SOURCE: Mooney, Edward F. “Self-Choice or Self-Reception: Judge Wilhelm's Admonition.” In Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology from Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death, pp. 11-26. New York: Routledge, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Mooney discusses the concepts of autonomy, rights, and responsibilities inherent within Judge Wilhelm's advice to “A” that he accept himself.]

The I chooses itself, or more correctly, it accepts itself.

What is crucial is not so much deliberation as the baptism of choice by which it is assumed into the ethical.

—Judge Wilhelm, Either/Or II¹

“Choose yourself!” is the admonition delivered by Judge Wilhelm to his friend, identified only as “A,” in an avuncular, terribly wordy letter. The editor of Either/Or, one Victor Eremitor, provides an imposing title for this second letter from the Judge: “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.”² Although Judge Wilhelm disclaims any standing as a trained or knowledgeable philosopher, he nevertheless presents an important contribution to moral and religious psychology. There are reflections on freedom, responsibility, choice, and despair; thoughts on the contrast between moral action and choosing to be ethical; persuasive depictions of the nature of the self and its grounding in community; and homilies on the secular and religious vocations of the self, and on the role and limits of moral exhortation, advice, and judgment. Wilhelm couches his advice informally, conversationally, though as a municipal judge, he naturally speaks with some moral authority. And he is not afraid to invoke the deeper authority of Greek philosophy. “Choose thyself” is Judge Wilhelm's self-conscious amendment to the Socratic formula “Know thyself.”³

The idea of self-choice branches out toward autonomy, rights, and responsibilities. Self-choice is an exercise and confirmation of autonomy, a value protected by rights. And autonomous agents will be responsible for what they do and who they are. This cluster of moral concepts has permeated and even come to dominate Western thought and institutions, from politics to law, from literature to psychology. Yet the specifically Kierkegaardian version of self-choice, and its links to responsibility, has been left in relative obscurity. In fact, the Kierkegaardian concept turns out to be at odds with what have become tacit assumptions of this tradition.

Exploring the ins and outs of the Judge's formula “Choose yourself!” will carry us through a range of issues central to Either/Or, and should expand our understanding of specifically Kierkegaardian choice, receptivity, and self-responsibility, as well as widen our understanding of moral and religious psychology more generally.

CHOOSE THYSELF

The admonition “Choose thyself” is addressed to a somewhat obsessive yet clever and poetic observer of others, the world, and himself. From the perspective of the Judge, the young esthete shows a dangerous indifference to deep moral realities. What the Judge finds unpalatable in his friend is not any breach of etiquette, or legal impropriety, or the violation of some simple moral injunction. The youth is well-mannered, in many ways charming and attractive, not in any obvious way a liar or a cheat. Unlike the Abraham of Fear and Trembling, who seems ready at a moment's notice to sacrifice his son, the esthete does not appear to pose a threat of moral scandal. He is, we may assume, a fairly well-assimilated member of Danish society. Nevertheless, Judge Wilhelm fears for the man's soul.

As the Judge has it, this nameless esthete is empty, his existence devoid of any inward moral worth. As Kant might put it, whatever outward behavior he may display, whatever acts may lie in accord with a moral code, if the esthete does not act from a moral stance or source, his actions will lack specifically moral worth—specifically human worth.⁴ The esthete has no moral self and hence can form no moral intentions. He can at most conform to public codes. At issue is the esthete's disengaged spectatorship. He tests the waters of a true “inward morality” (as opposed to a civic or role morality) only gingerly, if at all. But to acquire a proper self, he must take the plunge and choose the ethical, choose himself. One hundred years later, the injunction “Choose yourself” will be reiterated by Sartre—but the meaning of that phrase will by then have lost most of its Kierkegaardian complexity.

Why is it necessary to amend self-knowledge to bring self-choice to center stage? For the Judge, this is a strategy to combat the shallowness inherent in a merely esthetic existence. The esthete is brilliantly versed in human psychology, a master of subtle self-observation and description. He possesses a refined awareness of the intricate variety of motives, pains, and pleasures, that course through human consciousness. If he can converse perceptively about himself and others, then in what sense does he lack a self?

As the Judge sees it, “A” faces a problem of will and of the structures of perception and conception rather than a simple problem of self-knowledge. The esthete feigns moral indifference to all he sees. He is like a revolving door through which all manner of perception or opinion will effortlessly pass. This hollow form of intuition permits exquisite articulation of experience. But the esthete's reflections flow from a morally vacant channel, unstructured by any qualitative measures of good and evil. Insofar as one acquires selfhood, the channels of reception and expression must show moral modulation, must cast good and evil, love, marriage, work, and community, in their proper moral light. If he heeds the Judge, the esthete must strip from these channels their sheen of sophisticated indifference. It is not this or that opinion, not this or that specific policy or public action, that must be changed or altered. Instead, he must choose—that is, acquire—the moral framework or self that will modulate all his reception and expression of experience, giving a moral cast to everything within that frame or channel.

There is a clear analogy here with Kant, whose “forms of intuition” and “categories of understanding” shape any possible experience of the physical world. Of course Kierkegaard—or at this point, the Judge—is dealing with moral experience. And in this domain, as Kierkegaard has it, forms of ethical reception and judgment are not built-in as biological or psychological inevitabilities. Rather, they are acquired through moral or spiritual labor as the personality develops from premoral to ethical existence. Although the esthete retains a somewhat passable “moral” persona he nevertheless remains essentially premoral. What he lacks is inward “spirit” or “selfhood.” The Judge declares that, in choosing the ethical, “It is less a matter of choosing between willing good or evil than of choosing to will, but, with this latter, good and evil are posited once again.”⁵ And he continues, noting that in making the choice that restructures the self, the esthete cannot but choose the good. “My either/or does not denote the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them. The question here is, under what categories one wants to contemplate the entire world and would oneself live. That someone who chooses good-and-evil chooses the good is indeed true, but this becomes evident only afterwards, for the esthetic is not evil but indifference. …”⁶ According to the Judge, it cannot but be good to take in the world and act upon it through moral or ethical sensibilities and categories.

