Sunday, March 21, 2021

 506. Virtue, ethics and Kierkegaard

 Aristotelian virtue ethics calls for virtues as character traits, more or less durable dispositions to virtuous action, to build Eudaimonia, the good life, a flourishing life, taken not as an accumulation of incidental pleasures but as a path of development of personality, of becoming who one wants to be. Here I want to point out a similarity to the ethics of Kierkegaard, who treated ethics as a stage of life transcending what he called the stage of aesthetics, of pleasures of the body, in ongoing, never ending consumption, a craze of wanting ever more resources of money, status, power, reputation, renown, which strand in boredom and a sense of meaninglessness (Keij 2015).

 Negative freedom is absence of interference in one’s employment of resources, of talent and economic, social, and symbolic capital. Libertarians want activities to be left to an unrestrained market, without limitations of government interference. In earlier writings, I took positive freedom as access to resources needed to live, such a guide dog or brail writing for a blind person, or a wheelchair for a lame.person, and for others education, schooling, health care, public transport, suffrage, police protection, legal protection, and so on. Keij (2015) opened my eyes to a deeper meaning of positive freedom, professed by Kierkegaard, in using freedom of the spirit to make choices and decisions to give direction to one’s life independently, against public rules of morality, if needed. I think this view of life not as pleasure but as development is equivalent to Aristotle’s Eudaimonia.

 Keij compared the stance of Kierkegaard with that of Sartre, with his concept of ‘bad faith’, in going along with the stream as a rolling stone, and not exercising positive freedom.

 A criticism of Aristotelian eudaimonia is that it seems to be oriented exclusively at the self, and in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics it is extended with orientation towards others. Kierkegaard’s ethics is oriented clearly at the benefit of others, and in this comes close to Kant’s injunction never to use others only instrumentally but also as a goal in themselves.

 Kierkegaard’s idea of an ongoing transformation of oneself, in making and revising choices and decisions, is reminiscent of Aristotle’s ‘phronesis’, practical wisdom, in enacting and adapting, deepening virtues as a function of the circumstances one meets on the path of life.

 Kierkegaard is seen as the father of existentialism, returning and developing in the philosophies of Heidegger and, as mentioned, Sartre. One is not an outside spectator of a film, but playing in it. in the similarity with Aristotelian eudaimonia, perhaps Aristotle can be seen as a forefather of existentialism.

With Kierkegaard, I still have a puzzle concerning his treatment of time, in particular the notion of the moment, the present, as a cut in the flow of duration, where you have the freedom to make a choice, take a decision, make a commitment, for giving direction to your life. In a book of mine about process philosophy that will appear in April 2021, I make the following of it: the moment is the derivative, the differential, of duration. With an object moving in time and space, the derivative is its speed. When that is zero, there is stagnation. Here, there is no choice, no ‘elan vital’, as Bergson called it: one lets oneself be dragged along.passively.

Jan Keij, 2015, Kierkegaard seen differently (in Dutch), Zoetermeer: Klement

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