this shortly. 5 Compare in this respect Clare Carlisle’s claim that for Kierkegaard, ‘The task of becoming a Christian can be reduced to two basic elements: recognition that one is a sinner, and faith in the forgiveness of sins’ (2013: 423). 6 I borrow the label ‘therapeutic’ from Garrard and McNaughton 2010: 3–6. Garrard and McNaughton do not deny either that therapy can be valuable, or that forgiveness can be cathartic and therapeutic. Rather, their objection is to the kind of shallow ‘self-help advocacy’ that ‘fails to address the realities of terrible wrongdoing and what it does, and means, to its victims’ (2010: 5). Their point is that we need to see that ‘there are other reasons for forgiving wrongdoers, apart from the therapeutic effects that are so often touted in its favour’ (ibid.). I am sympathetic to this line and hence choose the phrase ‘cheaply therapeutic’ rather than just ‘therapeutic’. On the prevalence amongst counselling practitioners of a focus on the benefits of forgiveness to the forgiver, rather than ‘a gift to the offending person as well as the self ’, see Konstam, Marx, Schurer, Lombardo and Harrington 2002, especially p. 67. 7 Griswold 2007: 122. Put more theologically, the worry here is one about a kind of ‘cheap grace’, and moreover one that is not only cheap but that is granted to oneself by oneself. 8 Ibid. In The Sickness Unto Death, this theme is connected to the rejection of hope: ‘Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible – no, that he does not want … he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell’ (SUD 71/SKS 11 185). For further discussion of the defiant will in Kierkegaard, see Podmore 2011: 160ff.

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There is an obvious caveat to a discussion of self-forgiveness in Kierkegaard: that, for him, self-forgiveness is in one important sense impossible, since only God can forgive sins. One finds this claim towards the end of The Sickness Unto Death, where Anti-Climacus discusses ‘the sin of despairing of the forgiveness of sins’ (SUD 113–24/SKS 11 225–36). Such despair is either that of weakness (‘which is offended and does not dare to believe’ [SUD 113/SKS 11 225]) or defiance (‘which is offended and will not believe’ [SUD 113/SKS 11 225]). Anti-Climacus asserts, ‘When the sinner despairs of the forgiveness of sins, it is almost as if he walked right up to God and said, “No, there is no forgiveness of sins, it is impossible”’ (SUD 114/SKS 11 226). This is entirely understandable from the perspective of ‘human understanding’: indeed, only ‘spiritlessness’ would fail to be offended by Christ’s claim to be able to forgive sins or the very idea that sins can be forgiven (SUD 116/SKS 11 227–28).9 The ability to forgive sin is a ‘chasmal qualitative abyss’ (SUD 122/SKS 11 233) between God and humanity. And yet the importance of accepting that God can forgive one’s sin is stressed: this ‘offensive’ claim ‘shall be believed’ (SUD 116/SKS 11 228). Indeed, in an 1848 journal entry, Kierkegaard claims, ‘To believe the forgiveness of one’s sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; he who does not believe this is not spirit’ (JP 1 67/SKS 27 Papir 409.1). And, in his commentary on Matthew 11:28 in the Christian Discourses, ‘consciousness of the forgiveness of sins’ (CD 267/SKS 10 283) is what gives ‘rest’ to the ‘burdened’ soul. Strictly speaking, then, in a deep theological sense, perhaps self-forgiveness is impossible. And yet Kierkegaard does speak of self-forgiveness, making a version of Griswold’s second point in theological terms. For example, The Sickness Unto Death gives short shrift to the use of the phrase ‘I will never forgive myself.’ Far from this showing the speaker’s ‘deep nature’, Anti-Climacus responds that ‘if God would forgive him this, well, he certainly could have the goodness to forgive himself. No, his despair over the sin is a far cry from being a qualification of the good, is a more intensive qualification of sin, the intensity of which is absorption in sin’ (SUD 111/SKS 11 223). The assertion that ‘I will never forgive myself ’ is ‘exactly the opposite of the brokenhearted contrition that prays to God to forgive’ (SUD 111/SKS 11 223). And, in an 1850 journal entry, discussing a Catholic convert to Lutheranism who became convinced that he had Hugh S. Pyper points out that Christ never claims himself to be able to forgive sins, customarily saying rather that ‘Your sins are forgiven’ and thus appealing to the Father (2002: 12). Kierkegaard himself makes this point in an 1850 journal entry (JP 2 1223/SKS 24 NB 21: 129). Nevertheless, Jesus’s hearers seem to take this to be his claim: see, for instance, Mark 2:5–7. 9

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committed the New Testament’s mysterious and much discussed unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit and was therefore beyond the reach of divine mercy, Kierkegaard observes, ‘Perhaps the sin against the Holy Spirit was rather the pride with which he would not forgive himself [sic: den Stolthed, med hvilken han ikke vilde tilgive sig selv]. There is also a severity in condemning oneself and not wanting to hear about grace which is nothing but sin’ (JP 4 4029/SKS 23 NB 15: 94, my emphasis). So, for Kierkegaard, precisely because we have been forgiven, we should accept this forgiveness, difficult though this will be for many of us. Consider the following journal entry from 1847, the same year as Works of Love: ‘A man rests in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God does not remind him of the sin but that it is forgiven, when the past is not a memory of how much he trespassed but of how much he has been forgiven’ (JP 2 1209/KJN 4/SKS 20 NB 2: 116). As noted, The Sickness Unto Death insists that to fail to recognise and accept this forgiveness is a form of despair. And, as some of the above comments suggest, often this acceptance of forgiveness will be inextricably linked to what we would colloquially call self-forgiveness. On one level, this is merely the application to ourselves of the New Testament view that our having been forgiven means that we must be prepared to forgive others. And the refusal to forgive myself would thus count as the kind of disguised pride or hubris to which both Griswold and Kierkegaard refer (‘Look at what high standards I hold myself to! Look at what torment I’m prepared to suffer rather than let myself off the hook too easily!’). Podmore connects self-forgiveness in Kierkegaard with a passage in the Works of Love deliberation ‘Love Hides a Multitude of Sins’, in which Kierkegaard speaks of God’s ‘forgetting’ as well as forgiving sins. He interprets this as ‘a figurative reflection of how, by the grace of God, forgiven sins are not held over the head of the one who is forgiven like an (unrepayable) debt or a melancholy remembrance of past transgressions’.10 But several questions arise here. First, what is the nature of the forgiveness that serves as the model for self-forgiveness? Second, when is a wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness appropriate? In particular, is it the case  – as commonly supposed  – that the victim’s forgiveness of the offender is a necessary prerequisite to self-forgiveness? And what difference does faith in God make to one’s answer to this question? Let us tackle each of these questions in turn. In doing so, while recognising that forgiveness is a vital theme running through the second series of Works of Love, I focus here on   Podmore 2009: 178.

10

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its role as the third and ‘most notable’ (WL 294/SKS 9 292) of three ways in which ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ that it ‘cannot avoid seeing or hearing’ in the Works of Love deliberation of that title (WL 289/SKS 9 286).

I  Forgiveness as the model for self-forgiveness? With regard to the first question above, in the final few pages of ‘Love Hides a Multitude of Sins’, Kierkegaard initially seems to say that forgiveness wipes out the relevant sin: ‘Forgiveness removes what cannot be denied to be sin’, ‘forgiveness takes the forgiven sin away’ (WL 294/SKS 9 292, my emphases). He relates this to faith, and its connection to ‘what is not seen’: ‘The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away. This cannot be seen, whereas the sin can indeed be seen … the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen’ (WL 295/SKS 9 292, emphases in original). Kierkegaard suggests that we recognise the power of forgiveness by considering cases in which we ourselves have needed forgiveness. He criticises unloving instances of (quasi-)forgiveness, in which a person misuses the power to forgive to increase his own sense of self-importance (WL 295/SKS 9 292–3). This danger is one reason why forgiveness must be offered in love: ‘only love has sufficient dexterity to take away the sin by means of forgiveness’ (WL 295/SKS 9 293), such that ‘what is seen is, by being forgiven, not seen’ (WL 295/SKS 9 293). The overall impression created by this discussion is that forgiveness is more of a gift than a model of ‘wiping the slate clean’ in recognition of debts repaid.11 But he also uses a variety of other images, not obviously compatible with ‘removing’ or ‘wiping out’. He indeed associates forgiving with forgetting and uses the Old Testament image of sin as being ‘hidden behind [God’s] back’ (WL 295/SKS 9 293): ‘the one who loves forgives in this way: he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course cannot see what is lying behind his back’ (WL 296/SKS 9 293, my emphasis).12 The overall 11 If this is so, then Kierkegaard cannot be charged with holding the problematic view that forgiveness is something owed when the wrongdoer’s debt to the wronged party is repaid. For some effective criticism of this ‘debt repayment’ view of forgiveness, see, for instance, Radzik 2009: 121. 12 In Isaiah, sins are described as having been cast behind God’s back (Isaiah 38:17). On forgetting, compare also the 1848 journal entry in which Kierkegaard makes a rather dubious conflation between forgiving and forgetting: ‘when the anguished conscience starts having burdensome thoughts, and it seems to one that in all eternity it is impossible to forget, you shall forget, you shall stop thinking of your sin; not only are you permitted to stop, not only do you dare ask God

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impression here is of a wilful refusal on the part of the one who loves to see the sin.13 But – one may object – sins that are ‘hidden’ or ‘not seen’ are still there. Andrew Burgess puts the point thus: ‘Do the sins continue to exist, but unseen, after they are believed away? If they do, then they are merely hidden and not removed. If they do not, they are removed and not hidden.’14 Moreover, the image of forgetting sins doesn’t help diminish this paradox, since, as Burgess points out, forgetting is more like hiding than removing, as the image of the sins as being ‘hidden behind God’s back’ underlines. So the key question remains: is it really the case that forgiveness takes away sin? If so, in what sense? Burgess’s suggestion is that Kierkegaard’s position can be understood in terms of Luther’s formula that the Christian is simul justus et peccator: ‘at the same time justified and a sinner’. Does divine forgiveness take away sin? Yes, in the sense that God totally forgives sin (though justification is by faith alone).15 No, in the sense that this does not mean that the slate is entirely ‘wiped clean’: the consequences of sin remain. An 1846 journal entry, focusing on guilt, sheds light on this position: Forgiveness of sins cannot be such that God by a single stroke, as it were, erases all guilt [Skyld], abrogates all its consequences. Such a craving is only a worldly desire which does not really know what guilt is. It is only the guilt which is forgiven; more than this the forgiveness of sins is not. It does for permission to dare to forget – no, you shall forget, for you shall believe that your sin is forgiven’ (KJN 5/SKS 21 NB 6: 26 [JP 2 1217], second emphasis mine). Whether accepting one’s sins as being forgiven justifies forgetting them surely depends upon the nature of those sins. One of the key themes that emerges from the contributors to the symposium in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower – of which more later – is that some sins or ‘crimes against humanity’ and God, such as the Holocaust, are so monstrous that even those capable of forgiving must never dishonour the dead by forgetting. See, for instance, the response of Robert McAfee Brown in Wiesenthal 1998: 121. Kierkegaard offers a more nuanced view of the relationship between being forgiven and forgetting in ‘The Gospel of Sufferings’, in which the forgiven sinner ‘must steadfastly recollect’ that he is forgiven: ‘forgiveness through Christ is the gentle disciplinarian who does not have the heart to remind us of what has been forgotten but still reminds us of it to the extent of saying: Just remember that it is forgiven’ (UDVS 247/SKS 8 346). See also the moving autobiographical note at KJN 4/SKS 20 NB 2: 136. 13 Compare here Kierkegaard’s image of Christ hiding or covering our sins as a mother hen hides her chicks from danger under her wings (WA 185–6/SKS 12 299–300). 14 Burgess 1999: 46. Kierkegaard had clearly been wrestling with this question for years. For instance, see the 1840 journal entry at JP 2: 1201/SKS 27 Papir 288. 15 Burgess notes that Luther uses his simul justus et peccator formula in two senses: ‘partial’ and ‘total’. In the former, he follows Augustine and the common Christian heritage in viewing us as ‘in part sinners and in part righteous’ (Luther 1972: 434). In the latter, he applies his distinctive doctrine of justification by faith alone: ‘Before God the saints find themselves totally sinful, but their sins are entirely covered by Christ’s righteousness. Directly before God there can be no quantitative judgment of “more or less sinful”, or “more or less righteous”, but only a qualitative judgment of total sinfulness and total righteousness’ (Burgess 1999: 49–50).