The esthete seems half to believe that becoming a solid nondespairing self requires no more than continuing the detached self-observation and thoughtful reflections on life at which he is so adept. Or perhaps he does not care to become a self with moral depth or does not grasp the fact that moral depth or moral despair are concrete realities, that they are more than bourgeois illusions. In any case, the Judge, as a friend of “A,” knows that the time for idle observation is past. If “personality is to develop,” then “A” must be disabused of the thought that it is sufficient to “know thyself”—in the shallow way that the esthete is presumed to take this formula. The Judge confronts the esthete with an urgent, commitment-requiring “either/or,” and makes it clear that the demanding, non-spectatorial “Choose thyself”—not the potentially passive and disengaged “Know thyself”—is the only real option.

Note that the admonition or plea is context-sensitive. It is practical advice offered to a young man in particular straits that others may avoid. That is, although a full-time philosopher of moral development might take a hint from the Judge and erect a general theory around the idea that moral selfhood is acquired mainly by self-choice, the Judge is not in the business of offering general theories and is not a full-time philosopher. Perhaps he would advise another friend to attend more to the requirements of civic duty, or to become more self-aware. Perhaps self-choice is not a viable option for a person unversed to some degree in self-reflection, and so could not be recommended in all cases. But, no doubt, the Judge has assessed his friend correctly. We can trust that his counsel that “A” choose himself, rather than know more about himself, is appropriate.

We should note, too, that the advice to choose oneself does not in fact countermand the Socratic advice to know oneself. “The ethical individual knows himself, but this knowledge is not mere contemplation … it is a reflection on himself, which is itself an action.”⁷ Self-choice, actively reflecting on oneself, complements the Socratic admonition. It calls attention to a neglected issue: What does one make of or do with, the products of self-reflection or self-examination? “When the individual knows himself and has chosen himself, he is on the way to realizing himself, but since he must realize himself freely he must know what it is he would realize.”⁸ A narrow construal of the Socratic “Know yourself” can diminish a rich self-knowledge to mere self-observation or self-commentary. The broader goal of moral self-actualization requires something more.

Finally, it is important to see that the plea or admonition is meant to work as a corrective to an inflated Hegelian drive toward absolute knowledge—or knowledge of the absolute. Assume that some of the Danish readers of Either/Or were acquainted with the Hegelian project of tracing the historical journey of Spirit toward ever-richer conceptions of Freedom and Reason. One might naturally expect that this Hegelian project would also lead to greater wisdom, fuller self-hood. But the Judge's challenge to the esthete applies as well to the Hegelian: What does one make of, or do with, this story? It may be essential to individual growth to have some reflective, narrative grasp of one's history, autobiography, and culture. But such a grasp of developing historical structures, in the Judge's view, remains vastly insufficient to save a soul. “Choose yourself” remains pertinent advice

So the motivation for stressing self-choice should now be clear. To power moral development we must be more than reflective, perceptive, or even creative renderers of experience, whether that experience is personal, social, or world-historical. If one is to become a self with moral tasks, there must be regulative standards, values, or ideals in place prior to the rendering of experience or the production of knowledge. One then confronts a world infused with moral value. To acquire a self is to acquire standards, ideals, or values which then operate in a Kant-like fashion as a priori categories of moral understanding or presuppositions of (moral) activity.⁹ To choose the ethical, in the Judge's view, is to acquire a self-structure that henceforth frames all relevant experiential material, casting experience in its proper moral and aspirational shape.

THE AMBIANCE OF SELF-CHOICE

Let me provide a preliminary sketch of some of the terrain through which the concept of self-choice travels. This will help place the explorations that follow.

Self-choice is one element within an array of moral concepts at work within the Judge's project of tracing the “development of the personality.” It is clearly allied with freedom, autonomy, and the will. With moral freedom comes the burden of responsibility. Standards constituting the moral self operate reflexively: the self takes responsibility for itself. In addition, the Judge alludes to “the eternal validity” of the self.¹⁰ When work, marriage, and civic duty are morally unstructured, the would-be self engaged in these practices lacks validity or truth—the validity or truth of moral selfhood. This validity does not vary with time and place and so is deemed “eternal.” The moral values animating everyday practices, and the moral self that they underwrite, will have a depth and duration greater than the transitoriness or whimsy of “merely” immediate, esthetic experience.

The Judge links self-choice to “choosing despair.” “A”'s existence has so far been permeated by moral indifference, a perdition that he has refused to fully face. Confronting this despair or moral perdition will trigger repentance. In this regard, Judge Wilhelm speaks of “repentance back into the family, back into history, back into the [human] race.”¹¹ The esthete needs to reassess his past in the light of ethical standards. As we will elaborate below, accepting these standards against which the self will be measured and found wanting is, in the Judge's terms, choosing oneself and choosing despair. Recognition (and repentance) of such fault will unite the esthete with his past, with his family and with an historical community of fellow sufferers—or so the Judge believes. Identification with this moral community will be central to the esthete's self-development. Thus he must drop the pose of “alienated outsider.” His life as a detached intellectual or poet, a rootless voyeur gazing indifferently upon the human scene, will be finished.

The Judge presents himself as living in the light of “inner” values related to self-choice, which color the more public virtues related to marriage, friendship, and the arts. “The self … is not just a personal self but a social, a civic self.”¹² This ethical personality points forward toward a life of religious depth. A properly ethical self will “… develop the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life proceeds through his constantly translating himself from one stage to the next.”¹³

The Judge models a moral-religious confidence that may “rub off” on the esthete. Taken in its proper light—the light the Judge provides—the esthete's despair foretells “a metamorphosis”: “Everything returns, but transfigured. So only when life is regarded ethically does it acquire beauty, truth, meaning, substance.”¹⁴ This is an early formulation of Kierkegaard's concept of “repetition,” the central theme of Kierkegaard's subsequent book of that title, and of his discourse on the Book of Job, which we explore in the following chapter. What is lost in despair or inattention may be subsequently regained, wondrously transformed.¹⁵ The sphere of esthetic life is returned, now reframed in moral-religious terms.

