Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 45: March 2003

This is an excellent study of one of Kierkegaard's most important writings¾Works of Love, his extended deliberations on the commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Ferreira is clearly well informed with respect to both Kierkegaard scholarship and relevant philosophical and theological discussions of love. She is meticulous in her attention to the details and nuances of Kierkegaard's text, and insightful in her consideration of various alternatives to and criticisms of Kierkegaard's treatment of love.

As one might expect, Ferreira's commentary is, in general, organized parallel to the divisions of Kierkegaard's text, and focuses on its major themes. But she also brings to the text a number of questions¾many derived from criticisms that others have brought against Works of Love. And she reads Kierkegaard in relation to a richly diverse group of other thinkers¾including critics such as Theodore Adorno and K.E. Løgstrup (to whom she responds strongly and convincingly), other philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida, and Luther. (Her comparisons of Kierkegaard and Levinas are especially interesting, and provide provocative insights into the positions of each.)

Among the questions that Ferreira addresses are: Does Kierkegaard's understanding of the command to love our neighbor preclude “preferential love”¾erotic love and friendship? Does Kierkegaard's claim that God is the “middle term”¾or even the “sole object”¾in love mean that one is not called to love another human being directly? Does Kierkegaard regard love of neighbor as somehow requiring a lack of reciprocity, or as necessarily being met with hatred by the world? Does his account of the work of love in recollecting one who is dead as an instance of the most unselfish and faithful love justify Adorno's judgment that, according to this conception, to love is to “behave toward all men as if they were dead”? More generally, is neighbor love as Kierkegaard conceives it abstract, and blind to the concrete character of the neighbor who is to be loved? Does it involve lack of concern for the material needs of the poor? Does his claim that in loving we have an “infinite debt” to the other imply that the command to love our neighbor cannot really be fulfilled? And is Kierkegaard's ethical position a form of divine command ethics?

In addressing these questions, Ferreira is dealing with the fact that, as she notes, “many of Kierkegaard's claims, when presented in isolation from their context, provide grist for the mill of someone who wants to find fault with this ethic” (p. 55). In response, a major aim of her work is to provide a charitable interpretation of Kierkegaard, and to defend him from such critics. But I suspect that it is not only those who want to fault Kierkegaard who find some of his claims problematic¾that other sympathetic readers have shared my experience of struggling for acceptable interpretations of some statements made in Works of Love. Hence Ferreira's reading of the text is welcome help.

Her approach to these matters involves various strategies. She often relies on identifying the rhetorical context in which Kierkegaard makes apparently problematical statements; sometimes she shows that he presupposes things that, because he does not explicitly state them, critics have taken him to deny. For example, in choosing to devote one chapter of his work to mercifulness, rather than generosity, Kierkegaard is not¾as Adorno charges¾demonstrating indifference to temporal circumstances, including the material needs of the unfortunate; rather, Kierkegaard holds that generosity will follow true mercifulness. Other passages indicate that he is not opposed per se to works of “charity” in the usual sense, but that he is concerned that they not be performed unlovingly. Similarly, when Kierkegaard says that Christianity calls on us to be indifferent to worldly distinctions, he does not mean that one should be uncaring about the situation of the disadvantaged; in context, he is rather stressing how the command to love is “indifferent” in the sense of being addressed to all, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

In an especially thoughtful and interesting chapter entitled “Love's Vision,” Ferreira explains that when Kierkegaard says that one who is to love may need to approach the neighbor “with closed eyes,” he is not counseling indifference to the concrete other. Rather, his point is that we must not be kept from loving because of the apparently unlovable qualities of the other. As she notes, the “closed eyes” passage is balanced by his discussion of our duty “to love the one we see,” which requires attention to the concrete and distinctive qualities of the other.

