SOURCE: Mehl, Peter J. “Moral Virtue, Mental Health, and Happiness: The Moral Psychology of Kierkegaard's Judge William.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, Part II, edited by Robert L. Perkins, pp. 155-82. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Mehl examines the moral personality of Judge William within the context of recent writings on the relationship between psychology and ethics, particularly invoking the work of Owen Flanagan.]

INTRODUCTION

Philosophical discussions about relationships between ethics and psychology are undergoing something of a revival. Not only is there considerable discussion about character and virtue, but many philosophers have begun to renew the classic philosophical discussion of the self and the nature of personhood, a discussion that has significant implications for how we do moral philosophy. A number of major works have appeared in this vein: Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and Owen Flanagan's recent Varieties of Moral Personality.¹ Flanagan's work is less well known than the others but, I think, equally worthy of wide consideration. Varieties of Moral Personality is a careful, analytic consideration of relations between ethics and the psychological sciences (both broadly conceived).²

Although Kierkegaard's Either/Or is listed in Flanagan's bibliography, it is not mentioned in the text. Flanagan does, however, mention “Kierkegaard's character A” in a recent article.³ But more of Kierkegaard's writings could have been considered, for much of what Flanagan is concerned with in his recent writings, as well as some of the above authors, is foremost in Kierkegaard's thought, especially as found in Judge William's “letter” entitled “The Balance of the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.” My consideration of Judge William's moral psychology will focus on this letter and be informed by my reading in this recent body of writing, especially Flanagan's writings.

My focus will be on Judge William's moral psychology, his vision of moral personality; therein I will examine relations between moral virtue, mental health, and happiness. I will also consider how Judge William's religious commitments influence his vision of moral personality. Kierkegaard was one of the first modern philosophers to add mental health to the traditional duo of moral virtue and happiness. His insistence that the self is not rightly understood in substantialist terms, but best conceptualized as a relational construct, suggests the modern notion of identity formation, and hence of mental health. An identity crisis is a disorder of our psychological economy. Add to this his claim that despair (unhappiness) is the consequence of our lack of self, and, finally, the more controversial claim that identity formation is a specifically ethical matter, and we have the making of a distinctive claim that there are definite links among these three important notions. More specifically, Judge William makes the claim that a certain sort of “ethical attitude” is necessary for becoming a self or a personality, for moving toward mental health, and in turn toward dispelling despair. Part of the force of this normative claim derives from his theological perspective. With Flanagan, however, I will argue that there are serious questions about what sort of links obtain between these three areas. There are, it seems, many individuals who are morally good and psychologically healthy that are not contented, that are not happy by their own lights. As well, there seem to be people who are contented, and not clinically ill, but who are self-absorbed and do not really go in for ethical evaluation. (They are not immoral, just not very ethically concerned.) Furthermore, there seem to be people who are very moral who experience considerable unhappiness, if not psychological depression. So is Judge William's claim meant to be an empirical one? If so, then it seems false. If it is a normative claim how does he argue for it, what gives it plausibility in his eyes?

JUDGE WILLIAM'S IDEAL OF PERSONHOOD

Respecting Kierkegaard's wish that “if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author's name,” I will refer to Judge William's position (CUP, 1:627). Is Judge William's position identical to Kierkegaard's own? My conviction is that there is a good deal of coherence in Kierkegaard's whole corpus, and central to it is an image of moral personhood similar to Judge William's, but I will not argue that here. Rather I will simply refer to Judge William's view and let others ferret out the pseudonymous issue.

What is Judge William's central message to his young friend? In Judge William's title we find three terms that are crucial to his position, but that need further explication: aesthetic, ethical and personality. Although it seems clear that balancing the aesthetic and the ethical is part of human personality development, little else is clear. Obviously Judge William is not saying that humans, as a matter of fact, have a bit of the artist and a bit of the ethicist in them, and as they develop they balance these; his claim, as anyone familiar with Kierkegaard's writings knows, is far more normative than that. But let us move through Judge William's rather dense letter, focusing on some major themes.

Judge William begins by stressing the importance of choice, of self-conscious decision making, which he calls the moment of either/or. A person's choices are always important, says the Judge, and what concerns him about A is that he does not take choice with enough seriousness. Why should one take choice seriously? Right off Judge William points to the consequences for the self if one does not take decision making seriously. “[C]an you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality” (EO, 2:160)?

We already have, then, in the first few pages of Judge William's letter, a number of general claims that are backed by other assumptions. One is about the human psyche, namely that it has the capacity for agency, and the function of agency is forming of character or self through decisions. Furthermore this “binding power of the personality” can be lost; the consequence of this is the collapse of the self, or a crisis of identity. In and of itself such a crisis is not a joyful event; it leads, Judge William already suggests, to considerable unhappiness. In addition, this capacity for agency and binding is the human essence; it is the most holy dimension of a human being. Obviously I have read ahead, but much of this does appear on the fourth page of Judge William's letter, and continues throughout the letter.

Slightly further on Judge William ties much of this together: “The choice itself is crucial for the content of the personality: through the choice the personality submerges itself in that which is being chosen, and when it does not choose, it withers away in atrophy” (EO, 2:163). So far then we have some interesting suggestions about the importance of self-conscious decision making for the development of the self. But we have little in the way of explicit moral, or even ethical, discussion, for the choices of a person could, for all that Judge William has said, be rather immoral, or minimally moral. What is clear is that if we do not choose the activities of our life, something of importance will be lost. Does Judge William mean to say that we will not become persons, that our identities will not take shape if we do not continually and self-consciously choose our life projects?