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This idea – that even the total forgiveness of my sins by God does not wipe out the consequences – has an important implication for how we are to think about the psychology of self-forgiveness, as we shall shortly see. But, as a preliminary, consider Linda Radzik’s example as an illustration of how the ‘consequences of guilt’ remain: Your dear mother may well say to you, ‘Yes, you insulted and disappointed me, you broke my heart, but I love you, and I forgive you. Let’s forget it.’ However, that does not mean you may forget it. Mother dear deserves your respect and repentance even if she is not willing to lay claim to it. You morally ought to become a better person than the one who wronged her even if she does not demand that you do.17

To recap: Kierkegaard claims that forgiveness is a major way of ‘hiding the multitude of sins’. Since such hiding is a work of love, then forgiveness is a work of love. Recalling that I am a neighbour too, perhaps part of proper self-love is self-forgiveness. But, we have already noted, self-forgiveness raises some tricky questions. What exactly does it involve? And when is it called for? In recent discussions of forgiveness, some have given attention to Derrida’s paradoxical claim, repeated in a number of places, that ‘forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable … forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself.’18 As Pyper, in a passage approvingly cited by Podmore, paraphrases this, ‘To forgive what is forgivable is … tautologous. The very act of deciding that a given situation is forgivable is tantamount to forgiving it. It is only when faced with the unforgivable that the work of forgiveness becomes appropriate or required.’19 But this seems to me quite wrong. Deciding that a given situation is forgivable is no more tantamount to actually forgiving it than deciding that this river is swimmable is tantamount to actually swimming it. I shall not be following this Derridian line, as I think it actually risks trivialising 16 I take it that guilt and sin are more or less interchangeable here, as Kierkegaard seems to be talking about what is commonly called ‘objective guilt’ as opposed to feelings of guilt (‘subjective guilt’). Later in the same journal entry he claims that ‘guilt is something completely different from and more terrible than the consequences of guilt (regarded as misfortune, suffering)’ (JP 2 1205/SKS 27 Papir 340: 12). 17 Radzik 2009: 120.  18  Derrida 2001: 32–3. 19 Pyper 2002: 8, cited in Podmore 2011: 190, my emphases.

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the work of forgiveness.20 For what might ‘the work of forgiveness’ mean? I take it to mean something like this: I recognise that others have been able to forgive a wrongdoer for murdering their child, or their spouse for walking out of the marriage. I further judge that these things are indeed forgivable, and I want to forgive the murderer of my child or my estranged spouse. But I find myself unable to forgive. The process of coming to forgive what I judge to be forgivable may take years of painful effort – and perhaps a lengthy course of psychotherapy. Kierkegaard recognises the need for some such effort when he says that ‘the one who loves’ knows nothing about the past, but only because ‘he has continually cleared away the past’ (WL 314/SKS 9 311). We may reasonably surmise that this process of coming to forgive will typically involve the kind of effort to ‘look again’, to see more charitably, that we earlier associated with Murdoch and ‘love’s vision’. The same is true, I suggest, of self-forgiveness (and, as I shall argue below, it is here that Robin Dillon’s work is particularly interesting). In one of his discussions of ‘the woman who was a sinner’ from Luke’s gospel, Kierkegaard claims that ‘with regard to finding forgiveness’, one important thing we learn from her is that ‘she herself is able to do nothing at all’ (WA 155/SKS 12 268). But it does not follow from this that having found forgiveness – that is, recognised with gratitude than one is forgiven (by God or another) – there might not be additional work to do to forgive oneself, as the experience of many a psychotherapist would confirm. Kierkegaard certainly recognises this when he comments as follows: And yet how difficult! Yes, even more rare than a person who accomplished the apparently very easy task, after having received the assurance of the gracious forgiveness of his sins and the pledge thereof, of feeling completely unburdened of every sin, even the least, or relieved of every sin, also even the greatest! (WA 170/SKS 12 286)

Similarly, he remarks that although a loving person can ‘lovingly shut his eyes to your sins … he cannot shut your eyes to them’ (WA 184/SKS 12 298). Self-forgiveness, then, has a fight on its hands, against the self-accusing gaze. So what exactly might self-forgiveness involve? Griswold offers the following sketch: One must reframe one’s view of oneself and see oneself in a new light; make a commitment to change one’s ways; confront honestly and fully the injury 20 John B. Howell III argues that ultimately Derrida’s position does not take wrongdoing seriously enough, in so far as it does not give reasons for forgiveness and that on Derrida’s view one cannot adequately distinguish forgiveness from condonation. See Howell 2009: 179ff.

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Most of this account strikes me as reasonable and helpful. But what about the final claim? Isn’t it possible that negative attitudes (one dimension of what Kierkegaard in the 1846 journal entry called ‘the consequences of guilt’?) are still warranted even after one has taken responsibility for one’s wrongdoing?22 As Dillon puts it, ‘Self-forgiveness would then involve overcoming self-reproach while recognizing that one still deserves it.’23 Perhaps this is part of what Luther’s ‘at the same time justified and a sinner’ formula is able to preserve. However, there is a problem here, as Dillon also notes: To forswear warranted damning attitudes would seem to sacrifice integrity and self-respect. For … those attitudes express one’s judgement, in light of standards that are important to one’s moral self-identity, that some central aspect of oneself is reprehensible. To overcome the attitudes would be to renounce the judgment and the standards that entail it. But when those standards are central to one’s normative self-identity … renouncing them would be a failure to respect oneself and a sacrifice of moral integrity, which would give one additional grounds for self-condemnation.24

Hence the following question: how can self-forgiveness do ethically significant work without sacrificing self-respect?25

II  Self-forgiveness and self-respect Note that this is a specific aspect of a more general link between self-respect and forgiveness often made in the literature on forgiveness. For instance, 21 Griswold 2007: 127, my emphases. Compare the first emphasised phrase with the idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin. 22 Or wrong feeling, wanting, etc. See Dillon 2001: 59. 23 Dillon 2001: 57.  24  Dillon 2001: 57–8. 25 The near unanimous agreement on the value of self-respect amongst moral philosophers is noted by Dillon (1995b: 1) and Kristjan Kristjansson. As the latter puts it, ‘philosophers of every stripe

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as noted in Chapter 6, Jeffrie Murphy suggests that an excessively ready tendency to forgive may be a sign that one lacks self-respect. If I immediately rush to forgive you whenever you wrong me without any sense of injustice or feeling of resentment, this might well indicate that I do not take my intrinsic human dignity with sufficient seriousness. (This is at the heart of the nervousness some of us may have about certain interpretations of the injunction to ‘turn the other cheek’.26) ‘Forgiveness may restore relationships’, says Murphy, ‘but to seek restoration at all costs – even at the cost of one’s self-respect – can hardly be a virtue.’27 Those who find it difficult to forgive themselves occupy a stance that Murphy calls ‘moral self-hatred’, ‘a kind of shame placed on top of guilt – guilt over the wrong one has done but … [also] shame that one has fallen so far below one’s own ideal of selfhood that life – at least life with full self-consciousness  – is now less bearable.’28 In other words, because of the difference between how I assumed myself to be and how I realise (to my horror) I actually am, my ‘moral self-image sustains a severe fracture’ and damages my self-respect.29 Indeed, it has even been argued that ‘Self-forgiveness only arises as a genuine and serious issue when the agent has acted in a way that leads to diminished self-respect.’30 There is an important role here for what Dillon calls ‘transformational self-forgiveness’. She argues that an adequate account of self-forgiveness requires an understanding of what kind of damaged self-respect needs to be restored.31 She distinguishes three kinds, of which I’ll discuss two. First is recognition self-respect. This centres on ‘status worth’, such as ‘respect for oneself as a being with the dignity that, on the Kantian view, persons as such have’ or, we could add, in the Christian tradition, the and persuasion’ celebrate it as ‘a virtue and/or a character trait to which pride of place should be given in our lives’ (Kristjansson 2002: 93). The reasons for this are manifold: Kristjansson outlines the psychological, moral, educational and pragmatic value of self-respect (2002: 97). Of most interest to us here is its moral value: ‘as a guardian of the (other) virtues: as the column of true majesty in man which preserves moral character and contributes to the continuation of morality’ (ibid.). I see no reason to depart from this consensus: the following discussion aims to cash out some of the importance we attributed to self-respect in Chapter 6. 26 But for a far more promising reading of this phrase, see Bennett 2003. For Bennett, ‘turning the other cheek’ involves ‘having sufficient confidence in your own [moral] status … that you are prepared to make yourself vulnerable to further insult in order to reach out to the wrongdoer in some way – for instance in the hope of encouraging his return to the moral community’ (2003: 139). 27 Murphy 1982: 505. See also Murphy 2002, especially p. 44. Margaret R. Holmgren also holds that a person who forgives prematurely can thereby demonstrate her lack of self-respect. Holmgren argues that what is often necessary is a process of response to wrongdoing that culminates in forgiveness and that forgiving before this process is complete is inconsistent with self-respect (1993). 28 Murphy 1998: 218.  29  Horsbrugh 1974: 276. 30 Ibid.  31  Dillon 2001: 65.

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self-respect that anyone is entitled to in virtue of being a ‘child of God’.32 This latter is the basic self-respect that, I suggested in Chapter 6, underlies Kierkegaard’s comments about the importance of loving oneself properly. Anti-Climacus stresses this in his parable of the mighty emperor who sends for a poor day-labourer whom he wants as a son-in-law. He spells out the implications thus: ‘Christianity teaches that … every single individual human being, no matter whether man, woman, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student or whatever … exists before God … is invited to live on the most intimate terms with God!’ (SUD 85/SKS 11 198–9).33 Second, evaluative self-respect, which centres on what prima facie might appear to be a more dubious idea from Kierkegaard’s point of view, namely merit based on the quality of our character and conduct, and which we earn or lose through what we do and become … It includes thinking well of oneself on account of positive merit, but its primary mode is regarding oneself as coming up to scratch in the absence of significant demerit.34

How do these distinctions help in understanding the kinds of self-respect that need to be present in proper self-love? Recognition self-respect is crucial. We can understand it better by noting Dillon’s suggestion that intrinsic worth can be grounded in equal dignity, moral agency and individuality. First, equality: all persons have equal basic moral worth, which entitles each to respect from all (including respect from oneself ). Living with a view of oneself as a being with equal dignity to others involves ‘having a conception of what persons as such are due and what is degrading or beneath the dignity of persons, desiring to be regarded and treated appropriately, and resenting disregard and disrespectful treatment’.35 Second, 32 Dillon 2001: 66. 33 I am grateful to George Pattison for drawing my attention to the importance of this passage in this context. 34 Ibid. Underlying both, according to Dillon, is a third variety, basal self-respect, which she claims is ‘more intimate and less inferential than Kantian dignity’ (Dillon 2001: 68). ‘[W]eak or distorted basal valuing is fundamental insecurity about one’s worth or a tacit view of oneself as not good enough or as nothing that reverberates throughout one’s self-experiences and life’ (ibid.). The distinction between basal and recognition self-respect is not central to our purposes here. Dillon tries to cash out the difference thus: ‘recognition self-respect expresses “I matter because I am a person”’ whereas ‘basal self-respect expresses simply “I matter”’ (Dillon 2001: 68n45). If I understand her correctly, basal self-respect is simply the perhaps unconscious expression of a tacitly but not explicitly acknowledged recognition self-respect. As Dillon acknowledges, ‘recognition’ and ‘evaluative’ respect roughly parallel Stephen Darwall’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘appraisal’ respect’: see Darwall 1977. See also the articles in Dillon 1995 (which includes Darwall’s). 35 Dillon 2001: 66.