Moreover, Kierkegaard's claim that the work of love in recollecting one who is dead provides a proper criterion of love does not call us to treat the living as if they were dead. Rather, his point is that because loving one who is dead cannot be based on any sort of reciprocity, it is a “test case” of neighbor love, which is owing to the other even if the other fails to reciprocate.

Many more issues are addressed, and addressed well, in this book. I will refer to only a few other points, and will offer minor suggestions as to how Ferreira's treatments might be extended. I find her discussion of whether Kierkegaard's ethic is a divine command ethic to be particularly interesting. Such a position has been attributed to him, on the basis of the account of Abraham in Fear and Trembling¾although, as Ferreira says, one should not automatically read into the later work what was said in the earlier, pseudonymous one. (I believe it is possible to read the account of Abraham as a figure for the sacrificial relativization of preferential love for the sake of love of neighbor, and to think that this was how Kierkegaard regarded his own sacrifice of Regine, which he associated with Abraham's sacrifice. But Ferreira does not in general attempt to show how Works of Love might provide resources for interpretation of Kierkegaard's earlier works¾nor could she, without undermining the proper focus of her commentary.)

Her basic response to the question whether Kierkegaard's ethic is a simple divine command ethic is in part based on the very sound point that, according to Kierkegaard, human beings have a deep need for love¾not only to be loved, but to love, so that the command to love one's neighbor, although indicating how our love is to be directed, is not related arbitrarily to those to whom it is addressed. Here I would suggest that Kierkegaard's account of how “commanded love” is characterized by “blessed independence,” freedom from despair, and “enduring continuance” could be appealed to as additional indications of how obedience to such a command fulfills certain basic needs of the self, which would further qualify the sense in which his ethic is a divine command ethic. But Ferreira rightly recognizes that the fundamental basis of Kierkegaard's ethic of love of neighbor is the belief that we have, first of all, been loved by God.

As Ferreira says, it is “not easy to know how best to describe Kierkegaard's position” regarding the basic issue of the proper relation between nonpreferential love¾love of neighbor¾and preferential love¾erotic love and friendship. Some passages can be read as suggesting that the former calls for abandoning the latter. Yet Kierkegaard says, “in erotic love and friendship, preserve love for the neighbor” (WL, p. 62; quoted by Ferreira on p. 45).

Ferreira has many insightful things to say on this topic. I would merely suggest that much of what Kierkegaard has in mind here can be summed up by saying that, according to his understanding of the love commandment, preferential love is to be relativized for the sake of nonpreferential love. That is, the former is to be made conditional on the latter, and in a double respect. First, although I should love my beloved or friend, I must not allow these relationships to prevent me from loving my neighbor; second, I should love my beloved or friend with the kind of love that is appropriate to these special relationships, but only on the condition that I first of all love them as neighbors¾that is, that I not allow the claims that our special relationships entail to keep me from treating them as selves having their own worth, and a relation to God more basic than their relation to me.

One difficult topic for Ferreira¾and it would, I think, be difficult for almost any sympathetic critic¾is that in certain passages Kierkegaard suggests that hatred (from one who is loved, but has the wrong conception of love, and demands the fulfillment of his or her arbitrary wants) and persecution are necessarily to be expected by those who take up the task of loving their neighbor. Here the only recourse is to say, as she says, that “most of the time” Kierkegaard insists only that one must be willing to be hated (p. 75). His more extreme statements in this context can, I think, be seen as anticipating his later, highly polemical attitude toward “Christendom,” and in particular his insistence that Bishop Mynster could not properly be considered a “Witness to the Truth” because he had not undergone martyrdom.

My comments can only hint at the richness of Ferreira's study. I find her interpretations of Kierkegaard's text to be very convincing. Perhaps others will not¾but they do need to read and consider carefully what she has to say. Despite the unique and striking characteristics of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, Works of Love may well be¾if not for the specialist, at least for general readers who are concerned for the light that can be thrown on human life¾his most enduringly valuable work. Ferreira has made a very valuable contribution to understanding it.