Well, not exactly. Further on he says that the person who refrains from self-consciously choosing gets shaped by others; others will, by default, choose for such a person since as life goes on the personality, despite itself, is shaped. Or, if one is not shaped by the content of others' projects, one is shaped by “obscure forces” within the personality, one “unconsciously chooses” (EO, 2:164). This suggests that such a person does not really lack an identity, or a self; what he or she lacks is something more specific. Nevertheless, Judge William continually says that such a person has lost him or herself, but I take this to mean that he or she has lost the chance to form the personality through his or her own self-conscious choices. Of course, then Judge William's claim is more normative. It is not the claim that individuals who do not self-consciously choose lack an identity, it is the claim that what is important, and what “truly gives life meaning,” is that one's identity takes shape through the decisions one makes (EO, 2:168). What is sad, says Judge William, is that “so many live out their lives in quiet lostness, … they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows” (EO, 2:168). This is not to say, I take it, that they lack a self in the sense that they lack an identity, for this they gained, or so modern psychologists would lead us to believe, in the normal course of life.⁴ But this gets ahead and into my critical remarks.

Shaping one's self self-consciously, Judge William next informs his reader, is the core of the ethical. Furthermore, a person “has to live aesthetically or he has to live ethically” (EO, 2:168). Judge William explains. “[T]he person who lives aesthetically does not choose, and the person who chooses the aesthetic after the ethical has become manifest to him is not living aesthetically, for he is sinning and is subject to ethical qualifications, even if his life must be termed unethical” (EO, 2:168). The ethical, thus far, is the autonomous life, the life of self-conscious responsible decision making, and it becomes manifest to every person that they have a capacity for autonomy. But what exactly is the aesthetic? Any life lived without self-conscious decision making. But what if I self-consciously choose to live life nonautonomously, to defer to others as I move though life? This seems to present a problem for the Judge's claim, for a person could, to a large degree, continually choose not to choose: they would choose not to chart a rational and responsible course of interaction. This stance, he admits, suggests that individuals could, in principle, not really live aesthetically, but yet not live ethically either. But what do they lack, for they are choosing? What they lack or will soon lack is an ethical character; they will not become a self in the ethical sense for they do not make rational and responsible decisions; they do not engage life in evaluative terms. In the Judge's words:

[M]y either/or designates the choice by which one chooses good or evil or rules them out. Here the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live. That the person who chooses good and evil chooses the good is indeed true, but only later does this become manifest, for the aesthetic is not evil but the indifferent.

(EO, 2:169)

From this passage it is clear that what the aesthetic life lacks is a normative angle on life; the aesthetic personality may choose but without making self-conscious qualitative distinctions, just according to how things strike him or her immediately. (That any normal adult could actually do this in any sustained way strikes me as implausible, but I leave that aside for now.) Such a person may be said to be minimally free, but not autonomous in a fuller sense; the “ethical” person makes evaluative distinctions, and this entails being aware of alternatives, their consequences, and choosing in accordance with one's analysis; it entails living with some prudence. If we do not engage our capacity for practical judgment, Judge William claims, we will lose something of value in life (“the good”) and consequently be dissatisfied. The aesthetic individual, it seems, is blown by the winds of inner tendencies, or by the projects of others around him. “What does it mean to live aesthetically, … to that I would respond: the aesthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is” (EO, 2:178). In other words he or she does not deliberate and choose; he or she is not a self-consciously engaged agent. Notice that Judge William has said nothing yet about the explicit content of the ethical person's life, except that one lives by the evaluative distinctions made.

At this juncture, just when one thinks they understand the difference between the aesthetic and the ethical, Judge William adds something that gives one pause. He claims that “every human being has a natural need to formulate a lifeview, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose. The person who lives aesthetically also does that, and the popular expression heard in all ages and from various stages is this: One must enjoy life” (EO, 2:179). What gives one pause is that this does not sound like indifference, it sounds like self-consciously chosen hedonism. Judge William seeks to clarify. The one thing that distinguishes all forms of aestheticism, he says in an italicized sentence, is that the individual after enjoyment “posits a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself” (EO, 2:180). In more Hegelian language, Judge William says that in all aesthetic lifestyles “the spirit is not qualified as spirit but is immediately qualified” (EO, 2:180). This means that the capacity for rational and responsible agency, for autonomy, has not been chosen but is (in this case) self-consciously in the service of some configuration of empirical conditions. But saying this of aestheticism is different from saying that one does not make qualitative evaluations and choices based on them; the aesthetic person, it seems, has made a major evaluation and now seeks to live not apart from self-conscious choice, but in pursuit of some empirical good, such as health, wealth, honor, or more inwardly, talent or passion (EO, 2:182-83). The aesthetic person is sinning, one might agree, but in a major sense is not necessarily indifferent to his life, for as the judge says, like every other human being the aesthetic person has a lifeview and pursues purposes that flow from it.

If it is not that the aesthetic individual does not choose, does not self-consciously pursue a life project, what is the problem? The problem is that the aesthetic lifestyle is ultimately unsatisfactory because it does not affirm the conditions in which a certain sort of ethical character can develop, a character with engaged autonomy as the centerpiece of life. The aesthetic life denies personhood. Judge William speaks of the depression caused when the spirit (responsible freedom) is repressed (or better, not made the center out of which one's life is lived):

There comes a moment in a person's life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit. As immediate spirit, a person is bound up with all the earthly life, and now spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then depression sets in.

(EO, 2:188-89)

To Judge William's mind this capacity of the self whereby it can self-consciously assess itself in its empirical facticity, can get a critical grip on itself and evaluate itself, must be acknowledged and pursued in a single-minded fashion. (Once again we see that for the Judge this capacity of the personality has a religious overtone; I will return to this.) Any lifestyle that neglects this, any aesthetic lifestyle, is a recipe for despair. But first notice in the above passage, that spirit can express itself as “immediate spirit.” What exactly is this? This it seems would be a minimal sort of autonomy, the sort of autonomy which is expressed in intentional and voluntary action, but which does not involve sustained evaluative deliberation of alternatives and their consequences, and certainly not sustained reflection on one's whole set of values and attitudes, one's life posture, prior to choice. A capacity for such minimal autonomy, one could argue, is a necessary condition for any personal life, and this it seems is what Judge William is calling “immediate spirit.” The aesthetic individual has this sort of autonomy, and hence makes choices, but is not exhibiting choice in a “fuller” sense, which I will call “strong autonomy.” The ethical individual, one who pursues strong autonomy, not only considers, at every turn, the fullest scope of alternatives and their consequences, but the very attitudes, inclinations, desires, and values that inform his or her evaluative weighings. An individual that pursues strong autonomy seeks to become “transparent to himself;” such a person “penetrates his whole concretion with his consciousness” (EO, 2:258).

