Anthropology and Morality: Facticity and Moral Character

Abstract

Kierkegaard’s account of human nature (agency) and selfhood as a synthesis, as well as the closely related idea of choosing oneself in the ethicist, represents one of Kierkegaard’s most important and influential contributions to modern thinking.^l However, several commentators have briefly pointed to similarities between the choice of oneself in the ethicist and the revolution in way of thinking (Denkungsart), or moral conversion, in which one changes disposition (Gesinnung) from evil to good in Kant’s Religion.² Like Kierkegaard and existentialists, Kant seems to call for the necessity of choosing oneself. Allison comments:

… Kant’s conception of Gesinnung… reflects his partial agreement with a tradition in moral psychology that stretches at least back to Aristotle and that includes, in addition to Leibniz and Hume, contemporary thinkers who insist that moral responsibility be connected with the character of the agent. Where Kant breaks with this tradition … is with his insistence that, like the specific maxims adopted on the basis of it, an agent’s Gesinnung is itself somehow chosen. In insisting on this point, Kant appears to go well beyond the widely shared intuition that, to some extent at least, we are responsible for our characters as well as for our deeds and to affirm a paradoxical … doctrine of a timeless act of self-constitution.³