Although the Judge is an exemplar for the esthete, this rather stuffy and conventional bureaucrat falls short of Kierkegaard's later articulations of a fully moral-religious self. His failure as a religious prototype is suggested even within the covers of Either/Or. This collection of various letters and appeals concludes with a sermon by a Jutland Priest who castigates self-satisfied complacency. The Judge claims he has read and pondered this sermon which he appends to his letters to “A.” Perhaps he has applied it to himself. Or perhaps he appends it without grasping the possibility that this sermon is (at this moment) more relevant to his life than to the esthete's. Could Kierkegaard intend this sermon as a device to take the Judge, whose own “sermons” have filled far too many pages, down a peg or two?¹⁶

The moral-religious framework embodied by the Judge will come under withering scrutiny in later works, notably in Fear and Trembling, published soon after Either/Or. Although the Judge is meant to embody an ethical orientation in need of revision, it's clear his stance is already ethico-religious. So the outcome of this later critique will be complex. The Judge does not represent an ethical position free from religious grounding—as if the simple introduction of a religious basis would correct the defects of his stance. There is an inkling of a proper ethical stance in the esthete's dominantly nonethical stance, and it is to this that the Judge appeals. Similarly, there is an inkling of a more adequate religious stance in the Judge's dominantly ethical stance.¹⁷ There is a latent religious core that can be addressed by the Jutland Priest and by the author of Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio, even if the Judge does not fully grasp the implications of this core nor the extent to which he is himself a target of the admonitory sermon which closes out Either/Or.

WHAT SELF-CHOICE IS NOT

In 1843, when Either/Or was published, the notion of self-choice would have seemed stranger than it does today. In the wake of Sartre and liberal-libertarian views of selfhood, the notion of self-choice has become a cultural icon. Philosophers as diverse as Hare, Sartre, and MacIntyre present a picture—really, a caricature—of continually renewable (and arbitrary) choice of self or principle, sometimes in lonely existential anguish, sometimes in the calm of rational equilibrium.¹⁸ But Kierkegaard (or his Judge Wilhelm) would not endorse this descendant version of self-choice. The differences are several and severe.

Self-choice is not radical Sartrean choice. The Judge denies that self-choice is “identical with creating myself.”¹⁹ The ethical individual “… does not become someone other than he was before, he becomes himself; consciousness unites.”²⁰

Thus we are neither the collected string of our free choices nor always placed at the brink, ready by our next choice either to continue on our path or to become a new person. By choosing himself (or herself), the individual “is not the product of whim, making it look as though he has absolute power to make himself into whatever he wanted.”²¹ At most, one ethically “edits” the self one is, improving its particular expression.²²

Neither is self-choice picking a social role or career. Judge Wilhelm imagines the esthete fancifully musing along these lines: “I have it in me to be a Don Juan, a Faust, a robber chief; I shall now cultivate this trait … [to] let the seedling planted in me develop fully.”²³ But ethically speaking, as the Judge avers, this would be folly: “… even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what might be called the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that, but to be oneself; and every person can be that if he wants.”²⁴ So choosing oneself is not plotting a career or pursuing a Rawlsian rational “life-plan.”

Self-choice is not separating oneself off from others or becoming a solitary recluse or mystic. Civic duties can be embraced in self-choice. In this, Kierkegaard undermines the sharp distinction between public and private life promoted, for example, by Richard Rorty. As Rorty has it “… the vocabulary of self creation is necessarily private … [and] the vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared.”²⁵ But self-development can include embracing public values and roles, and be no less a matter of self-choice. Kierkegaard's Judge insists that self-choice is “repenting oneself back into the race.”²⁶ This means accepting a concrete historical and communal continuity with others. “[R]eligion,” claims the Judge, “has a tendency to isolate the individual.”²⁷ But “every withdrawal, every ascetic self-torment” is a mistake.²⁸ When a person chooses the ethical “he would say something that reconciled him absolutely with every human being, with the whole of humankind.”²⁹ Finally, self-choice is not a heroic or extraordinary feat which elevates the individual pridefully above his fellows. It embodies “the self-love that has the interest of its own self at heart in just the same way as it has that of any other.”³⁰

The view of self and of self-choice that the Judge unveils in Either/Or and the view of self-choice in the Sartrean or liberal-libertarian traditions are only distantly related. Perhaps Rorty comes closer than Sartre or MacIntyre to the Judge's view when he avers that our lives are essentially a never-ending weaving and reweaving of “a web of relationships.” Yet Rorty sees this activity as responding to “the need [of each individual] to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.”³¹

In contrast to Rorty, the Judge sees self-choice as a matter of moral action or responsiveness rather than “redescription”—a linguistic activity which Rorty keeps largely at the esthetic level. Rorty's paradigm of the “self creator” is “the strong poet.”³² The Judge would find no need to strip the riches of family and civic life, not to mention the riches of human history and tradition, down to a “blind impress” we are forced to animate by our creative “redescriptions.” Finally, the outcome of self-choice for the Judge is the achievement of full and self-responsible personhood—not a self whittled down to terms that are, as Rorty has it, “only marginally his own.”³³

But questions remain for the Judge's account. How can self-choice be squared with the intuition that ethical duties are given or imposed rather than chosen? Selves also appear (at least initially) largely given—whether construed as strands of memory, an accumulation of experience and action, a cluster of root convictions or cares, or a web of relationships. Finally, how can something not-yet-a-self muster resources to choose a self? From whence does the esthete—not-yet-a-self—derive cares, projects, and powers of integration sufficient to bring himself into existence?

