Abstract
According to contemporary hierarchical views of the self and agency, the distinctive feature of human agency is that we have the ability to distance ourselves from our immediate desires (Frankfurt) and from those socially prescribed norms that guide our actions (Korsgaard) and choose which desires/practical identities we want to identify as being truly reflective of our own selves. The ironic agent is able to achieve this reflective distance, but is not able to take the second step of fully identifying herself with any desires/identities. Instead, the ironic agent plays at being a certain type of person or having certain desires. The problem for the ironic agent, broadly speaking, is that she is not able to be an agent in the fullest sense of the term, something which requires that we have at least some desires or practical identities with which we have reflectively and fully identified. In Kierkegaard’s thought, we find an in-depth description of ironic agency and its problems, as well as a recommendation for how to move beyond ironic agency. In this paper, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s solution to the problem of ironic agency (a move to the ethical sphere of existence) is not a tenable one, but that a solution to the problem of ironic agency can be worked out by giving a reconstructed reading of Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith.
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Notes
- 1.
Cross (1998), again, does a nice job explaining what Kierkegaard seems to have in mind here when he talks about breaking from immediacy. See especially pages 136–37.
- 2.
Obviously, this assumption is debatable, and many prominent thinkers have criticized hierarchical accounts of the self. For instance, Gary Watson critiques Frankfurt’s hierarchical conception of agency in his “Free Agency” (1975), and Robert Pippin criticizes Korsgaard’s view that we ever can achieve a reflective distance from all of our practical identities in his Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2008).
- 3.
It might be argued that we can even achieve a reflective distance from practical identities like being a son or being a particular nationality and then choose to reject them by, for example, “divorcing” our parents or moving to and becoming a citizen of a different country. I do not think much hinges on this for my purposes, but I would suggest that these possibilities are still non-contingent in the sense that we must respond to them in some way, even if this response takes the form of rejection. These practical identities differ from those purely contingent ones like, for example, being someone’s spouse. Being someone’s spouse requires an initial choice on the part of the agent in a way that is fundamentally different from being someone’s child.
- 4.
In particular, I am thinking of “Problema 1: Is There a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” in Fear and Trembling (1983).
- 5.
See Megan Altman’s essay in this volume for further discussion of the way in which Kierkegaard’s ethical stage of existence is characterized by this focus on self-creation.
- 6.
See Charles Guignon’s On Being Authentic (2004), Chapter 7, for a general overview of this view in the Existentialist tradition.
- 7.
See, for instance, his concluding discussion of the transition from one stage of existence to another in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard 2000a, 241).
- 8.
This is not, perhaps, a perfect analogy, since the actor does not necessarily imbue her work with the playfulness characteristic of ironic agency. However, I would suggest that the example of the actor does provide some phenomenological support for the claim that it is possible to fully identify oneself with a practical identity or desire while maintaining a sense of oneself as a discrete individual and that the master ironist could be seen as a good actor with the added factor of playfulness.
References
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Pedersen, H. (2015). Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ironic Agency. In: Pedersen, H., Altman, M. (eds) Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 74. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9442-8_18
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