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properly appreciating oneself as a moral agent includes ‘taking seriously one’s responsibilities as a person, especially the responsibility to manifest one’s dignity as a person’ and thus avoiding degrading thoughts, feelings and acts. Third, individuality: ‘appreciating the importance of being one’s own person by striving to live according to a conception of a life that defines and befits one as the particular person one is’.36 For all his emphasis on such themes as self-denial and ‘dying to the self ’, I do think we can find support for these ideas in Kierkegaard. As we have seen, in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, the idea of the equality of all before God is a perennial theme in Works of Love. And, in his preface to the ‘Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays’, Kierkegaard hammers this point home. He describes as ‘the content of my life, its fullness, its bliss, its peace and satisfaction … the thought of humanity [Menneskelighed] and human equality [Menneske-Liighed]: Christianly, every human being … is equally close to God … is loved by him’ (WA 165/SKS 12 281). The comments on agency resonate with the focus on ‘becoming a self ’, the ‘moral perfectionist’ elements in his thought and the Kantian strains of especially the first series of Works of Love.37 We noted in Chapter 6 that we cannot accept any version of ‘self-denial’s love’ that goes as far as to deny agency. And the importance of individuality comes out in such passages as the following, where we are told that God gives in such a way that ‘the receiver acquires distinctiveness … so that the creature in relation to God does not become nothing even though it is taken from nothing and is nothing but becomes a distinctive individuality’ (WL 271–2/SKS 9 270, my emphasis). It is perhaps this last point that runs into prima facie tension with Kierkegaard’s injunctions to ‘die to the self ’ and so on. And yet this point comes out in other texts too. In Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard claims that ‘at every person’s birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular. Faithfulness to oneself with respect to this is the highest thing a person can do, and as that most profound poet has said, “Worse than self-love is self-contempt”’ (UDVS 93/SKS 8 198).38 Compare this 1854 journal entry: ‘To be spirit is to be I. God 36 Ibid., my emphasis. 37 On the former, see Lippitt 2000, especially Chapter 3. With regard to the latter, I am of course not claiming that Kierkegaard’s position is identical to Kant’s. Kierkegaardian dignity is not rooted in rationality in the way it is for Kant. 38 The ‘most profound poet’ is Shakespeare, and Kierkegaard is quoting from King Henry V Part Two. Actually, he is misquoting, since, as the Hongs point out in a footnote, Shakespeare’s contrast is not with self-contempt but self-neglect.

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desires to have I’s, for God desires to be loved’ (JP 4 4350/SKS 26 NB 31: 151). This also relates to Anti-Climacus’s idea that: Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self is certainly angular, but that only means that it is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is to utterly abandon being itself out of fear of men, or … not to dare to be itself in its more essential contingency. (SUD 33/SKS 11 149)

That is, as well as universal ethical duties, each of us has specific tasks and potential in what John Davenport calls ‘the web of providence’.39 Davenport comments on such passages as follows: Our capacity for founded, moderate autonomy is established by God’s withholding direct control to give us freedom: this ‘infinite concession’ that creates us in God’s own image as free spirits is also a relation that preserves the self in its self-structure even if it refuses to affirm itself either as free or as indebted to God (SUD 21/SKS 11 136–7). Thus the constitution of finite spirit necessarily includes a kind of divine appropriation of created freedom – a paradox that demands a free relation of love towards one’s origin in divine love. This is what our existential telos – to become our self – actually requires as our highest duty.40

Such thoughts already provide at least the beginning of a bridge between recognition self-respect and evaluative self-respect. We should not let a knee-jerk reaction against any talk of ‘merit’ prevent us from seeing that the latter too has an important value. While such a feature as basic moral dignity is important, proper self-love requires more, and evaluative self-respect captures an important dimension of this. For Dillon, the person who possesses it ‘stands back to reflect on herself, asking whether she has merit’.41 But note how she glosses such merit: ‘is she living congruently with her normative self-conception? … it matters to her that she be able to “bear her own survey”.’42 In other words, this is not self-glorification or an objectionable kind of pride. Rather, Evaluative self-respect contains the judgment that one is or is becoming the kind of person one thinks one should be or wants to be, or more significantly, that one is not or is not in danger of becoming the sort of person one thinks one should not be or wants not to be. To have a normative self-conception is to stake oneself on how one stands in light of it, so self-evaluation and concern for evaluative self-respect are integral to it. The 39 Davenport 2013: 245. For a useful related discussion of the connection between love as universal duty and particular calling, see Evans 2004: 170–9. 40 Davenport 2013: 246–7, final emphasis mine.  41  Dillon 2001: 67. 42 Ibid. The phrase in quotations is from Hume’s Treatise.

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disposition to appraise and regulate oneself in its light is essential for moral self-development … and pursuit of one’s important goals.43

For Kierkegaard, presumably such goals are related to the uniquely given tasks and potentialities referred to above. Such concerns are surely part of that Kierkegaardian ‘self-examination’ which involves looking at oneself ‘in the Mirror of the Word’ (FSE 7/SKS 13 39). Dillon argues that part of our moral self-identity is ‘our representation to ourselves of how we stand in light of ’ our ‘normative self-conception’.44 In other words, our view of ourselves is doubled: ‘we see ourselves both as we think we are and as we would have ourselves be.’45 In a Kierkegaardian context, this recalls what Judge William says in Either/Or about the ideal and actual self: ‘The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself ’ (EO II 259/SKS 3 246–7). It also echoes the logic of taking Christ as the ‘pattern’ or ‘prototype’ (Forbillede) for one’s life: ‘Christ came to the world with the purpose of saving the world, also with the purpose – this in turn is implicit in his first purpose – of being the prototype, of leaving footprints for the person who wanted to join him, who then might become an imitator’ (PC 238/SKS 12 231–2). But how does this connect with self-forgiveness? Evaluative self-respect is crucial to the negative stance towards oneself (the idea that I don’t come up to scratch) which ‘transformative self-forgiveness’ – the ability to get beyond this – might overcome.46 Linda Radzik offers a valuable account of forgiveness to which (as for Kierkegaard in the deliberation ‘The Victory of the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome’), reconciliation between the affected parties is crucial, and a related account of self-forgiveness in which reconciliation with oneself plays a crucial role. What Radzik means by moral reconciliation in the latter context is that the wrongdoer ‘accepts that he is an agent with intrinsic moral value and equal to all other persons’, neither superior in moral status to those he has wronged nor rendered devoid of moral status by his having done wrong.47 He also ‘regains confidence in his own goodwill and his ability to follow 43 Ibid., my emphasis. Elsewhere, Dillon notes the emphases of other writers: evaluative self-respect is not about ‘pat[ting] oneself on the back morally’, but its concern is ‘to assure oneself that one comes up to scratch’ (Elizabeth Telfer); ‘has not lowered oneself in one’s eyes’ (Thomas Hill); or ‘has not acted beneath one’s dignity’ (Gabriele Taylor). See, respectively, Telfer 1995; Hill 1995a and 1995b; and Taylor 1995. 44 Dillon 2001: 67.  45  Ibid. 46 See especially Dillon 2001: 63.  47  Radzik 2009: 139.

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the norms of morality’.48 As noted, this may be a lengthy and agonising process, and one would be rightly suspicious of one to whom it came too easily. As Radzik notes, ‘The ability to tap into a reservoir of guilt and shame might well be part of what helps one to maintain one’s moral character.’49 Citing a question once asked by J. L. Austin, ‘How many of you keep a list of the kinds of fool you make of yourself?’, Radzik surmises, ‘I imagine most of us do carry around such lists, and we do not wish to forget at least some of the items on those lists too quickly or to cease feeling the pangs they occasion. Complete self-forgiveness is not always desirable.’50 We shall return to the idea contained in the final sentence quoted shortly. For now, note that this helps us to understand Dillon’s important remark that being hard on oneself, … and not just one’s actions, isn’t pathological or egocentric. Rather, it enacts broad features of the human psyche, including the dispositions to express one’s values and to take matters of character very seriously. The power and persistence of negative self-assessments manifest the value one places both on the things one has harmed and on being a certain kind of person. One cannot have a normative self-conception without a disposition to assess one’s self and not just one’s actions in light of it, and without being liable, unless one is a saint, to self-reproach.51

But, it may still be objected, are there not good reasons to get rid of such self-reproach? By considering self-respect we can see why we should answer this question with a qualified ‘yes’. It is a ‘yes’ because if self-reproach denies all self-worth (and one’s status as a moral agent or ‘child of God’), this violates recognition self-respect. In the most extreme cases, viewing oneself as irredeemably bad can make it ‘impossible to exercise moral agency in living toward the good’.52 Or, as Kierkegaard would put it, defiantly refusing to accept that one’s sins are forgiven. Moreover, when self-condemnation damages our judgement, distorts our character and, in the above way, ‘blocks agency’, it is self-destructive. When it involves self-absorption, and demands a never-ending unpayable debt, it perverts one’s ability to value (‘where the most important thing in the world is 48 Ibid.  49  Radzik 2009: 140.  50  Ibid. 51 Dillon 2001: 69. Strictly speaking, I think Dillon should say ‘isn’t necessarily pathological or egocentric’. I have also omitted the phrase ‘despising oneself ’, since (at least without considerable further qualification) this seem excessively strong to be endorsed. It comes too close to the ‘self-contempt’ which we saw Kierkegaard reject in the quotation from Purity of Heart discussed earlier in the chapter. 52 Dillon 2001: 71. Recall here Gabriele Taylor’s point about acedia or sloth in Chapter 6.

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how awful one is, one can’t value other things properly’53). All of the above are antithetical to an agent’s recognition self-respect. Thus, the reason to forgive oneself is not necessarily the convenient but inadequate one that it makes things less painful (the ‘cheaply therapeutic’ view of forgiveness mentioned at the start of the chapter). It could be that the failure to do so, and to continue to wallow in self-reproach, can be ‘morally pernicious’.54 In such a case, recognition self-respect, as well as respect for others and the good, demands that the negative stance towards oneself be overcome. We might even claim that here self-forgiveness is a duty. So why is this ‘yes’ qualified? Here is where the position I want to defend differs slightly from Radzik’s position as quoted above. It is because self-forgiveness does not necessarily exclude all self-reproach. It is not necessarily the case, pace Griswold and Radzik, that self-reproach must be expunged when one forgives oneself. For what does it mean to do so? Not to blot out fault, or to wipe the slate clean. Thus, Dillon: ‘self-forgiveness does not erase the past, but only alters its power or meaning for us.’55 For this reason, we have seen that we need to be careful how we read Kierkegaard’s claim that forgiveness does not just hide a sin but ‘takes the forgiven sin away’ (WL 294/SKS 9 292). As Dillon puts it, One troubling dimension of much of what is written about self-forgiveness is the assumption that there are only two stances one can take toward the self: negative or positive, loathing or being at ease with oneself. But in truth there is a vast middle ground in which one could retain a complex view of oneself that is shot through with ambivalence. One can both value oneself enough to get on with one’s life and yet rightly carry a burden of guilt and shame to one’s grave. And the closer to the core the violated standards, the more reason there is not to lay down that burden. But, and here’s the important thing, to go on like this can be to have forgiven oneself. Self-forgiveness does not require extinguishing all self-reproach, for it is not really about the presence or absence of negative feelings and judgments; it’s about their power. Forgiving oneself means not that one no longer experiences self-reproach but that one is no longer in bondage to it, no longer controlled or crippled by a negative conception of oneself and the debilitating pain of it, no longer alienated from oneself, so that one can now live well enough. This is possible even if one retains a measure of clear-sighted self-reproach, overcoming it without eliminating it.56 53 Ibid. Again, recall our discussion of self-centredness in Chapter 6. 54 Ibid.  55  Dillon 2001: 80. 56 Dillon 2001: 83, my emphases. Kant’s remarks on conscience in the Lectures on Ethics are also interesting here: ‘Conscience should not be a tyrant within us … Those who have a tormenting conscience eventually weary of it entirely, and finally send it on vacation’ (1997: 135 [27: 357]).

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I think that this is one dimension of the self-respect that is a crucial part of proper self-love. Dillon suggests we should reject the contemporary tendency to assume that ‘the evaluative form of self-regard must be wholly positive to be good’, taking note of ‘an older tradition [which] holds that a low sense of merit is, for most of us, more likely to be accurate and so more virtuous and respectful of our reality as deeply flawed beings.’57 We can add, of course, that Kierkegaard, like Kant, operates with reference to a ‘standard of perfection’ in comparison with which ‘we have sufficient cause to feel humble.’58 What Dillon calls ‘humble self-respect’ is typically appropriate, and, as she concludes, ‘sometimes a self-respecting person should not be entirely at peace with herself.’59 Despite the minor difference I drew between Radzik, on the one hand, and Dillon and myself, on the other, concerning what self-forgiveness amounts to, a distinction discussed by Radzik in fact helps to clarify the position I want to defend here. In a criticism of Margaret Holmgren, Radzik makes an important distinction between moral status and moral standing. All moral agents have the former; one possesses it so long as one has a sense of right and wrong, and to have it is to deserve recognition respect.60 (Once again, I’m a neighbour too.) But Radzik argues that whereas moral status is not affected by wrongdoing – because doing wrong does not affect the fact that one possesses moral agency – moral standing is thus affected: When someone commits a wrongful act, we have reason to see her (and she has reason to see herself ) as less trustworthy in moral matters. Wrongdoing is evidence of a failure of either goodwill or competence (which we might think of as a developed capacity) in the moral matter at hand. Our level of evaluative61 respect for the wrongdoer is appropriately lowered. Insofar as the wrongdoer is sensitive to her failings, she will make a similar judgment of her own standing. This judgment of compromised standing should underlie the wrongdoer’s emotions of guilt and shame and should be addressed if the wrongdoer is justly to overcome or foreswear these emotions and forgive herself.62 57 Dillon 2001: 83.  58  Ibid. 59 Ibid. Murphy seems to share Dillon’s view here when he comments that ‘burdens may properly humble us without crippling us. One can have a tragic view of human life without being destroyed or defeated by that view’ (Murphy 2002: 52). 60 Radzik 2009: 143. 61 In the original quote, Radzik uses Darwall’s term, appraisal respect. In the interests of clarity for my own overall discussion, I have substituted Dillon’s alternative here. 62 Radzik 2009: 143.