After insisting for numerous pages that A is living an aesthetic life, albeit, an aesthetic life of very refined proportions, Judge William spells out the precise sort of lifestyle choice he would have A make. It is clear in this passage that Judge William has in mind the very rich and demanding sort of autonomy mentioned above. “Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself—not until then has a person chosen himself ethically” (EO, 2:248).

We see clearly now that Judge William affirms a very strong sense of autonomy. It is a moral ideal that demands constant and continual analysis of all those empirical conditions that inform one's action. It is an ideal that aspires to complete continuity and coherence in one's life, and in one's personality, through the self-conscious adoption of a settled set of evaluative terms (EO, 2:230). Given that we have the capacity for self-transcendence, the capacity to be “ethical” in Judge William's sense, we find it possible to subject the empirical conditions of our life to critical assessment; we find it possible to take a critical and creative stance toward ourselves. We are all “aesthetic creatures,” creatures conditioned by a multitude of specific empirical conditions, but the ethically autonomous individual who chooses himself “becomes conscious as this specific individual with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of a specific environment. But as he becomes aware of all of this, he takes upon himself responsibility for it all” (EO, 2:251). Henceforth, the ethical individual strives for complete constancy and integrity.

The goal for the ethical individual then is nothing less than fully engaged autonomy, and this means “interpenetrating” his full concretion with the powers of spirit, (or less religiously) with rational and responsible self-transcending agency (EO, 2:256-59). But does such a life necessarily have any definite moral content? More exactly, is the autonomous life a moral life, in the sense of being perceptive of the interests of others? In that the ethical individual is striving to be a rational and responsible agent, to make self-conscious responsible decisions, it seems that he or she would be a morally good person. But it depends on what can be gained in the way of moral content from the affirmation of this ideal of ethical autonomy.

Judge William provides no clue regarding this question until well into his letter. His view, finally, seems to be that when I have chosen myself I must take into account, and be accountable to, all the conditions in which I find myself, and this includes social conditions. For example, if I am born a female into a family, I am a “daughter,” and this is a designation that carries with it certain familial, social and cultural meanings, meanings from which I cannot fully escape even if I disavow my family. Judge William's ideal requires that I be aware of, and accept responsibility for, this part of my identity as I move into the future. In the judge's words: [T]he ethical individual dares to employ the expression that he is his own editor, but he is also fully aware that he is responsible, responsible for himself personally, inasmuch as what he chooses will have a decisive influence on himself, responsible to the order of things in which he lives, responsible to God” (EO, 2:260). The ethical life then is one in which I continually strive to understand the life-world in which I live (my psychobiological desires, my social involvements, my cultural context, and even the metaphysical bottom line), so that I might stand in an aware and responsible relation. In this ongoing process my personality takes shape; but I am “the editor” of this emergent configuration, rather than only the product. At the personal level, then, the judge sounds like he advocates a sort of eudaimonistic ideal of development. The ethical individual “possesses himself as a task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control—in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony, which is the fruit of the personal virtues” (EO, 2:262). It is pretty clear that this sort of ethic does not necessarily entail a moral dimension; an individual could have a “harmony of soul,” it seems, and be minimally moral (have little concern for the interests of others).

Nevertheless, it seems that social life is crucial to the Judge's ideal; he is well aware that an individual's full constitution, his aesthetic immediacy, is deeply constituted by social relations. “The self that is the objective is not only a personal self but a social, a civic self” (EO, 2:262). The ethical person continues to engage in the affairs of social life and will develop social or civic virtues (EO, 2:262). What exactly he means by social or civic virtues is not specified; he suggests at various points that one will work for a living, that one will marry and have a family, but that seems to mean simply that one will come to be engaged in social life. Perhaps since the content of duty will be determined by my particular context, it is impossible to say more about it other than I will be engaged rationally and responsibly and this means adopting a settled set of evaluative terms. If we return to our daughter example, we must ask ourselves if the designation “daughter” carries with it a moral content. That, of course, depends on the context, on how the role of daughter has developed in a particular family, in a particular social context. It might be that a daughter has very strict and defined obligations and responsibilities, or it might be very minimal: being a daughter signifies only a biological and legal relationship. At one point in his letter the Judge tells of his experience as a boy, and the responsibilities he had as a student, a role defined by his father's stern requirements (EO, 2:266-70). But these responsibilities could have been nonmoral and even immoral, such as a case where a father required that his son (the “student”) become the star athlete, “have” as many women as possible, and graduate. That the son respects his father's wishes might seem moral, but the behavior of the “student” seems less than moral. At points Judge William suggests that at least children should always intend good for their parents, care for their parents, but why that should follow from his ideal is not clear (EO, 2:265). Judge William's conviction seems to be, then, that if an individual strives for autonomy he or she will come to appreciate the importance and role of social virtues, but these virtues, it seems to me, might be minimally moral.⁵

The Judge, in my opinion, is not really concerned about the specifics of morality; what concerns him is that one is autonomous. As he says at one point: “what is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with which one chooses” (EO, 2:167). If one is sincere about strong autonomy one will inevitably pursue and practice some set of ethical considerations as best one can construe them given one's full life conditions. What these considerations are will depend on who one is, on what configured one in the past, on what one self-consciously pursues subsequent to the choice of oneself, in short, on how the process of self-definition unfolds. But whatever the content turns out to be, it is not as crucial as the universal possibility of autonomous engagement, for the essential thing about a person is the capacity for maintaining distance from our ends and interests, and hence binding ourselves into a coherent and constant whole. That the content is not crucial is clear in Judge William's response to the moral skeptic who argues that moral codes are shifting and relative to social context (EO, 2:265). This “does not apply to the negative aspect of morality, for that continues unchanged” (EO, 2:263). In other words, he continues, the crucial thing is that a person intend to do what he or she construes to be the morally right thing. This is the internal or negative aspect of morality; the external or positive is the content. Now whether or not a person gets the content right, Judge William seems to say, is not the crucial consideration; what is crucial is that the person pursue autonomy and hence do their particular duty however they can best work that out.⁶

Throughout my reading of Judge William's vision of moral psychology I have noted a theological dimension. I noted that the Judge seems to suggest that the capacity for autonomous engagement is the “eternal,” the “holy,” in a human being. To choose the self is to choose the capacity for autonomous engagement; it is to choose freedom, and hence to choose to fulfill the ideal of personhood. As the Judge says, “The personality appears as the absolute that has its teleology in itself” (EO, 2:263) If the ideal of personhood is the absolute, where does the theological dimension enter?

