The Naked Self, Kierkegaard, Personal Identity

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/8/2015, SPi
The Naked Self

The Naked Self

Kierkegaard and Personal Identity
Patrick Stokes
1
3
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For Ruby and Lily, who both came along while I was writing this.
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works xiii
List of Pseudonyms xvii
Introduction: Kierkegaard and the History of the Self 1

The Self in Contemporary Philosophy: A Bleak Picture 1
Metaphysical vs Practical Identity 6
Soteriological Origins 8
Kierkegaard on the Self 12
Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy 16
Outline 21
1. Recollection and Memory 25
Locke and Becoming ‘Self to Oneself ’ 25
Locke’s Three Forms of Identity 25
The Memory Criterion 28
Metaphysics, Concern, and Theological Pragmatism 32
Memory vs Recollection in Kierkegaard 36
Recollection and Soteriology 42
2. Contemporaneity 46
Contemporaneity and Memory 46
Contemporaneity and Vision 48
Contemporaneity as Religious Experience? 52
Imaginative Distance 54
The Missing Element 59
Verisimilitude? 61
The Self-reflexive Imagination 63
The De-historicization Objection 65
Contemporaneity and Soteriological Identity 66
Coda: The Impossibility of Contemporaneity 67
3. Perspectival Subjectivity 69
A Puzzle about Memory 69
Memory and Visualization 70
Non-stipulation and Unselfconscious Memory 75
Contemporaneity and the Notional and Actual Subject 78
Observer Memories and False Memories 82
Anticipatory Imagination 85
Fission Cases 88
viii CONTENTS
4. Diachronicity, Episodicity, Synchronicity 93

The Self across Time 93
Episodic Self-experience 96
The Reductive Account of Diachronicity 98
Kierkegaardian Contemporaneity as Diachronic Self-experience 101
Contemporaneity and Episodic Ethics 106
Fearing the Future, Fearing Death 112
Diachronicity: From Descriptive to Normative 115
5. Self-alienation 117
‘The Past Is Another Country; They Do Things differently there’ 118
The Nineteenth-century Russian 121
Schechtman’s Matrons 124
Soteriology and Transmission Loss 129
Memory, Guilt, and Totality 133
Subjectivity, Interest, and Mortality 135
6. Continuity and Temporality 141
The Neo-Lockean Project 141
Anti-Climacus’ Ontology of Selfhood 143
Continuity 147
The Loss of Selfhood 150
The Present-tense Character of the Self 154
Self and Eternality 159
Metaphysics from the Inside 163
7. Practical and Narrative Identity 166
The Rise of Narrative 166
From Metaphysical to Narrative Selfhood 168
The Practical Kierkegaard 170
The Narrative Approach 172
The Narrative Kierkegaard 175
Minimal vs Narrative Selves 180
Kierkegaard’s Naked Self 182
The Four-dimensional Problem 186
8. Survival and Eschatology 192
Identity and the Survival Problem 192
Death and the Divided Self 196
Naked Self and Eternity 199
Eternity as Judgement 202
Purity of Heart: Narrative and Eternity 205
The Eleventh Hour 209
Implications for Narrative Selfhood 213
9. Objections and Future Directions 218
Summing Up 218
Changing the Subject 220
CONTENTS ix
Setting Boundaries 222

How Far Can Non-theists Go with Kierkegaard? 226
Conclusion: Where Next? 229
Bibliography 233
Index 249
Acknowledgements
The core research for this book took place while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen (2008–10), made
possible by a generous grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research—
Humanities. I am deeply grateful to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn for his encouragement,
advice, and support, to Jon Stewart, Pia Søltoft, Joakim Garff, to the various visiting
scholars and students passing through the Centre during my time there, and espe-
cially to Bjarne Still Laurberg for his invaluable and tireless help.
Some of the material on episodic selfhood was developed under the auspices of a
Kierkegaard House Foundation fellowship at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf
College, Minnesota in 2007, and on subsequent visits. Gordon Marino and Cynthia
Lund have continued to provide wonderful support over many years for which I can
never thank them enough.
Further background work on the manuscript took place at the University of
Hertfordshire while I was working on a European Commission Marie Curie Intra-
European Fellowship. I’m especially grateful to John Lippitt for his mentorship and
encouragement, and to my colleagues at UH, particularly Brendan Larvor and Dan
Hutto.
Since we finally found our way back to Melbourne, my colleagues at Deakin have
been very supportive during the final phase of writing this book. My thanks to Matt
Sharpe for comments on the introduction and to Sean Bowden, Leesa Davis, George
Duke, Russell Grigg, Douglas Kirsner, Jack Reynolds, Stan van Hooft, and Petra
Brown.
While the material presented here has been heavily re-written, I have drawn from a
number of previously published papers:
– Most of Chapter 2 was originally published as ‘ “See For Your Self:” Contem-
poraneity, Autopsy, and Presence in Kierkegaard’s Moral–Religious Psychology’.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18:2 (2010): 297–319.
– Most of Chapter 3 was originally published as ‘Uniting the Perspectival Subject:
Two Approaches’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10:1 (2011):
23–44.
– Most of Chapter 4 was originally published as ‘What’s Missing in Episodic
Selfhood? A Kierkegaardian Response to Galen Strawson’. Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies 17:1–2 (2010): 119–43.
– Some of Chapter 5 and elements of Chapter 1 were originally published as
‘Locke, Kierkegaard, and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity’. Inter-
national Journal of Philosophical Studies 16:5 (2008): 645–72.
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
– Some of Chapter 6 appeared as ‘Anti-Climacus and Neo-Lockeanism: Towards

a Kierkegaardian Theory of Personal Identity’. In Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook
2009, edited by Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn and K. Brian Söderquist, Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2009, 527–55.
– Material from ‘Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard’.
Inquiry 53:4 (2010): 356–82 appears in Chapters 7 and 8.
This material is reproduced by kind permission of the respective journal editors
and publishers.
Many people have offered comments, advice and practical assistance, and I would
particularly like to thank Adam Buben, Andrew Burgess, Rob Compaijen, Matias
Møl Dalsgaard, John Davenport, Roe Fremstedal, Rick Furtak, James Giles, Dario
Gonzalez, Arne Grøn, Alastair Hannay, Jeffrey Hanson, Andrew Henscheid, Carl
Hughes, Bruce Kirmmse, Sinead Ladegaard Knox, Søren Landkildehus, Ed Langerak,
Poul Lübcke, William McDonald, Ed Mooney, Paul Muench, Klaus Nielsen, David
Possen, Richard Purkhartoffer, Ettore Rocca, Anthony Rudd, Peter Šajda, Liesbet
Samyn, Marya Schechtman, Brian Söderquist, Leo Stan, Galen Strawson, Michael
Tilley, Jamie Turnbull, Daniel Watts, Claudia Welz, and audiences at the Australa-
sian Association of Philosophy Conference at the University of New England, June
2007, the 6th International Kierkegaard Conference at St Olaf College, June 2010, the
‘Being and Becoming a Self ’ conference at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre,
August 2010, the ‘Upbuilding Discourses of 1847’ conference at the University of
Sheffield, May 2011, the ‘Narrative, Identity, and the Kierkegaardian Self ’ conference
at the University of Hertfordshire in November 2011, the ‘Point of View in Memory
and Imagery’ conference at Macquarie University in May 2013, and at seminars at
the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre and the Centre for Subjectivity Research at
the University of Copenhagen, the University of Essex, St Olaf College, Deakin
University, and Monash University.
Finally, and most of all: none of this could have happened if Jess hadn’t agreed to
take a decidedly Kierkegaardian leap with me and wander the earth for what turned
out to be five years, while somehow meeting all my angst and distraction with love
and care.
Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works
References to Kierkegaard’s writings are given in the text in brackets, with the English
version cited first followed by the Danish version, as well as a journal/notebook
reference where appropriate (e.g. DD, NB5 etc.)
English Translations:
The following abbreviations are used for the Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press) series:
BA The Book on Adler, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1995.
CA The Concept of Anxiety, translated by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with
Albert B. Anderson, 1980.
CD Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,
translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1997.
CUP, 1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ Volume
One, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1992.
EO, 1 Either/Or Volume One, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong,
1987.
EO, 2 Either/Or Volume Two, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong,
1995.
EPW Early Polemical Writings, edited and translated by Julia Watkin, 1990.
EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong, 1990.
FSE For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself! translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1990.
FT Fear and Trembling and Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, 1983.
JC Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est. See PF.
LD Letters and Documents, translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, 1978.
PC Practice in Christianity, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong,
1991.
PF Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1985.
SLW Stages on Life’s Way, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong,
1988.
xiv ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS
SUD The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong, 1980.
TA Two Ages, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1978.
TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, translated by Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong, 1993.
TM The Moment and Late Writings, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong, 1998.
UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, translated by Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong, 1993.
WL Works of Love, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1995.
Journal Translations:
KJN 1 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Vol. 1, Journals AA–DD, edited
by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce
H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian
Söderquist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
KJN 2 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Vol. 2, Journals EE–KK, edited
by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce
H. Kirmmse, Vanessa Rumble, K. Brian Söderquist, and volume editor
George Pattison, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
KJN 4 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Vol. 4: Journals NB:NB5, edited by
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce
H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble,
and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 volumes, edited and translated
by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk,
Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78.
(Citations give entry number rather than page number).
Danish Texts:
The following abbreviations are used for the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Copen-
hagen: Gads) series:
SKS 1 Af en endnu Levendes Papirer; Om Begrebet Ironi, edited by Niels Jørgen
Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen,
1997.
SKS 2 Enten-Eller, Første del, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
Johnny Kondrup and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, 1997.
SKS 3 Enten-Eller, Anden del, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
Johnny Kondrup, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, 1997.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS xv
SKS 4 Gjentagelsen;, Frygt og Bæven; Philosophiske Smuler; Begrebet Angest;

Forord, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny
Kondrup, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, 1997.
SKS K4 Kommentar til Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter Bind 4, edited by Niels Jørgen
Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen,
1997.
SKS 5 Opbyggelige taler, 1843-44; Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, edited by
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup,
and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, 1998.
SKS 6 Stadier paa Livets Vei, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, 1999.
SKS 7 Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn,
Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2002.
SKS 8 En literair Anmeldelse; Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand, edited by Niels
Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, and Johnny Kondrup, 2004.
SKS 9 Kjærlighedens Gjerninger, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
and Johnny Kondrup, 2004.
SKS 10 Christlige Taler, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, and
Johnny Kondrup, 2004.
SKS 11 Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen; Tvende ethisk religieuse Smaa
Afhandlinger; Sygdommen til Døden; ‘Ypperstepræsten’—‘Tolderen’—
‘Synderinden’, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne
Mette Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2006.
SKS 12 Indøvelse i Christendom; En opbyggelig Tale; To Taler ved Altergangen om
Fredagen, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette
Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2008.
SKS 13 Dagbladsartikler 1834-48; Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed; Til Selvprøvelse,
edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Tonny
Aagaard Olesen, and Steen Tullberg, 2009.
SKS 15 Sendebrev til Heiberg; Johannes Climacus; Bogen om Adler, edited by Niels
Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard
Olesen, and Steen Tullberg, 2012.
SKS 17 Journalerne AA, BB, CC og DD, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim
Garff, Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2000.
SKS 18 Journalerne EE, FF, GG, HH, JJ og KK, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn,
Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2001.
SKS 19 Notesbøgerne 1–15, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette
Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2001.
xvi ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS
SKS 20 Journalerne NB–NB5, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,

Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2003.
SKS 22 Journalerne NB11–NB14, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2005.
Anne Mette Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2007.
Anne Mette Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 2009.
SKS 27 Løse papirer, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny
Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard Olesen, and Steen Tullberg, 2011.
SKS 28 Breve og Dedikationer, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,
Johnny Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard Olesen, and Steen Tullberg, 2013.
Where a citation does not appear in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter the Papirer reference
is given:
Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, E. Torsting, Niels
Thulstrup, and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–48;
1968–70; 1975–8.
List of Pseudonyms
In the present work I’ve tried wherever possible to respect the request Kierkegaard
makes of us at the end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘if it should occur to
anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the [pseudonymous] books, it is
my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective
pseudonymous author’s name, not mine’ (CUP, 1:627/SKS 7, 571).
However, for readers not already well acquainted with his work, Kierkegaard’s
gallery of pseudonyms may be somewhat disorienting at first. The following dramatis
personae introduces the pseudonyms encountered in this book.
A Author of the papers that comprise the first volume of Either/Or (1843), except
the final chapter ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’ of which he presents himself the editor). The
designation ‘A’ is given to him by the ‘editor’ of Either/Or, a certain ‘Hilarious
Bookbinder’. A is a jaded young aesthete, who offers reflections on art, music, and
the nature of pleasure and boredom. He is a friend of the older, married, ethical
spokesman, Judge William.
WILLIAM A FHAM Narrator of ‘In Vino Veritas,’ the first part of Stages on Life’s Way
(1845), and an attendee at the banquet described therein. The name ‘Afham’ literally
means ‘by himself.’
A NTI -C LIMACUS The author of The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and Practice in
Christianity (1850). The decision to publish The Sickness Unto Death under a
pseudonym, with Kierkegaard listed as ‘editor,’ was made late in the publishing
process. In a journal entry, Kierkegaard tells us that ‘Johannes Climacus and Anti-
Climacus have several things in common; but the difference is that whereas Johannes
Climacus places himself so low that he even says himself that he is not a Christian,
one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he regards himself to be a
Christian on an extraordinarily high level . . . I would place myself higher than
Johannes Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus’ (JP, 6431/SKS 22, 130).
J OHANNES C LIMACUS Author of Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Concluding
Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), and protagonist of the
unfinished Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. The name is
taken from the seventh-century Greek monk who wrote the Ladder of Paradise.
Climacus presents himself in the Postscript as a thirty-year-old university graduate,
and a self-declared ‘idler’ and Socratic ‘gadfly’.1
1
For a full discussion of the character of Johannes Climacus, see Muench 2010.
xviii LIST OF PSEUDONYMS
J OHANNES DE SILENTIO Author of Fear and Trembling (1843). Silentio attempts to

grapple with Abraham’s status as the father of faith, and ultimately comes to
conclude that he cannot understand Abraham.
J OHANNES THE S EDUCER Author of letters that comprise most of the final chapter of
the first part of Either/Or. These letters trace the history of Johannes’ highly reflective
and meticulously planned seduction of a young girl, Cordelia. Details of the
seduction story are clearly meant to evoke Kierkegaard’s own broken engagement
with Regine Olsen (later Regine Schlegel, 1822–1904).
P ETRUS M INOR Author of the text known today as The Book on Adler, a discussion of
theological issues raised by the scandal surrounding clergyman Adolf Peter Adler
(1812–69). Adler, a friend of Kierkegaard from their student days, claimed in the
preface to his 1843 collected sermons that had received a new divine revelation. Adler
was suspended from his duties and subsequently pensioned off. Kierkegaard wrote
several drafts of this text but never published it.
J UDGE W ILLIAM The author of a series of letters that (along with a sermon from a
Jutland pastor that William relates) make up the second part of Either/Or. An older
married man and a judge in an unspecified court, William delivers long exhortations
to his younger friend on the importance of self-integrating ethical choice, using
marriage in particular as a paradigm case. William also appears in Stages on Life’s
Way, where he again delivers a lengthy encomium on marriage.
V IGILIUS H AUFNIENSIS The author of The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Along with The
Sickness Unto Death, this is perhaps Kierkegaard’s most directly ‘philosophical’ work;
Haufniensis is not strongly characterized, and Kierkegaard himself is listed as author
in the first draft. The name means ‘The Watchman of Copenhagen’ (based on
Hafnia, the Latin form of the name København, ‘merchant harbour’).
Introduction
Kierkegaard and the History of the Self
The Self in Contemporary Philosophy: A Bleak Picture

William James once declared that the problem of personal identity—the question of
what, if anything, it is to be a self, and what makes us the same self across time—was
‘the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal’.1 A century later, Peter
Goldie could still observe that ‘philosophical questions about the nature of personal
identity and of survival remain completely open and unsettled; the questions are as
contested and intractable here as anywhere in philosophy’.2 The dismal truth is that
we are no closer to solving this ‘most puzzling puzzle’. Instead, the discussion has
fractured across so many disciplines, and so many different assumptions and
approaches within each, as to drive some authors to despair. Decades of intense
debate hasn’t even yielded an agreed usage of the word ‘self ’; on one estimate there
are at least thirty-two different senses of the term in the literature, and no doubt there
are even more than that in circulation somewhere.3 As Raymond Martin and John
Barresi put it, by the end of the twentieth century the idea of a single thing called
the Self ‘had died the death if not of a thousand qualifications, then of a thousand
hyphenations’.4
Robert Solomon argued that in its modern form the problem of personal identity is
‘actually quite localized and only a couple of hundred years old, a provincial upstart
in the Hellenic–Judeo–Christian philosophical tradition’.5 That’s not strictly true, as
we’ll see shortly—indeed this view is an artefact of the process of de-soteriologization
that occurs to the personal identity debate during the eighteenth century—but it is
remarkable just how comprehensively the tone, agenda, and scope for our contem-
porary discussions of personal identity were set by writers of the English and Scottish
Enlightenments. Despite the passage of the centuries, the rise of empirical science
1 2 3
James 1950, p.330. Goldie 2012, p.127. Strawson 2009, p.18.
4
Martin and Barresi 2011, p.51.
5
Solomon 1994, p.7. Solomon’s point here is about the personal identity debate, and so is still
compatible with the claim, as urged by Galen Strawson (2009, pp.8–9) for instance, that self-experience
is fundamental to humans and displays little cultural variation.
 INTRODUCTION
and the resurgence of interest in identity since the 1960s, philosophy is still digesting
and responding to the insights of Locke, Hume, Reid, and Butler.
And in keeping with those origins, these discussions have remained almost
entirely the preserve of metaphysicians and philosophers of mind in the analytic
tradition. With the exception of Paul Ricoeur,6 continental philosophy has had far
less to say about the topic of the constitution and persistence of selves across time.
It goes without saying that the phenomenological analyses of subjectivity offered
by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas all, in their distinctive ways, discuss
different aspects of what we might call the self. In particular, phenomenologists
return again and again to a phenomenal sense of self within consciousness,7 such as
Heideggarian jemeinigkeit, ‘mineness’, and Sartrean ‘non-positional consciousness’.
This sense of self—which, as I’ll argue, has important analogues in Kierkegaard—is
an important deliverance of the phenomenological tradition for an increasingly
prominent contemporary approach to philosophy of mind, one that unites insights
from classical phenomenology and cognitive science and that is also relevant for
our discussion of the Kierkegaardian self. Yet ‘the self ’ as an enduring entity has
operated largely as a locus of suspicion for contemporary continental thought,
which, particularly in its poststructuralist and deconstructionist forms, is keen to
root out any traces of de-historicized, de-culturalized metaphysics. One thing
Kierkegaard has in common with his ‘postmodern’ successors according to Merold
Westphal is a distaste for ‘onto-theo-logical speculation’, for they both ‘operate in a
world that does not welcome either Platonic souls or Cartesian egos’.8 Like their
analytic counterparts, continental philosophers have scrupulously repudiated Car-
tesian substantialism, but in the process have largely ignored traditional questions
of how selves might persist across time.
Analytic philosophy, by contrast, has had no such qualms, taking the self as an
ongoing object of inquiry even while periodically insisting on its distance from
Cartesianism.9 In the process it has offered up a plethora of competing metaphys-
ical theories: animalism, physicalism, psychological continuity theory, four-
dimensionalism, closest-continuer theory, constitution theory, and more besides.
All attempt to articulate what sort of thing a self is by reference to its conditions of
6
Most notably in Ricoeur 1992.
7
Dan Zahavi has argued that this sense of self can be found in all major phenomenologists; see e.g.
Zahavi 2005, p.11.
8
Westphal 1996, p.viii. Westphal goes on to note that, like Kierkegaard, many ‘postmodern’ phil-
osophers (a somewhat imprecise term but useful enough here) nonetheless retain the idea of selfhood as
something to strive towards rather than an attained state of being.
9
As Allen Wood, speaking, I suspect, for both traditions, puts it: ‘As philosophers of mind, we are all
recovering Cartesians—in the same sense that some people are said to be recovering alcoholics. Like
recovering alcoholics, we have our good days and our bad days . . . In the modern counter-movement to
Cartesianism, however, whether continental or Anglophone, there has been little agreement among
philosophers about how Cartesianism is to be avoided. More often it is simply evaded; the anti-Cartesian
philosophical schools are always more successful at labeling their rivals as “Cartesian,” or “solipsistic,” or
“monological” than they are at developing a clear and convincing alternative’ (Wood 2006, pp.62–6).
INTRODUCTION 
persistence, or put another way, its conditions of re-identification: the circum-

stances under which we are licenced in identifying a given person as the same
person as a person existing at another time.10 Often, though not always, these
metaphysical positions are recommended by their proponents because of the ease
with which they cohere with our pre-theoretical intuitions about selves and
persons—understandably, given the huge practical and ethical importance issues
of identity play in our lives (which I’ll say more about shortly).
This has left contemporary analytic metaphysics of personal identity at something
of an impasse. On one side of this impasse are the standard neo-Lockean approaches
to personal identity, according to which the identity of selves across time is secured
by psychological ‘continuity’ or ‘connectedness’ between persons at different times.
On at least some versions of this line of thought, I could theoretically exist if deprived
of my body, or continue to exist if I was psychologically continuous with or
connected to a different body, say by virtue of a transfer of brain information. On
the other side are the broadly physicalist approaches to personal identity, according
to which selves are bodies—so it is not so much that I have a body as that I just am
my body. The idea of my continuing to exist without my body, or some specified
minimal part thereof (such as my brain) is therefore incoherent. An important subset
of this approach is animalism, according to which selves are individual human
animals; my survival across time consists in the maintenance of unified organic
organization (at some minimal level of metabolic function), rather than simple
physical continuity.11
I offer this quite simplistic overview of the current state the discipline simply to
point out that if we take intuitions about identity seriously (and not every philoso-
pher does set much store in them), this split between psychological and physical
forms of continuity leaves us hopelessly stranded between two rival sets of intuitions.
On the one hand, in a post-Cartesian context, the pull of physicalism is undeniably
strong, and both physicalism and animalism can accommodate everyday judgements
about identity that psychological continuity approaches, save at the cost of enormous
strain, cannot. For instance, as Eric T. Olson argues, we take it that each of us was
once a baby—but what forms of identity-bearing psychological continuity could
possibly hold between an adult and a foetus, or between an adult and a toddler, or
even between a toddler and a foetus? And how could I be the same person as a future
human being in a persistent vegetative state, who has no psychological properties and
therefore nothing I could be psychologically continuous with? Olson’s conclusion is
that ‘person’, understood to mean a thinking rational being with psychological
continuity across time, is a phase sortal, like ‘foetus’, ‘teenager’, or ‘acrobat’, that
applies to some phases of a given animal’s life but not others.12 The underlying
10
On re-identification, see P. F. Strawson 1959.
11
On animalism, see e.g. Olson 1997; Noonan 1998; Mackie 1999; Noonan 2001; Johansson 2007.
12
Olson 1997, pp.29–31.
 INTRODUCTION
substance to which that phase sortal applies—what we essentially are—is an individual

animal.
Yet this move salvages one set of intuitions about identity at the cost of jettisoning
another:13 the intuition that prudential concern and personal identity go together.
We customarily assume (what Olson calls the ‘Transplant Intuition’) that if Bill’s
brain or—more contentiously—Bill’s mind was somehow transplanted into Bob’s
body in a way that preserved psychological continuity, Bill’s identity would go with
it; thus the person that wakes up after the transplant would be Bill in a new body,
not Bob with a particularly severe case of amnesia and delusional beliefs about
being Bill.14 We assume, moreover, that Bill could reasonably anticipate experi-
ences that would befall Bob’s body after the operation (he could fearfully anticipate
weeks of post-operative pain, for instance) and we tend to assume that we can only
anticipate experiences that we will have in this particular way. So it seems that we
find ourselves in a bind: admit that the self is a body or an animal, and give up on
our sense that psychological continuity matters to identity in some essential sense,
or go with the psychological continuity model and give up our belief that the infant
my mother is holding in this faded Polaroid is me, and insist that my fear of falling
into a permanent vegetative state is unfounded as it cannot be me who is in such a
state. If there is a way to have our intuitive cake and eat it too, philosophers have
yet to find it.
This impasse might seem like a mere headache for metaphysicians, nothing more.
Yet the problem of personal identity is not simply born of intellectual curiosity. It
emerges from central and irreducibly practical features of our everyday lives: our self-
regarding concerns, our concerns for the imputability of moral praiseworthiness and
blameworthiness, our concern to be compensated for our efforts, and our concern for
survival itself.15 When we put off taking a vacation this year to save up our annual
leave, it’s because we want that six-week South Pacific cruise next year; if we were told
that we were working now so that someone exactly like us would be sipping cocktails
on a beach in Bora Bora in a year’s time, we’d find the whole thing horribly unjust.
Likewise if we were to be punished for something someone exactly like us did, or if we
were told that while we were about to be killed, someone exactly like us would appear
at the moment of our death and move into our house, take over our job, and slip into
our family and social roles.
Some have argued that these sorts of thought-experiments are quite meaningless:16
we never do encounter such exotic situations as the creation of perfect replicas, brain
13
Actually, more than one. Another example is the infamous ‘corpse problem’: animalism implies that
at death an animal ceases to exist and a new thing, a corpse, comes into being, such that we can’t, strictly,
say the corpse used to be the person who died.
14
See for instance Perry 1975, pp.3–6.
15
On these ‘Four Features’ of experience that motivate the question of personal identity, see
Schechtman 1996. For a similar claim, see Buchanan 1988, p.285.
16
For a sustained argument against thought-experiments in personal identity theory, see Wilkes 1988.
INTRODUCTION 
transplants, people splitting in two like amoebas, teleportation, and all the other
science fiction scenarios that philosophers have been conjuring up since Locke
imagined a prince and a cobbler mysteriously swapping minds during the night.17
But even in real life we do, in fact, encounter live questions of identity. Some are idle
daydream (‘If my parents had never met, would I exist? What if they’d gotten
pregnant a year earlier, or later?’), but others are all too tragically real. The
identity-destroying features of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and progressive
dementia are often remarked upon. My grandmother lived with end-stage Alzheimer’s
for over ten years, and I’ve always felt that, in a more than merely metaphorical sense,
she died two deaths: a horribly gradual one that took her away from us piece by piece,
and, years later, a metabolic one that seemed more like an epilogue than an ending.18
Some non-fatal illnesses that radically change a person’s personality or take away
their memory also seem to volatilize identity in this way. Another family member has
suffered anterograde amnesia for over sixty years. She remembers with great clarity
her life as a young woman, right up until she got sick, but has a severely compromised
relationship to her autobiography from that point onwards. Major life-changes—
grandchildren, moving house, her husband’s death—take several months to make
their way into her semantic memory, while conversations are completely forgotten
within a matter of minutes.
And every day, thousands of people face identity issues in far more sudden and
jarring circumstances, like the end-of-life decisions that have to be made in cases of
brain death. The neurologist Antonio Damasio admits that:
Few things are as sad to watch as the sudden and forced disappearance of the conscious mind
in someone who remains alive, and few things are as painful to explain to a family. How does
one look a person in the eye and make clear that the quiet state of a lifetime’s companion may
appear like sleep but is not sleep; that there is nothing benign or restorative about this way of
resting; that the once-sentient being may never return to sentience?19
I know Damasio is right: I watched my father die like that. In such crises, phrases like
‘it’s no longer really her, you know’ come to play a serious, if ambiguous and highly
contestable, role in our moral dialogue. And then, of course, there are the more
practical identity crises, including cases of people so traumatized or displaced that
their self-conception has been shattered; the cry of ‘I don’t know who I am anymore!’
might not impress metaphysicians, but it’s not simply rhetorical, either.
Still, it’s at least philosophically permissible to bracket the practical and ethical
questions associated with identity completely and simply concentrate on the meta-
physics, as Olson quite explicitly does.20 (Much the same move is available to phe-
nomenologists too: Dan Zahavi, in his discussion of the experiential underpinnings of
narrative identity, endorses aspects of Ricoeur’s view of selfhood but elects not to
17 18
Locke 1975, p.340. Belshaw (2009, p.56) denies that we ever speak of two deaths this way.
19 20
Damasio 2000, p.7. Olson 1997, p.4.
 INTRODUCTION
‘follow Ricoeur on his excursion into ethics’.)21 Metaphysicians, according to this way
of thinking, should be allowed to leave aside questions about egocentric concern,
prudential reasoning, anticipation, moral imputability, and the question of what
matters in survival, and simply focus on the ontological facts of the matter. Others,
such as Derek Parfit (whose work on personal identity theory has unarguably been
more widely influential than any philosopher since Hume) do address the question of
our self-regarding concerns, but in a way that prioritizes metaphysics over intuition. If
it turns out—as, for Parfit, it does—that there are no ‘deep further facts’ about identity
beneath facts about degrees of psychological relatedness, then we should adapt our
practical and affective attitudes to this reality. If our pre-theoretical attitudes and
intuitions fail to track metaphysical realities, then so much the worse for those
attitudes.22 In cases of both question-bracketing and Parfitian attitude-realignment,
the assumption is that identity facts, if such exist, are conceptually prior to whatever
practical and moral judgements they may licence or attitudes they may engender. It
may be that moral facts, such as facts about imputability and blameworthiness,
supervene upon facts about identity, but that subvenient base can be described in
wholly non-moral terms.
Metaphysical vs Practical Identity

Other philosophers, in seeking to give the moral basis of personal identity questions
their due, have gone in a very different direction. There has been a proliferation of
approaches according to which personal identity is a matter of articulating a nor-
mative practical identity.23 According to this sort of account, a person’s identity is
something that they actively shape, through reflective commitment and certain types
of volitional comportment. For instance, Harry G. Frankfurt speaks of the formation
of second-order volitions—those volitions we have about which of our first-order
volitions will be efficacious, such as where I have a first-order desire to eat fried
chicken, another first-order desire to only eat healthy food, and second-order desire
that my first-order desire to eat healthy food be the one that is acted upon—as a
process of ‘identifying’ with some of our volitions.24 Such a form of identification is
not the same as re-identifying (reflectively) ourselves with past and future selves (as
the metaphysical approach seeks to find criteria for doing), but of actively forming a
volitional and dispositional set or framework which we endorse as being us. Christine
Korsgaard develops a Kantian, agency-centred account of personal identity, accord-
ing to which to be a self is to articulate ‘the description under which you value
yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth under-
taking’.25 Such a description provides an Humean bundle of psychological events
21 22
Zahavi 2005, p.114. Parfit 1984.
23
On this shift, see Schechtman 1996, esp. pp.68–70; MacKenzie 2008a, pp.3–17.
24 25
Frankfurt 1988, pp.80–94. Korsgaard 1996a, p.102.
INTRODUCTION 
with a kind of deeper integration, giving it both a backward-directed explanatory

coherence and a forward-directed regulative one. It is not far from this practical
conception of identity to a narrative conception of identity, whereby this practical
identity has a diachronic unity analogous to that of a story. This narrative under-
standing of the self has found adherents as diverse as Daniel Dennett, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, J. David Velleman, and Paul Ricoeur. Narrative identity
theory goes beyond psychological continuity theories in that narrativity confers not
just continuity across time, but a specific type of intelligibility. To tell the story of our
actions and emotions is to make them comprehensible to ourselves in—so the
narrativists claim—a uniquely unifying way.
A key merit of all these approaches is their insistence on taking seriously the
significance of the first-person perspective. Both psychological and physical continu-
ity are available to inspection by an external observer; yet our from-the-inside
experience of ourselves as free agents is qualitatively different. Aside from the
phenomenal property of ‘mineness’ mentioned above, the self qua agent is not simply
an interpreter of its internal coherence (as an outside observer, such as a therapist,
would be) but the author of that coherent identity, even if, given the contingency of
my life circumstances and the background of socially determined meanings into
which I am born, I can never be more than its co-author.26 According to Korsgaard,
this authorial aspect allows our identity to survive radical changes that would
otherwise destroy it. Externally imposed changes can indeed alienate us from our
past and future, but when we actively and willingly bring such changes about
ourselves, ‘the sort of continuity needed for identity may be preserved, even if
I become very different’.27
Yet not everyone accepts that metaphysics and ethics can be separated in this
way,28 and in any case it is not clear that a purely practical account of identity will do
any better at satisfying some of our prudential and ethical concerns. Like early critics
of the Lockean rejection of thinking immaterial substance, we might object that the
self, the object of my self-regarding concern, has here been reduced to a mere ethical
fiction.29 Indeed, for someone like Dennett, the self is ‘an abstract object, a theorist’s
fiction’,30 no more ‘real’ than the centre of gravity is for a physicist—but like the
centre of gravity, it is an enormously useful fiction. Yet a curious feature of our self-
regarding concern is how impervious it seems to this sort of metaphysical disen-
chantment. Reductionists have offered thought-experiments that seem to show that
questions about personal identity admit of no non-trivial, determinate answers.31 Yet
26 27
MacIntyre 1984, p.99; Ricoeur 1992, p.160. Korsgaard 1996b, p.380.
28
For instance, Caroline West (2008, p.59) argues that if ‘person’ is a nonnatural social kind rather than
a natural kind, more like ‘nation’ or ‘corporation’ than ‘water’ or ‘gold’, then value-theoretic connections
between person-stages may indeed constitute the metaphysical relation of identity—in which case we can’t
simply separate metaphysical from practical identity.
29 30
Martin and Barresi 2000, p.58. Dennett 1992, p.105.
31
Such as Williams 1973, pp.55–6; Parfit 1984, pp.231–4.
 INTRODUCTION
the concern that animates such questions is notoriously hard to exorcise: knowing
that there’s no significant, non-arbitrary point at which identity conditions between
me and a future self suddenly cease to hold seems to do little to alter the all-or-
nothing character of egocentric concern. Being told that there are no ‘deep’, more-
than-merely conventional answers to questions about identity doesn’t seem to enable
us to stop asking them.32 And being told that the referent of ‘me’ is a practical
identity emerging from my agential and self-narrating activity doesn’t seem to silence
this concern either. While the practical identity approach may answer to more of our
ethical concerns than the purely metaphysical approach, there still seems to be a gap
between our theoretical and intuitive understandings of self.
Of course, that could simply be dismissed as a Cartesian hangover: we’ve been
thinking of ourselves as some sort of immaterial substance for so long that our
intuitions stubbornly keep tracking an all-or-nothing conception of self even when
such a conception is no longer theoretically tenable. The Cartesian picture in
which, in Nishitani Keiji’s evocative phrase, ‘each individual ego became like a
lonely but well-fortified island floating on a sea of dead matter’33 is taking us a long
time to shake off. Perhaps so—but the vehemence with which many of Locke’s
critics objected to his rejection of the soul as the seat of identity surely wasn’t
simply due to a purely philosophical commitment to dualism. Instead, what they
feared was that this new philosophy of the self could not answer to another,
altogether more terrifying, set of concerns.
Soteriological Origins
The turn away from metaphysics is motivated, as we’ve seen, by an acknowledgement
of the practical and ethical concerns that underlie questions of identity. At the
historical outset, however, the specific form of these motivating concerns was not
simply prudential or moral, but soteriological. And that outset is much further back
in time than the quote from Solomon above would suggest. The Classical world
didn’t ask about the identity of persons across time, but whether individuals could
persist after death; as the neo-Platonic answer to this question became woven into
Christian theology, discussion turned to specific problems posed by the doctrine of
bodily resurrection.34 Patristic writers such as Athenagoras, Irenaeus, and Tertullian
through to Origen and Augustine all wrestled with questions of identity and con-
tinuity between pre-mortem and post-resurrection bodies.35 Jewish and Muslim
writers grappled with similar questions; medieval Jewish writers appealed to an
indestructible bone in the spine, the luz, as the bearer of continuity between the
32
On this topic, see Rudd 2005, p.415; Schechtman 1996, pp.63–4; Martin 1998, p.112; Stokes 2013b.
33 34
Nishitani 1982, p.11. Martin and Barresi 2000, pp.2–3; 2006.
35
Martin and Barresi 2006, pp.56–74.
INTRODUCTION 
pre- and post-resurrection person.36 The self that was asked about in this context was
understood as—and cared about as—the subject of a future eschatological judgement
and recipient of eternal reward or punishment; questions about its identity and
persistence conditions were raised only with regard to this posthumous function.
The later rationalist identification of the self with thinking immaterial substance gave
a new philosophical expression to the theological idea of the soul, an immaterial core
whose numerical identity could survive the period of disembodiment between death
and resurrection.
But as the Enlightenment wore on, and rationalism came up against empiricism,
this happy marriage of theology and metaphysics started to break down. In asserting
that personal, numerical identity was secured by sameness of consciousness rather
than sameness of immaterial substance—regardless of whether such substances
existed or not—Locke opened the door to a new science of the mind that had no
use for the increasingly problematic metaphysics of the soul. As Martin and Barresi
put it, the eighteenth century witnessed a gradual but inexorable naturalization of the
concept of spirit: the old discipline of pneumatology, encompassing the supernatural
spirits of God, angels, humans, and nonhuman animals, gave way to a new, natur-
alistic (and often materialist) ‘Mental Philosophy’, which in turn split into the
approaches that became philosophy of mind and empirical psychology.37 By the
time Kant revolutionized European philosophy with his transcendental idealist
account of self-experience, the ghost in the machine had been, if not exorcized, at
least stripped of its pretentions to immateriality.38 And in this process of naturaliza-
tion, the soteriological concerns that had driven the topic of personal identity in the
first place were quietly dispensed with; the new ‘science of man’, as Hume called it,39
simply lost interest in these questions. This was entirely in keeping with the domin-
ant religious tenor of Enlightenment Europe: a disenchanted, mechanistic universe
understood more and more of its moral and political resources in immanent terms,
and correspondingly had less and less conceptual need of an afterlife that would
correct for the injustices and evils of this world. As Charles Taylor notes in his
magisterial study of the rise of unbelief in modernity, the afterlife in the eighteenth
century increasingly tends to be viewed as a place of ‘peace, repose, the reunion with
loved ones. The horizon of transformation, in particular in relation to our life here,
recedes.’40 The ‘decline of Hell’ that begins in this period makes questions of
soteriological judgement considerably less pressing, and thus considerably less salient
for philosophical reckonings of the self.
36
Reichman and Rosner 1996; Johnston 2010, pp.108–9.
37
This history is laid out perspicuously throughout Martin and Barresi 2000.
38
It’s only fair to note that one can still find defenders of the dualist soul-as-mental-substance
hypothesis today; see for instance Swinburne 1986.
39 40
Hume 2007, pp.4–6. Taylor 2007, p.261.
 INTRODUCTION
Yet this certainly isn’t the outcome that Locke had intended. Locke is not starting
from a place of detached intellectual curiosity; nor, unlike his rationalist forebears, is
he absorbed in visions of grand celestial mechanics or the austere, abstract majesty of
mathematics. Rather, as we’ll see, in keeping with the Puritan tradition of religious
self-examination in which he was raised,41 the ultimate concern of his discussion of
identity is eschatological.42 His ultimate concern is salvation, not simply metaphysics
for metaphysics’ sake.
Kierkegaard only ever mentions Locke twice, in notes on lectures by Martensen
and Schelling (SKS 19, 132; 325), and there is nothing to suggest he ever read Locke.
But the Lockean inheritance, particularly via Hume, had an enormous influence on
the thinking of Kant and his successors. Having rejected the obscurities inherent in
the notion of an immaterial spirit as early as his discussions of Swedenborg in 1766,43
Kant went on to reduce the ego to a purely formal (or at least unknowable) property
of the transcendental unity of apperception (e.g. A386: ‘The identity of the con-
sciousness of Myself in different times is therefore only a formal condition of my
thoughts and their connection, but it does not prove at all the numerical identity of
my subject’).44 Moreover, he developed the idea of a day of judgement (jüngster Tag,
the ‘Youngest Day’) into something more like a regulative ideal rather than a literal, if
supernatural, event to come.45
This de-substantialization of the ego and de-literalization of eschatology set the
stage for the sidelining of soteriological concerns in idealism’s extensive discussions
of self-consciousness, particularly in the late idealist context in which Kierkegaard
was educated. The Hegelian collapsing of the ‘inner and the outer’ that so disturbed
Kierkegaard right from the start of his pseudonymous writings (EO, 1:3/SKS 2, 11),
and consciousness’ continual sublation into higher unities held particularly stark
implications for traditional eschatological ideas. In the years immediately following
Hegel’s death, the question of whether the Hegelian system was compatible with
traditional Christian doctrines of personal identity and resurrection was fiercely
contested; indeed, this was a proximate cause of the rift between left- and right-
Hegelianism.46 Key figures in Kierkegaard’s milieu, such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg,
Hans Lassen Martensen, and Kierkegaard’s favourite teacher Poul Martin Møller,
were either participants in or keen observers of this debate.47 While some, such as
Karl Friedrich Göschel, attempted to reconcile Hegelianism with Christian doctrines
of personal immortality, others found that speculative philosophy rendered such
beliefs unsustainable. As David Friedrich Strauss told Martensen during the latter’s
visit to Tübingen in 1835, ‘I had scarce finished reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of
41 42
Seigel 2005, p.95. As argued in e.g. Forstrom 2010.
43 44
Van der Ruhr 2000, pp.217–18. Kant 1998, p.423.
45 46
Kant 1983, pp.93–4. On this debate, see Czakó 2008.
47
Møller 1837. See Kjældgaard 2005; Stewart 2007a, pp.37–53; Czakó 2008; Stokes 2009; Marks 2010.
INTRODUCTION 
Spirit before that belief fell away from me like a withered leaf.’48 Johan Ludvig
Heiberg, the leading (and most staunchly partisan) Hegelian in Golden Age Den-
mark, seems to have enthusiastically adopted a Hegelian picture of an ‘afterlife’ that
amounted to the sublation of the individual into Spirit—a prospect that utterly
appalled his mother, the novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg, according to a particu-
larly amusing scene recorded in Johanne Louise Heiberg’s memoirs.49 A decade later,
Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Johannes Climacus declare, matter-of-factly, that:
I know that some have found immortality in Hegel; others have not. I know that I have not
found it in the system, since it is unreasonable to look for it there anyway, because in a
fantastical sense all systematic thinking is sub specie aeterni . . . and to that extent immortality is
there as eternity. But this immortality is not at all the one inquired about, since the question is
about the immortality of a mortal, and that question is not answered by showing that the
eternal is immortal, because the eternal is, after all, not the mortal, and the immortality of the
eternal is a tautology and a misuse of words. (CUP, 1:171/SKS 7, 158–9)
The disentangling of eschatology and personal identity within philosophy of mind

(and its emerging offshoot, empirical psychology) was more or less complete by the
close of the nineteenth century, such that James could dismiss the old requirement
for ‘a soul which is at the judgement day all that it ever was’ as neither psychologically
demonstrable nor desirable, an irrelevancy for modern readers ‘who are less insatiate
for retribution than their grandfathers’.50 Personal identity and soteriology never
completely parted ways, insofar as philosophers of religion have continued to attend
to the problems that personal identity presents for beliefs about immortality and
resurrection.51 But the Enlightenment’s prioritization of the metaphysical question of
identity, to the detriment of the ethical and the soteriological, has held sway. The
soteriological concerns that originally animated questions of personal identity have
been largely effaced; it’s tacitly assumed that pre-Enlightenment pneumatology is to
modern philosophy of mind roughly what alchemy and astrology are to chemistry
and astronomy.
48
Martensen 1882, p.131.
49
‘The two gentlemen [Heiberg and Martensen] had discussed Hegel’s view that the immortality of
individuals was dissolved in the entire great universe. At this Heiberg’s mother was completely beside
herself. Again and again she came back, in increasing stages of undress, as she attacked the doctrine. To this
attack Heiberg only responded “Go to bed, it’s late.” “Merge together!” she exclaimed, “Do you think I will
merge together with the many loathsome drops?”—“Go to bed!” ’ quoted in Stewart 2007b, p.543.
50
James 1950, p.349. James was a major figure in the early years of psychical research and a keen
investigator of spiritualist phenomena, and the spiritualists themselves were scornful of traditional
eschatological concepts such as damnation. Spiritualism offered an empirically backed belief in an afterlife
and an optimistic soteriology of (eventual) universal salvation, one that suited an age of apparently
boundless scientific progress. On spiritualist epistemology and soteriology, see Vaczy Kragh 2002a,
2002b. On the relationship between Danish Hegelianism and spiritualism, see Stokes 2009.
51
As one early example, Robert Audi (1976) uses the metaphysics of personal identity to object to John
Hick’s argument for the possibility of ‘Eschatological Verification’ of religious beliefs.
 INTRODUCTION
Kierkegaard on the Self

Seen in the context laid out above, Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood is a curious mix
of the modern and the anti-modern. Despite his antipathy to the speculative philo-
sophical programme, Kierkegaard shares many of the assumptions of late idealism—
including its rejection of Cartesian ego-substantialism and any pretheoretical beliefs
that might imply or require it. Post-Kantian idealism can profitably be understood as
a series of attempts to overcome the scepticism engendered by Kant’s divorcing of
phenomenon and noumenon. This was to be done by re-grounding philosophy (as
Kant had done) in the experience of consciousness, but in a way that gave meta-
physical primacy to the positing consciousness rather than some inaccessible realm
of things-in-themselves. This made the ego the wellspring of all representations in
consciousness as well as of itself—yet these egos were a very different animal from
their Cartesian counterparts. Despite Fichte’s attempt to ground philosophy in das
Ich, an ego or Absolute Self that was the source of all representations and therefore
irreducible to anything within the empirical world, this ego was not to be understood
as a persisting, thinking immaterial substance à la Descartes, but as pure intellectual
activity: ‘The intellect, for idealism, is an act, and absolutely nothing more; we should
not even call it an active something, for this expression refers to something subsistent
in which activity inheres.’52 In Hegel too, despite his disagreements with figures like
Fichte and Schelling, the essence of the self is bound up in relation and activity rather
than simple persistence. As consciousness gradually comes to a progressively better
self-understanding, it becomes aware that both it and the world around it are
functions of the same Spirit, a single, universal, animating power.53 Spirit, in its
freedom, emerges in the interrelation of elements in the world (including corporeal
ones), not as a spiritual substance inhabiting a body:
Personality implies that as this person: (i) I am completely determined on every side (in my
inner caprice, impulse, and desire, as well as by immediate external facts) and so finite; yet
(ii) none the less I am simply and solely self-relation, and therefore in finitude I know myself
as something infinite, universal, and free.54
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the self is very much shaped by this idealist context.55
David Kangas notes that Fichte’s account of subjectivity ‘unquestionably gave
Kierkegaard the conceptual resources to break from an ontological description of
52 53 54
Fichte 1982, p.21. Seigel 2005, p.407. Hegel 2008, pp.53–4.
55
Jon Stewart has pointed out to me that physicalist conceptions of the self were not completely
unknown within Kierkegaard’s intellectual context, as evidenced by the ‘Howitz Affair’. Franz Gothard
Howitz’s 1824 article ‘On Madness and Ascribing Responsibility, A Contribution to Psychology and
Jurisprudence’ argued against the Kantian conception of noumenal freedom, on the basis of a purely
physical (and wholly deterministic) understanding of moral psychology. Sibbern, Mynster, and Heiberg all
offered rejoinders to this physicalist account, with Mynster defending a Kantian conception of freedom
while Sibbern and Heiberg both offered idealist arguments that were either implicitly (Sibbern) or explicitly
(Heiberg) Hegelian in character. See Stewart 2007a, pp.136–52.
INTRODUCTION 
the subject in favour of one pursued through categories of self-consciousness:

namely, those of reflection, act, will, freedom’,56 and in keeping with this Fichtean
tenor, Kierkegaard’s articulations of selfhood are thoroughly non-substantialist.
Indeed, as early as Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William actively
rejects the notion of the self as a substance to which any psychological predicates
could be assigned without compromising its identity, as if an individual ‘could be
changed continually and yet remain the same, as if his innermost being were an
algebraic symbol that could signify anything whatever it is assumed to be’ (EO, 2:215/
SKS 3, 206). Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms locate selfhood, even when spoken of as
‘spirit’, not in the superaddition of a Cartesian ego or immaterial soul to the human
animal, but in a relational dynamic whereby a mass of psychological facts and
dispositions relates to itself and its environment in an irreducibly first-personal
way. It is in the specific way in which this psychology relates to itself that a human
being comes to constitute a self. Selfhood for Kierkegaard, like intellect for Fichte, is
pure activity. Hubert Dreyfus notes that one of the things Heidegger takes from
Kierkegaard (largely without acknowledgement) is the latter’s ‘understanding of the
self as a set of factors that are defined by the stand this structure takes on itself ’57—
which, if true, suggests that Kierkegaard was instrumental in transmitting a certain
type of relational, non-substantialist conception of self between post-Hegelian ideal-
ism and post-Husserlian phenomenology.
Yet Kierkegaard’s discussions of the self don’t just sound modern in their own
context, but in ours as well. Like contemporary neo-Lockeans, Kierkegaard regards
selfhood as a status that holds by virtue of relations between psychological events: for
a self to be co-identical with some past or future self is for it to be related to those
selves in a particular way. And the specific mode of this psychological relation also
has a modern flavour to it. For neo-Lockeans, the forms of psychological continuity
that bind person-stages into a single individual are (when specified at all) largely
passive: the persistence of memory, dispositional properties, beliefs, and so on. For
Kierkegaard, by contrast, a human being (regarded as a set of diachronic physical and
psychological facts) becomes a self through a process of active appropriation, vari-
ously referred to as ‘choice’ and ‘relating to oneself ’ (at forholde sig til sig selv). (This
split between the human being and the self is also one that, as we’ll see in coming
chapters, has emerged as an important feature of the personal identity debate in the
last three decades.)
Moreover, Kierkegaard sees the cultivation of a consistent practical identity across
time as essential to selfhood, in ways that seem to align him with contemporary
practical identity approaches to selfhood. In his first published work, a review of
Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler, Kierkegaard berates Andersen for
lacking a ‘life-view’ (Livs-Anskuelse). He contrasts Andersen with Gyllembourg, who
56 57
Kangas 2007b, p.67. Dreyfus 1991, p.299.
 INTRODUCTION
he praises for, as Richard M. Summers puts it, developing a life-view that ‘accepts
reality in full awareness of its imperfections and finds its task there’.58 The lack of
such a life-view is not simply a problem for Andersen’s novels, but for Andersen as a
person: without a life-view, Andersen is no more than a ‘possibility of a personality,
that to become such needs a strong life-development’ (EPW, 70/SKS 1, 26).59 This
notion of a viewpoint that integrates the personality and normatively structures
one’s understanding of and volitional responses to the world echoes throughout
Kierkegaard’s authorship. Such a claim, and Kierkegaard’s conception of the self
as a freely chosen ethical project, resonate with contemporary claims that identity
is a function of ‘ground projects’,60 second-order volitions and normative self-
description. This is especially salient with respect to Judge William’s discussion of
self-constitution in Either/Or, for William sees the choice of oneself within socially
defined ethical roles (especially marriage) as integrating a mass of otherwise atomistic
psychological elements into a coherent, diachronically extended self. In so doing,
selves acquire themselves as a ‘history’—a term pregnant with possibilities, for the
Danish historie means both ‘history’ and ‘story’. Thus Judge William has served as
the point of departure for readings of Kierkegaard, such as those offered by John
J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, which align him with contemporary narrativist
accounts of personal identity. If the narrativist reading is correct, then Kierkegaard’s
philosophical ‘contemporaries’ with respect to selfhood are figures like Alasdair
MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, not to mention the many active proponents of narrative
identity working today.
‘But,’ as George Connell reminds us, ‘alongside the Kierkegaard who surprises
readers by his preternatural contemporaneity stands another, antimodern Kierke-
gaard.’61 Kierkegaard’s goal, as is particularly evident in The Sickness Unto Death and
in his veronymous discourses, is ultimately a religious one. The facts of selfhood are
always theological ones for Kierkegaard; while Sickness is clearly a work of philo-
sophical anthropology it is also inescapably a work of creation theology as well,62 and
the overtly Christocentric focus of the second half of the book can obscure the
theological basis that’s present right from the outset. Consider the infamously obtuse
opening passages of Part A of The Sickness Unto Death. Here Anti-Climacus tells us
that ‘Such a relation, that relates to itself, a self, must either have established itself, or
be established by an other’—yet instead of arguing for either option he simply
declares that ‘A human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that
relates to itself and in relating to itself relates to an other’ (SUD, 13/SKS 11, 129,
translation modified, my emphasis). The language may be reminiscent of speculative
58
Summers 1999, p.47.
59
Even here, there is already an intimation of the importance of soteriology to one’s self-conception, for
Kierkegaard claims that ‘the life-view proper commences first . . . at the hour of one’s death’ (EPW, 77/SKS
1, 33). I’m grateful to Adam Buben for this observation.
60 61 62
Williams 1982, pp.1–19. Connell 2011, p.22. See e.g. Lübcke 1984.
INTRODUCTION 
idealism, but this apparently unearned assumption that selves are established by
some external power tells us that Anti-Climacus’ programme is to outline an
ontology of the self from within a framework that assumes an orthodox creation
theology beforehand. Here Kierkegaard registers his distance from the idealist
account of subjectivity as its own ground:63 the Kierkegaardian self is always a created
self, a self that finds God as the ultimate ‘criterion’ for its own self-actualization
(SUD, 79/SKS 11, 193),64 and Christ as its prototype for emulation.
In addition to this creaturely account of selfhood, Kierkegaard’s account of the self
strives to preserve (without any kind of apologetic argument) a key feature of
revealed doctrine: the self as a subject of eternal judgement. Kierkegaard is fully
aware that this swims against the post-Enlightenment current. In one of the Upbuild-
ing Discourses of 1844, Kierkegaard laments that the concept of eternal salvation had
become ‘a loose and idle phrase, at times virtually forgotten, or arbitrarily left out of
the language, or indifferently set aside as an old-fashioned turn of speech no longer
used but retained only because it is so quaint’ (EUD, 254/SKS 5, 251). As if to redress
this forgetting of soteriology, the concept of eternal judgement can be found
throughout Kierkegaard’s religious writings, and in The Sickness Unto Death and
The Concept of Anxiety he lays out conceptions of the self and time, respectively, that
make such a judgement possible. His category of the ‘single individual’ (Enkelt), the
‘self-before-God’, is defined and individuated primarily by eschatological responsi-
bility. The single individual, as we’re told in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ (echoing The
Concept of Anxiety) lives simultaneously in time and eternity. This changes the
temporality of the self in important ways, for the possibilities of human time and
the possibilities of eschatological time are radically different: while human life is a
gradual passing-away of possibilities, the relation to the eternal, and the tasks of
repentance and hope that this relationship engenders, is omnipresent and constant
throughout that life. This dual temporality, as we’ll see in our discussions of The
Sickness Unto Death and Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, marks a funda-
mental difference between Kierkegaardian selfhood and the neo-Lockean search for
the persistence conditions of persons.
Moreover, the single individual (or the self-before-God in Sickness) is enjoined to
make an accounting for their life to an extraordinary level of detail: ‘every idle word
must be repeated in the transformation of eternity!’ (UDVS, 15/SKS 8, 131),
‘everything—down to the smallest, down to the superfluous words that are spoken’
(UDVS, 66/SKS 8, 174) will be answered for in eternal judgement. According to Anti-
Climacus, ‘everyone arrives in eternity bringing along with him and delivering his
own absolutely accurate record of every least trifle he has committed or omitted’
(SUD, 124/SKS 11, 235). While Kierkegaard uses soul (sjæl) to mean something more
like ‘mind’ rather than anything substantialist, the eschatological identity of the
63
On which, see Söderquist 2007; Kangas 2007a.
64
On this topic, see Pattison 1997, pp.70–84.
 INTRODUCTION
single individual is clearly co-extensive with the ‘soul which is at the judgement day
all that it ever was’ that James found so outré.
The Kierkegaardian self, then, harkens back to a soteriological understanding of
the self that modernity had rendered philosophically untenable, but does so in the
language and assumptions of a relational psychology that is as fresh today as it was
then. As Simon Podmore puts it, his discussion of the self is ‘an attempt to rehabili-
tate older theological truths without undermining orthodox biblical Christianity (as
he perceived Hegelianism to be doing), while at the same time speaking within and
critiquing the lexicon of modernity’.65 This is not to say that Kierkegaard articulates
some new metaphysical basis for old Christian claims; rather, he re-articulates
selfhood from within a Christian soteriological perspective, outlining the way self
and time appear to the believer. In these respects, the Kierkegaardian project is
stubbornly pre-Enlightenment. It strives to preserve the self ’s status as the personally
immortal subject of an eternal judgement, a status that Hegelianism had, at least
implicitly, made indefensible. Yet Kierkegaard does not aim to defend traditional
beliefs via philosophical apology, or re-found them on a new philosophical or
epistemological basis, but to show, as Tamara Monet Marks puts it, what is at
stake in believing traditional doctrines such as bodily resurrection.66
In short, Kierkegaardian selfhood is both philosophically progressive and theo-
logically conservative—a tension that, with regard to the question of self and identity,
is enormously productive.
Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy