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So one reason I can retain self-respect yet not be ‘at peace with’ myself is because I recognise that while my moral status remains intact, my moral standing has been diminished.63

III  When is self-forgiveness appropriate? Wrongdoers, victims and God We turn now to the questions of when a wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness is appropriate. In particular, is the victim’s forgiveness of the offender a necessary prerequisite to self-forgiveness? And what difference does a Christian faith in God make to one’s answer to this question? We discussed earlier the view that, strictly speaking, self-forgiveness is impossible because only God can forgive sins. But some thinkers – both religious and secular – have offered another reason why self-forgiveness is impossible. Consider first Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. This haunting book discusses whether the author should have forgiven a dying Nazi soldier (named Karl) whose specific crimes are heinous but who seems to repent for them.64 Wiesenthal, a concentration-camp inmate at the time, is taken to hear the dying man’s confession, and hears him out, as well as performing a number of small but significant kind acts such as giving the dying man water, allowing him to hold on to his hand and chasing away a fly which Karl was too weak to get rid of himself. But when Karl asks for his forgiveness, Wiesenthal turns and leaves the room in silence. He subsequently agonises over whether this was the right decision, a question he puts to his reader directly at the end of his memoir. This question is also put to a variety of interlocutors – such as philosophers, religious and atheist, and Jewish and Christian theologians – whose responses make up the second part of the book. Several voices argue that only the victims of wrongdoing (and its correlates) have the power to forgive that wrongdoing. Compare also the criticism of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for forgiving and reconciling with those who had abused human rights in the absence of prior forgiveness by the victims.65 On this view, if A wrongs B, then C cannot forgive A, because only B can. It follows that if A wrongs B, then A cannot forgive A (the self-forgiveness 63 These cases of self-forgiveness which still have room for self-reproach are the self-forgiveness equivalent of cases in which I can forgive an offender while continuing to blame him. For a compelling account of how this is possible in cases of inter-personal forgiveness, see Bennett 2003: 139–42. 64 Wiesenthal 1998: 53. 65 See Govier and Verwoerd 2002, cited in Radzik 2009: 120.

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case) because only B can. If this view is right, then the only cases of self-forgiveness possible are cases where one in some way wrongs oneself without wronging others – presumably a relatively small subset of cases. A more moderate view than the outright impossibility of self-forgiveness is that self-forgiveness requires the forgiveness of the victim before the wrongdoer can legitimately forgive himself. I here briefly discuss a further dimension of an important disagreement between Holmgren and Radzik on this point. Holmgren holds that it is morally important for a wrongdoer to forgive herself ‘independently of her victim’s decision [whether or not to forgive], even if the victim is perfectly willing and able to forgive her’,66 and also that it is also morally preferable for a wrongdoer ‘to forgive herself before she seeks either her victim’s forgiveness or full reconciliation with her victim’.67 One of her reasons for this is that making self-forgiveness dependent upon the forgiveness of the wronged party is likely to put additional pressure upon that party.68 Holmgren’s concern is that if I have wronged you, it is self-centred, disrespectful and manipulative of me to seek your forgiveness in order solely to free myself of my feelings of guilt and shame. Radzik shares this view but adds that she finds it ‘arrogant, disrespectful, and manipulative in a different way for a wrongdoer to approach her victim and say, “I have forgiven myself, I am at peace, and I hope you will forgive me someday, too”.’69 Because of her position on the importance of the distinction between moral status and moral standing, what Radzik counts as such premature self-forgiveness is not just rude. Rather, It says to the victim, ‘I’m okay now, deserving of the trust and esteem of my fellows in the moral community. I ask your opinion on this matter as a courtesy and to evince my good moral character to you and others but not because anything you might have to say could legitimately influence my opinion on the matter. I hope you are as enlightened with respect to my moral standing as I am.’70

Anyone who explicitly said this would certainly betray an objectionable kind of arrogance or self-conceit. But I think Holmgren’s view of the independence of self-forgiveness deserves more credit than this. First, note 66 Holmgren 1998: 82, my emphasis. Holmgren argues along similar lines, against critics such as Murphy, in Holmgren 2002. 67 Holmgren 1998: 83, my emphasis. 68 Kierkegaard asks: ‘Does not the one who unlovingly denies forgiveness increase the multitude of sins – and not only because his irreconcilability becomes one more sin, which it indeed is and to that extent ought to be taken into account?’ (WL 296/SKS 9 294) But one might reasonably ask Kierkegaard why putting pressure on the potential forgiver, at least in some contexts (think, for example, of a woman who has recently been raped), isn’t also a ‘new sin’. 69 Radzik 2009: 147.  70  Ibid.

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that if we take Dillon’s line – where self-forgiveness has room for continuing self-reproach  – the wrongdoer would not be saying ‘I am at peace’; far from it. Second, the person who has the feelings of guilt and shame that Dillon, like Radzik, considers to be consistent with self-forgiveness cannot say anything like the second, objectionable because complacent phrase (the longer of the two utterances Radzik puts into the mouth of the wrongdoer above). Moreover, consider the difference between hearing the first phrase as Radzik puts it and hearing what remains of it in Dillon’s mode, where I recognise that I carry the guilt and shame of what I have done with me even if I simultaneously think of myself as having forgiven myself. (What Dillon’s position seems to recognise is that self-forgiveness is more of a process than a one-off achievement.) In other words, there would be no room, on such a view, for the smug self-congratulation that Radzik worries that Holmgren’s view implies.71 III.1  The difference God makes What difference does Christianity make to all this? I think a Christian position such as Kierkegaard’s will place a different emphasis to Radzik. Consider first a preliminary but important point. As part of her defence of the victim’s prerogative to guide forgiveness, Radzik discusses the importance of recognition: ‘As we learn from Hegel, having intrinsic value is one thing, but having that value realized in the social world is something else. Holmgren’s position undervalues the fact that both our self-evaluations and the respect we receive from others are influenced by how we are treated.’72 Nor, for Radzik, is this dependence on recognition regrettable. Radzik cites Pamela Hieronymi’s view that: being threatened by another’s disregard does not betray a failing or weakness … we ought to care about what other people think. To not care about what you think is not to care about you. To disregard your evaluation is to 71 To be fair to Radzik, this worry is not without justification. Partly for reasons that will become clearer below, I have more sympathy than she does with Holmgren’s view of the independence of self-forgiveness from the forgiveness of the victim. Nevertheless, I do find something troubling about the potentially self-congratulatory dimension of the wrongdoer who Holmgren describes here: ‘an offender who forgives herself independently of her victim’s response, and prior to seeking reconciliation with him, comes to the relationship as an equal partner with much to offer the victim. Having met her own needs for peace of mind and self-acceptance, she is in a position to focus on him and to contribute to his life’ (Holmgren 1998: 85). But that self-forgiveness must ultimately be independent of the victim’s forgiveness does not imply that one should forgive oneself first. We should reject any view that effectively says: ‘Since I don’t actually need your forgiveness, why don’t I go ahead and forgive myself before I even seek it?’ For this reason, I think that Holmgren tempered by Dillon has more credibility than Holmgren’s unqualified position. 72 Radzik 2009: 148.

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From this, Radzik concludes: ‘Victims are right to resent being treated poorly, and they are right to value the respect and authority they are granted when wrongdoers work to gain their forgiveness and moral reconciliation.’74 Holmgren’s response would presumably be the one she makes to a similar objection from Murphy: that we ‘need not ground [our] self-respect in other people’s attitudes toward [us]’.75 But even if we overlook this possible response, an argument about the importance of respect will not establish the victim’s authority, which is what Radzik needs. Indeed, immediately after the passage Radzik quotes, Hieronymi adds, ‘I may, in the end, think your evaluation mistaken and wrong. If it is importantly wrong, so long as you continue in your standing as a moral peer, I will protest it.’76 Caring about the victim’s evaluation certainly matters, and Radzik may even be right that the victim’s ‘forgiveness and readiness to reconcile should guide self-forgiveness and self-reconciliation’.77 But to guide is not the same as to determine. As Hieronymi’s further point acknowledges, disagreeing with your evaluation of whether the wrong I have done you warrants forgiveness does not ipso facto amount to disrespecting you.78 (Once again, it may appear crass and arrogant explicitly to point this out. But then self-forgiveness does not require me to do so.) In other words, if I have wronged you, I should care about your view in the sense that I consider your opinion to have considerable weight (and, indeed, more weight than that of a neutral observer). But I cannot see how this establishes the position Radzik wants to defend, namely that (in general) my self-forgiveness is dependent upon, and thus can only rightly follow, your forgiving me. I may care about your opinion to such an extent that I hugely regret that you are unable to forgive me, and experience deep and prolonged sorrow and anguish over this. But I may still judge the incident to be an instance of the kind of case Radzik recognises to exist, in which the withholding of forgiveness by the victim is unreasonable (or even maliciously vengeful).79 It is not clear on what basis Radzik thinks 73 Hieronymi 2001: 549.  74  Radzik 2009: 148. 75 Holmgren 2002: 118.  76  Hieronymi 2001: 549. 77 Radzik 2009: 149. 78 On this point, compare Holmgren 2002: 132. 79 Radzik recognises such possibilities as follows: ‘a wrongdoer’s self-regarding attitudes should generally be guided by a victim’s willingness to reconcile. Before wrongdoers fully reconcile with or forgive themselves, they should generally secure the moral reconciliation of their victims (and at

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that such cases can be distinguished from those where forgiveness is properly withheld. It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that such judgements will always have to be made on a case-by-case basis. But, in that case, it is unclear why we should not say the same about cases where self-forgiveness legitimately can, and cases where it legitimately cannot, precede the forgiveness of the victim. (Matters become more complicated still if we accept, as I think Radzik does, that forgiveness – both the victim’s of me, and mine of myself – is a process rather than a one-off ‘gift’.) Perhaps then the difference between Holmgren and Radzik is ultimately a disagreement only about what the default position is (as to whether self-forgiveness can legitimately precede the victim’s forgiveness). Yet, despite this, they might agree on a significant number of specific cases. But, to return to our central question, what is the difference between the view of a secular Kantian such as Radzik and Kierkegaard’s Christian view? It seems to me that Radzik’s case for the victim’s prerogative is weaker when judged from a Christian standpoint. She is quite right to stress the importance of apology, atonement, making amends to and seeking reconciliation with those one has wronged.80 Christians should avoid the response of Charles Colson, one of the chief figures in the Watergate cover-up who converted to Christianity whilst in prison. Asked whether he felt the need to apologise to those whose lives he had damaged, Colson replied, ‘No, I have made my peace with God.’81 But when push comes to shove, if God forgives me, then is not the importance of being forgiven by the wronged party less crucial than Radzik suggests? As Pyper notes, ‘The New Testament’s model is consistently contrary to the common view that forgiveness has to be a transaction between one who asks forgiveness and the offended party.’82 From a Kierkegaardian perspective, one cannot share Radzik’s view that: The victim has the role of ratifying the wrongdoer’s atonement and determining whether her standing as a trustworthy member of the moral community (with regard to the moral issues in question) is to be restored. The victim deserves this role because of his epistemic and other forms of authority … The conciliatory or nonconciliatory reactions of community times their communities). Exceptions are valid, however, in cases where victims are unreasonably or viciously resistant to moral reconciliation’ (Radzik 2009: 140, my emphases). Hans Habe, in what I find one of the most insightful of The Sunflower responses, is amongst those who stress atonement as the prerequisite for forgiveness (Wiesenthal 1998: 162–3). 81 As reported by Deborah E. Lipstadt: Wiesenthal 1998: 194. 82 Pyper 2002: 12. 80