Remember that the mention of the divine occurs in the context of the move from the aesthetic to the ethical posture, and is connected to the self-conscious realization that I can sustain a relationship to myself as empirical, that the “I” as self-consciousness remains throughout the shifting sands of the empirical. It seems to be this very capacity that the Judge declares as ultimate, as the divine. When the Judge speaks of the reality of God he speaks of an experience wherein God has revealed himself, and this experience is virtually identical to the experience of choosing oneself. In speaking of major life-shaping experiences, the Judge declares that the most significant experience occurs with the moment of choosing “the reality of choosing” (EO, 2:176).

When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, … the eternal power itself, then the heavens seem to open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the soul has seen the highest, which no mortal eye can see, and which can never be forgotten; then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.

(EO, 2:177)

We have here a sort of pietism, an experienced sense of being foundationally related to God, where the point of relation is the inner reality of spirit as self-consciousness.⁷ This experience has religious significance for the Judge, I would venture, because it is thought to transcend the merely empirical, the merely earthly; it is not historically or temporally conditioned, it is not relative to this or that. That it transcends the merely empirical provides the individual with a foothold in the shifting sands of the particular finite conditions in which he finds himself. Much further on in his letter the Judge puts it this way.

The atheist perceives very well that the way by which the ethical is most easily evaporated is to open the door to the historical infinity. And yet there is something legitimate in his behavior, for if, when all is said and done, the individual is not the absolute, then the empirical is the only road allotted to him, and the end of this road is just like the source of the Niger River—no one knows where it is. If I am assigned to the finite, it is arbitrary to remain standing at any particular point. Therefore, along this road one never makes a beginning, … [But] when the personality is the absolute, then it is itself the Archmedian point from which one can lift the world.

(EO, 2:265)

Again we see the close connection between the divine and the ideal of personhood. I encounter the divine within myself; in a sense I am the divine insofar as I am outside of the merely finite, the merely relative. I have a path that does end, a path that is the point from which I can transcend the vicissitudes of time and context, and that is myself as responsible agent, as spirit. Without this absolute foothold the individual, the Judge suggests, would lack the philosophical basis from which to legitimately take up one posture rather than another; such a person would be stuck in the never-ending approximation process of trying to locate the correct set of empirical conditions out of which to live. The absolute foothold then is taken to be divine because it is taken to be more than a merely empirical apprehension. The empirical is epistemologically unstable, while the capacity to sustain a responsible relationship to myself is not an empirical apprehension, but is of another order, an order that is absolute, unchanging, above the vicissitudes of finitude. What the status, epistemologically speaking, of such an apprehension is is not exactly spelled out; it seems to be so pervasive and powerful that the Judge declares it divine.

We have here, in my view, the essentials of the theological dimension of Judge William's vision of moral personality. Others argue that there is more to Judge William's position; it is argued that he believes that belief in God is necessary if the individual is to hold to the rigorous task of ethical existence.⁸ Without God individuals will find ethical existence too strenuous and give up. In other words, Judge William finds belief in God to be edifying, or morally helpful. Such an argument is, in my judgment, difficult to find in Judge William's writings, and certainly in this letter. I will take up these arguments again in my conclusion.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISMS OF JUDGE WILLIAM'S IDEAL

At this point a number of questions can be developed, some of which I have already suggested. First, how does Judge William's ideal of autonomy relate to the rest of the human constitution; how does it mesh with our psychological makeup as we best understand it? We have discovered that Judge William admits that it is not necessary for the development of an identity, for becoming a particular person—that happens in the course of any normal personal life. Does this mean that I can be mentally healthy, have a firm and unified personal identity, regardless of how autonomous I am? Or will my lack of autonomy mean that I am so deficient in my psychological economy that I am headed for a crisis? If not, why then should I “choose myself” as Judge William insists? Furthermore, is this sort of moral ideal one that is even possible for human beings; to what extent should we simply say that because of our psychological makeup this ideal is justifiably set aside? One wonders whether anyone, even the Judge himself, could approximate this sort of strong autonomy! Second, is it the case that unless an individual affirms this sort of strong autonomy he or she will fall into despair? John Stuart Mill argues that individuality is one of the elements of human well-being; is Judge William making a similar claim? Is the sort of autonomy which Judge William has in mind necessary for human happiness? It seems, rather, that to pursue this sort of strong autonomy, to believe that this is what is required, might itself produce despair! Third and finally, to what extent is this sort of strong autonomy necessary for moral virtue? What exactly is the relationship between Judge William's ideal of personhood and moral virtue? Is the ethically autonomous person necessarily a morally virtuous one? Conversely, do we need to be autonomous to be morally virtuous?

Although Judge William's letter continues for some pages, we have, I think, the essentials of his position. My thesis is that Judge William overstates his claims about the relationships between virtue, mental health and happiness. Although there is some truth in these claims, especially for those of us formed in the context of Western European thought, from a wider more recent view the strong claims he makes cannot be supported. What enables Judge William to make these claims is that he advocates a particular view of moral virtue, a certain sort of mental health and identity, and a specific sort of happiness. These specific views form pieces of a broader worldview, a “narrative” that is prevalent in the Western theological tradition. In general the Judge is making a case for an image of the normatively human, but he makes his case out as if it was the universally human, he makes strong essentialistic claims for it. Careful examination of the Judge's moral psychology, informed by contemporary philosophical, psychological and ethical studies, casts considerable doubt on such claims. My conclusion will be that properly modified Judge William's normative ideal remains persuasive, but the case for it is not nearly as strong as Judge William suggests. Part of the reason for these strong claims are his theological commitments.