This somewhat lengthy historical overview of the question of identity is provided
here to help situate Kierkegaard in relation to the intellectual currents that have
shaped the discourse on the self from Locke onwards. However, my intention in this
book is not so much to bring Kierkegaard into dialogue with his past, but with his
future. This is likely to be controversial, so let me take a few moments to explain.
As noted, there has been a remarkable proliferation in discussions of the self in the
last forty years, especially in the analytic tradition. Yet Kierkegaard has been con-
spicuously absent from these discussions. Figures like Alasdair MacIntyre and
Charles Taylor have seen Kierkegaard as a figure of at least some importance in the
history of self and reason,67 but he has not been treated as having anything of note to
say to contemporary philosophical discussions of the nature of selfhood. Lest this be
blamed entirely on the analytic disdain for historical topics, it should be noted that
things aren’t much better on the continental side of the fence: even Ricoeur, in his
65 66
Podmore 2011, p.xx. Marks 2010, p.181.
67
MacIntyre 1984, pp.39–43; Taylor 1992, pp.450–3. Jerrold Seigel’s expansive (though by his own
admission not exhaustive) history of the concept of selfhood never once mentions Kierkegaard, even in its
discussion of Heidegger. On this omission (as well as that of Sartre, and others), see Izenberg 2005, p.391.
INTRODUCTION 
laudable attempt to bring continental and analytic discussions of selfhood together,

manages to bypass Kierkegaard. So the neglect of Kierkegaard has been, at least,
scrupulously bipartisan.
What the present work aims to show is that Kierkegaard’s distinctive and insight-
ful discussions on the nature of the self can profitably be brought into dialogue
with contemporary work on personal identity. In his 1968 book-length critique of
Kierkegaard, K. E. Løgstrup speaks of Kierkegaard’s ‘polemic against every substan-
tial interpretation of the self ’, which had exerted an important influence on contin-
ental philosophy and theology, and notes that ‘there is also a polemic against the
substantial interpretation of the self in Anglo-Saxon empiricist philosophy, in which
this polemic has a long tradition. A confrontation is thus in order.’68 Løgstrup then
offers a short discussion of Kierkegaard and Bertrand Russell—the very archetype, it
must be admitted, of the analytic philosopher!—on the non-substantiality of the self.
But sustained discussions of what Kierkegaard can contribute to contemporary views
of the self did not start to appear until the mid 1990s, and then largely with reference
to practical and narrative conceptions of personal identity. What this book seeks to
do is to broaden the scope of engagement from the narrative self-constitution debate
to wider questions about metaphysical persistence, psychological continuity, and
posthumous survival.
The motivation for this dialogue is twofold. Firstly, we can gain a fuller under-
standing of Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood by considering how it stands in
relation to the main currents of contemporary personal identity theory. As noted
above, there are several respects in which Kierkegaard seems to have a great deal in
common with both neo-Lockean metaphysical approaches to personal identity and
practical, ethical understandings of the self. This suggests that a deeper and richer
understanding of Kierkegaard’s picture of the self can be opened up by exploring
these similarities, as well as the key differences. The contemporary context provides
several different ways of thinking about the self, and we can use these to help us
discern what sort of self-theorist Kierkegaard is, what features he shares with
contemporary thinkers, what sort of objections his account might thereby be
subject to, and whether his work contains resources for meeting them. By placing
Kierkegaard’s thought against a different background, we can see its shape in a way
we haven’t seen it before.
On the other hand, we can also determine whether Kierkegaard also has a
contribution to make to these debates. Kierkegaard’s corpus provides a rich reposi-
tory of philosophically structured psychological observation—a resource that con-
temporary philosophy has yet to fully exploit. One of the tasks of the present work
is to unpack some of the key concepts in Kierkegaard and show that they can,
indeed, be useful inputs into current debates on the reflexivity of memory, the
68
Løgstrup 2005, p.164.
 INTRODUCTION
nature of diachronic self-experience, the relationship between psychological con-

tinuity and identity, and the interrelation of the core and narrative selves. Kierke-
gaard is thereby brought into focus not simply as a figure of historical interest, but
as a thinker with something to offer live debates. And in this regard his disagree-
ments with the major figures in those debates are, once again, as instructive as his
similarities. We can use Kierkegaardian themes and concepts to assemble some
new answers to questions that have perplexed modern-day philosophy—but the
answers that he offers may push personal identity theory in some unfamiliar, and
perhaps uncomfortable, directions.
Nonetheless, despite its potential contribution to both Kierkegaard Studies and
personal identity theory, this dialogue between Kierkegaard and living philosophers
may be resisted from several perspectives. Some may find the whole thing hopelessly
anachronistic: why would a nineteenth century Danish philosopher–theologian have
anything to say to living, analytic philosophers such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson,
Marya Schechtman, and J. David Velleman? The only real way to answer this
objection is to simply go ahead and show that Kierkegaard does have something to
say; but it is important to be clear at the outset about what my project does and does
not claim. It does claim that Kierkegaard’s work contains philosophical resources
which we can use in trying to answer some of the questions these living philosophers
have raised. It does not claim—implicitly or otherwise—that Kierkegaard himself is
concerned with the same questions. I do not suggest that Kierkegaard was somehow
prescient enough to foresee problems that would not be raised for another century or
more. But insofar as he is a philosopher concerned with the nature of selfhood, we
shouldn’t be surprised to see him respond to similar features of our experience of the
self, such as the reflexivity of memory and the experience of alienation from our past
and future, as modern writers do.
Analytic philosophers of the self may also find Kierkegaard simply doesn’t pass
muster as a worthy interlocutor: they may find his writings too unsystematic, his
concepts too imprecise, his religious commitments too intrusive and controversial.
Again, some of this can only be dealt with by doing the work to demonstrate his
usefulness. However, it’s worth acknowledging that much of what Kierkegaard has to
say might indeed be indigestible to at least some analytic philosophers. The analytic
reader may look askance at some of the things they encounter in this book, such as
the notion of figures of speech that are less than literally true but more than merely
metaphorical, or the refusal to collapse phenomenal and metaphysical identity-
claims into one ontological register of ‘real’ identity. Indeed anyone committed to a
metaphysical conception of selfhood that can be disentangled from the phenomen-
ology of self will likely be left cold by what Kierkegaard has to say. Likewise,
philosophers who want to insist that a morally neutral base of facts about persons
must be conceptually prior to the moral features of selfhood will also find key
assumptions of the Kierkegaardian project unacceptable. And as we will see, Kierke-
gaard’s understanding of identity involves a normativity that has its roots firmly in
INTRODUCTION 
his soteriological commitments, which may rule the Kierkegaardian approach out-
of-court for many philosophers.
I think that at least some of what Kierkegaard says can survive these objections; for
instance, I think it’s possible to entertain the idea of a soteriological understanding of
human life without being committed to any sort of theism, let alone Kierkegaard’s
Christianity. The idea of omnipresent concern for the final status of one’s life, for
instance, can survive the thought that there will be no actual accounting for that
status, for as is implicit in several religions’ accounts of final judgement, the soterio-
logical status of the deceased exists independently of any external judge (more on this
in Chapter 9). But where we depart from Kierkegaard’s core assumptions in order to
make his thought more widely acceptable we need to be clear that we are doing so;
and not everyone would agree that this can, or should, be done.
This brings me to some of the most strident objections that might be offered to the
methodology of this book—by Kierkegaardians themselves. Within Kierkegaard
Studies, the question of whether Kierkegaard can be read as a philosopher, or even
as someone with a contribution to make to contemporary philosophy, has been
surprisingly controversial. Some regard Kierkegaard as a philosopher whose work
intersects in valuable ways with ongoing debates in ethics and moral psychology,69
while others insist Kierkegaard can only coherently be read as a theologian concerned
with issues specific to his intellectual context.70
Consider the methodological disagreements between the contributors to the
Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard collection edited by Edward Mooney. On
the one hand, Rick Anthony Furtak declares that Kierkegaard’s writings both
‘address some of the central problems of philosophy’ and ‘challenge us to reevaluate
our standard ways of approaching these problems’. He goes on to note that ‘If
contemporary philosophers hesitate to view Kierkegaard’s work as pertinent to
their concerns, this is just another sign that the discipline of philosophy, as it
currently exists, is in need of a Kierkegaardian thickening if it is to survive in a
form that is worthy of its own name.’71 Marilyn Piety takes issue with Louis Mackey’s
claim that Kierkegaard’s literary mode of production is incompatible with his being a
philosopher72 by noting—quite rightly—that ‘If Kierkegaard’s style is too “literary,”
however, to satisfy the conceptual rigor required of philosophy, then there are a host
of other thinkers whose names should also be stricken from the philosophical rolls.’73
(Piety doesn’t name names here, but Nietzsche springs to mind). George Pattison,
on the other hand, warns that while there are ‘things that look like fragments of
philosophy in Kierkegaard, things like contributions to long-standing debates in the
philosophy of religion, in epistemology, in logic, maybe even an attempt at a kind of
69
In addition to Davenport and Rudd, who will be discussed extensively in later chapters, see also
Mooney 1996; Furtak 2005; Stokes 2010a; Lippitt 2013.
70 71 72
Such as Turnbull 2007, 2011. Furtak 2008, p.59. Mackey 1971.
73
Piety 2008, p.163.
 INTRODUCTION
proto-phenomenology’, Kierkegaard’s faith-based authorship imposes ‘a clear limit

to the extent to which Kierkegaard as a whole can be read as a philosopher’.74
Pattison echoes here a long-standing suspicion among Kierkegaard commentators
that purely philosophical readings of Kierkegaard will somehow de-theologize him.
This wariness is understandable: mid-twentieth-century discussions of Kierkegaard
tended to read him through the prism of atheist existentialism, simply pushing
Kierkegaard’s religious commitments to one side in their appropriations of themes
such as freedom, anxiety, and despair. Gordon Marino has argued that even today,
‘among Kierkegaard scholars, many of whom are quietly offended by Kierkegaard’s
Christianity, there is an ongoing question as to how to remove the gem of wisdom
from the gangue of Kierkegaard’s pietistic faith’.75 The readings of Kierkegaard that
Pattison and Marino complain about can indeed do a particularly severe sort of
exegetical violence to Kierkegaard.
Alastair Hannay warns that ‘It is all too easy to place Kierkegaard’s works in
debates where it is far from obvious that they belong. Or if they do, then to place
them there is to have them take part in disputes of a kind in which Kierkegaard would
not feel at home.’76 Nonetheless, I think we can indeed mine Kierkegaard for useful
philosophical insights that may have applications in contexts very alien to his own.
This is, it seems to me, essential work if Kierkegaard is to be regarded as a thinker of
ongoing philosophical value rather than a merely historical figure, a sort of dimly
remembered eccentric uncle of Heidegger, whose work can safely be ignored by those
disinclined to deal with it. So there is a difficult balancing act to be performed:
extracting philosophically useful resources from Kierkegaard without distorting his
thought in the process. In order to do so we need to be both scrupulous in our
exegesis and cautious about distinguishing between what counts as an interpretation
of Kierkegaard and what counts as an application of Kierkegaardian concepts. In
what follows, part of my task will be to show that Kierkegaard’s work contains
descriptions of reflexive psychological states that, when introduced into contempor-
ary discussions, can play a surprisingly useful role. The answers they provide to
philosophical questions might be open to objections, and not every philosopher
might find them credible (much will turn simply on how convincing we find
Kierkegaard’s phenomenologies of memory and imagination). But they are nonethe-
less answers worthy of our attention.
However, Kierkegaard does not simply offer us resources for developing existing
approaches to personal identity. Rather, the distinctive temporality of the self which
he outlines—which I’ll argue maps onto important distinctions within the contem-
porary literature—suggests that there is something amiss with the entire project of
trying to find persistence conditions for the self across time. To determine what
counts as an entity’s persisting between two points of time is implicitly to take an
74 75 76
Pattison 2008, p.155. Marino 2008, p.126. Hannay 2008, p.241.
INTRODUCTION 
external and atemporal perspective on that entity. Yet the irreducibly present-tense
and first-personal character of Kierkegaardian selfhood, as we’ll see, suggests that we
cannot regard selves in this way without missing the point about selfhood. If that
claim is accepted, then the impasse we discussed at the start of this introduction
between rival post-Lockean theories of identity loses its teeth. In his warning about
using Kierkegaard philosophically, Hannay goes on to claim that if we do decide to
use Kierkegaard in this way, ‘we should always be on the lookout in case what is
essentially Kierkegaardian is the idea that we should not be bothered too much by
discussions of this kind’.77 As we’ll see, Kierkegaard’s most significant contribution to
the project initiated by Locke might indeed turn out to be gesturing towards a way
out of it.
Outline
In Chapter 1 we begin, appropriately enough, at the beginning: Locke’s identification
of ‘extension of consciousness’ as constituting the extension of the self across time.
Equating ‘self ’ with ‘consciousness’ is already a move that has resonances with
Kierkegaard, but Locke has traditionally been read as offering a metaphysical ‘mem-
ory criterion’ view of personal identity, such that to remember being some past self is
to be numerically identical with that self. However, this misses the essential role that
‘concernment’ has in Locke’s account. For Locke, identity-constituting (or tracking)
extension of consciousness is not simply a matter of remembering the past, but of
remembering it with a certain form of concern. This concern is, for Locke, ultimately
a soteriological one, for, as some commentators have claimed, Locke is not so much
offering a metaphysical account of identity as one that will be pragmatically adequate
for beings concerned about their ultimate salvation. Here, Kierkegaard’s distinction
between memory (hukommelsen) and recollection (erindringen) equips us with a way
of understanding what ‘concernful’ memory might mean for Locke—for Kierke-
gaardian recollection, like Lockean concernful remembering, is essentially concerned
with soteriology.
In Chapter 2 we undertake an analysis of Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘contemporan-
eity’ (samtidighed), which will be central to the Kierkegaardian engagement with
contemporary discussions that follows. Samtidighed has typically been interpreted as
a form of religious experience, a description of the epistemic state of the believer, or a
practical orientation towards the imitation of Christ. Building on discussions of how
one becomes ‘contemporary’ with the incarnation in Philosophical Fragments and
Practice in Christianity, we will trace a different understanding of samtidighed
running throughout Kierkegaard’s works, one that uses the term to refer to a
phenomenal property of direct experience which can be present or absent in episodic
77
Hannay 2008, p.241.
 INTRODUCTION
memory or imagination—and which is irreducibly normative in character. We

become contemporary with those past events which we contemplate insofar as we
experience these events as making demands upon us.
With this understanding of contemporaneity in hand, we turn in Chapter 3 to
important contemporary debates regarding the phenomenology of memory, antici-
pation, and imagination, and the way self-experiences figures in these. Philosophers
such as Wollheim and Velleman have asked: what is it that connects the ‘notional
subject’ of a remembered experience (the subject presented as having the remem-
bered experience) with the ‘actual subject’ (the person having the memory)? Relat-
edly, what differentiates the experience of episodic memory from mere ‘imagined
seeing’? In other words, what makes some forms of visualization reflexive and others
not? Kierkegaard’s discussions of memory and imagination strongly suggest that he
belongs to a tradition, exemplified by figures like Hazlitt and James, which sees self-
reflexivity as given by a particular phenomenal property of memory (one that is
lacking in other forms of visualization). Yet unlike these other proponents of this
approach, Kierkegaard sees the phenomenal property that makes memory reflexive
as fundamentally normative in character, and as something that needs to be achieved
rather than simply given. We consider how the introduction of Kierkegaardian
contemporaneity into these discussions might answer some of these puzzles about
memory, as well as related problems regarding anticipation, and a perennial favourite
of personal identity theorists: the ‘personal fission’ thought-experiment, in which a
person splits in two like an amoeba.
In Chapter 4 we apply this account of contemporaneity to Galen Strawson’s
prominent discussion of ‘episodic’ and ‘diachronic’ self-experience. Strawson has
articulated a spectrum of ‘temporal temperaments’ among people, relating to how we
experience our self, where ‘self ’ is understood as the mental entity we experience
ourselves as being right now. At one end of this spectrum are ‘diachronics’, who have
a sense that the self they experience themselves as being right now existed in the past
and will exist in the future. At the other end are ‘episodics’, including Strawson
himself, who lack this sense of temporal extension. Episodics remember their pasts
and anticipate their futures, but do so without any sense that the self that exists now
was there in the past or will be there in the future. I argue, however, that Strawson
does not offer a non-reductive account of what diachronic self-experience is like.
Kierkegaardian contemporaneity offers precisely such an account—but one that, due
to its radically normative nature, poses considerable challenges to Strawson’s defence
of the episodic life. We will also consider Strawson’s recent replies to this Kierke-
gaardian response to his work.
Strawson operates with an important distinction, one that echoes through other
discussions of personal identity as well as in the cognitive sciences: the split between
our phenomenal sense of self and our reflective awareness of being a particular
person. This distinction is central to the entire trajectory of this book. In Chapter 5,
we consider the ways in which we sometimes become affectively alienated from the
INTRODUCTION 
past and future of the human beings we are, such that we no longer feel that we are
that past or future person. Derek Parfit’s example of a young socialist who is horrified
at the thought of the crusty conservative he will one day become, and Marya
Schechtman’s example of the ‘serious matron’ who can no longer identify with the
carefree ‘party girl’ she once was, provide rich examples of this phenomenon.
Whereas Strawson denies the importance of unifying one’s sense of self with our
awareness of our extension as a psycho-physically constituted person, Schechtman
argues that it is psychologically desirable that we affectively identify with as much of
our past and future as possible. Once again, we’ll see that Kierkegaard provides the
affective connection that unites the perspectives of the self and the person. Moreover,
the normative cast of Kierkegardian self-experience unifies the subject across time in
a particularly thoroughgoing way, overcoming the massive yet gradual changes in
psychology that are a problem for many neo-Lockean accounts of selfhood.
Our discussion of contemporaneity as a phenomenal feature of memory and
anticipation that unifies past and future selves with the experiencing subject might
seem to licence the claim that Kierkegaard understands selfhood as a matter of
psychological continuity—which would align him very strongly with contemporary
neo-Lockean approaches to personal identity. The place where Kierkegaard seems to
come closest to offering an overt metaphysics of selfhood is in The Sickness Unto
Death, with its famous (and forbidding) ontology of the self as a cluster of oppos-
itional psycho-physical elements that becomes a self by ‘relating to itself ’. Yet as we’ll
see in Chapter 6, while both Anti-Climacus and Judge William speak of the ‘con-
tinuity’ of the self, they also both subtly work against the idea that the constitution of
selves can be understood in this way. Indeed, Anti-Climacus’ descriptions of what it
is to lose one’s self throw the entire project of grounding diachronic identity in
psychological continuity into doubt. By tracing the ways in which both Judge
William and Anti-Climacus speak of ‘eternity’ in the context of the self, we can
begin to see the ways in which Kierkegaard’s soteriological understanding of tem-
porality will draw the discussion of selfhood away from neo-Lockean metaphysics.
If Kierkegaard is not straightforwardly a psychological-continuity theorist, might
he not be better situated within the ambits of the practical and narrative identity
approaches discussed above? Indeed, the most important and influential discussion
of Kierkegaardian selfhood to date—that offered by John J. Davenport and Anthony
Rudd, culminating in their two recent monographs—has seen Kierkegaard as offer-
ing a robustly narrative account of personal identity. We consider these accounts in
Chapter 7, where we explore a distinction (cognate with the person/self distinction
discussed in Chapter 5) that has recently been offered by phenomenologists and
cognitive scientists alike between the ‘narrative’ and ‘minimal’ selves. By considering
the ways in which Judge William and Anti-Climacus invoke a ‘naked’ self as an
irreducible component of the phenomenology of selfhood, we can see that Kierke-
gaard’s discussion is less about diachronic identity per se and more about the
interaction between the present-tense self and the diachronically extended person.
 INTRODUCTION
Again, though, this ‘naked self ’ is a creature of soteriology, a being that knows
itself as more than its concretion and facticity but which is nonetheless responsible
for this facticity. It does not simply live in time, but at the intersection of time and
eternity. Hence selfhood, for Kierkegaard, is a question of how this subject now stands
in relation to the totality of its earthly lifespan. What Kierkegaard offers us then is
something that, in light of the minimal/narrative self distinction, narrativist accounts
of personal identity (and indeed any personal identity theory that wants to take the
first-person perspective seriously) will need to address: an account of how the
present-tense self relates to its narrative, as both what it is and yet something it is
not reducible to. But can Kierkegaard’s soteriological account really be a viable
candidate for this role? Could the ‘naked self ’, the subject that is separable from its
concretion and concerned for its final eschatological status be a worthy object of our
concern, or is it, as Mark Johnston has argued, a ‘busted’ entity of no real substance
or significance? These questions will be considered in Chapter 8, in which we
consider the phenomenology of the self-before-final-judgement offered in Kierke-
gaard’s discussion of ‘the eleventh hour’, the intersection of biological time and
eternal judgement.
In Chapter 9, we will take stock of just where this discussion has left us. As I’ll
suggest, Kierkegaard stands both as a corrective to purely metaphysical approaches to
personal identity, and as a resource for exploring the ways in which our sense of
ourselves as present-tense subjects interacts with our diachronic concretion. I’ll also
consider three main lines of objection to the argument developed here, including the
question of what can be salvaged from Kierkegaard’s soteriological account of
selfhood for non-theistic believers. Perhaps we really do live, as Kierkegaard said,
at the intersection of time and eternity, even if for many of us, ‘eternity’ means
something different to what it means for Kierkegaard.
1
Recollection and Memory
Locke and Becoming ‘Self to Oneself ’

The history of the problem of personal identity, right down to the present day, can in
many ways be viewed as the story of metaphysics’ ongoing struggle to free itself from
the assumption of an immaterial substance as the bearer of identity. For writers like
Locke, standing at the inception of that history, this was a dangerous business. For all
its considerable problems—perhaps most seriously the problem of how an immater-
ial substance could interact causally with the material world—the Cartesian ego had
the considerable advantage of fitting with religious beliefs that seemed to require a
non-material, immortal core of the self. It was inevitable, then, that Locke’s uncoup-
ling of identity and substance would be controversial, even if Locke stopped short of
denying the existence of immaterial souls (claiming merely that we could have no
knowledge of them, and therefore no explanatory use for them). Yet as we’ll see,
Locke’s concern is not counter-theological—quite the opposite in fact.
In this chapter I don’t offer anything like a comprehensive reading of Locke.
Instead I will trace out some themes in Locke’s discussion of identity that connect
in interesting ways with Kierkegaard’s account of self-experience: the role of con-
cernment in consciousness and memory, the moral irreducibility of personhood, and
the importance of soteriology to understanding what we really are.
Locke’s Three Forms of Identity

In a signally important move, Locke distinguished the identity of the self or person
from both the identity of the bodily organism (the ‘man’ in Locke’s terms; we might
use ‘human animal’ today) and the identity of the thinking substance or soul. Locke
posited three different types of identity: that of objects, that of organisms (including
humans), and that of selves or persons, each with its own, very different, persistence
conditions. Objects, for Locke, are essentially collections of specific particles of
matter, which leads him to the rather counterintuitive result that a pile of sand is
no longer the same pile if a single grain is removed or replaced.1 An animal, by
contrast, has its ontological essence in its status as a ‘living organized body’, and the
1
Locke 1975, pp.329–30. For a critique of Locke’s metaphysics of objects, see Ayers 1991, pp.207–15.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
persistence of its identity therefore depends upon the continuance of its organic
function.2 Unlike inanimate objects, which cease to exist with even the slightest
change in their physical composition, the identity of an organism can persist through
radical alterations in the particles that comprise the body. A tiny acorn can become a
mighty oak, through massive changes in its composition (and therefore innumerable
changes of object-identity) and yet still be the same organism.3 So humans qua
animals can remain the same organism despite developing from a foetus into a
full-sized adult (and despite the body’s continual turnover of cells, which Locke
anticipates,4 as well as organ transplants).
Yet for Locke, persons or selves have a third type of identity, one that is neither
dependent upon nor reducible to object-identity or organism-identity. A person,
understood as ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can
consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and place’ has as its
identity conditions sameness of consciousness across time: ‘as far as this consciousness
can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity
of that Person’.5 So a ‘man’ or human animal will persist as long as its metabolism
persists, but the self is something whose persistence depends upon the capacity of
consciousness to be extended to past events. The effect of positing these separate
identity conditions for humans and selves is not trivial: it calls into question the
assumption that each human automatically has a one-to-one, isomorphic relation-
ship to one person. It’s entirely possible, for instance, for a human being to fail to be a
‘thinking intelligent Being, that has Reason and Reflection’ and to therefore fail to be
a person—an observation that accords with the sense in which we might say that
embryos or patients in permanent vegetative states are human but no longer persons.
Equally, Locke explicitly raises the possibility of nonhuman persons: an intelligent
parrot, such as the one in a report Locke relates, would count as a person but not a
human.6
The claim that person-identity is dependent upon sameness or extension of
consciousness (which, as we’ll discuss below, is notoriously unclear) brings both
reflexivity and the first-person perspective to the fore: ‘it is by the Consciousness it
has of its present Thoughts and Actions, that it is Self to it Self now, and so will be the
2
Note that this means Monty Python got it right: if organic function is essential to the identity of the
animal qua animal, then ‘This is an ex-parrot’ is more correct than ‘This is a dead parrot’.
3
Locke 1975, pp.330–3. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that animalists essentially agree with Locke
about this, but disagree that the identity of persons is distinct from the identity of the animal. Rather,
‘person’ is a qualification of most human animals for most, but not all, of their lives. See e.g. Olson 1997,
2007.
4 5
Locke 1824, p.308. Locke 1975, p.335.
6
Locke 1975, p.333. Locke relates (p.333–4) Sir William Temple’s (1709, pp.49–50) charming—if
somewhat dubious—description of an intelligent Brazilian parrot’s meeting with John Maurice, Prince
of Nassau-Siegen. Today this point might be more commonly made with regard to higher primates who
can be taught to use language, although the remarkable linguistic and cognitive abilities apparently
displayed by some parrots (cf. Pepperberg 2002) suggest some parrots might indeed count as nonhuman
persons in the Lockean sense.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
same Self, as far as the same Consciousness can extend to Actions past, or to come.’7
This phrase ‘self to itself ’ already resonates with later descriptions of consciousness,
such as ‘being for-itself ’, as well as the picture offered by the Kierkegaardian
pseudonym Anti-Climacus of the self as a set of elements that becomes a self in
‘relating to itself ’. Indeed, the emphasis on consciousness also coheres strongly with
Anti-Climacus’ claim that ‘In general, consciousness, self-consciousness, is decisive
in relation to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness,
the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a
self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also’ (SUD, 29/SKS
11, 145).8 So for Anti-Climacus, consciousness and selfhood are either coterminous,
or consciousness is a necessary condition for selfhood—a claim that, at least super-
ficially, sounds very much like Locke’s vesting of the identity of the self in the
extension of consciousness. (On the other hand, Anti-Climacus’ scalar understand-
ing of consciousness marks an important difference from Locke, who, as we’ll see,
seems to develop an all-or-nothing account of identity that comes under challenge
from several different directions.)
Moreover, both Locke and Kierkegaard treat consciousness as intimately related to
concern. In the unfinished manuscript Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitan-
dum Est, Kierkegaard equates consciousness with ‘interestedness’ (interesserethed), a
term that captures a sense of self-referentiality built into intentional consciousness,
such that consciousness is always implicitly for the subject. Hence consciousness
points back (non-thetically) to an interested subject.9 Elsewhere, Kierkegaard speaks
of bekymring, ‘concern’, as a feature of thought that (as I’ve argued elsewhere)10 does
much the same work in his Upbuilding Discourses as interesse does in Johannes
Climacus.
For Locke, ‘concernment’ is also an essential index of selfhood that derives from
the nature of consciousness: ‘Self is that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible
or conscious of Pleasure and Pain, capable of Happiness or Misery, and so is
concern’d for it self, as far as that consciousness extends.’11 Indeed, at one point
Locke makes an appeal to common experience of the self precisely in terms of
concern: ‘This every intelligent Being, sensible of Happiness or Misery, must grant,
that there is something that is himself, that he is concerned for, and would have
happy.’12 It is on the basis of ‘a concern for Happiness the unavoidable concomitant
of consciousness’ that consciousness appropriates to itself past actions and becomes
7
Locke 1975, p.336.
8
It should be noted that in Kierkegaard’s most sustained discussion of consciousness, Johannes
Climacus differentiates consciousness (bevidsthed) from mere sentience or experience (Sandsning, Erfar-
ing) (JC 169/SKS 15, 56). On that basis Climacus makes the surprising claim that even human infants are
not, strictly speaking, conscious (JC, 168/SKS 15, 54).
9
I offer a much fuller treatment of this work’s discussion of consciousness in Stokes 2010a, pp.29–60.
10 11 12
Stokes 2010a, pp.147–59. Locke 1975, p.341. Locke 1975, p.345.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
‘concerned and accountable’ for them.13 Yet in describing concern as an ‘unavoidable

concomitant’ of consciousness Locke seems to resist simply equating consciousness
with concern, thereby leaving a conceptual gap that Kierkegaard, it might seem, does
not.14 For Locke, the phrasing suggests, consciousness is always accompanied by
concernment, but it is not the same thing as concernment.15 Consciousness is
identified fundamentally with feeling: the particles that make up our bodies are
‘vitally united’ to a ‘thinking conscious self, so that we feel when they are touch’d,
and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that happens to them’.16 Thus we
‘sympathize and [are] concerned’ for parts of our body because we are conscious of
what happens to them,17 and this makes even our little finger part of our self regarded
as that entity for whose happiness we are concerned.18 Yet while concern may be a
‘concomitant’ of consciousness, it is not coterminous with consciousness, and it may
not be as ‘unavoidable’ as Locke thinks. As we’ll see, the conceptual gap between
consciousness and concern opens up an important fissure in the experience of self,
one that Locke did not anticipate but to which Kierkegaard, who makes interest/
concern the telos of consciousness, offers an important solution.
The Memory Criterion

Traditionally, personal identity has been understood as a form of numerical identity,
a logical relationship which (unlike similarity) does not admit of degrees. An object
cannot be partly identical with itself; either a = a, or a 6¼ a. The law of the excluded
middle prohibits anything in between. It was not until the second half of the
twentieth century that philosophers seriously began to question whether personal
identity works in the same way: perhaps personal identity might simply be a matter
of being more or less strongly connected to a past person.19 Locke certainly doesn’t
entertain the possibility of identity being scalar. For Locke, identity just extends as far
13
Locke 1975, p.346.
14
Importantly, for Climacus, we can be disinterested, which would suggest that Kierkegaardian interest,
like Lockean concernment, can come apart from consciousness. However, for Climacus, interest is both a
description of consciousness and the telos that consciousness is to attain, and this makes consciousness
scalar: we are more conscious the more interested we are. A completely disinterested person—such as the
abstracted speculative philosophers Climacus attacks in Concluding Unscientific Postscript—might be
sentient, on Kierkegaard’s line, but he would not be conscious. In any case, as Kierkegaard uses the
term, completely disinterested individuals presumably never actually exist.
15
I’m grateful to Galen Strawson for this observation. Ayers makes a somewhat similar point in
defending a straightforward memory view of identity from more ethically focused readings of Locke
(such as that advanced here): ‘It is memory in a straightforward sense which for Locke both ties past actions
to the present and excites such moral concern as the acknowledgement of guilt. Consciousness is distinct
from conscience, and prior to it’ (Ayers 1991, p.267). Note however that for Strawson, there are things we
are concerned in that we may not actually be conscious of, and which on Strawson’s reading of Locke
therefore fall outside the bounds of our person; the ‘field of concernment’ is wider than the ‘field of
consciousness’ (Strawson 2011a, pp.24–9).
16 17 18
Locke 1975, p.336. Locke 1975, p.337. Locke 1975, p.341.
19
Parfit 1984, pp.219–43.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
as consciousness can be extended, such that I am as much the same self (insofar as we
can make sense of that expression at all, as for Locke there is no question of
quantification here) now as the self that had the most temporally distant experiences
to which I can extend my consciousness to: ‘Consciousness, as far as it ever can be
extended, should it be to Ages past, unites Existences and Actions, very remote in
Time, into the same Person, as well as it does the Existence and Actions of the
immediately preceding Moment.’20 Yet what might ‘extension of consciousness’
actually mean here?
The traditional answer is that Locke here offers a ‘memory criterion’ theory of
personal identity: personal identity holds across time by virtue of memory. At first
blush, this seems to be the obvious way to interpret claims that the subject extends
consciousness to past events by ‘repeat[ing] the Idea of any past action with the same
consciousness it had of it at first’.21 Thus was born a pervasive reading according to
which Locke offers a refreshingly novel but flawed picture of personal identity,
whereby I am the same self as the selves who had the experiences I can remember.
If that is what Locke is arguing, then his position is subject to a range of apparently
fatal objections—as a number of eighteenth-century commentators were only too
happy to point out.22
Not least among these is that, as Butler and Reid noted, memory taken as a
criterion of identity appears to be circular, because the very concept ‘memory’ already
assumes the co-identity of the subject of the original experience and the person
remembering it. On this understanding of memory I can only remember, rather than
imagine, things that happened to me, so to determine if I remember something
I must have already assumed identity with the self that had the past experience.23 (As
we’ll see in Chapter 3, this is in fact not the only way to differentiate memory from
mere imagination). Accordingly, if memory is taken as constitutive of identity, then
‘personal identity is confounded with the evidence which we have of our personal
identity’.24 Moreover, while Locke insists that temporal distance is no impediment to
identity holding between the present self and past selves, the memory criterion,
understood as a criterion of numerical identity, is susceptible to Reid’s infamous
transitivity objection. Reid presents us with three person-stages (as they would now
be known) which, according to our pretheoretical assumptions, are person-stages of a
single individual: a young boy who is thrashed for stealing fruit from an orchard; a
gallant young soldier who captures a flag in battle; and an old man who has been
promoted to the rank of General. The old General remembers capturing the flag in
battle, and the young soldier remembers being thrashed for stealing fruit—but the old
man no longer remembers the thrashing incident that occurred so many decades ago.
20 21
Locke 1975, p.340. Locke 1975, p.336.
22
Theil 2011 summarizes several such critiques.
23
Shoemaker 1975, p.120; also Parfit 1984, pp.219–23.
24
Reid 1790, p.398.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
In such a case a strict memory criterion would have the logically intolerable conse-
quence that x = y, y = z, but z 6¼ x; or as Reid puts it, ‘a man may be, and at the same
time not be, the person that did a particular action’.25
Attempts have been made to get around these problems and so rescue the memory
criterion. The notion of ‘quasi-memory’ or ‘q-memory’ (a mental event that resem-
bles a memory in all salient respects but does not involve any prima facie identity-
claims in the way normal memories do) has been advanced as a means of circum-
venting the circularity problem,26 while philosophers such as H. P. Grice tried to
defeat the transitivity objection by recasting the memory criterion in terms of an
interconnected chain of ‘temporary total states’, each state preserving some memor-
ies of the immediately preceding state27 (thus the General can be the same person as
the boy so long as he is linked by a chain of mental states containing overlapping
memory-traces that ultimately leads back to the boy). But Reid and Butler offer
another objection to Locke: we cannot make sense of the idea of a subject having the
same consciousness of a past event now as she had of it at the time without using
‘same’ in the sense of qualitative similarity rather than numerical identity—and mere
similarity doesn’t seem to secure the sort of numerical identity apparently necessary
to support most of our intuitions about why identity matters, such as survival.28 This
last objection would also seem to apply to other forms of psychological continuity
which neo-Lockeans have cited as identity conditions for persons, suggesting that
twentieth-century attempts to get around the transitivity and circularity problems
still don’t secure personal identity in any intuitively satisfactory sense. Perhaps the
best we can say for Locke is what J. David Velleman suggests: Locke gives a correct
account of how memory ‘recruits past selves for me, by putting them within reach of
subjectively reflexive thought’ but then mistakes this for a metaphysics of personal
identity.29 Indeed, J. L. Mackie complained in the mid 1970s that what Locke offers is
‘hardly a theory of personal identity at all, but might be better described as a theory of
action appropriation’.30
Yet as Marya Schechtman notes, accusing Locke of equating sameness-of-
consciousness with memory is too hasty. While it’s clear Locke sees memory as
centrally involved in identity-preserving extension of consciousness across time, it’s
notable that ‘he always talks about extension of consciousness and never about
memory connections’.31 Rather, it is an appropriation of such memories, not a merely
cognitive having of them, that is essential to the attainment of Lockean identity.32
Such appropriation is, as we saw above, crucially linked to self-regarding concern, yet
is not exactly the same as concernment. Locke is not wonderfully clear on this point,
25
Reid 1790, p.397.
26
On q-memory, see e.g. Shoemaker 1984, pp.19–45 and Parfit 1984, pp.220–6. For some critiques and
defences of the notion of q-memory, see Hamilton 1995; Garrett 1996; Collins 1997.
27 28 29
Grice 1975. Schechtman 1996, pp.53–4. Velleman 2006, p.193.
30 31
Mackie 1976, p.183. Schechtman 1996, p.107; see also 2005, esp. p.12.
32
Schechtman 1996 p.106; also 2006, pp.166–7.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
but one way to make sense of this appropriative element, without either collapsing
appropriation into concernment or ignoring appropriation altogether (as straight-
forward memory theories do), is to understand ‘extension of consciousness’ as
concernful remembering. What this might mean—and this is, I admit, a somewhat
speculative interpretation of Locke, one that builds over the lacunae in his account at
least as much as it uses what Locke did say—is that memory is exercised in a
particular way, whereby concern both directs the act of remembering thematically
and suffuses it affectively. To remember concernfully is both to experience our
memories as having a particular emotional cast to them, and to have what we
remember determined by some prior set of concerns.
And while these concerns aim at the ‘happiness’ of a ‘Self . . . which is sensible or
conscious of Pleasure and Pain’ and thus ‘capable of Happiness or Misery’, they are
not merely hedonistic. ‘Self ’ and ‘Person,’ which Locke tells us are co-referent terms
(corresponding roughly to a first-person and third-person perspective on the same
object, respectively), are fundamentally ethical concepts for Locke; person ‘is a
Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit’.33 Indeed, Locke’s entire
discussion of personal identity has an ethical motivation that his critics generally
failed to notice.34 Even his cobbler/prince body-swap thought-experiment (Locke’s
contribution to the stock of science fiction scenarios his followers are justly renowned
for) moves quickly into issues of accountability for past actions as central to the
assignation of identity.35 There are even passages where Locke seems to suggest that
it is not so much that moral responsibility rests upon identity, as that identity is itself
constituted in the process of assuming moral responsibility:36
This Personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by Conscious-
ness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions,
just upon the same Ground, and for the same Reason that it does the present.37
In such passages, it looks as though Locke violates, as Carole Rovane puts it, the
‘general presumption that once we get the metaphysics of the person straight, we
must then accept whatever ethical and moral consequences follow’.38 It’s worth
bearing in mind here Udo Theil’s warning that the more recent readings of Locke
which, in reaction against the earlier purely cognitive readings, ‘have emphasized the
practical aspect of Locke’s theory to such an extent that they ascribe to self-concern
and related moral and legal notions even a certain priority over consciousness in the
constitution of personal identity’ are in many ways as problematic as the extreme
cognitivist reading they reacted against.39 Nonetheless, if the account of concernful
remembering that I have offered here is correct, then we can understand passages like
33
Locke 1975, p.346. Strawson (2011a, p.22) gives a useful gloss on the term ‘Person’ in Locke as a ‘unit
of accountability’.
34 35 36
Allison 1966, p.43. Locke 1975, p.340. Rovane 1993, p.79.
37 38 39
Locke 1975, p.346. Rovane 1993, p.81. Theil 2011, pp.127–8.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
this one as claiming that ‘extension of consciousness’ is an active exercise of memory

that proceeds from a fundamental concern for oneself (particularly for one’s moral
imputability), rather than such concern responding to the deliverances of memory.
So this reading replaces the straightforward memory-criterion interpretation of
Locke, which holds that our egocentric concern arises on the basis of an identity
that is constituted by memory, with an interpretation whereby memory is used in an
active, complex mental operation that has as its goal the ultimate happiness (under-
stood as a function of its moral status) of the self. By remembering past events in a
certain way the subject appropriates those events to itself.40
Metaphysics, Concern, and Theological Pragmatism

Of course, as a metaphysical account of identity this fares no better than the memory
criterion. Moreover, if memories have to be concerned in order to be appropriated to
the self, there arises the possibility that some exercises of memory are not concerned
in this way; that is, that we might remember some events and fail to appropriate
them, which would amount to claiming that some events are remembered but are not
part of the person. As we’ll see more concretely in Chapter 5, this possibility of
remembering without appropriating (or, if you prefer, unconcerned remembering),
depends upon a fissure between cognitive awareness of identity and affective identi-
fication that Locke simply did not contemplate.41
But this failure to develop a viable metaphysics of identity may not be a problem
for Locke, because Locke simply may not have been playing the same game as his
successors. The received reading has Locke trying to give an account of the persist-
ence conditions of selves—which he takes to be constituted by consciousness, and so
which turns out to be a question about the diachronic continuity of experiencing
subjects. However, Galen Strawson has recently argued that in fact, Locke simply
takes the existence of continuing subjects of experience as a given, and then asks, first,
what makes such a subject a person (which, to reiterate, here means ‘a thinking
intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection’ and is a subject of moral imput-
ability), and second, how we determine the identity of a given person, that is, what
that person is ‘forensically’ responsible for and concerned in.42 Locke, on Strawson’s
reading, is doing something quite different from later neo-Lockeans, who take
40
David P. Behan makes a similar claim insofar as he distinguishes remembering and appropriating
in Locke, although it is not clear that Behan makes a strong distinction between ‘concerned conscious-
ness’ and consciousness per se (this may be why he sees Locke as having failed to accommodate the
possibility of ‘callous disavowal’ of our remembered actions, but doesn’t consider the possibility that we
might also fail to appropriate them in a far more passive, less self-conscious way that overt repudiation).
Behan 1979, pp.66, 74.
41
In the other direction, Locke simply assumes, as Don Garrett (2003, p.104) notes, that ‘The
appropriation of an earlier perception or action by the same consciousness in memory is psychologically
sufficient for an irresistible conviction that one is the same person who perceived or performed it.’
42
Strawson 2011a, p.11.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
themselves to be developing and improving the Lockean approach: ‘Locke’s account

of Personal identity begins where the neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity end.
It begins with the assumption of what they seek to give an account of: a diachron-
ically continuous subject of experience that qualifies as a Person,’43 where ‘person’ is
a term that picks out a locus of forensic responsibility.
What Locke is trying to do, on Strawson’s reading, is to give an account of what
any subject of experience (whatever its substantial realizer might turn out to be) is
responsible for at any given time, which turns out to be a function of consciousness
and concernment. A given subject of experience is responsible at time t1 for whatever
past experiences and actions it is then concerned in. At time t2 the same subject may
be concerned in a different set of actions and experiences—and will therefore be a
different person in the moral sense at t1 and t2 although remaining the same subject
and the same human animal. If this result seems counterintuitive, it needs to be
remembered here that ‘person’ is being used in a far more restrictive sense than neo-
Lockeans use the term, one that is principally concerned with forensic responsibility
at given points of time.
Or rather, as Joanna Forstrom claims, one given point in time: Judgement Day.
Discussions of personal identity in the seventeenth and at least the first half of the
eighteenth century largely revolved around questions of posthumous survival and the
Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection. For Forstrom, Locke’s account of personal
identity is a piece of metaphysics, but a metaphysics that is only concerned with the
state of affairs on the Day of Judgement:
Locke uses the appropriation of memory to explain why responsibility accrues to a particular
individual in the future, specifically after death. For Locke, an individual is responsible before
God for what he or she can appropriate on the Day of Judgment. Before that time, the same
man or thinking being might be different persons, that is, a consciousness connected to the
same thinking thing in union with the same organized body might appropriate to itself
different actions from the past.44
It’s been replied that Forstrom’s interpretation would leave Locke open to an
objection that can be traced back to Leibniz:45 presumably if God is going to restore
our memories to us on the Day of Judgement46 (rather than just letting us off the
hook for things we’ve forgotten about), God must have some sort of objective criteria
upon which to assign the ‘right’ memories to each subject. If, as Locke claims, the
goodness of God won’t allow such a ‘fatal error’47 as subjects remembering actions
43 44
Strawson 2011a, p.23. Forstrom 2010, p.122, my emphasis.
45
This objection is raised against Forstrom by both Weinberg 2010 and Strickland 2011. On Leibniz’
version, see Allison 1966. A version is also discussed by Winkler 1991, p.220, who notes antecedents in
Anthony Flew and J. L. Mackie.
46
As Theil (2011, p.255) notes, one of Locke’s early critics, Thomas Becconsal, explicitly endorses this
memory-restoration reading.
47
Locke 1975, p.338; ‘fatal’, as various commentators note, here means ‘connected to one’s ultimate
fate’.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
performed by someone else on the Day of Judgement and so being unjustly punished
for things they never did, then God must know who we ‘really’ are and what they
‘really’ did. That being the case, it’s not extension of consciousness that imputes
actions to our persons, despite what Locke says, but some other set of criteria
(possibly known only to God) that Locke doesn’t provide.
This objection, however, only has force insofar as Forstrom still thinks Locke is
trying to give a correct metaphysical account of our true identity. But Locke’s project
may be more modest in scope than this. Kenneth Winkler argues that Locke’s
‘allegiance to certain features of the lived or common-sense world’ makes him largely
immune to worries about certain metaphysical questions, such as that of the rela-
tionship between persons and their substantial realizers (i.e. whether thinking is
realized in material substances like brains or immaterial substances like souls).48
Locke emerges from certain passages in the Essay as ‘a metaphysician of common life,
or as an analyst of the lived world, a world bounded by our concern for happiness or
misery’ who ‘seeks a human philosophy, a philosophy adjusted to us’.49 Such
adjustment entails a certain pragmatism. For instance, Locke insists that our cer-
tainty that we aren’t dreaming and that the objects of our sensory experience really
do exist ‘is not only as great as our frame can attend to, but as our condition needs’.50
Likewise, according to Winkler, the idea that personal identity depends upon con-
sciousness may turn out to be false, in the way Leibniz’ objection suggests, and such a
proposal admittedly ‘drives a wedge between the real self and the self I take myself to
be’, but ‘the size and significance of the wedge depends upon the relationship between
consciousness (or consciousness as we know it) and whatever it is (at the moment
known only to God) that underlies it’.51
Raymond Martin and John Barresi take this realization to its logical conclusion:
Locke’s discussion of identity isn’t terribly concerned with ultimate metaphysics at
all, but with a metaphysics that’s good enough for practical purposes. Martin and
Barresi call Locke’s approach ‘theological pragmatism’: his primary concern with
identity is eschatological rather than metaphysical, and accordingly he offers an
account of identity that’s the maximally reasonable account available to us here
and now for the purposes of living with an eye to salvation. Whether it is the true
view of identity is something we will have to wait until the Day of Judgement to find
out; but whatever the true view of identity turns out to be, ‘we know it will be close
enough to maximally reasonable views that our view will have been an adequate basis
for conduct’.52
Indeed, Locke subordinates metaphysical issues to soteriological ones even before
the Essay. In a journal entry from February 1682 he claims that attempts to demon-
strate the immortality of the soul from the putative indestructibility of immaterial
48 49
Winkler 1991, p.217. Winkler 1991, p.219.
50 51
Locke 1975, p.634; Winkler 1991, p.219. Winkler 1991, p.222.
52
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
objects all fail to secure the continued consciousness and memory that any mean-
ingful conception of the afterlife would require; hence immortality is entirely
dependent upon ‘the will and good pleasure of the first author’.53 Likewise, in a
pre-Essay journal entry, Locke rejects the notion that identity could persist posthu-
mously without memory, simply because this would yield no sort of eternal life we
could care about:
If they say as some doe that the soule dureing a sound quiet sleep perceives and thinkes but
remembers it not, one may with as much certainty and evidence say that the beds post thinkes
and perceives to all the while but remembers it not for I aske whether dureing this profound
sleepe the soule has any sense of happynesse or misery, and if the soule should continue in that
state to eternity (with all that sense about it whereof it hath no consciousnesse noe memory)
whether there could be any such destinct states of heaven or hell as we suppose to belong to
soules after this life, and for which only we are concerned for and inquisitive after its
immortality and to this end I leave every man to answer to his owne self, viz if he should
continue to eternity in the same sound sleepe he has sometimes been in whether he would be
ever a jot more happy or miserable dureing that eternity then the bedstead he lay on.54
Even at this early stage, it seems an account of personal identity that can only yield an
afterlife we cannot extend our concern to is just thereby to be rejected. Here, at least,
the soteriological tail is wagging the metaphysical dog. A philosophy ‘adjusted to us’
must be adjusted to our hopes regarding happiness and misery, including—and for
Locke, principally—our ultimate, ‘fatal’ hopes.
Hence when Locke comes up against problems of moral imputability thrown up by
states like somnambulism and drunkenness, he is content to say that while human
law is right to punish those who plead that they do not remember their misdeeds
(because, quite simply, they might be lying), ‘in the great Day, wherein the Secrets of
all Hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to
answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his Doom, his Conscience
accusing or excusing him’.55 That looks suspiciously like a cheat, an ad hoc appeal to
the goodness of God used to buy himself out of a philosophical difficulty on the
cheap. Moreover, as we saw above, taken on its own it leaves open the prospect that
sinners will not be punished for the sins they’ve simply forgotten, a prospect William
James claims Locke’s critics regarded as ‘scandalous’56 and which Locke does not
clear up in his replies to accusations by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester,
that Locke’s theory was incompatible with the doctrine of resurrection.57
Locke eventually came to accept that such problems were trickier than he had first
allowed. For instance, in correspondence with Molyneaux, he had to concede that the
drunk is responsible for his actions (and thereby liable for punishment) in a way the
sleepwalker is not, even though both are equally unable to extend consciousness to
53
Ayers 1991, pp.254–5; the journal quote is reprinted in Locke 1936, p.123.
54 55 56
King 1884, p.129; cf. Forstrom 2010, p.13. Locke 1975, p.344. James 1950, p.349.
57
For Locke’s correspondence with Stillingfleet, see Locke 1824.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
their misdeeds.58 Yet such problems largely dissolve if Martin and Barresi’s theo-
logical pragmatist reading is correct, and Locke is simply trying to outline the best
account of identity available to us here and now, not the definitive, God’s-eye account
of what we are, which will only be available to us post-mortem.59 Locke’s discussion
of identity is, in Udo Theil’s terms, ‘essentially a subjectivist treatment of the issue
where our own concepts are crucial rather than the things themselves’.60 From that
perspective, memory matters not because it defines the boundaries of the self in an
ultimate sense, but because it is centrally involved in the ways in which we appro-
priate what appears to us to be included within ourselves. So when Locke declares
that if I remember seeing Noah’s flood then I am the same self as the self that saw the
flood,61 this is not a rather outlandish metaphysical statement (one that looks like a
reductio of Locke’s own position), but a declaration of how identity appears from the
inside, for living, morally engaged beings such as us. At the risk of using a rather
dangerous word here, Locke is at least in part developing a phenomenology of
personal identity rather than a metaphysics. Locke’s question, as commentators
such as David P. Behan have argued, seems to have been misinterpreted: ‘Locke’s
problem of personal identity was not a third-person problem of finding a relation—
memory—which would unite perceptions into a spiritual bundle but was rather a
first-person problem of how a moral man is self to himself over time.’62 And central
to that process is what Strawson terms a subject’s ‘field of morally-affectively-
concerned-from-the-inside givenness’63—a description that, as we’ll now see, con-
nects with Kierkegaard in interesting and suggestive ways.
Memory vs Recollection in Kierkegaard

My reading of Locke as endorsing ‘concernful remembering’ as appropriating past
events, or ‘extending consciousness’ to the past, involves a distinction between
memory per se, and an appropriative way of remembering. To apprehend a past
event in a way that counts as self-constituting (on a phenomenal if not metaphysical
level) is not simply to remember it, but to remember it in some appropriative or self-
concerned mode. There are of course many different types of memory, as captured in
contemporary psychology’s taxonomies of declarative (episodic and semantic) and
procedural memory. But Kierkegaard offers a distinction between memory (hukom-
melsen) and recollection (erindringen) that is remarkably useful in terms of trying to
flesh out this concept of concernful remembering.
58
Allison 1966, p.47. Helm 1981 disputes this, arguing that Locke didn’t, in fact, concede.
59
See also Theil 2011, p.133: ‘It is important to note that Locke’s reference to the Last Judgement is an
essential element of his theory: only by relating the question of moral responsibility and reward or
punishment to the Last Judgement can he avoid all those problems which would arise from his position
that consciousness-based personal identity alone is the foundation of just reward and punishment.’
60 61 62
Theil 2011, p.102. Locke 1975, p.341. Behan 1979, p.55.
63
Strawson 2011a, p.51.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
In Stages on Life’s Way, the pseudonym William Afham differentiates between the
verbs ‘to remember’ (at huske) and ‘to recollect’ (at erindre)—a distinction that
echoes both Plato and Aristotle.64 Memory, in Afham’s picture, is essentially a
mere deliverer of information, an ‘indiscriminate’ faculty that provides ‘a mass of
details’ (SLW, 14/SKS 6, 21) which do not necessarily have any inherent meaning or
interconnection. (As an extreme example, think of Borges’ short story ‘Funes the
Memorious’, about a man who, following a head injury, perceives and remembers
everything in phenomenal detail but at the cost of being unable to think anything.)65
In that regard Afham seems to regard remembering as a relatively passive process.
That has something right about it—certainly memories suddenly can, and frequently
do, pop into our head for no apparent reason and apropos of nothing in particular, in
a way that seems independent of our agency.66 The famous scene where Proust’s
narrator bites into a madeleine cake and is flooded with involuntary memory bears
quoting at length here:
At the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate,
I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. . . . Undoubtedly
what is fluttering this way deep inside me must be the image, the visual memory which is
attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me . . . And suddenly the memory appeared.
That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray
(because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good
morning to her in her bedroom, my Aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion
of tea or lime-blossom. . . . all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-
lilies on the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the
church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is assuming form and
substance, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.67
Not all involuntary memory is this detailed or vivid of course, but the passivity of
the experience is familiar enough. Moreover, some of our non-technical English
terms for memory seem more active than others: ‘I remember’ or ‘I’m reminded of ’
seem more like reports of something happening to the subject while ‘reminisce’ or
‘call to mind’ seem to refer more to willed actions. Arguably, at least, ‘I recollect’
belongs more to the active set of verbs (and it’s interesting in this context—though of
course far from conclusive—that Afham does not use another memory term that
Kierkegaard sometimes uses, mindes, which can only be used in the passive voice).
64
See SLW, 676 and SKS K6, 96.
65
‘With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, and Latin. I suspect, however, that he
was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the
teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence’ (Borges 2000, p.94).
66
On whether unbidden thoughts (including spontaneous memories) lack a sense of agency, see
Gallagher 2005, p.181 and de Haan and de Bruin 2010.
67
Proust 2003, pp.47–50.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
However, for Afham the difference between memory and recollection is not simply
that the former is involuntary and the latter is voluntary—for in fact, according to
Afham, memory can be used, more or less deliberately, to prevent recollection:
When memory is refreshed again and again, it enriches the soul with a mass of details that
distract recollection. Thus repentance is a recollection of guilt. From a purely psychological
point of view, I really believe that the police aid the criminal in not coming to repent. By
continually recounting and repeating his life experiences, the criminal becomes such a
memory expert at rattling off his life that the ideality of recollection is driven away. (SLW,
14/SKS 6, 21)68
So recollection and memory are two separate (if related) processes, both of which can
be willed, and one of which can be pursued to the detriment of the other. Yet memory
is ‘immediate and is assisted immediately’ while recollection can only be assisted
‘reflectively’ (SLW, 12/SKS 6, 20). Memory thus is more of an immediate response to
a stimulus, which can be aided in non-reflective ways: if you’re trying to remember
the name of the 39th president of the United States, and I say ‘Here’s a clue: rhymes
with “garter,” ’ the words ‘Jimmy Carter’ will spring into your head more or less
spontaneously.69 Recollection, on the other hand, can only be assisted by some sort of
reflective process (which, it should be noted, doesn’t rule out the occurrence of
unprompted, unassisted recollection). This reflective aspect to recollection maps
onto the first-order/second-order conceptual relationship that Afham posits between
memory and recollection: ‘Remembering,’ he tells us, ‘is only a vanishing condition.
Through memory, the experience presents itself to receive the consecration of
recollection’ (SLW, 9/SKS 6 17–18).
Memory, for Afham, provides raw material for recollection; the ‘mass of details’ it
brings forth into consciousness is somehow synthesized or arranged by recollection
in a way that gives it an ‘ideality’—and by virtue of this ideal goal, this synthetic
process is ‘strenuous and conscientious in a way completely different from indis-
criminate memory’ (SLW, 10/SKS 6, 18). Whereas memory has no internal principle
directing or organizing its reproduction of details (beyond whatever might be found
in an associationist psychology such as Hume’s), recollection organizes these details
in light of some higher principle of schematization. A useful analogy here (and
anticipating some of what we’ll discuss in Chapter 7) is that of writing a biography:
the biographer sifts through a mass of details and determines which are relevant
and how they are to be presented. Both the selection and the arrangement happen
68
Judge William makes a related statement later in Stages on Life’s Way: ‘there are cases of a man’s
becoming absent-minded because he has too much memory’ (SLW, 120/SKS 6, 113).
69
It may be that not all mnemonics work in such a clearly non-reflective and spontaneous way. When a
beginner guitar student can’t remember which note corresponds to a given string (in standard tuning) and
rattles off the ‘Easter Bunny gets drunk at Easter’ mnemonic, they might need to perform some limited
reflective process (‘the fifth string is the second-last string, the second-last word in the mnemonic was “at”,
which begins with “a”, so the fifth string is tuned to “a” ’).
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
according to some logos that the biography is meant to bring out: biographies are not
simply chronicles but instead seek to bring out meanings inherent in (but only
recoverable through the re-telling of) the raw material of a life. What we look to a
biography to furnish us with is, at least typically, a fuller understanding of the subject,
such that the details presented, and their mode of presentation, all contribute to
giving us a better grasp of who the subject is in the richest sense. Even Proust’s
narrator, once the taste of the madeleine has caused his spontaneous memory rush of
seemingly random details, still has to narrate his experiences, in a way that brings out
their essential meaning for him and his life. So when Afham tells us that many
memoirs have no doubt been written that are products of memory but contain no
recollection (SLW, 11/SKS 6, 19), and that these recollection-less memoirs would be
like ‘a notebook in which one scribbles anything that comes to mind’ (SLW, 11/SKS
6, 19), we understand what would be defective about them, and by extension, what
‘the consecration of recollection’ adds to memory. A mere chronicle of the ‘chatter’ of
events that lacks a coordinating reference to the person as its internal telos would
make a very poor biography—and, according to Afham, the same applies to auto-
biography and to autobiographical recollection.
Elsewhere Kierkegaard reiterates that recollection’s synthesis of the raw material
provided by memory also performs this editorial function of cutting out inessential
details to allow the essential meanings of others to emerge. In a letter to Bishop
Mynster in 1849, Kierkegaard speaks of ‘the quiet of my mind where “recollection”
completely hides all the particulars that “memory” now and then piece by piece has
transmitted to it’ (LD, 339–40/SKS 28, 361). And in his review of Two Ages he claims
that when we recollect some event that has a personal significance for us we often
forget many of the details (which is why—so he says—lovers often can’t give a good
description of what their beloved looks like in the early stages of their relationship);
conversely, external details devoid of such significance that are remembered ‘obtru-
sively make one unable to forget them because there is nothing to recollect’ (TA, 36/
SKS 8, 36). In Stages on Life’s Way Afham distinguishes between what can and
cannot be recollected in striking terms:
Only the essential can be recollected . . . The essential is conditioned not only by itself but also
by its relation to the person concerned. The person who has broken with the idea cannot act
essentially, can undertake nothing that is essential; the essential would then be to repent, which
is only the new ideality. (SLW, 12/SKS 6, 19–20)
Recollection, in Robert E. Wood’s phrase, ‘ripens’70 experience by bringing what is

essential in the past into the present71 (an understanding of recollection that, as
David Kangas points out, appears to owe much to Hegel).72 And what counts as
essential determined by a recollected state of affairs’ reflexive relationship to the
person doing the recollecting, a relationship that is lacking in the case of mere
70 71 72
Wood 2000, p.63. Wood 2000, p.66. Kangas 2007a, p.104.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
memory. As Peter Goldie puts it (in an explicit appropriation of the memory/

recollection distinction from Stages on Life’s Way), ‘an indifferent act of memory
of an incident in one’s past life is not sufficient for one to be able to recollect that
incident, and thus to have a narrative sense of self in respect of it’.73 The result is that
while memory concerns mere facts, and so ‘chatter[s] on and on in order to ape the
chattering nature of life’s content’, recollection is concerned with a specific task: ‘to
maintain for a person the essential continuity of life and assure him that his earthly
existence wants to remain uno tenore [uninterrupted], one breath, and expressible in
one breath’ (SLW, 10/SKS 6, 18). Recollection therefore differs from memory in that
it reflexively (not necessarily reflectively i.e. as an object of thematized reflection—
recall that Afham only says that recollection can only be assisted reflectively) refers
back to the recollecting self. In so doing, it ‘assures’ the subject that his life has
continuity—a claim that has a clear resonance with both Locke and neo-Lockean
versions of the memory criterion. However, just as (if Strawson’s reading is correct)
Locke himself does not regard memory per se as constitutive of the continuing
subject of experience (which he simply takes as given), Afham regards memory as
assuring the subject of his uninterrupted life on earth. The charge that Locke
confounded our evidence of the continuity of identity (memory) with what consti-
tutes that identity would not hold against Afham’s account of recollection, for Afham
is not claiming that memory is the metaphysical ground of that continuity. What is at
issue here is how a being of a particular type—a ‘man’ in Locke’s parlance, a
menneske or human being in Kierkegaard’s—attains a type of morally qualified
identity (‘person’ for Locke, ‘self ’ for Kierkegaard) through appropriative conscious-
ness. Memory is part of what constitutes the latter kind of identity, but the former is
simply assumed as given.
But when discussing Kierkegaard, we must be careful to distinguish between
Kierkegaard’s own views and those of his pseudonyms, who are not mere mouth-
pieces for Kierkegaard himself but spokesmen for a range of competing life-views.
And in that context we need to bear in mind that Afham’s account of memory is part
of an ‘aesthetic’ understanding of the role memory plays in life. That understanding
is also prosecuted by ‘A’, the young aesthete whose papers make up the first volume
of Either/Or. For A, life is ultimately a flight from the boredom that threatens to
engulf us at every moment. A is an aesthete, but he is no simple hedonist; rather he
approaches experience in a fairly careful, calculated way, designed to find and exploit
‘the interesting’ (det interessante) in every encounter and event. A recommends a
(relatively strenuous) system of ‘crop rotation’, in which the aesthete carefully
arranges and apportions their pleasures in such a way as to avoid the sorts of
commitment or stable continuity that might lead to boredom. The crop rotator
doesn’t just avoid the big commitments (marriage, career) but even the trivial
73
Goldie 2003, pp.302–3. See also Goldie 2012, pp.54–5, 70.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
commitment of watching a whole play or reading a whole book. He participates in

life, but in an ironic way, such that his involvement can be rescinded at any
moment—that is, at the first sign that things are becoming boring.
In this context, A recommends cultivating memory (and here he uses at erindre
and at huske more or less interchangeably, without the distinction that Afham
introduces) in such a way that the subject can remember or forget at will, as the
fight against boredom might demand at a given moment. Forgetting is a way of
shrugging off any involvement in life that might not be entirely on the aesthete’s own
terms. And such wilful forgetting requires keeping any essential meanings that what
is remembered may have for us at arm’s length:
But to forget is an art that must be practiced in advance. To be able to forget always depends
upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends upon how one experiences
actuality. The person who runs aground with the speed of hope will recollect in such a way
that he will be unable to forget. Thus nil admirari is the proper wisdom of life. No part of life
ought to have such decisive meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants
to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that
he can remember it at any moment. (EO, 1:293/SKS 2, 282)
Of course it may be difficult simply to forget some past event that is redolent with
uncomfortable meaning for the subject, but the aesthete has developed a strategy to
overcome this too: to remember something poetically is, in effect, a form of forget-
ting, for ‘When I remember poetically, my experience has already undergone the
change of having lost everything painful’ (EO, 1:293/SKS 2, 282). In the first section
of A’s papers, the ‘Diapsalmata’, A also claims that ‘nothing is more dangerous than
to recollect’ insofar as an aesthete’s poeticizing mode of recollection deprives all
temporal relationships of their interest for the recollector—yet this also means that,
for an aesthete, ‘recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has a
security that no actuality possesses’ (EO, 1:32/SKS 2, 41). At the other end of the
same volume we encounter Johannes the Seducer, an aesthete whose powers of
reflection have rendered his aesthetic enjoyment even more reified and recursive
than those of the crop rotator. The Seducer also finds that recollection is a means ‘not
only of conserving but also of augmenting’, giving a ‘double effect’ to the act of
recollection such that it involves both the pleasure of the recollected event and the
pleasure of recollection itself (EO, 1:343/SKS 2, 333). Like the crop rotator, the
seducer strives to ensure that every event is lived through in such a way that it can
be recollected afterwards in the maximally pleasing, maximally interesting way (EO,
1:390/SKS 2, 378).
But to experience the world in this way, in the state that George Connell has called
‘anticipatory recollection’,74 is to live at one step removed from direct experience, to
forsake the present in order to imaginatively adopt a future standpoint from which
74
Connell 2006, p.427; see also Stokes 2010b.
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
what is now present can be recollected. For the aesthete, recollection is simply
another technique for extracting pleasure from life while avoiding any sort of deeper
commitment or ethical engagement with the world. No wonder then that in his
admonitions to the young aesthete to change his ways, Judge William, Kierkegaard’s
spokesman for the ‘ethical’ sphere of existence, distinguishes between recollection ‘in
the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth’ and ‘the
earnest and faithful recollection of your conscience’ (EO, 2:16/SKS 3, 25).
Afham, despite his talk of the essential self-reflexivity of recollection that distin-
guishes it from the distracting chatter of memory, is himself among Kierkegaard’s
aesthetic pseudonyms. He too wishes to elevate recollection to something like an
aesthetic, escapist art, one that ‘conjures away the present’ (SLW 13/SKS 6, 21). Yet in
putting forward an understanding of recollection as linked to what is ‘essential’ in
memory, he nonetheless points in the direction of a normative form of memory, one
that is linked to the subjective apprehension of what we fundamentally are in our
totality.
Recollection and Soteriology

