Michael Au-Mullaney

Some Kierkegaard scholars view him as endorsing a bestowal account of neighborly love. In this view, love is not grounded in the lovability of the neighbor but freely bestows value on the neighbor. Others interpret him as endorsing a qualities‐responsive view, in which love is a response to the neighbor's intrinsic value. I argue both readings miss a distinction Kierkegaard makes between the normative justification for love and its motivation. I suggest Kierkegaard held that love was normatively justified by the intrinsic value of being human, but not motivated by perception of this value. This is because Kierkegaard held to a “principle of engaged observation,” i.e., that the perceiver always perceives others in light of her love or lack of love for them. In his view, only sincere love for the neighbor allows a person to perceive her value. Thus, Christian love cannot be motivated by perception of the neighbor's value. The motivation for love, for Kierkegaard, is an inchoate urge to love that is constitutive of being human. This urge is typically obstructed by false concepts of love, but can be directed toward the neighbor by adopting the mere belief that every human being is worthy of love.

Hegel famously accuses Christianity of ‘unhappy consciousness’: it has a normative goal – union with the divine – that it cannot, in principle, satisfy. Kierkegaard was intimately aware of this criticism and, unlike some of Hegel’s other accusations, takes it seriously. In this paper my co-author and I investigate the way in which Kierkegaard addresses this issue in two texts published in 1843: Fear and Trembling and ‘The Expectancy of Faith’. We are especially interested in how the two texts describe faith’s relationship to finitude: for instance, whether the person of faith is permitted to expect that God will bless her in particular and concrete ways. My co-author and I offer competing interpretations. I argue that there is a deep tension in the way faith is described in the two texts; my co-author argues that there is consonance.