The Judge clearly sees a close relationship between autonomy, becoming a self, and a sort of happiness. I will consider the link between autonomy and self-realization first. Judge William's full image of personhood is perhaps best thought of as one that seeks to bring together three fundamental aspects of humanness: (1) the self-transcending agent, spirit, stands between myself as (2) an empirically determinant creature with a particular subjective life and myself as (3) a reflective creature capable of generating an objective perspective on my life-world. The self-transcending agent can influence the commerce between these two poles of my being, and thus influence the sort of personal identity, the sort of self, I become. Doing so is to live autonomously. Judge William insists that in life we must take the drivers seat, engage our capacity for autonomy, and never relinquish it (EO, 2:251). The ethical person takes no moral holidays! Although he begins by suggesting that without taking the drivers seat we do not become a self, he admits that we achieve some degree of unity between these two poles of our constitution, and thus become a personal self, in the natural course of human life. So then his claim is modified to read that we do not, in the natural course of life, become a self in freedom; we do not fully or rightly realize ourselves.

Such a modification is psychologically astute. It seems clear, as Flanagan argues, that we do not need to be “strong evaluators” in order to be persons with firm and healthy identities. The pursuit of what I have called strong autonomy, Judge William's ethical ideal, is not a necessary condition for forestalling an identity crisis. It is not, to follow Flanagan again, what people who undergo identity crises lack. People who have identity crises have no sense of what defines them because they have no “set of cares and identifications,” they lack a defining set of interests.⁹ This is probably the result of some traumatic external conditions in childhood, or in latter life (less often), that brought about the undoing of a basic set of identifications, or forestalled their initial development. In adolescence one often hears of identity crises, but what happens then is that more self-conscious aims and interests have not yet congealed, and so a young person feels at loose ends. The problem, in Judge William's terms, is that a person has not found, identified, the aesthetic content of their particular life, their characteristic desires, and so they are floundering. As Flanagan notes, “many professional athletes, whom we would not think of as particularly reflective or as centrally motivated by ethical concerns, fall prey to identity crises when they lose their central project, when the framework of their lives changes at the end of their playing career.”¹⁰ They have an identity without pursuing the “ethical life;” and they do not lose themselves because they have not become autonomous. There seems no necessary connection between strong autonomy and self-realization, at least where self realization means the possession of a firm and motivating identity.

So Judge William's modification weakens the strength of his claim. It is not that if we do not become autonomous in the fullest sense, we will not become a self, but that we will not become a particular sort of ethical self. But there seems little psychologically compelling reason to become a self with strong autonomy as its defining feature; or is there? If becoming this sort of self will forestall all possibility for an identity crisis, and hence unhappiness, such as the athlete might undergo when life conditions change, then we will have reason to pursue it. Judge William does claim that the person who lives ethically is not pursuing as central an empirical state of affairs (e.g. developing my athletic talent), the realization of which is the condition for my happiness—this is aestheticism. The ethical person is pursuing a unification of the aesthetic and the ethical; he is pursuing personhood (EO, 2:256, 264). The possibility of doing this is subject only, the Judge suggests, to my own strength of volitional agency. In the Judge's words:

A human being's eternal dignity lies in precisely this, that he can gain a history. The divine in him lies in this, that he himself, if he so chooses, can give this history continuity, because it gains that, not when it is a summary of what has taken place or has happened to me, but only when it is my personal deed in such a way that even that which has happened to me is transformed and transferred from necessity to freedom.

(EO, 2:250; italics added)

Is this possibility for standing in relationship, for making the choice, at all conditional on my empirical constitution, my aesthetic self? It seems to me that it is. My capacity for autonomy, for example, would be severely affected by the conditions of my basic identity. If I lack basic identity, my capacity for autonomous decision making will be impaired; in fact numerous internal and external conditions affect the strength of rational and responsible agency. Yet Judge William insists that this is not the case: “I can lose my wealth, my honor in the eyes of others, my intellectual capacity, and yet not damage my soul” (EO, 2:220). By “soul” Judge William means to refer to my capacity to stand in relation to myself, ethically engage life, and become a person. In my view Judge William's claim is limited by the fact that my “ethical posture” will be swayed by other psychological and social conditions that impair (or hopefully, empower) my capacity for autonomy.

As well, even if my capacity for rational and responsible agency is not impaired, it seems obvious that this task, the task of interpenetrating one's life with consciousness, is most difficult, and subject to failure. And if my happiness is tied to realizing this interest, then I am subject to unhappiness when I fail to do so. If this is Judge William's recommendation then we might be inclined to set our sights lower. The ideal of full autonomy is very demanding and probably impossible for us. Flanagan argues that no one is a “pure strong evaluator;” to try to be so would be psychologically debilitating.

But if Judge William is not calling for success in this task of realizing the self as autonomous, but simply the pursuit of it as important, then his claim is more plausible. The truth in Judge William's claim is found in the idea that we naturally do aspire to become autonomous, we find autonomy a compelling way of life. If autonomy is the capacity to direct our life in terms of evaluative considerations, to interpenetrate life with consciousness, to pursue practical wisdom and ethical character, it is not hard to see how this could be attractive for creatures such as ourselves. In Thomas Nagel's words:

In belief, as in action, rational beings aspire to autonomy. … [They aspire to] the pursuit of freedom in everyday life. I wish to act not only in light of the external circumstances facing me and the possibilities they leave open, but in light of internal circumstances as well: my desires, beliefs, feelings, and impulses. I wish to be able to subject my motives, principles, and habits to critical examination so that nothing moves me to action without my agreeing to it. In this way, the setting against which I act is gradually enlarged and extended inward, till it includes more and more of myself, considered as one of the contents of the world.¹¹

This, no doubt, is Judge William's ideal. But as Nagel notes in the same section, we find that this natural aspiration is impossible, yet we cannot completely escape its claim on us. The question is to what degree we should feel compelled to pursue autonomy.