Afham considers recollection to be that which assures the recollector that his life is
‘uno tenore’, all of one voice—and this continuity, according to Afham, is a condition
for personal immortality:
The condition for man’s immortality is that life is uno tenore. Strangely enough, Jacobi is
the only one who, as far as I know, has commented on the terror in thinking oneself
immortal . . . However, as soon as one confuses memory and recollection, the thought is not
so terrible—in the first place because one is bold, manly and robust, and in the second place
because one is not thinking the thought at all. (SLW, 10–11/SKS 6, 18–19)
As we’ve seen, what distinguishes memory from recollection is that recollection

concerns itself with what is essential, and what is essential in the object of recol-
lection, according to Afham, is constituted by its relation to the self as the subject of
an eternal accounting: in the ‘bookkeeping’ of recollection, a person ‘draws on the
eternal’ which ‘regard[s] everyone as solvent’ (SLW, 11/SKS 6, 19). When we
remember an event, it stands in a merely accidental relation to the person remem-
bering it, whereas when we recollect it we apprehend its import for our putative
status as immortal beings. Indeed, to remember rather than recollect is to fail to
think the thought of immortality—which can here only mean that we fail to connect
what we remember to ourselves as immortal, and thereby (in the context of
Kierkegaard’s religious commitments at least) fail to consider its implications
for final judgement. Recollection, even for the aesthete Afham, has an irreducibly
soteriological dimension.
The link between memory/recollection and soteriology is, as we’ve seen above, an
important topic in the Lockean context, for soteriology ultimately motivates Locke’s
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
emphasis on extension-of-consciousness as the basis of identity. It’s not that memory

per se constitutes identity in a standard metaphysical sense, but that concernful
remembering tracks—to a degree of accuracy that appears to be at least pragmatically
acceptable—the identity of the self understood as the bearer of a certain soteriological
status. And in the same way, Kierkegaard regards recollection rather than memory
(or in looser terms, the correct use of memory) as referring back to the self qua
soteriological subject.
While Kierkegaard’s use of the verbs at erindre and at huske are not always so
scrupulously distinguished as they are in Stages on Life’s Way,75 the notion of
recollection as a privileged form of memory with an essentially soteriological mean-
ing runs throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Concluding Unscientific Postscript reiter-
ates the distinction between memory and recollection; the former is concerned with
inessential, accidental details, while the latter concerns the ‘eternal recollection’ of
guilt and its relation to salvation:
Thus every conception of guilt is lower that does not through an eternal recollecting join guilt
together with the relation to an eternal happiness but through memory joins it together with
something lower, something comparative (his own accidentality or others’), and allows
forgetfulness to come between the particularities of guilt. This makes life free and easy, as a
child’s life is, because a child has much memory (oriented outward) but no recollection, at
most the inwardness of the moment. (CUP, 1:540/SKS 7, 491)
Johannes Climacus tells us that the object of the recollection of one’s guilt is one’s
total guilt—the very status of being guilty, not guilty for this or that specific individual
deed (CUP, 1:529/SKS 7, 480–1). As Andrew Burgess puts it, ‘Directly before God
there can be no quantitative judgment of “more or less sinful,” or “more or less
righteous,” but only a qualitative judgment of total sinfulness and total righteous-
ness’.76 Yet for Climacus ‘it is this totality of guilt that ultimately makes it possible for
someone to be guilty or not-guilty in the particular’77 because ‘a totality-qualification
is never produced numerically’; instead, ‘The totality of guilt comes into existence for
the individual by joining his guilt, be it just one, be it utterly trivial, together with the
relation to an eternal happiness . . . The slightest guilt, even if the individual hence-
forth were an angel, when joined together with the relation to an eternal happiness is
sufficient, because the joining together yields the qualitative category’ (CUP, 1:529/
SKS 7, 481). In other words, everything that is recollected, even our most morally
praiseworthy actions, is recollected in the context of a concern for one’s status as
guilty overall. The self that is tracked in all moments of recollection is the subject of a
75
Not all uses of at erindre relate to episodic memory either—see e.g. TDIO 71–3/SKS 5, 442–4 on the
recollection of God.
76
Burgess 1999, pp.49–50.
77
As noted by Nordentoft 2008, p.170: ‘The total guilt is not only a guilt for individual actions
(although, be it noted, it is a guilt for this as well), but it is the precondition for such guilt in individual
matters.’
 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY
final overall judgement, a judgement of a totality, in which a single unrepented guilt

makes one guilty. Taking away this concern for the self as the subject of a total
judgement leaves us with, at most, a mereological conception of guilt which ‘remains
in childish categories that are on a level with the grades on a child’s report card, or it
becomes civil self-defense’ (CUP, 1:533/SKS 7, 484).78 The final comment there is
one of Kierkegaard’s many comparisons between human and divine justice: ‘human
justice sentences to life imprisonment only for the third offence, but eternity sen-
tences forever the very first time’ (CUP, 1:533/SKS 7, 485). Locke too sets up such a
contrast, comparing the imperfections of earthly justice, which sometimes punishes
offenders in ignorance of their true consciousness (due to drunkenness, somnambu-
lence, etc.) and justice in foro divina in which there will be no such imperfections and
each of us ‘shall receive his Doom, his Conscience accusing or excusing him’79 (as
we’ll see in Chapter 5, for Kierkegaard, nothing resembles the eternal less than
human forgetfulness (UDVS, 18/SKS 8, 133)).
The claim that only what is essential can be recollected also recurs elsewhere in
Kierkegaard. In his final months, he even makes the far more strident stipulation that
the only thing that can be recollected eternally—that is, in the context of final
judgement—is that one has suffered for the truth (TM, 298–300/SKS 13, 357–9).
And the claim that the distinction between memory and recollection distinguishes
good memoirs from bad also holds in this soteriological context. A more fulsome
memory might deliver a more detailed chronicle of events, but not necessarily a
better memoir, for having a particularly good episodic memory does not necessarily
make one any better at bringing out the essential meaning of the events. In a marginal
note made in a draft for Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard notes that this also applies
‘with respect to repentance or the actual recollection of guilt, which is very different
from remembering it. The moment a sin is committed, a person remembers every
detail, and yet it has a totally different meaning when many years later he recollects it
and does not remember it nearly so well’ (SLW, 520–1/Pap. V B 155 n.d., 1844). In
other words, it’s not recall of the details of some past event that brings out what is
essential in it, but its relevance for the recollector’s soteriological status. The con-
cernful import of the event does not derive from the detail in which it is recalled but
from its significance for the person recollecting insofar as they are concerned for their
78
See also CUP, 1:536/ SKS 7, 487: ‘The guilt-consciousness is what is decisive, and one guilt joined
together with the relation to an eternal happiness is sufficient, and yet it is true of guilt, more than of
anything else, that it sows itself. But the total guilt is what is decisive; compared with it, making oneself
guilty fourteen times is child’s play—this is also why childishness always keeps to the numerical. When,
however, the consciousness of the new guilt is in turn referred to the absolute consciousness of guilt, the
eternal recollecting of guilt is thereby preserved, in case the existing person should be on the point of
forgetting.’ An interesting counterpoint to Climacus here is Gabrielle Taylor (1985, p.89): ‘A person is
guilty if he has done something which constitutes breaking the law. His guilt is thus localized: given that he
has at one time broken one law it does not follow that he has also broken others, or that he will go on
breaking the law . . . Punishment is for what he has done and not for what he is.’
79
Locke 1975, p.344.
RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 
salvation—and that significance might be available even where recall of the details is
fairly hazy. That what I recollect features in the life for which I am finally answerable
is enough to make it a legitimate object of concern.
This discussion of memory and identity has already moved us beyond the meta-
physics of personal identity towards an account of what the putatively identity-tracking
features of memory are like from the inside—in effect, towards a phenomenology of
personal identity, one that, as I’ve intimated here, involves a robust soteriological
normativity. On the reading gestured to here—and to reiterate I don’t offer this as a
piece of definitive Locke exegesis—Locke is not offering a straightforward metaphysics
of psychological continuity via memory, but an account of how subjects appropriate
past and future actions to their present moral status. For both Locke and Kierkegaard,
the self that is constituted through this act of subjective appropriation is fundamentally
soteriologically qualified; its concern is ‘fatal’, concerned with ultimate happiness
(salighed for Kierkegaard, ‘happiness’ or ‘blessedness’) and misery.
Yet for Locke, this process seems to be more or less automatic: to remember a past
person-stage concernfully is to be the same person as that stage. Kierkegaard, by
contrast, offers us a more nuanced picture of memory, in which some forms of
memory manage to be appropriative in this way and others do not. Memory
provides a sort of perspectival access to past events, but it is in one’s concernful
relating of what one remembers to the thought of one’s salvation, the ‘consecration’
of recollection, that the identity-tracking features of memory come into play. In this
way, Kierkegaard seems to have something to offer to the Lockean account of
selfhood, and arguably to the neo-Lockean version as well: a description of how
and under what conditions extension of consciousness to the past and future makes
a subject ‘self to itself ’. Kierkegaard, it seems, stands ready to deepen our under-
standing of what makes memory (and anticipation) reflexive. And this connects his
work to a broader problem in the philosophy of memory and personal identity: what
differentiates the experience of having an episodic memory from the experience of
simply imagining some past event? This is a problem that has sparked considerable
discussion; and, as we’ll see, it’s one to which Kierkegaard offers a distinctive—and
uniquely challenging in its uncompromisingly normative character—answer. Before
we can consider Kierkegaard’s answer, however, we need to look in some depth at
the phenomenal property of contemporaneity that is central to it.
2
Contemporaneity
Contemporaneity and Memory

As noted in Chapter 1, the aesthetes that we encounter in Kierkegaard’s writings are
often concerned with, and indeed deeply interested in, the aesthetic possibilities and
limitations of memory and recollection. Among these aesthetes there is perhaps no
greater connoisseur of recollection than Johannes the Seducer, a man who has
expended considerable effort in developing a method for squeezing every last drop
of pleasure from an event—by ensuring, through careful planning, that the recollec-
tion of the event itself will be as pleasurable as possible (EO, 1:390/SKS 2, 378). For
Johannes, a properly planned aesthetic experience, such as a romantic or erotic
encounter, is a gift that keeps on giving well after the event has occurred. Yet in his
cold-blooded pursuit of the hapless Cordelia, even Johannes must concede that there
are limits to what he can conjure up in, and out of, memory:
It would be of real interest to me if it were possible to reproduce very accurately the conversations
I have with Cordelia. But I easily perceive that it is an impossibility, for even if I managed to
recollect every single word exchanged between us, it nevertheless is out of the question to
reproduce the element of contemporaneity, which actually is the nerve in conversation,
the surprise in the outburst, the passionateness, which is the life principle in conversation.
(EO, 1:399/SKS 2, 387)
Johannes seems to be a person with considerable powers of recall, and indeed his
diary suggests he has an uncommon eye—and memory—for details. Yet the Seducer
finds that even if he could ‘replay’ verbatim his conversations with Cordelia, his
experience of recollection would nonetheless lack a key element that was present in
the original experience. Something in direct experience is lacking in episodic mem-
ory. But what? Johannes’ even-if clause seems to rule out a lot of the things we would
normally associate with the notion of a deficient memory. Insofar as this element
would be missing even if Johannes could remember every word spoken, it cannot be
straightforwardly conceptual; it must, it seems, relate to a how of experience rather
than a what, some phenomenal feature that captures something essential to the
experience such that no recollection that leaves this element out can be regarded as
an accurate representation of the event. Yet equally it can’t simply be an emotional
feature of the experience, as presumably Johannes can relive those too; compare
the way actors sometimes use memories to produce certain emotions, or Richard
CONTEMPORANEITY 
Wollheim’s claim that the memory of accidentally driving into the German lines in
1944 generated in him the same sense of loss, terror, and resistance as the original
event.1 This emotional aspect of memory, which Wollheim calls the ‘cogency’ of a
memory, should be well within Johannes’ power to bring forth. Yet no matter how
vividly, precisely and cogently he manages to relive the experience, he still finds
something from the direct experience missing. There’s something about being there
that he just can’t recreate after the fact2—a phenomenal property of the experience
which he labels ‘contemporaneity’ (samtidighed).
Samtidighed (literally ‘same-time-ness’ and translatable as ‘contemporaneity’ or
‘simultaneity’ depending on context) is a term that recurs throughout Kierkegaard’s
signed and pseudonymous authorships with considerable persistence, right up until
the final confrontation with ‘Christendom’ in 1855, when he declares contemporan-
eity to be ‘the decisive point’ and ‘my life’s thought’3 (TM, 290/SKS 13, 348). It’s a
concept that found a degree of currency in the twentieth century, with Gadamer,4
Bonhoeffer,5 and (in a more critical vein) Guardini6 deploying their own under-
standings of Kierkegaardian contemporaneity in new philosophical and theological
contexts. Yet despite this—and in spite of Kierkegaard’s exhortation to his reader to
‘Pay sharp attention to this matter of contemporaneity!’ (TM, 290/SKS 13, 347)—the
critical literature on Kierkegaard has had relatively little to say about the topic until
fairly recently.7 To be fair, there are several reasons why this might be the case, such
as the term’s diffuse occurrence across various texts, and the difficulty of disentan-
gling putatively philosophical uses of samtidighed from more prosaic ones.
It’s also been objected that Kierkegaard gives no account of how such contem-
poraneity (in Kierkegaard’s central case, a latter-day believer’s contemporaneity
with the Jesus of the New Testament narratives) is actually possible. Mark C. Taylor
takes Kierkegaard to task for not providing an argument that ‘establishes the
possibility of “overleaping” the 1,800 years of Christian history’ and for not
appreciating the ‘processive nature of historical development’8 through which all
such engagement with narratives about the past are mediated. On this account,
Kierkegaard’s strident rejection of the Hegelian picture of history as the systematic
unfolding of the rational in time blinds him to the historically conditioned nature of
our understanding. Taylor accuses Kierkegaard of failing to recognise that ‘the
1
Wollheim 1989, p.106.
2
Even if others can recreate it—for as we’ll see, the failure to become contemporary in this way is a
function of Johannes’ aesthetic life-view, not any limitation in the faculty of memory per se.
3
It should be noted—as Kierkegaard rather curiously goes out of his way to remind the reader—that the
discourse on contemporaneity in Number 8 of The Moment was written two years earlier, in 1853.
4
Gadamer 1975, pp.112–13.
5
Bonhoeffer 1966, p.32. For a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s treatment of this topic, see Jenson 2005,
pp.143–60.
6
Guardini 1965. For a discussion of Guardini’s use of ‘contemporaneity’, see Šajda 2010.
7
In addition to the references discussed below, see also Rocca 2004; Welz 2007; Martens 2008.
8
Taylor 1975, p.358.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
moment of the incarnation is always filtered to the believer through the intervening
events of the historical process’, a history that includes theological and philosoph-
ical developments that determine the shape and structure of the believer’s under-
standing of the events of the scriptural narrative.9 If contemporaneity is understood
as a direct, historically unconditioned experience of the past, Kierkegaard’s ‘life’s
thought’ suddenly looks decidedly shaky. If Kierkegaardian contemporaneity is
defensible, it must therefore be shown in what contemporaneity consists and
upon which features of Kierkegaard’s account of experience it depends.
Analyses of what Kierkegaard means by contemporaneity have largely focussed on
contemporaneity on the level concrete action (the level emphasized in Kierkegaard’s
late discussions). There are, as we’ll see, important reasons for this. However, to show
whether, and if so how, such a contemporaneity is actually possible for Kierkegaard,
we need to explicate samtidighed on the phenomenal, experiential level, rather than
solely considering it as an ethical imperative to undertake specific types of action. The
operation of contemporaneity on this level, which is essentially the level on which
Gadamer’s later appropriation of the concept occurs, will be shown to have intriguing
and surprising implications for our understanding of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology
of religious experience. And as we’ll develop over the next three chapters, it also
stands as an important resource for use in discussions of reflexivity and diachronic
self-experience in personal identity theory.
Contemporaneity and Vision

The most sustained, and manifestly philosophical, treatment of samtidighed in the
Kierkegaardian corpus is to be found in Philosophical Fragments, written in the voice
of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. It is here, too, that we see the transition from
the prosaic meaning of ‘contemporaneity’ to a more philosophically interesting sense
that extends the concept beyond objective historical contemporaneity (i.e. co-
location at a given point in time) to something altogether more novel. Philosophical
Fragments is structured as an ostensibly hypothetical inquiry into whether ‘a histor-
ical point of departure [can] be given for an eternal consciousness’ (PF, 1/SKS 4, 213).
The discussion turns to the unique epistemic problems posed by the paradoxical
event of God appearing in time, and asks whether, in relation to an historical fact, a
person temporally co-present with such an historical event enjoys any advantage
over those temporally distant from the event. Such a person is a ‘contemporary’ of
Jesus in the mundane sense—the sense in which Kierkegaard is a contemporary of
the younger Meïr Goldschmidt and the older Hans Christian Andersen. For the sake
of clarity we will hereafter refer to this form of contemporaneity as ‘temporal
contemporaneity’ or ‘contemporaneityt’ for short.
9
Taylor 1975, p.358.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
Climacus considers whether there is an epistemic advantage to being such a

contemporaryt follower by virtue of their immediate (by which he here essentially
means sensory) access to the putatively historical events described in the New
Testament. At first blush, we might think, the answer would have to be ‘yes.’
Climacus too acknowledges that ‘it seems natural to regard as blessed the contem-
porary generation that saw and heard’ Jesus (PF, 66/SKS 4, 267), and proceeds to cash
out this supposed advantage in experiential terms. We are asked to imagine a
fabulous royal wedding feast held in the far-distant past, where the heightened
pleasure of every sense has been catered for. If all that we, in our historical era,
have available to us is a sketchy record of the event, then we are entitled, ‘humanly
speaking’, to ‘regard the contemporaries as fortunate—that is, those contemporaries
who saw and heard and touched, for otherwise what is the good of being contem-
porary?’ (PF, 66/SKS 4, 268). The implication here is that imaginative recreation of
historical events cannot adequately capture the magnificence of events in actuality;
only direct experience can provide access to this dimension of an occurrence. This is,
essentially, a claim about the limits of our imaginative faculties, a brute fact of human
psychology.
However, the ‘magnificence’ specific to the figure of the god-in-time is not
immediately perceptible. As the god10 has appeared in human guise, with no
objectively discernible traits of divinity (thus making the claim of his divinity an
object of either offence or faith), this epistemic advantage to contemporaneityt does
not hold. In a situation where the god cannot be recognized directly, ‘in regard to the
birth of the god’ the contemporaryt ‘will be in the very same situation as the follower
at second hand’ (PF, 59/SKS 4, 261) insofar as the contemporaryt’s relation to the fact
of this birth remains one of the possession of ‘merely historical’ knowledge. This will
hold for even the closest contemporaryt—one who goes to enormous lengths to
observe and document the god’s every move (PF, 59–60/SKS 4, 262) or even the
woman who gives birth to the god (PF, 59/SKS 4, 261). When a contemporaryt does
come to apprehend the divinity of the god, however, this is not because they move
from apprehending the historical fact before them to apprehending an eternal truth,
such as when, in Climacus’ example, we move from a consideration of Spinoza as an
historical person to a consideration of ‘Spinoza’, where we use the name as shorthand
for a body of teaching with claimed universal applicability (PF, 62/SKS 4, 264).
Rather, the object of the apprehension of the God-in-time is and remains a specific,
concrete, historical person, for ‘The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in
the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching’ (PF, 55/SKS 4, 258). As John
D. Glenn Jr notes, the god’s teaching is a sort of performative utterance, such that the
god enacts by his presence the love he speaks of11—and accordingly, the message and
the act of its delivery cannot be separated.
10
Climacus consistently refers to guden, ‘the god’ rather than using Gud as a proper name here.
11
Glenn 1994, p.238.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
Strictly speaking, by this point in the text Climacus has now made his case against
contemporaneityt. As the contemporaryt enjoys no epistemic advantage with respect
to one putative historical event, that is, the Incarnation, such a person’s privileged
status with respect to that event is fully revoked. Climacus could simply leave things
where an 1845 Journal entry leaves them: ‘Contemporaneity or noncontemporaneity
makes no essential difference; a historical (and for the contemporary it certainly is
the historical, that the god exists, that is, exists by having come into existence) point
of departure for an eternal decision is and remains a leap’ (Pap. IV B 35:30, n.d.,
1845). Yet instead, having apparently dismissed contemporaneity as a factor in the
acquisition of faith, Climacus now inverts the dialectic by declaring a new sense of
contemporaneity that is essential to faith. As Patrick Sheil puts it, Climacus here
indulges in a ‘Kierkegaardian ploy; he attracts our interest with what we think is
important, questions that importance, but uses the word that is left standing as the
name for something unexpected; perhaps the opposite of what we expected.’12
Climacus asks, in the torturous language characteristic of a new concept emerging
from an existing one:
But what does it mean to say that one can be contemporary without, however, being
contemporary, consequently that one can be contemporary and yet, although using this
advantage (in the sense of immediacy) be a noncontemporary—what else does this mean
except that one simply cannot be immediately contemporary with a teacher and event of that
sort, so that the real contemporary is not that by virtue of immediate contemporaneity but by
virtue of something else. (PF, 67/SKS 4, 268)
Such a new form of contemporaneity does not depend upon direct sensory access—
something of no avail in this situation anyway—and is therefore open to followers at
all times, not merely the contemporaryt (PF, 67/SKS 4, 268). The effect of introducing
this new sense of contemporaneity is to dissolve the distinction between ‘the con-
temporary follower’ and ‘the follower at second hand’; as Taylor puts it ‘all persons
are equidistant from the event [of the incarnation]; all are contemporaries of the
God-Man’.13 The merely accidental fact of the point in history at which such
followers live has no bearing on their status as contemporaries of Christ.14
In what, phenomenologically speaking, does this contemporaneity consist? Cli-
macus, like Kierkegaard generally, couches his description of the contemporary
believer in language which emphasises the visual aspects of the experience of
contemporaneity:
There is not and cannot be any question of a follower at second hand, for the believer (and only
he, after all, is a follower) continually has the autopsy of faith [Troens Autopsi]; he does not see
with the eyes of others and sees only the same as every believer sees—with the eyes of faith. (PF,
102/SKS 4, 299)
12 13
Sheil 2010, p.9. Taylor 1975, p.303.
14
With the obvious proviso that they must at least live at some point from roughly 30CE onwards.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
‘Autopsy’ here is a striking expression, somewhat jarring to modern ears. In their

translation, Howard and Edna Hong note that autopsy (from the Greek autos +
optos) literally means ‘the personal act of seeing’ (PF, 296 n.39). Gregor Malantschuk
too equates the ‘autopsy of faith’ with ‘personal inspection’ or ‘witnessing’ (selvsyn,
literally ‘self-seeing’, a term Climacus curiously does not appear to use in this
context).15 The noncontemporaryt is ‘not an eyewitness (in the sense of immediacy)’,
but nonetheless he gets to ‘see for himself ’ in that ‘as a believer he is contemporary in
the autopsy of faith’ (PF, 70/SKS 4, 270). It is by means of this autopsy, this personal
seeing, that ‘every noncontemporary (in the sense of immediacy) is in turn a
contemporary’ (PF, 70/SKS 4, 271).
This visual language is rather surprising, if not bewildering, given that Climacus
has been at such pains to deny the direct recognizability of the God-Man. Spirit,
Kierkegaard tells us elsewhere, is precisely the invisible (UDVS, 192/SKS 8, 289), and
the god cannot be recognized as such based on his appearance.16 Climacus too avers
that ‘the god . . . cannot be envisioned’ (PF, 63/SKS 4, 265), and hence attempts to
artificially prolong contemporaneityt through ‘immortalizing’ the god in detailed
portraits (again, note the specifically visual example offered here) will not thereby
make those who look upon such portraits into followers (PF, 63/SKS 4, 265). This
seems to cut off all forms of visual (or at least quasi-sensory) engagement with the
historical god-in-time available to the latter follower, whether in the form of mem-
ories or merely imaginative representation. However, Climacus does actually allow
for a genuinely contemporaneous imaginative experience of the god via memory—
but, in an important sense, cut off from the usual grounds of veridicality of memory:
When the teacher is dead and departed from the follower, memory presumably will repro-
duce the form, but he does not believe because of that but because he received the condition
from the teacher; therefore, in recollection’s trustworthy picture, he again sees the god. (PF,
65/SKS 4, 267).
Note that here the resources of the immanently human faculty of memory are still in
play, but because the follower has received the capacity to ‘recognize’ the god directly
from the god, memory’s normally incomplete authority is supplanted by a transcend-
ent warrant to regard the imagined representation as being a truthful representation
of the god. In a limited sense we are familiar with such external authorities under-
writing our sense that we have remembered something correctly, as when physical
evidence or the testimony of others backs up our memory claims. For the believer,
though, the transcendent authority provided by ‘the condition’ provides a certainty
which empirical evidence, as Climacus tells us in many places, can only ever
15
Malantschuk 1993, p.138.
16
See also UDVS, 317/SKS 8, 409: ‘How nobly faithful is the courtier who follows an overthrown
emperor into exile and, when his imperial majesty is dressed in rags, still addresses him with the same
submissiveness and homage as he did once in the halls of the palace and says: Your Majesty—because he
did not cringingly recognise the emperor by the purple and therefore can now nobly recognise him in rags.’
 CONTEMPORANEITY
approximate. In fact it would not matter whether the follower’s memory was
inaccurate, or indeed was not a memory at all, but rather something like the
‘quasi-memory’ category we touched on in Chapter 1.
This is so because the god’s appearance is essentially immaterial to his being the
god (except insofar as his ‘incognito’, his unrecognizability, is essential to the
believer’s acceptance of him as God being made by virtue of faith). Hence while
the appearance is important to the degree that it is ‘what the follower has seen and
touched with his hands’, it is ‘not of such importance that he would cease to be a
believer’ if he saw the god one day and failed to recognize him (PF, 65/SKS 4, 266).
Yet significantly, the engagement with the god still occurs on the visual level, a
mimetic recreation of the experience of being in the physical presence of the god.
Here we have a description of an imaginative apprehension of the god, decidedly
visual in character, but where what is essential to the experience is not contained on
the level of representational content, but of the meaning that suffuses that content for
the believer.
Contemporaneity as Religious Experience?

Contemporaneity, then, on an experiential level, plays out as an experience of
‘seeing-for-oneself ’, in a way that transcends the resources of immediate perception,
yet nonetheless seems to be somehow perceptual in character. We become contem-
porary with an historical person via an apprehension of a specific kind, one that goes
beyond our normal epistemological resources. At this point it seems germane to ask
if this Climacan contemporaneity is some variety of religious experience. Certainly,
Kierkegaard’s use of contemporaneity throughout his authorship is explicitly Chris-
tian in character, seeking as it does to ‘cut away the posthistorical’ (Pap. VII2
B 241:4), and ‘exclude what has been called the later-historical’ (CUP, 1:96/SKS 7,
95) in order to bring the modern believer into some sort of direct engagement with
the Jesus depicted in the New Testament.
However, if we attempt to analyse contemporaneity-with-Christ on an experien-
tial level, there would seem to be two possible interpretations: one which sees such
contemporaneity as possible only with Christ, and one which sees contemporaneity
as an experience at least theoretically possible with other intentional objects as
well.17 In other words, we have a dichotomy between a form of essentially religious
experience and a form of experience that can be directed towards a religious object.
The question becomes whether contemporaneity with an historical fact is an
17
Stan 2014, p.61 notes that ‘The generic context and theoretical substratum of contemporaneity is
overwhelmingly Christological’ but adds that this is not the only sense of samtidighed to be found in
Kierkegaard’s writings.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
extramundane experience, or a specific type of experience that here happens to be

directed towards an extramundane object.18
In his discussion of Fragments, C. Stephen Evans articulates something very close
to the first view, that contemporaneity is a form of extramundane religious experi-
ence. Evans argues that ‘most Christians, at least of those who have made a conscious
choice, do trace their conversion to something that could be described as an encoun-
ter with Jesus Christ’19 and illustrates his point with the conversion narrative of
Anthony Bloom. Bloom’s description of becoming aware, while reading the New
Testament, of a presence on the other side of his desk, a presence he felt absolutely
certain to be Jesus, clearly belongs to an order of anomalous experience utterly
different to our usual cognitive engagement with the world. This leaves problemat-
ically open the question of whether such experiences have a merely physiological
origin (‘presences’, after all, are associated with supposed hauntings and certain types
of psychedelic drug, as well as religious experiences), but this need not detain us. Of
more concern is that Climacus’ account doesn’t seem to contain any clear indication
that the follower’s encounter with Jesus is an experience of this type. This could be a
function of the ostensibly hypothetical character of the argument in Philosophical
Fragments, but evidence from elsewhere in Kierkegaard’s writings suggests that the
form of cognition needed to achieve contemporaneity doesn’t belong to such an
anomalous register of human experience. For a noncontemporaryt follower, such an
encounter with Christ is mediated through the record of Scripture, and Kierkegaard’s
detailed discussion in For Self-Examination of the appropriate mode of receiving
Scripture, explicated through the metaphor of the ‘mirror of the Word’,20 contains
nothing corresponding to the sort of religious experience Bloom describes. Instead,
Kierkegaard develops an account of a self-reflexive mode of vision in which one
becomes ‘alone with’ Scripture (FSE, 31/SKS 13, 58) in which the reader understands
Scripture as speaking to them directly.
Nonetheless, Evans does indirectly highlight an element of contemporaneity
crucial to understanding the psychological dimensions of the experience: that of
co-presence with a historical fact. This is attested to elsewhere in Kierkegaard’s
writings on contemporaneity, specifically in Anti-Climacus’ discussion of the term
in Practice in Christianity, where faith secures the presence of Jesus on earth with the
believer:
No, his presence here on earth never becomes a thing of the past, thus does not become more
and more distant—that is, if faith is at all to be found upon the earth; if not, well, in that very
instant it is a very long time since he lived. (PC, 9/SKS 12, 17)
18
Michelle Kosch’s discussion of revelation in the Fragments seems to come down on the former side;
Kosch 2006, p.180.
19
Evans 1992, p.114.
20
For a discussion of the role of this important metaphor in Kierkegaard’s moral psychology, see Stokes
2010a, Ch. 7.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
The connection between presence—in this case the presence of Jesus on earth
centuries after his death21—and particular modes of cognition is a theme that occurs
elsewhere in Kierkegaard. In particular, Kierkegaard stresses in the discourse ‘At a
Graveside’ that earnest contemplation of our own death brings about a form of co-
presence with death such that, contra the claims of Epicurus that we can never be
where our death is, ‘you are and death also is’ (TDIO, 75/SKS 5: 446).22 It seems,
then, that certain modes of thought have the power to negate the historical distance
between contemplator and contemplated, making them, in some sense, actually
present with the object in a way even stronger than contemporaneityt. It is this
sense of co-presence that Gadamer exports from the theological domain to that of art,
whereby contemporaneity ‘constitutes the nature of being present; it means that a
single thing that presents itself to us achieves in its presentation full presentness,
however remote its origin may be’.23
It would be tempting to dismiss such claimed co-presence as merely metaphorical,
a rhetorical exaggeration meant to instil ‘upbuilding’ urgency in the reader. Sheil
seems to regard it as such, taking contemporaneity to be a matter of ‘acting as if you
were contemporary with Christ’.24 Yet Kierkegaard seems to want us to take this
claimed co-presence seriously; and it’s worth noting that Gadamer takes it seriously
too, telling us that contemporaneity is ‘a formulation of the believer’s task of so
totally combining one’s own presence and the redeeming act of Christ, that the latter
is experienced as something present (not as something in the past) and is taken
seriously as such’.25 This appeal to ‘experience-as’ takes us beyond the metaphorical
and elevates contemporaneity to the same status, on the phenomenal level, as direct
experience. (Bonhoeffer, too, insists that the ‘presence’ of Christ is not merely
metaphorical, though here presence is taken to refer more to the presence of Jesus
in the body of the church than to any imaginatively mediated experience).26
Imaginative Distance
If contemporaneity is inextricably linked with a notion of ‘presence’, then we would
expect the state against which it is offered as a corrective to be ‘absence’, which would
here equate to the non-existence or non-divinity of the historical Jesus. But here as
throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard’s target is not declared atheism but rather
what he sees as his era’s dominant mode of spiritless, shallow religious conviction, in
which Christ is not made absent, but is rather kept at a distance. Distance is an
important recurring motif in Kierkegaard’s writings, and we can distinguish two
21
It is interesting in this context that, as Evans notes, Climacus says very little about the resurrection.
Evans 1992, p.115.
22
For a fuller discussion of the topic of co-presence with death in Kierkegaard, see Stokes 2006.
23 24 25
Gadamer 1975, p.112. Sheil 2010, p.3. Gadamer 1975, p.113.
26
Jenson 2005, p.155.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
distinct, but closely related, forms of such distance in his work. (Some readings seem
to run the two forms of distance together without doing much exegetical damage, but
they are nonetheless worth treating distinctly.)27 Each of these forms of imaginative
distance has its own use for the ‘spiritless’ person who nonetheless wishes to regard
themselves as a believer. One of these uses is ostensibly directed towards securing
faith, but both are ultimately deployed as strategies for evading the moral demand
encapsulated in Scriptural narrative.
The first form involves directing attention towards the history that comes between
us and the past. In the Book on Adler, the pseudonym Petrus Minor gives his voice to
Fragments’ aim of ‘cut[ting] away the posthistorical’ (Pap. VII2 B 241:4) such that
‘the person who becomes a Christian in 1846 becomes that by being contemporary
with Christianity’s entry into the world in the same sense as the contemporaries were
eighteen hundred years ago’ (BA, 38/SKS 15, 158). If attention is focussed on the
intervening history, however, the central religious theses of Christianity become
‘Christianly probable’ (BA, 39/ SKS 15, 159) simply on the basis of its endurance.
Here we focus not on the object of belief but on that belief ’s longevity as probabilistic
evidence for its truth; while this durability supposedly strengthens our grounds for
belief, it directs our attention away from the content of the belief itself. Moreover,
probabilistic reasoning always leaves the door to scepticism at least theoretically
open. By importing the historical narrative into a quantitative, inductive economy of
probability, the contemplator maintains a distance analogous to physical distance
with the narrative, by preserving a sliver of doubt that allows her to evade the
qualitative transition into belief.
It’s important to note here that the subsequent history does nothing to change the
putatively factual content of the past described in Scripture and imaginatively
reconstructed. While events can indeed exert a type of retroactive power over the
past by ‘making true’ descriptions of past events (as when the deposition of Richard II
made the long-dead Edward III the second-last Plantagenet king of England), this is
not being claimed for the distance created by the later-historical. The scriptural
narrative itself is unchanged by the support it receives from subsequent events, just
as when evidence is uncovered exonerating a wrongfully convicted person, the fact of
their innocence is not thereby instantiated, merely discovered. Hence when we
encounter scriptural narratives, the ‘picture’ we construct will be qualitatively iden-
tical whether we then focus on the intervening history or not. The relation of distance
imposes itself upon the imaginative content of the experience, transfiguring it not in
its content, but in its relation to the contemplator: it becomes a matter of quantitative
probability rather than qualitative decision.
27
Taylor provides an example: ‘With the passing of years and the expansion of Christendom, the
tension present in the Absolute Paradox gradually relaxes and the incongruity of the Incarnation event is
“naturalized.” As a result of widespread acceptance, the God-Man becomes inoffensive and the transition
from nonbelief to belief seems to be facilitated’. Taylor 1980, pp.135–6.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
The second type of distance is apprehended in an imaginative comprehension of

the qualitative alterity of the temporally distant world—think of L. P. Hartley’s
famous epigram, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’28
Here too, imaginative distance transfigures the content of contemplation. But instead
of the distance created by the distraction of an intervening history, the distance here
is provided by a sense of the past being radically different from the present, in a way
that disconnects it from the order of imperatives which impact upon us in our own
historical era. Kierkegaard here appeals to what he seems to take as another brute fact
of empirical psychology: it is easier to believe that the extraordinary happened long
ago (e.g. BA, 46–7/SKS 15, 168–9). Anti-Climacus makes the same point in Practice
in Christianity:
And let us not forget: in the situation of contemporaneity signs and wonders have an entirely
different elasticity to repel and to attract than this tame, this, as warmed up by the preachers,
even tamer bit about signs and wonders eighteen hundred years ago. (PC, 41/SKS 12, 54)
This is a rather curious psychological observation, but there’s something to it.

Imagined in distant times and locales, the extraordinary can lose at least some of
its power to compel awe and be easier to accept. At first glance, this looks like a sheer
fact about the psychological resources available to us: extraordinary events situated in
an exotic or alien context seem less jarringly incongruous us than ones occurring in
our familiar, everyday environment. Yet Anti-Climacus implies that imaginative
distance is used to defer the moment of choice that such extramundane events
demand, and thereby implies that it is within our power to transcend this distance:
In the situation of contemporaneity signs and wonders are something exasperatingly annoying,
something that in a very embarrassing way almost forces one to have an opinion, something
that, if one does not happen to feel like believing, can be a burdensome thing to be contem-
porary with, especially since it makes existence far too strenuous, especially the more intelli-
gent, developed, and cultured one is. (PC, 41/SKS 12, 54–5).
The point here is that I can use imaginative distance to keep at bay the need to take
up a position on the meaning of past events, especially where these have implications
for how I should live now. It allows us to talk about claimed extraordinary events
from the past while still, in a larger sense, ignoring them. As a rational, educated
person living in an age of science, I can simply suspend judgement on the question of
whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea by not bothering to answer it; the UFO
hovering over my front lawn right now, however, compels me to take up an epistemic
position. I can’t evade the question ‘is this really happening?’ in such a case of
immediate presence. Moreover, I can ‘delude [my]self into thinking that [I] believe’
(PC, 41/SKS 12, 55) in Moses’ feats, simply by not honestly confronting the full
content of that belief, the enormity of the claims involved. Through avoiding the
28
Hartley 2002, p.17.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
extraordinary character of narrated past events we can accept them as a matter of

course, which, Petrus Minor tells us, ‘becomes identical with leaving it undecided’
(BA, 41/SKS 15, 161). Such evasion, it seems, is not possible when the ‘wondrous’ object
is directly present to our senses. Conversely, we ‘lap up’ the extraordinary ‘the more
easily the longer ago it was’ (BA, 46/SKS 15, 168). Climacus, too, notes the effect of
temporal distance upon our epistemic capacities, claiming that ‘Distance in time
prompts a mental illusion just as distance in space prompts a sensory illusion’ whereby
the contingency of past events comes to be seen retrospectively as having been necessary,
‘just as the person at a distance sees something square as round’ (PF, 79/SKS 4, 279).
Kierkegaard quite possibly has Johan Ludvig Heiberg in mind here. Heiberg had
insisted that religious believers demand proof in the form of revelation ‘in the crass
belief that the sensible phenomenon can teach them what science cannot’.29 They are
wrong, Heiberg thinks, to look to revelation in this way, for ‘If people in our time do
not believe in reason, they believe even less in the senses. And even if miracle after
miracle took place, our scepticism would soon finish them off.’30 Climacus would
agree about the scepticism, but not that the answer is a turn to philosophy to
overcome it. The testimony of our senses cannot get us to faith, but neither can
speculative thought, either.
As Michelle Kosch notes, Hume’s discussion of miracles (which Kierkegaard knew
of through his reading of Hamann) lurks unacknowledged in the background of
Fragments, where Climacus expands Hume’s point about testimony as the basis of
belief for miracles to cover the direct experience of anomalous events.31 The young
Kierkegaard was quite taken by Hamann’s assertion that when Hume caustically
declares that anyone who ‘is moved by Faith to assent to [Christianity], is conscious
of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of
understanding’,32 he is, in fact, simply asserting how, for a Christian, it really is
(KJN, 1:26/SKS 17, 34). Kosch puts it thus:
Kierkegaard found Hume’s conclusion—that the only way for a believer to explain his belief is
as a sort of miracle—to conform to the phenomenological facts of religious belief: not only the
fact that it is rationally unjustified, but also the privacy and (human) incommunicability of its
grounds, and the moral tenuousness of the situation of a believer who has every reason to think
the condition a delusion.33
To this we can add another aspect in which the fideist Climacus and the atheist
Hume are in unlikely agreement: their shared rejection of an ‘age of miracles’ that is
somehow separate from (and thus not subject to the same epistemic conditions as)
our own era. One of the key advances of Enlightenment thought is its insistence on
what Charles Taylor has called ‘homogenized time’, brought about by a ‘refusal to
consider certain “legendary” events as taking place in some higher time, or on some
29 30 31
Heiberg 2005, p.97. Heiberg 2005, p.97. Kosch 2006, pp.185–6.
32 33
Hume 1985, p.55. Kosch 2006, p.186.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
higher plane of being, that of, say, Gods or heroes’.34 The legendary past has a
mythological aura to it, such that, as Hume remarks, ‘When we peruse the first
histories of all nations, we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new
world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its
operations in a different manner, from what it does at present.’35 But as we get closer
to ‘the enlightened ages’ this aura of mystification lifts, and from this vantage point
we can see that we were wrong to view the legendary past as somehow nomologically
and epistemically different. Now, for the first time, legendary time is no longer to be
quarantined from the investigative techniques of history, philology, and biblical
hermeneutics. Time becomes homogenized because we come to understand ourselves
as occupying the same realm of temporality as those in the distant past, including the
biblical past: there is no longer sacred and profane history, there is, simply, history.
And once the past has been made thus continuous with the present, and we are freed to
apply our usual evidentiary standards to all points in time, reports of ancient wonders
suddenly appear deeply dubious: ‘It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the
perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our
days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.’36
We might think Climacus (or certainly Kierkegaard, at any rate) would have little
truck with Hume’s view. But this is another point at which Kierkegaard can reply to
Hume, with Hamann, ‘yes, that’s just how it is’ (KJN, 1:26/SKS 17, 34). Hume argues,
in effect, that it’s infinitely harder to believe in miracles once one sees time as
homogenized: the epistemic standards that legendary time had previously been
spared now come into full operation, and what had appeared merely surprising
and wonderful (which, being ‘agreeable’ emotions, incline us towards belief)37 now
appears outlandish and utterly non-credible. Quite so, Climacus can respond, and
that’s how it should be. In homogenized time, the full counter-rational ‘offensiveness’
of signs and wonders becomes apparent—and it’s only in this context that what it
truly is to believe in these claims comes fully into view. Maintaining one’s imagina-
tive distance is thereby a resistance to this homogenization, and the ‘belief ’ that it
engenders avoids a full confrontation with the implications of the extraordinary—
and fails, thereby, to be belief at all. Here again we see the tension that I mentioned in
the Introduction between Kierkegaard’s pre- and post-Enlightenment commit-
ments. Kierkegaard is fully committed, as we’ll see, to the notion of ‘sacred history’,
but he also sets up the question of faith against a backdrop of a universe that has
already been disenchanted and a past that has been brought into full, naturalistic
continuity with our own era. The time in which the God appears is our time, and
this makes what this flesh-and-blood historical figure reports about himself infin-
itely more extraordinary, more contrary to immanent rationality, more uncomfort-
able, and infinitely harder to believe. In Climacus’ conception of faith, a thoroughly
34 35
Taylor 2007, p.271. Hume 1985, pp.37–8.
36 37
Hume 1985, p.38. Hume 1985, p.35.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
supernatural revelation breaks into a thoroughly natural world, and any attempt to
meet that revelation halfway—by supernaturalizing the world as much as by
naturalizing the revelation—is antithetical to faith.
The Missing Element

The experience of imaginative distance, then, involves an imaginative engagement
with an object whereby some non-representational element of cognition is missing,
an element that would be present in direct sensory experience of the same object. It is
the presence of this aspect in both direct sensory experience and certain forms of
imaginative experience that licences the extension of the term ‘contemporaneity’ to
the latter. In other words, there is some element of direct experience that can be
either present or absent in imaginative representations, and this element makes an
important, categorical difference to the nature of experiences overall.
Recall that at the start of this chapter we saw that Johannes the Seducer regards
contemporaneity as a phenomenal element of experience that he, at least, finds
absent in episodic memory. It is by virtue of this same element that, as Petrus
Minor puts it, even small events in our life ‘really come to grips with’ us (this is the
Hongs’ translation of ret kommer ham paa Livet) and make a decisive impression,
while we can ‘sit in the theatre and see great scenes of tragedy’, ‘read about the
extraordinary in the newspaper’, and ‘listen to the pastor’ with no such effect (BA, 42/
SKS 15, 162). Petrus blames this failure to ‘become contemporary’ on multiple
factors: ‘in the first instance he lacks imagination; in the last he lacks the inner
experience for really becoming contemporary with what is depicted, because he
thinks like this: it is, of course, many years since it happened’ (BA, 42/SKS 15, 162).
If the contemporaneity-conferring element of experience is not to be found in the
conceptually and/or visually structured content of our imaginative engagement with
the past, it may seem we can say precious little more about it. If contemporaneity in no
way changes the content of the object of imaginative engagement, then the cognitive
factors essential to contemporaneity would appear to be non-conceptual in character.
Nonetheless we can speak of experience ‘coming to grips with’ us and similar meta-
phors of the experiences’ impression upon us in order to give some sense of the
character of contemporaneous experience. Moreover, we can pick out the conceptual
space the contemporaneity-conferring element occupies, as Anti-Climacus does when
he refers to contemporaneity as ‘the difference between poetry and actuality’ (PC, 63/
SKS 12, 75). The poetic, being a mere register of possibility, is set up in opposition to the
actual, but to this opposition is then added the move to subjectivity: the past may be
actual relative to the merely imaginary (poetic), but the past is nonetheless not actual
on the subjective level to the extent that it lacks a key element:
The qualification that is lacking—which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all
religiousness is—for you. The past is not actuality—for me. Only the contemporary is actuality
 CONTEMPORANEITY
for me. That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality—for you. Thus every human
being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living—and then with
one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands
alone by itself, outside history. (PC, 64/SKS 12, 76)
Hence contemporaneity is here regarded as a property of experience that makes the

past actual for the contemplator. The past is real insofar as, through contemporan-
eity, it is for me. (Bonhoeffer takes this thought further: ‘Christ is Christ not as Christ
in himself, but in his relation to me. His being Christ is his being pro me . . . Christ can
never be thought of in his being in himself, but only in his relationship to me’.)38 The
theme recurs in Adler, where we are told that it makes an ‘infinite difference’ whether
‘one for one’s own sake considers something in the situation of contemporaneity’ or
instead ‘casually thinks about something in the delusion that it was eighteen hundred
years ago’ (BA, 44/SKS 15, 166). At the same time, Anti-Climacus circumscribes the
field of objects we can become contemporary with to our own lives and the life of
Jesus.39 Given that Anti-Climacus’ concern is Jesus qua object of imitation, this
places contemporaneity into the context of Anti-Climacus’ nuanced account of
ethical imagination, in which the self is brought into a reflexively moral relation
with the object of contemplation.
In Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus deploys an extended hypothetical dis-
cussion of a youth and his relation to ‘some image of perfection (ideal)’, whether this
has the actuality of having existed historically or the mere ‘thought-actuality’ of the
purely imaginary (PC, 186/SKS 12, 186). The youth’s imagination ‘draws’ the youth
and the image together such that the image becomes an ideal for the youth’s action
(PC, 186–96/SKS 12, 186–94). This sense of being claimed by the imaginary, which
thereby comes to inform one’s actions, anchors the imaginative image to the actuality
of the imaginer.40 Through the medium of imagination, the exemplar becomes
present to the contemplator, in an immediately compelling way that does not allow
the demands the exemplar makes to be kept at imaginative distance. We might expect
from this example that contemporaneity is conferred by some property internal to
the image, perhaps to be understood as some form of vividness or depth of detail. If
this were the case, the compelling quality of the exemplar the youth imagines would
reside in something like the ‘realness’ of the image, the extent to which it has the same
sensory character as direct experience. We would then have an explanation for the
ease with which we can assent to the extraordinary when it is temporally distant: put
simply, when we imagine these scenarios, they lack the experiential detail of real
38
Bonhoeffer 1966, pp.47–8.
39
Note that in Two Ages Kierkegaard does speak of becoming contemporary with other persons as a
support to the individual, support that an abstract public cannot provide (TA, 91/SKS 8, 87). Hence this
Anti-Climacan restriction may not be one Kierkegaard ‘himself ’ would fully endorse.
40
I discuss this example in Stokes 2010a, pp.90–2.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
events, and therefore make a less shocking impression upon us. Is this what the
Kierkegaard of Book on Adler means when he accuses the apathetic theatregoer of
lacking imagination? Does the ‘for-me’ quality of imagination depend upon imagin-
ation being ‘true to life’ in this way?
Verisimilitude?
Though superficially satisfying, this option must, I think, be rejected. The impossi-
bility of direct recognizability in the paradigm case of contemporaneity-with-Christ
already places the necessary conditions for contemporaneity beyond the ‘visual’
composition of the experience. If the divinity of Jesus can’t be directly perceived,
then whatever confers contemporaneity cannot be contained within the sensibilia
that constitute the substance of the imaginative reconstruction. In short, if we don’t
become contemporary with Jesus because of what Jesus looks like, then the accuracy,
detail and level of visual ‘resolution’ (in something like the photographic sense)
cannot determine whether or not we become ‘contemporary’ with the image. In
Fragments, Climacus makes it clear that the sort of meanings to be derived through
contemporaneity with past events cannot be gotten at through imaginative verisim-
ilitude, such that a more detailed imaginative representation or historical description
will deliver proportionally more of this meaning: ‘Any apprehension of the past that
thinks to understand it thoroughly by constructing it has only thoroughly misun-
derstood it’ (PF, 79/SKS 4, 279).
This is not merely a commentary on the limitations of our imaginative capaci-
ties (which, as we have seen, Climacus is very conscious of, and which is also a
concern of Anti-Climacus and Johannes the Seducer in their different ways). It is
certainly the case that reconstructions of the past—imaginative or discursive—are
always less detailed, more coarsely grained than the circumstances they seek to
replicate. If I stage a re-enactment of the Battle of Culloden, meticulously re-
created down to the smallest historical and topographical detail, inevitably some
detail will be left out. It may be that the recreation in the unfettered theatre of my
imagination may have no such blemishes, but even so I simply won’t have the
imaginative resources to recreate fully the experience of an eighteenth-century
battle down to the smallest perceptible detail. Whether this is a merely empirical
fact about human psychology or something more metaphysically fundamental is
irrelevant to Climacus’ argument. His claim is both stronger and more narrow: if
we try to understand the past through a reconstruction of it, we do not merely fail
to achieve this understanding, we ‘thoroughly misunderstand’ it. It is not simply
that merely historical inquiry can never achieve perfect comprehension of its
object, but rather that an entire register of meaning is missed by this type of
inquiry, and further, that this order of meaning is essential to really understanding
at least one class of historical event.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
As noted, Anti-Climacus tells us that it is precisely in my relation to what is

imagined, in that what is encountered imaginatively is for me, that contemporan-
eity is to be located. My relation, however, is nowhere to be found in (most)
imaginatively mediated events from the past. In my re-enactment of the Battle of
Culloden, the impeccable historical accuracy of my costume, movements, and
perhaps even physiological state (underfed, under-slept etc.) can’t supply every-
thing essential to the experience of a Jacobite soldier facing the Government lines
in 1746. It is not my life that is at risk, nor my people or culture I am fighting for—
because of course, I am not fighting at all.41 Whatever moral demands I may be
subject to, fighting for this cause is not among them. And unlike the combatants,
I know the outcome of the battle and its ramifications (recall that among the
elements in contemporaneoust experience that Johannes the Seducer despairs of
reproducing in his recollection of conversations is ‘the surprise in the outburst’).
All of these factors constitute a gulf between me and the past event I seek to
recreate, but crucially, none of these factors is contained on the immediately
sensory level. Yet equally crucially, the gulf is nonetheless experiential; the fact of
distance is not uncovered on a merely reflective level whereby I only apprehend my
distance from what I imagine in a subsequent thought about that distance (‘it’s
only a re-enactment’). In Husserl’s terminology, the ‘act-characters’ of experiencing
a battle and experiencing a recreation differ, despite their sensorally identical
intentional objects.42 The experience itself is lacking something, however complete
its sensible content may be.
Conversely, when an imaginative episode does stand in some relation to my actual
self, it is pervaded by something from outside itself, and it is this, and not anything
proper to the image as such, which gives it its decisive meaning for my actual self.
Marya Schechtman describes with great clarity the sort of supervenience we are
speaking of:
The sensory experience of a dramatic thunderstorm is qualitatively different in a consciousness
that also includes a terror of storms, or a worry about friends travelling in the rain, than in one
which includes a feeling of how warm and cosy it is by the fire—even if the details of the
sensory inputs themselves are identical in the two cases.43
In the case of a long-ago battle, whether recreated in the world or in my mind’s eye,
the scrupulously authentic and detailed ‘sensory inputs’ cannot alter a key feature of
the experience: that this battle is just not for me in the way that it was for the
combatants.
41
For an interesting thought-experiment that attempts to overcome this in an immersive virtual reality
scenario, see Dainton 2008, pp.15–16.
42
Husserl 2001, p.105; for a discussion of this passage, see Zahavi 2005, p.118.
43
Schechtman 1996, p.138.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
The Self-reflexive Imagination

This idea of a relation between imagination and the imagining self that goes beyond
the immediate resources of what is imagined is a key theme in The Sickness Unto
Death. In that work, Anti-Climacus develops a nuanced account of the place of
imagination (phantasie) in moral agency. Though imagination is the ‘capacity instar
omnium [capacity for all capacities]’ that makes our mental life possible (SUD, 31/
SKS 11, 147), and is therefore a necessary condition for moral agency, phantasie can
also render the self phantastiske, leading the self away from its situation in a realm of
concrete ethical demands, and into a ‘despair of infinitization’. Such despair can only
be overcome through an exercise of imagination that somehow tethers the concrete
(actuality) and infinite (imagination) together, such that the agent ‘continually
become[s] proportionately as concrete as it is abstract, so that the more infinite it
becomes in purpose and determination, the more personally present and contem-
porary [nærværende og samtidig] it becomes in the small part of the task that can be
carried out at once’ (SUD, 32/SKS 11, 148).44
Anti-Climacus returns to this theme in Practice in Christianity, where the person
suffering the despair of infinitization ‘has let himself be enticed by his imagination to
go out too far, so he has become overwrought and ridiculous and does not fit into the
actual world’ (PC, 189/SKS 12, 189). Similarly, in the Christian Discourses of 1848
Kierkegaard bemoans ‘how rare is the person who actually is contemporary with
himself; ordinarily most people are apocalyptically, in theatrical illusions, hundreds
of thousands of miles ahead of themselves in feelings, in delusions, in intentions, in
resolutions, in wishings, in longings’ (CD, 74/SKS 10, 83). Linking the attainment of
contemporaneity to the ‘grounding’ of imagination necessary for avoiding despair,
Anti-Climcus describes a misuse of phantasie which keeps the imaginer from
becoming contemporary with the figure of Christ—a morally obligating figure that
compels individual response. Here the capacity of phantasie to generate ‘a fantastic
figure of Christ, to which one then relates at the distance of imagination’45 allows the
imaginer to evade the ‘offence’ proper to an encounter with the figure of Christ (PC,
100/SKS 12, 109). Were Christ to be encountered in the situation of contempor-
aneityt, however, we could not evade the necessity of responding to the challenge
posed by this figure. We would be confronted with a stark choice: ‘the only way to
avoid the possibility of offence is to believe’ (PC, 101/SKS 12, 109). We have here
returned to the power of the extraordinary to compel a response, a power that, as we
have seen, is only efficacious if the subject confronts the extraordinary directly, rather
44
This paragraph summarizes the core argument of Stokes 2010a, pp.73–90.
45
See also Fear and Trembling: ‘We are touched, we look back on those beautiful times. Sweet
sentimental longing leads us to the goal of our desire, to see Christ walking about in the promised land.
We forget the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. Was it such a simple matter not to make a mistake? Was it
not terrifying that this man walking around among the others was God? . . . I do not feel brave enough to
wish to become a contemporary’ (FT, 66/SKS 4, 158).
 CONTEMPORANEITY
than quarantining ourselves from the implications of the extraordinary via the
imposition of imaginative distance.
Contemporaneity, then, is crucially linked to the experience of an event as
normatively compelling, and that in a specifically self-directed way. In contemporan-
eity, we experience events in the reconstructed past as directly implicating, involving,
or obligating us in the here-and-now, ‘directly’ here indicating that the experience
claims us in exactly the same way as events with which we are temporally and
spatially co-located. I can ignore the starving child I see on my TV while acknow-
ledging the moral demand implicit in her suffering, but the same child sitting right in
front of me makes a demand of me, one that I can only accede to or refuse. I cannot
shelter behind the distance of mediation provided by my television; I cannot evade
my personal responsibility in this situation of direct co-presence. It’s in precisely this
sense that, Kierkegaard claims, Scripture speaks directly and personally to the reader
who becomes contemporary with what it depicts. (I suspect it’s precisely because he
lacks such a sense of normative import that Johannes the Seducer can’t recreate the
element of contemporaneity in his relationship to Cordelia: he doesn’t feel norma-
tively claimed by anything, and so his experience of episodic memory can’t become
reflexive in this way).
Such a relation is not apprehended reflectively, at least in the sense of the relation
itself becoming an explicit object of reflection. When we become contemporary with
events depicted in Scripture, according to Kierkegaard, our contemporaneity itself
does not become an object of overt thought; we don’t think thoughts such as ‘this
involves me’. Such overt thematizing would be precisely to think ‘one thought too
many’,46 for it would divert our attention from the correct object of contemplation.
In contemporaneity, by contrast, our sense of being involved supervenes upon the
experience rather than being a reflective addendum to it.
The experiential result of this supervenient sense of self-involvement in the scene
we imagine is that I become co-present with the events depicted in Scripture;
I become a listener to the Sermon on the Mount in that I experience it as addressed
directly to me as much as to the contemporariest. This subjective mode of being
‘alone with Scripture’ amounts to a continuous (if non-thematized) awareness that ‘It
is I to whom it is speaking; it is I about whom it is speaking’ (FSE, 35/SKS 13, 62). In
this mode, we experience Scripture as talking to the reader as a specific individual,
not as the generalized, abstract figure of ‘the reader’. As Nishitani Keiji notes, this
individuating power of religious narratives cuts across religious traditions: compare
Paul’s declaration that Jesus ‘gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2:20) and Shinran’s
claim that ‘When I carefully consider the Vow which Amida brought forth after five
kalpas’ contemplation, I find that it was solely for me, Shinran.’47 There is no
mediation here: the believer is addressed directly and personally as if they themselves
46
The phrase is from Williams 1982, p.18.
47
Nishitani 1982, p.27; see Shinran 1997, p.679.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
were interlocutors. It is Paul for whom the event of Jesus’ death occurs, and it is
Shinran for whom the event of Amitābha’s vowing to save all beings from suffering
occurs. On the propositional level it is of course true that the death and the vow occur
for all people, and thus they are done for Paul and Shinran only insofar as they are
members of that set; but on the phenomenal level the effect is of a direct personal
address, whereby the viewer sees themselves as personally involved every bit as much
as if they had been historically present at the event. This is familiar enough from non-
religious contexts too: the famous First World War recruitment posters declaring
‘Lord Kitchener [or Uncle Sam] Wants You!’ are meant to be experienced as speaking
directly and individually to the person who sees the poster (otherwise they wouldn’t
work as recruitment posters), even though Lord Kitchener knows nothing of any of
the individuals seeing it.48 In seeing that poster, you’re alone, face-to-face, with Lord
Kitchener; likewise, according to Climacus, the believer at second-hand is nonethe-
less face-to-face with the incarnation of God.
The De-historicization Objection

