Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self
Edited by John Lippitt, Patrick Stokes
Use insights from Kierkegaard to explore contemporary problems of self, time, narrative and death
- Brings together leading figures in a central philosophical debate of ongoing significance: personal identity
- Engages with a range of questions of vital importance for the debate about narrative selfhood
- Demonstrates Kierkegaard’s capacity to generate new and illuminating insights for contemporary discussions across a range of traditions
Is each of us the main character in a story we tell about ourselves, or is this narrative understanding of selfhood misguided and possibly harmful? Are selves and persons the same thing? And what does the possibility of sudden death mean for our ability to understand the narrative of ourselves?
These questions have been much discussed both in recent philosophy and by scholars grappling with the work of the enigmatic 19th-century thinker Søren Kierkegaard. For the first time, this collection brings together figures in both contemporary philosophy and Kierkegaard studies to explore pressing issues in the philosophy of personal identity and moral psychology. It serves both to advance important ongoing discussions of selfhood and to explore the light that, 200 years after his birth, Kierkegaard is still able to shed on contemporary problems.
1. The Moments of a Life: On Some Similarities between Life and Literature,Marya Schechtman
2. Teleology, Narrative, and Death, Roman Altshuler
3. Kierkegaard’s Platonic Teleology, Anthony Rudd
4. Narrative Holism and the Moment, Patrick Stokes
5. Kierkegaard’s Erotic Reduction and the Problem of Founding the Self, Michael Strawser
6. Narrativity and Normativity, Walter Wieizke
7. The End in the Beginning: Eschatology in Kierkegaard’s Literary Criticism, Eleanor Helms
8. Forgiveness and the Rat Man: Kierkegaard, ‘Narrative Unity’ and ‘Wholeheartedness’ Revisited, John Lippitt
9. The Virtues of Ambivalence: Wholeheartedness as Existential Telos and the Unwillable Completion of Narravives, John J. Davenport
10. Non-Narrative Protestant Goods: Protestant Ethics and Kierkegaardian Selfhood, Matias Møl Dalsgaard
11. Narrativity, Aspect, and Selfhood, Michael J. Sigrist
12. The Senses of an Ending, Kathy Behrendt
13. The End? Kierkegaard’s Death and its Implications for Telling his Story, George Pattison.
Are our lives enacted dramatic narratives? Did Kierkegaard understand human existence in these terms? Anyone grappling with these two questions will find in these excellent essays a remarkable catalogue of insights and arguments to be reckoned with in giving an answer. That is no small achievement.
This wonderful collection tackles the issue of who I am and where I’m going (if anywhere), and the place of telling my story in forming my identity. It opens new vistas on this philosophical concern, drawing on MacIntyre, Taylor and Frankfurt, and centrally, Kierkegaard – a virtuoso explorer of this terrain.