We have already concluded that we need not pursue it to any great degree to have a personal identity; personal identity has more to do with possessing a firm set of defining cares than with standing in a fully self-aware and responsible relationship to them, a relationship that would entail a continual assessment of those cares as I interact with the world. But if we shift to our more general concern with flourishing in our life, to self-realization in the sense of exercising our human faculties, the pursuit of autonomy seems to have considerable merit. Granted that we are generally structured the way Judge William claims, then seeking to bring our capacities for rational and responsible agency to bear on our praxis is nothing more than seeking to live wisely. Practical wisdom recommends itself to us not simply because it enables us to navigate the world better, but because we achieve satisfaction in autonomously expanding our interaction with the life-world. John Stuart Mill put it this way.

Where not the person's own character but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness. … [T]he free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being. … [T]o conform to custom merely as custom does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice in discerning or desiring what is best.¹²

This passage almost sounds like Judge William! My point, however, is that numerous philosophers have argued for a link between autonomy and self-realization, and in turn a link to happiness. If self-realization is seen as realization of our general human capacities, and not merely as personal identity, and if happiness is seen as the contentment that follows on knowledge that we are realizing our distinctively human abilities, then Judge William's claims are properly placed. Some significant degree of autonomy, where autonomy is self-consciously seeking, on a relatively consistent and comprehensive basis, to bring our reflective capacities to bear on our praxis, will be an important component of human happiness. To argue that it must be our central project seems to overstate its importance. Autonomy interests us, but to demand of ourselves full and continuous autonomy is inhumane. Nevertheless, a person that has not discovered or denies her capacity for engaged autonomy forfeits one important ingredient of human happiness—but certainly not all the important ingredients! And it does seem to me that the sort of happiness Judge William has in mind is more like flourishing as a human being, and not like the pleasure that ensues from stimulating one's senses, nor even the elation that follows upon significant achievement, such as setting a world record in track and field. Such human flourishing, as Flanagan notes, is “compatible with a certain lack of contentment or personal equanimity, as well as with a certain amount of misfortune in one's interpersonal and material circumstances.”¹³ This suggests, what the Judge argues, that the satisfaction resulting from the pursuit of autonomy is not completely subject to the shifting sands of empirical conditions.

I turn now to a different question: what does the pursuit of Judge William's ideal of full autonomy entail in the way of moral virtue? Although we noted that Judge William believes that the ideal of strong autonomy entails the development of social virtues, it still seems unclear to what extent these virtues will be morally good. First of all, it seems possible that even people who choose themselves as autonomous could have substantive normative commitments that are fairly out of kilter. If they lacked sufficient factual information, or if their capacity for evaluative weighing of alternatives was minimal, then their moral posture would be askew. If, in other words, they were simply not very intelligent or naive, they could well be lacking in moral perception and, at best, be minimally moral. Of course, as we noted earlier, the Judge seems more concerned that an individual be clear that she intends to do the good, and not whether it really is good! Even worse it seems possible, although this is less plausible, that a person could choose herself as autonomous in the full sense of pursuing practical wisdom and good character, and hold values and attitudes that while self-consistent, did not consider others' interests to any significant degree. One could argue with Aristotle that we should pursue the good life, and since we are social beings, the good life for us will include, to some degree, moral considerations. But this is only an accidental consequence of our central aim which is our flourishing. Much of the problem here is that it is unclear what is to count as moral.

Or conversely, it seems possible that a person could be morally good (where that involves considerable sensitivity to other's interests) without being very autonomous: the moral person need not be as self-reflective and as intentional as Judge William's ideal person. Judge William's demand that one interpenetrate one's whole concretion with consciousness (self-knowledge) and take responsibility for it (self-appropriation) seems to fit certain sorts of ethical ideals better than others. Where morality centers more on interpersonal properties, (social sensitivity, kindness) this ideal seems negligent; where morality centers more on intrapersonal properties (harmony of soul, self-awareness) then the ideal of autonomy is to be commended. In the latter case we find the classic views of Plato and Aristotle; in the former case we have Christian ideals of neighborly love, and Freudian denunciations of this as psychologically damaging, if not morally suspect. Judge William's ideal connects neatly to classical ideals of moral excellence as involving self-knowledge and self-realization. Such psychological and intrapersonal sophistication, such well-developed capacities for ethical evaluation, is, as Flanagan points out, a valuable thing, but not essential for a morally commendable life. Many individuals are morally good, admirable in some cases, but lacking developed capacities for strong autonomy. Flanagan cites Tolstoy's peasants as examples of individuals who are morally good but who lack capacities for strong evaluation, who are not anywhere near fully autonomous.¹⁴

Whether such individuals, however, could be morally virtuous, where virtuous seems to mean for Judge William living rationally and responsibly is another question. If virtue is defined in terms of autonomy, then the person who consistently displays kindness to others, but does so largely because she has been habituated to that by her mother's demands, is not really virtuous. As the Judge says, “when a young girl follows her heart's choice, this choice, however beautiful it is otherwise, is no choice in the stricter sense, because it is altogether immediate” (EO, 2:167). But this seems to put the emphasis on “how” an action is performed, in what spirit, and not on the “what,” the content, and this seems wrongheaded in some cases because the person who is the recipient of the action is not so much concerned with the motive as the result. Yet if one knows that something was done from (say) a spirit of resentment, one is at least partially dissuaded of the goodness or merit of the action. Still if an action was done without a studied assessment of the alternatives and their consequences, but simply from a heartfelt effort at kindness, (motivated largely by sheer sympathy) one is not so taken aback, although strong autonomy is certainly lacking. This leads me to conclude that Judge William puts too much emphasis on autonomy; autonomy is part but not all of moral virtue.

