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Kierkegaard at Princeton

From left to right: Lara Buchak, Hans Halvorson, Austen McDougal, and Z Quanbeck

I attended a Kierkegaard workshop at Princeton University last month and it was such a delightful experience I thought I should post about it. The papers were uniformly good and thought provoking. Many of the presenters, including Alexander (a.k.a Z) Quanbeck, who organized the conference, were young and that certainly bodes well for the future of Kierkegaard scholarship. I was also encouraged to learn that Princeton has two tenured members of the philosophy department, Lara Buchak and Hans Halvorson, who are Kierkegaard enthusiasts, and that bodes even better for Kierkegaard scholarship. 

Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that neither Buchak nor Halvorson has a background in continental philosophy. Buchak focuses on “decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy or religion,” and Halvorson “focuses on applications of category theory in mathematical logic,” as well as the philosophy of physics. That is, both have the kind of highly technical math, logic, and science-based backgrounds that used to dominate Anglo-American philosophy and for which there is still a strong favorable bias on the part of most philosophy hiring committees. 

That two such traditionally-trained analytic philosophers would have an interest in Kierkegaard may seem strange to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. Kierkegaard, contrary to popular belief, was highly analytical and generally averse to speculation. That’s actually a conspicuous difference between Kierkegaard and George MacDonald, while both have very similar theologies at the most fundamental level, MacDonald’s prodigious imagination was drawn to speculating on issues such as the spiritual status of animals and the fate of souls whose moral progress is, on his view, merely interrupted by death, while Kierkegaard was far most skeptically inclined. 

Buchak presented a fascinating paper called “Why Should We Defer to Authority?” that reminded me very much of my paper, “The Social Implications of Epistemic Obligation in Kierkegaard’s Epistemology” (presented at a conference entitled “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism, and Conspiracy Theory,” at the University of Southampton, in September of 2024). There were lots of differences, of course, but I anticipate that Buchak’s paper will soon be published and that I will then be able to make a comparison of the two the subject of a future blog post.

Halvorson presented an equally compelling paper entitled “Climacus on the Objective Way.” My notes are too sketchy, sadly, to facilitate a responsible reconstruction of either Buchak’s or Halvorson’s that paper. I can summarize here very briefly, however, a paper Halvorson published earlier that I think every Kierkegaard scholars should read because of the massive implications it has for future Kierkegaard research. That paper is “The Philosophy of Science in Either-Or.” It originally appeared in Cambridge’s Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Critical Guide,and is available for download from PhilArchive. 

Halvorson argues in this paper that Either-Or “contains Kierkegaard’s argument against the predominant Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of scientific objectivity” and that this rejection “is a forerunner of Niels Bohr’s ‘epistemological lesson of quantum theory.’” That is, Halvorson argues very persuasively that “Either-Or is a central text for the transition from and enlightenment picture of scientific objectivity to the new picture that began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (pp. 1-2). 

The argument, very roughly, goes something like this. A, the protagonist of the first volume of Either-Or is paralyzed by indecision precisely because his perspective on his existence, or on existence more generally, is too objective. Objectively, everything simply is, and there is no reason to chose one thing, or one course of action, over another. Halvorson then traces this view of the existential effect of an extremely objective stance relative to one’s existence back to Kierkegaard’s teacher, Poul Martin Møller and, in particular, to Møller’s novel En Danske Students Eventyr (A Danish student’s adventure) which presents a character who, like Kierkegaard’s A, is paralyzed by indecision brought on by what Halvorson describes as “a hypertrophied capacity for reflection.” 

I’m ashamed to admit that while I own a copy of Møller’s collected works, I’m not much of a novel reader, so I had never read En Danske Students Eventyr (which is probably the best-known work of Møller’s, at least to contemporary Danes). One doesn’t have to have read it, though, to follow Halvorson’s argument. The only problem I have with the argument is that I think putting Hegel in the same class as Descartes, and the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity with which he is associated, is problematic. Everything Halvorson says about Kierkegaard’s attitude toward this ideal is, I believe, unassailable. I’m just not entirely confident that Kierkegaard would ascribe such an ideal to Hegel.

