Kierkegaard's Ethics of Cooperative Self-Becoming

By illuminating the phenomenological presuppositions underlying his ethical philosophy, this book revises our understanding of Søren Kierkegaard’s ethics.

Illuminates the phenomenological presuppositions underlying Søren Kierkegaard’s ethical philosophy.

Søren Kierkegaard has been typically read as an ardent supporter of autonomous subjectivity. His proposal that the task of human existence is to “become subjective” lends itself to a narrow reading positing an isolating self. However, such a reading fails to take seriously the emphasis he places on the importance of others not only to ethics, but to ethics’ intertwined purpose of self-becoming. By rereading Kierkegaard’s works through the lens of contemporary phenomenology, we can uncover the essentiality of others to the constitution of selfhood, and the ethical imperative to strive alongside and in response to others. This monograph revitalizes Kierkegaard’s conception of subjectivity not as isolation, but as the discovery of an intersubjective community of unique others to whom we owe our self, and with whom we become a self.