A THEOLOGICAL CONCLUSION

In a review of Charles Taylor's Philosophical Papers, Annette Baier criticizes Taylor for elevating a particular moral tradition of the West, a tradition which focuses on practical reason and autonomy, to the level of the universal normative ideal for all. In Baier's words, “Philosophical anthropology of Taylor's kind is a ‘higher’ anthropology, by beings self confident of their own special spiritual status. It is really theological anthropology.”¹⁵ As a “suspicious naturalistic skeptic,” she concludes her review of Taylor with these words: “This remarkable tradition for which Taylor is an eloquent spokesman, is a cultural artifact of enormous expressive power. It fascinates and will continue to fascinate more naturalist anthropologists, as they are fascinated by the mitres, head dresses, breastplates, mirrors and fetishes of less intellectual tribes.”¹⁶ Surely Judge William is a representative of this tradition, but, just as Taylor, he does not see himself as simply expressing a particular cultural tradition. He takes himself to be speaking just the truth about the proper human life to lead. What are we to make of this?

If we set up a fully engaged and constant autonomy as the ultimate aim for our lives, and the central interest around which we are fully invested, we are subject to disappointment, even despair. For just as with any central project, with any self-conscious set of interests, the pursuit of autonomy cannot be continuously achieved. In addition, this sort of strong autonomy is so demanding that it is not only unreasonable but impossible. But Judge William insists that we make the ethical, the pursuit of personhood, central to our lives.¹⁷ Only in this way can we escape the despair of the merely aesthetic life. This claim seems overstated if it is meant to suggest that in the ethical, but not the aesthetic, we can dispel despair.¹⁸

I would suggest that Judge William thinks this is the case because he is religiously committed to this ethical way of life. Why is this the case? As we have already noted, he seems to believe that living in this manner is to affirm what is eternal (as opposed to empirical and contingent) within the human being, what is the “most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of personality.” Choosing oneself ethically is affirming oneself in one's “eternal validity.” As I indicated in the last section, Judge William believes that he has found the ultimate, the Archimedean point from which he can lift the whole world, the point from which he can be “raised above the moment.” Indeed, one can be so raised by focusing one's attention on one's mental capacities, one's awareness, memory and imagination, but does one in so doing completely transcend the historical and empirical and make contact with an ahistorical, metaempirical realm, a realm which should be designated the divine? That this is the case is certainly not logically entailed; and any post-Freudian psychology should be suspicious of such claims. Why then should the experience of this capacity be thought to constitute an argument for the divine?

Exercising one's autonomy, continuing to choose oneself, is a religiously informed experience for the Judge. A person that chooses himself as an ethical evaluator, says the Judge, finds “his inner being is purified and he himself is brought into an immediate relationship with the eternal power that omnipresently pervades all existence. The person who chooses aesthetically never reaches this transfiguration, this higher dedication. Despite all its passion, the rhythm in his soul is only a spiritus lenis [weak aspiration]” (EO, 2:167). Is there anything more than an experiential, rhetorically embellished confession here? Judge William might be read as proposing a theological rationale for the choice of ethical existence. As I noted earlier, others have argued that Judge William proposes an image of ethical existence where God is thought of as the ground, the metaphysical basis, the epistemological rationale, for the pursuit of the ethical ideal. This is often referred to as a theonomous view of ethics. It is not that the divine provides commands which specify what one ought to do at any given point; it is rather that the divine provides a rationale for pursuing the ideal of ethical existence at all.

We have already noted, however, that the individual, on the Judge's view, would seem to have some psychological reason, apart from the reality of God, to pursue the ethical ideal. The psychological reason is related to the fact that the self will be denying what is essential to it if it denies the capacity to autonomously engage life. The Judge speaks of the depression that results from trying to repress spirit, and our natural aspirations for rational and responsible decision making. Aesthetic existence in the Judge's view is despair; ethical existence is the choice of despair and hence the way beyond despair. To deny our basic psychological existential interest in choosing the ethical, our telos, is to deny ourselves at a very deep level, and hence to produce deep dissatisfaction, depression, despair. Why then is it thought that the Judge makes a theological appeal to ground the ethical?

The problem, it is argued, that compels one into theological convictions is that the self on its own cannot sustain the stringent telos of ethical existence, cannot be anything more than an experimenter. If there is nothing higher than myself then I lack rigor, and I will fall away from the ethical life; a strenuous business such as the ethical life will be too much for me and I will succumb to the temptations of an irresponsible, irresolute life. George Connell says that Judge William is claiming that God is needed as an explanation for the obligation to take up ethical existence; we are theologically obligated to take up the ideal of moral personality. The Judge believes, in Connell's words, that “the watchful presence of a higher authority … is a necessary condition of binding, nonexperimental choice.”¹⁹ Or, put another way, “the unbounded self, the self that knows no higher authority than itself, is subject to its own whims and moods.”²⁰ But if there is a divine source for our life posture, then we are secure and held to a path that is given to us by God.²¹ On Connell's reading Judge William means to say that we are subject to ourselves as beings divinely rooted; to add divinely rooted is to add some compulsion. For the Judge then the divine mandate is a “natural relation between a finite free agent and its creator.”²² We are created and sustained by God, and thus it has been traditionally thought to follow that “we are restless till we (self-consciously) rest in Thee.” Clearly we are linked to a venerable Western theological tradition, and a specific theological anthropology.

The argument, however, for affirming this vision of God as the moral ground seems to come (on Connell's reading) to a psychological, motivational, or practical one. When he says that the Judge believes that God is a “necessary condition” for maintaining the choice of the ethical, he means, I take it, psychologically or motivationally necessary, not logically or theoretically necessary. “The self can only take responsibility for itself in an earnest, nonexperimental manner if this choice is taken before a higher authority able to hold the self to its choice.”²³ This argument seems to be both empirically and philosophically dubious.