THE IDEA OF SELF-RECEPTION

In an unguarded moment the Judge allows a competing image into play. Reminding us that human will does not have a single structure, he introduces the idiom of self-reception. Volition can be modeled as a relatively active process—say, as selective or assertive choice. But volition can also be modeled in a less active mode as something responsive—say, as willing receptivity. Perhaps the questions left unanswered by self-choice can be answered by the alternative idiom that now suddenly appears in the Judge's ruminations. In the following rhapsodic passage, he lapses into the idiom of receptive will:

When around me all has become still, solemn as a starlit night, when the soul is all alone in the world, there appears before it not a distinguished person, but the eternal power itself. It is as though the heavens parted, and the I chooses itself—or more correctly, it accepts itself. The soul has then seen the highest, which no mortal eye can see and which never can be forgotten. The personality receives the accolade of knighthood which ennobles it for an eternity.³⁴

Judge Wilhelm often exhorts the esthete in stern and scolding schoolmaster's terms. But in this passage, the tone softens. The Judge is less concerned to penetrate the esthete's consciousness than to share a moment of reverie. Dropping his role as friendly adversary, the Judge sketches a picture that the esthete can contemplate with him as an equal. He is captured by a vision that quiets his otherwise insistent preaching. The Judge seems to have shed the robes of masterly authority over his moral life. He yields center-stage—to a vision. His will recedes to a receptive mode.

Starlit heavens, grand or modest visions, can silence mundane discussion and mundane selves. This occasion of self-submission or rebirth is something “no mortal eye can see.” A dogmatic pedagogy becomes instead a poetic context that sweeps consciousness itself into new modes. As volition assumes its second mode, it becomes an organ of responsive sensibility, of imagination, of “openness-to-otherness.”³⁵ The Judge switches idioms, shifting almost imperceptibly from “the heavens part and the I chooses itself” to “the heavens part and the I chooses itself, or more correctly, accepts itself.”³⁶ Something other than the productive, choosing or assertive will is now engaged.

That the Judge changes idioms, adopts the phrase “the I accepts [or perhaps ‘receives’] itself,” is just one piece of evidence that a reception model of self-acquisition now competes with the more familiar choice model.³⁷ Here are three other indications of a change from choice to reception.

The Judge, in the passage at hand, has the soul see “the highest.” An immediate perception, a seeing, is more a receiving than a choice or an assertion. Second, the beneficiary of this self-bestowal receives therein an ennobling “accolade of knighthood.” Accolades are given, not chosen. Finally, the Judge will write of “the baptism of choice” that occurs when one attains the ethical. Baptism too is something that is not chosen but given or received.³⁸

The formula “Choose thyself” works to deprive the esthete of his spectatorial stance. It depends on a contrast between volition and knowledge. But if we take the idiom of receptivity and vision seriously, the Judge's earlier “knowing/choosing” contrast will now seem distorting and simplistic. Each term in the “knowing/choosing,” “cognition/will” contrast is complicated by the reception model. In addition to the detached intellectual process of observation that Kierkegaard ridicules, there is cognition that is poetic, cognition that displays how the world is seen, known by this self, and moved by these emotions, sentiments, and commitments. The Judge's epiphany “that no mortal eye can see” is not a species of simple esthetic or theoretical spectatorship. So perception shifts from mere onlooking to rich and overarching vision.

Will is likewise complicated. It now can be receptive as well as selective, assertive, or productive. Volition becomes a deep, willing responsiveness. The receptivity model of self presupposes something received, and a Power that confers.

TWO SIDES OF WILL

In the milieu of industrial-bureaucratic society, the domain of free activities is modeled on selective choice. In politics, one chooses (or votes) for one policy or candidate over another; in the marketplace, one chooses (or buys) one brand over another; in relationships, one “shops” for the right partner. Everything from recreational vehicles to lifestyles to religions can be presented as choice-options for autonomous agents. Even moods and emotions are characterized as outcomes of choice.³⁹ In this vein, we picture ourselves, in Iris Murdoch's phrase, as “pinpoints of will” confronting an array of items to select, try out, purchase, or consume, guided by our preferences (and perhaps by some rational principles).⁴⁰

Yet clearly my self is not one among several items on display awaiting my appropriation. As Hume observed, a self is not an item I come upon in consciousness. However much I am assured of its existence, its contours are elusive, lacking distinct definition. Although I may speak easily enough of “taking charge of” or “choosing” myself, this activity has none of the relative simplicity of consumer or political choice. “Taking charge of,” or “taking responsibility for oneself,” is linked to “self-choice.” But the relevant volition seems more akin to willingness or readiness for embrace than to selective choice. We accept demands or requirements, values or ideals, “absolutes,” esthetic or religious visions. Each of these varying “objects” of receptivity becomes our own—through that embrace. Moments of love, creativity, moral sensitivity, or reverence illustrate this process.⁴¹

LOVE, CREATIVITY, REVERENCE

Falling in love is not selection from a field of candidates. If it is “love-at-first-sight,” love gives way to another rather than appropriating its target. A single face or flower can crystallize my consciousness in willing acclamation. Volition is engaged, enchanted. Giving way to an enchanting smile excludes weighing alternatives. Deliberation or comparison would break the spell. Responding to this face or this flower, does not devalue or discount other choice-options because I face no option-array. If there are no competing objects for my embrace, then my response is noncomparative and in this sense absolute. Will is present, alert, and energized but in a mode of responsive receptivity rather than deliberate choice.

What is true of falling in love can also be true of creativity. I can exert my will trying to capture in poetic line a mood now striking me. Perhaps I'll line up an array of phrases, consider each, and finally decide deliberately on one that fits. But as often, it seems that at a crucial unwilled moment of recognition, one phrase strikes with brute necessity, allowing for no competitors. I embrace a given line that fits. The words arrive already tagged with my endorsement. Or take an unchosen moment of awe before some natural or moral grandeur—say Job's encounter with the Whirlwind's Voice. Here the focus of good calls on my receptive willingness to acknowledge the single value that addresses me. In these moments of willing receptivity, an encounter molds or informs the self I am. As the Judge has it, “the heavens part,” and the self receives itself.

A sense of what is morally good or fitting can also jell apart from choice or selection from an array. The idea of choosing values may mean that I am responsible for them. But it cannot mean that one by one I select ideals or values that ground my identity. They are not set out like icons, products awaiting my anxious or eager purchase. Responsibility for self or for the values that ground it is not a selective affair.