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From a Christian point of view, Kierkegaard would surely argue, all this gives to the victim and the community a role that is ultimately God’s. This comes out in some of the Christian responses in The Sunflower. There is understandably tremendous reluctance on the part of almost all writers to criticise Wiesenthal for his directly refusing forgiveness to Karl. But by no means all unequivocally endorse his response. A number of the Christian symposiasts answer Wiesenthal’s questions  – ‘Ought I to have forgiven him?’, ‘Was my silence … right or wrong?’, ‘What would [you] have done?’84 – by saying that such forgiveness is for God alone to offer. Robert McAfee Brown, for example, recommends urging Karl ‘to address his plea directly to God, and throw himself on the possibility of the Divine Mercy, something I am not permitted to adjudicate one way or the other’.85 On the matter of whether there are wrongs too severe to be forgivable, Cardinal Franz König answers unequivocally: ‘The question of whether there is a limit to forgiveness has been emphatically answered by Christ in the negative.’86 I take this to mean not that we should ‘forgive the unforgivable’ but that there is no such thing as the truly unforgivable. In the discourse ‘One Who Is Forgiven Little Loves Little’, Kierkegaard comments, ‘It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything – if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little’ (WA 172/SKS 12 287). I repeat: none of this is intended to downplay the importance of apologising and attempting to atone for one’s wrongs, and making amends to and seeking reconciliation with those one has wronged. But from a Kierkegaardian point of view, the ultimate point would be that if God forgives me, the refusal of my victims to do so – while it should certainly be taken seriously and may continue to occasion profound and genuine sorrow and regret on my part – should not ipso facto prevent me from accepting divine forgiveness and extending to myself the self-forgiveness that this acceptance makes possible.87 Though, importantly, this self-forgiveness 83 Radzik 2009: 149.  84  Wiesenthal 1998: 97–8. 85 Wiesenthal 1998: 123. Cf. the very similar response of Eva Fleischner (Wiesenthal 1998: 142). One of the few symposiasts explicitly to criticise Wiesenthal’s response (albeit while judging it understandable), Edward H. Flannery, takes a similar line (Wiesenthal 1998: 138). 86 Wiesenthal 1998: 182. 87 It seems to me that this position is still consistent with Radzik’s point about the distinction between moral status and moral standing. From a Christian point of view, God’s forgiveness and acceptance

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would be one that still has room for the kind of self-reproach we drew on Dillon to describe above.88 We noted above Radzik’s view that forgiveness is primarily about reconciliation and that self-forgiveness is about achieving such reconciliation with oneself. This seems consistent with a Kierkegaardian perspective on forgiveness provided one recognises the crucial role of sin and grace – oneself as a sinner and yet one whose sins have been forgiven – in allowing and legitimising self-forgiveness. As we noted towards the end of Chapter 7, becoming reconciled with oneself means in significant part earning the ability once again to trust oneself. In a further connection with the themes of Chapter 7, Beverly Flanigan also suggests that the process of self-forgiveness is ‘one of hope. At its end lies a transformation you may have been seeking for years.’89

IV  Summary Although forgiveness is a major theme in Works of Love, self-forgiveness is under-discussed in the secondary literature. Yet it is a topic that provides a route into thinking in more detail about the kinds of self-respect needed in proper self-love. In this chapter we have considered the nature of the forgiveness that serves as the model for self-forgiveness and the senses in which for Kierkegaard forgiveness does – and does not – ‘take away’ sin. I argued for the need for a middle ground between an excessive focus on ‘self-denial’ and a ‘cheaply therapeutic’ view of forgiveness that diminishes the value both of forgiveness of others and oneself. In light of the question of how self-forgiveness can do ethically significant work without sacrificing self-respect, I drew on some important recent work on forgiveness and self-respect to argue for a picture of self-forgiveness that retains a role for continuing self-reproach of a certain kind. I argued that as well as recognising the importance of self-respect as part of proper self-love of me reminds me of my moral status. But my moral standing might well have been diminished and need the atoning and reconciliatory work on which Radzik writes so insightfully: this is part of the ‘consequences of guilt’ we saw Kierkegaard refer to in the journal entry discussed earlier. 88 My claim here also presupposes that Karl’s repentance was genuine. Fleischner suggests in her Sunflower response that both Judaism and Christianity are agreed that there is no forgiveness without repentance (Wiesenthal 1998: 140). In one important sense, with respect to interpersonal forgiveness, Kierkegaard disagrees: ‘In the absolute sense, to forgive is not the conciliatory spirit if forgiveness is asked for; but it is the conciliatory spirit to need to forgive already when the other perhaps has not had the slightest thought of seeking forgiveness … the true conciliatory spirit is this: when the one who does not, note well, need forgiveness is the one who offers reconciliation’ (WL 336/SKS 9 331–2). 89 Flanigan 1996: xxiv.

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we need to distinguish two kinds: recognition and evaluative self-respect. The former emphasises the importance of equal dignity, moral agency and individuality and finds many echoes in Kierkegaard. While the latter is in prima facie tension with Kierkegaard’s Lutheran warnings about ‘merit’, I argued that there is a way of understanding this kind of self-respect in a way unproblematic to a Kierkegaardian perspective. Finally, we considered the question of when a wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness is appropriate. Is it the case – as commonly supposed – that the victim’s forgiveness of the offender is a necessary prerequisite to self-forgiveness? I argued that there is an important difference between Kierkegaard and secular Kantian moral philosophers such as Linda Radzik on this matter. A Kierkegaardian faith in the Christian God diminishes the power of the ‘victim’s prerogative’, such that from this point of view the ultimate point is that if God forgives me the refusal of my victims to do so should not ipso facto prevent me from accepting divine forgiveness and extending this forgiveness to myself.

ch apter ni ne

An immodest proposal

A coda on rehabilitating pride

One important notion in the previous chapter was the idea of ‘humble self-respect’. There is something very appealing about this. And yet I think we can go further: the observations in the previous chapter about evaluative self-respect also need to be connected with a concept much maligned in the Christian tradition: pride. Dillon cites Kant’s claim that proper self-respect (or self-esteem) consists in a combination of humility and ‘true noble pride’.1 In this brief chapter, I shall argue that recognising the importance of self-respect to proper self-love should lead us to take seriously the possibility that pride is not necessarily a vice or sin but might, understood in a certain way, even be a kind of virtue. This will strike some as a step too far. But it seems to me important, rather than unequivocally condemning pride as a sin or vice, to be able to distinguish the kinds of pride that are vicious from those that are not – and which might even be virtuous. While the claim that pride might be virtuous is certainly not original, I think the case needs making here given Kierkegaard’s worries about pride and the relative weight he puts, at least explicitly, on self-denial as opposed to self-respect.2 What needs to be emphasised in the context of the Kierkegaardian literature is different from what needs to be emphasised elsewhere. Jeanine Grenberg, who makes a related case in a Kantian context – that (recognition) self-respect and humility are both required, and mutually interdependent, in a virtuous agent3 – notes that amongst Kantians, the focus on self-respect has been much louder than the focus on humility: ‘Self-respect may be one important self-regarding virtue, but Kantians have focused on the worth of agency to the exclusion of concern for other Kantian qualities of that same agency [viz, its ‘dependent’   Kant 1997: 129 (27: 348), cited in Dillon 2001: 83.   For Kierkegaard’s worries about pride, see, for instance, SUD 112/SKS 11 223. 3   Grenberg 2005: Chapter 6. 1

2

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and ‘corrupt’ nature, that occasions the need for humility], and this seems wrong.’4 Grenberg’s worry is the need to avoid a charge of ‘egoistic self-centredness’.5 But she also cautions against abandoning ‘a moral concern for self, turning instead to a simple other-focused morality’ in the attempt to avoid this charge.6 It is this second danger, rather than the first, against which warnings need to be sounded in the Kierkegaardian literature. With that in mind, by way of a corrective, I want to say a word or two for pride.

I  Pride as a virtue? We already noted in Chapter 6 that, within the Christian tradition, pride is typically considered to be at least one of the ‘deadly sins’  – indeed, often, the source of all such sin. On this view, pride looks like an obvious manifestation of improper self-love.7 In the course of an explanation as to why it is a sin, St Thomas Aquinas describes pride thus: ‘pride [superbia] is so called because a man thereby aims higher than he is.’8 Outside Christianity, a very similar definition is given by Spinoza, according to whom, ‘Pride should be defined as the pleasure arising from false belief, in that a man thinks himself above others. Pride is the pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.’9 Pride is commonly conflated with some or all of the following: a refusal to admit one’s dependence upon God, a sense of one’s superiority to others, arrogance and vanity. I would argue that the true picture is rather more complex than this, and we now have the resources to suggest why. One philosopher who has recently argued that pride can function as a virtue is Tara Smith.10 Moreover, she does this in a way that is not just a return to Aristotle (for whom a species of pride was of course a virtue).11 Pride’s bad press means 4 Grenberg 2005: 185; see also her Chapter 1. 5 Ibid.  6  Ibid. 7 Including to the usually insightful Adams, who rejects pride – along with conceit and egotism – as a vice of ‘cognitive self-preference’ (2006: 104). 8 Aquinas 1964–80: ii-ii q. 162 a. 1 c. Patrick Stokes has pointed out to me that, pace Aquinas, someone might be perfectly accurate in their self-description but still insufferably proud: ‘Yes, I know you have won more Olympic gold medals in that event than any other person in history, but would you mind shutting up about it for five minutes?’ 9 Spinoza 1982: 186.  10  Smith 2005. 11 Note that despite the occasional reference to Aristotle in what follows, in arguing that a certain kind of pride can be a virtue, I am certainly not seeking to defend the whole package of what Aristotle means by megalopsuchia (greatness of soul). Aristotle’s great-souled man not only has certain features that just seem amusing to a contemporary reader (such as his measured gait, deep voice and unhurried speech) (1976: 1125a). Far more importantly, his pride is also bound up with a sense of self-sufficiency that I find implausible (for instance, he ‘is disposed to confer benefits, but

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that we can easily be blinded to the thought that many things we might ordinarily call appropriate evaluative self-respect contain an important element of pride. Two of Smith’s examples are a student’s unwillingness to turn in what he considers to be less than his best work and an unemployed person’s seeking out work rather than begging for charity.12 These may both be manifestations of pride, but hardly instances of vice, let alone sin. Smith offers the following definition of ethically significant pride: ‘To be proud is to set high moral standards and to strive to become ever better in attaining them, i.e., more alert to all their demands and more consistent in fulfilling them … pride, as a virtue, is the disposition to practice proper and demanding moral standards.’13 Pride, thus understood, sounds very close to Dillon’s evaluative self-respect. Recall how Dillon glosses this: ‘is she living congruently with her normative self-conception? … it matters to her that she can “bear her own survey”.’14 We can think of this as the application to the ethical realm of the idea of taking pride in one’s work. And the person who overhears a colleague appreciatively saying of her that she takes a real pride in her work would hardly assume that she was being accused of sinfulness.15 Note that thus understood, pride, far from being mere self-satisfaction or a ‘savoring of past glories’, is future-oriented. The proud person, in this sense, sets herself very high standards, won’t settle for anything less and is ashamed to accept them, because the one is the act of a superior and the other than of an inferior’ (Aristotle 1976: 1124b). As the above quote shows, he also operates with a sense of some people as being of greater intrinsic value than others: an obvious problem for any ethic of neighbour-love. 12 Smith 2005: 93–4. 13 Smith 2005: 94–5. Kristjan Kristjansson distinguishes between ‘simple pride’ (‘an emotion of self-satisfaction, arising from the belief that oneself, or someone else with whom one identifies, has achieved something that is worth achieving’) and ‘pridefulness’, a ‘dispositional emotion’ whose possessors ‘are inclined to experience profound and frequent (simple) pride when living up to their own expectations and successfully achieving their goals, but also profound and frequent shame upon failing to do so’ (2002: 104, 106). He criticises Smith for using the term pride when she means ‘pridefulness’ (Kristjansson 2002: 228). I think that relatively little hangs on this terminological dispute, but I mention it here in order to explain why I sometimes use the term ‘pridefulness’ when discussing Kristjansson below. 14 Dillon 2001: 67. Hume – from whom, remember, Dillon takes the cited phrase – gives a central role to such pride: ‘This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in reflection, keeps alive all the sentiments of right and wrong, and begets, in noble natures, a certain reverence for themselves as well as others, which is the surest guardian of every virtue’ (Hume 1972: 276). 15 Daniel Russell suggests that the most important aspect of the Aristotelian virtue of pride is the self-respect of the virtuous person: ‘pride consists in the virtuous person’s trait of acting only in ways that are worthy of her dignity’ (2005: 111). But precisely because we are talking about a virtuous person – Aristotle insists that only the truly good person can be proud in the true sense (1976: 1123b) – this ‘dignity’ has nothing to do with social face-saving, and is rather essentially the same as true (evaluative) self-respect. Kristjansson supports the translation of megalopsychia as ‘dignity’ (2002: 105).