And here, according to the objection put forward by Taylor, Kierkegaard’s anti-
Hegelianism has led him into absurdity, for such historically unmediated under-
standing of the historical is impossible. Our understanding of the past is not static,
but formed by an ongoing process of historical formation; hence we cannot come at
past events in the same way the contemporariest would have, unencumbered by the
baggage of two millennia of theology and philology. If Kierkegaard is talking about
contemporaneity with the incarnation, then our very understanding of this historical
event as the incarnation already shows just how far our understanding has come
from that available to those immediately contemporaryt with the event.
Yet it should be clear by now that historically unconditioned understanding is not
what Kierkegaard is claiming as contemporaneity-with-Christ. Contemporaneity is
conferred by an immediately self-reflexive mode of vision, that is, one in which we
(non-reflectively) apprehend our relation to what is imagined within the imaginative
experience, rather than apprehending that relation in a subsequent reflective
moment. What I see somehow refers back to me without me being part of its explicit
content. It is the ‘for-me’ quality, the personally claiming quality that supervenes
upon what is contemplated, that constitutes the contemporaneous character of the
experience. The experience is pervaded by a non-thematized sense of involvement, a
sense that ‘this concerns me’ even though I am nowhere to be found in its objective
content.
The understanding that structures the experience will indeed be determined by the
linguistic, cultural, philosophical, and theological history that has shaped us as
48
Thanks to an anonymous journal referee for suggesting this analogy; I should note that the referee did
not agree with my reading of contemporaneity.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
contemplators; I cannot unlearn two thousand years of history and science and
occupy the same epistemic horizons as someone living in first-century Judea. But
in contemporaneity our historically conditioned understanding of what the past
means is not itself the thematized object of our contemplation. The Kierkegaardian
contemporary does not reflect on the putative religious meanings of the incarnation;
rather she is present with the incarnation. She perceives it rather than reflects on it.
What she sees the figure as is of course determined by her place in a history of
interpretation, but this in no way impedes the phenomenal experience of contem-
poraneity. It is through this non-thematized quality of experience, rather than in
some impossible revocation of the historically mediated elements of understanding,
that we overleap the temporal gap that separates us from the past. Whether such a
form of self-reflexive contemplation in fact occurs is another question, one which
goes to the plausibility of Kierkegaard’s phenomenological psychology. But it is clear
that Kierkegaard does give an account as to how subjectivity can bring together the
two moments of history that meet in contemporaneity. Hence his rejection of the
Hegelian account of processive historical development does not commit him to an
incoherent view of how we understand the past.
Contemporaneity and Soteriological Identity

Moreover, when contemporaneity as co-presence is understood in this way as a
product of self-reflexive vision, the previously disturbing word ‘autopsy’ takes on a
new, deeper meaning. ‘Autopsy’, ‘self-seeing’ implies not just ‘seeing for oneself ’ but
‘seeing oneself ’ in that vision: in the context of Fragments, seeing the figure of Christ
for oneself by becoming contemporary with him, but also thereby seeing oneself in
soteriological categories that are only disclosed in this encounter. This is, as Marius
Mjaaland puts it, ‘autopsy in the proper sense, that is a diagnostic introspection based
on radical ignorance’.49 Retaining the more modern sense of ‘autopsy’, Simon
Podmore parses this autopsy as a ‘dissection by faith’, in which the self ‘must see
itself initially through the anatomy of its own disintegration’50—in seeing itself in
this way the self comes to see that it is not a self-positing, independent power, but
rather utterly dependent upon God. Hence in apprehending the historical event
which serves as an exemplar and condition for personal salvation, I simultaneously
apprehend myself as being a certain way (morally obligated, saved, damned etc.),
precisely because the experience involves an immediate self-reflexivity. This self-
apprehension is a feature of Bonhoeffer’s Christology, in which, as Peter Selby
notes, ‘the question of identity is mutual; those who examine the identity of Christ
will find their own identity questioned’.51 Such questioning, says Matt Jenson, is a
‘double questioning’,52 a phrase redolent with resonances to Kierkegaardian ‘double
49 50
Mjaaland 2006, p.385. Podmore 2011, p.11.
51 52
Selby 1997, p.27. Jenson 2005, p.144.
CONTEMPORANEITY 
reflection’.53 In seeing-for-oneself, we see ourselves, and in so doing, gain the self we

see. I’ll have more to say on this notion of soteriological identity in Chapter 9.
Coda: The Impossibility of Contemporaneity

This concludes our discussion of the phenomenal aspects of contemporaneity, at
precisely the point at which most Kierkegaard commentators have begun their
engagement with contemporaneity. This is so because the phenomenology of
contemporaneity-with-Christ is quickly subsumed in Kierkegaard’s writings by the
ethical requirement of contemporaneity as acting and suffering in the world. The
demand to experience co-presence, constituted as such presence is by its normative,
obligating character, is taken up into a requirement of Imitatio Christi, whereby the
criterion for contemporaneity shifts from a form of experience to a form of action.
Merold Westphal marks this transition thus:
Contemporaneity now takes on a new and deeper meaning (without abandoning the earlier
meaning). It is not just finding oneself in essentially the same epistemic ambiguity as the
Inviter’s immediate contemporaries; it is choosing not just to receive his help but also to share
his life.54
This transition from the world of interior experience to the realm of concrete action
completely transfigures the criteria for success, such that becoming contemporary
with Christ now depends (as a necessary though by no means sufficient condition)
upon acting in a certain way. In The Moment, Kierkegaard tells us that to become
contemporary with a ‘truth witness’ is precisely to suffer the consequences of
acknowledging them; if none are to be found in contemporaneityt, what is required
is an imaginative confrontation with the figures of the past that ‘make[s] present the
life of the departed glorious one in such a way that you thereby would come to suffer
as you would have suffered in contemporaneity if you had acknowledged a prophet to
53
Invoking Kierkegaard’s complex notion of ‘double-reflection’ here does not necessarily tell against
my earlier claim that contemporaneity is not a reflective relationship, in one key sense of reflection at least.
Double-reflection, as it applies to the project of indirect communication exemplified by the pseudonyms, is
a presentation of two opposing ethical possibilities, thereby implicitly confronting the listener with a choice
(see e.g. Malantschuk 1993, p.131). In this way the ‘doubleness’ of the reflection consists not just in the
opposites from which one must choose, but the fact that in contemplating the choice I simultaneously
contemplate my own relation to what is being communicated insofar as I am impelled to choose. In
relating to what’s presented as objects of choice I am implicitly relating back to myself as chooser. Yet
I don’t necessarily do so reflectively in the sense of thinking thoughts explicitly about my relation to what
I contemplate (‘this choice is mine to make’ etc.). The choice itself—not my status as one compelled to
choose—is what fills the contents of my thoughts, yet my status is nonetheless non-thetically present in this
way of thinking insofar as I am deliberating and not merely disinterestedly contemplating. This is even
clearer in the case of the incarnation, where the communicator is precisely the object of contemplation, yet
takes a form in which direct communication is impossible. See PC, 133–4/SKS 12, 137–8. I am grateful to
an anonymous referee for British Journal for the History of Philosophy for originally pressing me to clarify
this point.
54
Westphal 2004, pp.37–8. Stan (2014) likewise sees samtidighed as intrinsically linked with imitation.
 CONTEMPORANEITY
be a prophet’ (TM, 289/SKS 13, 347).55 This suffering, however, is inflicted within
and by the present world, not an imaginatively apprehended past world. It is for this
reason that Murray Rae can declare that contemporaneity’s ‘personal relation to
Christ’ is ‘a relation that takes place not primarily as a matter of the intellect or
imagination, but rather as the venture of one’s life in obedience to Christ’.56 As we
have seen, imagination is utterly essential to the experience of contemporaneity on a
cognitive level; however, Kierkegaard continually enjoins us not to allow imagination
to take us out of the world altogether, and so on the level of direct action, the real is to
be emphasized over the imaginary.
Ultimately, though, the Imitatio Christi as a telos of ethics is one that we cannot
live up to, and so contemporaneity in this fullest and highest sense—which would be
to live the life and die the death of Christ—can never be completely achieved,
however hard we may engage in this ‘prodigious exertion’ (SKS 24, 124):
On closer inspection all this talk about wishing to have been contemporary with Christ is
presumptuous; for what is it but fancying oneself to be good enough to be an apostle . . . those
who talk this way about contemporaneity do not know what they are saying; it is the usual
thing: they take the glory and leave out the difficulty. It is flirtation. (JP, 694/SKS 22, 390;
NB14: 68)
So there are clear limitations on how far we can become practically contemporary
with Christ. But this takes nothing away from the phenomenal analysis of contem-
poraneity as a mode of experience we’ve uncovered here. Across the following
chapters, I intend to show the utility of this analysis to a variety of topics in personal
identity theory, from very basic questions about perspectival accessibility to more
complex phenomena of identity loss and alienation from our own lives.
55 56
This point is reiterated at TM, 291/SKS 13, 349. Rae 2004, p.88, my emphasis.
3
Perspectival Subjectivity
A Puzzle about Memory

We saw in Chapter 1 that the relationship between memory and identity remains
controversial, but the sense that memory matters somehow to personal identity is
hard to exorcise. That memory seems somehow central to our sense of who we are,
even if attempts to build a metaphysical account of identity on the basis of memory
have not been overwhelmingly successful, reflects the ways in which our experience of
identity is bound up with memory and anticipation. In the normal run of everyday
life, we don’t encounter the sort of puzzling science fiction scenarios described in the
neo-Lockean literature (though as I mentioned in the Introduction, certain illnesses
can play havoc with our diachronic and even synchronic sense of identity—
schizophrenia, for instance, can disrupt the patient’s sense of ownership of their
thoughts, effectively shattering their synchronic unity).1 But we do sometimes find
ourselves alienated from the past we remember and the future we anticipate, as I’ll be
discussing in Chapter 5. Memory and anticipation are essential features of our
psychological, social, moral, and agential lives, and both seem to track a stable,
diachronically extended entity that is the object of my self-reference.
On an overcast day in July 2005, I fulfilled a promise I’d made my partner years
before, when we were just teenagers, that one day I’d propose to her on a bridge in
Paris. This event stands at the intersection of a range of forward-directed and
backwards-directed mental events: the framing of intentions for the future; the
recollection of past intentions and promises (coloured by awareness of the interven-
ing years) and resolving to carry them out in the present; the acknowledgment of
long-standing obligations and the creation of new obligations with the intention that
these will be binding in the future; the anticipation of things to come, including how
I’ll remember the present moment in the future; and the sense of continuity between
past, present, and future. (Needless to say, none of that was on my mind at the time;
I was more concerned about finding a bridge near Notre Dame that wasn’t swarming
with tourists). All of these recollections, promises, intentions, and anticipations seem
to depend upon continued identity across time. They assume that the teen making
the somewhat flippant promise, the imagined future groom and husband, and the
1
See e.g. Sass 1999; Sass and Parnas 2003.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
nervous guy looking for a suitably romantic bridge are all one and the same—that
when I say ‘I remember the day I proposed, in the way I’d promised to do many years
before’ the referent of ‘I’ is the same in each of the three instances in that sentence. At
the very least, the event seems to involve some sort of privileged access to a specific
remembered past and a specific anticipated future, such that the obligations and
anticipated pleasures which this specific past and future present apply uniquely to
me. But that assumes that there is some essential difference between my remembering
making that past promise and someone else simply imagining having made that past
promise, or simply imagining being married to my (now) wife instead of anticipating
it. In what does that difference consist? Or put another way: when I have a memory
or anticipate a future event, what is it that makes that memory or anticipation
genuinely reflexive? This is a question that is very much alive in the contemporary
literature.
Memory and Visualization

The problem of reflexivity is particularly salient when we think of both episodic
memory2 and anticipation in terms of visualization, though it may well have ana-
logues in at least some other sensory modalities.3 (It may seem wrong to place this
sort of emphasis on the visual aspects of memory and imagination, but as the
discussion of ‘autopsy’ in the last chapter suggested, Kierkegaard also comes back
again and again to visual language). Episodic memories present themselves as
ostensible copies of some originally visual experience, even when they don’t appear
to depend on a single experience—if I visualize the house I grew up in, it’s far from
clear that I am remembering a single, theoretically datable instance of walking
through my house.4 Richard Wollheim claims episodic memories can be either
centred (remembered from a specific point of view within the imagined event) or
acentred;5 the now-standard distinction in the literature between ‘field’ and ‘observer’
memories6 captures the same thought. Wollheim takes centred memory to be the
standard case of memory,7 an assumption contested by John Sutton, who rejects the
view that ‘visuospatial perspective is still the canonical or privileged form of personal
memory’.8 I’ll return to observer memories below, but for the moment—though
mindful of Sutton’s argument against privileging field over observer memory—we’ll
concentrate on field memories.
The core features of field/centred memories is a certain form of visual organization
that implies an experiencer located at some (at least theoretically) specifiable distance
and position relative to the events observed. There have been several articulations of
2
On the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, see Tulving 1983, p.v passim (especially
Part I, pp.17–120).
3 4 5
Debus 2007, p.189. Debus 2007, p.176. Wollheim 1989, p.102.
6 7 8
Nigro and Neisser 1983. Wollheim 1989, p.104. Sutton 2010, p.29.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
this ‘perspectival organization’ feature of visualizations (including experiential mem-

ories), but J. David Velleman’s is arguably the clearest:
A visual image has a perspective because objects are represented in it by regions whose size and
placement depend on the angles subtended by those objects at some common point in space.
The representational scheme of the image is governed by lines of sight converging at a single
vantage point, whose location the image suggests but doesn’t depict.9
In any representational visualization of spatially arranged objects (even acentered

ones)10 the mere fact of convergent perspective necessarily implies a viewpoint,
though as Velleman notes we don’t always think of this viewpoint as actually being
occupied11—just as, in Bernard Williams’ example, when we watch a movie with a
tracking shot along the side of a castle wall, or an intimate scene between two lovers,
we are not ‘invited to think of Griffith or Antonioni floating up towers or creeping
around lovers’.12 This, according to Velleman, is what distinguishes visualization
simpliciter from the more complex exercise of ‘imagined seeing’;13 in the latter (which
will include episodic memory and anticipatory imagination) we do think of the
viewpoint as occupied. All secondary mental images—that is, visualizations that
purport to present someone’s experience—come equipped with a built-in ‘notional
subject’ occupying the viewpoint implied by perspectival organization. 14
But although the perspectival organization of images implies a subject, whose eyes
are located where the lines of sight converge,15 we might know little or nothing about
who this implied observer is meant to be—and there is certainly no requirement that
the protagonist of a centrally imagined scene must be me, the self imagining or
remembering it.16 So Velleman distinguishes between the notional subject and actual
subject of secondary mental images.17 The notional subject is the viewer implied by
perspectival organization, ‘the person thought of as occupying the image’s vantage
point and undergoing the visual impression of which the image is a copy’.18 The
actual subject is the person doing the visualization or having the visual memory. And
insofar as I can imagine a scene where the notional subject is someone other than
9
Velleman 2006a, p.179. See also Smith 2006, pp.52–3; Goldie 2000, p.196.
10 11
Wollheim 1989, p.104. Velleman 2006a, p.179; see also Goldie 2012, p.78.
12
Williams 1973, p.37. Similar considerations lead Kendall Walton to conclude that visual depictions
are not (standardly) mediated through a fictional observer in the same way that narrated events are
mediated through a narrator, though there are cases where, for instance, movie shots are framed to imply
we are seeing an object through the eyes of one of the film’s characters. Walton 1976, pp.49–61; Walton
1990, pp.337–40. See also Goldie 2000, p.196. An anonymous referee points out to me here that we may be
conditioned to the filmic perspective through our experience of dreams; personally I seem to dream in field
perspective, but as Rosen and Sutton (2013) note, observer perspective dreams certainly do happen.
13
Velleman 2006a, p.179.
14
For this reason, according to Wollheim, acentred event-memories are both rare and unstable: even
though these are not meant to represent an event from an observer’s perspective, their very visual
organization implies some observer, and so (he claims) we quickly move to imaginatively ‘occupy’ the
point of view around which the memory is organized.
15
Even where the image is supposedly mediated through a telephoto lens or the like.
16 17 18
Wollheim 1989, p.74. Velleman 2006a, p.186. Velleman 2006a, p.182.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
me—in Williams’ well-worn example, I can visualize the battlefield at Austerlitz as

seen from the viewpoint of Napoleon19—the notional and actual subject can be two
different people.
The question, then, with respect to reflexive secondary mental images such as
episodic memories or imaginative anticipations, is what might constitute a connec-
tion between the notional and actual subject—and it seems that nothing within
secondary mental images themselves will do the trick. Derek Parfit notes that
apparent memories, even when experienced in a ‘first person mode of presentation’,
include no reference to the rememberer herself,20 while as we’ll see in Chapter 4,
Galen Strawson argues that while the perspectival convergence of sensory data gives
episodic memory a ‘from the inside character’, this character ‘can detach completely
from any lived identification with the subject of the remembered experience’.21
Further, Williams notes that the perspectival structure of any visualized scene no
more refers back to the visualizing self than the spatial composition of a movie scene
or play refers me back to my situation as viewer. I may be sitting in a theatre seat
40 meters away from Sir Ian McKellen, but I am not simultaneously at that distance,
or any specifiable distance, from Lear.22
Likewise with static visual images. Kierkegaard’s Golden Age contemporary, the
painter C. W. Eckersberg, produced at least two portraits and several drawings of a
model he dubbed ‘Florentine’. The more demure of these two portraits now hangs in
the Hirschprung Collection in Copenhagen. It’s an unsettlingly intimate image:
Florentine stands with her back to us, seemingly unaware of our presence as she
goes about her morning toilette. The tension is heightened by a sense that at any
moment she will look up and see us reflected in the mirror in front of her. Yet on a
more fundamental level, of course, we aren’t in Florentine’s room at all. Even if we
take it that Eckersberg is deliberately trying to imply a visual perspective from a
position within Florentine’s room, and inviting the viewer to imaginatively occupy
that position, such an implied perspective is ultimately not that of the viewer standing
in the Hirschprung, staring at the portrait and perhaps being taken aback to find it’s
much smaller than they had expected. The notional subject of the image—the person
apparently standing in Florentine’s room—is not the actual subject that views it.
The famous painting of Florentine comes from a session between 9 August and
16 September 1841, at which Eckersberg and five students were present. In addition
to Eckersberg’s, two other portraits from this session survive, by Ludvig August
Smith and Salomon (Sally) Henriques.23 Despite striking differences in style, all three
paintings unmistakably depict the same woman, in the same pose (though curiously,
other details of the room have been altered), but from their slightly different angles
19
Williams 1973, p.43.
20
Parfit 1984, p.221. Parfit credits the term ‘first-person mode of presentation’ to Peacocke 1983.
21 22
Strawson 1999, p.109. Williams 1973, p.35 (updating Williams’ reference to Olivier).
23
Fabritius 2005.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
we can infer that Smith was standing to Eckersberg’s right and Henriques further
right again.24 Mentally, we can partially reconstruct the room using these three
paintings, with Florentine standing in front of a mirror, Eckersberg in front of her
having reserved the best position for himself, putting Smith in a slightly more
awkward position, and Henriques in a worse position again with the light from the
window dazzling him.25 Yet such reconstruction is secondary to an encounter with
each individual painting and relies on features that are wholly extrinsic to each image
itself. Each image is self-contained: each references nothing outside the image, and
none of the images is, in and of itself, co-ordinate with the others. We can tell where
Eckersberg, Smith, and Henriques were standing, but that these are the perspectives
of Eckersberg or of Smith or of Henriques is nowhere to be found in the painting. We
can infer the position of the artist just as we can infer the position of a camera from a
photograph, but the artist and the camera are not ‘in’ the world of the image in a
fundamental sense any more than your eye is ‘in’ your field of vision right now.
Even anamorphic visual effects in two-dimensional images which depend upon
the physical position of the viewer don’t thereby reference the viewer’s position in
any way. If I find myself in front of Holbein’s The Ambassadors in the National
Gallery in London, I will need to stand in exactly the right spot relative to the
painting’s surface in order to see the giant skull which would otherwise appear as a
puzzling whitish mass in the foreground. But this in no way implies any relation
between my position as an observer and any position within the field of objects
depicted in the painting. The image doesn’t care, so to speak, about my spatial
relation to the world of the image; my present position is simply nowhere to be
found in the field of objects captured in the painting, the play, or the movie. To the
best of my knowledge, no-one has yet given this feature of visual organization a
name, so let’s give it one now: structural indifference. Images are structurally indif-
ferent insofar as they contain no internal or implicit reference to their viewer. It
follows that Wollheim’s claim that ‘the only point from which I can centrally
remember an event is mine’ must be subject to severe caveats: unless we make further
stipulations about the relationship between memory and identity, it is not strictly
true that ‘I am necessarily the protagonist of my event-memories’26 unless we are
using ‘I’ in the sense of a quasi-indicator.27 Structural indifference would seem to
entail that nothing within the visualization itself can secure the co-identity of the
notional and actual subject.
So why should any of this be a problem? There are two main reasons why this
disconnect between the notional and actual subject of memories might bother us.
The first arises if we subscribe to the memory criterion view of personal identity. But
it’s the second reason that motivates Wollheim and Velleman: the need to specify in
what sense memories are qualitatively different from other mental states such as
24 25 26
Fabritius 2005; Berman 2007, p.56. Fabritius 2005, p.362. Wollheim 1989, p.105.
27
Velleman 2006a, pp.184–6; see also Hector-Neri Castañeda 1967, 1968.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
imagination. It’s clear that there is some experiential difference between remember-
ing seeing Austerlitz (whether veridically or not) and imagining being Napoleon
seeing Austerlitz. In the latter case, ‘the notional reflexivity of my thoughts about
Napoleon is less than genuine’.28 Specifying just what that difference might consist
in, however, is notoriously hard, especially once structural indifference has been
acknowledged. One option would be to appeal to what Bertrand Russell called ‘belief-
feeling’,29 the sense of certitude that pervades episodic (though not semantic)
memory,30 though it also seems possible to have episodic memories that lack this
quality. With memories of early childhood in particular, it can be hard to be sure
these are veridical and not mere fantasies.31
Wollheim claims that ‘Every memory state comes labelled as such’, containing
within itself a thought to the effect that it depends causally upon some earlier
experience in a way different to imagination or fantasy.32 But structural indifference
implies this ‘label’ cannot be found within the immediate visual contents of the
memory. This being the case, what salient features of a memory distinguish it from a
mere ‘imagined seeing’? There have been two main families of responses to this
question. The first set of responses claim that memories have some phenomenal
property, over and above their sensory contents,33 that is lacking in mere imagin-
ation. Let’s call this the Phenomenal Property Approach. This approach has a
surprisingly distinguished history. It’s taken by William James, for example, who
asserts that a certain ‘warmth and intimacy’ or ‘animal heat’ attaches to our personal
memories but not the memories of others34 (to which of course we can only have
imaginative access, however vivid). Even Wollheim, who ultimately rejects the
Phenomenal Property Approach, speaks of a ‘sense of familiarity’ invested in the
remembered event.35 These senses would amount to a phenomenal property of co-
identity or ownership (perhaps related to what Heidegger called Jemeinigkeit, ‘mine-
ness’, or what Dan Zahavi calls a quality of ‘first-personal givenness’),36 a sense that
memories are my experiences in a way imagined scenes are not. The problem with
the Phenomenal Property Approach has traditionally been that it is difficult to single
out any phenomenal property—or in Wollheim’s terms, any ‘distinctive aspect of the
subjectivity of mental states’—that will hold for all memories.37 As James Giles puts
28 29 30
Velleman 2006a, p.187. Russell 2009, p.237 Tulving 1983, p.40.
31
Cf. Martin and Deutscher 1966, p.168.
32
Wollheim 1989, p.118. Martin and Deutscher (1966, pp.167–8) offer a counterexample that suggests
this is not the case: a painter is asked to paint what he takes to be a purely imaginary farm scene, but his
parents then point out that he’s actually just painted an actual farm he saw only once as a child. I think the
answer here is simply to restrict the scope of what Wollheim is saying to experiences of episodic memory:
the painter may be remembering a real place, and his memory depends upon a single, datable episode, but
it’s not clear that we’d call it an experience of episodic memory.
33
Using ‘sensory’ as shorthand for the five classical senses plus others such as proprioception etc.
34
James 1950, pp.331–6. Correspondingly, William Hazlitt (1805, p.40) also speaks of ‘warmth of
imagination’ and ‘greater liveliness and force’ to explain the interest we take in our projected future selves.
35 36 37
Wollheim 1989, p.118. Zahavi 2007, p.189. Wollheim 1989, p.118.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
it, for whichever phenomenal quality of memory we nominate as the one that
constitutes a sense of identity, ‘it seems it will be easy enough to find a memory of
an earlier self that does not have it, or a memory of another person which does have
it’.38 Even if it is not a necessary condition that only memories and no other states
(e.g. imagining the past from some other person’s perspective) would have such a
property, it would be necessary that all memories do have such a quality—and that
seems empirically dubious. The search for a distinctive ‘memory affect’ that holds
for all memories thus looks very much like a non-starter. Let’s assume, in fact, that
this is correct: there is no distinctive phenomenal quality that is automatically
encountered in each and every memory. As I’ll argue below, that need not be the
end of the story for the Phenomenal Property Approach. For the moment, though,
we need to consider its main competition.
Non-stipulation and Unselfconscious Memory

The second approach, that favoured by Wollheim and Velleman, is the inverse of the
above: what labels memories as such is precisely the absence of something that is
found in instances of imagined-seeing. Call this the Non-Stipulation Approach.
Wollheim suggests that centrally imagining being someone else involves drawing
on a certain psychological ‘repertoire’, a ‘total body of desires, beliefs and emo-
tions’.39 If I imagine being Napoleon seeing Austerlitz, I must imagine the battlefield
seen from the viewpoint of a victorious nineteenth-century megalomaniac. But,
Wollheim notes, before I can draw upon Napoleon’s ‘repertoire’ in this way, I must
first ‘select or assume it’.40 I have to actively take on the psychological outlook of
Napoleon first. And this is quite different to how I centrally imagine myself in a given
context, where instead of having to assume a repertoire I always simply slip into it.
Actively assuming a repertoire beforehand is thus a necessary feature of exercises of
imagined seeing (at least where the identity of the notional subject is reasonably
concrete) but is simply incompatible with episodic memory.
Velleman makes a closely related point,41 but at greater length and more closely
focused on the question of the relation between notional and actual subject, or what
connects me as actual subject to the notional subject figured in genuinely self-reflexive
images such as those of episodic memories, but not to the notional subjects of my
imagined seeing. For Velleman, the question is not how the actual self insinuates
itself into the image being ‘seen’ by the notional self in the imagining-being-
Napoleon case, for it is clear that David Velleman is in no way figured in the image
purportedly being ‘seen’ by Napoleon, even if David Velleman is the actual subject of
this image. The notional subject tends to ‘crowd out the actual subject as the target of
38
Giles 1997, p.86.
39
Wollheim 1989, p.87. Goldie (2000, pp.195, 198–201) prefers the term ‘characterization’.
40 41
Wollheim 1989, p.116. The connection is noted by Mackenzie 2007, p.279, n.12.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
reflexive reference’,42 which expresses (in an equally metaphorical way) the same idea
as structural indifference. Any ‘I’-utterances the notional subject makes will refer to
the notional subject, not the actual subject. The question then is how that subject
comes to be identified with Napoleon? How does Napoleon, in Velleman’s terms, ‘get
into the act’ of a structurally indifferent image?
Velleman’s answer is a prior stipulation of identity, akin to Wollheim’s assump-
tion of a personal repertoire. We centre the image on Napoleon more or less by fiat:43
‘Without this referential stipulation, my mental image would not be a way of thinking
about Napoleon as “me,” and so it wouldn’t be a way of imagining that I am
Napoleon’.44 And just as such assumptions are alien to memory, such stipulations
are no less foreign to genuinely reflexive thoughts and images.45 I don’t need to
specify who I am referring to when I say ‘I’, whereas if I am imagining being
Napoleon I do need to make such a stipulation (‘I, Napoleon, see Austerlitz’).46
Genuine memories pick out the actual subject as identical with the notional subject
not stipulatively, but precisely by being ‘unselfconscious about their reference, in that
they require no other thought about who they refer to’.47 It’s traditionally claimed
that memories cannot be mistaken about the identity of the subject who experienced
them; Velleman’s account implies that episodic memory can’t misidentify the subject
of the original experience ‘only because it doesn’t thereby identify him at all’.48 And if
there are no identity stipulations to be found in the sensory content of experiential
memory, then ‘Memory can thus succeed in making someone “me” to me even if he
was Napoleon—not, of course, by making him the same person as me, but rather by
presenting him to me in the notional first-person’,49 though we can then check this
against the causal history of the image to determine whether it is accurate.50
Velleman speaks here of genuinely reflexive forms of visualization as providing the
subject with ‘access’ to a ‘first-person perspective’ which they can occupy by virtue of
a causal history that is not figured in the image itself. Underlying this claim is a
distinction Velleman draws (and which we encountered in our discussion of Locke in
Chapter 1) between personal identity as a metaphysical relation holding between
persons at different times, and reflexivity as a psychological relation holding between
subjects who can think of each other first-personally.51 In this latter sense, memory
‘recruits past selves for me, by putting them within reach of subjectively reflexive
thought’.52 Whether I fail to be metaphysically identical with Napoleon or not, I fail
to be perspectivally identical because having to stipulate who the notional subject of
42 43
Velleman 2006a, p.182. Velleman 2006a, p.188.
44
Velleman 2006a, p.187. Smith (2006) makes much the same move using Peacocke’s distinction
between experiential and suppositional imagination. See also Recanati 2007, pp.203–7.
45
Velleman 2006a, p.187.
46
Wollheim (1989, p.116) makes a similar point about self-ascription.
47 48 49
Velleman 2006a, p.188. Velleman 2006a, p.192. Velleman 2006a, p.192.
50 51 52
Velleman 2006a, p.188. Velleman 2006a, pp.192–3. Velleman 2006a, pp.193.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
my image of Austerlitz is rules it out of contention as a genuinely reflexive memory; ‘I

am not really on first-personal terms with Napoleon’ but only pretend to be.53
The difficulty is that, insofar as Velleman wants perspectival access to do most of
the work that personal identity was traditionally taken to do—secure egocentric
concern and moral responsibility, ground our concern for survival, and so on54—
then he needs to show that memory and projective imagination ‘recruit’ perspectiv-
ally available selves in more or less the same way. If memories are genuinely reflexive
because they present a first-personal perspective with no extraneous identity stipu-
lations, then we’d expect anticipatory imagination, if it is to preserve the same forms
of concern we have regarding our past selves, to present our future selves in the same
way. But memory and anticipation might not, in fact, determine the identity of the
notional subject in the same way.55 For one thing, if I visualize something that I plan
or expect to do, the identity of the notional subject accompanying that anticipatory
image would seem to be under my direct control—and that seems to render antici-
patory imagination no different to other forms of imagined seeing, in that the
identity of the notional subject has to be stipulated beforehand.56
Yet Velleman insists that some modes of anticipation are in fact ‘unselfconscious’
in the same way as memories, thereby placing the notional and actual subject of
anticipatory images in a genuinely first-personal relation to each other. This serves,
according to Velleman, to ‘ground a distinction between real and imaginary future
selves’.57 Framing intentions, for instance, involves visualizing a future action in a
way that always presents a notional subject, and which always presents that subject as
‘me’.58 Once again, the co-identity of this notional subject and the actual subject (the
person doing the anticipating) is secured by the ‘future causal history of the intention
itself ’: ‘the referent of “me” in the context is simply whoever fills the role of subject
within that perspective’.59
One of the great merits of Velleman’s position is that it turns an apparent
weakness of episodic memory as a bearer of identity (namely, structural indifference)
into a strength. The phenomenal ‘unselfconsciousness’ about identity that charac-
terizes memory and anticipation, but not imagined seeing, coheres nicely with the
lack of reference to the remembering/anticipating subject in the images such experi-
ences present us with. Yet while Velleman is absolutely right to draw our attention to
the non-reflective, immediate character of our experience of identity with remem-
bered past selves and anticipated future selves, it can be argued that there is
nonetheless some key experiential property of these experiences that distinguishes
them from mere imagination, rather than it being the absence of anything additional
that marks them out in this way.
53
Velleman 2006a, pp.194.
54
The literature on whether identity matters in survival is vast, but see e.g. Lewis 1983; Parfit 1984; Sosa
1990; Unger 1992; Martin 1998; Belzer, 2005; Johnston 2010.
55 56 57
Velleman 2006a, p.195. Velleman 2006a, p.196. Velleman 2006a, p.196.
58 59
Velleman 2006a, p.197. Velleman 2006a, p.198.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
I’ve taken us into this stand-off between the Phenomenal Property Approach and
the Non-Stipulation Approach at some length because, as I now hope to show,
Kierkegaard comes down on the side of the Phenomenal Property Approach. Such
a finding would tell us something important about Kierkegaard’s understanding of
selfhood, and in particular, fills out our understanding of what Kierkegaardian terms
like ‘choosing oneself ’ and ‘the self relating to itself ’ might mean. Yet this is not a
‘mere’ historical finding—for Kierkegaard’s version of this approach is intriguingly
different from that envisioned in contemporary philosophy.
Contemporaneity and the Notional and Actual Subject

In Chapter 2 we saw that the account of contemporaneity with Christ offered in
Philosophical Fragments involves distinguishing between contemporaneity in the
prosaic sense of historical co-location (a form of contemporaneity only available to
those living in the same point in time as Christ) and another form of contemporan-
eity through ‘seeing with the eyes of faith’—in effect a form of phenomenal co-
presence with the event of the incarnation.60 As both the historical contemporary
(the contemporaryt) and the follower at second hand are in the same position
epistemically, it follows that this ‘real’ contemporary can either live in direct physical
contact with Christ or live thousands of years later, without this affecting her ability
to become contemporary in the higher sense. A sort of direct inspection of the event
is made available to the modern-day believer, but conversely, the direct historical
contemporary is not necessarily contemporaneous with the event of the incarnation
in this eminent sense. It’s only by seeing the envisioned events in a particular way that
one becomes contemporary with them—and this applies, quite indifferently, to both
direct sensory perception and imaginative reconstruction (and also memory, for
Climacus also discusses the recollections of an historical contemporary after Jesus’
death (PF, 65/SKS 4, 267)). Accordingly, with regard to this phenomenal form of
contemporaneity we can no longer speak meaningfully of a ‘follower at first hand’
and ‘follower at second hand’ (PF, 103/SKS 4, 299)—the distinction loses its meaning
when, phenomenally speaking, every believer is equally close to the events depicted in
the New Testament.
When we put contemporaneity in these terms, it should begin to be apparent how
this might relate to the question of how the notional and actual subjects of a
visualization are connected: seeing ‘with the eyes of faith’ amounts to phenomenally
collapsing the distinction between notional and actual subject. In phenomenal terms,
the contemporaryt is to the notional subject as the higher/phenomenal contemporary
is to the actual subject; the question of how the believer at second hand can be as
60
David J. Gouwens (1996, pp.134–5) notes that this ‘event’ increasingly takes on the form of an
extended narrative, rather than just ‘a bare historical “that” of “the moment” of Incarnation, an icon of
eternity invading time’.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
present with the incarnation as the contemporaryt is isomorphic with the question of
how the notional subject of memory or anticipation can be the same as the actual
subject. In both cases, the question is what unites two perspectives.
Samtidighed, literally ‘same-time-ness’, can also be translated ‘simultaneity’, and
this tells us something about the contemporaneous experience of an event like the
incarnation: the believer experiences the event with a property of direct presence,
experiencing it as if it is happening right now. A believer’s engagement with the
incarnation has a property of being ‘right in front of ’ them, whether their visual
image of this event is primary (the believer at first hand) or secondary (the believer at
second hand). But as the historical contemporary can fail to become phenomenally
contemporary with such an event, this property of phenomenal contemporaneity
cannot be a function of the sensory input or visual constitution of the experience. It
has to be something phenomenal, but not sensory, that attends the image.
Contemporaneity of this sort thereby removes any question over whether the
perspectives of the notional and actual subject are identical: if one encounters the
incarnation with the property of phenomenal contemporaneity, the experience will
be the same, in some salient respect, regardless of whether the follower is physically
co-located with the event or imaginatively reconstructing it thousands of years later.
But this crucially differs from imagined seeing in that, like memory, it is immediate
and ‘unselfconscious’ in Velleman’s strictly cognitive sense: the later follower does
not stipulate that she is some historical contemporary of Jesus’ standing at a
specifiable distance from him as he speaks, nor does she imagine or believe that
she is somehow causally connected to a person who lived two thousand years ago in
Roman-occupied Judea, understood Aramaic, and so on. The actual subject of the
image utters no identity-stipulative phrase equivalent to ‘I, Napoleon, see Austerlitz’,
but nor is the fact that it is the subject personally—the actual subject—who is
addressed elided from the experience. How is this possible? How does the actual
subject ‘get into the act’ here?
The phenomenal ‘co-presence’ afforded by contemporaneity goes a long way
towards answering this question. Whether we experience the event as an historical
eyewitness or later follower, the outlandish event of a human being claiming to be
God and offering personal salvation demands a response, one way or the other, from
the individual. As we’ve seen, both the historical contemporary and those who read
their reports have the option of merely suspending judgement, or of paying lip
service to the belief without fully and personally confronting what is really at issue
in this belief-claim, but to do so is precisely not to become phenomenally contem-
porary with the event (PC, 41/SKS 12, 55). In the situation of phenomenal contem-
poraneity, we encounter this event, whether directly or through imagination, with the
same urgency as an event occurring right before our eyes, one that speaks to us
directly and personally and makes demands of us.
This answers a question we might have about how the same property of contem-
poraneity could be a feature of both episodic memory and anticipation on the one
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
hand, which involve apprehensions of events in our own lives, and events outside our
own lives such as episodes in the life of Jesus on the other. This seems dangerously
close to collapsing the distinction between remembering and imagining, though with
the added complication that I’m not imagining being anyone in the scene I recreate in
imagination. How can contemporaneity with my own past and future be the same,
phenomenally speaking, with events that fall well outside my own experience, and in
which I am in no way a participant? Anti-Climacus, at least, asserts explicitly that this
is possible: ‘Thus every human being is able to become contemporary only with the
time in which he is living—and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for
Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history’ (PC,
64/SKS 12, 76).
According to a viewpoint that has already posited the truth of Christian doctrine,
one thing both events in my biological life and events in ‘sacred history’ such as the
event of the incarnation have in common is that both have direct soteriological
implications which I can choose to acknowledge or ignore. Accordingly, when
I regard them with an (implicit) eye to my ultimate salvation, these events are
experienced as addressing themselves personally to me as I am here-and-now. It’s
this quality of experiencing an event (whether directly perceived or imaginatively
mediated) as issuing a personal and direct demand upon the observer, and not its
sensory detail or realism, that gives the experience its quality of ‘happening now’,
regardless of whether they are events in the biological life of the subject or certain
events (here, events with soteriological significance for the subject) that fall outside it.
Whereas we can normally view historical events from the outside, in the position of
dispassionate observers—for history is structurally indifferent—events encountered
in scripture have, for the believer, the property of engaging them personally, of being
about them.
The net effect of this is to claim that where I regard some past event as making
some sort of normative claim on me—as being something for which I am responsible,
that for or to which I am to respond—I can experience it with a certain property that
connects me as actual subject to the perspective of the notional subject figured in the
image. This says nothing about the origin of that normativity (and therefore doesn’t
rule out mistaken beliefs about what we are and are not obligated by) but does,
I hope, make it clear that it’s the experience of this phenomenal property, not the fact
of being normatively enjoined per se, that does the work of uniting the notional and
actual subject here. The unity is a felt, subjective one, not an objective state of affairs,
even if it does in fact track some objective set of facts.61
61
There is a certain unavoidable ambiguity here, insofar as contemporaneity centrally involves a sense
of being ‘claimed’ by the event—a sense of having something imposed on us—while still being dependent
upon our subjective engagement with the event; thus when we fail to experience this sense of being claimed,
we are ourselves responsible for this failure. On these sorts of volitional ambiguities in Kierkegaard, see
Ferreira 1991, pp.207–34; Stokes 2010a, pp.130–3.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
Here I need to note a possible objection. Our discussion has centred on the
question of co-presence with the (in Kierkegaard’s view, uniquely privileged) histor-
ical event of the incarnation; but insofar as Anti-Climacus claims I can also become
contemporary with events in my own life, this same property can also be a feature of
standard episodic memories, not just imagined scenes from the distant past. In the
previous chapter I asked whether contemporaneity is to be understood (as it some-
times has been) as a purely religious form of experience, or whether contemporaneity
is a more general form of experience we can extend to specific religious objects. The
suggestion that we can become contemporary only with the time in which one is
living and with sacred history suggests the latter interpretation, but seems to leave
open the possibility that we—like Johannes the Seducer—can’t become phenomen-
ally contemporary with events we are not living through right now, that is, with
events in our remembered past and anticipated future. If that’s correct, then the
applicability of Kierkegaardian contemporaneity to the sort of problem Velleman,
Parfit, and Wollheim are discussing falls apart.
However, as we saw in Chapter 1, for Kierkegaard, recollection (erindringen) is
distinguished from memory by its essential, soteriological relation to the recollector.
It is insofar as what I recollect pertains to my status as subject concerned for its
ultimate salvation that this essential relation is constituted. In other words, in
recollection, the raw ‘stuff ’ of memory presents itself as pertaining essentially to
the recollector; or to borrow the language of Anti-Climacus, it presents itself with a
property of ‘for-you-ness’ to the recollector. It seems, therefore, to be a very reason-
able reading of Kierkegaardian contemporaneity that it is indeed something that can
be extended to episodic memory, and so a reasonable reading of Anti-Climacus’s
phrase ‘the time in which [we are] living’ (as the limits of what we can become
contemporary with) as referring to one’s lifetime rather than one’s immediate
present. (We then further need to delimit what one’s ‘lifetime’ actually consists in,
a problem which I’ll discuss in Chapter 9).
On my reading, then, contemporaneity is not a property of purely religious
experience, nor simply a (somewhat metaphorical) description of the epistemic
situation of the religious believer, but a property of ordinary experience that applies
when contemplating any situation that involves a sense that it concerns the contem-
plator directly and individually. The parallels with Lockean ‘concernment’ as the
‘unavoidable concomitant’ of consciousness should be obvious. Yet as the experience
of Johannes the Seducer (who cannot reproduce the element of contemporaneity in
his recollections of meetings with his soon-to-be latest conquest) shows, it is not
always a feature of episodic memories. Accordingly it won’t supply us with the
‘memory affect’—a phenomenal property always present in memories and always
absent from imagined-seeing—that we despaired of finding earlier. What this sug-
gests is that whatever the causal accessibility of the perspective figured in some past
remembered/imagined scene, on the phenomenal level the connection of the
notional and actual subject in both memory and imagination is contingent. Whatever
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
we might say about the metaphysical basis of personal identity (which is not
Kierkegaard’s concern here), phenomenal identification with the past person is
contingent upon an affective sense that the past deeds figured in memory are what
the present self is responsible for. Whilst it may be the case that imagined scenes and
memory feel different in other respects, this is not what makes them reflexive: their
reflexivity comes from my feeling myself responsible for them by envisaging them as
making a direct demand upon me, as if they were happening for-me-right-now.
Observer Memories and False Memories

Shifting the locus of reflexivity in this way, such that imagined images can also have
the property of reflexivity regardless of their causal history, actually helps in dealing
with puzzles about the perspectival accessibility of acentrally remembered events. To
return to a topic mentioned earlier, observer memories, where we envision ourselves
from the outside—as an object within the visual field rather than merely implied by
its perspectival organization—are surprisingly common.62 If episodic memories are
veridical copies of past experiences, observer memories are puzzling, as we obviously
can’t have originally observed ourselves from the outside in this way; yet while there
appear to be experimentally discernible differences in their emotional content and
the salience of recalled details, for all intents and purposes these are genuine
memories. They are also generally unselfconscious in Velleman’s sense. But if we
make contemporaneity the key to reflexivity, this problem disappears. If I visually
remember an event with the subjective phenomenal property of being personally
responsible for it (whatever the source and scope of that responsibility), it does not
matter whether the physical perspective from which the event is presented as having
been recorded63 is one that could have been physically available to me or not.
Moreover, we can imaginatively experience past actions we have no recollection of
(due to age, amnesia, intoxication, etc.) as being the deeds of selves we are on
genuinely first-personal terms with,64 precisely because we see them as deeds we
are answerable for. To lack that (non-thematized) sense that the experience
I remember falls within my field of answerability, as concerning me in that way, is
tantamount to mere imagined seeing—even when I am nonetheless related to the
image via the normal causal mechanisms of memory.
62
See Nigro and Neisser 1983; Robinson and Swanson 1993; McIsaac and Eich 2002; Debus 2007;
Sutton 2010.
63
Writers on memory increasingly insist that memories are more like ongoing reconstructions than
recordings, but we should also note that a memory needn’t be thought of as a simple recording for it to
present itself as being a recording.
64
Which, per Goldie, we do: ‘My contention is that diverse kinds of remembering of one’s past
characteristically get pulled together in autobiographical narrative remembering—semantic memories,
all sorts of experiential memories, traces of thought and imagination, fragments of “flashbulb” memory,
almost dreamlike sequences that flit through one’s mind from time to time, perhaps many of them hardly
reaching a level of conscious awareness, and much else besides’ (Goldie 2012, p.44).
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
In Chapter 1 we saw that Locke’s model of identity throws up problems of moral

imputability for actions we have forgotten. Locke found no satisfactory answer to the
imputability problem, though as we saw, given the pragmatic focus of his discussion,
he may not have needed one anyway. But perhaps here we can see an answer
emerging, at least in vague outline: if I can imagine the past deed with a phenom-
enal sense of it as something for which I am responsible, then it is genuinely
perspectivally recruited to me (whatever the metaphysical facts of identity turn
out to be). Thoughts about this past event are as genuinely reflexive as standard
memories are taken to be if the same property of normative for-me-ness is present
in them. Yet this seems, troublingly, to rule out the possibility of false memories,
which despite Locke’s assurances about what will happen on judgement day clearly
do occur to us here and now. Locke notoriously insists that if I can remember
Noah’s flood, then I am the person who saw the flood65—a claim which looks like a
reductio ad absurdum of the memory criterion for personal identity, unless I can
tell some bizarre story that links me causally to someone living thousands of years
ago. But if we want to insist that I am not really the person who saw the flood then
it seems we’re back to insisting that there’s a metaphysical story about what we
really are and that our phenomenal sense of identity is secondary and derivative.
Metaphysics, it seems, is back in the driving seat.
To anticipate the next few chapters somewhat, we have two separate senses of
identity: a phenomenal sense of ourselves as a present-tense subject, and a cognitive
awareness of the diachronically extended human being that we are. I’ve argued
elsewhere that we can accept this distinction between our ‘from-the-inside’ sense
of identity and our third-personal conception of the careers of the human animal
that each of us is without insisting one of these is what we really are and the other
merely secondary or derivative.66 Indeed, I think resisting the standing temptation to
collapse phenomenal and metaphysical judgements of identity or non-identity into
one common account—which will in effect mean making one decisive and the other
subordinate, and it’s pretty much always metaphysics that comes out on top—is one
of the most important things Kierkegaard has to teach us. But false memories may
seem to present an insurmountable challenge to this view. Unless we want to bite
Locke’s bullet and accept that I just am the person who saw the flood, it seems we
have to privilege metaphysical identity over phenomenal identity. It doesn’t matter
how strong my sense that I saw the flood might be: I’m wrong, because I wasn’t there.
But this challenge is lessened somewhat if we take it that metaphysical and
phenomenal senses of self, though separate (as our discussion of alienation in
Chapter 5 in particular will show) nonetheless interact with, impact upon, and
modify each other. There are straightforward ways in which my sense of self can
be altered when I am presented with facts that appear to contradict my memory.
65 66
Locke 1975, pp.340–1. Stokes 2013b, 2014.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
I can be persuaded that despite my indignant denials and complete lack of recall, I did
drunkenly belt out ‘The Safety Dance’ at karaoke last night, and I can be persuaded
that despite my apparent memory I couldn’t possibly have been present for an event
that happened years before my birth. In such cases the quality of the rememberer’s
self-experience alters: what had seemed like a memory of Noah’s flood now comes to
seem like a mere imagined-seeing of the flood, despite there being no alteration in its
visual content. The imagery is the same, but it lacks a sense that what is depicted falls
within my field of answerability. Or, we might be stuck with a sense of being troubled
by the origin of the imagery: did I just imagine that flood? Or am I actually
remembering a film I saw about a flood, or a dream, or some different event I’ve
misinterpreted as a flood when remembering it?
It should be no surprise that the sorts of things we appeal to in constructing
metaphysical accounts of personal identity, such as psychological and physical
continuity, impact upon the subjective quality of our experience in this way. I’ve
tied the subjective sense of identity to a sense of responsibility for the selves we
remember and imagine, and claimed our sense of responsibility is indexed to a sense
of a life for which we are uniquely responsible. Metaphysics may not yield one clear
picture of exactly what that life does and does not contain, but the sorts of continuity
it makes use of do feed into our subjective sense of self. The pictures you’ve taken on
your phone of my karaoke antics will change my relation to a segment of my past (by
making me suddenly identify, cringingly, with the dreadful singer presented in the
photos), but if I don’t remember what’s depicted, then it is the photo’s status as
evidence of bodily continuity between drunk-singer-last-night and hungover-non-
rememberer-today that effects this change, by presenting me with a ‘candidate’ self
that I can’t declaim identity with.
That might look once again like metaphysical identity taking priority. But the
influence can arguably move in the other direction too. To take a well-worn example:
many philosophers regard Star Trek-style teleportation as a form of suicide, as most
metaphysically realist accounts of personal identity (both neo-Lockean and physical-
ist/animalist) imply that the relevant self-constituting forms of continuity don’t hold
between the pre-teleportation person and the post-teleportation person. But as Mark
Johnston has argued,67 if we lived in a society in which teleportation is commonplace,
we might come to see our teleportation products as us, envisioning their actions as
things we are answerable for and extending our egocentric concern to them in the
same way we would with regular survival. In such cases, instead of our egocentric
and practical concerns being guided by metaphysics, our metaphysical commitments
(of the form ‘x is identical with y’) are being directed by our practical and moral
concerns. Admittedly this point needs to be developed further, and this isn’t the place
to do it. But there is at least some reason to think that the interaction between
67
Johnston 2010.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
phenomenal identity and metaphysical identity is two-way, in a way that licences us in

refusing a strict hierarchicalization between them.
As we’ve seen, for Locke the false memory problem was ‘fatally’ urgent, for on the
standard interpretation of Locke as a memory criterion theorist, the ‘correction’ of
false memories implies another, truer account of our identity that is not available to
us but which will be available to God on the Day of Judgement. But we’ve also seen
that the theological pragmatist reading takes the heat out of this objection, because
Locke arguably isn’t trying to offer the definitive account of what we are, but an
account that’s good enough for now. We ‘recruit’ past selves via our concernful
remembering, but we remain open to the possibility that this sense of self may come
to be altered at a future time and in light of future disclosures.
It’s worth reminding ourselves though that Kierkegaardian contemporaneity is in
some ways more extreme: not only can I recruit perspectival images to myself to
which I have a problematized relationship, such as observer memories or seeing
photos of events I’ve forgotten, I can recruit the subject of past events that I was
clearly not physically co-located with at all. The incarnation is the obvious example,
while the young aesthete ‘A’ suggests we could similarly become ‘present’ with events
in the Middle Ages, should they acquire ‘decisive reality’ for us (EO, 1:224/SKS 2,
218). In such a case, the subject would be co-present with visualized long-ago events
because she would experience them with the phenomenal sense that they make
demands of her as she is here and now. We could, moreover, include events for
which I bear agential responsibility despite not being physically present: if I was the
person who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, I could imagine their
deaths, scattered across different times and places, as events in my life understood as
the life I am to answer for. These may not, strictly speaking, be events within the
spatio-temporal history of my body, but they might, in the normative sense discussed
here, fall within a perspective with which I can still be on first-personal terms. And
this leads us to the broader question of the relation between contemporaneity and
imagination per se.
Anticipatory Imagination
It is a pervasive claim throughout Kierkegaard’s work that certain forms of self-
reflexive thought or vision involve seeing oneself within remembered and projected
scenarios.68 In the account of moral imagination offered by Anti-Climacus we find a
persistent concern for the importance of recognizing ourselves in representations of
our projected future actions, seeing ‘oneself ’ in the ‘mirror of possibility’ instead of
seeing only a human being (SUD, 37/SKS 11, 152). But what might it mean to see
68
As discussed in Part II of Stokes 2010a.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
oneself as the person who carries out the intentions I frame in projective
imagination?
For Velleman, as we’ve seen, framing an intention (or simply anticipating the
future), in visual forms at least, involves experiencing the notional subject of the
image of the future we project as first-personally-accessible by virtue of the image’s
causal history rather than any extraneous stipulations. We don’t stipulate the identity
of the person who ‘turns up’ to fill the position; he is ‘simply the person who will
confront the envisioned future with this image at his back’, his identity ‘picked out
by the natural history of the image, as the person whom it presents in the notional
first-person’.69 But there is nonetheless something distinctive about these modes of
anticipatory imagination when compared to, say, simply visualizing some future
event: in both cases we do not stipulate the identity of the notional subject, but our
way of anticipating colours how the future will eventually be experienced. ‘I don’t just
anticipate experiencing the future; I anticipate experiencing it as the payoff of this
anticipation, as the cadence resolving the present, anticipatory phrase of thought’.70
I cannot, for instance, anticipate being shocked by an event that I’m already antici-
pating.71 It’s because of these forms of ‘intercommunication’ between the notional
and actual perspective that I care more about what I anticipate happening to me than
to others: to imagine the future event ‘befalling a mind that has somehow been
prepared’ by precisely this anticipation, is to be ‘caught up in it’ in a way that ‘to some
degree, already constitutes [the event’s] mattering’.72
What Kierkegaard brings to this sort of discussion, however, is an awareness that
there are different ways of imagining a causally connected first-person perspective,
some of which contain a sense of identity and some of which do not—even when the
causal-connectedness of the two perspectives is not in question. There are, for
instance, ways in which we can imagine future actions that are strongly connected
or contiguous with the circumstances of our lives right now, and which we frame
specifically as intentions, and yet which we do not fully inhabit in an important sense.
In his discussion of imagination and agency, Anti-Climacus casts the possible courses
of action we present to ourselves in terms of a ‘mirror’ that shows us selves to which
we bear a rather curious modal relationship:
The mirror of possibility is no ordinary mirror; it must be used with extreme caution, for, in
the highest sense, this mirror does not tell the truth. That a self appears to be such and such
in the possibility of itself is only a half-truth, for in the possibility of itself the self is still far from
or is only half of itself. (SUD, 37/SKS 11, 152)
69 70
Velleman 2006a, pp.198–9. Velleman 2006a, p.198.
71
Velleman 2006a, p.199. An anonymous referee points out that Velleman’s claim doesn’t quite seem
right here: I can anticipate an event that I expect I’ll have forgotten anticipating by the time it happens,
such that I’ll be shocked when it does.
72
Velleman 2006a, p.199; see also Velleman 2008.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
The selves presented in anticipatory or intention-framing imagination are, truisti-

cally, selves that have realized (or are in the process of realizing) possibilities that
have not yet in fact been realized. But for Anti-Climacus, what’s at issue here is not
just the causal history by which the prefigured intention comes to be realized, but the
particular way in which we see the selves we encounter in projective imagination:
‘Even in seeing oneself in a mirror it is necessary to recognize oneself, for if one does
not, one does not see oneself but only a human being’ (SUD, 37/SKS 11, 152).
It is clearly not a feature of projective imagination that we sometimes have to work
out reflectively whether it is us involved in the projected scenario—that’s simply
given in the experience of anticipation or framing an intention. That, after all, is one
of the unassailable strengths of Velleman’s account: there are no overt cognitions of
the sort ‘and that will be me’, just as no comparable overt thoughts attend memory.
Velleman and Anti-Climacus agree, I think, that we have an immediate relationship
to the selves so figured, without any cognitive stipulations. To that extent, Anti-
Climacus could probably go along with the claim that purely imaginary exercises
such as imagining being Napoleon seeing Austerlitz are not genuinely self-reflexive.
But what Anti-Climacus takes genuine self-reflexivity to consist in is a mode of
experience that forms a phenomenal connection between the present and future
perspectives. Like recognition—an essentially perceptual experience in which we
suddenly see something as what we recognize it to be—this amounts to seeing a
future perspective as mine in some phenomenally decisive sense, in a way that is not
necessarily determined by (but perhaps responds to) causal facts about which human
it belongs to.
Conversely, we can frame intentions or anticipate possibilities without experien-
cing a sense of phenomenal identification with the self figured in those possibilities.
Consider someone who decides that someday soon she is going to give away all her
possessions, move to an isolated spot in the countryside, and live a life of rustic
simplicity and sustainability. She envisions, often and in exquisite detail, how she will
cast off the trappings of modern life, how she’ll deal with the responses of her family
and friends when she does, and what her bucolic life will be like. She tells anyone
who’ll listen about the move she’s ‘planning’. But—and here’s why the scare quotes
around ‘planning’ seem justified—weeks, months, and years pass, and the move to
the country never happens. It remains always off in the ‘someday soon’, continually
planned for but never actually carried out. I suspect many of our most treasured
hopes and dreams are more like this than we’d care to admit.
What can we say about our would-be latter-day Thoreau’s relation to this inten-
tion? She isn’t straightforwardly akratic, and it seems too hasty to claim that she
doesn’t honestly intend to realize her plan. But we can have serious misgivings as to
whether she seriously holds this intention—she frames it as a genuine intention, and
imagines a human being causally connected with herself turning up to carry this
intention out, but she does not experience a phenomenal sense that she, the self she
experiences herself as being right now, is enjoined to take action to this end. Without
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
the sense that this possibility speaks to her personally as presenting what she, here
and now, is to bring about, the intention degrades into mere reverie or fantasy. The
future scenario appears not as a task, but as a mere diversion, a plaything. As the
jaded A notes in Either/Or, possibility is an intoxicant that, unlike pleasure itself,
never disappoints (EO, 1:26/SKS 2, 50). As cases like this show, we can indulge in
such fantasies while insisting that we are seriously and soberly framing intentions, all
the while quarantining ourselves from the implications of what we envision. In such
reveries we ‘transmute’, as Catriona Mackenzie puts it, from centrally imagining
being me (the actual subject) to imagining from the notional first-person perspective
of a person I’d like to be—but unlike in the example Mackenzie cites (of a timid child
imaging standing up to bullies in ways inconsistent with her actual personality), the
distance between the notional and actual perspectives is constituted by a lack of
reflexive identification rather than an awareness of dispositional difference.73 In such
cases we do not, as Anti-Climacus puts it, see ourselves in the mirror but only a
human being—even though it is clear that, on Anti-Climacus’ account, we don’t see it
as another human being. In other words, we acknowledge our co-identity with the
human figured in the scenario we imagine, but we do not see this as being the same
self. (This distinction will become crucial in the following chapters.) We fail to
‘occupy’ the position of the notional subject of the projected experience, without
any awareness that we are doing so.
Fission Cases
The differences between the Non-Stipulation Approach and Kierkegaard’s distinctive
version of the Phenomenal Property Approach becomes clear when Velleman turns
his attention to another example of a split between causal history and perspectival
accessibility: the human fission thought-experiment so beloved of philosophers of
personal identity. (That’s hardly an exaggeration: in Reasons and Persons, the book
that has done more to shape personal identity discussions than any other since Locke,
Parfit mentions that David Wiggins’ presentation of the fission problem was almost
entirely responsible for his decision to study philosophy.)74 Suppose I know that
tomorrow I will split into two complete human beings, like an amoeba—or instead,
that my brain will be bisected into its constituent hemispheres, each of which, fully
capable of sustaining my complete psychology, will then be transplanted into iden-
tical twin bodies. Each of the resulting persons will be psychologically continuous
with the person I am now. Such thought-experiments play havoc with the idea that
psychological continuity is what constitutes personal identity, at least where identity
73
Mackenzie 2008b, p.127.
74
Parfit 1984, p.518, n.40. Wiggin’s account of the fission problem is to be found in Wiggins 1967, p.50.
In fact, embryonic versions of the fission example can be found as early as Samuel Clarke and Anthony
Collins’s debate over Locke between 1706 and 1709. See Martin and Barresi 2000, pp.33–8.
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
is understood as a transitive, one-to-one logical relation. For if the two ‘fission

products’ are each perfectly psychologically continuous with the pre-fission person
(at least momentarily), what sorts of identity relations hold here? The pre-fission
person can’t be identical with both fission products, as the transitivity of the identity
relation would then require that the fission products also be identical with each other,
which they clearly aren’t. Yet equally we have no non-arbitrary grounds on which to
declare the pre-fission person to be identical with one of the fission products but not
the other, for the fission products are both equally continuous with the pre-fission
self; there is, in Nozick’s phrase, no ‘closest continuer’ of the pre-fission self, for both
post-fission selves are equally close.75
It seems that the pre-fission person simply ceases to exist here—yet as Parfit notes,
this clearly isn’t as bad as normal death, and indeed might even be slightly better than
normal survival.76 If I’m psychologically continuous with my fission products,
shouldn’t I still be able to anticipate the things that will happen to them? There
may be practical limits to how many future perspectives we can anticipate, for having
several fission descendants may rob us of what Peter Unger calls, somewhat
obliquely, ‘the focus of a person’s life’,77 and as Raymond Martin claims, ‘as a matter
of contingent fact, few of us can easily project ourselves into what we imagine will be
the psychologies of more than one simultaneously conscious fission descendant’.78
Yet on the assumption that at least some of us, at least some of the time, could so
project ourselves, what would this look like? What would it be like to anticipate the
experiences of more than one self, or (pre-fission) frame intentions for my fission
products to carry out in the future?
According to Velleman I can frame such intentions—but not in a genuinely
reflexive manner, because I could not imagine these future actions being carried
out without first specifying which of my fission products’ perspective I am imagining:
If I try to picture the moment as it will appear in an experience specified merely as
forthcoming, or to follow, I won’t succeed in picking out the perspective from which I’m
trying to picture it, since my picture may be followed, in the relevant sense, by two different
experiences of the moment in question, and I cannot be trying to draw it from both
perspectives at once. Similarly, my anticipation may be remembered in two different
perspectives, and so I cannot frame it from a perspective specified merely as that in which
it will be remembered.79
75 76
As discussed in Nozick 1983, pp.29–69. Parfit Reasons and Persons pp.264–5.
77
Unger 1992, p.269. In fact Unger says we lose too much of this focus even with two fission
descendants. It’s not that we lose more focus when we fission into a hundred people rather than two,
but simply that the loss is more obvious in cases of ‘century fission’; the loss is just easier to overlook when
there are only two fission products.
78
Martin 1998, p.67. Barry Dainton (2008, p.13) also claims that in a situation where thousands of
perfect (physical and psychological) copies of you are made, these are, intuitively, mere copies whose fates
don’t engender your egocentric concern regarding their future welfare.
79
Velleman 2006a, pp.200–1.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
Since I cannot unselfconsciously (i.e. without identity-stipulation) imagine the action

that I intend to carry out, fission would deprive me of the basis on which I can
become genuinely first-personal with my fission products. Fission does, therefore,
deprive me of future selves, even in the perspectivally accessible rather than meta-
physical sense.80 There would exist no perspective which I could imaginatively enter
‘without a second thought’—and ‘the second thought of whose perspective I was
entering would be an alienating thought, one too many for the intimacy that holds
among selves’.81 So in fission cases, I lose my future,82 in the sense that there no
longer exists a future I can unselfconsciously anticipate as mine.83
Human fission seems like the sort of abstract philosopher’s daydream that Kier-
kegaard would want absolutely nothing to do with. Still, even here Kierkegaardian
contemporaneity might be of use to philosophers, even if it’s not an application of the
idea that Kierkegaard, with his overriding existential and religious concerns, would
approve of. What follows, just to be clear, is a (somewhat speculative) use of one of
Kierkegaard’s concepts, but it’s certainly not a Kierkegaardian use of that concept.
Contemporaneity, as we’ve seen, can make a person phenomenally present with
events which they could not possibly have been physically present at. If we claim that
the same property is at work when forward-directed anticipations are genuinely
reflexive, then the perspectives of our fission products could once again be made
accessible to us. In imagining an action carried out by one of my future fission
products, so long as I can experience what I imagine as something I now am
answerable for, then the distinction between the notional and actual self is cancelled
out. Contemporaneity connects me in the required way with what I anticipate that
80
Velleman 2006a, p.201. For an interesting objection to Velleman’s argument, see Shipley 2002; see
also Belzer 2005.
81
Velleman 2006a, p.202. My present perspective will still, however, be unselfconsciously accessible to
my post-fission products; perspectival identity can therefore be asymmetrical in a way that human-being-
identity cannot, which shows, according to Velleman, that metaphysical person-identity cannot coincide
with perspectival selfhood (2006a, p.201, n.53).
82
An anonymous referee points out that this may not be the case if the fission products are never
conscious at the same time, as in Martin’s (1998, pp.53–72) ‘fission rejuvenation’ example. In fission
rejuvenation, one of the fission products A is unconscious from the moment of fission, and placed into a
state of biological stasis, while the other fission product B continues to live a life psychologically continuous
with that of the pre-fission self. A device in B’s brain continually transmits information about B’s brain-
states to a device inside A’s brain. When B dies (say of a heart attack), the device in his brain sends a signal
to the device in A’s brain that wakes A up. A will be psychologically continuous with B as B was at the
moment of death, and physically continuous with the pre-fission person as they were at the point of fission.
Subjectively, A will have the experience of having just had a heart attack and then waking up having
instantly reversed the aging process back to where he was when he fissioned.
83
Of course, someone like Parfit could claim that this ‘loss’ isn’t something that should bother us.
Velleman has challenged the rationality of Parfit’s general equanimity about survival: ‘I don’t see why
bearing a less robust relation to his own past and future is any consolation to Parfit. Why should a sense of
partial alienation from past and future selves leave him feeling relieved rather than bereft? It’s not as if he
has come to realize that this isn’t his “only life”; he has merely come to realize that it isn’t even his in the
sense that he previously thought. This realization provides only the cold comfort of having nothing to lose’
(Velleman 2006b, p.15).
PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY 
fission product doing. That I can then imagine a separate action, carried out by the
other fission product, does not necessarily add an extra layer of stipulation to the
process: I simply imagine one scenario with the property of being contemporary with
it, then the other. Each thought can be attended by the appropriate phenomenal
property—contemporaneity—independently of each other. This would certainly be
an unfamiliar form of anticipation, though as Parfit points out, just because a form of
anticipation seems unimaginable to us now doesn’t make it impossible.84
It might be objected here that in fission cases, contemporaneity would be even
more removed from normal anticipation than the forms of stipulative anticipation
Velleman describes. To become contemporaneous with events seen from a future
perspective, I have to see that perspective as one for which I am responsible; doesn’t
adding this normative dimension add a reflective layer to the question of whether
I can, quite simply, fear or look forward to something that will happen to one of my
fission products? If I’m told that after I undergo fission, one of the fission products
will be subjected to hideous torture, do I really need to feel some sense of moral
responsibility—let alone soteriological responsibility—for the hapless torture victim?
Put differently, is contemporaneity really a candidate for the property that distin-
guishes self-regarding fear of being tortured myself from other-regarding fear of
someone else being tortured?
That is, I think, one of the most serious objections to using samtidighed in the
context of personal identity.85 Part of the answer will consist in describing how, for
Kierkegaard, contemporaneity is not simply how we normally anticipate the future,
but is a normatively enjoined state to be achieved that uses the same psychological
materials as normal anticipation. Just as erindringen uses the raw ‘stuff ’ of hukom-
melse to fashion an exercise of memory that relates essentially to the rememberer, so
too contemporaneity uses both episodic memory and anticipatory imagination to
generate a mode of recollection and anticipation that is suffused with a sense of
soteriological-identity-tracking responsibility. And this gives contemporaneity a
certain immunity to the sense of alienation from our distant past and distant future
that ‘basic’ memory or anticipation is otherwise prone to. (We’ll discuss such self-
alienation in Chapter 5).
The merit of the Kierkegaardian version of the Phenomenal Property Approach to
the question of what links us with our first-personally accessible past and future
perspectives is that it allows for the gap that is sometimes experienced between the
causal and phenomenal accessibility of our memories and projected futures. An
account such as Velleman’s that claims that an unselfconscious causal history
provides the sort of perspectival access that underpins egocentric concern will
84
Parfit 1984, p.174.
85
It’s an objection that was first raised to me by Ed Langerak in a seminar at St Olaf College in 2007;
Martin (1998, p.102) makes a similar point. I try to answer it in several different ways across this book;
whether successfully or not is for the reader to judge, but I’d like to record my gratitude to Ed for raising it.
 PERSPECTIVAL SUBJECTIVITY
struggle with cases where such access is taken as given but egocentric concern fails to
hold. We’ll have more to say about that in the following Chapters 4 and 5. For the
moment, it’s enough to note that Kierkegaardian contemporaneity has furnished us
with an account of how the notional and actual subjects of memories and of
anticipatory imagination are linked. But does this account have more to recommend
it than the Non-Stipulation Approach? In Chapters 4 and 5 I hope to show that
contemporaneity, precisely by virtue of its robustly normative dimension, connects
in important ways with our sense of what we care about in identity, in ways that go
beyond what the Non-Stipulation Approach can offer.
4
Diachronicity, Episodicity,
Synchronicity
The Self across Time