This shift toward receptive will does not eliminate but rather relocates enigmas surrounding value and the will. We confront an all-important yet imponderable Source of value that resists explication in terms of anything deeper than itself. How are we to characterize this conferring Source to which the self becomes attuned?⁴² Granting these disturbing issues, the idiom of self-reception nevertheless highlights features of experience otherwise left obscure—moments of love, creativity, moral demand, and self-embrace.

CAN RECEPTIVITY REPLACE SELF-CHOICE?

The choice model of volition presupposes that available options are clearly defined. The self needs only to decide and follow through. The receptivity model of volition presupposes an overarching good, a value source that may not be clearly articulable. The self is marked by a willingness to respond to this source in ways that may be subtle and hidden from public view. Responding to this overarching good is linked to accepting or answering for what we are and may become. As Kierkegaard's Judge presents the case, there is a unique telos offered for the esthete's acknowledgement: the self he is and can become. Its value is non-comparative. Becoming a self is choosing—or under our revised account, accepting or receiving—the absolute, the ethical, the “eternal validity” of the self.

How should we interpret this tension between the idioms of self-choice and self-reception? Perhaps the model of self-reception is superior. In the Judge's words, it is the “more correct” account. The tension reflects development in the Judge's view. He struggles toward an improved idiom of self-reception from an initial preference for the idiom of self-choice. In retrospect, having the benefit of the Judge's labors, we should revise the final letter to “A.” We should substitute the phrase “Receive yourself” for every occurrence of the phrase “Choose yourself.”

A second strategy would be to declare a simple equivalence between these idioms. Perhaps self-choice just means receptivity or willingness. “Choice” translates as “reception.” When Wilhelm writes that the esthete “chooses [the self] absolutely from the hand of the eternal God,”⁴³ choice and reception are interlocked, and nearly indistinguishable.⁴⁴ “Choice” marks the core of an other-regarding readiness to receive what may be given.

But will the Judge be willing thus to muffle overtones of resolve, of urgency, of decision? Surely the esthete must seize, if not his self, then his opportunity? The choice model fits a kind of wholehearted embrace of an “object” without real competitors. We embrace—that is, “choose absolutely”—the self we are, the ethical standpoint, the focus of our love or commitment. But this embrace is also a kind of receptivity or responsive acceptance. These apparently conflicting idioms coexist in dialectical tension. The Judge does not, however, spell this tension out, or coordinate its elements. A picture of this relation self appears much later in Anti-Climacus's discussion of self-acquisition in Sickness Unto Death. But for the moment, we must settle for the rough divergence of idiom the Judge bequeaths. And perhaps there is virtue in this unresolved divergence. Discarding either of these models may well cost more than living with the discord of having both at hand.

The Judge addresses the needs (and limitations) of a friend. The informality of personal exploration and counsel may produce expressive metaphors with diverging structures. If there are deep-set conceptual and ideological tensions in the wider culture in which our self-conceptions have their ground, then we should expect a writer like Kierkegaard (or the Judge) to bring these into the open.⁴⁵ Idioms or ideals separately plausible but only problematically conjoined are left intact. Conflicting stories of the self receive their separate turn.

CHOICE, RECEPTIVITY, AND FREEDOM

The receptivity or responsive model of self is apt for articulating key features of love, creativity, and reverence. It also illuminates responsibility for self.⁴⁶

The idea of receiving one's self depends for Kierkegaard on the idea of a divinity, a Source, conferring or bestowing selves and the grounds that nourish them. These grounds are independent ideals that call or bear on a self. In self-reception, value flows to, rather than exclusively from, the self. But this picture makes inhabitants of a “modern” or even a “postmodern” sensibility uneasy. We are happier with the idea of a self projecting or choosing or inventing values or ways of life than with the idea of a self responding to independent meaning-sources, to objects of love, or awe, or aspiration. A self that is dependent on an external source of meaning seems to have its freedom and responsibility restrained or occluded.⁴⁷ Modern political, bureaucratic and consuming routines make autonomy and responsibility paramount, if not absolute. But perhaps the fear that the receptive self must sacrifice autonomy or freedom is exaggerated or outright false.

Our discussions of love and creativity, of awe or reverence suggest that receptivity, autonomy, and responsibility are mutually compatible. Although love, reverence, or creativity can be articulated in terms of responsiveness to an external object of regard and inspiration, the self is nonetheless answerable for its loving regard, for its embrace of a poetically apt phrase, or for an effusion of reverence. Poets, lovers, or awestruck admirers are free in their responsiveness. The task before us then is to elaborate freedom and responsibility without relying on the idea of selective or explicit choice. For the poet gives us verse without always deliberately choosing the fitting line. The lover gestures lovingly without selecting the loving response (as opposed, say, to the envious one). The person is spellbound or awestruck without a discernible decision to acknowledge a reverence-invoking object. But how can we have self-responsibility if choice, decision, or selection play no dominant or explicit role?

SECTORS OF RESPONSIBILITY

We can distinguish three domains of responsibility. Within the realm of act-responsibility, the dominant question is who acted, who brought about an event or state of affairs; along the way we try to determine whether coercion or ignorance or some other extenuating factor diminishes responsibility.

Role-responsibility covers different ground. Here the dominant question is who occupies a role or office, and what responsibilities these social institutions or practices confer upon the occupant. Parents, department heads, and citizens incur positional or role-responsibilities, things they should do or are expected to do. This includes overseeing the activities of others, so role-occupants can be responsible for the acts of others, say those of a wayward child. Here one takes responsibility for actions or situations independently of whether one chose to perform that action, or chose to bring about that state of affairs.

Both act-responsibility and role-responsibility can be nailed down more or less legalistically. We find out who chose what, or who did what, or determine from the public record what requirements were implicit in the position occupied by the person whose responsibility is at issue. In its third domain, however, responsibility is harder to pin down. If I am responsible as a matter of character—“self-responsible” that is—then I will accept responsibility for my acts and I will be sensitive to the position responsibilities that I incur as I take on jobs or assume the open-end responsibilities of citizenship, say, or of parenthood. But a responsible character or self embodies more than act- or role-responsibility.