Hegel certainly thought he was objective, but he was no victim of the paralysis that characterizes both A and the protagonist of Møller’s novel. Kierkegaard appears to believe that, rather than exemplifying the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity, Hegel suffered from a kind of intellectual megalomania that was pathological. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Kierkegaard, who is generally averse to speculation, is so often lumped together with Hegel as one of those “weak-minded continental thinkers” to which analytic philosophers have such an aversion. The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity arguably does lead to indecision, as Halvorson argues, and in that way, precludes the kind of wild speculations in which Hegel engaged. That is, it would preclude the conclusion that one had achieved absolute knowledge of the sort Hegel claimed (hence the practice of the Pyrrhonists, the paradigmatic objective inquirers [Σκεπτικό], of allowing assent only to appearances, or impressions concerning the nature of reality, rather than to beliefs about it).   

In support of this view is the fact that most contemporary Anglo-American philosophers trace their own philosophical stance back to the Enlightenment, but few see Hegel as an embodiment of that ideal, and more than a few have strongly negative reactions to him. Of course it’s conceivable that Kierkegaard thinks hewing too closely to the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity could eventually drive a person mad and that this was what had happened to Hegel. So from that perspective, I suppose, Hegel could be considered at least an anomalous exemplar of this ideal.

Whether Hegel is properly classed with Descartes is a minor point, however, in the context of Halvorson’s argument and hence in no way weakens it. Halvorson’s argument is that the role of subjectivity in knowledge formation was passed from Møller, to Kierkegaard, from Kierkegaard to Rasmus Nielsen (a friend of Kierkegaard’s and a professor at the University of Copenhagen), from Nielsen to his student Harald Høffding, and from Høffding to his student (drumroll…) Niels Bohr! 

Fascinating, eh? It’s no wonder that Halvorson, who has a background in in physics, has developed an interest in Kierkegaard. There is so much work to be done in the area of Kierkegaard’s relevance to, and influence upon, contemporary empirical science, and physics in particular. My hope is that Halvorson will lead that scholarly charge and that there will soon be a growing body of work in this area of Kierkegaard scholarship. 

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Report from the Pacific APA

I chaired a session on practical reasoning at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association last month. The session was great. The presenter, Ting Cho Lau, was a very sharp graduate student from Notre Dame. His paper was entitled “Tough Choices, Reasons, and Practical Reasoning,” and his argument was that none of the dominant theories of why “tough choices” are tough either adequately explains the phenomenon of toughness or holds out much promise of providing agents with guidance for making such choices.

I won’t go into Lau’s specific criticisms of each of the dominant theories. What will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars is that Lau argues none of those theories adequately acknowledges that tough choices, such as what career to choose, often involve the shaping of a person’s identity and so among the many considerations that must be looked at is what kind of person it is possible for one to become. Not everyone can, for example, become a great opera star. Even those who are excellent singers by most standards may have to accept at some point that their talents will likely limit them to more minor roles. That kind of self-examination is very difficult and that does indeed go a long way to explaining why at least some tough choices are so tough.

Lau’s paper was clearly presented and well argued. It was also ambitious, though, in that he proposed not simply to give a more adequate account of why tough choices were tough, but also to provide agents with guidance for making them less tough. It seems to me, however, that knowing that a choice is so “tough” because it involves figuring out just who exactly one is and who one is capable of becoming isn’t necessarily going to make the choice any less difficult. It seems entirely possible, in fact, that it might make the choice even more difficult.

The situation is even more complex, I would argue, than Lau presented it as being because the issue is not simply that of determining what kind of person one is capable of becoming, but also of determining what kind of person one wants to become. Usually, we are pulled in various directions with respect to that issue. As difficult as it may be to acknowledge that we may want to become someone (a famous opera singer, for example) that we simply don’t have the talent to become, it is even harder, Kierkegaard would argue, to determine who we really want to become. We want to become good people, people pleasing to God (or, if we are not religious, at least pleasing to our neighbors, or to those in our culture more generally), and yet, and yet, we are also drawn toward decisions that would make us into quite another sort of person.