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An immodest proposal

consequently views the self as something upon which ethical work needs continually to be done. Is not this an important aspect of proper self-love? Smith uses this very terminology, concluding that the virtue of pride ‘builds and bespeaks healthy love of self ’.16 Importantly, such pride is a very long way from vanity: the proud person is not to be equated with the ‘vain, pompous show-off who is not content with her own self-estimate, but broadcasts her feats to make sure that everyone else is aware of them, as well’.17 In comparison to that, humility certainly seems attractive. But such vainglorious self-preening is, Smith argues, counterfeit pride, in so far as it seems to display an inappropriate need for the good opinion of others.18 Smith also makes a point about one of the psychological payoffs of pride that serves as an important corrective to an excessive stress on self-sacrifice. Pride, she claims, ‘nourishes self-esteem. Insofar as a positive view of oneself is necessary to live – to the will to live, and to one’s sense of worthiness to live – this is its most significant payoff.’19 This also seems a vital aspect of proper self-love and might be read in a way that emphasises either recognition or evaluative self-respect. The need for a positive view of oneself – as someone who has a sense of self-worth and whose life and projects are meaningful and valuable  – is standardly and quite reasonably accepted as a vital aspect of psychological health. We argued along similar lines in Chapter 6. Indeed, as we suggested, it is questionable whether a person totally lacking such a sense of herself could function as a moral agent at all. ‘She needs’, as Smith puts it, ‘a minimum of self-regard to consider her actions sufficiently significant to matter.’20 Compare here Ricoeur’s suggestion that such a basic element of proper self-love may be crucial for other-relatedness: ‘Must one not, in order to make oneself open, available [to others], belong to oneself in a certain sense?’21 Smith views a virtuous circle as operating thus: Pride encourages moral action, which, in turn, nourishes belief in one’s goodness; this belief reinforces one’s commitment to strengthening that moral character. The practice of pride thus enables a person honestly to 16 Smith 2005: 105.  17  Smith 2005: 98. 18 For Aristotle, too, the truly proud person (in the virtuous sense of the term) will not be a braggart. Eschewing gossip ‘he will talk neither about himself nor about anyone else, because he does not care to be complimented himself or to hear others criticized’ (1976: 1125a). This makes both Aristotle’s and Smith’s accounts of pride very different from Hume’s, in which the opinions of others are crucial. 19 Smith 2005: 102, my emphasis.  20  Ibid. 21 Ricoeur 1992: 138, my emphasis.

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think of herself as fit to live, able to act as she should and to achieve all the rewards of so doing.22

Similarly, Russell suggests that a minimal self-respect is necessary in the first place to develop as a virtuous person, but that, as one develops, the self one respects changes into someone increasingly worthy of respect.23 On this view, one would become increasingly able to ‘bear one’s own survey’. From a Kierkegaardian point of view, though, we need to add a couple of important riders here. First, Smith, in the final quote given above, paints a rather one-sided picture of a life of continual moral progress. But what of the various moral lapses and wrong turnings that actual human lives take? She is overlooking, Kierkegaard would doubtless tell us, the problem of sin. Second, we should not overlook Tietjen’s point, mentioned in Chapter 1, that for Kierkegaard a virtue must not be thought of as something that is ‘meritorious’, where this means one’s own (at least, one’s own exclusive) achievement.24 This was the worry behind our initial hesitation about Dillon’s use of the term ‘merit’. Similarly, Smith’s talk of ‘belief in one’s goodness’ needs handling with care. For Kierkegaard, of course, this could only possibly make sense if we understood ‘belief in one’s goodness’ in a manner consistent with recognition of oneself as a sinner. But I think some of the arguments of the previous chapter (utilising Burgess and others) have shown how this might be possible. Relatedly, recall Tietjen’s definition of virtues according to Kierkegaard: ‘dispositions to be achieved by works that one must strive to do in response to God’s grace, with the help of God’s grace’.25 This point cannot be overemphasised. Note the important contrast here between the Christian ‘who truly loves’ and, say, Socrates. Kierkegaard claims that in helping another, Socrates says, with a ‘roguish’ smile, ‘“Now this individual is standing by himself – through my help”’ (WL 277/SKS 9 275). He comments on this as follows: Oh, but for the loving person this dash means something different from a smile; however noble and magnanimous and unselfish that rogue was, he still did not in the sense of concern love the one he wanted to help … The one who loves has understood that it is truly the greatest, the only beneficence one human being can do for another, to help him to stand 22 Smith 2005: 103. 23 Russell 2005: 105. If Russell is right that the most important aspect of megalopychia is self-respect, then this goes some way toward explaining why Aristotle thinks of it as ‘a sort of crown of the virtues, because it enhances them and is never found apart from them’ (Aristotle 1976: 1123b). 24 The significance of the qualifier in parentheses will become clear shortly. 25 Tietjen 2010: 163.

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An immodest proposal by himself, to become himself, to become his own master; but he has also understood the danger and the suffering in the midst of the work, and above all the terribleness of the responsibility. Therefore, giving thanks to God, he declares: Now this individual is standing by himself – through my help. But there is no self-satisfaction in the last phrase, because the loving one has understood that essentially every human being indeed stands by himself – through God’s help – and that the loving one’s self-annihilation is really only in order not to hinder the other person’s God-relationship, so that all the loving one’s help infinitely vanishes in the God-relationship. He works without reward, since he makes himself nothing, and in the very moment when there could be any question of the possibility that he still could keep the reward of proud self-consciousness, God enters in, and he is again annihilated, which nonetheless is for him his salvation. (WL 277–8/SKS 9 275–6)

That is to say, what enables ‘the one who loves’ to do so truly is God, thus removing what one commentator calls ‘the possibility of any self-satisfaction such as we see in Socrates’ roguish smile’.26 But what if we do adopt something like Tietjen’s view of what a virtue would mean for Kierkegaard (so that possession of virtues is consistent with salvation by grace and thus dependence upon God) alongside Smith’s view of pride as future-oriented and distinct from vanity and arrogance? Then I think we can seriously suggest that even within a Kierkegaardian framework, pride – understood in the way described above – constitutes a significant part of proper self-love. But, the objection will go, isn’t pride love ‘seeking its own’? Not necessarily. As Kierkegaard notes in ‘Love Builds Up’, ‘To commend oneself [At rose sig selv] hardly seems upbuilding, and yet this, too, can be upbuilding. Does not Paul at times do it? But he does it in love and therefore, as he himself says, “for upbuilding”’ (WL 215/SKS 9 217).27 So, what is this defensible self-commendation? Let me offer a few suggestions.

II  What warrants proper self-love? Pridefulness as an attitude to the virtues? I do so in response to an important question as to what warrants proper self-love. Are we to love ourselves solely because we are children of God (compare recognition self-respect), or are we allowed to appreciate any part of our specific character, virtues, etc. (compare evaluative self-respect),   Howell 2009: 240.   An alternative translation of at rose here would be ‘to praise’ rather than ‘to commend’.

26

27

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provided we always keep in mind that whatever we achieve has been achieved by or through God in us? I shall argue that some version of the latter must be the case if we are properly to recognise the importance of specificity and uniqueness discussed in Chapter 8.28 In other words, important though the idea of equality has been in our discussion, proper self-love must allow for more than this. In Chapters 3 and 4, we argued that proper self-love for Kierkegaard is self-love that has passed through the ‘God filter’. Yet such a view of self-love is consistent with loving one’s own unique distinctiveness, such as one’s particular character, combination of virtues, etc. The key qualifier, taking its lead from Tietjen’s definition of a Kierkegaardian virtue, would be that one does not consider one’s virtues as achievements of one’s own but rather as gifts, the appropriate attitude to which is gratitude, as discussed in Chapter 1. In other words, and as should be clear from our discussion in Chapters 7 and 8, we should think of virtues as gifts not in the radical sense that there is nothing for us to do in respect of them. If we are to take gratitude seriously, we need to make an important distinction between the gifts we receive and what we are to do with them, as the following discussion will aim to make clear. In his defence of ‘pridefulness’, Kristjansson discusses an objection in terms of ‘moral luck’ that parallels the worry about ‘meritoriousness’ raised here. In short, the objection is that ‘much of what the typical prideful person is potentially proud or ashamed … is beyond the bounds of that person’s emotional agency and hence responsibility’.29 His example consists of four people, P1 to P4, whose financial circumstances vary enormously. P4 is poor. Each of P1 to P3 is wealthy, but their use of their wealth differs greatly. P1 has used it to do much good for others. P2 has not, but has preserved and invested it wisely. P3 has squandered the lot. Kristjansson argues that: P1 has not only more to be proud of than P2 and P3 (which seems rather obvious) but also more than P4. Perhaps P4 would have become just as worthy of pride and respect if he had had the same opportunities as the other three, and he should clearly not be blamed or blame himself for not doing what was beyond his power. However, he should not be praised or praise himself either, for he did not have a chance to prove his mettle. Perhaps P4 would in fact have fallen into similar temptations as P3.30 28 Of course, the trick will be to do this without falling prey to the vice of self-centredness, as described in Chapter 6. 29 Kristjansson 2002: 122.  30  Kristjansson 2002: 123–4.

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As with financial resources, so with the ‘gifts’ of character. Unless we accept, implausibly, that we all start on a level playing field with respect to our capacities to develop various virtues, a similar objection would seem to apply here. If Phil was born into a stable family environment to parents who took seriously his ethical habituation and Bill had to cope with hostile conditions of poverty and abuse, might it not seem that Phil starts with an (unfair?) advantage with regard to his ability to develop and nurture virtues? I submit that Kristjansson’s response in the financial case applies to the virtues case as well. He argues that P1 (and, to a lesser extent, P2) ‘are not supposed to take pride in or accept recognition for their abundance or resources as such but rather for what they did with them’.31 Similarly, I submit that a person might take a proper pride in having (through God’s grace, Kierkegaard would add) acted virtuously in various ways and in having developed the kind of character to whom such behaviour becomes ‘second nature’. It does not follow from our being equal before God that we are all of equal moral standing (as opposed to moral status). Anyone committed to that is committed to the deeply counter-intuitive view that there is no difference between the moral standing of Mother Theresa and that of Saddam Hussein.32 (Compare here our point against Krishek in Chapter 4: a commitment to equality of value [even mass murderers deserve recognition respect] does not imply the need for equality of treatment [criminals should be punished appropriately; non-criminals should not be punished].) Still less is it the case that we are all equal in terms of our virtues: our being hopeful, trusting, patient, courageous, etc. The key thing is that we don’t claim too much credit for whatever virtuousness we may have learned to manifest. But this does not imply  – as both Kierkegaard and his commentators sometimes do – that we may not claim any credit. This, I think, is where Kierkegaard’s position would be better tempered by a more Catholic emphasis. In the Conclusion to Works of Love, Kierkegaard claims that God ‘is too sublimely transcendent ever to think that to him a human being’s effort should have some meritoriousness. Yet he requires it [the human being’s effort], and then one thing more, that the human being himself not dare to think that he has some meritoriousness’ (WL 379/SKS 9 372). Much depends here on 31 Kristjansson 2002: 124, my emphasis. 32 Kristjansson 2002: 132. Kristjansson also points out that granting an unequal ‘moral worth as persons’ is not the same as granting unequal ‘worth as moral persons’ (2002: 133). I take this to be akin to Radzik’s distinction between moral standing and moral status.