We’ve now seen that Kierkegaard belongs to a tradition that regards a certain
phenomenal property as essential to the experience of putatively identity-tracking
features of memory and anticipation. Our sense that the events we remember or
anticipate matters to us uniquely, in a way that amounts to our having a sense of being
identical with the selves that had or will have those experiences, depends upon
normatively laden sense of responsibility for those events—and not, as we might
assume, the other way around. This sense of responsibility presents itself as a sort of
phenomenal co-presence with the events, such that the distinction between the
perspective of the original experiencer of a memory (or the imagined experiencer
of a future event) and the perspective of the present subject collapses, at least on a
phenomenal level. Of course, we know that these events are temporally distant from
us—that’s a key part of the difference between remembering and hallucinating.1 Does
this mean, then, that it’s Kierkegaardian contemporaneity that accounts for our sense
of having been in the past, our sense of having diachronic extension across time? And
if so, given that contemporaneity is something we’re supposed to achieve, doesn’t
that mean that we might sometimes fail to have a sense of diachronic extension? The
possibility of subjects having memories yet lacking a sense of diachronic extension
seems, at first blush, so unlikely as to count against the thesis that our sense of
diachronic extension is a function of samtidighed. Certainly Locke, who saw con-
cernment as an ‘unavoidable concomitant’ of consciousness, doesn’t seem to have
anticipated such a possibility.
Yet the idea of subjects who have memories and anticipations yet lack a sense of
their self as something that persists through time, something that existed in the past
and will exist in the future, has been defended at length by Galen Strawson—who,
compellingly, claims to be such a subject himself. Across a number of heavily
discussed works, Strawson has articulated a number of important and challenging
1
As claimed by Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p.79.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
claims about the phenomenology2 of self-experience. As I hope the extensive engage-

ment that follows would attest, despite my deep disagreements with aspects of
Strawson’s account of self-experience I think there is much in it that is also import-
antly right and deeply valuable. And Strawson’s work has been one of the key
catalysts for discussions of self-experience in recent years, due largely to the pro-
vocative character of his central claims: that our experience contains a phenomenal
‘sense of self ’, a self that is figured in experience as a single mental thing that is a
subject of experience; that this self is a physical object (which Strawson sees as
entailed by any form of materialism worthy of the name); that my sense of the
temporal persistence of my self (again, understood as a mental thing) is quite distinct
from my sense of my long-term continuity as a human being; that due to the
saccadic, ‘jumpy’ nature of consciousness, this self is always (though contingently)
short-lived; and that accordingly, human beings do not have one self throughout
their lives but a succession of countless selves of only momentary duration.3 This
position is challenging both to neo-Lockeans who want to preserve the concept of the
self as a psychological entity that is co-extensive with most or all of an individual
human animal’s life, and to those who seek to emphasize the embodied, enactive, and
environmental aspects of selfhood.4 For the latter group—currently very much in the
ascendant—Strawson’s selves are too ghostly, too Cartesian, while for the former
group, they’re simply too short-lived to do the work the concept ‘self ’ is expected (or
hoped) to do.
A parallel claim in these works concerns different ways in which the self ’s
temporal dimensions are experienced. ‘One can,’ according to Strawson, ‘be fully
cognizant of the fact that one has long-term continuity as a human being without ipso
facto having any significant sense or experience-structuring conception of the self as
something that has long-term continuity.’5 Some people, according to Strawson, are
‘Diachronics’ or ‘Endurantists’, who experience their selves as things that extend/
persist across time, while others are ‘Episodics’ or ‘Impermanentists’, with no sense of
their selves as existing outside of the present moment.6 Strawson’s stated aims are
modest: he claims merely to defend episodic self-experience as no less rich or fully
moral than diachronic self-experience. He doesn’t set out to commend episodicity
over diachronicity (though he is more critical of narrativity). Yet ultimately his
account makes it hard to see in what diachronic experience could possibly consist
2
For a critique of Strawson’s claim to be engaging in phenomenology, see Sheets-Johnstone 1999; for a
defence of Strawson’s approach, see Brook 1999.
3
These claims are made across Strawson 1999, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2011b.
4 5
Strawson 2009, p.23. Strawson 2009, p.202.
6
Strawson 2003, pp.109–10; 2004, p.430 passim; 2009, pp.221–2. ‘Endurantist’ and ‘Impermanetist’ are
Strawson’s newer terms, meant to reduce confusion between the adjective and noun forms of ‘diachronic’
and ‘episodic’ (though in his 2011b he simply uses ‘diachronic’ and ‘non-diachronic’). However, ‘Episodic’
and ‘Diachronic’ have become quite firmly embedded in discussions of Strawson, and so despite the
potential for confusion I’ll stick with the older terms here. I’m using capitals to pick out the noun form (i.e.
Diachronic and Episodic persons), with lower-case for the adjective.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
other than an artefact of our awareness of ourselves as mere human beings.7 Our
phenomenal sense that we persist across time is an illusion engendered by ‘resem-
blances of content among successive experiences . . . deep similarities and constancies
of general mental feeling-tone’ and ‘constancies and coherences of development of
perceptual and cognitive content from experience to experience as we move around
in the world and think our thoughts’.8
One could claim that Strawson’s argument suffers for this lack of a phenomen-
ology of diachronic self-experience that doesn’t ‘delimn when scrutinized’.9 On this
line, Strawson needs a non-reductive account of whatever is distinctive about the
diachronic life if he’s to maintain that there are no epistemological or moral grounds
for privileging either diachronicity or episodicity—and it’s not enough simply to
assume that such an account must be possible. Call this the Strong Lack Argument.
But even if we assume, more charitably, that Strawson doesn’t need to provide a non-
reductive account of diachronicity to maintain his neutrality between episodic and
diachronic existence, the fact remains that there’s still a gap in the picture that we
may reasonably want to fill. Call this the Weak Lack Argument. Either the Strong or
the Weak Lack Arguments are sufficient to motivate the search for a phenomenology
of Diachronic self-experience to correspond to Strawson’s descriptions of episodicity.
As Strawson, a self-declared Episodic, may not be in a position to provide such a
phenomenology, we will need to look elsewhere to find it.
In what follows, I do not claim to offer the definitive phenomenology of diachro-
nicity. I will argue, however, that Kierkegaardian contemporaneity, in the Phenom-
enal Property Approach interpretation of the term we’ve been developing here,
stands as perhaps the best picture yet offered of what diachronic self-experience
consists in. Kierkegaard furnishes us with a philosophically structured description of
what it is like to experience a phenomenally rich sense of co-identity with represen-
tations of one’s past and future selves—precisely the robust phenomenology of
diachronic self-experience Strawson’s account lacks. We’ll see that in this context
there are at least two distinct advantages to adopting samtidighed as our model of
diachronic self-experience. First, its normative character serves to ground the fre-
quently voiced suspicion that there is something incomplete, inadequate, or morally
deficient about a purely episodic experience of self, especially with regard to the
availability or otherwise of morally valuable self-reflexive emotions. Secondly, the
Kierkegaardian model offers a more parsimonious explanation than Strawson pro-
vides of why even Episodics fear the future, especially death.
Yet a morally normative account of diachronicity, such as we get from con-
temporaneity, implicitly critiques the very episodic modes of self-experience that
Strawson seeks to defend. On the Strong Lack Argument, this means the encounter
with Kierkegaard confronts Strawsonians with a fairly stark choice: either articulate
7
Davenport (2012, pp.24, 26) basically endorses this criticism of Strawson.
8 9
Strawson 2009, pp.218–19; see also 2003, p.357. Strawson 2003, p.355.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
another, normatively neutral but nonetheless robust phenomenology of diachroni-

city, or take on the Kierkegaardian account of what it is to be diachronic and
abandon their neutrality about the diachronic–episodic distinction. In the latter
case, there are only two moves left open: dismiss diachronicity as illusory, or accept
it as normative. In other words, if Strawsonians cannot provide a better account of
diachronicity, they will have to endorse one or the other mode of experience. Fence-
sitting, as it turns out, is not an option. If, however, we stick to the Weak Lack
Argument, the Kierkegaardian position still poses a challenge to Strawson’s claim
that episodicity is no worse than diachronicity.
The main lines of the argument presented below have previously appeared in
print,10 and Strawson has responded in generous detail.11 In what follows I’ll try to
address his responses; doing so will, I think, help to clarify some terminological
confusions between us as well as sharpening where the deep points of disagreement lie.
Episodic Self-experience
The Episodic–Diachronic distinction is, according to Strawson, ‘another of the great
dividing facts about humanity’,12 grounded in brute genetic, neurological fact,13
although environmental factors may also play a part.14 Whilst Strawson takes it
that all conscious experience contains a sense of our ‘self ’ as some sort of mental
thing, Diachronics experience this self as something with significant ongoing tem-
poral duration, while Episodics have less to none of this sense of extension, and
experience their selves as existing purely in the here-and-now. Strawson locates
himself ‘somewhere down the episodic end of the spectrum’;15 this allows him to
use his own introspectibilia as material for describing such a form of self-experience,
but prevents him from furnishing a corresponding account of the phenomenal
content of diachronic self-experience. Accordingly he says very little about the
character of diachronicity. In earlier work he claims that some people ‘experience
their lives in terms of something that has a shape and story, narrative trajectory’,16
but later distinguishes diachronicity from narrativity, as subjects can experience
themselves as narratively conditioned without being diachronic.17 We’re also told
that some diachronic self-experiencers are ‘great planners’,18 a fact that describes
their dispositions of thought, but not, strictly speaking, their self-experience in
Strawson’s sense.
Conversely, Strawson describes his own episodic self-experience in striking terms:
I have little interest in my own past and little concern for my future. My poor personal memory
rarely impinges on my present consciousness. Even when I am interested in my past, I’m not
interested in it specifically in so far as it is mine. I’m perfectly well aware that it is mine, in so far
10 11 12
Stokes 2010c. Strawson 2011b. Strawson 1999, p.109.
13 14 15
Strawson 2004, p.431; 2009, p.221. Strawson 2009, p.221. Strawson 2003, p.353.
16 17 18
Strawson 2003, p.353. Strawson 2004, p.446. Strawson 2003, p.353.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
as I am a human being considered as a whole, but I do not really think of it as mine at all, in so
far as ‘mine’ picks me out as I am now. For me as I am now, the interest (emotional or
otherwise) of my personal memories lies in their experiential content considered independ-
ently of the fact that what is remembered happened to me—i.e. to the me that is now
remembering.19
Central to the claimed experience of episodic selfhood is a delamination of the sense

of self as a distinct mental entity from my conception of myself as a human being
persisting through time. Strawson insists on a distinction between ‘one’s experience
of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a
whole, and one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as
an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort’.20 This posits two distinct referents for
each of the first-person pronouns: a human being persisting across time, and a
present mental entity, both of which I can call ‘myself ’.21 To remove this confusion
Strawson refers to the mental entity, to ‘what which I experience myself to be when
I’m apprehending myself . . . as a subject of experience that isn’t the same thing as the
whole human being that I am’22 as ‘Me*’ or ‘I*’, to distinguish it from the human
being ‘me’. For an Episodic such as Strawson, this distinction captures something
crucial about their self-experience, for when he remembers an event in his past (‘his’
here picking out Strawson considered as a human being), he experiences no phe-
nomenal sense that the self he is now (me*) is located within that memory:
In my own case, the interest (emotional or otherwise) of my—rather sparse—autobiographical
memories lies in their experiential content considered quite independently of the fact that what
is remembered happened to me. In fact I am strongly inclined to say that the events in question
didn’t happen to me—to Me*, to that which I feel myself to be, in having Self-experience—at
all. These memories are of course distinctive in their ‘from-the-inside’ character, and they
certainly happened to the human being that I (also) am; but it simply does not follow that they
present, or are experienced, as things that happened to Me* as just characterized.23
What Strawson is talking about here should be familiar from Chapter 4: it’s what we
previously labelled the structural indifference of episodic memory, the fact that the
perspectival organization of such memories in no way connects the notional subject
of the memory with the subject now doing the remembering. Even awareness of
causal connections between those perspectives, according to Strawson, will not
automatically or necessarily impact upon my self-experience in the sense picked
out by ‘Me*’, or give me the phenomenal quality of experiencing that it’s Me* that
was present in that past experience. There would need to be something extra
encountered in the phenomenal content of memory for an experience of Me* as
being in the past to be possible. And for an Episodic, this ‘something extra’ is
19 20
Strawson 2003, pp.353–4. Strawson 2004, p.429.
21
While Strawson makes much of this form of double-reference and how frequently it’s implicit in our
everyday language, (see e.g. 2003, p.6), some philosophers would deny this; see e.g. Baker 2000, p.68.
22 23
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
nowhere to be found, even in the most complete and vivid of first-person-perspective

memories:
The ‘from-the-inside’ character of a memory can detach completely from any lived identifi-
cation with—any sense of being the same person as—the subject of the remembered experi-
ence. My memory of the experience of falling out of a punt last year, for example, has an
essentially from-the-inside character, visually (the water rushing up to meet me), kinaesthet-
ically, proprioceptively, and so on, but it doesn’t follow, and in my case it isn’t true, that it
carries any sense at all that what is remembered happened to me*.24
Strawson raises a compelling question: where, even in such a detailed and vivid
memory, could I possibly locate a sense that this was something that happened to
me*? Or to put it another way: what experiential quality could memory have which
might either constitute or indicate a connection between the self that had the original
experience and the self remembering it? Strawson’s inability to find such a quality
amounts to a rejection of the Phenomenal Property Approach (including, a fortiori,
Kierkegaard’s version of that approach).
The same question arises when Strawson turns from memory of the past to
anticipation of the future, and again finds nothing answering to a phenomenal
sense of connection between himself* and the human who he anticipates undergoing
the future experience:
I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of Me* as being something
in the future. It is also accurate to shift the ‘not’, and say, more strongly, that what I think of
being in the future is not Me*.25
Strawson is fully aware that the events he envisions from his remembered past and
anticipated future are events in the life of the human being he is (the identity
conditions of which are not here in question). Yet in these experiences of memory
and anticipation there is no distinctive phenomenal content that links the human
being figured in them with the phenomenally present self he feels himself to be in the
moment of remembering or anticipating. The ‘first-personal mode of givenness’ that
characterizes self-experience does not contain in itself any significant sense of
temporal extension,26 and none is provided by considering the past or future of the
human being that the Episodic fully acknowledges being.
The Reductive Account of Diachronicity

It’s important to note that ‘Diachronic’ and ‘Episodic’ are not, according to Strawson,
absolute, mutually exclusive terms, but instead exist on a spectrum of ‘temporal
temperaments’. Accordingly, Diachronics might experience themselves more-or-less
episodically some of the time, and vice versa. Strawson himself acknowledges certain
24 25 26
Strawson 2009, p.226. Strawson 2003, p.354. Cf. Zahavi and Parnas 1999, p.255.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
features of his own experience of memory and anticipation that appear to be

diachronic in character. Yet he describes these in a way that renders their diachro-
nicity ephemeral and essentially artefactual:
In so far as I have any sense of Me* (rather than the living human being that I am) as
something with a history and a future, it seems that this sense is a wispy, short-range product
of, and in no way a ground of, my innate predisposition to physiological impulses that develop
into experiences of anxiety or regret. It delimns when scrutinised, and it is more accurate to say
that it does not exist.27
Strawson doesn’t claim that no one experiences a sense of identity with their
remembered selves, merely that ‘a sense of the self need not necessarily involve a
sense of it as something that has long-term continuity’28 and that, in fact, for
Episodics it does not. Yet his account contains some clearly reductionist elements
that seek to explain diachronicity away, in a way that accords episodicity a certain
conceptual priority. Strawson vividly describes the heavily disjointed character of
consciousness: not so much a continuously flowing stream as a gappy, fitful series of
saccadic jumps between intentional objects: ‘always shooting off, fuzzing, shorting
out, spurting, and stalling . . . trains of thought are continually broken by detours—by
blows—fissures—white noise’.29 This places another serious constraint on any pos-
sible experience of the self as something with any sort of significant temporal
extension, for Strawson denies that:
the Persistence Belief—the sense of the self as something that has long-term continuity—has
some sort of iron phenomenological warrant in the immediate character of our moment-to-
moment experience of the process of consciousness. I don’t think it’s supported at the level of
detail by any experiential phenomenon of steady uninterrupted flow . . . In so far as there’s
support for the Persistence Belief in the moment-to-moment character of our experience of the
process of consciousness, much of it derives indirectly from other sources—the massive
constancies and developmental coherencies of content . . . that standardly link up experiences
through time, and by courtesy of short-term memory, across all the small radical jumps and
breaks of flow.30
According to Strawson, we do not have a ‘Persistence Experience that is independent

of, not a product of, the Persistence Belief ’31—leaving it rather unclear just what
diachronic experience could possibly consist in, other than some sort of artefact
produced by the thematic continuity of our thoughts across time (or reflection
thereupon). Strawson has replied that his view is a) not reductive in the way
I claim it is, b) does not try to explain diachronicity away, and that c) his definition
of diachronicity as ‘the sense that the self I am now was present in the past’
constitutes ‘a clear and substantive description of a way of experiencing things that
27 28
Strawson 2003, pp.354–5. Strawson 2003, p.355, my emphasis.
29 30 31
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
is familiar to many’.32 Though clear enough, I’m not it is substantive as here given—
let alone, as Strawson insists, ‘phenomenologically speaking substantive’.33 We need
some sort of phenomenological description of what diachronic experience is like that
is more informative than ‘a sense of my* being in the past’ if the term is to have
purchase.
The assertion that diachronicity is just a brute, unanalysable fact about how many
of us experience memory and anticipation sits uneasily with Strawson’s claim that
there is no phenomenal warrant for the Persistence Belief, and that any experience
of persistence we might have is artefactual. Even if an experience of persisting and
an experience of diachronicity were not the same thing, it’s difficult to avoid the
conclusion that, on Strawson’s view, Episodics experience their selves more accur-
ately than Diachronics. Strawson has insisted that our temporal temperament is not
connected to the ‘metaphysical proposal’ that selves are short-lived: the ephemerality
of selves has no bearing on whether we experience ourselves* as extended in time.34
Yet even if episodicity does not track the duration of actual selves in the sense of
being caused by that duration, it still seems more ‘true to the facts’ than diachronicity
(even if, given variability among Episodics, some will experience a duration more
closely aligned to the ‘actual’ duration of the self than others).35 In Strawson’s picture,
Diachronics experience a persistence that in fact isn’t there, whereas Episodics do
not. That being the case, diachronic self-experience seems to be a mere illusion
generated by our awareness of our temporal extension as human beings; it falsifies
self-experience in a way episodicity does not, even if there is no causal link between
the duration of selves and episodic self-experience. Diachronicity therefore isn’t
simply another way of experiencing the self, but a distortion of the more fundamental
episodic mode of self-experience.36 Episodicity thus seems to have something dis-
tinctively normative about it, even if it is not entirely clear precisely what sort of
normativity this is—perhaps we can say that diachronicity, lacking real warrant, is
somehow an ‘inauthentic’ experience of oneself.37
Strawson sets out to show that there is nothing wrong—epistemically, psycho-
logically, morally—in episodic self-experience. The Strong Lack Argument in reply
runs thus: in defending the episodic form of life from the criticism that it is deficient,
Strawson implicitly claims, against his stated intentions, that it’s the Diachronics who
have gotten it wrong and that episodicity is the more fundamental and less distorted
mode of self-experience. Unless Strawson is prepared to give up his neutrality and
32
Strawson 2011b, p.178. 33
Strawson 2011b, p.179. 34
Strawson, ‘Episodic Ethics’, p.89.
35
Strawson, ‘Episodic Ethics’, p.89.
36
Rudd (2012, p.207, n.18) also makes the claim that Strawson seems committed to the ‘metaphysical
superiority’ of the episodic life, for ‘according to Strawson’s own strange metaphysics of the radically
punctual self . . . the Episodic’s sense of self tracks the truth about the nature of selfhood better than the
Diachronic’s’.
37
On why, if we assume reductionism is true, it might be a good thing to realign our experiences of (and
attitudes towards) personal identity with underlying realities, see e.g. Parfit 1984, pp.281–2; Martin 1998,
pp.27–8.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
fully embrace this claim that diachronicity is an illusion, he therefore needs to posit
some distinctive property in Diachronics’ experience of themselves that cannot be
analysed away in the way his own phenomenally derivative, ‘whispy, short-range’
sense of temporal extension can be. Strawson’s more recent assertion that diachro-
nicity is simply a brute phenomenal fact doesn’t get around the deflationary character
of his earlier descriptions of diachronicity, and it tells us too little about what
diachronic experience is like to be helpful.
If we reject the Strong Lack Argument, we’re still faced with the Weak Lack
Argument: the picture Strawson gives us is incomplete, even if it avoids the tension
described above. Strawson’s argument might not need a fuller account of diachroni-
city, but such an account is still a reasonable desideratum. If, quite reasonably, an
Episodic such as Strawson cannot provide a sufficiently full, non-reductive descrip-
tion of diachronic self-experience, we need to look further afield for an account of
what it would be to experience me* as something with extension into the past and
future.
Kierkegaardian Contemporaneity as
Diachronic Self-experience
Strawson’s me/me* distinction captures an important feature of our lived experience
of selfhood: the way in which our awareness of ourselves as human beings with
careers across time can come apart from our sense of ourselves as we are here-and-
now, with the result that we fail to experience a sense of identification with tempor-
ally distant parts of our human lives. Strawsonian Episodics are perfectly well aware
that their memories or anticipations track events in the life of the human being they
are, but lack, in Schechtman’s terms, some ‘deep, phenomenological relation between
different portions of a life’38 (i.e. the portions figured in memory/anticipation and the
portion containing my* present experience). For Diachronics, me* extends to cover
at least some segment of the human past and human future, while for Episodics, the
phenomenally encountered self has no such extension and so does not identify itself
with anything encountered in memories or anticipations.
Part of the difficulty in showing what robustly diachronic self-experience might
consist in stems from claiming that such an experience would amount to a sense that
the phenomenal self I am now was present in the past and will be present in the future.
It’s very difficult, as Strawson demonstrates, to assign any descriptive content to that
idea. Even a memory of having had a sense of myself as a mental entity at some past
point in time would not amount to a sense that I* was present in the past, for (given
Strawson’s claim that there is no phenomenal sense of identity automatically experi-
enced in episodic memory) remembering having had a similar sense of self in the past
38
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
does not automatically entail it was me* who was there. But we might fruitfully be
able to put things another way: perhaps diachronic selfhood involves not an experi-
ence of temporal extension, but a synchronic experience of past and present. (This has
the advantage of getting around Strawson’s reductive claims about the experience
of persistence as well—if he wants to distinguish diachronicity from persistence-
experience, then synchronic experience seems like a viable way to do so.) Perhaps
what is at issue is our experience of the past as past (which does seem to be a
phenomenal property of memory per se), but experientially qualified in some way as
if it was also present: not so much Me* being present in the past, as the past being
present here with Me*. But what might such an experience be? Here, I think, the
picture of samtidighed and reflexive memory we’ve developed over the previous three
chapters proves to be a useful input.
The very term ‘episodicity’ might, at first blush, tend to conjure up the figure of the
aesthete, especially as presented in Part I of Either/Or, who lives, as they say, ‘in the
moment’. That’s an initially attractive interpretation of the aesthete’s relationship to
time, and there’s certainly an important and powerful sense in which that’s true. The
‘Crop Rotator’, who we met in Chapter 1 and who seeks to elevate forgetting into an
art form (EO, 1:293/SKS 2, 282) does so precisely to sever the present moment from
any phenomenal connection to the past. As we’ve seen there are two ways in which
the Crop Rotator can do this: straightforward forgetting (which removes the phe-
nomenal past completely, though is difficult to achieve through willpower alone) or
through poeticized remembering, which deprives what is remembered of its affective
significance for the rememberer. Both A and Johannes the Seducer see themselves as
devotees of ‘the moment’, understood as a category for avoiding diachronic com-
mitments that might become boring. The Seducer goes so far as to declare that ‘The
moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences
I do not understand’ (EO 1: 433/SKS 2, 420). Moreover, in the chapter ‘The
Unhappiest One’ we’re told that when aesthetes recollect or anticipate, they fail to
experience themselves as ‘present’ (nærværende, lit. ‘near-being’) in the past and
future.39 That certainly seems to smack of Strawsonian episodicity, but does that
make Kierkegaard’s aesthetes Episodics?
Not exactly. For one thing, Strawson’s Episodics experience their lack of temporal
extension as a given. By contrast, the Crop Rotator needs to actively cut himself off
from his past through attempting to control the manner in which he remembers; his
episodicity, if such it be, is something he works to maintain. The lack of presence in
the past and future described in ‘The Unhappiest One’ might seem to gel with some
of Strawson’s descriptions, and might also sound like something experienced auto-
matically, much like Episodic self-experience. However, it’s at least arguable that
Kierkegaard thinks even the most unreflective aesthete does, on some primordial
39
On this, see Stokes 2010b.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
level, actually choose an aesthetic existence, and its concomitant modes of self-
experience that might on the surface appear to be simply matters of psychological
contingency.40
Moreover, the description of the aesthete as ‘living in the moment’, though true in
one sense, misses another dimension of the aesthete’s experience of time: the aesthete
has a remarkable capacity to occupy different times imaginatively,41 yet this can only
be achieved through a sort of renunciation of the present. Consider the aesthete’s art
of recollection: in Either/Or, A presents the art of remembering and forgetting as a
means of bringing phenomenal reality (or at least the portion of it presented in
memory—which will of course be an enormously wide temporal domain relative to
one’s experienced present) under conscious direction. To draw on David Kangas, it
changes my experience of a world ultimately beyond my control into an interiorized
re-presentation that is entirely of my positing.42 But this means that recollection
takes a sort of priority over direct experience, such that ultimately, in the more
reflectively complicated forms of aesthetic existence, the aesthete experiences things
in order to recollect them. As touched on in Chapter 1, the aesthete organizes his
direct experience of events in such a way as to enjoy what the Seducer calls
recollection’s ‘double effect’ (Erindring virker dobbelt) (EO, 1:343/SKS 2, 333), thus
abstracting his present experience out of actuality by turning it into fodder for
recollection. He does not engage with the present moment directly, but refracted
through the process of recollection even as it is happening. Aesthetic recollection
wrenches events out of the temporal sequence in which they have meaning and
places them into the service of aesthetic enjoyment, and in so doing, phenomenally
tears the aesthete himself out of temporality. The aesthete ‘lives in the moment’, yet at
the same time abandons the present moment altogether.
That’s a far more complicated experiential relation to time than episodicity, at
least as presented by Strawson. Nonetheless, the experiential absence in the remem-
bered past and anticipated future that’s described in the chapter ‘The Unhappiest
One’ in particular does seem to resonate strongly with the form of temporal self-
experience Strawson describes. Even so, we don’t have to equate episodicity with
aestheticism, or claim that the aesthete experiences themselves with Strawsonian
episodicity, to argue that Kierkegaard offers a valuable response to Strawson.
Instead of simply condemning episodics as aesthetes, what I want to claim here is
that Kierkegaardian contemporaneity offers an account of diachronic experience—
40
On the claim that the aesthetic life is chosen on a primordial, pre-reflective level, see Davenport
2001a.
41
‘How distant must an event be from us in time in order for us to recollect it; how distant so that
recollection’s longing can no longer grasp it? In this respect, most people have a limit; they cannot recollect
what is too close in time, nor can they recollect what is too distant. I know no limit. Yesterday’s experience I push
back a thousand years in time and recollect it as if it were experienced yesterday’ (EO, 1:397–8/SKS 2, 385).
42
Kangas 2007, p.58.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
taking a positive rather than critical route which, in dealing with Kierkegaard, is
something of a refreshing novelty!
Contemporaneity, as we’ve seen, has the effect of making the follower’s apprehen-
sion of the imaginatively mediated past fully ‘present’ to them in some phenomenally
rich way. This richness does not depend upon phenomenal accuracy or detail, and
nor does it require that the experience be felt and understood in the same way as at
the time of the original experience.43 It depends upon a specific mode of contempla-
tion, one that involves a quality of being there, of being co-present with the past. If
such a sense is going to amount to a form of diachronic self-experience—and thereby
satisfy Strawson’s criteria of experiencing myself* as being in the past—it cannot be
merely reflective or stipulative, as if memories were accompanied by the overt
thought ‘and that was me’. Neither Kierkegaard nor Strawson see self-consciousness
as a matter of thinking thoughts about the self.44 At best, such stipulations or overt
self-thematizations could merely endorse the awareness that me-the-human-being
was present in the past, which is not in question. Rather there must be an experienced
identity, and this takes the form of a self-reflexivity built into the imaginative
experience, such that it is experienced as somehow for the experiencer: it must
have the property of for-you-ness that Anti-Climacus ascribes to contemporaneity
(PC, 64/SKS 12, 76).
It should be pointed out here that this ‘for you’ character of experience is
considerably thicker than (though clearly related to) the bare quality of ‘first-personal
givenness’ cited by traditional phenomenologists. While it has been argued that every
major phenomenologist from Husserl onwards posits a sense in which every moment
of consciousness is phenomenally ‘for’ the subject,45 this is simply a property of all
moments of consciousness that does not entail any further sense of identity with or
responsibility for remembered past selves. Thus while memories would be ‘for’ the
conscious subject, this is just a property they share with all conscious episodes as
such, from idle daydreaming to intense concentration. Nor is there anything par-
ticularly normative about this sense of first-personal givenness, which is offered
simply as a brute fact of consciousness. Kierkegaardian contemporaneity, by contrast,
is far richer: it involves a normatively loaded sense of identification between remem-
bered past selves, projected future selves, and the present self. For Kierkegaard, self-
experience is morally qualified all the way down: I don’t take moral responsibility for
myself on the basis of a cognitive or reflective apprehension of identity with my
43
Goldie notes in several places in The Mess Inside that it is a crucial feature of memory in general that
we can overlay memories with new meanings that change the affective content of those memories: ‘In one
and the same experience of remembering, and at one and the same time, we inhabit the “omniscience” of
our present perspective and the “partiality” of our perspective at the time, seeing things as we then saw
them and seeing them as we now see them, in a new and different light. We can and do, consciously or
unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, change the way we remember the past, in the light of the
triply ironic gap that is opened up and simultaneously bridged by our memories’ (Goldie 2012, p.53).
44
I here disagree with Wilkes’ reading of Strawson. Wilkes 1999, pp.31–2.
45
Zahavi 2005, p.20. For a critique of this claim, see Strawser 2015.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
remembered past, but rather that experience of identity is itself an experience of

responsibility. I am able to become contemporary with temporally distant events
precisely insofar as I experience them as something that claims, obligates or ‘calls to’
me as an agent46—and because this is a non-reflective, ‘inward’ (inderlig) experience,
the entity so claimed by the experience is me*.
In samtidig consciousness, what is remembered or imaginatively (re)constructed
somehow presents itself as in our lives, in a way that stems from its conferring
responsibility upon us. They demand something of us, and we experience that
demand with the same directness as we experience a claim made upon us by events
right in front of us. Consider once again the experience of a direct, face-to-face appeal
from a person in need. There are two interrelated reflexive elements to the demand
encountered in this experience that give some insight into Kierkegaardian contem-
poraneity: unavoidability and agent-referentiality:
a) The demand is unavoidable in that it compels us, one way or the other, to
respond; we must either help or refuse to do so (simply walking away from the
distressed person would count as the latter). Conversely, it is possible to avoid
such a demand when the sufferer is kept at some sort of experiential distance
from me—the famine victim seen on TV—whereby I can express sympathy
without really experiencing this situation as something that makes some
demand of me. Yet this seems to be an evasion of responsibility.
b) The demand is agent-referential in that it compels a response from me specif-
ically; I can accept or refuse this responsibility, but I can’t hide behind a
generalized ‘you’ the way I can when I see a poster telling me ‘Uncle Sam
Wants You!’ As noted in Chapter 2, the latter response again seems to be an
evasion.
What Kierkegaard seems to be claiming is that these qualities of direct, first-
personal appeal should be a feature of my exercises of memory, because I experience
what I remember as something for which, by virtue of my constitution as a moral agent,
I am directly and personally responsible. I can no longer rightly keep the remembered
past at a phenomenal distance. And insofar as this phenomenally collapses the
perspectives of the remembering self and the remembered self figured in the memory,
this will amount to seeing it as occurring directly to me*. It is still the case that, as in
Strawson’s punt example, there is nothing in the given content of our memories that
refers back to me as I am now (just as, in Kierkegaard’s paradigm case of contempor-
aneity, I-as-I-am-now am not to be found in any imaginative representation of the life
of Jesus). But I can experience those memories as if they were happening to me* to the
extent that I can experience them as claiming me* in this way. Not all memories have
46
The capacity of imagined and remembered scenarios, as well as narratives such as stories and
parables, to claim us as specific individuals is an important feature of Kierkegaard’s moral psychology
generally; see Stokes 2010a for a fuller account.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
strong normative content of course—my memory of eating an ice cream last summer
doesn’t seem to have any strong moral affect associated with it or make any moral
claim on me now—but this doesn’t preclude me from seeing it as something I am
responsible for in the way I’ve described, even if that responsibility has no immediately
discernable moral implications. Equally, the experience of contemporaneity with our
past and future need not always be either imaginatively vivid or affectively rich, but it
will be experientially different from, say, mere fantasy.
A final feature of Kierkegaard’s account of contemporaneity (and subjectivity in
general) worth noting is its volitional ambiguity. James Giles invokes Kierkegaard in
support of the idea that identifying with our past selves is something we actively
choose rather than have experientially imposed upon us.47 I think, however, this is a
false dichotomy. It’s true that Kierkegaard thinks we are responsible for achieving
contemporaneity with our past, but he also would insist that I can take responsibility
for something on a merely reflective, intellectual level without subjectively or
inwardly taking responsibility. And it’s here that the ambiguity arises: the agent is
responsible for inwardly taking responsibility, yet it’s far from clear that we simply
choose to feel responsibility in this phenomenally deep way. This shouldn’t neces-
sarily be seen as a weakness of Kierkegaard’s account, as it coheres with some of our
everyday intuitions about the experience of responsibility. We find a lack of remorse
in criminal offenders, for instance, to be culpable in itself, while remorse is sometimes
taken as a reason to mitigate punishment; yet that being the case, if we could simply
choose to feel remorse, surely all apprehended criminals would have a compelling
prudential reason to do so? Rather, remorse is built into our mode of apprehension of
the past in ways we are not entirely in control of, but are nonetheless answerable for.
The same is true in general for the moral character on the basis of which we
experience contemporaneity in episodic memory.
Contemporaneity and Episodic Ethics

To recapitulate our motivation for introducing Kierkegaard into the debate over
episodic selfhood: Strawson’s picture, lacking a robust account of diachronic self-
experience, is incomplete. On the Weak Lack Argument this is something we should
want to remedy for the sake of completeness if nothing else, while on the Strong Lack
Argument Strawson actually requires a non-reductive description of diachronic self-
experience if he is to maintain that Diachronics are not merely deluded Episodics.
Either way, the Kierkegaardian account of contemporaneity offers what’s missing: a
phenomenal account of what it is to experience co-identity with our former selves.
I do not, as I indicated above, claim that this is the only possible account of
diachronicity, nor that Strawsonians must accept this particular account. But
47
Giles 1997, p.89.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
they must provide some non-reductive picture of diachronicity, and Kierkegaard’s

account at least provides a very good place to start. Yet I think it has considerably
more going for it than just its availability. Individual readers may differ markedly
on whether Kierkegaard’s distinction between contemporaneous versus non-
contemporaneous forms of memory and anticipation rings true phenomenologically.
But it also has two further philosophical advantages that commend it.
The first is that the thoroughly normative character of Kierkegaardian contem-
poraneity helps to ground concerns many commentators have expressed about
whether Strawsonian Episodics can live fully moral lives. Of particular concern are
self-reflexive emotions such as remorse, pride, or regret, emotions that are taken to be
important features of our moral lives. The concern commentators such as Wilkes
have had is that the episodic implicitly ‘treat[s] past selves as others’,48 whereas the
object of self-reflexive emotions is necessarily oneself. If one does not see one’s past
and future person-stages as being oneself, surely these self-reflexive emotions are not
experientially available? And if they are unavailable, isn’t the Episodic cut off from
whatever moral value (be it epistemic or motivational) such experiences might have?
Strawson has a two-part reply: that self-reflexive emotions are in fact available to
Episodics, and that, in any case, nothing morally important would be lost even if they
were not. With respect to the first part, he simply asserts that Episodics just do
experience past-directed, ostensibly-identity-tracking affective responses, despite
having no sense that the events that are the intentional object of these emotions
occurred to them*. Likewise, he asserts that a feeling of myself* being obligated on the
basis of the past acts of the human being I am ‘is an experiential fact for many
Episodics, make of it what you will’.49 Perhaps such experiences are simply a
neurophysiological hangover, as Strawson takes anxiety over the future to be (see
the following section, ‘Fearing the Futre, Fearing Death’). But on the phenomeno-
logical level—the level on which Strawson’s account of episodicity operates—there is
still something puzzling about the notion of remorse, guilt, or self-regarding pride or
embarrassment divorced from any sense of identification with my past and future
person-stages.
Strawson has replied that this misrepresents his views: he does not claim that
Episodics do not identify with past person-stages. Rather, they simply lack ‘the strong
identification of feeling that I* performed the action’, while retaining ‘the identifica-
tion of knowing that GS performed the action, that I am GS, that GS’s actions are
my* business and responsibility’:50
I can and do have, as a non-Diachronic, and in Stokes’s words, ‘a sense that I* am as
responsible for my past deeds as I am for what I* do right now’. I can fail to feel the same
emotions about A as I did before, and even fail to feel I* performed A, while knowing that A is
my—my*—business. I don’t have to feel that I* performed A in order to have an ‘experience of
48 49 50
Wilkes 1999, p.28. Strawson 2007, p.100. Strawson 2011b, p.191.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
full affective responsibility’ for A. If Stokes stipulates that ‘full affective responsibility’ for
A entails feeling that I* did A, I’ll give him the phrase, and insist that one can as a non-
Diachronic take full responsibility for A, in a genuinely morally feeling way, without experi-
encing Stokesian ‘full affective responsibility’.51
There is still, according to Strawson, a sense of responsibility for a past action,

‘ownership of it, and this is something immediate, unreflective, and that concerns
me*’,52 without this involving a sense of my* having carried the action out. He retains
‘A proper sense of responsibility for my (GS’s) past actions . . . lodged in me* as I am
in the present’53 that falls short of a sense that his* actions are those of GS; yet neither
does he have a sense that ‘it is my* bad luck that GS did whatever regrettable thing he
did; nor do I lack awareness of the fact that I have some sort of special connection
with the action’.54 Such ‘ownership without authorship’ as Strawson is prepared to
call this ‘special connection’ is, he claims, in no way ethically inferior as a sense of
responsibility to that experienced by Diachronics. Strawson tells us here that the
sense of responsibility involved here can be understood on the model of responsi-
bility for the actions of members of one’s family;55 ‘I*’m therefore responsible for
[GS’s action] in at least the sense in which I can be responsible for the damage caused
by a member of my family or my ward.’56
But the ‘at least’ clause there is telling. Strawson here seems to appeal to some
affective condition in between a remorseful sense that I* did the wrong thing, and a
regretful sense that someone did it.57 He notes a ‘phenomenon of natural transition
of a sense of responsibility’58 that allows us to feel pride or shame over what our
family, nation, or species has done, without thereby having a sense that I—let alone
I*—did these things. Such a sense of responsibility can be ‘strong and particular—
personal’, and while this may be different in ‘tone’ with his* experience of respon-
sibility for what GS has done, the two experiences nonetheless have ‘kinship’.59 But
this analogy of kinship can lead us in one of two, equally unsatisfactory, directions.
Either I feel somewhat less remorse for what my past, non-me* self did than things
I* do, in the same way as I feel more remorse for my personal actions than those of
my family, nation, or species; or else I am so closely related to the non-me* selves that
the distinction seems to collapse. If there is a middle position between regret over the
actions of others and remorse over my own, it is difficult to discern where it could be.
The sorts of responsibility or embarrassment we might feel for something our child has
done, for instance, are admittedly complex, and the various strands of other-directed
51 52 53
Strawson 2011b, p.188. Strawson 2011b, p.189. Strawson 2007, pp.100–1.
54 55 56
Strawson 2007, p.102. Strawson 2011b, pp.188–9. Strawson 2011b, p.192.
57
I am grateful for a comment from Anthony Rudd for helping me see this. See also Rudd 2012, p.209:
‘it seems that all [Strawson] can find good in contrition, apart from a purely intellectual judgement that my
past act was wrong, is a feeling of sorrow for the pain caused, essentially no different from a feeling of
sorrow for the pain caused by another person, or even by an earthquake. But this seems to miss something
essential.’
58 59
Strawson 2007, p.102. Strawson 2011b, p.181.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
(dis)approval and self-congratulation/self-reproach may not be easy to disentangle;

but these complex responses don’t seem to be as fully self-reflexive as responses like
pride, remorse, or guilt.60 Likewise, presumably as an Episodic I could feel strong
disapproval for the things I regarded as a human being have done—but the worry
persists that this isn’t remorse. Even if accompanied by strong emotion rather than the
‘cold acknowledgement’ that Schechtman sees Strawson as endorsing,61 this sort of
attitude still seems to hold the object of responsibility at some sort of distance (of the
sort discussed in Chapter 2). A combination of regret and acknowledged liability
doesn’t necessarily equate to self-reflexive remorse.
In requiring such a middle position, Strawson implicitly acknowledges that a
proper sense of moral obligation entailed by past actions involves more than mere
intellectual assent to their having been committed by the human being for which I*
am responsible. But if there is no middle experience between diachronic remorse and
impersonal regret—and it is far from clear that there is—then remorse just is
diachronic, even when it manifests among Episodics.62
Positing diachronic regret as a function of Kierkegaardian contemporaneity takes
us down this second, more parsimonious path. The experience of full affective
responsibility is a sense that I* am as responsible for my past deeds as I am for
what I* do right now. Anything less, on this line, is not a true experience of
responsibility. Hence contemporaneity passes a fairly unforgiving judgement upon
Episodics: either they don’t experience real remorse, or they actually experience past
events with the same sense of immediacy as they experience present ones, which
we’re arguing here would, in fact, count as diachronicity. On the Kierkegaardian line,
we don’t base moral responsibility upon a prior experience of diachronic extension;
rather, to experience ourselves as fully responsible is to experience ourselves as
diachronically extended, because it brings our past and present into synchronic
experience. This is a version of what Strawson calls the ‘Emotional Priority Thesis’:
feelings such as embarrassment or remorse that seemingly presuppose diachronicity
are actually themselves the foundation for the diachronic outlook.63 But while
Strawson thinks the Emotional Priority Thesis leads us to form a belief in diachronic
extension that may or may not be justified metaphysically (or even phenomenally,
given Strawson’s scepticism about phenomenal ‘warrant’), on the Kierkegaardian
picture, to experience phenomenal contemporaneity is to be diachronic, independ-
ently of whatever beliefs the experience might cause us to form.
60
There may, for example, be instances where it’s ambiguous whether I feel pride at my child’s
achievements or pride at myself as their parent (or, if they’re screaming their heads off in a shopping
centre, embarrassment on their behalf versus embarrassment at how bystanders must judge my parenting).
But I don’t see that such cases are in principle undecidable.
61
62
Cf. Rudd 2012, pp.209–10: ‘To genuinely believe that I have done something horrible is to feel
horrible about it. To claim the belief without feeling anything except a general sympathy for the victims
seems to be, if not simply hypocrisy, then a kind of self-deceptive self-exculpation.’
63
Strawson 2007, p.99.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
Strawson, however, objects to this use of the word ‘remorse’: ‘I take “remorse” to be
the name of a highly distinctive moral emotion which is certainly not a necessary part
of genuinely feeling responsible for something, whereas Stokes sometimes seems to
take it to be more or less synonymous with “feeling responsible.” ’64 It’s quite true that
in my argument as presented here I’ve been particularly focussed on remorse, and
that not every experience of responsibility can be characterized as a remorseful one.
After all, pride is also a self-reflexive emotion that would seem to depend upon a
sense that I* am responsible for the commendable thing I remember doing. Strawson
points out that the sort of objection I put forward to his view would also entail
someone who doesn’t take proper pride in her achievements would also not be
properly identifying with their past self. Against this he offers the figure of a perfectly
good Diachronic with nothing in his history to feel remorse over, but who takes no
pride in his past achievements, chalking these up to luck.65 Here it seems one could
reply that, depending on one’s beliefs about agent-responsibility, one should feel such
pride. Alternatively, one could reply that there just is an asymmetry in what we’re
responsible for, such that we should rue our mistakes but not exalt at our successes.
Interestingly, one can arguably find both responses in Kierkegaard.66
So Strawson is right to point out that remorse is just one of the ways in which we
can feel responsible. But the important thing about remorse, embarrassment, pride,
and so on is precisely that they recruit a past action to me* in a way that allows no
space for affective disidentification. Strawson wants to insist that a Diachronic can
feel responsibility for a past action, and that this will be more than a merely cognitive
awareness of liability. He describes ‘a feeling of responsibility for past actions, that
is . . . essentially more than just a belief in one’s wrongdoing’ but which ‘doesn’t
require any sort of feeling of guilt, or any Kierkegaardian contemporaneity as
I understand it’; such a ‘feeling or attitude of responsibility’ and ‘self-admonition’
‘is, perhaps, a quieter, truer, more sober phenomenon than guilt’.67 I’d agree that
Diachronics needn’t spend their waking hours wracked with guilt in the rather
dramatic sense in which Strawson uses the term; rather the guilt I’d endorse would
be more like the element of ‘continuing self-reproach’ that John Lippitt argues is a
key component of self-forgiveness.68 But the danger here, I’d suggest, is that a certain
self-reflexive attitude is necessary for understanding the full nature of an action’s
significance for the agent: a full sense that it is my* action, not just an action
I* happen to be responsible for.
Strawson himself imagines an objector asserting (as I’ve done here) that remorse
must be diachronic to be genuine, and replies simply that ‘Our disagreement is
64 65
Strawson 2011b, p.190. Strawson 2011b, p.178.
66
Kierkegaard claims in several places that our successes are in no way our own achievement but should
be credited to God, which would seem to obviate any possibility of pride. Conversely, John Lippitt (2013,
pp.181–9) has recently argued that Kierkegaaard’s insistence on proper self-love in Works of Love does
indeed seem to allow for a certain kind of justified pride.
67 68
Strawson 2011b, p.184. Lippitt 2013, pp.170–2.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
clear’—but, to move to the second part of Strawson’s reply, nothing ethically signifi-
cant ultimately hangs on the point: ‘One doesn’t have to care about oneself in any
essentially self-concerned way, still less feel or conceive it as one*’s own, in order to
act well or be disposed to act well.’69 Strawson insists that a ‘past action calls to me as
a non-Diachronic, in that I* now feel a sense of responsibility for it, ownership of
it’,70 and can still respond to the needs of others, make amends to them for my past
behaviours, and see that I don’t repeat my past misdeeds. That, he says, is enough to
make episodic lives no less morally valid than diachronic ones.
This does suggest an important difference between the understanding of ethics
with which I’m operating, which sees remorse and contrition as morally valuable
independently of how they motivate behaviour, and the understanding which Straw-
son uses. For Strawson, what matters morally is how I act in the present, which allows
him to dismiss the feeling of guilt as ‘a chimpanzee thing, and wholly so, an ancient
adaptive emotional reflex in social animals’ that plays no role in improving our
behaviour and thus ‘adds nothing—nothing good—to moral being’.71 To feel guilt,
for Strawson, is ‘always to feel something more than whatever feeling is morally
required’72 and can in fact be an impediment to moral action by creating an avenue
for moral self-indulgence (which is a fair point if we take it, as I do not, that guilt
needs to be overtly thematized in our thinking in order to give us moral insight into
the nature of our actions). Strawson’s picture retains conscience as, in the wonderful
Middle English phrase he cites, the ‘agenbite of inwit’, but loses the idea that the guilt-
affect might track or disclose our moral status as indexed to a life, the totality of
which we might somehow be answerable for. (Indeed, in his discussion of Locke, he
explicitly rejects such a picture, as we’ll see.) As I’ll be developing across the rest of
this book (and particularly Chapters 7–9), I take it that part of what makes Kierke-
gaard’s moral thinking valuable is his acknowledgement that each of us confronts our
life as something for which we are uniquely and inescapably responsible, not just in
the sense of being responsible for our present characters and liabilities but also for the
shape and quality of our life overall. Both Strawson and Kierkegaard agree that, in
Strawson’s phrase, ‘one has a certain overall moral standing, or moral quality, or
moral being, or moral identity, at any given time’.73 Where they disagree is on how
the past figures in that moral identity. For Strawson, this moral status has nothing
essentially to do with one’s past history: ‘It’s wholly constituted by one’s present
disposition, metaphysically speaking, and necessarily so. One’s actions up to now are
no part of it, however much they may reveal it.’74 Kierkegaard’s conception of moral
standing is concerned both with how one stands at present and how one’s life stands
overall: a concern for one’s life as a totality as viewed from here and now that
Strawson explicitly repudiates. This does not mean that we need to be concerned
for the totality of our life in a self-absorbed way, but that our actions should be shot
69 70 71
Strawson 2007, p.104. Strawson 2011b, p.189. Strawson 2007, p.93.
72 73 74
Strawson 2011b, p.184. Strawson 2011b, p.192. Strawson 2011b, p.192.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
through with a subjective, agential depth that may be seriously compromised by a

lack of affective identification with the past.
For the moment, it is enough that enlisting Kierkegaardian contemporaneity to
provide the robust form of diachronicity that Strawson’s account lacks offers the
following advantages:
1) It allows us to explain in non-reductive terms (i.e. without appealing to
reflective artefact or biological hardwiring) the occurrence of seemingly dia-
chronic feelings such as embarrassment and remorse in Episodics, for having
these experiences is diachronic self-experience.
2) It legitimates the intuition that a non-diachronic feeling of responsibility is
somehow deficient, by positing that the feeling of responsibility is the sense of
diachronic extension.
So if we take it that such a deep sense of responsibility is necessary for moral life, then
the account of contemporaneity we’ve provided helps underpin the intuition that a
sense of diachronic extension is necessary for a genuine feeling of responsibility.
Fearing the Future, Fearing Death