A deeply responsible person has moral aspirations and sensitivities to suffering and injustice that far exceed what can be caught within the nets of act- or role-responsibility. These aspirations and sensitivities become traits of character or sensibility. They become clusters of virtues that unfold narratively as the story of our identity. They trace out a self with overarching and interwoven aims that serve as essential background and supplement our grasp of the specific self that takes on roles or that acts. We become “crystallized particulars.” Self-responsibility is, in part, responsibility to and for this particular identity, to and for the interweaving cares, resolves, and relationships that course through one's life, bequeathed by tradition, history, and others, and shaped through self-articulation. A familiar example will illustrate such self-responsibility.

SELF-RESPONSIBILITY: THE CASE OF SOCRATES

As the Judge surely agrees, Socrates is a paradigmatic ethical and responsible figure, answerable for who he is. He's responsible for things he's done, and responsibly fulfills the varied requirements of the offices or roles he holds. Yet his good character is more than this. Socrates finds himself saddled with responsibilities toward Athens that are based on relationships largely inherited, and not a matter of choice. He sees his integrity in terms of responding to those unchosen situational demands. His case reinforces our native intuition that many duties and moral demands come upon us, rather than being invented or selected by choice.

Socrates speaks movingly in the Crito of his bonds to Athens and its traditions. The laws and practices of the place are like parents to him. They give him birth, and provide nourishment and protection for his flourishing. As the place he's grown to cherish, we might say that Athens is Socrates's “chosen city.” But Socrates has not deliberately picked Athens from an array of cities to be the place that he respects, in which his identity will be rooted. Athens is his city because he recognizes a debt of gratitude for the way he's been raised by it. He acknowledges a value deriving from the city, from the community. He is receptive to the demands of the place.

The Judge writes of the ethical, self-responsible individual: “He has his place in the world, with freedom he himself chooses his place, that is, he chooses this place.⁴⁸ “Accepts” or “acknowledges” his place, or “receives this place as his own,” are phrases that fit as well as “chooses his place.” But “selects his place (from an array)” is no fit at all.

Socrates's loyalty to Athens is best clarified by bringing out his recognition of links to Athens that are already well-established. Alternative accounts have some weight. Acts he has performed (or failed to perform) ground his loyalty. He has participated in the life of the city, and so owes it respect. His loyalty is partly based on default. He failed to leave Athens; therefore he owes a debt to her. His loyalty might be partly grounded on the recognition that his physical residence is role-related. He filled the role of resident; therefore he has a debt. But Socrates puts most weight on the idea that the practices of the place have raised him to full selfhood.⁴⁹

A responsible self will answer for things it has not chosen, by virtue of who and where it is. Upon receiving his sentence, Socrates answers for the good in Athens by returning it to good, not evil. Earlier, at his trial, his response to the mistakes and foolishness of his city was responsible. He took upon himself its shames not as something he had chosen, not as something for which he was to blame, but as something that demanded his moral critique. Taking on the burden of critique showed the extent to which his character was morally responsive to the plight of Athens. He is responsible to and for Athens. Self-responsibility now becomes articulated as responsibility for others, for ideals, for history and tradition.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR HISTORY AND MILIEU

Say that I, like Socrates, identify with the country within whose borders I reside. I feel proud or exhilarated by some aspects of its shape or past, and repelled by others. These reactive emotions betray the fact that I take some responsibility, perhaps vicariously or imaginatively, but nonetheless decisively, for the way the country has evolved. I may be proud of the havens it has afforded and repelled by the oppressions it has committed. This pride or shame is centered on a wide historical community to which I find myself attached, a community which includes groups, victims, and victors far removed in time. Some of these will be known to me only collectively or as general types. Acknowledging these ties expresses the need to take the boundaries of my self (and hence my responsibility) out beyond the acts I alone have performed or the roles I occupy.⁵⁰

Establishing the history of my community or my country as part of my past will expand my responsibility. This acknowledged past predates my birth. Nevertheless, it is something that I find myself already involved in. Here is how the poet William Carlos Williams puts it: “… only by making [America] my own from the beginning to my own day, in detail, should I ever have a basis for knowing where I stood.”⁵¹ Taking up the past as my own is to find my ground and footing.

Character as self-responsibility looks simultaneously outward and inward. There is outward responsiveness to one's situation, including one's past and the history of one's community. There is also inward responsiveness to the self one takes oneself to be. “The individual is then aware of himself as this definite individual with these aptitudes, these tendencies, these instincts, these passions, influenced by these definite surroundings, as this definite product of a definite outside world. But in becoming self-aware in this way, he assumes responsibility for it all.”⁵² Assuming responsibility for self presupposes that I can be more or less transparent to myself, responsive to my deepest inner promptings, and morally attentive to my context and historical location.⁵³ And it includes, as Kierkegaard's Judge has it, taking responsibility for one's “definite surroundings,” and for oneself as the unwitting “definite product of a definite outside world” constituted by traditions and a past established prior to one's birth.

Although the idiom of self-choice can highlight the taking of responsibility, choice cannot be cited as the basis for self-responsibility. The basis in the case of responsibility for history and milieu is simply my avowal that I will be answerable for and show moral sensitivity toward shames or prides lying deep in the past and beyond the grasp of my control or choice. Nothing deeper can or needs to ground it.

Say we tried to ground the idea of self-responsibility by positing a phantom prior choice of self. If that choice is a responsible one, then the choosing self already is responsible. And if that prior choice does not issue from a responsible self, then what it aims to choose (say, responsible selfhood) cannot derive its special virtue (responsibility) from that act of choice itself. Who (or what) could have effected this choice if not a person with character and responsibility intact? And what could be the target of this postulated “choice”? Do sensibilities, virtues, or principles and their interpretation (the likely ingredients of moral selfhood) come package wrapped like “policies to vote on,” or “products to be delivered?” If not, what would choice of self be like?