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how we understand ‘merit’. In one sense of the term, I’m afraid I do dare. A recognition of our absolute dependence on God for whatever good we have managed to do should not prevent us from taking an  – appropriately humble – pride in the ways in which we have not squandered the opportunities to do good with which we have been presented. Indeed, the importance of doing what one can with one’s resources, whether of character or finance, is an important element of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And an important objection to the excessively humble – those who underestimate their qualities and abilities  – is that they shy away from the opportunities for moral courage that appear, at least on occasion, in all human lives.

ch apter ten

Summary and conclusion

This book has explored a notion – self-love – that has been under-examined in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard. He typically uses it as a negative term, and it is sometimes treated by commentators as unequivocally such. I have explored his reasons for concern about friendship and romantic love as forms of, often disguised, self-love. In Chapter 2, I argued that, though not the straightforward enemy of friendship he is typically portrayed as being, Kierkegaard’s tacit acceptance of certain assumptions inherent in a classical view of friendship means that he nevertheless tends to undervalue that to which friendship can aspire, even when it does not have neighbour-love at its heart. The ‘drawing’ view of friendship serves as an important counterbalance to this view. Nevertheless, our discussion also made some suggestions as to how agapic neighbour-love can positively inform friendship. By exploring in more detail the references to self-love in Works of Love, Chapter 3 noted just to what extent the negative references outweigh the positive. And yet the importance of ‘proper’ self-love, and the view that we must learn to love ourselves properly, clearly emerges from such a reading, as does the importance Kierkegaard attaches to ‘self-denial’. Unsurprisingly, God (the ‘middle term’ in love) is crucial to Kierkegaard’s view of proper self-love. I suggested that the idea of God acts as a kind of ‘filter’ through which our ‘works’ of love, including our love of ourselves, must pass, in which we try to leave behind ‘selfishness’ and related ‘impurities’. The discussion drew further on this idea of the ‘God filter’ in Chapter 4, on the problem of ‘special relationships’. (One’s relation to oneself might be thought of as a subcategory of this general problem.) While largely sympathetic to Jamie Ferreira’s account of Works of Love, I noted some problems with her attempts to defend Kierkegaard from his critics. I then considered Sharon Krishek’s recent charge, brought against part of Ferreira’s account, that Works of Love gives a conflicted account of 190

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preferential loves according to which, despite what Kierkegaard intends, neighbour-love and preferential love cannot coincide. The ‘God filter’ imagery enables us to resist Krishek’s apparent assumption that for Kierkegaard the ‘purified’ versions of any two manifestations or works of love must be identical. Once we see that the equality of value of all neighbours on which Kierkegaard insists does not imply identity of treatment, we can defend Kierkegaard from this charge, a defence enhanced by paying attention to the various ways in which Kierkegaard aims to ‘preserve the concrete’ or specifics of special relationships. Perhaps chief amongst these is the crucial passage on what it might mean to ‘make distinctions’ having made ‘no distinctions at all’. However, I also suggested that Ferreira and Krishek sometimes concede too much to a ‘Levinasian’ element in Kierkegaard, in which, despite the latter’s insistence on equality, the other always seems to hold the trump card. And so do we need a more robust defence of self-love, the self and its projects, in the face of passages that can smell suspiciously of the demand for total self-abnegation? Chapter 5’s excursus into a discussion of Harry Frankfurt’s view of self-love considered this possibility. Though I was critical of Frankfurt’s particular manifestation of the attempt to distinguish proper from improper forms of self-love, some important themes emerged from this discussion: how the commitment that love demands entails an appropriate self-relation; how self-love necessarily points outside the self; and how love can involve self-interest without being merely ‘selfish’. Chapter 6 then considered Sylvia Walsh’s charge that Kierkegaard’s view of self-love is superior to Frankfurt’s because the latter lacks an adequate concept of ‘self-denial’. Discussing Walsh’s detailed exegesis of Kierkegaardian self-denial, I argued that such an account has significant problems of its own. Drawing both on feminist work and that of Ricoeur, I argued against Kierkegaard’s tendency to overemphasise self-denial. Self-respect emerged here as a vital theme, rarely if ever named by Kierkegaard but to be overlooked at our peril. However, while troubled by some aspects of Kierkegaard, I find Works of Love to be an extraordinarily rich and edifying work. In Chapters 7 and 8, I returned to it in a more positive spirit. Since Kierkegaard hints in numerous places about the importance of learning to love oneself properly and yet does not work out in detail what it would mean to do so, I here attempted to contribute to such a task. Central to such an attempt, I suggested, is to ask what it would mean to apply to oneself some of the key aspects of love of others Kierkegaard discusses in Works of Love: trust, hope and forgiveness. The discussion of trust highlights a different dimension

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of our earlier discussion, in Chapter 4, of what Ferreira calls ‘love’s vision’, as a comparison with Iris Murdoch helped us to see. I also noted some parallels between Annette Baier’s view of how trusting both requires and encourages the growth of trust and Kierkegaard’s claim that love presupposes and ‘builds up’ love in the person loved. A focus on hope for others and oneself, in both its temporal and ‘eternal’, eschatological, modes, proves crucial in the battle against despair. Along the way, we saw how hope for oneself also has important implications for self-knowledge and self-respect. In the cases of both trust and hope, I noted that Kierkegaard enables us to see something not always stressed in discussions of these virtues: the importance of love in trusting and hoping. Chapter 8 then highlighted the centrality of forgiveness for Kierkegaard and connected his discussion of the forgiveness of sins – in Works of Love and elsewhere  – to self-forgiveness. I sought to bring Kierkegaard into dialogue with some important recent work on forgiveness from moral philosophers operating out of a broadly Kantian tradition. This enabled us to explore the important connection between self-forgiveness and self-respect and to argue  – against a ‘cheaply therapeutic’ view of both forgiveness and self-forgiveness that is sadly all too common – for a variety of self-forgiveness that still has room for ‘managed’ self-reproach. Kierkegaard, I believe, would approve of such a picture. We also saw that the joy he takes in the implications of our forgiveness has important ramifications in enabling us to resist what some have called the ‘victim’s prerogative’ in forgiveness. Finally, the brief Chapter 9, while not essential to the book’s overall argument, completes this exploration of proper self-love by suggesting that even a recognition of radical dependence does not rule out the possibility and value of finding room for a certain kind of pride, as well as humility, in the complex tapestry of our lives.

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Index

Page numbers with ‘n’ are notes. Quotations are indexed under the English titles of Kierkegaard’s works. acceptance, of forgiveness 12, 157, 158, 159, 170–1, 178–9, 180 active love 101–2, 104, 109 Adams, Robert M. 75, 102, 113, 115–16, 118, 120, 131, 133–4 Adorno, Theodor 9, 14 agape see neighbour-love agency 167 ambivalence 78, 100, 107–8, 171 Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert 127 Anna (Jewish prophetess) 150 annihilation 129 see also self-annihilation apologies see atonement Aquinas, St Thomas 182 Aristotle 23–4, 25, 29, 41, 182, 183–4n.15 Armstrong, John 26 ‘as yourself ’, loving neighbour 2, 14, 17, 19, 45–7, 75, 85, 98 atonement 133–4n.110, 154, 177–9 Augustine, St 2, 32, 38, 44–5 Baier, Annette 113, 140–1, 142–4, 147, 192 Barth, Karl 2 ‘becoming a self ’ 3, 49, 111, 116, 167–8 ‘being for oneself ’ 36–8 Bernard of Clairvaux 45n.2 Biviano, Erin Lothes 121–2 blindness 64–6, 79, 80, 85–6, 87, 140n.8 see also ‘love’s vision’ Bovens, Luc 152–4 brotherly love see neighbour-love Brown, Robert McAfee 178 building up 137–8, 186 Burgess, Andrew 161 Butler, Bishop Joseph 2, 118 Calvin, John 2 care self-respect 146

‘cheap grace’ 157n.7 Christ 122, 131 and forgiveness 158 hiding sins 161n.13 imitation of 125 as pattern for life 169 and Peter 86 as Redeemer 133–4n.110 and self-emptying 131 Christian Discourses (CD) (Kierkegaard) duty 5 forgiveness of sins 158 Christianity commandments 2, 55–6 love and 5–6, 8, 15, 41, 58, 73, 119–20 and preferential love 52–3 and self-denial 8, 50–1, 54–5, 61, 110–12, 122–7 and self-forgiveness 175–9 on self-love 2, 19, 44–7 and selfishness 112–22 and special relationships 69–70 and ‘the poet’ 17, 33–4 see also Christ; commandment of God Cicero 21, 24, 41 Climacus, Johannes 3, 141 Coakley, Sarah 128 Cocking, Dean 8, 16, 26, 27–9, 30 Colson, Charles 177 commandment of God (loving neighbour as yourself ) 2, 14, 45–7, 98 and friendship 17, 19 and God as middle term 55–6 and special relationships 75, 85 commitment 102–3 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (CUP) (Kierkegaard), Socrates 141 conscience 33–4, 36, 68–70, 121 consciousness, non-thetic 56, 84

203

204

Index

Cooper, John 29 cowardliness 131n.94 Davenport, John 40, 96, 101–3, 168 ‘dear self, the’ 97, 99, 103 Derrida, Jacques 162, 163–4n.20 despair 147–8, 148n.38, 149, 153, 192 of forgiveness of sin 158, 159 see also hope differences, concrete 84–9 Dillon, Robin S. 93–4, 131, 157, 164, 165, 166–7, 168–9, 170–2, 175, 181, 183 disinterest 99, 101, 103–4, 105, 106–7 domestic violence 60, 128, 146–7 domineering persons 39–40 ‘doormat’, being a 49–50, 100, 119, 121, 131, 133, 135 see also servility ‘double danger’ 122–4 ‘drawing’ view of friendship 8, 16, 18, 26–30, 37, 40–2, 43 and neighbour-love 32 duty 5, 73, 97 earthly hope 112, 149, 151–4, 155 egoistic self-centredness 182 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (EUD) (Kierkegaard) blindness of love 140n.8 cowardliness 131n.94 expectancy 150–1 faith 148n.38 hope 152, 154n.60 self-knowledge 150 Either/Or (EO) (Kierkegaard) hope 147–8n.35 self 169 Eliot, George 65 Ellis, Albert 52 Ellis, Theresa 38, 43 equality 17, 69, 78–9, 187, 191 and self-respect 166, 167 erotic love 9, 14–15, 19, 20–2, 59–60 and Christianity 52–3, 112 identification with the beloved 99 and likeness 25 and neighbour-love 116–17 and self-esteem 51–2 and selfish self 55 and selfishness 116–17 and spousal love 65–9 see also ‘the poet’; special relationships eternal hope 11, 151–2, 153, 155 eternity 72 Euripides 35

evaluative respect 93, 172 evaluative self-respect 166, 168–9, 172, 180 and pride 181, 184, 186 Evans, C. Stephen 56, 81 exclusivity see preferential love expectancy 149–52 faith 148n.38 feminist theologians/philosophers 10, 42, 47, 127–35, 145, 191 Ferreira, M. Jamie 3–4, 9, 16, 17–19, 20, 26, 30, 36, 37–8, 43, 47, 49, 54, 63–70, 78, 81, 84–7, 90–1, 94, 124, 125–6, 156, 190–1, 192 filter, God as 8, 9, 57, 61, 64, 82–4, 85, 88, 190–1 Flanigan, Beverly 179 focus on the self 47, 74–5, 76–7 For Self-Examination (FSE) (Kierkegaard) selfishness 112 understanding Scripture 5 forgetting sin 160–1 forgiveness 11–12, 156, 160–4, 192 acceptance of 12, 157, 158, 159, 170–1, 178–9, 180 Christ’s 158 as gift 160 God’s 156, 158–9, 160–2 self-forgiveness 157–80 and self-respect 154, 164–5 Frankfurt, Harry 1, 10, 96–109, 191 Frankl, Viktor 153 Friedman, Marilyn 42 friendship 7–8, 14–26, 59 ‘drawing’ view 8, 16, 26–30 and neighbour-love 17–18, 30–42, 43, 62 as preferential 16–18 and self-esteem 51 and selfish self 55 Fromm, Erich 8, 47–50, 126 Furtak, Rick Anthony 141 future 149–50, 183–4, 186 George, Peter 60 gift creation as a 133 forgiveness as 160 and virtues 187 gift-love 104–5 God as filter 8, 9, 57, 61, 64, 82–4, 85, 88, 190–1 and forgiveness 156, 158–9, 160–2 as middle term 8, 9, 38, 55, 56–61, 64, 66–8, 82