There is, as Kant would say, a corruption in the subjective determining ground of our will. Or, as Kierkegaard would put it, we are “double-minded.” Arguably, that is the real reason why at least some choices are so “tough.” It isn’t all that difficult, generally, to decide on a career, or on whom to marry. Many people, in fact, would describe these choices as having been made for them, in a sense, by inclinations that were so strong they didn’t really seem like choices. Other sorts of choice, however, are not so easy. Deciding, for example, whether to stick up for a colleague who is being bullied and harassed when doing so might expose one to the same treatment––now that can be difficult!

The session was great, though, and Lau’s paper is a work-in-progress that even in light of the above criticism is better than many a paper I’ve seen published in peer-reviewed journals. The commentator, Susan Vineberg, from Wayne State University was also excellent, and the session as a whole was exceptionally well run. I’m not tooting my own horn there. I was only one of three chairs for three separate papers and actually the weakest link in that chain in that I mistakenly assumed the respondent had the same length of time to present her remarks as had the presenter. Each presenter got twenty minutes and each respondent got ten, so even though the entire session was three hours long, it went by in a stimulating flash.

My favorite session, however, was one of two sessions put on by The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. The topic of the session was love and “attachment.” Each of the three speakers was good. The highlight of the session for me, however, was the last speaker, Monique Wonderly of Princeton. Her paper was entitled “Love, Caring, and the Value of Attachment.” Wonderly argued, in terms such as I had used in the speech I gave at my father’s memorial service, that “[a]ttachment figures help to shape our senses of self, imbue us with self-confidence, and can serve as a source of emotional regulation and support even in their absence.”

I am really happy to have discovered The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. I knew about its existence before, of course, but for some reason I had assumed it was more about sex than it was about love, or that when it treated love that it was only sexual, or romantic love. I was wrong. The session was wonderful and would have been of enormous interest to Kierkegaard scholars.

There was one session on Kierkegaard. It was sort of a stealth session because Kierkegaard was not mentioned in the title of the session. The title was simply “Political Theology Group.” All the papers were on Kierkegaard, though. Unfortunately, the session was not well run. There were four speakers and a respondent for a two-hour session! It wasn’t clear how much time had been allotted to each speaker or whether any of them ran over that time. There was no time for questions, however, none. Hence there was no discussion whatever and there really should have been because some of the presenters appeared to be laboring under the erroneous view that Kierkegaard was generally contemptuous of the plight of the poor and the downtrodden and that there really wasn’t much in Kierkegaard that would provide a foundation for a positive political philosophy. I won’t rehash that tired argument or my response to it here. Go back and look at the earlier posts on this blog relating to Daphne Hampson’s book and Peter Gordon’s review of it for my comments on that view. Actually, one kind reader of this blog sent me a long list of quotations from Kierkegaard’s works that support his concern for the poor and downtrodden. I am going to use that list in a future post––with proper attribution, of course.

Just as an aside, I should alert readers to the fact that there is going to be a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November the theme of which will be “Truth is Subjectivity: Kierkegaard and Political Theology. A Symposium in Honor of Robert Perkins.” I know some of the speakers already and I can tell you that it promises to be a very good session indeed. Bob Perkins, about whom I will write more later, deserves nothing less. He was a true giant in Kierkegaard scholarship and he will be sorely missed.

There were lots of other great sessions at the Pacific APA meeting, including Onora O’Neill’s Berggruen Prize lecture that included comments from Andrew Chignell of Princeton and Eric Watkins of U.C. San Diego. Yes, that’s right, Andrew Chignell appears to have moved already from Penn to Princeton. And I was so happy and excited to have him here in Philly. That guy is really smart, and, as I learned from that session, a fantastic speaker.