Abstract
Though sensitivity to pedagogy infuses all of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, Kierkegaard’s voice in education, and moral education specifically, is scant. This is striking considering the range and depth of his influence in philosophy and theology. Given the ethico-religious telos that animates Kierkegaard’s project, and the amazing variety of texts that illuminate and enact the existential journey into lived virtue, Kierkegaard offers a wealth of resources for pedagogies that aspire to cultivate virtue. Yet Kierkegaard does, as his pseudonym Johannas Climacus intends, create difficulties. Specifically, he exposes how difficult it is to become and remain virtuous. Moreover, he reveals how difficult it is to teach others how to become virtuous, all the while enacting a pedagogy that intends to do just that. In this essay I make a case for Kierkegaard’s indispensable contribution to a pedagogy that aims to impart virtue. Specifically, I examine the challenge the aesthetic sphere poses for virtue ethics, noting the interior moves that precede, undergird, and sustain the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere. I then explore Kierkegaard’s pedagogical approach that aims to reach the aesthete.
[W]ith regard to something in which the individual person has only himself to deal with, the most one person can do for another is to unsettle him (sic)
(Kierkegaard 1992, p. 387)
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- 1.
Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, (eds. Davenport and Rudd 2001). MacIntyre’s position on this point has arguably evolved most notably In Three Rival Versions of Inquiry, where he argues that traditions, rather than insular and incomprehensible, are intelligible across time. Truths are made intelligible within a tradition and that tradition (T1) which is able to understanding a rival tradition (T2) on its own terms and is able to resolve its (T2) intractable problems with a better account (i.e. Galileo’s answer to Ptolemy) is or should be the prevailing tradition. This in effect is what B attempts with A in Either/Or—explaining A’s modality within B’s terms. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous editor, Victor Eremita, notes that A and B’s manuscripts offer no clear resolution. This makes sense for A, as I will argue, needs more than cognitive persuasive.
- 2.
The aesthete’s comprehension of the ethical sphere, however, is in question. For Kierkegaard genuine ethical knowledge is subjective and existential. It is won by living into the ethical ideals one aspires to. The aesthete’s knowledge of the ethical sphere is laced with an existential despair that tends towards an idealized (and impractical) abstraction, on the one hand, or is prone towards a hardened and cynical realism that dismisses ethical ideals as unrealistic possibilities, on the other.
- 3.
- 4.
By this, I am not suggesting Aristotle’s ethic lacks imagination. To become virtuous, in Aristotle’s account, the telos of human flourishing must be continually re-imagined and enacted with practical wisdom. Kierkegaard agrees with this, but goes further, examining and enacting how imagination so often goes awry.
- 5.
On Kierkegaard’s engagement with the popular culture of his day see Carl Hughes’s (2014) fine analysis in Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros. In particular, Hughes notes Kierkegaard’s intensive commentary on The First Love and The Talisman—two comedies (the second a farce) that were popular in his own time, yet forgettable today. Kierkegaard sojourns into popular media to expose where the aesthetes live and have their being. This move, as I will argue, is a key part of Kierkegaard’s pedagogy.
- 6.
The unconscious version is captured in the robotic, saccharine happiness of the Stepford Wives or in the vain pursuits of the Madmen. The protagonists in these films are blind to the futility of their pursuits—there is occasional awareness, but it is trumped and bulled over by long-standing habits and ways of seeing. Consequently, the characters are far removed from the abiding existential awareness of a Qoheleth, the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes, who sees the vanity and emptiness in such endeavours.
- 7.
Pascal references both tennis and geometry as ways to evade the task of becoming a self. Though arguably worthy endeavours, they are not necessarily moral endeavours, which are required for a substantive self to emerge.
- 8.
Jung defines neurosis as a substitute for genuine suffering.
- 9.
Kierkegaard’s anthropology envisions the self as an unstable mix of body and soul. Becoming a self, rather than negating one half over the other (i.e. materialism or Platonisim), requires a synthesis of both. Echoing Pascal, Kierkegaard sees human beings as half-angelic and half-best (Pensées #329). Selfhood requires integrating both.
- 10.
This interview with Louis C.K. was on the Conan O’Brian show. It is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c
- 11.
The exact quote from MacIntyre reads as follows: “Students who ask about their academic disciplines, ‘But what use are they to us after we leave school?’ should be taught that the mark of someone who is ready to leave school is that they no longer ask that question.”
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Gary, K. (2017). The Seduction of Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Sphere. In: Carr, D., Arthur, J., Kristjánsson, K. (eds) Varieties of Virtue Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59177-7_17
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