Index as origin of human love 71–2 and self-forgiveness 175–9 see also Christianity; commandment of God; grace Good Samaritan 77–8, 83, 84, 94, 119n.40, 189 grace 7, 33n.72, 137 ‘cheap’ 157n.7 and forgiveness 159, 179 and friendship with God 38n.87 and nature 67 and pride 185–6, 188 salvation by 127n.73 gratitude 7, 187 and forgiveness 163 and friendship 38, 41 Green, Ronald 38, 43 Grenberg, Jeanine 181–2 Griswold, Charles 157, 163–4 Groenhout, Ruth 128–30 guilt 165 hatred of beloved 67–8 self-hatred 154 Hauerwas, Stanley 152 Hazlitt, William 22 hierarchy in love 80–1 Hieronymi, Pamela 175–6 Hill, Thomas E. 132–3 Hirschman, Albert 140 Holmgren, Margaret R. 174, 176 hope 11–12, 147–55, 157n.7, 179, 191–2 see also despair Howell, John B., III 163–4n.20 humility 12, 181, 189, 192 identification with the beloved 99, 100 immediacy, powers of 72–3 improper self-love, and proper self-love distinctions 2, 16, 19, 44–5 individuality 167 jealousy 37 Jollimore, Troy 74, 89n.96, 93 Kant, Immanuel 3, 97–8, 128, 181 Kearney, Richard 121 Kennett, Jeanette 8, 16, 26, 27–9, 30 kenosis 129 Kierkegaard, Søren, writings of see Christian Discourses; Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses; Either/Or; For Self-Examination; Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks; Philosophical Fragments; Practice in

205

Christianity; Sickness Unto Death, The; Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers; Three Discourses; on Imagined Occasions; Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits; Without Authority; Works of Love Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (KJN) 46–7n.6 forgiveness 159, 160–1n.12 self-denial 61 self-esteem 51 knowledge misuse of 139 self-knowledge 150 Kolnai, Aurel 141–2, 147 König, Cardinal Franz 178 Krishek, Sharon 9, 63–4, 70–82, 83, 87–9, 91–4, 190–1 Kristjansson, Kristjan 187–8 Levinas, Emmanuel 10–11, 90–5, 121 Lewis, C. S. 22, 33, 37, 80, 104–5 likeness, and friendship 24–6 see also differences, concrete Lindberg, Carter 45n.2 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 14–15 love active 101–2, 104, 109 gift-love 104–5 God as origin of human 71–2 hierarchy in 80–1 ‘love’s vision’ 94, 192 non-preferential 17, 70 parental 58, 98–9, 106–7, 113 passive 101–2, 104 spousal 65–9 see also erotic love; hatred; preferential love ‘love’s vision’ 94, 192 loyalty 35 Luther, Martin 124, 161, 161–2n.15, 164 Lutheranism 12, 67, 116–17, 161 Lynch, Sandra 15, 21, 25 McDonald, William 149 MacIntyre, Alasdair 74 Martin, Mike W. 146 ‘meritoriousness’ 12, 180, 185, 188–9 middle term, God as 8, 9, 38, 55, 56–61, 64, 66–8, 82 ‘mirror’ view of friendship 8, 25 mistrust 137, 138–9, 141 Montaigne, Michel de 21–2, 38, 43 moral agency 167 ‘moral self-hatred’ 165 moral status and moral standing 172–3, 174, 177–8 morality 77, 133, 142, 164–5n.25, 170

206 motivation, human 97, 102 Murdoch, Iris 92–3, 140, 192 Murphy, Jeffrie 132–3, 165 mutual intoxication 23, 38, 43 narcissism 1, 25, 26, 43, 48 ‘natural’ human standpoint 113 nature, and grace 67 need-love 104–5, 109 neighbour-love 9, 55–6, 57, 62 commandment to love ‘as yourself ’ 2, 14, 17, 19, 45–7, 75, 85, 98 and erotic love 116–17 and friendship 17–18, 34–6, 40–2 Fromm on 47–8 and self-denial 111–12 and special relationships 69–70, 79–82, 84, 85, 88, 91–2 Newman, John Henry 32 non-preferential love 17, 70 see also preferential love non-thetic consciousness 56, 84 Nygren, Anders 2, 104n.40 O’Donovan, Oliver 2, 45 Ortega y Gasset, José 80 other 17–18, 121 and the self 90–5 ‘other I’ see ‘second self ’ Outka, Gene 2, 10, 111–12, 119 pagan thinkers 73 and friendship 33–8, 70 parental love 58, 98–9, 106–7, 113 passive love 101–2, 104 patience in expectancy 5, 149–52 Paul, St 152 Paulinus of Nola 38 Peter, and Christ 86 Pharisee example 4–5 Philosophical Fragments (PF) (Kierkegaard) 3 trust 141 Pinches, Charles 152 Podmore, Simon 156, 159, 162 ‘the poet’ 17, 33–4, 36 Practice in Christianity (PC) (Kierkegaard) Christ as pattern 169 self-denial 124 preferential love 15–16, 19–23, 31, 46, 47, 79 friendship as 16–18 and hierarchy 80–2 and self-esteem 51, 52–3 see also erotic love; special relationships Price, A. W. 26 pride 12, 104n.44, 181–2, 192

Index and forgiveness 157 of friendship 22 as sin 128 as virtue 182–9 projective motivation 40 proper self-love, and improper self-love distinctions 2, 16, 19, 44–5 purification of love see God, as filter Purvis, Sally B. 74 Pyper, Hugh S. 162, 177 Pythagoras 35 Radzik, Linda 154, 162, 169–70, 172, 174–6 reciprocity 90, 119 recognition respect 93, 172, 188 recognition self-respect 165–6, 168, 170–1, 180, 181–2, 184, 186 reconciliation 156, 169–70, 175n.71, 177, 179 self-reconciliation 176 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 173–4 Redeemer, Christ as 133–4n.110 redoubling 117 replaceable, loved one as 99 respect 93–4 evaluative 93, 172 and morality 133 for others 30, 42, 49, 74–5, 76 of others 113, 166, 176 recognition 93, 172, 188 and worthiness of 134, 185, 187 see also self-respect Ricoeur, Paul 10–11, 90, 109, 121, 184, 191 Roberts, David 47 Roberts, Robert C. 6, 56, 149, 152 romantic love see erotic love Rudd, Anthony 127, 139n.4, 145, 146 Russell, Daniel 74–5, 134, 183–4n.15, 185 Saiving Goldstein, Valerie 127 ‘second self ’ 16, 19–21, 23–6, 117 ‘secrets’ view of friendship 27 self 3, 6, 9–10 becoming a 3, 49, 111, 116 caring for 133–4 ‘the dear’ 97, 99, 103 establishing a 128 focus on the 74–5 and the other 90–5, 121–2 ‘second’ 16, 19–21, 23–6, 117 selfish 55 self-acceptance 52, 75, 175n.71 paradoxical 49 self-annihilation 130–1 self-attestation 121

Index self-centredness 115–16, 125–6, 146 egoistic 182 self-confidence 146 self-deception 82 self-denial 10–11, 12, 37–8, 58–61, 72, 191 and Christianity 8, 50–1, 54–5, 61, 110–12 and feminism 127–35 Frankfurt on 96 and self-sacrifice 122–7 and selfishness 111, 112–22 as vice 74 self-emptying 3, 10–11, 92, 94, 129 and Christ 131 self-esteem 2, 50–3, 121, 128, 184 see also self-respect self-focus 47, 74–5, 76–7, 116 see also self-centredness self-forgiveness 157–60 appropriate 173–9 and forgiveness 160–4 and self-respect 164–73 self-giving 129, 130 self-hatred 131, 154 moral 165 self-indulgence 98–9, 100 self-interest 96, 102, 109 self-knowledge 150, 192 self-limitation 129–30 self-preference see self-focus self-reconciliation 176 self-reproach 157, 164, 170–2, 175, 179 self-respect 11, 91, 121, 191 and forgiveness 154, 164–5 and humility 12 and self-forgiveness 157, 164–73, 179–80 and servility 132–3 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) example 74–5 see also pride; self-confidence self-sacrifice 91 excessive 127–35 and self-denial 122–7 self-trust 144, 147 self-willfulness 53–6 self-worth 154 selfish self-love 75–6 selfishness 8, 20, 48, 53, 61 and Christianity 58–9, 112–22 defined 114 in friendship 8, 41–2 Krishek on 72, 75–6, 77–8 and preferential love 31 and self-denial 111, 112–22 and self-willfulness 53–4 selflessness 103–4 see also parental love

207

Seneca 41 servility 132–3 Sheil, Patrick 4–5, 139–40 Sickness Unto Death, The (SUD) (Kierkegaard) becoming a self 168 Christian teaching 166 forgiveness of sins 158 hope 157–8n.8 on losing the self 128 neighbourly love 89 similarity see likeness sin 33n.72 pride as 128 see also forgiveness; self-forgiveness small-mindedness 39–40 Smith Pangle, Lorraine 15, 25 Smith, Tara 182–3, 184–5 Socrates 141, 185–6 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (JP) Christianity 110 forgiveness 158, 158n.9, 159, 160–1n.12, 161n.14 maternal love 58 self-denial 125n.61 self/I 167–8 Socrates 141 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 173–4 special relationships 9 Ferreira on 63–70 Krishek on 63–4, 70–82, 83 and Levinasian element 90–5 ‘preserving the concrete’ 84–9 Spinoza, Baruch 182 spousal love 65–9 see also erotic love Stokes, Patrick 5–6, 56, 89 suicide 115 taking beloved’s interests 99, 100 Taylor, Charles 134–5 Taylor, Gabriele 104n.44 teaching self-love 50 temporal hope see earthly hope things, love of 107 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (TDIO) (Kierkegaard), forgiveness 156 Tietjen, Mark 7, 185 Tillich, Paul 49 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) 74–5 transformation 117–18, 120 ‘transformational self-forgiveness’ 165 tribalism, clannish 66 trust 11–12, 137–47, 155, 191–2 in friendship 42 trustworthiness 138, 142

208

Index

universal love see neighbour-love Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (UDVS) (Kierkegaard) forgiveness 156, 160–1n.12 hope 153 self-esteem 52 self-reproach 167 selflessness 118n.38 Vacek, Edward J. 38n.87, 120 vanity 184 Vernon, Mark 15 vice 114 self-centredness as 115–16 self-denial as 74 servility as 132–3 virtue 6–7, 11–12 theorists 114 see also forgiveness; hope; pride; trust virtues, and gifts 187 vision, love’s 94 volition see will Voltaire 1 Walsh, Sylvia 10, 68, 78, 96, 109, 110–13, 116–21, 123–4, 125, 191 Weaver, Darlene Fozard 116–17, 128 Weil, Simone 130–1, 154 Welz, Claudia 6–7 White, Carolinne 35 White, Richard 40, 41, 42 wholeheartedness 107–9 Wiesenthal, Simon 173, 178, 179n.88 will 98, 99, 100–3 and active love 109 and trust 144 William, Judge 169 Without Authority (WA) (Kierkegaard) Christ hiding sins 161n.13 forgiveness 178 self-denial 167 self-forgiveness 163 self-sacrifice 133–4n.110 on woman who was a sinner (Luke’s Gospel) 105n.48 women see feminist theologians/philosophers work of forgiveness 163 Works of Love (WL) (Kierkegaard) 1 ‘alliance in self-love’ 58 becoming a self 167 building up 137–8, 186 ‘bustler, light-minded person, depressed person’ 50, 115, 121

Christianity 5–6, 52, 55, 57, 59–60, 69, 70, 83, 90–1 duty to love God 73 God as middle term 55, 56, 66–7 loving God as yourself 45–7 ‘common watermark’ 52, 65, 119 conscience 69 despair 148, 148n.38, 149 erotic love 15, 25, 47, 53, 55, 58, 59, 68–9, 82–3n.79 forgiveness 156, 160, 163, 171, 174n.68, 179n.88 friendship 15, 16n.11, 17, 21–2, 25, 26, 47, 53, 55 as being for oneself 37 centrality of God 59 as moral task 33–4, 36 and neighbourly love 38–9 and paganism 15 as self-love 19–20, 23 hating the beloved 67 hope 147, 148–9, 151, 153–5 ‘idol-worship’ 55 immediacy 72 ‘inner glory’ 119 law and love 83 merit/meritoriousness 137n.2, 188 natural man 113 need-love 105 neighbourly love 4, 14, 16n.11, 38–9, 82–3n.79, 119–20 origin of love 48, 71 preferential love 17, 17–18n.14, 19–20, 65 ‘preserving the concrete’ 85, 86–7 pride 185–6 on proper self-love 44, 45 ‘sagacious’ self-love 58 and the self 55, 128 self-abasement 60 self-denial 37, 54n.32, 60–1, 111, 122–3, 124, 125n.61 self-esteem 21–2, 50–2, 53 self-forgiveness 157 self-trust 144, 145, 147 self-willfulness 53 selfishness 5, 58 silhouette image 85n.84 special relationships 68–9, 79, 79n.66, 81 on teaching love 50 trust 137, 138–9, 142–3n.17, 148n.36 unfaithful/devoted self-love 54 vain people 60 world, rejection by the 122, 126–7