School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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End date: 2009 × Start date: 2000 × Subject: 1813-1855 × Subject: Self ×

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    The concept of interest in Kierkegaard's moral psychology
    Stokes, Patrick Alan ( 2006)
    The category of interesse, "interest," has been regarded in the critical literature as one of the more marginal terms employed in Kierkegaard's account of the experience of moral selfhood. However, careful attention to the way Kierkegaard uses the term in his phenomenology of consciousness shows the term to pick out something both distinctive and fundamental to the structures of experience and the ontology of selfhood Kierkegaard develops. Through consideration of the identification of consciousness with "interestedness" in Johannes Climacus, a specific sense of interesse as a non-thetic, immediate self-referentiality built into cognition emerges. Interesse is not a thought about a specific object, but a self-reflexivity that attends all thought without the self thereby becoming the object of thought.. The structure of consciousness itself allows interesse to qualify consciousness teleologically, such that the achievement of interested (that is, implicitly selfreferential) thinking becomes the implicit goal of consciousness. It is this teleology that is evident when interesse re-emerges in the Climacan writings in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript's many formulations regarding the self's "impassioned," "personal," "infinite" interest in its eternal blessedness. Interest provides a teleological direction to thought by investing all thought with implicit reference to (and coordination by) the self's highest ends. The trichotomous structure of consciousness is mirrored in the trichotomous structure of selfhood developed in The Sickness Unto Death, and accordingly the structurally given nature of interesse is to be found in this structure as well. The self's self-relation, which is taken to be constitutive of selfhood, is not composed of temporally distinct cognitions of self-relation, but is rather implicit in every intentional thought of actualised selfhood. This sense of immediate self-referentiality is then shown to play, a crucial role in Kierkegaard's account of ethical imagination and moral vision. Interesse allows the self to experience immediately its genuine co-identity with its imaginatively posited selves; as such it allows the self to maintain a connection with what it imagines and so allows imagination to fulfil functions necessary to moral agency rather than being carried away into the "fantastic." Explicating interesse in this way throws into relief Kierkegaard's emphasis upon a language of self-recognition. This language (and the related descriptions of the failure of such self-recognition) expresses a particular model of moral psychology, one that is teleologically qualified such that vision and volition become increasingly co-extensive. The use of mirror metaphors, most notably in For Self-Examination are also shown to describe a selfreflexive mode of apprehension of morally compelling situations, exemplars or texts. Finally, this understanding of interesse is shown to be central to Kierkegaard's repudiation of the Epicurean counsel of indifference towards death. The aspect of interesse as an immediate experience of co-identity allows Kierkegaard to secure a sense in which we can become, contra Epicurus, copresent with our own death. This allows for useful Kierkegaardian interventions into modern debates on the harm of death.