Just as adopting Kierkegaardian contemporaneity as our model of diachronic self-
experience provides a less reductive explanation than Strawson does of how Episo-
dics can experience remorse, embarrassment, and so on, it also offers a more
parsimonious explanation for certain puzzling features of Strawson’s experience of
imagining the future. When he considers his episodic anticipations of things to come,
Strawson once again finds no sense that he as he is now is the self that will be in the
future: ‘I do not think of Me* as being something in the future. It is also accurate to
shift the “not,” and say, more strongly, that what I think of as being in the future
is not Me*.’75 But as a phenomenologist of episodic self-experience, Strawson still
has to account for how anxiety over future events in our lives is possible for
Episodics, who do not think of themselves* as ‘being something in the future’.
Strawson explicitly claims that his anxiety over the future, though palpable, contains
no sense of himself* as temporally extended:
As I write these words, the thought that I have to give a lecture before a large audience in two
months’ time causes me some worry, which has familiar psychological manifestations. I feel the
anxiety naturally and directly as pertaining to me even though I have no sense that it will be
Me* that will be giving the lecture. Indeed it seems completely false to say that it will be Me*.
And this is how it feels, not something I believe for theoretical reasons. So why do I feel any
anxiety now?76
75 76
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
Indeed, there is something puzzling about anxiety over the future if identity is
reduced to facts about the ongoing continuity of the human being. A curious feature
of our fearful apprehension of the future is just how big a role identity—in something
like the strict logical sense—plays in it. And this role persists even when it’s
demonstrated that the identity-facts our egocentric concern over future events
appear to track do not, in fact, obtain. Examples have been offered in the copious
literature on concern for future selves that seem to show that questions about
personal identity admit of no non-trivial determinate answers.77 Yet the concern
that motivates such questions is notoriously hard to exorcise: awareness that there is
no significant point at which identity conditions between me and a future self
suddenly cease to hold does not, it seems, alter the all-or-nothing character of
egocentric concern. The operative concern when, say, Williams’ victim asks ‘will it
be me that’s tortured tomorrow after the brain surgery?’ seems to be precisely with
identity in a strict logical sense. Being told by a helpful philosopher that such a
question is finally unanswerable, or even incoherent, doesn’t seem to enable me to
stop asking it.78 Regardless of what we might believe about the underlying meta-
physics, our concern seems, unavoidably, to track an all-or-nothing conception of
our identity. When all the psychological and physical facts about human-being-
continuity are swept away, as they are in the thought-experiments offered by
Williams and Parfit, we can’t stop asking ourselves if it will be me who is to
suffer—and if those facts have indeed been removed, the ‘me’ asked about in such
a question can only be Me*. But if, as I’m suggesting here, such an all-or-nothing
conception of personal identity appears to be a non-eliminable feature of our
egocentric concern, then it becomes extremely puzzling how Episodics, who have
no sense of having a long-term self (over and above the human being), can experience
states like anxiety for the future.
Strawson’s answer to this problem is, as with guilt, to posit anxiety over the future
as something coded into our biology, ‘a manifestation of the instinct for self-
preservation’79 with obvious adaptive utility. This biological basis allows anxiety
over the future to persist ‘even though it is not supported by any emotionally backed
sense on the part of Me* now that Me* will be there in the future’.80 If we weren’t
genetically hardwired to feel anxiety about future events, we simply wouldn’t feel it,
even though we are fully aware that future events will occur to the human being that
I am. At most, we’d feel sympathy for that human in the same way we feel sympathy
for others without being those others.81 But egocentric concern (including anxiety),
as I’ve suggested above, turns precisely on Me*-identity. And the hapless victim
trying to work out if he will be tortured tomorrow will probably take as little comfort
77
See e.g. Williams 1973, pp.55–6; Parfit 1984, pp.231–43.
78
Rudd 2005, p.415; Schechtman 1996, pp.63–4; Martin 1998, p.112. I discuss this issue at length in
Stokes 2013b.
79 80 81
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
from the thought that his anxiety is a non-truth-tracking evolutionary artefact as he

will from the thought that identity-questions don’t admit of determinate or signifi-
cant answers.
Strawson does allow one exception to the failure to identify with future selves:
it is certainly Me* whom I think of as subject to mortality.82 Strawson explains this
apparent anomaly by pointing to the fact that eternal nonexistence makes the gap
constituted by the indefinite but finite time remaining to me approximate to nothing,
just as any number of any size approximates to zero when compared to infinity.83
This answer isn’t entirely satisfactory. For one thing, it’s not clear that the infinite
duration of eternal non-existence is necessarily a feature in the apprehension of
death.84 The thought of permanent non-existence would seem to be enough to strike
the fear of death into us, without requiring some further mathematical intuition
about how long we won’t exist for.
Fortunately, a more elegant answer to the question of why my death should matter
to me is to hand—and again, it is supplied by the Kierkegaardian account of
contemporaneity. This is most strongly attested in the discourse ‘At a Graveside’,
where Kierkegaard replies to Epicurus that when we contemplate our death with
alvor, ‘earnestness’ or ‘seriousness,’ we are co-present with our death: ‘you are
and death also is’ (TDIO, 75/SKS 5, 446). Kierkegaard doesn’t use the language of
contemporaneity here, though it is clear the same sort of imaginatively mediated co-
presence is involved. By becoming contemporary with our death, we bridge the gulf
between ourselves now and our death, in a way that occurs on a purely immediate
experiential level and makes this death into my death.85 What Kierkegaard calls
the ‘certain-uncertainty’ of death means that the imagined content of that death may
be ambiguous, as there are limitless ways in which I can imagine myself dying, from a
violent demise five minutes from now to a peaceful death in old age. Yet while some
scenarios are obviously more likely than others—heart attack versus shark attack, for
instance—and only one scenario will actually occur (which may well be one I don’t
anticipate), the fact that each possible death is qualified as possible-for-me means it is
open for me to relate to it in a way that makes it co-present with me.
82
Strawson 2003, p.355. Mark Johnston (2010, p.180) also distinguishes between ‘two sorts of de se
thought, a merely indexical thought directed to the person or human being that I am, and a truly subjective
thought, as it were, directed to the self that I am’ and claims that it’s the second thought—which we can see
here is cognate with Strawson’s Me*—that ‘appears to reach out to my subjective death’. But, according to
Johnston, this appearance is illusory, for reasons we will discuss in Chapter 8.
83
Interestingly, Schopenhauer claims that the same thought actually makes death seem less fearful: ‘the
few years that one has yet to be, vanish entirely before the endless time when one will be no more.
Accordingly it appears to reflection even ludicrous to be so anxious about this span of time, to tremble so
much if our own life or that of another is in danger, and to compose tragedies the horror of which has its
strength in the fear of death.’ Schopenhauer 1909, p.252.
84
For a more detailed critique of Strawson on fearing death, see Behrendt 2007, especially p.136.
85
For an extended discussion of imaginative co-presence in the contemplation of death, see Stokes
2006.
DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY 
It may also be that I can contemplate my death in a way that is nearly devoid of
phenomenal content altogether: the sheer thought of my death as such may be
enough to bring us to such presence, even though this might have only the thinnest
imaginative content.86 We saw in Chapter 2 that Kierkegaardian contemporaneity in
no way depends upon the depth or accuracy of the phenomenal content of imagined
scenarios; how we relate to the scenario is decisive, not the conceptual detail or
representational verisimilitude of the way the scenario is presented. It may therefore
be possible for us to become contemporaneous with our death regardless of the way
in which this is envisaged occurring.
In such cases, my death is for me in a real sense, because an ‘earnest’ contemplation
of death, one that connects the future event with my present existence in normatively
charged ways, plays out phenomenally as my death becoming present to me. It’s not
just an event in my life, albeit one I won’t live through,87 it’s what will happen to
Me*—because in contemplating my death I* become synchronous with the self that
will one day do the dying, over and above the fact that that dying self and I ‘share’ a
human organism. And we can extend this to cover more mundane instances of how
we anticipate the future. Events in my future are experienced as events that will
happen to Me* insofar as I* relate to them as such, which I do through a specific
mode of contemplation in which I contemplate them as if they were happening to
Me* right now.
Diachronicity: From Descriptive to Normative

I’ve tried to use Kierkegaard’s work to supply the missing account of diachronic self-
experience that Strawson doesn’t give us. If Kierkegaard is correct that our psych-
ology contains resources for becoming co-present with past events, then it would
appear he has supplied an immediate (phenomenal, experiential) link between the
past and present self. Contemporaneity also has a certain philosophical attractiveness
in that it provides a more economical explanation of how Episodics can sometimes
experience such apparently diachronic feelings as remorse and embarrassment as
‘involving their me*’. With respect to explaining our fear of future events and death,
the Kierkegaardian model is again more parsimonious, in that it posits one mech-
anism for generating a sense of identity with imagined selves rather than at least two
(biological and mathematical) as in Strawson.
But as I have stressed, all this does is provide one phenomenology of diachronic
self-experience; and while I submit that it’s a compelling and attractive articulation of
what diachronicity consists in (and it has the welcome benefit of seeming to legit-
imate the widespread concern that there’s something deficient about episodicity),
others may find it far less plausible. For Strawsonians, moreover, adopting this model
86
On the claim that there is a particular fear of non-existence-as-such, see Behrendt 2010.
87
Wittgenstein 1996, p.185.
 DIACHRONICITY , EPISODICITY , SYNCHRONICITY
of diachronicity to plug the gap in Strawson’s account comes at a steep price: the
normative character of contemporaneity reinscribes some of the worries about
whether Episodics can experience fully moral lives and have genuine feelings of
responsibility and remorse. If Strawsonians wish to insist that there is nothing
normative about diachronic self-experience, then they must reject Kierkegaardian
contemporaneity as a candidate phenomenology of diachronicity, and, at least
according to the Strong Lack Argument, look for something else.
It’s entirely possible that Strawsonians can provide another such account, of equal
or greater plausibility, of what diachronicity is like. However if they also wish to
maintain Strawson’s posture of neutrality between episodic and diachronic self-
experience, their new account of diachronicity would have to be robust enough to
avoid implicitly making episodicity morally or epistemologically normative, in the
way Strawson’s existing descriptions of diachronicity sometimes do. If they do not or
cannot, then per the Weak Lack Argument they are offering a dissatisfyingly incom-
plete picture. If we further endorse the Strong Lack Argument, then they will need to
give up the ecumenical stance Strawson has sought to maintain, in one of two ways.
They can either fully embrace the deflationism about diachronicity that already
haunts Strawson’s work, and assert that Diachronics are in the grip of an illusion
(at best benign, at worst positively harmful) from which Episodics are mercifully free;
or they can accept a phenomenology (such as the one I’ve outlined here) which
privileges diachronicity over episodicity. Unless they can supply us with a phenom-
enology of diachronic self-experience that is both normatively neutral and non-
reductive, the Strong Lack Argument claims, Strawsonians will have to pick sides.
5
Self-alienation
Chapter 4 spent quite a lot of time arguing against Galen Strawson’s claims for
Episodic selfhood. I’m not the first person to take up that task, and I doubt I’ll be
the last. But part of the reason why I devoted so much space to that question is that
I think there is an important core of phenomenological truth in what Strawson is
talking about. I have serious reservations about many of Strawson’s claims, but the
central insight that we can, and many of us frequently do, fail to identify with our
past and future person-stages is a crucial one, and Strawson’s descriptions of episodic
self-experience do have something unsettlingly familiar to them. What Strawson’s
depiction of Episodic self-experience brings to the fore is the way in which our
cognitive and practical awareness of our extension across time, on the one hand, and
our phenomenal sense of self, on the other, can and do come apart—and the
bifurcation of ‘self ’ (or ‘subject’) and ‘person’ that this entails is deeply important.
It makes possible a radical form of alienation from the past and future of the human
being one ‘is,’ the human animal who shares your name, stares at you from old
photos and with luck will one day cash out your pension fund. It’s possible to know
that this human being is intimately connected with you in a way that makes you the
bearer of her projects and responsible for her liabilities, and yet not feel like he or she
is you in a deeper phenomenal sense.
Strawson is not the only philosopher to notice this gap. Indeed, this split
between my present-tense subjective sense of self and the diachronic person that
I am is pointed to in various ways by several of the living philosophers discussed in
this book. We’ll see in Chapter 7 that it appears in the distinction between minimal
(or core) and narrative (or autobiographical) selves that we find in contemporary
cognitive science and the strand of phenomenological philosophy of mind that it
informs. I’ll be linking it to Kierkegaard’s occasional and oblique talk of a ‘naked
self ’ distinct from the concrete, historical person that one is. And it also occurs in
the signally important, if enormously different, projects of Marya Schechtman and
Derek Parfit, which we’ll be discussing here. Both Schechtman and Parfit offer
accounts of what it is like to become alienated from our past and our future,
recognizing it as our past or future in one sense while strongly disidentifying with it
in another sense. In both cases, I know full well that the person I remember being
is causally continuous with the human person I am, and yet I cannot help but feel
that person is not me.
 SELF - ALIENATION
Those philosophers who have noted this gap between intellectual and affective
identification have responded to it in different ways. Some have simply denied that
the gap is a real one or have downplayed the reality of alienation. Others, such as
Strawson and Parfit, have taken alienation to just be a brute fact that poses no
particular problems: for Parfit, awareness of this gap should simply show us that
there is no deep fact of personal identity to care about, while for Strawson, as we’ve
seen, Episodics get along just fine in both psychological and ethical terms. Others
have felt that this gap does indeed present a problem to be solved, not merely a fact to
be described. Schechtman is concerned to show how psychologically helpful it is to
identify affectively with as much of one’s past and future as possible: life simply goes
better for us when we are not emotionally cut off from our histories.
In this chapter, we’ll once again be bringing Kierkegaard into this discussion.
Kierkegaard, as I hope to show over the course of Chapters 6, 7, and 8, is both aware
of the perspectival gap that Strawson, Schechtman, Parfit, Zahavi, Damasio, and
Johnston are working with, and like Schechtman he sees this gap as something we
should overcome. However, the force of that ‘should’ is considerably greater for
Kierkegaard. Appropriating our past and future is not simply a matter of living
a more pleasant life or of overcoming uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for
Kierkegaard. Rather, it is a requirement imposed upon us by soteriology. Like
Locke, Kierkegaard links a concernful appropriation of one’s past (and future) to
an understanding of identity that is ultimately eschatological: we are to identify with
our past because that is what I, the subject having this experience right now, will
ultimately answer for. And for better or worse, that gives Kierkegaard’s account of
affective identification a thoroughness—one might say a pitilessness—that contem-
porary neo-Lockean accounts of identity cannot match.
‘The Past Is Another Country; They Do Things

differently there’
That well-worn epigram to L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, already alluded to
in Chapter 2, captures something of the strangeness that sometimes creeps into our
memories of the past. For all James’ talk of the ‘warmth and intimacy’ of episodic
memory, the remembered past can often seem decidedly foreign. So it is no surprise
that the sense of alienation from the selves we encounter in memory and anticipation
that Strawson describes in a somewhat extreme form is well attested in literature.
Strawson invokes Henry James’ letter to the novelist Rhoda Broughton: ‘I think of it,
the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this
date—that of a rich (so much rather than a poor) relation, say, who hasn’t cast me off
in my trouble, but suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship.’1 Mark Johnston
1
James 1999, pp.562–3; see Strawson 2009, p.328.
SELF - ALIENATION 
(who as we’ll see is also a key proponent of the self/person split) similarly discusses
Jorge Luis Borges’ dramatic experience of such alienation:
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to . . . I know of Borges from the
mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses,
maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares
these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor . . . I am
destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by
little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of
falsifying and magnifying things. . . . I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am
someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious
strumming of a guitar. . . . Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs
to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.2
The narrator here is, if you like, Borges*, who is aware of, but does not take himself to
be, the person who goes by the name of Borges. Borges* has essentially a third-
personal relationship to Borges. That’s an extreme case, but most of us can probably
find analogues to these literary forms of self-alienation in our own experiences of
memory—particularly memories from early childhood which can have a strange air
of unreality and ambiguous identity about them. Kierkegaard himself describes this
in a charming journal entry from 1838:
When I stand so and look and look over Røyen’s old place deep into Hestehaven, and the forest
thickens densely in the background, the shadow and secrecy accentuated even more with the
isolated trunks on which only crowns have grown—then I seem vividly to see myself as a little
boy running off in my green jacket and gray pants—but, alas, I have grown older and cannot
catch up with myself [indhente mig selv]. Grasping childhood is like grasping a beautiful region
as one rides in a carriage looking backward; one only becomes properly aware of the beauty at
that moment, at that very instant when it begins to disappear, and all I have left of that happy
time is crying like a child. (KJN 1, 248/SKS 17, 257; DD 122.a)
In their translation of the Journals, Howard and Edna Hong render indhente mig self
as ‘fetch myself;’ indhente without the reflexive also means ‘obtain’ or ‘gather.’
Kierkegaard is here complaining that he has grown too old to catch the running
child (despite only being in his mid-twenties!), but in a deeper sense, he is mourning
the sense in which he cannot appropriate that child to himself. His encomium on the
beauty of lost youth involves a sense of disconnection from that little boy despite
recognizing his causal continuity with him. This isn’t as extreme as what Borges,
James, and Episodics describe, but it seems to be on the same spectrum of alienation
from past and future stages in the career of the psycho-socio-physical entity, the
human animal, known as ‘Søren Aabye Kierkegaard’. And it too relies on a gap
between the extension of consciousness back into time and the appropriation of what
we find there.
2
Borges 2000, pp.282–3. Johnston’s discussion is in Johnston 2010, pp.149–50, 205–6. For an extended
philosophical discussion, see Perry 2007.
 SELF - ALIENATION
The sort of alienation that Kierkegaard describes here does not, on its face, appear
to have any evaluative dimension. He is simply struck by the alterity, the irrecover-
ability, of that child and its milieu. Deep-past memories do sometimes have an air of
alienness about them, but that unfamiliarity doesn’t seem to be charged with any tone
of disapproval or rejection. (Equally, there is an experience of familiarity with the
past, as when we hear a long-forgotten song or see an item we remember from
childhood—though even here, there is a sort of uncanny surprise built into the
experience.) Other forms of alienation in memory, however, are more reflexively
evaluative. Think of the experience of seeing old photographs of yourself. Sometimes
we’re simply struck by difference (‘I was so thin back then!’), but sometimes we also
react in a way that involves a sort of active disavowal (‘I can’t believe I wore those
flannel shirts all through the nineties! What was I thinking?’).
The latter can take a more thoroughgoing form, in which we do not merely react
negatively to some aspect of our past selves but respond with a more global rejection
of our past or future selves: ‘That wasn’t me!’ or ‘I’m no longer that person!’ We
disidentify with the past or future person-stage in such a comprehensive way that we
see them as, in some sense, being someone else—but in what sense? We might think
of these disavowals as merely metaphorical, as Anthony Rudd does for instance,3 or
as merely speaking ‘hyperbolically’, as Goldie sees them, ‘just as it is when I step out
of the shower saying that I feel like a new man’.4 Parfit thinks that statements like ‘I’m
no longer that person’ go to the sort of qualitative identity that psychologists are
interested in, but not the numerical identity that philosophers are concerned about—
and that it’s numerical identity that’s in play when we discuss things like survival.5
Parfit notes that while ‘I may believe that, after my marriage, I shall be a different
person’, this fact ‘does not make marriage death’.6 And yet, if we do stick to
numerical identity, there is a sense in which, according to Parfit’s reductionist
position (echoing the Buddhist annata, ‘no-self ’ doctrine) these disavowals are
ultimately neither true nor false: I’m no longer that past person because there was
never any ‘me’ in a deep sense to begin with. There are just a set of physical and
psychological properties, a Humean bundle; asking whether it’s still ‘you’ or not is
just a shorthand way of asking whether these properties have persisted in certain,
ultimately conventional, ways.
To consider what is happening in these forms of alienation and how we should
understand these disavowals, we’ll now turn to two figures of temporal alienation
offered in the literature, one future-directed, one past-directed.
3
Rudd 2012, p.211, n.38.
4
Goldie 2012, p.145. Goldie links this to the sense in which ‘life and death go with the basic sense’ of
survival (p.140), though as we’ll, we even have ways of anticipating our death in which we don’t see it as
really us who will die. Goldie would insist in such cases that we don’t think we literally won’t die, but as
we’ll see shortly, I think such disidentifications are more than merely metaphorical or hyperbolic.
5 6
Parfit 2011, p.420. Parfit 2011, p.420.
SELF - ALIENATION 
The Nineteenth-century Russian

We’ll begin with a future-directed example of alienation: Derek Parfit’s ‘Nineteenth-
century Russian.’ Parfit envisions a young Russian aristocrat (hereafter the ‘Young
Russian’), who has not yet inherited his father’s estates. Having become a committed
socialist, he intends to give his land to the local peasantry as soon as he inherits. But it
will likely be many years before this will happen, and he realizes that by the time his
father dies, his revolutionary zeal will have faded and he will have become more
conservative—and less willing to give away his land. Disturbed by this prospect, he
has a legal document drawn up that will automatically transfer ownership of the land
to the peasants as soon as he inherits. The document is structured so that he himself
cannot countermand it; the only person who can do so is his wife. He begs of her that,
when the time comes, she will help him frustrate the interests of his older, reactionary
self: ‘I regard my ideals as essential to me. If I lose these ideals, I want you to think
that I cease to exist. I want you to regard your husband then, not as me, the man who
asks you for this promise, but only as his corrupted later self. Promise me that you
would not do what he asks.’7
Parfit puts forward this example in a discussion of what his reductionist view of
personal identity does to the holding of commitments. In that context, many of the
philosophically interesting questions are actually to be found on the wife’s side of the
experience, such as problems about moral autonomy,8 and whether the example
suggests we should give greater force to someone’s earlier commitments or to their
capacity to change their mind. When the future arrives, so to speak, and the wife
confronts the moral force of her earlier commitment to the Young Russian not to
rescind the contract in the face of the Older Russian’s entreaties, how should she
respond? Joel Feinberg argues she would be right to ignore the Older Russian’s pleas
and stick to her earlier commitment to the Young Russian,9 while Jennifer Radden
thinks she should accede to his request to rescind the contract, because: ‘Our ability
to entertain second thoughts, to reconsider, adapt and change direction in the light of
a new piece of information, or a telling experience, is deeply bound up with what
makes us autonomous human beings.’10 Unlike Ulysses, chained to the mast and
enthralled to the Sirens’ song, the Older Russian is fully in his right mind and not
suffering from coercion (including the coercive effects of excessive pain or pleasure);
he’s simply changed his mind on the basis of changes in his values and attitudes, and
we should, according to Radden, respect his capacity to do so. But we can only
change our minds if it’s the same ‘we’ before and after the change.
When the Older Russian says he releases his wife from her earlier commitment,
identity thus becomes decisively important: is the Older Russian the man to whom
7 8
Parfit 1984, p.327. See, for instance, Kleinig 2009, pp.99–101.
9
Feinberg 1986, p.86.
10
Radden 1994, p.792. For further thoughts on the Russian, see Davenport 2012, pp.36–7.
 SELF - ALIENATION
she made the commitment and therefore entitled to release her from it? Or is what
the Young Russian claimed correct: anyone who would ask her to countermand the
document is not the Young Russian? If so, notes Parfit, ‘she can never be released
from her commitment. The self to whom she is committed would, in trying to release
her, cease to exist.’11 This looks very much like a metaphysical problem, but, Parfit
tells us, it admits of no real metaphysical answer: determinations of personal identity
don’t track any ‘deep’ features of the situation and are therefore largely conventional.
We can make context-bound judgements as to whether the young man is the same
self or a different self, but there is no underlying metaphysical ‘fact of the matter’ to
make those judgements for us.
But these metaphysical problems don’t become (fully) operative until what, from
the perspective of the Young Russian, is the fairly distant future. From the Young
Russian’s perspective, things are different—because, as Radden notes, ‘The ‘subject-
ive’ perspective is temporally bounded: it is the perspective not only of here, but of
NOW.’12 Looking forward from that perspective, the Young Russian would know
that a mind will be changed without any sense that his mind will be changed. Radden
deliberately sidesteps having to make any claims about discontinuity of personal
identity here, while Allen Buchanan calls the claim that we should regard the Young
Russian and the Older Russian as separate people ‘as unconvincing as it is gratuit-
ous’.13 Part of the reason commentators have found the claim that personal identity
doesn’t hold between the Young and Older Russian so unpersuasive is precisely
because it is a first-person, perspectivally bound (and thus temporally bound) report
about how identity claims seem to the Young Russian now in prospect. What possible
bearing, a metaphysically inclined reader might ask, do the Young Russian’s antici-
patory attitudes (or, for that matter, the Older Russian’s recollective attitudes) have
on whether he is the same self? Simon Beck sums this attitude up in stark terms: ‘That
the Russian says he would not survive is neither here nor there; if Parfit insisted that
we should see it that way—and he does not—that would make the case no stronger.
Any strength would lie only in its demanding the intuitive response that the Russian
does not survive, and it does not even begin to do that.’14 If we’re serious metaphys-
icians looking for some matter of fact here, how things seem to the Young Russian (or
the Older Russian for that matter) is utterly inconsequential. After all, all that Parfit is
trying to do with the example is show that there is nothing more to identity than
11
Parfit 1984, p.328.
12
Radden 1994, p.799. As I hope will become clear in the following chapters, I take this point to be
decisive to understanding Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood; indeed I think it is irreducibly important to
any discussion of personal identity. On this point, see Stokes 2013b; Stokes 2014.
13
Buchanan 1988, p.289. Buchanan further points out (p.290) that if the Young Russian and the Older
Russian really are two different people, then the Russian’s wife is actually in no moral quandary: the Older
Russian is simply claiming that he has a right to the Younger Russian’s property, which, if he is not the
same person, he doesn’t. I think, as may become clear over the course of this chapter, this claim
insufficiently differentiates between person-identity and self-identity.
14
Beck 2008, p.75.
SELF - ALIENATION 
psychological continuity or connectedness across time; and even if we accepted this,

we could make the assessment that such connectedness fails to hold between the
Young and Older Russians quite independently of any first-personal reports from
either one of them.
I suspect the reason commentators like Beck react so contemptuously to the claim
that the Young Russian and the Older Russian are not identical is precisely that they
take objective metaphysics to be the whole story about personal identity. As Beck
notes,15 apparently self-reflexive emotions such as embarrassment can involve a
sense of repudiation of my past self ’s motives and concerns (as we’ll discuss in
relation to Schechtman) yet they remain reflexive precisely because I realize that I did
this regrettable thing. Hence Beck, taking aim at Schechtman’s reading of the
Nineteenth-century Russian, claims that ‘as an intuition pump in support of the
claim that continuity of personality is necessary for survival, the story of the Russians
is worse than unconvincing’16 and that Parfit never intended it as such in any case.
But Beck misses what is really important about the Russians. The Young Russian
fully acknowledges his objective psychological continuity with the Older Russian; it’s
precisely because he foresees such a causal psychological sequence unfolding that the
Young Russian sees a need to frustrate the actions of his future self. His future self is
perspectivally accessible to him: the Older Russian presents himself in imaginative
anticipation to the Young Russian as a person whose perspective he will come to
occupy, and one day the Young Russian will present himself in memory to the Older
Russian as a person whose perspective he did occupy. Yet the Young Russian’s
relation to the Older Russian completely lacks egocentric concern. It’s not that the
Russian is horrified that he, the self he feels himself to be now, will change so much,
but more that it seems to him as if some other, future person will intervene to
frustrate his interests of the person he now is. In other words, the complete lack of
what Schechtman labels ‘empathic access’, the ability to identify with the emotions,
concerns, and dispositions of his far-future self, means the Russian does not experi-
ence himself as being the same self as a being whose perspective is nonetheless fully
first-personally available to him given their causal connection.17 This wouldn’t be a
problem if we could dismiss cases like the Nineteenth-century Russian as exceptional
or pathological. But self-alienation of this sort is more pervasive than we might
imagine; the Nineteenth-century Russian stands at the far end of a continuum of
15 16
Beck 2008, pp.75–6. Beck 2008, p.78.
17
Schechtman 2003. Jan Branson brings Velleman’s work on notional and actual subjects (cf.
Chapter 3) and Schechtman together here, arguing that ‘the unselfconscious access the actual subject is
supposed to have to the perspective of the notional subject is part of the phenomenology of memory and
intention only if it is backed up by the actual subject’s empathic access to the notional subject’s perspective . . .
empathic access in Schechtman’s sense is a requirement for unselfconscious access in Velleman’s sense.’
Only perspectives that are ‘characteristically “colored” by the subject’s stance toward the world and himself
as agent’ are susceptible to the sort of unselfconscious co-identity Velleman describes—a view which in
some ways seems to be pushing in a similar direction to the one I here ascribe to Kierkegaard. Branson
2008, p.104.
 SELF - ALIENATION
experiences which includes more localized and less radical forms of alienation. What
the thought-experiment demonstrates, somewhat against Parfit’s own intentions, is
that our subjective, phenomenally figured sense of identity and our objective sense of
our extension across time can come apart.
Commentators like Beck can’t take that point seriously because they take it that
metaphysics is the only game in town, or at least the only one that matters:
metaphysics determines what we really are, how we happen to feel about things
does not. What they miss, and what Kierkegaard is well placed to show us, is that
personal identity is not simply a matter of objective continuity, but of how our
subjective sense of self interacts with our awareness of that objective continuity.
The estranged Russians bring to salience the question of how a self, the being that
we experience ourselves as being here and now, appropriates a person, a physical/
psychological being that is spread out across time. This question is not subsidiary to
the question of personal identity, but integral to it; we cannot understand selfhood,
I contend, if we ignore this sense of subjective, first-personal appropriation.
As we’ve seen, Strawson envisions the same gap between awareness of my person-
continuity and my* appropriation thereof, but doesn’t see such appropriation as
morally or psychologically normative. Before we get to Kierkegaard’s account of
why such normativity matters, let’s now consider a past-directed analogue to the
Nineteenth-century Russian, one which embeds a claim that appropriating the past
is, at least, a psychologically healthy thing to do.
Schechtman’s Matrons
In building on her Narrative View of personal identity, Schechtman has offered a
past-directed example to bookend this future-directed Russian example:18
Imagine a carefree and wild young woman who eventually settles down into a solid career, a
marriage and motherhood. Growing into the responsibilities these life changes require, she
may well change drastically. Her concerns about juggling her time, sorting out child care
arrangements, getting the mortgage check in the mail, and framing her report in a way that will
reflect well on the company will be a far cry from the old concerns about juggling dates, finding
the most exciting parties, and initiating adventures. The responsible matron is going to think,
feel and act quite differently from the party girl, and when her old friends try to drag her out for
a night of revelry she might reply that the wild friend they knew is no more. The present
woman does not care about the same things as the party girl, she does not have the capacity for
witty bar chatter, nor the uncanny ability to locate parties. Her sleep patterns are different as
are her thought patterns. She is, in many respects, a different subject in the same body.19
18
Though as she further notes, in one sense the Nineteenth Century Russian is really about memory
rather than anticipation, for the young Russian is concerned that in the future he will not share the views of
the self he is now, not that he now doesn’t share his older self ’s views. Schechtman 2003, p.253.
19
Schechtman 2003, pp.240–1.
SELF - ALIENATION 
There are three different iterations of this ‘matron’:

– The Serious Matron remembers her wild past but ‘she cannot recapture the
passions, emotions, likes and dislikes that she once felt;’ while she can under-
stand how someone might find her former passions and desires motivating, she
‘is so alienated from those desires and passions that she cannot quite compre-
hend how she could have made those choices’.20 Her past desires play no role in
how she lives her daily life.
– The Less Serious Matron now has different priorities to the party girl but retains
an affectively rich sense of what drove the party girl and still finds her passions
and desires compelling. To that extent her past passions are still affectively and
behaviourally alive in her, though to a lesser degree than in the past.
– The Mortified Matron has vivid recall of the experiences of the party girl, but
‘has altered in such a way that these recollections fill her with shame and
disgust’.21 She does not merely fail to endorse her past passions and desires
(as in the case of the serious matron) but repudiates them.
What distinguishes these matrons is the degree to which they maintain ‘empathic
access’: a ‘deep, phenomenological relation between different portions of a life’ that
goes beyond mere cognitive memory,22 an ability to relate to the conative and
affective states of a past person-stage with a degree of sympathy and vividness. This
is present to a reasonable degree with the Less Serious Matron, whereas the Serious
Matron seems to be almost entirely lacking in empathic access and the Mortified
Matron is in a position strongly analogous to the Young Russian. The Serious and
Mortified Matrons are aware of the causal history of psychological development
that link them to the Party Girl—they maintain memory-access to that past,
without which their survival as persons might be too radically compromised23—
but are so affectively alienated from the party girl that they experience the party girl
as if she was someone else. There are, as Goldie argues, problems with this view: for
one thing it involves a ‘two-state model’ whereby we recollect the state of mind of
our past person-stage and then form a reactive attitude to it, whereas memory may
in fact be more constructive than this: we simply remember our past indifferently
(Serious Matron) or with repulsion (Mortified Matron), and so ‘the very idea of
having direct epistemic access to one’s past, involving memories unalloyed by what
one now knows and how one now feels, becomes fundamentally suspect’.24
In the paper in which she introduces the Matrons, Schechtman is simply con-
cerned with the extent to which empathic access constitutes (or more accurately is
evidence of, though Schechtman doesn’t put it in these terms—and Goldie raises
important questions about its evidentiary value as to the persistence of psychological
traits)25 sufficient psychological continuity to preserve identity across time. But she is
20 21 22
Schechtman 2003, p.245. Schechtman 2003, p.250. Schechtman 2007, p.166.
23 24 25
Schechtman 2004, p.89. Goldie 2012, p.134. Goldie 2012, p.137–40.
 SELF - ALIENATION
already working explicitly with a distinction between two different kinds of identity.
When someone declares ‘I’m no longer that person’ we might be tempted to say that
this is merely metaphorical and that she is really the same person. But this is,
according to Schechtman, too hasty: the ‘thicker’26 sense of identity which we
might dismiss as merely figurative—the sort of identity the Mortified Matron and
the Young Russian disavow—is in fact central to discussions of personal identity as it
is ‘deeply intermeshed with the many significant practical implications of personal
continuation such as morality, self-interested concern, autonomy and authenticity’.27
In fact, I think we can go considerably further than Schechtman does at this point.
In developing his own Kierkegaardian account of personal identity, Anthony Rudd
has noted that while people say things like ‘I was a different person then’, ‘nearly all of
them would agree that they didn’t mean that literally . . . The sense of difference, of
change, is there; but so is the recognition that, for all of that, “the [past person-
stage] . . . was me”.’28 What makes these instances of psychological change striking,
on this view, just is that they have occurred to the same person. But Schechtman is
right, I think, to point to just how significant the sense of non-identification due to
affective alienation really is. It may fall somewhere short of being literally true, but it
is not quite merely metaphorical either. Can we make sense of a proposition’s being
more than metaphorically true without being true in a literal sense?
One possibility is suggested by David Kangas, who identifies in Kierkegaard’s work
a class of tropes that he refers to as ‘absolute figures’. Kangas’ example is ‘gift’ as
Kierkegaard uses the term in his 1843 discourses on the theme ‘every good gift and
every perfect gift is from above’ (James 1:17). This statement, for Kierkegaard, is ‘not
a metaphor [Billede, image, picture] but the only actual and true’ expression (EUD,
134/SKS 5, 137). On Kangas’ reading, ‘gift’ (as well as the figure of God as ‘father’)
functions in these discourses as ‘neither a metaphor nor a concept but a third thing that
precedes the opposition between the two’. This third thing is an ‘absolute figure’, a
‘figural meaning for which there is no corresponding and opposing proper meaning’.29
A figure or metaphor ultimately exists in order to be discarded, for once we grasp
the concept it represents the metaphor itself becomes unreal, merely figurative. Abso-
lute figures, by contrast, ‘are figurative, but they are not figurative of anything more
proper’.30 They also tend to end in aporia or paradox, for example, ‘God in giving
already has given’. Such absolute figures, for Kangas, allow us to glimpse truths that
are inaccessible from within the usual meanings designated by language, truths that are
essentially connected to personal upbuilding.
26 27
Schechtman 2004, p.92. Schechtman 2003, p.244.
28
Rudd 2012, p.211, n.38.
29
Kangas 2000, p.101. For a related claim see also Evans 2006, p.112: ‘What is implied is that picturing
Jesus as God’s son does more justice to the truth than any other image we might employ. While no human
language may be perfectly adequate to capture the mystery of Jesus’ oneness with God, the person who uses
the traditional language is coming as close to the truth as finite human beings can.’
30
Kangas 2000, p.111.
SELF - ALIENATION 
Without needing to explore the Hegelian onto-theology that Kangas takes Kier-
kegaard to be working against here, I think the notion of ‘absolute figures’ helps us to
understand a little better the status of a statement like ‘I am no longer the person
I was’. Such a statement already involves us in paradox—if we take it that ‘the person
I was’ must be me—and seems to end in the aproria that I both am and am not the
self I remember being. The Young Russian, for instance, is horrified at the self he will
become precisely because that self is not him. And the claim that ‘I am not that
person’ is not, I suggest, a metaphor for being especially affectively alienated from a
past person-stage. The expression is not an analogy we are meant to swap out for
some more literal, more fundamental meaning. Rather, it represents a real, irredu-
cible dimension of our experience of personal identity. We understand this claim best
when, instead of trying to reduce it to other claims that are consistent with a more
‘literal’ conception of identity, we allow it to stand on its own. Personal identity now
becomes not merely one type of identity ascription, but two: one linked to more
objective forms of continuity such as bodily re-identification, and one grounded in
affective (dis-)identification.
We’ve already encountered, in Strawson, this distinction between the diachronic-
ally extended human being (whose identity conditions are at least theoretically
knowable publicly) and a self or subject who may or may not experience a phenom-
enal sense of connection with the past and future stages of the career of that human
being. By the time of her 2007 paper, Strawson’s challenge has pushed Schechtman to
see this split as inherent in her own narrativist project, as indicated by the two senses
of identity revealed by her Matrons:
I am increasingly convinced that the concept of person as used by psychological theorists
mixes together two components. One is Strawson’s notion of the self; the other is a practical
notion that is more intimately connected to social context. On the one hand a person is
conceived as the subject of experiences, the ‘I’ that we experience as a psychological entity with
persistence conditions distinct from human beings. On the other hand, a person is conceived
as the bearer of certain complex social capacities that carry important practical implications.31
The identity and persistence conditions of the person and the self can be quite different,
as the Russian and Matron (and the Episodic) demonstrate. And as Schechtman notes,
this marks something of a departure from Locke, who despite drawing crucial distinc-
tions between animal identity, substance/soul identity, and personal identity, still ‘sees
the kind of continuity of experiencing subject that defines the persistence of the self as
the precondition for the capacities that make someone a person’.32 This conflation has
continued right to the end of the twentieth century—but now, thanks to writers like
Schechtman, Strawson, and others, it appears to be breaking down.33
31 32
33
Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera’s (2013) recent dissertation further develops the self-person distinction
(also differentiating ‘human’ and ‘person’ in ways that differ from the way I use these terms here) and
situates it within the history of personal identity discussions in helpful and productive ways.
 SELF - ALIENATION
On Schechtman’s model, the constitution of the person—roughly what had ini-

tially appeared to be ‘literal’ identity above—comes to be seen as the weaker sense of
identity, but the more indispensable: ‘One need not identify deeply with past or
future actions or experiences, care about them, or take an interest in them, but one
does need to recognize them as relevant to one’s options in certain fundamental
ways.’34 I may not feel like I truly am that past person anymore, but I can’t get out of
paying his parking fines. The stronger sense of identity, however, requires that past
events ‘must condition the quality of present experience in the strongest sense,
unifying consciousness over time through affective connections and identification’.35
All this is basically consonant and compatible with the way Strawson handles this
self/person or me*/GS split.
The opening of this split, however, generates a further question: is this distinction
a problem? Does this fissure between person and self need to be healed—and if so,
from where does that need arise? This is where Strawson and Schechtman part ways.
We’ve seen that Strawson sees no real problem in the split between self and person or
I* and GS. On his view, the Episodic is capable of living as psychologically and
ethically rich a life as a Diachronic. Schechtman, like many of Strawson’s critics, does
however think we have good reasons to try to unify self and person—to try to identify
with as much of our past and future as possible, to be more like the Less Serious
Matron than her less empathic matronly counterparts. The affective attitudes of the
Matrons is initially presented as being more or less a brute psychological fact: the
Serious Matron had simply changed so much she no longer has empathic access with
her past. In the revised version, however, we are told that ‘there are advantages to
making one’s self-narrative coincide as far as possible with one’s person-narrative’.36
Doing so, Schechtman claims, actually serves to lengthen the duration of our selves
(or I*s), and ‘lives that encourage affective and emotional identification with the past
and future instead of resting with mere cognitive awareness of what one did and
projections of what one might do are often made richer and smoother through this
effort’.37 If so, that gives us prudential reasons to try to identify with as much of our
physical, biological, and interpersonal past and future as possible.
But these reasons are, she admits, defeasible. It is generally desirable to make one’s
affective sense of self coextensive with one’s person-narrative, but not always; ‘There
may be circumstances in which it is better for a life to include radical affective breaks
within it. Sometimes it can be a good idea to put the past behind us or the future out
of play.’38 Moreover, these merely psychological reasons are in trouble the moment
an Episodic turns up and reports living a perfectly happy life despite not identifying
affectively with their past and future person-stages. This compels Schechtman to
point beyond a merely psychological normativity: ‘To develop my idea into an
argument for the desirability of making person and self coextensive, then, it will be
34 35 36
Schechtman 2007, p.170. Schechtman 2007, p.171. Schechtman 2007, p.176.
37 38
SELF - ALIENATION 
necessary to develop a notion of alienation that is not strictly psychological in the way
an introspective report will reveal.’39
What this ‘not strictly psychological’ account of alienation will consist in is not
elaborated upon. Two possibilities present themselves, however. The first would
involve some deeper psychological account in which we show that the Episodic is
not really happy, or not as happy as she could be. This seems possible, but again it
would likely yield only defeasible reasons to extend one’s identification to more or
less of the past (which is not necessarily an objection in itself). The second is to move
from a ‘merely’ psychological normativity to an ethical one. And this latter possibility
seems more closely allied to the sort of ‘ownership’ we expect in certain morally
charged contexts.
Consider again our Mortified Matron. This Matron, on Schechtman’s line, lacks
the empathic access which would secure a psychologically advantageous affective
identification with her past. Her life would be ‘richer and smoother’ if she wasn’t
periodically wracked with pangs of embarrassment and horror at the things she got
up to in her younger days. Yet she is not Episodic by any means: rather, as I argued in
Chapter 4, her horror that she did these things and had these passions and motives is
precisely what her affective identification with her past consists in. She extends her
self-identity to past person-stages in a way that is far from pleasant, but that is
nonetheless somehow indexed to her sense that she is responsible for these things.
Now imagine a reformed criminal in the dock, declaring that ‘I’m no longer that
person!’ If this declaration expresses a subjective state like that of the mortified
matron, then we would say that the criminal is reformed, yet remains remorseful
in a way that suggests they have fully taken ownership of their past. She understands
in the fullest sense what it means that she did these things in the past. If, however, the
reformed criminal’s situation is more like that of the serious matron—a lack of
subjective identification that takes the form of affective indifference to her past—
then we might say that the criminal simply hasn’t fully taken ownership for what she
has done. And as we saw previously, something does seem to be lacking in the latter
response. To account for this, we’ll need to look for an understanding of our ethical
relationship to the past and future that makes such affective identification normative,
even in circumstances where it won’t make life more pleasant.
Soteriology and Transmission Loss

I’ve mentioned that the problem of affective alienation never arises in Locke’s picture
of personal identity, which is perhaps why its significance (if any) for neo-Lockean
theories has been so contested. Whilst Locke does use ‘person’ in a way that is more
intersubjective and more closely connected to moral imputability than the way he
39
 SELF - ALIENATION
uses ‘self ’, he nonetheless ultimately takes these two terms to be coterminous, and so
assumes that extension of consciousness and what I earlier called ‘concernful
remembering’ always go together. As we’ve seen, he did grapple with the question
of my identity with past person-stages whose experience I cannot recall (such as in
cases of drunkenness and sleepwalking), yet he seems to assume that any experience
I can recall, that is, one that is perspectivally accessible to me, is the experience of a
self I am concerned for by default. In that case, Kierkegaard just is the child in the
green jacket and grey pants he cannot catch up with—though it’s interesting to ask
what Locke would have made of the apparent observer-memory perspective of that
memory.
For Locke, we find ourselves to be diachronically extended selves insofar as we are
beings ‘sensible of Happiness or Misery’ who therefore ‘must grant, that there is
something that is himself that he is concerned for’.40 But what then circumscribes the
boundaries of that for which we are concerned? We saw in Chapter 1 that this was a
problem for Locke in that if we link moral imputability to extension of consciousness,
it looks very much like we are not morally responsible for anything we cannot
remember doing. In response to this problem, Locke appealed to eschatology, to
‘the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open’ on which ‘no one
shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his Doom, his
Conscience accusing or excusing him’.41 So, as we’ve seen, while Locke takes exten-
sion of consciousness as constitutive of selfhood, there is also some fact of the matter
about what we are responsible for which is at least partially obscured for us (now) by
forgetfulness. Given that concern is linked to an imputability that is ultimately
soteriologically (‘fatally’) important, this suggests we should be concerned with as
much of our actual scope of responsibility as possible. Hence the existence of a
soteriological fact-of-the-matter about personal identity creates a reason to extend
our conscious concernment to align with this fact. However, because Locke assumes
that concernment just attends consciousness automatically as an ‘unavoidable con-
comitant’, this normative issue never arises for him: if we remember something, then
we automatically appropriate it to the self whose happiness we are concerned for,
and if we cannot remember something, we are presumably not responsible for not
appropriating it.
This automatic character of appropriation also leaves no room for degrees.
Whereas modern neo-Lockeans worry about the effect of gradations of psychological
change on personal survival, Locke seems to take identity to be largely immune from
the ravages of time, whatever changes these might have wrought on the person’s
dispositional and affective states:
Consciousness, as far as it ever can be extended, should it be to Ages past, unites Existences and
Actions, very remote in Time, into the same Person, as well as it does the Existence and Actions
40 41
Locke 1975, p.345. Locke 1975, p.344.
SELF - ALIENATION 
of the immediately preceding Moment: So that whatever has the Consciousness of present and
past Actions, is the same person to whom they both belong.42
In passages such as this, Locke does not seem to allow degrees of identity; appropri-
ation is not scalar but absolute, and so personal identity does not suffer what we
might call ‘transmission loss’ across time.43 However far I can extend my conscious-
ness, I still find myself completely there when I get there, so to speak. Conversely, the
strand of the neo-Lockean tradition that culminates in the reductionism of Parfit sees
personal identity as wholly scalar and as utterly plagued by this transmission loss of
selfhood. By the time the Young Russian has become the crusty old conservative,
there simply won’t be enough of his current psychology left for us to be able to say he
is the older man (though Parfit’s point here is that ultimately there are no more-than-
conventional facts about identity to be found). This is highly problematic if identity is
to carry the fairly heavy normative load Locke expected it to, for Locke sees us as
responsible for everything our consciousness can extend to, not just the actions that
happened within affectively accessible sections of our psychological lives. In Locke’s
eschatological scenario, the Serious Matron will presumably still be called to account
for any misdeeds of the Party Girl, even though she finds herself so affectively
alienated from that past that, from her perspective, these misdeeds may as well
have been performed by someone else. There is nothing in Locke’s picture to suggest
such affective alienation will mitigate this responsibility: ‘But I’m just not that person
anymore!’ won’t get her off the hook. Of course, the thought of Doomsday might
itself give the Matron excellent grounds for concern about that past, whether she does
care about it or not—but here again we see a schism between the person as object of
moral imputability and responsibility, on the one hand, and the self as something
that appropriates the past and future to itself through concernful affective identifi-
cation. Indeed we can see that from this perspective the Mortified Matron is actually
in a better position than the Serious Matron, in that the former’s embarrassment
looks more like the kind of responsible ownership of the past we discussed in the
Chapter 4.
Locke does not address this bifurcation of self-identity and person-identity simply
because he does not consider the possibility they could fail to be co-extensive, but if
we take cases such as the Nineteenth-century Russian and the Matrons seriously we
cannot return to Locke’s uncritical certainty on this point. An amended Lockean
account of identity would therefore seem to require that the person and the self be
made co-extensive. And the sort of psychological benefits Schechtman points to in
maintaining affective identification cannot reliably motivate such an extension.
There may in fact be pressing psychological reasons not to maintain empathic access
42
Locke 1975, p.340.
43
Here I disagree with Strawson’s assertion that, on the Lockean model of personhood, ‘Consciousness
may contain an involuntary natural mechanism that operates somewhat like a statute of limitations’ such
that we are let off the hook on the Day of Judgement for certain actions (Strawson 2011a, p.87).
 SELF - ALIENATION
with some parts of our past: preserving a degree of empathy with a phase of life in
which I was particularly self-destructive or vicious would certainly seem to run
counter to good psychological health, for instance. Accordingly, if the project
initiated by Locke were to succeed in its fullest sense—thereby preserving what
seems right about that project—it would need to identify a phenomenal experience
of becoming ‘self to oneself ’ that has the following features: an appropriative form of
consciousness that secures a non-scalar identity with all moments of my perspectiv-
ally accessible life in an intrinsically normative way.
What is needed, it seems, is a sort of phenomenal ‘glue’ to hold together the self
that I am now and the selves I access in memory and anticipation, such that my
person-identity and self-identity become coextensive.44 I need to somehow subject-
ively appropriate all those moments in the life of the human being I am and for
whose actions I am morally accountable, regardless of massive psychological change.
And it is here that we may look to Kierkegaard for resources. Like Locke, Kierkegaard
links our sense of ourselves across time to soteriology and final judgement, and
rejects the idea that we are somehow less responsible for what we have forgotten or
become less responsible due to the passage of time:
It is eternally false that guilt becomes something different even if a century passed by; to say
anything like that is to confuse the eternal with what the eternal least resembles, with human
forgetfulness [menneskelig Glemsomhed]. (UDVS, 18/SKS 8, 133)
For Kierkegaard as for Locke, the soteriological valence of the past suffers no
transmission loss across time—but unlike Locke, Kierkegaard is aware of how
often we fail to affectively identify with and appropriate the past for which we are
answerable, how often concernment fails to hold.
In the remainder of this chapter I wish to outline how key tropes of reflexive cognition
in Kierkegaard—contemporaneity, concern, interest, inwardness, earnestness—can
help to supply this phenomenological glue. As I hope this will show, looking to
Kierkegaard may furnish the neo-Lockean project with useful resources. As I will explain
in Chapter 6, however, other aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought work against the standard
neo-Lockean project of describing the identity and persistence conditions of a tempor-
ally extended psychological object called ‘the self ’. I think it would in fact be a
misunderstanding of Kierkegaard to try to build a metaphysics out of samtidighed or
these other terms—but that may not be a reason for neo-Lockeans to desist from doing
so. It may be a valid place to depart from Kierkegaard for some readers, having taken
what they need from him, even if it’s not where Kierkegaard ultimately wants to take us.
44
This glue metaphor is also used by Gallagher and Zahavi: ‘Our everyday experiences are normally
permeated with a kind of temporal super-glue—they are held together in the very short term by a strong
and pragmatically important structure . . . Memory . . . with a weaker sort of glue, provides, sometimes
explicitly and sometimes implicitly, a larger but sometimes less coherent framework for making sense
out of our experiences’ Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p.85.
SELF - ALIENATION 
Memory, Guilt, and Totality

As the quote from ‘An Occasional Discourse’ (better known as ‘Purity of Heart Is to
Will One Thing’) above would indicate, Kierkegaard is very much aware of the
persistence of memory and the sense in which events in the distant past can present
themselves to me as things for which I am fully responsible. Part of this awareness is
no doubt coloured by his unusual biography. In a journal entry from 1846 he refers to
what appears to be an event in his father’s life: ‘How dreadful the thought of that man
who once, as a small boy tending sheep on the Jutland heath, in much suffering,
starving and exhausted, stood up on a hill and cursed God—and that man was unable
to forget it when he was 82 years old’ (KJN 2, 287/SKS 18, 278; JJ:416). But he is also
aware of the phenomenology of memory more generally and the way in which it can
bring a sting of moral and indeed soteriological responsibility in its very presentation,
as we see from an early journal entry from 1836:
The marvellous way in which something that happened long ago can suddenly leap into the
consciousness is really remarkable—for example, the memory of something wrong, something
one was scarcely conscious of in the moment of action—a flash of lightening which intimates a
great thunderstorm. It does not step forward but actually leaps forward with tremendous
power and claims to be heard. And that, broadly speaking, is the way we should understand
that passage in the gospels which says that a man will be held accountable on the day of
judgment for every improper word he has spoken. (JP 854 [1:390]/SKS 27, 153; Papir 194)
We’ll return to the ‘every improper word’ motif in Chapter 8, but for the moment,
note that even at this early stage in Kierkegaard’s work, this thought connects the
experience of memory to an unforgivingly thorough soteriological criterion of
identity. The subjective experience of memory is already associated with an exhaustive,
‘objective’ criterion of identity linked to moral responsibility. And for Kierkegaard,
that association between subjective sense-of-self and the objective diachronic
continuity of the human being is not simply a brute psychological fact (as in
Strawson) or a psychologically desirable achievement (as in Schechtman) but
strongly normative. And hence the sort of transmission loss that seems unavoidable
in a neo-Lockean account, where psychological connectedness or continuity just is
what personal identity consists in, turns out to be inadequate to the reality of moral
imputability. ‘Human forgetfulness’ offers no mitigation to ultimate soteriological
responsibility—and nor, crucially, does psychological distance, as we see in a journal
entry from 1847:
Time is not only what is terrifying for a pers., but it is also what is mollifying; not only is it that
which makes his life so strenuous (for what strain can be compared with being an eternal spirit
and living years, weeks, hours [?]), it is also what soothes. If you have ever transgressed God’s
commandments, then you certainly dared not think of God at that same instant—not even in
repentance. But then, after a bit of time had passed during which you had not sinned again,
then you gained courage; it was as if your guilt had somehow become somewhat less because it
 SELF - ALIENATION
had been rather a while since then, and in the meanwhile you had not sinned often. For an
eternal spirit this apparition does not exist. (KJN 4, 112/SKS 20, 112; NB, 185)
Hence the idea that a subject’s responsibility for the past is ameliorated by the
passage of time is an artefact of human weakness and ‘forgetfulness’, one that does
not track the underlying facts of moral responsibility. From the perspective of
ultimate judgement, ‘That was a long time ago!’ turns out to be no more exculpatory
than the excuse offered by Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:
FRIAR BARNADINE : Thou hast committed—
BARABAS : Fornication? But that was in another country; and besides, the
wench is dead.45
And this is before we get to our capacity to use memory in a self-serving way:
‘Everything in the present incites to criticism, but recollection disarms it and permits
one to use ideality, not to reject, but to beautify what has gone before’ (KJN 2, 241/
SKS 18, 261; JJ 367.a).
So it would seem that one who accepts Kierkegaard’s soteriological commitments
(and as I’ll say in Chapter 9, those of us who do not accept them may still find
something valid in what Kierkegaard has to say here) has a very good reason to try to
identify with their past and future person-stages in the concernful, appropriative way
Locke takes to be automatic. We saw in Chapter 1 that Kierkegaard distinguishes
between recollection (erindringen) as a way of encountering the past that essentially
relates it to the remembering self, and memory (hukommelse) as a mere supplier of
detail about the past that contains no such essential connection to the rememberer.
What the quotes above suggest is that the prospect of a final judgement, in which
I am answerable for every idle word spoken, every trifling detail about the way I’ve
lived my life, should turn every act of memory into an act of recollection. Every
moment I can remember is a moment for which I am answerable—which is not
the same as saying every moment is a moment for which I will answer, though
Kierkegaard clearly believes we will—and so is a moment I should be particularly
concerned about.
This concernful appropriation of the past is of a piece with Kierkegaard’s overall
preoccupation with self-reflexive modes of cognition. Across a range of texts and in a
number of different ways, he explores ways in which we can think of ourselves and
the world we engage with that involve implicit self-reference, ways in which our
thought can be ‘shot through’ with subjective concern that nonetheless does not
always rise to the level of thematic reflection about oneself. Very often Kierkegaard
describes these indirectly or negatively, by sketching examples of what it is like to not
see oneself in these terms. I can only give a brief account of these forms of reflexive
cognition here (and do not attempt any sort of identification or reduction of the
45
Marlowe 1995, p.297 (4.1 l.41–3).
SELF - ALIENATION 
different terms he uses), but hopefully their relevance to the issue of psychological
alienation as it occurs in Parfit and Schechtman will be clear.
Subjectivity, Interest, and Mortality

