Moral Agency in Soren Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Dialogue between Kierkegaard’s Judge Wilhelm and Anti-Climacus

This paper is focussed upon a recent interpretation of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship presented by Michelle Kosch in her recent book Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. This paper examines Kosch’s supposition that the accounts of moral agency endorsed by Judge William and Anti-Climacus are radically different and incompatible, and her assertion that this incompatibility explains why we are supposed to see Judge William as exemplifying one of the forms of despair outlined by Anti-Climacus. However, contrary to Kosch it is argued that the accounts of moral agency endorsed by Judge William and Anti-Climacus are in fact compatible and are structurally very similar Although I agree with Kosch that the Judge is supposed to exemplify one of the forms of despair outlined by Anti-Climacus, I disagree with Kosch that this despair arises because of the incompatibility between these accounts. Instead I propose that we are supposed to attribute to Judge William the despair of willing to be oneself, because although he has the appropriate account of moral agency, he fails to adequately relate the conceptual content to this account to his own life. Read more