In the first place, as I indicated earlier, I do not find this argument in Judge William's letter, yet I do think it is central to Kierkegaard's religious affirmations.²⁴ I have addressed the argument in an earlier paper.²⁵ The upshot of my argument there was that Kierkegaard develops a psychological or “subjective” argument for God based in the experience of failing to maintain the absolute telos of ethical existence, and hence falling into despair. My restlessness, my despair, indicates that I am related to the divine, that I have an absolute telos. This argument is flawed because it depends on making a case for pursuing the ideal of moral personality in the first place, and this ethical ideal does not (in my judgment) assert itself as forcefully as Kierkegaard (and Judge William) believe. Although the ideal is appealing if modestly stated (we have a psychological interest in becoming relatively autonomous), it is unreasonable if it is claimed (as Kierkegaard and Judge William do) that we must be absolutely autonomous, that we must become fully transparent to ourselves in thought and action. Nevertheless they do insist that nothing less than the ethical ideal of personhood be pursued, and they assert this because they believe it is divinely commanded. Then, however, the argument cannot be used to support God's reality, since God's reality is already presupposed in the argument. Hence, it cannot be argued that God is a theoretically or logically necessary condition of pursuing the ideal. This is what I mean by arguing that the Judge is driven to his affirmation of this ideal by his prior theological commitments, commitments he has not yet theoretically established.

Secondly, if the above argument comes to a claim that belief in God is psychologically or motivationally necessary this cannot be used for theoretical support without additional argument, and it is empirically dubious. Many individuals are ethically admirable but do not need God to be so; many nonbelievers have well-developed moral characters, they maintain considerable moral integrity, they do not live simply by whim or mood. So empirically the claim is simply false. Why do they pursue the ethical life? Any number of explanations might reasonably be offered; maybe they find that it is psychologically satisfying. Now this is not to say that many people might not live more ethical lives if they believed, and this is not to say that many people legitimately find belief in God morally inspiring. If God is the moral orderer of the universe, then (as R. M. Adams has argued) belief in this God provides a “moral advantage.”²⁶ However, if the ideal that I put before myself is “strong autonomy” then belief in God may well be necessary for me psychologically—although I would wonder whether it is not also in some cases psychologically destructive. Kierkegaard may well claim that without the divine empowerment a self can only flounder, that it cannot lift itself out of aesthetic existence, but remains a dissolute, disunified, disparate self. This is overstated. To become a self on any reasonable psychological understanding (to have a relatively unified and focused identity) it is not necessary to believe in God or to pursue strong autonomy.

In the final analysis, the Judge's religious claims strike one more as a rhetorical effort designed to sing the praises of a way of life, than as a solid theoretical argument. To my mind the Judge here reveals the deeper motive for his high praise of strong autonomy; the requirement of ethical self-realization, of strong autonomy, is a consequence of his theistic commitments. The final question becomes, can we follow the Judge in his theological commitments? The skeptical naturalist anthropologist cannot, but we should bear in mind that Judge William's ideal, even minus the religious convictions and the strong universalistic claims, remains a valuable form of life for human beings, and especially for those of us formed in this cultural tradition. As others have noted, there is no way to completely disentangle one's thought and practice from the traditions, the narratives, in which one has been formed. We can conclude that there are reasons for seeing a good deal of autonomy as important to human self-realization and flourishing, but it is not sufficient for mental health nor for comprehensive human happiness, and certainly not for moral virtue, unless we have already decided that it must be.

Notes

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). There are, of course, other recent writings that address these issues, especially Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1984); Harry Frankfurt's writings in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); the essays collected in Identity, Character and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amélie Rorty (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990); and in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

2. Flangan examines the above three major works, and a good deal more, in light of a considerable body of study in ethics and the psychological sciences.

3. Owen Flanagan, “Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation,” in Identity, Character, and Morality, 37-66.

4. Later in his letter, Judge William suggests that he agrees; he says he does not mean to say that “the person who lives aesthetically does not develop, but he develops with necessity, not in freedom” (EO, 2:225).

5. It is not the case, in my view, that Kierkegaard himself finally advocates the same view as the Judge here; there are indications that Kierkegaard advocates a more specifically moral and Christian ethic in his other writings, see especially Works of Love.

6. One, of course, is reminded here of Kierkegaard's (or rather Climacus's) claim that the crucial element in religious faith is subjective orientation, and not objective approximation. See part 2, sec. 2, chap. 2 of CUP, “Subjective Truth.”

7. For my reading of pietism, see Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 1799-1870 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1972) 26-30.

8. See John Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) 156-66; and George B. Connell, “Judge William's Theonomous Ethics,” in Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1992) 56-70.

9. Flanagan, “Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation,” 48-49.

10. Ibid., 49-50.

11. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) 118-19.

12. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Currin V. Shields (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1956) 68-71.

13. Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, 317.

14. Flanagan, “Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation,” 45-47.

15. Annette Baier, “Critical Notice of Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1988): 589-94.

16. Ibid.

17. There is some indication that Kierkegaard (especially Vigilius Haufniensis) also thought of ethics as submitting its claims without considering whether they are humanly reasonable. This suggests there are some theological assumptions operative here. See CA, 17.

18. Kierkegaard, one might argue, would agree, and this is just the problem with the ethical life that compells one on to the religious. But why should we pursue strong autonomy in the first place? Why not a more modest autonomy? For some discussion of the theistic background that compells Kierkegaard to demand strong autonomy and hence his move to explicit religious convictions, see my “Despair's Demand: A Critical Appraisal of Kierkegaard's Argument for God,” in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1992): 167-82.

19. Connell, “Judge William's Theonomous Ethics,” 63.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 65.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. In Elrod's discussion of this motivational argument he does not cite any passages from Either/Or. The main support for this view comes from Kierkegaard's Journals. See Elrod, Being and Existence, 158-64. In Connell's discussion of this motivational argument he cites only a couple of passages from the Judge's letter entitled “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage.”

25. “Despair's Demand: A Critical Appraisal of Kierkegaard's Argument for God,” in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1992): 167-82.

26. Robert Merrihew Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 144-63.

Abbreviations

CA: The Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard's Writings 8. Trans. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980. (Bergrebet Angest, by Vigilius Haufniensis, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1844.)

CUP,1: Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Two volumes. Kierkegaard's Writings

CUP,2: 12:1-2. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992. (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, by Johannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1846.)

EO,1: Either/Or. Two volumes. Kierkegaard's Writings 3 and 4. Trans.

EO,2: Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987. (Enten/Eller I-II, ed. Victor Eremita, 1843.)