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus spends much of his
time reminding his reader that he, the reader, is an existing subject. It might seem
surprising that we need to be reminded of such a thing, but as Paul Muench points
out, the Postscript is written for a very specific audience: a philosophically sophisti-
cated reader who is prone to getting carried away with reflection, and needs to be
slowed down and brought back to concrete existence.46 Such a reader is at risk of
falling into the state Climacus calls being ‘absent-minded’ (distraite), a state in which
their own status as existing subject falls out of their comportment towards the world
and towards the object of their thought.
Kierkegaard uses stories told about the Copenhagen bookseller Salomon Soldin
(1774–1837) to illustrate this absent-mindedness in an extreme way. Soldin was so
absent-minded, we’re told, that when a customer impersonated his voice behind his
back, he had to ask his wife ‘Rebecca, is it I who is speaking?’ (CA, 51/SKS 4, 356).47
Soldin bumbled along like this in life until the fateful day that ‘When he was going to
get up in the morning, he was not aware that he was dead’ (CUP, 1:167/SKS 7, 155).
One can already see in that description the lack of a sort of self-possession or self-
appropriation. The speculative philosopher, who attempts to become objective, to
abstract from the particularities of his embodied existence and thereby assume the
voice of pure reason, is no less ridiculous than Soldin: he forgets that he is, inescap-
ably, a human being living in time, situated in a concrete world and hurtling towards
the event of his death. The comic contradiction in Soldin is replicated in the person
who acts as if in their philosophical activity they have become thought itself,
enunciating timeless truths of eternal and unbounded reason, rather than remaining
a finite, flawed, subjectively limited creature.
The subjective thinker, by contrast, is ‘essentially interested in his own thinking’
(CUP, 1:73/SKS 7, 73). His thought is permeated with a non-thematized self-
concern; he does not merely think his thought but possesses it in a non-thetic
awareness that it ‘belongs to the subject and no-one else’ (CUP, 1:73/SKS 7, 73).
The thought is related in important ways to Judge William’s talk in Either/Or of
a form of self-appropriation through ethical commitment, after which, for the
subject, ‘every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsib-
ility for himself ’ (EO, 2:248/SKS 3, 237). And it ramifies throughout Kierkegaard’s
moral psychology, in which there is a standing concern for non-thetic ways of
seeing ourselves in our imaginative engagements of the past and future, of seeing
46
Muench 2011, pp.104–10.
47
For the record, Soldin’s wife was actually named Hannah (nee Ruben), not Rebecca (SKS K4, 356).
 SELF - ALIENATION
the future possibilities we actualize.48 Kierkegaard’s various invocations of mirror

metaphors are instructive here: as we’ve already heard, we are to see ourselves in ‘the
Mirror of the Word’ of scripture as we’re told in For Self-Examination, and we’re to see
ourselves in the ‘mirror of possibility’ and not merely a human being as Anti-Climacus
urges in The Sickness Unto Death. For Climacus, Anti-Climacus, and Kierkegaard
more generally, there is a way of envisioning the possibilities we encounter in imagin-
ation whereby we truly experience them as our possibilities. I can imagine the future in
a mere daydreaming way, without really taking ownership of it (as in the case of the
wannabe Thoreau discussed in Chapter 3), or I can see the person we imagine in the
future as being me, investing the imagined future subject of experience with a sense of
normatively qualified affective identity.
Perhaps the clearest way to explicate this sense of identification is by considering
Climacus’ ruminations on mortality.49 Climacus tells us that while he knows plenty
about death—that sulphuric acid is fatal, that the Stoics praised suicide, ‘that one can
die from such a ludicrous trifle that the most solemn person cannot help laughing at
death’ and so on (CUP, 1:165/SKS 7, 153–4) —knowing about death in this way is
not the same thing as understanding what it is to die. To understand mortality one
must understand the reality of one’s own mortality: without the first-personal
dimension, one does not truly understand the significance and meaning of death.
To understand what it is to die it is necessary that I understand that I will die—
necessary, but not sufficient, for it is not enough to know in a wholly cognitive way
that one is going to die, as the outcome of a piece of syllogistic reasoning about the
mortality of Homo sapiens. To understand my death in that way is to reduce my
death to the death of ‘a human being in general’, a token of the human species, and
not the subject I experience myself as being here and now:
If death is always uncertain, if I am mortal, then this means that this uncertainty cannot
possibly be understood in general if I am not also such a human being in general. But this I am
not. . . . If, however, the uncertainty of death is something in general, then my dying is also
something in general. Perhaps dying is also something in general for systematicians, for
absentminded people. For the late bookseller Soldin, dying is said to have been something in
general—‘When he was going to get up in the morning, he was not aware that he was dead.’ But
for me, my dying is by no means something in general; for others, my dying is some such thing.
Nor am I for myself some such thing in general; perhaps for others I am some such thing in
general. But if the task is to become subjective, then every subject becomes for himself exactly
the opposite of some such thing in general. (CUP, 1:167/SKS 7, 154–5)
Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, the subjective thinker apprehends his death in a way
qualitatively different from the abstract way in which most of us, most of the time,
acknowledge our mortality. When we think about our death we frequently fail to
48
This is the main topic of Stokes 2010a, in which many of the claims made in this section are worked
out in greater depth.
49
For a much fuller treatment of this topic than I can offer here, see Stokes 2013a.
SELF - ALIENATION 
reflexively relate it back to how we are living now: we anticipate that someone with
our name, likeness, and relationships will die someday, but do not have the strong
reflexive sense that we will be the ones to die. Marking the difference this reflexivity
makes is difficult, as the propositional content of the thought is exactly the same:
‘I will die.’ Thinking that thought with genuine reflexivity—what Kierkegaard else-
where calls thinking the ‘earnest thought of death’ (TDIO, 75/ SKS 5, 445) in contrast
to thinking about death with mere ‘mood’ (stemning)—makes a phenomenological
difference to the non-conceptual content of the thought of death, a difference which
is therefore not easy to express. The thematic object of the earnest thought of death
must be one’s own death, for ‘To think of oneself as dead [At tænke sig selv død] is
earnestness; to be witness to the death of another is mood’—even if the death you
witness is that of your child or beloved (TDIO, 75/ SKS 5, 445). But one can likewise
envision one’s own death in a state of mood rather than earnestness, denuding the
thought of our own death of the sense of urgent for-me-ness this thought should
have—and as we’ve seen, this for-me-ness of death amounts to an experience of
phenomenal contemporaneity with death.
We can also explicate this difference between earnest and absent-minded ways of
thinking about our own death using the distinction between ‘self ’ and ‘person’
discussed above. As Mark Johnston notes, when we fear our death, what we fear is
not that the person will cease to exist—that there will be no person with my
appearance, motivations, and commitments in the world to carry out my projects—
but that my self, this subjective ‘arena of presence and action’ as he puts it, will be
extinct.50 The absent-minded person, by contrast, thinks of the loss of the person but
does not understand that the death they envisage is that of their self, the being they are
right now. Again, this is not a cognitive failure, but a phenomenological one: there just
isn’t the sense of me (or me*) being the person who is going to die.
Hopefully by this point the structural analogy between the cases of alienation we’ve
been discussing above and this approach to mortality is reasonably apparent:
– The absent-minded person is aware that a future person-stage who is causally
continuous with himself will die, but does not have a full affective sense of the
self he experiences himself as being the person who dies;
– The Young Russian is aware that a future person-stage who is causally continu-
ous with himself will hold conservative views, but has a strong affective sense
that the self he experiences himself as being now is not identical with that Older
Russian;
– The Serious Matron is aware that a past person-stage who is causally continuous
with herself enjoys parties, and so on, but does not have a full affective sense of
the self she experiences herself as being now is identical with that Party Girl.
50
Johnston 2010, p.175.
 SELF - ALIENATION
In each case, a full affective sense of ownership of the past or future person-stage will
involve a unification of affective self-identification and cognitive awareness of person-
identity across time. And this is precisely what each is lacking: to adopt Anti-Climacus’
terms, the Serious Matron does not see herself in the fullest sense in the mirror of the
past, but merely a human being; likewise for the Young Russian, peering into Anti-
Climacus’ ‘mirror of possibility’. Based on the contributions of the previous chapters
I think we can say that all three fail to become contemporaneous, in Kierkegaard’s
sense, with their past and future person-stages: they do not envisage the experiences of
those person-stages as being their own experiences but merely the experiences of a
human being to whom they are causally connected.
Viewed through the concept of contemporaneity, the Mortified Matron is a more
complex case. We saw in Chapter 4 that in one sense embarrassment is a form of
diachronic self-experience, in that to be embarrassed about the past is to experience a
negative judgement of oneself; one feels the sting of that judgement directly. The
Mortified Matron does not appear to be embarrassed on the Party Girl’s behalf, but
rather is embarrassed by the Party Girl because she is the Party Girl, of whom she has
a deeply negative judgement. Interestingly, it does not appear she is embarrassed
because others are forming a negative view of her past, which has been taken in the
literature to be a condition of embarrassment—but not of shame, which is often
taken to be possible without the actual presence of an audience.51 Robert C. Roberts
also claims that ‘while embarrassment is reflexive like shame, it does not seem to go
to the core of the self in the way shame does’,52 whereas the Mortified Matron’s
response does indeed seem connected to her sense of self in such a way. Embarrass-
ment has also been taken to be less substantial than shame,53 with shame ‘connected
with the agent’s personal morality in a way in which embarrassment is not’.54
Regardless of whether mortification, in the Matron’s case or in general, should be
thought of as embarrassment or as shame, just to the extent that she is mortified
the Matron seems to have something contemporaneous about her recollection of the
Party Girl insofar as she feels the reflexive sting of negative judgement, even though
she lacks empathic access to the Party Girl’s dispositional life.
For Schechtman, the Mortified Matron could overcome this sting by retaining
empathic access to her past. But the reasons this gives her are only psychological:
empathic access would simply ease the pain of embarrassment. But what if, by
reference to some external standard, the Mortified Matron concludes that she should
feel embarrassed by her past, however painful this may be? (In which case shame
rather than embarrassment might indeed be a better description.) Embarrassment,
shame, or perhaps pride, may well be entirely appropriate ways of appropriating
51
Cf. Taylor 1985, pp.69–76; Deonna, Rodogno and Teroni 2012, pp.115–16 (who also add that
embarrassment is linked to appearing to be a certain way); Roberts 2003, p.230.
52 53
Roberts 2003, p.231. Taylor 1985, p.69; Roberts 2003, p.230.
54
Taylor 1985, p.69.
SELF - ALIENATION 
one’s past and future on the basis of a normatively grounded self-concern. The
criminal should feel remorse at their past, not merely affective alienation, as this is
part of what it is to understand the moral meaning of the past: of what it is to grasp
that I did this terrible thing.55
For Climacus, this normative self-concern is grounded in soteriology: the subject’s
interest in his own thinking is a function of his infinite, passionate interest in his
eternal salvation (salighed, ‘happiness’ or ‘blessedness’). And this makes the norma-
tivity of self-concern comprehensive to a very high degree: concern for one’s ultimate
salvation should properly invest every moment of existence with an infinite import-
ance. Every moment, every action, every idle word matters. The ever-present possi-
bility of death, which brings with it the prospect of final judgement over one’s whole
life, means that concern needs to be built into every moment of subjective existence:
But if the task is to become subjective, then for the individual subject to think death is not at all
some such thing in general but is an act, because the development of subjectivity consists
precisely in this, that he, acting, works through himself in his thinking about his own existence,
consequently that he actually thinks what is thought by actualizing it, consequently that he
does not think for a moment: Now, you must keep watch every moment—but that he keeps
watch every moment. (CUP, 1:169/SKS 7, 156–7)
Likewise, every moment in my past and future should be encountered with samti-
dighed, with a phenomenal sense that this remembered or anticipated event is
happening for me because I am answerable for it. Like empathic access, contempor-
aneity of this sort involves an affective identification with my past person-stages.
Unlike empathic access, however, it does not require retaining enough psychological
continuity with the past to find my past desires and motivations compelling: like the
Mortified Matron, I may be contemporary with a past person-stage whose disposi-
tions and values I wholly repudiate, while still experiencing myself (my self) as
identical with and answerable for that past person-stage.
Goldie’s description of the way something analogous to ‘free indirect style’ oper-
ates in autobiographical memory gives, at first blush, a good description of what this
contemporaneous way of remembering past selves with whom we lack empathic
access looks like:
One does indeed see oneself as another, and in that sense it is from an external perspective
and ‘spectatorial’, but nevertheless you think of your past self as unequivocally you, and of
your past actions as unequivocally yours. In contrition and commitment to change, you
come to see your earlier self, who you were then, and what you did then, in a new light. The
possibility of self-forgiveness and redemption, then, arises just because you can see your
earlier self from the perspective of a renewed, changed, self, who is able to rejoin the moral
community.56
55
Compare Baker 2000, p.79, on Oedipus’ horrified realization that he himself killed Laius.
56
Goldie 2012, p.110.
 SELF - ALIENATION
Yet as we’ve seen, Goldie also takes it that even in alienation we never lose a sense
that we are the self we remember or anticipate, and that statements to the contrary
are mere ‘hyperbole’. He allows for the essential ambiguity involved in ‘in one way of
thinking of oneself as another, in another way thinking of that other absolutely as
riveted to oneself ’,57 yet insofar as he takes the first to be merely hyperbolic, he, like
Rudd, downplays the depth of alienation and thereby doesn’t seem to register that
taking affective ownership of person-stages from which we have become alienated
should be regarded as a psychological achievement, and one that ethics may demand
we try to accomplish.
So contemporaneity turns out to be a stronger phenomenal ‘glue’ with a wider
coverage than empathic access. It is able to unify my present sense of self with my
memory-access to past person-stages regardless of massive changes in psychology,
and does so with a normativity that, unlike the psychological normativity Schecht-
man appeals to, is non-defeasible. In short, it seems to do a lot of the work Lockean
concernment is taken to do in unifying the subject across time, by giving me a non-
defeasible motivation for identifying with all of my past and future. However, as
I hope to show in the following chapter, we should not be too quick here to assume
that Kierkegaard thinks contemporaneity thereby constitutes the self across time
as a four-dimensional, psychological object. Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of self-
experience may, as I hope to have shown, be a useful resource for neo-Lockean
metaphysics. But Kierkegaard himself is playing a different, and altogether more
interesting, game.
57
Goldie 2012, p.123.
6
Continuity and Temporality
The Neo-Lockean Project

In Chapter 5 I suggested that contemporaneity, as a sort of phenomenal ‘glue’ that
binds the subject to her past and future person-stages, may be a useful resource for
neo-Lockean discussions of personal identity. Neo-Lockean or Psychological Con-
tinuity View theorists hold that our survival across time is a matter of the persistence
of psychological properties: we endure (or in some versions, perdure)1 as the same
person across time just insofar as some quantum of psychological properties con-
tinues from one moment to the next. Or to put it more precisely: if some person
(-stage)-constituting set of psychological properties is appropriately related to some
earlier or later set of person(-stage)-constituting psychological properties, these sets
are co-personal and the person can be said to exist at all points in between them. The
terms ‘person-constituting’ or ‘person-stage-constituting’ and ‘appropriately related’
are clearly magnets for philosophical controversy here and have been defined, tacitly
or explicitly, by different theorists in a number of different ways.
For a start we need to determine what sorts of psychological properties might
count as person-constituting, such that their persistence across time could count as
constituting personal survival. Memory is the obvious such candidate property, but it
is not the only one. As Sydney Shoemaker points out, even if we lost all our memories
of all kinds (semantic, procedural, episodic, etc.) there may still be continuities of
character and disposition such that a neo-Lockean may judge a person to have
survived such a global ‘brain zap’.2 So instead of memory, we might take it that the
persistence of dispositions or propositional attitudes such as beliefs might constitute
personal survival. Or we might hold that some combination of memories, disposi-
tions, and other traits might be what continues us across time; we could, for instance,
think in terms of Grice’s overlapping ‘total temporary states’ with which—a quarter-
century before the contemporary explosion in personal identity theory began in the
late 1960s—he attempts to revivify the Memory Criterion.3 We might tell stories
about synchronic and diachronic causal relationships between the properties of
1 2
E.g. Lewis 1983, pp.55–77. Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, pp.87–8.
3
Roughly, a total temporary state is co-personal with a previous total temporary state if it contains at
least one element which is an element of the immediately preceding state (Grice 1975).
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
mental states, stories which very quickly become quite sophisticated.4 Alternatively
we might appeal to a sort of phenomenal continuity, as Barry Dainton has recently
done: moments of consciousness are co-personal just to the extent that each moment
overlaps (in a manner akin to the Husserlian retention-intention-protention struc-
ture) with the moments of consciousness immediately adjacent to it.5 We also need to
specify just how these relevant psychological properties relate to each other in order
to be person-constituting. Parfit famously distinguishes between psychological con-
nectedness and psychological continuity, the latter consisting of ‘overlapping chains
of strong connectedness’, and argues that while strong connectedness is not transitive
in the way numerical identity needs to be, psychological continuity is transitive.6 So
there is considerable scope for variation within the neo-Lockean picture both as to
which psychological properties are synchronically person-constituting and what sort
of relations need to hold between them to constitute a self diachronically.
Neo-Lockeanism has come in for heavy criticism in the last two decades, notably
from animalists such as Eric Olson7 and eliminativists8 such as Thomas Metzinger.9
Eliminativists argue there is no self at all, while animalists argue that selves or persons
just are individual human animals. Animalism has a certain attractive parsimony to
it: Locke accepted both ‘Man’ identity (roughly, the identity of the human animal)
and ‘Self ’ identity into his ontology, but animalism dispenses with the need for the
latter. So the very fact that neo-Lockeans have continued to defend their position
speaks to the plausibility of Locke’s central insight: psychology does have a bearing on
personal identity. That is why animalists have had to spend such a large portion of
their time trying to accommodate or dissolve the Lockean ‘transplant intuition’,10
according to which a brain transplant would result in a transfer of identity from
brain-donor to brain-recipient. The same would hold for a ‘brain wipe’ followed by a
transfer of information from one brain to another.
Our sense that psychology somehow does matter to identity, that a patient with
advanced Alzheimer’s for instance is no longer the same person even if they are the
same animal, is hard to shake. As the previous chapters have made clear, I think neo-
Lockeans are right that psychology matters: the fact that we are beings with first-
personal perspective is crucial for understanding personal identity, as figures as
diverse as Lynn Rudder Baker11 and Bas van Fraasen12 have argued. What neo-
Lockeans have done is to use this insight to motivate the construction of an ontology
of the person out of psychological materials. Selves or persons turn out, according to
these theorists, to be psychologically-constituted objects—a rather odd sort of object,
admittedly, but an object nonetheless, just another one of those medium-sized dry
goods that J. L. Austin wryly observed metaphysicians are most comfortable dealing
4 5 6
For a recent example, see Shoemaker 2011. Dainton 2008. Parfit 1984, pp.206–7.
7 8
Olson 1997, 2007. On eliminativism vs reductionism, see e.g. Giles 1997.
9 10
Metzinger 2003, 2011. On which see e.g. Olson 1997, pp.42–52.
11 12
See e.g. Baker, 2000. van Frassen 2005.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
with.13 Such objects would have specifiable identity and persistence conditions, such
that it would at least theoretically be possible to re-identify the same self at different
points in time. We can say that Octavian in 31 BCE is Augustus in 27 BCE if we can
point to appropriate forms of psychological continuity or connection holding
between the victor of Actium and the newly anointed princeps. Doing so would
allow us to point to a single diachronically extended object present at a birth and a
death and at all moments in between, sometimes bearing the name Gaius Octavius,
sometimes Augustus, at one point a newborn baby, at another an ambitious teen
donning the toga virilis for the first time, at another a canny politician feigning
reluctance to accept the power being offered him, at yet another an old man dying at
Nola. The baby and the old man neither share physical matter nor have access to each
other’s psychological states, but this need not, if neo-Lockeanism succeeds, mean
they are not the same person.
That sort of metaphysical project sounds a world away from Kierkegaard. Yet
there are indeed places where Kierkegaard outlines what looks inescapably like an
ontology of the self—one that both sees the self as psychologically constituted, and
that seems to assign a central role to psychological continuity in personal identity. If
I am right about the richness and depth of Kierkegaard’s descriptions of self-
experience, that should make his work a mouth-wateringly tempting resource for
neo-Lockeans. And yet, as we’ll see, the sort of metaphysics Kierkegaard is doing is in
fact very different. Far from participating in these metaphysical debates, Kierkegaard,
as I’ll go on to claim, may just be showing us the way out of this particular fly bottle.
Anti-Climacus’ Ontology of Selfhood

The Sickness Unto Death opens with what appears to be, and has widely been taken to
be, a relational ontology of selfhood. It is certainly an unusual ontology, in that its
object never is but is always coming to be (‘every moment that a self exists, it is
becoming (i Vorden), for the self ŒÆÆ ıÆØ does not actually exist, is simply that
which ought to come into existence’ (SUD, 30/SKS 11, 146, translation modified)),
yet the task the pseudonym Anti-Climacus sets himself is clearly ontological in
character. In the infamous opening paragraph, he seeks to distinguish between
several components that make up the human being (menneske) and specify the
conditions under which those components constitute a self (selv):
A human being is spirit [Mennesket er Aand]. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is
the self? The self is a relation that relates to itself or is the relation’s relating to itself in the
relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating to itself. A human being is a
synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity, in
13
Austin 1964, p.8.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being
is still not a self. (SUD, 13/SKS 11, 129, trans. modified)14
Note the rather tangled logic at work in this passage: the terms human, spirit, self,
and self-relation are all stated to be equivalent, but then ‘human’ is qualified as a
‘synthesis’ and ‘synthesis’ is then defined as not being a self until it relates to itself
(forholder sig til sig selv). Merold Westphal notes that while Anti-Climacus’ psycho-
logical account of the self has Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Hegelian elements,15 it also
pulls against all three of these tendencies in equally important ways. In this opening
passage, Anti-Climacus has, as John Davenport points out, already made a rather
significant break with both the Cartesian substance dualist (for whom what I am is a
thinking immaterial substance connected to, but not identical with, a material body)
and Aristotelian hylomorphic views of the self (according to which I am an indis-
soluble synthesis of matter and form). The human being might be viewed as either a
mind–body synthesis or an Aristotelian substantial form, but that is not what ‘self ’ or
‘spirit’ is for Anti-Climacus. Rather, self/spirit is something the mind-body synthesis
must achieve: ‘Every human being is a psychical-physical synthesis intended to be
spirit’ (SUD, 43/SKS 11, 158).
Anti-Climacus’ tripartite separation of body, soul, and spirit echoes Luther’s
assertion that ‘The nature of man consists of the three parts—spirit, soul, and
body’ with spirit the highest and that by which ‘he is enabled to lay hold on things
incomprehensible, invisible, and eternal’.16 But what makes his account new is the
note of self-relation he introduces into this structure, arguably influenced by figures
such as Fichte. Anti-Climacus pushes self-identity up one level: the self or spirit is not
the mind–body synthesis itself but is rather a (conceptually) second-order entity, one
that supervenes upon the human being if and only if the human being relates to itself
in a particular reflexive way.17 Selfhood is neither the synthesis of physical and
mental factors itself (as in Aristotle), nor merely the ‘negative unity’ of the opposi-
tions (both physical and psychological) that make up the human being, but a ‘positive
third’ that unites them in its self-relation (SUD, 13/SKS 11, 129).18
So, how might we situate this ontology of selfhood with respect to contemporary
metaphysical approaches to personal identity? Is Anti-Climacus more closely aligned
14
As Michelle Kosch (2006, p.202) notes, the Hongs’ ‘relates itself to itself ’ is a somewhat misleading
translation of forholder sig til sig selv, as forholder sig is here a reflexive verb.
15 16 17
Westphal 1987. Luther 1956, p.303. Davenport 2013, pp.234–5.
18
I here follow John Elrod’s (1975, p.30) interpretation that ‘negative unity’ here refers to the fact that
the elements held in tension stand in opposition to each other and cannot be understood apart from one
another. This interpretation therefore says nothing about the way the self relates to the opposition. Other
interpretations have been given, such as Hubert Dreyfus’ (2008, p.14) claim that ‘negative unity’ refers to
‘denying one set of factors and acting as if only the other aspect of the self is the essential one’. This is an
interesting reading, but it is not clear to me that it fits the text: for Anti-Climacus this would be a form of
despair i.e. a misrelation of spirit, whereas ‘negative unity’ appears to describe an element in the sub-
spiritual structure on which selfhood supervenes.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
to the neo-Lockean psychological continuity view, or physicalist views such as

animalism?
First, we need to be clear here that Anti-Climacus is no sort of ego-substantialist.
His picture contains no ‘metaphysical pincushion’19 (to borrow a phrase from Rudd)
in which each accidental property of the self inheres. Anti-Climacus replaces the
substantial res cogitans of the Cartesians with a relational process: in Arne Grøn’s
gloss, ‘Self is not a substance, but a relation, or, to be more precise, self is a process:
self-relating.’20 What makes us what we are is to be found within the psychology of
the human being, a fact about how it relates to itself, not something superadded
to the facts of psychology.21 Not all commentators have grasped this point. Jamie
Turnbull, for instance, insists that ‘the soul clearly is an entity for Kierkegaard (even
if it inhabits the theological, as opposed to the physical, universe)’ and that ‘As such
Kierkegaard’s soul is closer to the Cartesian substance, or immaterial soul, than Rudd
and Stokes are willing, or able, to allow’.22 Rudd and I have offered a fuller reply to
Turnbull elsewhere,23 but here it is worth pointing out that Anti-Climacus, and
Kierkegaard more generally, does not use sjel to mean ‘soul’ in the sense of a
substance that bears personal identity across time and faces eternal judgement
afterwards—that is what spirit (aand) is for Kierkegaard, while sjel is rather the
psyche aspect of the psycho-physical synthesis upon which self or spirit supervenes.
Hence the Hong’s translation ‘psychical’ for sjel is apt, if necessarily un-poetic. So for
all the anti-modern aspects of Kierkegaard’s project and of Anti-Climacus’ view of
the self, his view of the self is definitely post-Lockean. If we have immaterial souls,
they are not what make us what we are.
Reading Anti-Climacus as some species of physicalist also looks to be a non-
starter. Claims that selves are bodies, or brains, or animals (as defined by organic
functioning), all seem to be ruled out by the reflexive character of Anti-Climacus’
understanding of the self. Self-reflexivity is presumably a psychological property,
unless we were to count the sub-phenomenal work our bodies do in monitoring
and regulating temperature, digestion, hormone production, and so on as ‘self-
reflexivity’—which is clearly not what Kierkegaard has in mind. One might be
tempted to reply that relating to itself is nonetheless something that (minded) bodies,
brains, or animals do, and so Anti-Climacus might not be completely at odds with
physicalist views. However, precisely what makes physicalism attractive is that it does
not need to rely upon psychological states in order to explain the persistence of
identity, thus allowing us to say that I am the baby in this photo even though there is
vanishingly little, perhaps nothing, that connects me psychologically to that baby. It
also allows me to make sense of statements like ‘Peter is in a permanent vegetative
19 20
Rudd 2005, p.419. Grøn 2004, p.131.
21
Though arguably something is added in that the self-relationship depends on a relationship to God
that can only be discerned through a gift of grace.
22 23
Turnbull 2011, p.296. Rudd and Stokes 2013.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
state’. If Peter’s identity-conditions are psychological then ‘Peter’ in this proposition

must fail to refer, as a PVS patient no longer has psychological properties. But if Peter
is a body or an animal, then he still exists and so can bear predicates like ‘in a
vegetative state’. By making selfhood conditional on self-reflexivity, however, Anti-
Climacus is clearly tying the achievement and maintenance of selfhood to a psycho-
logical property.
Even so, the fact that Kierkegaard views the human being as a synthesis might also
initially seem to rule him out as any sort of neo-Lockean, because while neo-
Lockeans reject the immaterial substance account offered by dualists, they nonethe-
less identify what the self or person is with its psychology, and thus seem to identify it
with the mind rather than body side of the physical-psychical dichotomy that Anti-
Climacus posits. Locke himself has been criticized for downplaying embodiment;
after all his thought-experiment of a prince and a cobbler swapping minds in the
middle of the night24 (which acts as an intuition pump for the Transplant Intuition)
makes the physical continuity provided by embodiment contingent to identity in a
way that psychological continuity is not. Claudia Welz, for instance, claims that
Locke’s focus on psychology as the bearer of identity downplays embodiment and
sociality; he thereby misses that ‘Qualitative identity involves an inner sense of
identity that is experienced from a first person perspective and the oneness of the
bodily self that can also be seen from an observer’s third person perspective’.25
However, this needn’t be a huge stumbling block. For one thing, note that Locke’s
prince and cobbler do in fact remain embodied, just in different bodies. At one point
Locke avers that were my finger to be cut off I would no longer be concerned for it as
part of me,26 which Welz thinks ‘indicates that Locke considers the unity of the body
as irrelevant for the unity of consciousness’, leaving him unable to account for
phenomena such as phantom pain and psychosomatic illnesses which ‘teach that
body and mind cannot be separated from each other and that a person does not
consist of random combinations of material and spiritual substances, as Locke seems
to assume’.27 Yet this passage, as I read it, illustrates just how intimately related Locke
does take bodily experience to be to the concern central to identity. I am concerned for
my body precisely to the extent that I experience pain and pleasure through it, both
somatosensorally and instrumentally. Hence the reason that I stop caring what
happens to my little finger once it’s cut off—even though I might care very much
about my loss of bodily unity—is precisely that the severed finger ceases to contribute
to my embodied self-experience. Conversely, the pains of a phantom limb might
concern me very much, and concern me in much the same way that a pain in a non-
phantom limb would concern me (at least up to the point where I try to work out
how to alleviate the pain). So the fact Anti-Climacus sees selfhood as supervening
24 25
Locke 1975, p.340. Welz 2010, p.273.
26 27
Locke 1975, p.341. Welz 2010, p.273.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
upon a synthesis of body and soul might not make him as incompatible with neo-
Lockean psychological continuity theories of identity as we might have thought.
Moreover, while psychological properties (sjel as mind or psyche) is only part of
the synthesis upon which selfhood supervenes, the form of that synthesis is itself
psychological:
In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to
the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical
[under Bestemmelsen Sjel] the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If,
however, this relation relates to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.
(SUD, 13/SKS 11, 129, translation modified, my emphasis)
Note that there are in fact two psychological relations going on in this passage.
Firstly, there is the way the mind relates to the body by distinguishing itself there-
from, which is a psychological relation (‘under the qualification of the psychical’). But
then when the mind–body complex relates to itself—which is what constitutes the
‘positive third’ of selfhood—this too is a psychological operation, albeit one of a
higher order. And like Locke himself, Anti-Climacus sees not just the possession of
psychological properties but of consciousness as essential to self-constitution:
Generally speaking, consciousness—that is, self-consciousness—is decisive with regard to the
self. The more consciousness, the more self [Jo mere Bevisthed jo mere Selv]; the more conscious-
ness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but
the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also. (SUD, 29/SKS 11, 145)
It could be objected here that Anti-Climacus’ reference to ‘more self ’ is antithetical to

the traditional understanding of identity as a strict, all-or-nothing logical relation: the
phrase ‘more identical’ seems about as absurd as ‘slightly pregnant’. Already, here, we
can begin to discern respects in which Anti-Climacus offers something different from
the self of the neo-Lockean tradition. But it does seem clear that Sickness Unto Death
develops an ontology that in many respects is recognizable as belonging to that
tradition, thematically if not genealogically, in that it takes self as arising from
(embodied) consciousness itself rather than from the inherence of accidents in a
substance, or the persistence of biological or physical facts about human beings. So if
The Sickness Unto Death contains a genuine ontological claim about selfhood, it is
one that is more closely aligned to the neo-Lockean, psychological side of the
personal identity debate rather than the physicalist or animalist side. Human beings
are both physical and mental entities, but selves are the outcome of a distinctively
psychological form of self-relation on the human being’s part.
Continuity
Traditionally, the question of the identity and persistence conditions of selves has
been implicitly or explicitly understood as a question of re-identification across
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
time: what criterion/criteria would need to be satisfied to licence us in saying that the
person encountered at t2 is the same person as the person encountered at t1?28 There
are good reasons for doubting whether the re-identification question is really the
appropriate question for getting at what matters in selfhood; Schechtman has argued
that characterization rather than re-identification is the question that gets us closer to
what we actually care about when asking about personal identity (e.g. survival, self-
interested concern, moral responsibility, compensation),29 while Arne Grøn claims
that we don’t re-identify ourselves in the criterial way (he thinks) we re-identify other
objects.30 Still, if we bracket these quite legitimate concerns for the moment, the re-
identification approach does at least help to bring into focus the question of what
forms of continuity between the t1-person and the t2-person would constitute
continuity of self, that is, what has to persist in order for selves to survive. If Anti-
Climacus’ approach has something in common with neo-Lockeanism, does his view
amount to a psychological continuity approach? That is, does the Anti-Climacan self
amount to a psychological object, extended in time, and at least theoretically re-
identifiable at different moments?
Relatively late in The Sickness Unto Death we do, in fact, find a discussion of
continuity (Continueerlighed) and consistency (Conseqvents) that on its face seems
congruent with neo-Lockeanism. This discussion is also consonant in many ways
with a concern for psychological continuity as a key condition for selfhood that runs
throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. We can trace this concern right back to the
beginning, with the emphasis on ‘continuity’ of self in The Concept of Irony: the
ironist loses himself in a series of disconnected moods (CI, 284/SKS 1, 320), which,
as K. Brian Söderquist puts it, ‘remain internally unconnected and thus the inner
continuity which binds a self together is lacking’.31 The idea of a self being ‘bound’
together via the internal connectedness of psychological states—the standard neo-
Lockean picture of personal identity—is a key factor in Kierkegaard’s claim that
psychologically atomized subjects such as the ironist are not, in fact, selves. As we saw
in Chapter 1, such deliberate ironic atomization of psychological moments is also a
key feature in the aesthete’s flight from boredom in Either/Or, most clearly evident in
the chapter ‘The Rotation of Crops’ which lauds the aesthete’s capacity to become
absorbed in such disconnected, trivial details as a bead of sweat running down an
interlocutor’s face (EO, 1:299/SKS 2, 288). For the fully developed aesthete, ‘No part
of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any
moment he wants to’ (EO, 1:293/SKS 2, 282) and accordingly, a stable continuity of
memory, mood, and disposition is rendered impossible. Anti-Climacus diagnoses
this condition in most people, the great mass of ‘spiritless’ individuals living lives of
‘endearing childish naiveté’ or ‘shallow triviality’ whose lives lack any deep connect-
ing thread between events:
28
See e.g. Strawson 1959, pp.31–8 passim; Schechtman 1996, pp.7–25 passim.
29 30 31
Schechtman 1996, pp.136–62. Grøn 2004, pp.128–30. Söderquist 2007, p.160.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
Their lives . . . are made up of some action of sorts, some incidents, of this and that: now they do
something good, and then something stupid, and then they begin all over again; now they are
in despair for an afternoon, perhaps for three weeks, but then they are jolly fellows again, and
then once again in despair for a day. They play along in life, so to speak, but they never
experience putting everything together in one thing, never achieve the idea of an infinite self-
consistency. That is why they are always talking among themselves about the particular,
particular good deeds, particular sins. (SUD, 107/SKS 11, 219)
Locke speaks of sameness of consciousness as conferring personal identity, and Anti-

Climacus too speaks of extended consciousness as the condition for the consistency
and continuity across time that constitutes selfhood:
But how rare is the person who has continuity with regard to his consciousness of himself! As a
rule, men are conscious only momentarily, conscious in the midst of big decisions, but they do
not take the daily everyday into account at all; they are spirit of sorts for an hour one day a
week—which, of course, is a rather crude [bestialsk] way to be spirit. But eternity is the
essential continuity and demands this of a person or that he be conscious as spirit and have
faith. (SUD, 105/SKS 11, 217)
Self-consciousness, according to Anti-Climacus, issues in a qualitative ‘consistency’

which amounts to existing qua spirit (SUD, 107/SKS 11, 219). Yet this consistency is
not a function of psychological continuity per se but of the self-relating activity that
constitutes selfhood, an active appropriation rather than mere succession. Selves
qualified as spirit have ‘an essential interior consistency and a consistency in some-
thing higher, at least in an idea’, and actively cultivate such consistency and guard
against a dissolution whereby the human being would ‘be torn out of the totality in
which he has his life’ and plunged into ‘a chaos in which there is no agreement within
itself, no momentum, no impetus’ (SUD, 107/SKS 11, 219). The stakes are high: to
lose consistency is to face an ‘infinite loss’ which is the loss of selfhood itself, the loss
of an integrated, coherent, and spiritually qualified totality that ‘immediate individ-
uals, the childlike or childish’ (SUD, 107–8/SKS 11, 219), caught up in a succession of
disconnected particularities, never attain to begin with.
This active, appropriative function of self-consciousness marks an essential differ-
ence between continuity of spirit, with its ‘essential continuity of the eternal through
being before God in faith’ (SUD, 105/SKS 11, 218) and the merely psychological
continuity of sinfulness which gains its own ‘increasingly established continuity’
(SUD, 106/SKS 11, 218) as it persists over time. Just as moments of, say, anger can
be said to be expressions of a continuous disposition of short-temperedness that
exists outside of individual angry incidents, so ‘In the deepest sense, the state of sin is
the sin; the particular sins are not the continuance of sin but the expression for the
continuance of sin; in the specific new sin the impetus of sin merely becomes more
perceptible to the eye [sandselig mere til at bemærke]’ (SUD, 106/SKS 11, 218). For
the demonic personality, for whom there is a kind of self-conscious wilfulness in his
sinning, it is only the continuity of sin that holds him together: ‘the state of sin is what
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
holds him together deep down where he has sunk, profanely strengthening him with
its consistency’ (SUD, 108/SKS 11, 220). These demonic subjects have, according to
Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety, ‘an extraordinary continuity’ com-
pared to those stuck in the aesthetic sphere (CA, 129–30/SKS 4, 431). But as
Davenport notes, the continuity of the demonic is not volitionally unified, and so
is still subject to sudden reversal.32
For present purposes it is important to note that this analysis of the sinner strongly
resembles a neo-Lockean picture of a self constituted by the persistence of psycho-
logical states. Anti-Climacus endorses one type of continuity (spirit, that is, active
self-appropriation) as self-constituting and denies another (sinfulness) that status,
but choosing between forms of continuity in this way seems to wed Anti-Climacus to
the foundational neo-Lockean claim that at least some form of psychological con-
tinuity across time is what constitutes selfhood. Or so, at first blush, it appears.
Yet if Anti-Climacus does take some form of psychologically mediated continuity
across time to be constitutive of selfhood, his account will run into the same serious
problems that psychological identity theorists since Locke have never entirely man-
aged to overcome. We now turn to a consideration of some of these problems.
The Loss of Selfhood

Perhaps Anti-Climacus’ most innovative contribution to the philosophical discus-
sion of selves is his claim that selfhood is something to be achieved rather than always
already given, and moreover, something that can be lost. As we’ve seen, Anti-
Climacus claims that a distinctive, active form of appropriative self-consciousness
(one that relates to itself as it relates to the power which established it) creates a
continuity or consistency that unifies the disparate moments of the human being’s
psychological experience into a coherent whole. Yet taken together, two claims made
in The Sickness Unto Death—that self-consciousness confers selfhood, and that most
people are only intermittently self-conscious—suggests that selfhood may be fragile
and easily lost. Anti-Climacus acknowledges this as a very real danger:
It may not be detected that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. Such things do not create much of a
stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing
of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur
very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly;
any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc.—is sure to be noticed. (SUD, 32–3/SKS
11, 148)
There is an important ambiguity in the way Anti-Climacus speaks of loss of self,

because in another sense the subject cannot get rid of itself: it cannot rid itself of what
it finds itself to be, which leads to the state on ontological misrelation to itself that
32
Davenport 2011, p.165.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
Anti-Climacus calls despair (fortvivelse), the state of either not wanting to be oneself
or wanting to be oneself in way that denies what one really is:
For despair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates to itself.
A person cannot rid himself of the relation to himself any more than he can rid himself of
his self, which, after all, is one and the same thing, since the self is the relation to oneself. (SUD,
17/SKS 11, 133, translation modified)
Note the imputation that once selfhood has been achieved it can never completely
slip back into spiritlessness: ‘for that the self is too much self ’ (SUD, 62/SKS 11, 177).
Yet Anti-Climacus discusses loss of self often enough to suggest that he takes the
possibility of selfhood being forfeited seriously, and the equation of self-consciousness
(which he admits is usually sporadic) with selfhood would seem to commit him to the
claim that selves can indeed be, and perhaps frequently are, lost.
Anti-Climacus appears to believe that some sort of psychological condition
(namely non-despairing self-relatedness) has to be sustained across time if selfhood
is not to be lost. The problem, as generations of psychological-criterion identity
theorists have found to their cost, is that it seems almost impossible to specify any
significant form of psychological continuity that holds across a long enough period of
time to ground our intuitions about the unitary identity of individual persons.
Consciousness itself, of course, is not continual, which generates difficult questions
about how identity can be maintained over periods of unconsciousness—the ‘Bridge
Problem’.33 We assume that the person who woke up this morning is the same
person who went to sleep last night. Yet any theory that sees personal identity as
conferred by continuity of consciousness would seem to furnish no more grounds for
saying this than for saying that every night we die, and every morning a new person
is born in the bed ‘vacated’ by the previous day’s person. To the extent that Anti-
Climacus implicitly identifies self-consciousness as the form of psychological con-
tinuity that is constitutive of selfhood, he will have to account for how the self
can survive even the most mundane stretches of unconsciousness that punctuate
our lives.
The Bridge Problem needn’t be a decisive objection to Anti-Climacus, any more
than it’s decisive against anyone else. Yet precisely because Anti-Climacus offers such
a distinctive candidate for the psychological property which must persist in order for
selves to be constituted—an appropriative form of self-consciousness—the problems
his account faces are correspondingly more severe than those of the more orthodox
neo-Lockean positions. Anti-Climacan self-relation is a remarkably rigorous process
of appropriation: the self wills to be itself in the fullest sense, taking responsibility for
its entire history, concretion, and situation. Each ‘life-moment’, as we might call it—
each set of psychological, physical, and social facts pertaining to the human being in
33
See Parfit 1984, p.292; Dainton 2008, p.27 passim; Gustafsson 2011; Stokes 2014.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
question at a given moment—is appropriated by the individual human being as what

that human being is. Yet if such self-relation can cease, and then subsequently restart,
then so too, it seems, do selves. We thus find ourselves with a metaphysical conun-
drum: how can something cease to exist and then come back into existence? What
could justify saying that the same self comes back into existence rather than there
being a succession of different selves, supervening at different points in time on the
same human being?
A Parfitian suspicion arises here that such re-identification questions can only
have trivial or arbitrary answers. If my friends and I decide to re-constitute a club that
hasn’t existed in over a century, and then claim that our club is the original club, the
identity question—is this the same club or a new one?—doesn’t seem to admit of a
meaningful answer. 34 We could, following Nozick, hold that the self that arises in a
moment of Anti-Climacan self-consciousness is the same self as the one that existed
in a previously concluded moment of self-consciousness insofar as it is the ‘closest
continuer’ of that previous self.35 But this certainly appeals to no deep further fact (to
use a Parfitian term) about selfhood. In effect, the individual human being’s self
would have the same sort of identity as the monarch of England: a succession of
different individuals all fulfilling the same role. Anti-Climacus often mentions the
self as being (or having something) eternal, but under this scenario the self would
only be ‘eternal’ in the sense that the English monarch never dies, even though the
individuals fulfilling the role do.
We’ve seen that a closely related problem that besets neo-Lockean theory (since
Reid first raised it against Locke) concerns transitivity. This problem turns out to be
even more serious for Anti-Climacus in that he takes it that the self only exists in
relating to itself, including its past and future. This does not, I think, mean relating to
our past or our future at any given moment, but relating to each as part of a unified
whole. Interestingly, in a journal entry from 1839, Kierkegaard gives us a striking
diagrammatic representation of what this is like:
Premonition [Ahnelse] does not lie in the direction, the path of the eye being pointed in the
direction of existence and its future, but in the reflection of the eye’s direction [toward] the
past, so that by staring at what lies behind (in another sense, what lies in front) the eye develops
a disposition to see what lies in front (in another sense, what lies behind).
C…A…B
If A is thus the present time, the time in which we are living, and B its future, then I do not see
B by standing at A and turning my face toward B; for if I turn that way I don’t see anything at
all, but if C is the past, then it is by turning towards C that I see B, as also the premonitory eyes
34 35
Parfit 1984, p.213. Nozick 1983, pp.29–69.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
possessed by the Mandrake in Achim V. Arnim’s novella were set in the back of his head, while
the two other eyes, which did nothing more than look ahead in the ordinary way, i.e., simple,
straightforward eyes, were set in his brow as with other people, or in that part of the head that
is turned toward the future. (KJN 2, 55–6/SKS 18, 60; EE 178)
In relating to the future I cannot but help relating to the past that conditions it and
determines what the future will mean for me; I can only understand (and predict)
what is to come on the basis of what has come before. Without wanting to read too
much into this early journal entry, I think it gives us an idea of the way in which,
for Kierkegaard, self-relation simultaneously reaches backwards and forward across
our lives—but it does so from a given point (A, in Kierkegaard’s diagram). And
this temporal situatedness throws a spanner in the works for any attempt to
construct a straightforward metaphysical account of identity using Kierkegaard’s
writings as a base.
To help us see why, consider the following diagram. Each ‘o’ represents a con-
scious human being, with the spatio-temporal connections that hold between it at
different times indicated by the broken line. The arrowed lines represent the range
of past and future life-moments that each human being relates to itself in a self-
constituting way. At t4 the human relates itself to its entire history (t1–tn), thereby
making it a self; hence all life-moments from t1 to tn are part of the self. At t5 the
human ceases to relate to itself in this way (thus ceasing to be a self), and resumes
relating to itself again at t6:
Self at t4
No self at t5
Self at t6
t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 ‥‥ tn
Note the effect this has on each life-moment: if we’re asked ‘Is t3 a moment in the life
of a self?’ we cannot give a tenseless yes or no answer. The most we can say is that ‘t3
is a moment in the life of a self at t4, not a moment in the life of a self at t5 and a
moment in the life of a self at t6’. Yet because identity is classically regarded as a
transitive logical relationship (x = y and y = z entails x = z), identity questions always
ask for tenseless answers, and when these can’t be given, the criteria upon which
identity is claimed to obtain are called into question, as in the case of Reid’s boy-
soldier-general example.
There only appear to be two things we can say about the situation depicted in the
diagram: either the self successively comes into, goes out of, and comes back into
existence—in which case we have strong metaphysical grounds to doubt whether
there’s any force in the declaration that the self at t6 is the same self as the self at
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
t4—or we admit that two (or more) selves exist in the course of a single human life,
both of which appropriate exactly the same life-moments. This would apparently
involve multiple selves supervening upon the same life moments, such that we will
find it hard to say how many selves exist at any given point t1, t2 . . . tn.
One response to this problem might be a quasi-reductionist one: to read ‘self ’ as
simply another name for, rather than a product of, self-consciousness, and so see
Anti-Climacan selfhood as the name for a state which individual human beings are in
some of the time but not always. Romano Guardini reads Kierkegaardian selfhood as
intermittent and punctual in this way, ‘something that only is as an act and in an act;
something that flashes through in certain, namely, personal acts’.36 The effect of this
move would be to divorce meaningful questions about personal identity from
questions of selfhood: it’s not selves (which would be temporary psychological states)
who bear moral responsibility or who are the objects of our self-interested concern,
but human beings. Yet this is clearly a long way from what Anti-Climacus wants to
claim for the self: for him, it’s selves that are bound up with ‘fatal’ concern, selves that
are called to answer morally and eschatologically. In short, Anti-Climacus wants
there to be a ‘deep further fact’ about selfhood underlying the disparate moments of
psychological experience, wants this deep further fact to be psychological in charac-
ter, and wants it to inhere in a state of consciousness that, by his own admission, is
not always achieved and can be intermittent in character. How, then, do we get out of
the apparent logical contradictions and incoherencies his account throws up? The
answer is to be found in the distinctive temporal character Anti-Climacus assigns to
self-experience, something that marks a crucial point of differentiation from the neo-
Lockean tradition—and suggests that Kierkegaard is in fact doing something very
different to mainstream metaphysicians of the self.
The Present-tense Character of the Self

An interesting feature of the contexts in which Anti-Climacus discusses loss-of-self is
that he appears to conflate loss of self with never having had a self, or the loss of an
already achieved state with never achieving that state in the first place. The major
discussion of loss of self concerns the ‘person of immediacy’ who has ‘emasculated
oneself in a spiritual sense’ through thoughtless immersion in a finite world that ‘has
no understanding of the reductionism and narrowness involved in having lost
oneself, not by being volatilized in the infinite, but by being completely finitized,
by becoming a number instead of a self, just one more man, just one more repetition
of this everlasting Einerlei’ (SUD, 33/SKS 11, 149). Caught up in the stream of finite
things against which it never differentiates itself, the finitized subject offers no
resistance and takes no risks:
36
Guardini 1935, p.25; the translation is given in Šajda 2012, p.311.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
Not to venture is prudent. And yet, precisely by not venturing it is so terribly easy to lose what
would be hard to lose, however much one lost by risking, and in any case never this way, so
easily, so completely, as if it were nothing at all—namely, oneself. If I have ventured wrongly,
well, then life helps me by punishing me. But if I have not ventured at all, who helps me then?
Moreover, what if not by venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest
sense is precisely to become aware of oneself) I cowardly gain all earthly advantages—and lose
myself! (SUD, 34–5/SKS 11, 150)
The person of immediacy is ground ‘as smooth as a rolling stone’ (SUD, 34/SKS 11,
150), allowing her to pass through the social and economic world easily and
without friction. In what sense does this count as losing a self? Interestingly, this
is not so much to lose a state that has already been attained, as to lose the possibility
of becoming a self, like a raw material that is simply ground down rather than
ground into the shape that it was intended for (SUD, 33/SKS 11, 149). Compare
Anti-Climacus’ claims here with Kierkegaard’s image of the ‘inner being’ being
‘stillborn’ in the veronymous discourse ‘Strengthening the Inner Being’: if the
concern (bekymring) for transcendent meaning whereby the subject comes to
differentiate itself from the rest of the world leads that person to ‘have in mind
deciding this matter once and for all and then being finished with it’, then ‘the
inner being would only be stillborn and would vanish again’ (EUD, 87/SKS 5, 94).
Here too the ontological status of the inner being is ambiguous: it vanishes ‘again’,
yet it is also ‘stillborn’, suggesting that it is both simultaneously something that has
been lost and something that never came into being in the first place. In the same
way, according to Anti-Climacus, ‘secular’ or ‘philistine-bourgeois’ persons of
immediacy, who never tear themselves out of finitude’s worldly, prudential calcu-
lations of probability in order to relate themselves to something infinite and
transcendent, ‘have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything,
no self before God’ (SUD, 35/SKS 11, 151, my emphasis) and yet such a self ‘has
lost his self and God’ (SUD, 41/SKS 11, 156, my emphasis). In the first instance it
appears clear that the self has never existed (the self of immediacy hasn’t degen-
erated into philistine thoughtlessness, but has always existed within it), and yet the
self has at the same time been lost.
This curious conflation of the self ’s having been lost with its never having existed
at all also features elsewhere in Anti-Climacus’ descriptions of despair. When the
‘philistine-bourgeois’ finds himself confronted by adversity, he despairs: but this
reveals that he was in despair already, in that he lacked ‘faith’s possibility of being
able under God to save a self from certain downfall’ (SUD, 41/SKS 11, 156). To
despair is to be revealed as having been always in despair: ‘for whenever that which
triggers his despair occurs, it is immediately apparent that he has been in despair his
whole life . . . Despair is a qualification of the spirit, is related to the eternal, and thus
has something of the eternal in its dialectic’ (SUD, 24/SKS 11, 140). This ‘eternal’
element here amounts to despair being always present at all points in the life of the
human being up to the despair-event that discloses it.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
The other side of this eternal element in the dialectic is that to be saved from
despair is somehow to be permanently saved. Anti-Climacus tells us that not being in
despair is different to not being lame, for the non-lame person can still become lame
in the future, whereas to be saved from despair is to lose the very possibility of
despairing itself: ‘Not to be in despair must signify the destroyed possibility of being
able to be in despair; if a person is truly not to be in despair, he must at every moment
destroy the possibility’ (SUD, 15/SKS 11, 131). If the self is cured of despair, then
it thereby continually destroys the possibility of ever despairing again, and, as a
corollary, if the self does despair again this shows that it was always in despair all
along and was never in fact saved.37 As despair is equivalent to loss of self, and to be
saved from despair is to acquire a self, this amounts to the claim that to lose the self is
never to have had a self in the first place, and to gain a self is to gain it once and for all.
Such a conclusion is surely puzzling and decidedly un-Kierkegaardian. If salvation
from despair depends upon a particular state of consciousness, one that can be
punctual and intermittent and that must be actively maintained, how could it be
the case that we lose the possibility of sinking back into despair? If selfhood is
achieved through such a precarious and fragile mental state, how could it be the
case that selfhood is never lost—and if it is never lost, why use the strong, distinctive
phrase ‘loss of self ’ at all? Why not simply talk about selfhood never being achieved,
or about the capacity for selfhood being squandered,38 rather than saying repeatedly
that the self can be lost?
This apparently un-Kierkegaardian once-and-for-all character of salvation seems
to be contradicted in the discourse ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’, where
instead it appears that the opposite of salvation is once-and-for-all. Here, Kierkegaard
tells us that if one loses his soul, ‘it would be lost for all time and for eternity; if he lost
it for a single moment, it would be lost permanently, and death would be unable to
help him, but precisely for death’s sake he is bound to wish to have preserved it and to
preserve it’ (EUD, 186/SKS 5, 190). A little later on, he adds:
Not only did he who looked improperly into the mirror lose his soul, but also the one who
immediately went away and forgot what he looked like; and not only did he who remained
standing all day in the marketplace lose his soul, but also the one who, although called in the
first hour, soon left the work and once again stood in the marketplace; and not only did he who
never came to the light lose his soul, but also the one who, although enlightened after having
once tasted the heavenly gift, nevertheless fell away. (EUD, 194/SKS 5, 196–7)
Sjel in this work clearly does not mean ‘mind’ as it does in Anti-Climacus’ ontology
of self, but something more like selfhood or spirit. This sense of sjel would be similar
to the sense in which Turnbull understands Anti-Climacus to be using sjel.
37
There is an important asymmetry here too: being saved from despair is always a redemption, so while
the despairing self was always in fact in despair, it is not the case that the self saved-from-despair was
always in fact saved.
38
Another term Anti-Climacus employs, e.g. SUD 31/SKS 11, 147.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
However, Turnbull also conflates ‘having a soul’ with ‘being subject to soteriological
judgement’, allowing him to claim that both prelinguistic infants and patients in a
permanent vegetative state have souls.39 Presumably (for a Christian like Anti-
Climacus) such human beings are subject to soteriological judgement, and if that
is what we mean by ‘soul’ then they cannot lose their soul. But it seems clear that
Anti-Climacus thinks we can lose our self by failing to relate to ourselves in the right
way, and this also seems to be what the upbuilding discourses understand by ‘losing
one’s soul’.
How are we to make sense of all these competing, and seemingly self-contradictory,
claims regarding the temporality of gaining and losing a self? The answer is perhaps to
be found by following a suggestion made five years before The Sickness Unto Death, in
Either/Or. In his discussion of the category of the ‘first love’, Judge William cites the
claim in Hebrews 6:4–6 that those who have been converted and subsequently relapse
can never be saved again: ‘Here, then, the first acquired its whole profound meaning. In
the first, the whole profound Christian life proclaimed itself, and then the person who
blundered in it was lost. But here the eternal is drawn too much into temporal
qualifications’ (EO, 1:41/SKS 3, 48). The final sentence suggests that we make a
category mistake if we consider questions of salvation in temporally schematized
terms; William’s attempt to dismiss a potentially disturbing theological problem
depends upon a denial that we can fully apply temporal categories such as duration,
pastness, and completion to questions of faith and salvation.40 In Sickness Unto Death,
this idea manifests itself in the curious temporal characteristics of despair. Both despair
and selfhood have something of the ‘eternal’ (evighed) in them, but this is not presented
as simply infinitely extended temporal duration. Rather, the eternality of despair can be
read as an expression of its resolutely present-tense character:
Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is
bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense; in relation to the actuality there is no
pastness of the past: in every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past
as present in possibility. (SUD, 17/SKS 11, 132–3)
This present-tense character is rarely discussed in the critical literature.41 This is

unfortunate, for I think attending to this present-tense character can also dissolve
some other apparent aporias in both The Sickness Unto Death and elsewhere in the
Kierkegaardian corpus. For instance, Anti-Climacus worries whether unconscious
despair can properly be called despair (SUD, 42/SKS 11, 157), or whether the sin
of the pagan can truly be called sin as it is not (consciously) sin before God (SUD,
81/SKS 11, 194–5). Part of the answer he gives is that ‘No one is born devoid of spirit,
39
Turnbull 2011, pp.297–8.
40
Which is not to say that, for Kierkegaard, there is no such legitimate application; for instance,
consider the discourse ‘We Are Closer to Salvation now than when We Became Believers’ in Christian
Discourses, discussed in Chapter 8.
41
It is discussed briefly in Dreyfus 2008, p.15.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
and no matter how many go to their death with this spiritlessness as the one and only
outcome of their lives, it is not the fault of life’ (SUD, 102/SKS 11, 214). This leads
C. Stephen Evans to ask how one can become spiritless—that is, how one could come
to ‘lack a consciousness of God’42—unless one previously had such consciousness.
To answer this question, Evans points towards what he takes to be a fundamental,
pre-reflective awareness or ‘universal knowledge of God’ built into all subjects.43
Ultimately, he concludes, Kierkegaard must hold that ‘everyone has an unconscious
relation to God and that every person has to some degree obscured this relation’.44
Likewise, Davenport has to posit a level of ‘primordial’ choice operative in the non-
reflective aesthete in order to explain how a life lived in ‘immediate’, unreflective
categories can count as something for which she is nonetheless responsible.45 In both
cases, the question is how we can judge someone responsible for a condition they
have never consciously chosen. I don’t necessarily dispute the validity of the textual
readings Evans and Davenport come up with to answer this question, nor that such
readings are instructive. But if we take it that the questions here are irreducibly first-
personal and present tense, then the initial motivation for these readings largely loses
its force. Such questions as ‘am I, now, in sin?’ or ‘am I, now, a self before God?’
simply don’t arise from the perspective of a subject who is immediate/aesthetic/
spiritless in this way—any more than ‘Am I the same person who went to sleep
last night?’ arises for a subject who is dreamlessly asleep.46
Still, Anti-Climacus does seem to emphasize continuity and consistency across
time—precisely the characteristics which, as we’ve seen, suggest that Anti-Climacus
belongs to the psychological criteria school of personal identity theory. And undeni-
ably, Anti-Climacus does present sin and despair as states which can be described in
terms of temporal extension, states with histories across time. It is perfectly possible
to narrate histories of persons who never rise out of despair and into selfhood:
‘Meanwhile, time passes . . . a self he was not, and a self he did not become, but he
goes on living, qualified only by immediacy . . . he dies, the pastor ushers him into
eternity for ten rix-dollars—but a self he was not, and a self he did not become’ (SUD,
52/SKS 11, 167–8). Yet this is essentially the history of the human being, the synthesis
of polar opposites which, only when it relates to itself, becomes a self. What I wish to
claim here is that, in Anti-Climacan ontology, the temporality of selves differs from
the temporality of human beings. Humans are things in the world, things that (as
Heidegger famously said in his introductory lectures on Aristotle) are born, work,
and die,47 things that carve out spatio-temporal paths through the world and whose
durations can be measured with stopwatches and calendars. With selves, it’s not so
simple. And the key to this complication is the self ’s qualification as eternal.
42 43 44
Evans 2006, p.291. Evans 2006, p.292. Evans 2006, p.296.
45 46
Davenport 2001a. On this last point, see Stokes 2014.
47
Cited in Philipse 1998, p.xiii.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
Self and Eternality

As noted above, the lives of ‘immediate’ people, whose lives lack a certain form of
self-reflexivity, can be quite successfully narrated from the outside, with more-or-less
definite beginnings, middles, and ends. Yet Anti-Climacus insists that such beings are
not automatically selves, but can only become selves through a sort of self-conscious
appropriation of themselves over and above any facts of psychological continuity
their lives may have. The reach of this appropriative self-relation is extensive: all
moments of one’s life are brought into selfhood through this mechanism. In this way,
and as we saw in Chapter 5, it becomes clear that such self-relation is something
more than just affective identification with psychologically similar parts of our lives,
something that we notoriously can lose over time. The subjective character of such
self-relation must therefore be something quite distinctive in that it can appropriate a
totality that may incorporate significant psychological change across time. That
distinctive property is what we’ve taken to be captured by Kierkegaard’s phenomen-
ology of contemporaneity. And contemporaneity has a distinctive temporal charac-
ter, one that sets it radically at odds with the neo-Lockean metaphysical project—and
indeed with all standard metaphysical approaches to personal identity.
In the quote given above, despair, as the self ’s misrelation to its facticity, has the
curious quality of compressing the past into the present: ‘in relation to the actuality
there is no pastness of the past: in every actual moment of despair the person in despair
bears all the past as present in possibility’ (SUD, 17/SKS 11, 132–3). This interesting
formulation places the emphasis on the present moment, removing the temporal
distance and alterity conferred by pastness and bringing the self ’s past contemporan-
eously into full presence in the present moment. What this suggests is that the
experience of temporality in self-relation (including abortive despairing self-relation)
differs radically from the temporality which applies when regarding human beings as
human beings. Rather than diachronic continuity, self-relation apparently involves an
experience of self in robustly present-tense, synchronic terms.
This present-tense character of all moments of the self is a function of the
transfiguring effect of the self coming to relate itself to the eternal, to that which
transcends time. Anti-Climacus insists in several places that the self has something of
the eternal in it, something it can never rid itself of, and this language naturally
invokes the idea of an eternal soul or immaterial substance underlying all moments
of selfhood. It is indeed possible to make a prima facie case for the eternal as a form of
‘unchangeability’, which as Mark C. Taylor notes is a consistent referent of Kierke-
gaard’s use of the term eternal,48 which would bring us back to continuity across
time. However, if we accept that Anti-Climacus rejects ego-substantialism, it
becomes difficult to see what’s left of a human being that’s unchangeable in this
way. We have noted that sin has a kind of continuity and temporal extension to it,
48
Taylor 1975, p.91.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
and accordingly it is easy to assume that the continuity of sin and the continuity of
non-despairing selfhood are somehow two forms of the same thing. In that case, if we
could point to one human and say they are in despair and then point to another and
say they are saved from despair, we would simply be offering soteriologically
evaluative descriptions of their respective underlying psychological continuities:
this temporally extended psychology is in a state of despair, that temporally extended
psychology is not in despair and has therefore achieved selfhood. Yet the curious
temporal characteristics we’ve come across so far—the presence of all moments of
the past in despair, the apparently once-and-for-all character of despair and
selfhood—suggest that the continuity conferred by the eternal is very different
from these forms of straightforward psychological continuity.
Anti-Climacus tells us that becoming a self involves becoming conscious of oneself
in relation to a series of increasingly adequate ‘criteria’ (maalestok)—other individ-
uals, family, the state—leading ultimately to ‘rest[ing] transparently in the power that
established it’ (SUD, 14/SKS 11, 130). The self becomes progressively more ‘real’ as it
makes this ascent, finally attaining ‘infinite reality’ by coming to know itself as a self
existing before God (SUD, 79/SKS 11, 193), with all the sotieriological implications
this entails.49 Hence the emergence from despair into self-constituting self-relation
involves increasing awareness of the individual’s relation to the transcendent and
eternal. And making this move changes how we experience time itself.
The person of immediacy (who on Anti-Climacus’ line is already in despair) lives
purely in the temporal flow of successive moments, and has nothing of the eternal
other than the structural potential for eternality inherent in all humans. As despair
becomes progressively more self-conscious, it attains to a correspondingly greater
relation to the eternal, to that which transcends temporality. Hence the person
trapped in a state indesluttethed (‘inclosing reserve’ or ‘withdrawal’), a form of
despair (and so a form of selflessness according to Anti-Climacus), ‘goes on living
horis succesivis [hour after hour]’, yet ‘even if not lived for eternity, his hours have
something to do with the eternal and are concerned with the relation of his self to
itself—but he never really gets beyond that’ (SUD, 64/SKS 11, 179). This self has at
least some sort of relation to the eternal—in that he rejects it—but is nevertheless still
embedded in time experienced as a mere succession of instants. Yet even though the
self caught in this sort of despair tries to reject the eternal, spirit (self-relation) is
always a relation to the eternal, and so its despairing self-(mis)relation is always
present-tense:
To despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man. But he cannot rid himself
of the eternal—no, never in all eternity. He cannot throw it away once and for all, nothing is
more impossible; at any moment that he does not have it, he must have thrown it or is
49
On this progression by relating to progressively fuller ‘criteria’, see Pattison 1997; Lillegard 2001;
Stokes 2010a, pp.108–9.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
throwing it away—but it comes again, that is, every moment he is in despair he is bringing his
despair upon himself. (SUD, 17/SKS 11, 133)
Despair, in Alastair Hannay’s terms, is ‘an action of the spiritual subject unwilling to
conform to its true self ’, and to the extent that despair is thus a qualification of spirit,
it therefore fundamentally relates to the eternal.50 Hence despair does not properly
belong to the successive time in which the self tries to remain immersed; it still retains
a covert, self-effacing relationship to the eternal that it is actively trying to avoid.
In the most conscious forms of despair, the despair of defiance, this reaches the level
of consciously railing against eternity and willing to remain in the concrete and
temporal:
He is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood,
infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for what he is—
Himself is what he wills to be. He began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now he has
finally become so concrete that it would be impossible to become eternal in that sense;
nevertheless, he wills in despair to be himself. What demonic madness—the thought that
most infuriates him is that eternity could get the notion to deprive him of his misery. (SUD,
72/SKS 11, 186)
Yet to defy the eternal in the self in this way is not to get rid of it, but in fact to actively
relate to it in every moment. Insofar as defiance represents such a conscious, wilful
misrelation within the spirit, it is ‘the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self ’
or ‘despair through the aid of the eternal’; for this reason it is simultaneously ‘very
close to the truth’ and ‘infinitely far away’ (SUD, 67/SKS 11, 181).
It is also suggestive that, as we are told in a footnote, children (who Kierkegaard
claims in Johannes Climacus do not possess self-consciousness [JC, 168/SKS 15, 54])
cannot despair because they only have the eternal present in them in potentiality
(SUD, 49/SKS 11, 164). Children are clearly human beings, yet to the extent that they
are not self-relationally conscious they are not (according to Anti-Climacus!) selves.
Yet if eternality is only present in them if and to the extent that selfhood is, this
implies that eternality is a function of self-consciousness, not a pre-existing condition
of human beings. Once again, this works against a substantialist reading of Anti-
Climacus: the ‘eternal’ in the self is no sort of immaterial, immortal soul that persists
throughout human life. But if we posit a moment in human life where the eternal
‘begins’ (without seriously suggesting consciousness arises in a single, discriminable
moment) we can have at best only a concept of the eternal as infinitely extended
duration rather than atemporality—otherwise, how could the eternal have a begin-
ning? Again, the idea seems to be that when self-consciousness begins, the self relates
to something radically different from the temporality in which it has its (merely)
human existence.
50
Hannay 1987, p.32.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
All of the above might seem both unfamiliar and unhelpfully esoteric to the reader
looking to Kierkegaard to tell her something about personal identity. What is this
‘eternal’ aspect within the human, and why should non-theists care? I’ll return to the
second point in Chapter 9. As to the first, what is crucial to understand here is that
for Kierkegaard’s more religiously ‘advanced’ pseudonyms (unlike Judge William),51
the eternal is an irreducibly soteriological category.
What the self comes into contact with in its engagement with the eternal is the
possibility of eschatological judgement, which collects the totality of a life into a
single object of assessment:
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular
life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when
everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then . . . eternity asks you and every individual
in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
(SUD, 27/SKS 11, 143)
In the face of this eschatological scenario, one is either in despair (and so not a self) or
one has repented of despair and been saved (and has become a self). In the former
case, ‘eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you—or, still more terrible, it
knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair’ (SUD, 28/SKS
11, 144); in the latter case, one is judged as not being in despair, whatever has gone
before. Hence the soteriological status of the totality depends entirely upon the
present moment’s mode of self-relation; and it is for this reason that we can speak
of despair making it apparent we have always been in despair, or of being saved from
despair as removing the very possibility of despair. Across the course of a human life
it is entirely possible to slip back into despair or lose acquired selfhood; but the
viewpoint of spirit is entirely present tense because entirely oriented towards how
the diachronic totality to which I relate myself will be judged in eternity. There is
no question of whether I have been in despair or how many times I have achieved
selfhood; from the viewpoint of spirit, concerned for its salvation, there is only the
present-tense question of whether I am in despair.
None of this is to suggest that the non-despairing self somehow lives outside time.
Rather, the non-despairing self lives in a present moment that appropriates the past
and future in a way that’s transfigured by contact with the eternal. We’ll have more to
say about this in Chapter 8, but for the moment we can note that the self simultan-
eously relates itself to what is temporal—the diachronically extended or ‘narrative’
self—and the eternal. To employ the language of Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudo-
nym with whom Anti-Climacus is most closely aligned, the non-despairing self lives
in the Moment (Øjeblikket), understood as the point where time and eternity
intersect: ‘The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each
other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly
51
I discuss Judge William’s rather thin understanding of eternity in Stokes 2010b, esp. pp.500–1.
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time’ (CA, 89/SKS 4, 392). It is
through this contact with the eternal, as Haufnienis puts it, that the division of time
into past, present, and future ‘acquires its significance’ (CA, 89/SKS 4, 392)52 by
relating temporally schematised events to an eternal, transcendent goal. As Mark
C. Taylor notes, Anti-Climacan selves are ‘tensed’: ‘The past is the self ’s actuality, the
future is its possibility, and the present is the moment in which freedom can be
exercised by actualizing possibilities.’53 Yet only in relation to the eternal, understood
as final judgement over the whole of my life, does the past appear as the actuality for
which I am responsible, the future as the stage for possibilities which I am to
actualize, and the present as the place where I relate to the whole thing.
Metaphysics from the Inside

