Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Cooperative Self-Becoming

The aim of this thesis is to provide an account of Kierkegaard’s ethics that resolves some of the ambiguities arising from his theory of the stages and reorients them through the lens of contemporary ethical theories. To reformulate his ethics we must first understand the ethic that he is advocating. His version of the Christian neighbour love ethic is primarily articulated in Works of Love, and his explicitly Christian ethic represents his primary ethical commitments (Chapters 1 and 2). However, this ethic is itself an extension of an implicit ethic developed in his pseudonymous literature located within the humourist and religious stages (Chapter 3). This forces us to draw a distinction between the ethics of Judge William in Either/Or (often wrongly attributed to Kierkegaard as his statement on ethics), and the distinction between religiousness A and B, namely non-theological and Christian aspects of the religious stage respectively. Thus, our primary concern will be situating Kierkegaard’s ethics within religiousness A, without falling back to the ethical stage or leaping too far into Christianity.

However, there is major problem that must be addressed by adopting this approach: namely, that Kierkegaard gives relatively minimal structure to religiousness A. To resolve this problem, we will adopt two lenses through which to understand Kierkegaard’s ethic: narrative identity and phenomenology. We will therefore bring him into dialogue with critics Alasdair MacIntyre and Emmanuel Levinas (Chapter 4). While each provides one of these lenses respectively, it is finally by bringing Kierkegaard into dialogue with Paul Ricoeur that we can resolve the ambiguities, as well as adopt each of the lenses (Chapter 5). When viewed through the lens provided by Ricoeur, we can then finally see Kierkegaard as an advocate of an ethic of cooperative self-becoming that is not grounded in theological arguments, but is immanent to human existence and interpersonal relationships.