There are familiar arguments against “given essences” (say, “my essential and responsible self”) and against value structures that are mysteriously already in place, ready to be seen or found. To speak of Socrates “finding” or “seeing” himself as already answerable or as receptive to values already in place may sound like philosophical naiveté. Yet Socrates can find himself in Athens, in its past, in his “chosen home.” He can find himself (or receive himself) in a straightforward sense that does not carry with it the baggage of mysterious ontological “givens,” of essences that are historically unconditioned, or of factors that restrict freedom.

We can take the self that's found or received as a fluid mix of capacities and aspirations and convictions, of relationships and roles, of character traits and sensibilities, more or less in and out of environing strands of culture and convention.⁵⁴ Finding or recognizing oneself is having a pattern of these self-strands crystallize in a particular way one can acknowledge as one's own.⁵⁵ As we will see in the next chapter on Kierkegaard's reading of the Book of Job, this moment of transforming recognition engages imagination.⁵⁶ It is a moment of meaning-acquisition. Self-recognition and self-receptivity resemble Job's receptivity to world-conferral as he shutters before the majesty of the Whirlwind's Voice.

QUESTIONS REVISITED

The receptivity model of self emerges in Judge Wilhelm's letter almost accidentally. Here I've worked to fill out its capacities as a constructive alternative to the model of self-choice. The idiom of receptivity captures our sense that values, convictions, selves, are largely given in experience, already there awaiting our acknowledgment. The role of invention, projection, or selection by the self then becomes relatively peripheral. And the receptivity model has a further advantage. It dissolves the issue of how a premoral self can muster power sufficient to achieve an ethical status. Resources for self-acquisition are conferred by tradition, by community, even by a deeper Source. This avoids the paradox of brute choice vaulting a self into existence.

Of course self-reception adds new paradoxes. How can anything have the power to offer moral selfhood or value to a receptive (premoral) self? How can anything be a moral (or meaning) source? But is this enigmatic source more opaque or unintelligible than the enigmatic self that chooses itself? Perhaps the deepest issue is which questions must remain unanswered.

In Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard (or the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) introduces a model of self-acquisition and self-loss that can serve to some extent to coordinate the models Judge Wilhelm leaves in tensed suspension. This is a model of “relational self,” of self as an ensemble of juxtaposed opposites relating to a grounding power or source. The tension between choice and receptivity is not explicitly addressed by the mock-philosopher Anti-Climacus. But this contrast is implicit in his formula for self.

Anti-Climacus views selfhood as a “relation relating to itself and grounded in another.” The juxtaposed factors in relation referred to in this formula leave choice and reception poised in dynamic equilibrium. One such pair of related factors is Freedom and Necessity. And at another level in his relational schema, the self endorses or avows a relation to itself—hence “chooses itself.” But it also finds itself—or “receives itself”—as “grounded in another.” We must defer exploration of this model.⁵⁷ But it seems that Judge Wilhelm's tensed suspension of idioms remains even as it becomes transformed within Anti-Climacus's model of relational self.

REPENTANCE AND DESPAIR

The esthete must recognize that he is in utmost need. And in the Judge's view, “A” must choose (rather than reject) his despair.⁵⁸ Being in despair is a familiar state. We understand how someone might fall into it from deep affliction. But what could motivate choice of despair? If one had options in response to one's afflictions, why not chose hope, or resistance, or resignation? The enigma expands when the Judge urges the esthete not only to choose despair but to “repent back into the family, back into the [human] race.”⁵⁹ How do despair and repentance connect to becoming a moral, responsible self?

There is an inevitable gap between what the moral self requires of itself and what its actual performance and motives are. To acknowledge despair is to acknowledge this gap. The ethically mature self knows that it is perfect neither in intention nor in accomplishment, though it rightly aims at both. It recognizes complicity in acts and intentions that occurred before its maturity, and even in its familial or community past. It can hold itself accountable for states of affairs it had no part in bringing about.

History, experience, and maturity, will raise the level of moral demands one strives to satisfy. This feeds the sense that such faults as etch our lives lie well beyond repair. To choose despair is to repent oneself “back into the race.” It is to become aware of and answerable for a continually expanding moral burden. This crushes pride and makes indifference evil. As the Judge has it, moral effort can be sustained in such potentially debilitating circumstance only by repenting first back into the race, recognizing that one's burden is shared; and second, repenting back into God, a God providing hope for lives beyond repair. This falling back upon one's simple fault-lined humanity and upon a God who sustains it provides strength to continue moral efforts in circumstances that would otherwise be morally unbearable.⁶⁰

To “choose despair” does not mean that to become an ethical, answerable self one must suffer misery. Yes, one must suffer something, in the sense of being open to the allure of value, to affection, or to affliction. Each of these can involve a painful vulnerability of self. But none of these have intrinsic links to misery. One lets go of assertive, selective will. In the only language the esthete can understand this appears to be letting go of hope. The Judge knows this, and so counsels the esthete to choose despair. Properly understood, however, heeding the Judge's counsel does not destroy all hope but makes room for a patient, “suffering” ethical resolve and trust. “It is a grave and significant moment … when one receives oneself …, when in an eternal and unfailing sense one becomes aware of oneself as the person one is.”⁶¹ Situational responsibilities and demands are allowed to come upon one, to be embraced and acknowledged, inwardly and in action.

Assertive will—the will to self-sufficiently choose oneself—stands in the way of letting roots reveal their proper salience for embrace: roots in community, family, friendship, and worthy activities, whether religious, educational, artistic, or political. In the willful attempt to create myself from nothing, or in the willful attempt to erase or be indifferent to the wider self I am, these roots are severed from their essential environing ground. Then self-decline sets in. Despairing of assertive will lets the proper set of my identity stand forth, ready for reception.

Notes

1. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, abridg., ed., and trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), first epigraph, p. 491; second p. 487. Henceforth, page references to quotes from Either/Or will cite the Hannay translation first. The second citation, in parenthesis, is to the Hongs's translation: Either/Or, Vol. II, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), first epigraph, (177); second epigraph, (169).

2. For the use of pseudonyms as a philosophical strategy, see my Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), Chapter One, and Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993).

3. p. 549 (258).

4. Kantian moral character might be presented in terms of frames of cognitive-affective perception, understanding, and judgment. See Robert Louden, Morality and Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For a thorough discussion of the Kant-Kierkegaard connection generally, see Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

5. p. 487 (169).

6. p. 486 (169), hyphenation added, “good-and-evil.”

7. p. 549 (258)

8. p. 550 (259), my emphasis.

9. See note 4, above.

10. p. 509, 517 (211, 214).

11. p. 518 (216).

12. p. 553 (261).

13. p. 552 (262).

14. p. 559 (271).

15. See my discussion of Kierkegaard's “Job Discourse,” Chap. 3, below, and my essay “Getting the World Back: Repetition” Chap. 6 in Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds., Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

16. See Robert Perkins, “Giving the Parson His Due” in Robert L. Perkins, ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary, Either/Or (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995). For an excellent discussion of Judge Wilhelm's religious standpoint, see George B. Connell, “Judge William's Theonomous Ethics,” in George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, The Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1991).

17. This is part of what makes stage-shift not an utterly arbitrary affair.

18. MacIntyre's misleading but widely cited view of Either/Or is found in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). It is repeated in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 449-50.

19. p. 518 (217).

20. p. 4911 (177).

21. p. 551 (260).

22. Ibid.

23. p. 525f. (225).

24. p. 491 (177).

25. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xiv. See also Chap. 4. J. M. Bernstein argues, correctly, in my view, that this sharp division “… leaves the private futile and the public empty. … As if we knew and were content with our private self creations. … As if I can be … sensible above all to me, apart from questions of suffering and justice.” J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 286 n. 8.

26. p. 518 (216).

27. p. 539 (246).

28. p. 540 (247).

29. p. 559 (272).

30. p. 559 (271). The Hongs translate this passage: “[the choice] claims for the self the same as it claims for everyone else's self—no more, no less.”

31. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 43.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., my emphasis. I return to the discussion of moral responsibility and community in the sections “Self Responsibility: The Case of Socrates,” and “Responsibility for History and Milieu.”

34. p. 491 (177).

35. See M. Jamie Ferreira's discussion of imagination and otherness in “Repetition, Concreteness, and Imagination,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 25, 1989, and Chap. 3, below.

36. p. 491 (177) my emphasis.

37. The Hongs render the Danish, “The I chooses itself—or more correctly, receives itself.” (177)

38. p. 487 (169).

39. See Robert Solomon, The Passions (New York: Doubleday, 1976).

40. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Of course Murdoch believes that this widespread picture, once sketched out, will be impossible to believe.

41. Cf. Ross Poole, “Living with Reason,” Inquiry, June 1991, and Meir Dan-Cohen, “Conceptions of Choice and Conceptions of Autonomy,” Ethics, January 1992, for parallel discussions of the limits of the “choice-as-selection” model of moral agency.

42. This “meaning source” could be characterized as a power latent and awaiting acknowledgment which, in self-reception, becomes an object of transforming recognition. See M. Jamie Ferreira, Transforming Vision, and Ferreira, “Seeing (Just) is Believing,” Faith and Philosophy, April 1992.

43. p. 419 (217).

44. When Wilhelm has the esthete choose, or more correctly receive itself from “the eternal power” (177), choice and reception are likewise joined (or conflated).

45. On varied “moral images of the self,” see, among others, Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, Owen Flanagan, The Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), Lawrence A. Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Chap. 4, and Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (Lasalle: Open Court Publishing, 1987). On narrative and dramatic forms of self-articulation, see, among others, Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), and The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1989), and Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

46. See Charles Taylor's ground-breaking article, “Responsibility for Self,” first printed in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 176), and later printed as “What is Human Agency” in Taylor's Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

47. This shift in idiom also raises the question whether, given an anthropocentric or naturalistic modern perspective, there can be any metaphysical argument for the existence of such “independent” values, or of a “power” conferring them. The ontological or theological question of the origin and metaphysical status of values and moral selves, and of “the eternal power” conferring them is fundamental, but I'll not address it here.

48. p. 543 (251), my emphasis.

49. Of course, these arguments that I call “shallow or contrived” are presented by Socrates himself. But I think he does not believe them to be as significant as his argument that the traditions, the “laws,” of Athens bring him up, give birth to him. And I think Plato takes the latter argument as the central one, as well.

50. For a detailed discussion of a broadened sense of responsibility among those who sheltered Jews in Nazi Europe, see Lawrence A. Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), “Altruism, and the Moral Value of Rescue: Resisting Persecution, Racism, and Genocide,” Chap. 6.

51. See William Carlos Williams, Six American Poets, ed. Joel Conarroe (New York: Random House, 1991) p. 146. Consider also Henry Bugbee's remarks on philosophy as “a meditation of the place,” The Inward Morning (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 138.

52. p. 542 (251).

53. The account I give of self-responsibility is meant to illuminate the Judge's conception in Either/Or. In later works, Kierkegaard will cast doubt on our ability to become transparent enough to ourselves to take sufficient responsibility for who we are. The ground for a relatively virtuous self then becomes not just taking responsibility for oneself but also realizing a radical dependence on “the eternal power” that confers virtue, security, and selfhood, and which lifts the burden of fault. See Chap. 4, below.

54. For an account of the social context of self-construction, see Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community, Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard eds. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991)., in particular Chap. 5.

55. I elaborate the idea of self as a crystallized particular in Chap. 3, below.

56. See M. Jamie Ferreira. Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkagaardian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

57. See Chap. 8, below.

58. p. 518 (216).

59. p. 518 (216).

60. See Bas C. von Frassen, “The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire,” Perspectives on Self-Deception, eds. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and my Knights of Faith and Resignation, Chap. 9.

61. p. 509 (206).