What these admittedly dense observations on The Sickness Unto Death give us is
a picture of Anti-Climacan selfhood that is at once intriguingly similar and pro-
foundly different to the contemporary neo-Lockean picture of selfhood. The simi-
larity is reasonably clear: insofar as he takes self-consciousness to constitute selfhood,
Anti-Climacus seems to belong somewhere in the psychological continuity camp in
the debate over personal identity. To the extent that he, and Kierkegaard generally,
provides lucid and compelling phenomenologies of what it is to experience
co-identity with one’s remembered past and anticipated future—and what it is like
not to do so—Kierkegaard stands as a valuable source of insight and observation for
theorists working in that tradition.
But in important ways, Anti-Climacus, and Kierkegaard, are in fact doing something
quite different to contemporary personal identity theorists. To reiterate, neo-Lockeans
ask about the criteria for re-identifying selves at different points in time. Whatever the
implications for moral imputability, self-interested concern, and survival, moral facts
are taken to supervene upon metaphysical facts which in themselves are morally
neutral.
Kierkegaard’s approach, throughout his authorship, is very different. His focus,
even in the pseudonymous works, is upbuilding, not just philosophical, and as a
result, as Davenport puts it, ‘his ontology of the person is not presented as a thesis in
systematic metaphysics’ but ‘is offered as a conception to which we are implicitly
committed in our practical experience’,54 an articulation of the structures of subject-
ivity disclosed to us via self-experience. Davenport takes it that ‘we receive from
Kierkegaard not a metaphysics of self-identity but a practical phenomenology’,55 but,
echoing both Rudd and Evans, I’d suggest we resist drawing too sharp a dividing line
between metaphysical and practical concerns about selfhood (both in Kierkegaard
52
Indeed, it is only through positing soteriology that time truly comes to have direction for the subject;
see Stokes 2010b.
53 54 55
Taylor 1975, p.7. Davenport 2013, p.233. Davenport 2013, p.233.
 CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY
and more generally).56 Anti-Climacus is still making ontological claims, claims about
what we essentially are, and to that extent he is still using metaphysical concepts. But
his metaphysics are—and this may sound hopelessly contradictory to some ears—
irreducibly first-personal. This is metaphysics from the inside. Despite the somewhat
professorial character of Anti-Climacus’ prose, he does not step back to impersonally
consider the identity and persistence conditions of selves as such. Rather, he remains
on the level at which the question of identity is asked in the first place: the question of
my selfhood, a question that is inextricable from what Johannes Climacus earlier
called my infinite, passionate interest in my eternal happiness. And as Anti-Climacus
shows, this question can only be asked from the inside; unlike the traditional
question about identity, it cannot be asked tenselessly or impersonally, but only
here, now, and for me. Hence I cannot ask ‘is A at t1 the same self as B at t2’ if we are
asking about selves in the Anti-Climacan sense; the only question I can ask—and
given the moral and eschatological basis for the concern for selfhood that Anti-
Climacus is starting from, the only question I should rightly be concerned about—is
‘is the self I remember being one that I am to take responsibility for?’ And given that
there will only rarely be uncertainty about this, this really comes down to the
question ‘have I taken responsibility for my past and future?’
This may seem unsatisfying for personal identity theorists, but it does have the
(perhaps philosophically dubious) merit of excusing Anti-Climacus from having to
answer the difficult questions that have plagued that debate since its inception. If
the question of the selfhood constituted by self-consciousness can only be asked from
the here-and-now, then questions about the persistence of selves, and accordingly
questions about unconsciousness, amnesia, fission, fusion, and so on, all dissolve into
questions about the persistence conditions of human beings—an interesting meta-
physical problem, certainly, but secondary to the question of the self in Anti-
Climacus’ terms. And in an important sense, it’s also finally irrelevant to the concerns
for responsibility, self-interested concern, and survival that motivate us to ask
questions about personal identity in the first place. These concerns all imply a self
that I cannot stop asking about or caring about even after being shown that my
human persistence conditions won’t furnish any non-trivial deep further fact about
identity. It’s this self, the incorrigible locus of self-concern, that is at the heart of Anti-
Climacus’ account, and which has its being in the moment in which it appropriates
its life in its entirety as all that it is answerable for. How long such moments of self-
conscious self-appropriation happen to last, a question about psychological continuity
56
Rudd 2012, p.5. Evans (2006) sees Kierkegaard’s position as ‘relational but also metaphysical’ (p.265)
and as one that ‘frequently intermixes ontological and ethical discourse’, (p.285) and also endorses what he
describes as a Jamesian sense of the word ‘metaphysics’ in the context of Kierkegaard: ‘There is no hint here
of finality and certainty, no claim to absolute knowledge but rather a confession that theoretical evidence is
not decisive. However, James does not see this lack of absolute knowledge as a barrier to serious
consideration of metaphysical questions or to earnest conviction that certain positions on these questions
are true’ (p.51).
CONTINUITY AND TEMPORALITY 
which a neo-Lockean would naturally ask, actually has no bearing upon the question
of selfhood as Anti-Climacus sees it. As a psychological state, self-constituting self-
relation may persist for just an instant or an entire lifetime, but in the fundamental
sense, selves only exist in one moment: the Moment. Right now.
So much, then, for metaphysics. But then, Kierkegaard would hardly be the only
one to move from metaphysical accounts of personal identity to practical accounts,
abandoning questions of numerical re-identification in favour of questions of prac-
tical characterization, in Schechtman’s terms. In this century, Kierkegaard has been
explicitly recruited for this practical approach to identity, especially its narrativist
forms. But as we’ll see in Chapter 7, the unique temporality of the self that we’ve been
discussing also create headaches for that approach—while connecting Kierkegaard
with important themes in contemporary phenomenology and even cognitive science.
7
Practical and Narrative Identity
The Rise of Narrative

Anglophone Kierkegaard reception over the last century falls into overlapping but
distinct periods. Early commentators, like Walter Lowrie and David Swenson,
approached Kierkegaard in a fairly literal, theological frame. Like many of us in
our adolescent years, Kierkegaard then went through his ‘existentialist phase’, with
readers emphasizing notions of radical freedom, subjectivity, and absurdity. A later
cohort of readers, infused with the concerns of poststructuralism and deconstruc-
tionism, focused on themes of language, authorship, irony, the decentring of sub-
jectivity and the final impossibility of meaning. Somewhat surprisingly, a stickler for
Lutheran orthodoxy was now being read as announcing the possibility of a ‘religion
without religion’.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, Kierkegaard’s works
went from being read as straightforward philosophical statements—the sort of
interpretation Roger Poole later derided as ‘blunt reading’2—to deconstructive read-
ings that seem to refuse any meaning to the text at all. Perhaps it was inevitable, then,
that the ‘narrative turn’ in psychology, philosophy and the social sciences made itself
felt in Kierkegaard Studies too. And it’s a good thing that it has: the narrativist
research programme within Kierkegaard Studies over the last two decades has been
among its most productive and exciting lines of inquiry.
In personal identity theory, the ‘narrative turn’ has been part of a wider move away
from the strictly logical relationship of numerical identity. As the metaphysical
project of specifying identity and persistence conditions for ‘selves’ or ‘persons’
continued to fragment across psychological, physical, reductive, and eliminativist
approaches, an increasing number of writers began to change tack. Figures like
Christine Korsgaard, Harry G. Frankfurt, and Charles Taylor began to talk of
‘selfhood’ or ‘personhood’ as constituted by practical rather than metaphysical
considerations. In Schechtman’s terms, the focus shifted from re-identification to
characterization: ‘Re-identification theorists ask what it means to say that a person at
t2 is the same person as a person at t1; characterization theorists ask what it means
to say that a particular characteristic is that of a given person’.3 Narrative approaches
to identity began to emerge as a subset of this approach, entering the fray from at
1 2 3
Derrida 1995, p.49. Poole 1998, p.58 passim. Schechtman 1996, p.73.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
least two different directions: MacIntyre’s discussion of persons as narratively con-

stituted in After Virtue, and Ricoeur’s long discussion of narrative as the poesis that
mediates cosmological and subjective time4 and mediates idem (sameness across
time) and ipse (selfhood) in personal identity.5 A range of positions have emerged
concurrently within the narrative identity approach, from avowedly non-realist
positions such as that of Daniel Dennett6 to strongly realist ones such as that of
John J. Davenport7 and Anthony Rudd.8 And Davenport and Rudd have sought to
recruit Kierkegaard to the narrativist ranks, drawing on Kierkegaard’s talk of
teleologically qualified selves acquiring ‘histories’ to argue that Kierkegaardian
selves are constituted by a specifically narrative form of continuity. Yet none of
this has been without a backlash. Narrative approaches in general have come in for
significant criticism,9 while in Kierkegaard Studies commentators such as John
Lippitt have argued that there are good reasons for being wary both of narrativity
in general and of the claim that Kierkegaard himself endorses a narrative account
of personal identity.10
The debate between narrativists and ‘narrato-skeptics’ has certainly been a pro-
ductive one, and to the credit of narrativists that they have met many of the claims
critics have put to them in the course of finessing their own positions. As something
of a ‘narrato-agnostic’, I don’t propose to enter this debate as a partisan on either side
here.11 Instead, I wish to show that whatever forms of practical identity Kierkegaard
endorses, whether narrative or something else, this cannot be the whole story about
personal identity for Kierkegaard. Rather, I will argue (in ways that have been
gestured towards in previous chapters) that Kierkegaard’s writings contain an
analogue to a key distinction in recent discussions of selfhood: a distinction between
the minimal or core and narrative or autobiographical self, or more broadly, between
the phenomenally given self and the narratively constituted person. In this respect,
I think Kierkegaard emerges as a figure who has something important to contribute
to what I think will be the next move in personal identity theory: explicating how
these two forms of selfhood interact.
4 5 6
Ricoeur 1984. Ricoeur 1992. Dennett 1992.
7
Davenport 2012 in particular contains Davenport’s most thorough working out of his narrative
realist position to date.
8
Rudd’s position too is evolving; Rudd 2012 offers a somewhat more nuanced realism than found in
Rudd 2005. For further discussions see Rudd 2007, 2009.
9
Examples include Vice 2003; Lamarque 2004; Strawson 2004, 2012; Vollmer 2005; Williams 2009.
Peter Goldie (2012) gives narrative a central place in his thought, but rejects the idea that selves are
narratively constituted, while Daniel Hutto (2015) likewise defends a modest ‘Narrative Self-Shaping
Hypothesis’ but not narrative self-constitution.
10
Lippitt 2005, 2007; Dalsgaard 2010; Duckles 2007 (for a somewhat different set of objections to
Davenport and Rudd); and several chapters in Lippitt and Stokes 2015.
11
I’ve raised objections to narrative identity theory in Stokes 2006, 2012, 2015.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
From Metaphysical to Narrative Selfhood

As we’ve seen, personal identity theorists have largely focussed on questions of re-
identification, and have assumed that the concerns that drive us to ask about personal
identity, such as Schechtman’s ‘Four Features’ (moral responsibility, self-interested
concern, compensation, and survival)12 are essentially derivative; the more funda-
mental question is what allows for such re-identification, and once we get clear about
what we are, we’ll be able to answer these subsidiary questions about imputability
and survival. Just get the metaphysics right, and the practical questions will follow.
This assumption largely held until Bernard Williams’ work on egocentric concern,
which used ingenious thought-experiments to demonstrate a fissure between our
first-personal, egocentrically concerned fear for the future and our third-personal
judgements about the persistence of persons across time.13 Parfit’s ‘constitutive
reductionism’14 about persons also showed that what we care about in egocentric
concern and survival is separable from numerical identity: there may be forms of
physical or psychological continuity that don’t preserve numerical identity but that
are nonetheless as good, or nearly as good, as ordinary survival, where ‘good’ is a
function of self-reflexive concern. As we considered briefly in Chapter 3, many phil-
osophers have asked whether teleportation—in which I’m disintegrated in one place
and an exact replica created in another place—is properly regarded as a form of
transport, or a form of suicide. Ultimately this question may only be decidable by
reference not to metaphysical facts, but to practical concerns.15 It might not be survival
in any metaphysically ‘serious’ sense of numerical identity, but it might just preserve
enough of what we care about in ordinary survival for us to care about our teleportation
replicas in the way we ordinarily care about our future person-stages.
These practical concerns, it is claimed, bring forward a new way of understanding
the self: not as an enduring substance, but as a function of practical relationships.
Identity, on this view, emerges from a weave of personal, social, and political relations
between human beings. Hence this form of personal identity, and the person whose
identity it delineates, is born normative. It is not a non-moral substratum onto which
moral concepts like imputability or desert may be overlaid, but instead a thoroughly
moral, social, practical being in its very constitution. Recall that Locke, though largely
conflating ‘self ’ and ‘person’, nonetheless regarded ‘person’ as a ‘forensick’ term,16 a
way of picking out individual nodes of moral imputability within the interpersonal
world. In Davenport’s terms, ‘person’ in this sense is ‘not a natural kind, but an
essentially practical concept, or a set of closely related practical concepts . . . persons
12
Schechtman 1996, pp.2–3 passim.
13
Williams 1973, pp.46–63. I discuss this paper, and the fissure it brings to salience, in Stokes 2013b.
14
This is Parfit’s own description of his position, which he defines thus: ‘though a person is distinct
from that person’s body, and from any series of thoughts and experiences, the person’s existence just
consists in them’ (Parfit 2011, p.422).
15 16
On which see e.g. Johnston 2010. Locke 1975, p.346.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
may be defined as beings capable of moral responsibility, or (more widely) as beings

who deserve a distinctive sort of moral consideration because it is normal for them
(or part of their function) to develop the capacities sufficient for moral responsi-
bility’.17 Likewise, C. Stephen Evans calls the non-metaphysical form of personal
identity a ‘relational achievement theory’ of the self, which ‘attempts to say what a self
is, not by describing a type of entity or specifying an entity that possesses certain
natural properties, but rather by viewing the self in terms of its achievements and
relationships. Being a self is not being a special type of entity, but rather it is a matter
of having a special status, a status that is linked to social relationships.’18
Not everyone has signed up to the distinction between metaphysical and practical
selfhood. Rudd, for instance, has expressed scepticism with the idea that ‘the question
of what we are fully can helpfully be separated out from the question of what matters
to us’.19 And indeed practical identity may indeed be inextricable from questions
of numerical identity in many ways: for instance, numerical physical identity may
influence (though perhaps not fully determine) many of our ideas of practical
identity, such as when we use bodily continuity to reject false memories.20 Nonethe-
less, the distinction is at least analytically useful in that it allows us to talk about,
in Christine Korsgaard’s terms, the ‘continuity of identity and of agency’ that ‘in
choosing our careers, and pursuing our friendships and family lives, we both
presuppose and construct’21 without having to give a reductive account of what
holds that identity together diachronically. Such reductionism either tends to run
into too many metaphysical difficulties (as in neo-Lockeanism) or simply leaves out
too much of what we care about in discussing identity (as in animalism).
It is crucial to note here that on this understanding, the self is not merely something
that emerges out of interpersonal relationships and social conventions such as naming.
It is more than just a convenient way of denoting individual points of interaction and
responsibility in a social nexus, a ‘mere designation’ as the Buddhist sage Nāgasena has
it.22 Rather, it is also, and indeed predominantly, something that emerges from the
self-interpreting activity of conscious human beings, ‘the product of conceiving and
organizing one’s life in a certain way’ in Dan Zahavi’s phrase.23 Korsgaard tells us that
‘what it is to be a person, or a rational agent, is just to be engaged in the activity of
constantly making yourself into a person’.24 Such a process of self-making involves a
17
Davenport 2012, p.12. Davenport goes on to add ‘three further features’ to Schechtman’s increasingly
canonical four: virtue, authenticity, and autonomy.
18 19
Evans 2006, p.264. Rudd 2012, p.5.
20 21
See Chapter 3; also Stokes 2014. Korsgaard 1989, p.113.
22
The Milinda Panha, written around 100BCE, tells of the conversations between King Milinda (the
Indo-Greek ruler Menander I) and the sage Nāgasena. Upon meeting Nāgasena and asking his name,
Milinda is told: ‘Sire, I am known as Nāgasena,’ but ‘this “Nāgasena” is only a designation, a concept, an
expression, a mere name because there is no person as such that is found’ (Menis 1993, p.28). What then
follows is a wonderfully succinct explanation of the Buddhist anata (‘no-self ’) doctrine, including the
famous chariot analogy.
23 24
Zahavi 2005, p.105. Korsgaard 2009, p.41.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
degree of reflexive evaluation and self-shaping, of identifying with certain motives (as
in Frankfurt)25 and self-defining ‘ground projects’ (as in Williams).26 This is not
simply a matter of creating the self ex nihilo but of appropriating, moulding, and
directing an identity that is always-already situated within, and partly determined by, a
given historical and social context. Hence identity is not a default state of the human
animal, but a state that needs to be achieved and maintained—opening up the
possibility of humans who are not yet selves, as with foetuses for instance, or no
longer selves, as with permanent vegetative state patients.
The Practical Kierkegaard

Right away we can note that the relational, interpersonal character of practical
identity coheres with the distinctively relational nature of selfhood in Kierkegaard.
From Either/Or to The Sickness Unto Death the defining feature of self-constitution is
a sort of relation to oneself, which in the latter work is also linked to a series of
progressively more adequate relations to others: to the family, the state, and ultim-
ately to God (SUD, 79/SKS 11, 193). In the less overtly theological first half of
Sickness we are told that ‘in relating to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests
transparently in the power that established it’ (SUD, 14/SKS 11, 130, trans. modified),
thereby centralizing both self-relation and other-relation in the process of self-
constitution (albeit in a highly asymmetrical way: the self relates to its creator and
thereby relates to itself as creature). This self-relation, which Anti-Climacus describes
in Practice in Christianity as a ‘redoubling’ (Fordobelse) that creates a ‘duplexity’
(Dobbelthed) in the self, is essentially linked to freedom and thus to agency:
The magnet draws the iron to itself, but the iron is no self; in this relation, therefore, to draw to
itself is a singleness. But a self is a redoubling, is freedom; therefore in this relation truly to draw
to itself means to posit a choice. (PC, 159/SKS 12, 163)
The magnet analogy recalls Fichte’s use of the same image: the propositions ‘the
magnet attracts the iron’ and ‘the iron is attracted by the magnet’ exist in a reciprocal
relationship (neither is primary), but when we reflect on that reciprocity itself, it
becomes apparent that ‘in addition to the iron and the magnet an intelligent being
must be present, observing both, uniting the concepts of both in his consciousness’
via a free activity.27 By relating to itself, the human being posits itself as a self: not just
a locus of conscious experience, but of freedom, decision, and action. Importantly,
though, for both Fichte and Kierkegaard, there is nothing homuncular in this picture
of the self. As Mooney puts it, ‘a Kierkegaardian self is not a “little king” or ruler
within a body, or within a sphere of projects and activities, feelings and beliefs. It is
25
Frankfurt 1988, pp.11–25.
26
Williams 1982, pp.1–19. On ‘ground projects’ in Kierkegaard, see e.g. Mooney 1996, p.73.
27
Fichte 1982, p.150.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
instead just the field of its relationships, relating to itself, and to a grounding
power.’28
The clearest statement of identity as practical in Kierkegaard’s corpus, however, is
not to be found in the schematics of Anti-Climacus, but in the vision of self-
constituting choice offered by Judge William in the second half of Either/Or. Accord-
ing to William, for a human being to become a self is for her to attain a particular
type of psychological continuity through time, without which her entire personality
collapses into atomistic incoherence:
Or can you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of
your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually become several, just as that unhappy
demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a
human being, the binding power of the personality? (EO, 2:160/SKS 3, 158)
A human being in such a state amounts to no more than a sequence of psychological

events, devoid of any internal coordinating principle or coherence. Someone who
simply bounces from passion to passion, mood to mood, with no underlying projects
or commitments to coordinate these events, is reduced to these moments. In Judge
William’s terminology, such a subject is not a self; instead of achieving selfhood,
personality (personlighed) ‘withers away in atrophy’ (EO, 2:163/SKS 3, 160). What is
lost in such a case is the internal thematic and developmental coherence of the
personality, that which unifies it across time and gives the subject ‘continuity with the
past and the future’ (EO, 2:263/SKS 3, 250). Obtaining such continuity requires an
integration of consciousness (EO, 2:177/SKS 3, 173) that ‘submerges’ the raw mater-
ial of psychological life—dispositions, memories, emotions, intentions—into a con-
solidated identity via a process of choice (EO, 2:163/SKS 3, 160). This submersion
amounts to adopting all these psychological moments as a totality for which the self is
answerable, thereby regarding its concretion as a temporally extended ethical task
rather than as a mere sequence or bundle of psychological events:
The individual, then, becomes conscious as this specific individual with these capacities, these
inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this
specific product of a specific environment. But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes
upon himself responsibility for it all. He does not hesitate over whether he will take this
particular thing or not, for he knows that if he does not do it something much more important
will be lost. (EO, 2:251/SKS 3, 239)
In this way, the immediate, given content of the personality is changed into what
Davenport calls ‘volitional character constituted by patterns of earnest caring’,
converting a sequence of disconnected moments into ‘self-guiding patterns’ intelli-
gible in terms of volitional commitments.29 The key themes of self-constitution that
recur in the more technical (and more avowedly theological) Anti-Climacan writings
28 29
Mooney 1996, p.98. Davenport 2001b, pp.280–1.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
are already clearly at work here: reflexivity/redoubling, freedom, choice. By relating

to itself and to the context in which it finds itself, a human consciousness attains
identity, (conditioned) autonomy, and diachronic continuity as a self or person.
It may be objected that even if this is indeed a form of practical rather than
metaphysical identity, there is still nothing terribly narrative about this conception of
self-constitution. Indeed, Judge William’s account of self-consolidating choice has
also been likened to philosophical conceptions of the self such as William’s ‘ground
projects’ and Frankfurt’s account of self-constitution via higher-order volitions,30
neither of which centralize the concept of narrative. Moreover, as the discussion in
Chapter 6 might suggest, the Judge’s talk of achieving ‘continuity’ of personality, and
of the subject finding herself ‘in continuity with the past and the future’ of her
‘concrete personality’ might initially sound rather neo-Lockean, but that doesn’t
entail that it is also narrativist. Contemporary neo-Lockeans speak of various
forms of psychological continuity or connectedness as preserving personal identity
across time; why mightn’t Judge William’s self-constituting ‘choice’ be regarded
simply as securing such psychological continuity by giving the personality a stable,
diachronically extended volitional framework? Why invoke the stronger concept of
narrativity here at all?
The Narrative Approach

Narrative identity theories vary widely in scope, motivation and underlying meta-
physical assumptions, and so speaking of narrative identity per se can be quite
fraught. Narrative identity is still relatively new, and the differences between the
various forms of narrative approach are still being articulated. Minimally, we could
say that the narrative approach is perhaps best understood as an attempt to specify
more fully a distinctive form of diachronic coherence or sequential integration that
organizes a set of temporally separate psychological events and properties into
an enduring person. But even that less-than-informative description applies only
awkwardly to some narrativists, such as Goldie,31 Velleman, and Hutto, who give
narrative an important role in self-understanding without wanting to make any
claims for narrative self-constitution. Still, even these non-constitution versions of
the narrative approach arguably fall under Davenport’s Signature Narrative Thesis:
‘each person’s individual identity is, or depends on, an understanding he has of his life
in narrative form, as a development from his past towards his future prospects,
30
Davenport 2001a, p.87; 2001b, pp.278, 290. See also Rudd 2001, p.138.
31
‘A narrative is distinct from what it is a narrative of. To fail to maintain this distinction is to lose
the distinction between, on the one side, language and thought, and, on the other side, the world,
between representation and what is represented’ and ‘one’s narrative sense of self as I conceive it really
has no direct connection with the metaphysical question of one’s identity over time’ (Goldie 2012, pp.6
and 117).
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
ending in his death’.32 That definition is capacious enough to fit a variety of different

and conflicting understandings of the relationship between narrative, narration, and
the self: that the activity of self-narration brings the self into being; that the self
already exists and is already narrative in character prior to its narration (as in
Davenport); or that identity and narrative stand in a relationship of ‘mutual presup-
position’, as in MacIntyre.33
‘Narrative’ is in turn rarely well-defined in the literature, and such definitions as
have been given need to walk a thin line between being too strongly literary in
character to be credible, on the one hand, and too thin to deserve the name on the
other. One point that is sometimes emphasized is that narratives are more than mere
causal sequences, and more than mere chronicles or annals.34 Narratives have an
overall shape and trajectory, which gives them a unity that goes beyond mere
continuity between discrete points in time. The difference between narrative con-
tinuity and psychological continuity per se tracks this difference between a narrative
and a mere list of temporally ordered events:35 the former has a shape for which its
beginning and end are essential, while the latter simply recounts events falling
between two given points of time.36 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle could begin and
end in different years and still be perfectly intelligible as a chronicle, whereas if
Beowulf stopped suddenly before the fight with Grendel at Heorot, or began suddenly
with the journey to the Mere, it would be a broken narrative, containing a compre-
hensible sequence of events but only narratively intelligible as a fragment of a larger,
lost narrative. While a causal sequence explains a certain kind of relationship
between two or more temporally distant events, narratives do more than this: they
explain a sequence of events in a way that imbues it with a form of thematic and
purposive coherence. As Goldie puts it, the way in which emotional response and
evaluation infuse, shape, and colour narrative,37 as well as its distinctive capacity to
connect events to broader contexts, gives narratives a ‘special explanatory, revelatory,
and expressive power’ compared to merely causal accounts.38 (On some versions of
the narrative approach, such as that of Rudd and of David Carr, narratives are also
the very condition for us being able to individuate events in a sequence at all;
narratives do not so much connect events as make them the events they are.)
Narrativity gives events and actions what Karen Jones calls a ‘trajectory-dependant
property’,39 a property that events only have by virtue of being part of a temporally
extended process that is directed towards some sort of end or goal. Hence, in Jones’
32
Davenport 2012, p.2. Goldie won’t necessarily fit under the last clause, however, as he rejects the idea
that a narrative must encompass a whole life.
33 34
MacIntyre 1984, p.203. See e.g. Goldie 2012, p.2.
35
For a defence of narrative that seeks to avoid the ‘too literary vs too thin’ problem in a way that makes
clear what narrativity adds to mere psychological continuity, see Schechtman 2015.
36
It should be noted that this contrast between chronicle and narrative is not universally accepted; see
e.g. Ricoeur 1984, p.148.
37 38
Goldie 2012, p.11. See also Rudd 2009, p.62. Goldie 2012, p.46.
39
Jones 2008, pp.271–5.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
examples, ‘being a journey to Mordor’ is a trajectory-dependent property, but ‘has

been here since Roman times’ is not.
This notion of narrative trajectory involves a fundamentally teleological dimen-
sion. Narratives, whether short-term local ones or life-long, all-encompassing ones,
have an internal logic oriented towards their end. Narrativists differ as to how
important teleology is to narrative identity, but there is nonetheless a whiff of
teleology in even the simplest narratives by dint of their purposiveness. To adapt
an example from MacIntyre,40 if I walk into a lecture theatre and crack two eggs into
a bowl, this behaviour will only make sense with reference to some end towards
which the activity is directed: making a cake? Demonstrating some philosophical
point to my students? Satisfying a sudden desire to drink raw eggs like Rocky Balboa?
Hence the entire sequence of pulling out the bowl, cracking the eggs, pouring them
from the shells into the bowl and so on, is only narratively intelligible with reference
to some telos. That telos in turn may only make sense relative to some larger telos—
perhaps I’m cracking eggs to demonstrate a philosophical point about identity in
order to successfully teach a unit on metaphysics for instance. Not all narrativists
will go so far as to say that there is some ultimate telos that does, or should, make
narrative sense of all actions performed within a single life; but even without this
there does appear to be some minimal level of teleology (in a fairly prosaic sense) in
even the simplest of narratives.
A closely related further aspect to narrative theories, again held by some narrati-
vists but not all, is that narrative compels us ‘to think of ourselves as temporally
extended wholes’.41 It may be that key parts of our life-narratives are inaccessible to
us, such as our conception, birth, and death,42 and indeed our entire future is subject
to radical and unforeseeable contingencies; but according to the more MacIntyrean
narrativists we must nonetheless think of ourselves as a unified whole. If we want our
particular actions to be intelligible to ourselves,43 on this line, we must see them as
embedded in some larger narrative, which in turn will make sense with reference to
yet larger narratives; it seems to follow that at some ultimate (if inaccessible) level
there will be a narrative that holds together and makes sense of our entire life. This
narrative needn’t be articulated fully, but some degree of conscious self-narration is
essential to constituting oneself as an agent—we cannot, on this view, understand
ourselves and enact, evaluate, and modify our practical identities unless we at least
40
MacIntyre’s version (which involves making an entire cake) is in 1984, p.209. His point is twofold:
each action in the sequence is only comprehensible as an action relative to the narrative of the sequence
(compare the ‘narrative holism’ of Carr and Rudd), and that this narrative is only intelligible as part of
some larger goal-directed sequence of activities.
41
Rudd 2007, p.545, emphasis added.
42
On conception and birth, see Ricoeur 1992, p.160. For discussions of the problems death poses for
narrative theory, see Lippitt 2007; Behrendt 2007; Stokes 2006. Death has also been taken to be essential to
narrative intelligibility e.g. Malpas 1998; against this, see e.g. Behrendt 2015, Pattison 2015.
43
This is the motivation Velleman in particular cites for a narrative agency theory. See Velleman 2006a,
pp.203–23.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
partially and at least some of the time articulate our identities in narrative terms.44
Not all narration need be explicit, however, nor need it rise to the level of telling an
integrated life story; in fact, very little of it will.
Again, narrativists differ on whether this narrative self is constituted by our
narration (either tacit or explicit) of events that are in themselves non-narrative or
(as in Ricoeur) somehow proto-narrative, or whether real life has a narrative struc-
ture prior to our narration of it. Davenport falls resolutely into the latter camp. He
coins the term narravive, ‘a story that lives, the development of which is, for the most
part, prior to its telling or rational interpretation’45 to refer to the truth-maker of the
narratives we tell about ourselves, and holds this truth-maker to have something akin
to narrative properties already. So by deploying the narravive, Davenport steers
around one of the standard objections to narrative identity approaches—that they
conflate life and art and so end up giving accounts of identity that are untrue to messy
lived experience—by claiming that narravives are strongly analogous to, but are fuller
and more complex than, literary artefacts. Hence the near-isomorphism of explicit
narratives to narravives, as in a biography which tells the story of a life without
including every single detail therein. He also escapes the objection that stories
contain their ending prefigured in their narrative logic (a good story has to end the
way it does) whereas lives are open-ended and subject to radical contingency, by
claiming that ‘a living narravive is incomplete and still growing, and modally
extended into nonactual but possible continuations into the future, which are closed
only at the agent’s death’.46
The features of narrative identity theories I’ve described—teleology, holism,47 and
realism—open many narrative approaches up to a number of criticisms. Here, I’d like
to focus on how one particular strand of criticism of narrative identity impacts upon
the claim that Kierkegaard is a sort of narrativist. This criticism draws our attention
both to important structural features of Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood, and to
what may be one of his most important contributions given where the debate over
personal identity appears to be headed.
The Narrative Kierkegaard

Either/Or Part II and The Sickness Unto Death do, in fact, have much to offer those
seeking to recruit Kierkegaard to the cause of narrative identity, not least in their
emphases on how the self comes to acquire itself in the form of a history, and their
44
Cf. what Schechtman (1996, pp.114–19) calls the ‘Articulation Constraint’.
45 46
Davenport 2012, p.71. Davenport 2012, p.72.
47
In a posthumously published paper, Williams offers a criticism that combines worries about holism
with the ‘too literary’ objection: ‘fictional characters have a special unity that no real life can have, that the
end of them is present at their beginning . . . their wholeness is already there, and ours is not’ (Williams
2009, p.7).
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
developmental anthropology whereby selves come to progressively fuller under-

standings of themselves. MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians48 (principally Davenport
and Rudd) argue that Judge William’s developmental anthropology in Either/Or,
which we discussed above, makes his account of selfhood teleological in character
in a way straightforward neo-Lockean psychological continuity theories are not.
Selves acquire a ‘history’ in a narrative sense (the Danish historie, like the German
geschichte, means both ‘history’ and ‘story’) that provides a teleological understand-
ing of where we are going in terms of where we have been.49 The contents of
immediate selfhood only acquire a history when the subject ‘acknowledges identity
with himself ’ and that he ‘is the person he is only through this history’ (EO, 2:216/SKS
3, 207, my emphasis). And essential to this history is development: lives such as those
of mystics, which merely oscillate between ecstatic highs and frightful ‘flat moments’,
have ‘movement, but not development’ and so only acquire a history ‘in the same
sense that one speaks of the history of a plant’ (EO, 2:242/SKS 3, 231). A plant gets
bigger, but it does not have a developmental history in which the present can only be
understood by reference to the story of the past and in reference to an overall telos.50
The sort of ethical life Judge William advocates involves self-constitution via com-
mitments such as marriage, which require temporal extension and must unfold in
time for their full meaning to be evident. Such commitments involve, argues Rudd,
relatively localized teloi that derive their meaning by reference to an overarching telos
of choosing to be a coherent, autonomous self, which in turn only makes sense with
reference to a third kind of telos, an orientation to the Good-as-such, or what Judge
William calls choosing the self in its ‘eternal validity’.51
As we saw in Chapter 6, The Sickness Unto Death is also concerned with self-
relation and continuity, and, like the Judge, Anti-Climacus regards selfhood as a
product of a particular mode of self-relation. To recap, Anti-Climacus distinguishes
between the human being (mennenske)—a synthesis of opposed elements such as
finitude and infinitude, physical and mental—and the self (selv). The self is ‘spirit’
(aand), a task presented to the human being—‘Every human being is a psychical-
physical synthesis intended to be spirit’ (SUD, 43/SKS 11, 158)—and is constituted
when the human being ‘relates to itself ’ and simultaneously to ‘the power that
established it’ (SUD, 14/SKS 11, 130). Like Judge William’s self, the Anti-Climacan
self takes responsibility for its entire life in its concretion, and turns the immediate
psychological material it finds itself to be into an ethically qualified task. The self
is a lifelong totality that relates to itself in a self-integrating, self-constituting, and
48
A term coined by Lippitt 2007, p.50.
49
‘The self has a history, and its nature is given by the sort of continuity involved in the story it can tell
about itself ’ (Weston 2008, p.165).
50
There may be exceptions. If you’ve ever seen an agave plant, after twenty years, suddenly grow a
massive bloom spike taller than a house to spread its seeds before dying, it’s very hard not to narrativize this
plant’s life and death in teleological terms.
51
Rudd 2012, p.75.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
self-directing way—which, initially at least, sounds quite close to both Judge William
and to contemporary narrativism.
So it seems clear that Judge William and Anti-Climacus both depart from straight-
forward psychological continuity theory, in ways that seem friendly, at least, to
contemporary narrative theory. The notion of the self as a totality is also a decidedly
narrativist one—and indeed this is one of the most important insights that narrati-
vists offer us in their readings of Kierkegaard, for as we’ll see in Chapter 8, the idea
that I am a totality I am to relate to in a concerned way is essential to Kierkegaard’s
conception of the self. Simple psychological continuity doesn’t provide the notion of
a human being’s life as a defined whole in this way; what it furnishes is more like
chronicle than narrative.
Anti-Climacus’ formula might also seem to help narrativists get around what we
might call the ‘constitution problem’ for narrative identity theories. A standard
objection to narrative identity theories is that, as Goldie and Richard Menary object,
they confuse narratives with what they are the narratives of. A claim that ‘the subject
of the experiences that the story is about’ is identical with ‘the story that relates the
experiences’ would, in Menary’s view, be ‘close to incoherent’.52 This doesn’t arise for
a narrativist like Goldie, for whom self-constitution is not at issue: I simply tell
narratives about myself without being those narratives.53 But when the claim is
that in narratively understanding and shaping our lives we thereby author (or at
least co-author) ourselves, we run into what Korsgaard calls the ‘Paradox of Self-
Constitution’:54 how can we be both constitutor and constituted? ‘How,’ as Hutto
asks, ‘can we be the products of acts of narration, if in some sense we are responsible
for the production of the relevant self-making narratives?’55 When Judge William
explains that ‘Through the individual’s intercourse with himself the individual is
made pregnant by himself and gives birth to himself ’ (EO, 2:259/SKS 3, 246), just
who’s giving birth to who here?
Kierkegaard’s relational self model, as articulated most fully by Anti-Climacus,
seems to offer an easy answer to this: it’s the human being, a synthesis of physical and
psychological factors that ‘gives birth to itself ’ by relating to itself in a certain way.
At first blush, this is not dissimilar to ‘constitution’ views of identity such as that of
Lynne Rudder Baker, whereby a human body constitutes a person without being
identical to that person, much as a lump of marble constitutes Michelangelo’s
David.56 It’s also quite tantalizingly similar to what we find in the more materialist
narrative accounts, such as Dennett’s, according to which it’s the brain or the
organism that creates the narrative self through telling stories with that self as its
52
Menary 2008, p.72. Rudd (2012, p.185) replies that a MacIntyrean narrativist can overcome this by
pointing to the relationship of ‘mutual presupposition’ between self and narrative.
53 54 55
Goldie 2012, p.131. Korsgaard 2009, pp.41–2. Hutto 2007, p.6.
56
This is the central theme of Baker 2000.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
(fictional) protagonist.57 Borrowing from Korsgaard’s invocation of Aristotle, a

human being ‘making itself into itself ’ might here be regarded as part of what it is
for a human animal to realize its potential to be a human being properly, just as living
a giraffish life is what it is for a giraffe to be continually making itself into a giraffe
(and ‘No one is tempted to say: “how can the giraffe make itself into itself unless it is
already there?” The picture here is not of a craftsman who is, mysteriously, his own
product. The picture here is of the self-constitutive process that is the essence of life.
The paradox of self-constitution, in this context, is no paradox at all.’)58
As we’ve seen, for Kierkegaard, ‘self ’ (selv) names an achievement of the human
being (menneske), not something we are by default. On the narrativist reading, a
diachronically extended human being achieves selfhood by taking ownership of its
life, gathering together the strands of its biological, historical, social, political, and
spiritual being into a coherent, narratively qualified whole. In relating to itself in its
concretion in this way, and also in relating to others (including the ‘power that
established it’) a human animal acquires the status of a self: a self-conscious, self-
reflexive being with trajectory-dependent properties, able to assess, shape, and
redirect its own character. And this is also teleological in that, as Judge William
puts it in the continuation of the quote given above, the ‘self ’ is both the human being
it actually is and the ideal self it is striving to become:
Through the individual’s intercourse with himself the individual is made pregnant by himself
and gives birth to himself. The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and
the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to
form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself. Only
within himself does the individual have the objective toward which he is to strive, and yet he
has this objective outside himself as he strives towards it. (EO, 2:259/SKS 3, 246–7)
Rudd makes much of this bivalent character of narrative selfhood, taking narrative
identity to be (in a somewhat thicker version of Ricoeur’s idem and ipse) a negoti-
ation between ‘self-shaping’ and ‘self-acceptance’. The paradox of self-constitution
that the Judge is wrestling with here is that I don’t have to (and indeed, for moral
reasons, must not) simply accept my character, beliefs, and relationships as I find
them, but at the same time I can’t make myself into whatever I want by sheer force
of will.59 Rather I must negotiate between the ideal I strive to achieve and the
constraints imposed upon me by my facticity. I am neither wholly determined nor
a Sartrean locus of absolute freedom, but a being that is both simultaneously free and
constrained. It’s in reflectively owning and occupying that tension, negotiating my
way through the demands made upon me and the limits of my concretion, that
I attain a narratively qualified practical identity.
57
Mooney (1996, p.99) explicitly invokes Dennett’s conception of the self as a ‘narrative centre of
gravity’ in explicating Kierkegaard’s view.
58 59
Korsgaard 2009, pp.41–2. Rudd 2012, pp.75–6.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
Perhaps for this reason, both Davenport and Rudd reject the idea that the self is
something distinct from the human being, understood as a concatenation of physical
and psychological factors, both in their exegesis of Kierkegaard and in their accounts
of narrative selfhood as such. Davenport explicitly identifies the self with the totality
of the volitional character in a way that is clearly meant to avoid any Cartesian
connotations. Following Hannay,60 Davenport insists on two ‘levels of character: the
outer and the inner’ operative in Judge William’s moral psychology; but for Daven-
port, this must be understood as an internal relation within the dispositional and
volitional structure of the human being itself: there ‘is not a set of character-traits that
the self has as accidental properties; rather this character is the self ’.61 There is no
sense in Davenport’s picture of a self distinct from that structure. Rudd, too, insists
that ‘the self is not some isolatable thing, independent of all these [psychological]
characteristics; it is what is made manifest in the common style or manner of being in
the world that they express’.62 Hence the human being and the self are not separate
entities, such that we can speak of one creating the other. Rather, ‘self ’ designates a
human being that has attained a certain self-reflexive state.
So far, so good. However, these responses don’t fully obviate the self-constitution
problem. Evans recognizes as much when he points out that ‘Kierkegaard’s view
cannot be a simple achievement theory’ because ‘the self that the individual is
charged with failing to become is in some sense the self the individual is already’.63
Kierkegaard’s concept of selfhood is a thick concept, and (as we should expect
given the ‘born normative’ character of practical identity) a morally charged one:
we are ethically enjoined to become ourselves (e.g. EO, 2:177/SKS 3, 173). But then,
if we fail to become ourselves—that is, to attain the status of selfhood—who gets
the blame for this failure? Can blame be imputed to non-selves? If ‘self ’ is doing
the same sort of work as ‘person’ generally does in both neo-Lockean and practical
identity approaches, this seems problematic, because it appears being a self is
another name for being a morally responsible agent. How can a human being
who fails to become a self be held responsible for this failure, when becoming a self
is in turn a condition for being the sort of being who can be morally responsible?
The answer to this paradox that writers like Rudd, Davenport, and Evans have
offered is that selfhood, both in Kierkegaard and in their own narrative views, is
essentially a scalar concept. Rudd is forced to acknowledge that Kierkegaard must
have two senses of ‘self ’: a weak sense in which a self is just a ‘self-conscious rational
being’ and a stronger sense in which selfhood is ‘an ideal to be realized’ by that
subject. 64 This is one point on which Rudd and Lippitt are in agreement: ‘anyone
capable of responding to such a call must already [be] a self in some more minimal
sense’.65 Evans also accepts that ‘there is a tremendous difference between what we
could call the minimal self, who is a “bit of a subject”, and the responsible self who
60 61 62
Hannay 1998, pp.335–6. Davenport 2001b, p.279. Rudd 2005, p.424.
63 64 65
Evans 2006, pp.267–8. Rudd 2007, p.547. Lippitt 2007, p.60, n.14.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
has a formed character’ and that both must exist in Kierkegaard’s anthropology in
order for the former ‘self “of sorts” ’ to become the latter.66 Davenport has recently
articulated a complex typology of levels of narrative unity, beginning at the level of
bare unity of apperception (what he calls unity-0, the ability ‘to recognize experiences
across time as belonging to the same animal’)67 through the capacity for planning
agency (unity-1) all the way through to unity-3 (volitional wholeheartedness) and
unity-4 (existential faith). For Davenport, the (fuzzy) borderline between moral
imputability and non-imputability is unity-1. Insofar as the Kierkegaardian aesthete,
who fails to become a self, nonetheless has unity-1 (and unity-0, which is a precon-
dition for unity-1), he is morally responsible for this failure to become a self in a fuller
sense.68
Minimal vs Narrative Selves

In offering this scalar picture, Rudd in particular is rejecting a distinction operative in
much of the literature on narrative identity in recent years, particularly the literature
influenced by both phenomenology and cognitive science. This is the distinction
between the narrative or autobiographical self (a self-image or self-conception that is
diachronically constituted) and a core or minimal self, the present locus of conscious-
ness which relates to the diachronically extended narrative self.69 And in rejecting
this distinction, MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians will have to deal with both the phe-
nomenological grounds for asserting the existence of these two kinds of self, and the
evidence that Kierkegaard himself operates with something very like this distinction.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness,
which ‘provides the organism with a sense of self about one moment—now—and
about one place—here,’ and extended consciousness which ‘provides the organism
with an elaborate sense of self—an identity and a person, you or me, no less—and
places that person at a point in individual historical time, richly aware of the lived
past and of the anticipated future, and keenly cognizant of the world beside it’.70 Core
consciousness arises with each distinct ‘pulse’ of consciousness and is therefore
confined to the present moment; accordingly, the core self, the entity that core
consciousness senses itself to be, is only ‘a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created
for each and every object with which the brain interacts’.71 Extended consciousness,
by contrast, brings the past and future into view in the present moment and so gives
rise to a temporally extended autobiographical self.72 Like the self endorsed by
narrativists, this autobiographical self contains a sense of diachronic extension,
while both responding to and re-evaluating the past and evolving in response to its
66 67 68
Evans 2006, pp.267–8, 270. Davenport 2012, p.46. Davenport 2012, p.47.
69
Gallagher 2000; Zahavi 2007; Strawson 2011c; Dainton 2008, pp.49–51.
70 71 72
Damasio 2000, p.16. Damasio 2000, pp.16–17. Damasio 2000, p.17.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
anticipated future.73 The core and autobiographical selves are strongly, indeed
‘architecturally’ connected,74 yet remain distinguishable, not least by virtue of their
asymmetrical relationship of dependency: impairments in extended consciousness,
such as severe anterograde amnesia, can leave core consciousness unscathed, whereas
the destruction of the core self entails the destruction of the autobiographical self as
well.75 And mirroring the claim made by some narrativists that we are somehow
anthropologically geared to seek unity and coherence, Damasio claims that evolu-
tionary pressures have led to a situation where the core and autobiographical selves
interact to ensure the unity of the subject: ‘more than one self per organism is not a
good recipe for survival’.76
Dan Zahavi claims that this distinction between the core/minimal self and the
autobiographical/narrative self answers the constitution problem that we noted
above, namely, that there must already be some sort of self, something with a
distinctive first-person perspective, to be able to articulate an identity in narrative
terms.77 Note, however, that the minimal self as presented by Zahavi, Damasio, and
(in a different form as we saw in Chapter 4) Strawson, is something more phenom-
enally robust than a mere linguistic capacity for self-reference. The ability to use the
first-person pronoun at all depends upon a pre-linguistic phenomenal property of
experiencing oneself as a self in all moments of consciousness, an ‘invariant dimen-
sion of first-personal givenness in the multitude of changing experiences’, a tacit
sense that the experience is an experience for someone.78 Zahavi stresses that this is
not to suggest that there is some isolated, inner self, like a Cartesian mental sub-
stance;79 first-personal givenness and the sense of self it engenders is a feature of our
everyday consciousness, not something we uncover in worldless introspection.
Zahavi argues, compellingly, that any successful account of narrative selfhood
will need to presuppose this minimal, core sense of self, the feeling of ‘mineness’, in
order to get off the ground at all. It’s worth adding, though, that the notion of a
property of phenomenal ‘mineness’ built into consciousness can be traced further
back than Husserl—as far back, at least, as Kierkegaard’s unfinished manuscript
Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. As I’ve argued elsewhere,80 this
work’s equation of consciousness with ‘interestedness’ (interesserethed) amounts to
positing a phenomenal property of personal involvement in consciousness, a non-
thematized sense of self-referentiality built into the very structure of thought. That
interestedness is a state to be achieved, rather than a given, marks an important point
of difference between Kierkegaard and the twentieth-century phenomenological
tradition; but if Kierkegaard posits a sense of phenomenal self-referentiality even at
the level of basic consciousness, this suggests that his work will contain something
like a ‘minimal self ’ as currently understood.
73 74 75
Damasio 2000, p.225. Damasio 2000, p.172. Damasio 2000, p.17.
76 77 78
Damasio 2000, p.225. Zahavi 2007, p.191. Zahavi 2005, p.189.
79 80
Zahavi 2005, p.189. Stokes 2010a.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
Moreover, the narrative/minimal self distinction maps onto a gap we’ve encoun-
tered several times throughout this book: a gap between the self experienced as a
here-and-now subject, and the person or human being as a temporally extended
whole. It’s precisely this phenomenal gap that, I’ve argued, makes possible experi-
ences like episodicity and alienation from one’s past and future selves. I’ve also tried
to show that overcoming this gap via phenomenal contemporaneity is a key concern
running throughout Kierkegaard’s writings.
So: can we find something analogous to this contemporary minimal/narrative self
distinction in Kierkegaard? I think we can, and further think that this distinction
seriously complicates matters for anyone wanting to recruit Kierkegaard to the cause
of narrative approaches to personal identity.
Kierkegaard’s Naked Self

As early as his Gilleleje journals of 1835, the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard
already seems to have discarded the idea of the self as a sort of Cartesian inner
substance: for all his assiduous study to that point, ‘What did I find? Not my “I,” [ikke
mit Jeg], for that is exactly what I was trying in that way to find (I imagined, if I may
say so put it, my soul shut up in a box with a spring lock in front, which the external
surroundings would release by pressing the spring)’ (KJN 1, 21–2/SKS 17, 27;
AA:12). This rejection of the self as some pre-existing entity, something within us
that’s already there to be found, is a recurring theme throughout the authorship: as
we’ve seen, for Kierkegaard, the self, soul, or ‘I’ is not to be thought of as some sort of
persisting substance, nor as an homunculus, but rather something that exists in and
through a human being’s relationship to itself, the world and (ultimately) towards the
ground of its being. The discourse ‘To Gain One’s Soul in Patience’ from 1843 (which
appeared the year before The Concept of Anxiety, the work in which we first get the
idea of the human being as a synthesis of opposed factors) speaks of ‘the soul’ (sjel) as
‘the contradiction of the temporal and the eternal’ that ‘can be possessed only in such
a way that it is gained and gained in such a way that it is possessed’ (EUD, 163/SKS
5, 163). In other words:
One who comes naked into the world possesses nothing, but the one who comes into the
world in the nakedness of his soul does nevertheless possess his soul, that is, as something
that is to be gained, does not have it outside himself as something new that is to be
possessed. If this were not the case, if the seemingly empty thought or this expression for
emptiness—nakedness of soul—were not still in the soul, then it could not be possessed and
could not be gained except as the external is possessed, and gained, both of which in the
deeper sense are an illusion, for that which is gained can be lost because it was not possessed
and that which is possessed can be lost because it was not gained. However, that which
safeguards the possession of the soul from being an illusion is precisely the gaining of it, and
that which guarantees that the gaining of it is not an illusion is precisely that it is possessed
beforehand. (EUD, 163–4/SKS 5, 163)
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
This rather tortured language of possessing and gaining amounts to this: the human
being possesses selfhood from the outset as its telos, as that which it is enjoined to
become. What’s interesting here too is the notion of the nakedness of the soul. The
infant comes into the world naked, but the nakedness of its soul refers to its human
capacity to detach itself from the world and its facticity, a capacity that is the
precondition of coming to possess itself, that is, relate to itself in the distinctively
self-constituting way. A human being can be ‘lost in the life of the world’, a state in
which ‘he possesses the world, that is, he is possessed by it’; but ‘in the same moment
he is different from the whole world, and he senses a resistance that does not follow
the movements of the world’s life’ (EUD, 165/SKS 5, 164–5). That awareness of being
different from the world becomes the precondition for gaining one’s soul, that is,
becoming a self: ‘he must let this resistance become more and more pronounced and
in so doing gain his soul, for his soul was this very difference: it was the infinity in the
life of the world in its difference from itself ’ (EUD, 165/SKS 5, 165). We find
something similar in the discourse ‘Strengthening the Inner Being’ from the same
year, where a self-reflexive ‘concern’ (bekymring) individuates the self by differenti-
ating the subject from ‘everything within him by which he himself belongs to the
world and he therein for the world’ (EUD, 86/SKS 5, 93).81 Concern, it seems, strips
us bare.
This language of nudity, connected to the human being’s ability to transcend its
immediacy and thereby acquire selfhood, also occurs in the second part of Either/Or.
Here, the ‘naked self ’ is again treated as a precondition of attaining selfhood, but the
emphasis is placed on how this naked self, having thrown off the world, so to speak,
then goes about re-clothing itself in its concretion:
There was a sect of Hussites who thought that in order to become a normal human being one
had to go around naked like Adam and Eve in Paradise. In our day we not infrequently
encounter people who in the spiritual sense teach the same thing—that one becomes a normal
human being by going stark naked, which can be done by taking off one’s entire concretion.
But this is not the way it is. In the act of despair, the universal human being came forth and
now is behind the concretion and emerges through it . . . Every person, if he so wills, can
become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing off his accidental qualities, but by
remaining in them and ennobling them. But he ennobles them by choosing them. (EO,
2:261–2/SKS, 3, 249)
This ‘remaining in and ennobling’ is the process of self-constitution Davenport

describes: the human being takes up a position from within regarding the ‘accidental
qualities’ it finds itself to be, rather than somehow abstracting itself out of them. And
yet elsewhere, such a wholesale separation from the self ’s concretion is precisely what
William seems to describe:
81
For an extended discussion of bekymring and its individuating functions, see Chapter 9 of Stokes
2010a.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
When the passion of freedom is awakened, it is jealous of itself and by no means allows what
belongs to a person and what does not to remain unspecified and confused. Therefore, at the
first moment of choice the personality seemingly emerges as naked as the infant from the
mother’s womb; at the next moment it is concrete in itself, and a person can remain at this
point only through an arbitrary abstraction. He remains himself, exactly the same that he was
before, down to the most insignificant feature, and yet he becomes another, for the choice
penetrates everything and changes it. Thus his finite personality is now made infinite in the
choice, in which he infinitely chooses himself. (EO, 2:223/SKS 3, 213; emphasis added)
William’s emphasis here, clearly, is on the self ’s coming to possess itself in its
facticity, not on any assertion of a bare, featureless ‘I’ beneath the accidental layers
of psychological history and accretion. There’s no homunculus hiding in a spring-
locked box here, just a human being relating to itself in a process of choosing to be
itself in its concretion. Indeed we’re earlier told that the ‘moment of deliberation’ in
which the self can be indifferent to what it chooses does not actually exist at all, ‘least
of all in the abstract sense in which you wish to hold onto it; and the longer one stares
at it, the smaller it is’ (EO, 2:163/SKS 3, 160). Michelle Kosch reads William as
claiming that the moment of choice is not even an introspectible event at all: like
Climacus’ ‘leap’, such a moment of transition can only appear as something in the
past or yet to come.82 You can’t perceive choice happening; you’ve either already
made a choice or you haven’t. Yet in referring to the emergence of the ‘naked self ’
William seems to posit some state of transition where the subject has shaken off
everything it immediately took itself to be—its social roles, proclivities of character,
and disposition—but not yet willed itself back into its concretion. William calls this
initial moment of choice ‘complete isolation’ in which ‘in choosing myself, I separate
myself from my relations to the whole world, until in this separation I end in an
abstract identity’ (EO, 2:240/SKS 3, 229).
What William wants to warn against is the danger of trying to remain in this state
of isolation (the detachment affected by the ‘ironist’ described in The Concept of
Irony),83 completely withdrawn from the world and attaining only an ‘abstract’
perfection; instead, the self needs to immediately regain its concretion through a
‘repentance [which] places the individual in the closest connection and the most
intimate relation with an outside world’ (EO, 2:241/SKS 3, 230). Looked at from the
perspective of this moral urgency, the moment of choice ought to be infinitesimally
small, for the time spent in a state of deliberative non-commitment is itself an object
of repentance.84 The transition to the ethical life requires a final moment of departure
from the non-ethical life, but for ethical reasons this moment must be minimized as
much as possible: stalling there only compounds the subject’s guilt.
82
Kosch 2006, p.213.
83
On irony as detachment, see e.g. Söderquist 2007; Cross 1998; Kangas 2007a, pp.24–7.
84
Other pseudonyms make similar claims. Vigilius Haufniensis claims that even the time spent
repenting of one’s sins is itself a ‘deficit of action’ and therefore a new sin (CA, 117–18/SKS 4, 419); see
also CUP, 1:526/SKS 7, 478 and SUD, 105/SKS 11, 217.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
The seemingly paradoxical notion that the self must understand itself as separable
from its history, dispositions, and social relationships, and yet relate to this concre-
tion as that which it is, recurs several times in Kierkegaard’s work. In Sickness Unto
Death, a work concerned precisely with how the self relates to itself in its synthetic
concretion, we are told that the person of immediacy must distinguish himself from
his social context and psychological history if he is to attain selfhood. Here, Anti-
Climacus echoes Judge William in tellingly familiar terms: the man of immediacy
may, to a certain extent, have ‘separated his self from externalities, because he has a
dim idea that there may even be something eternal in the self ’ (SUD, 55/SKS 11, 170),
and yet:
He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from every externality, this
naked abstract self, which, compared with immediacy’s fully dressed self, is the first form of the
infinite self and the advancing impetus in the whole process by which a self infinitely becomes
responsible for its actual self with all its difficulties and advantages. (SUD 55/SKS 11, 170, my
emphasis)
Once again, the ‘naked’ self appears, a self that is teleologically enjoined to take
responsibility for the human being that it is, becoming a fully conscious and respon-
sible ethical agent, but which is nonetheless on some level distinguishable from the
human being it identifies with. The despairing attempt to be nothing but this purely
negative freedom and to foreswear what Davenport calls ‘the “own self” which the
ethically responsible person chooses to “put on” ’ will foreclose the possibility of
stable ethical identity, for it would make all commitments arbitrarily reversible.85
Anti-Climacus takes Judge William’s admonition against trying to remain in such
abstraction and raises it to the level of sin: wanting to be ‘the most abstract form, the
most abstract possibility of the self ’ is to sever one’s relation to the power that
established the self, a defiance as despairing as it is blasphemous (SUD, 68/SKS 11,
182). A self that denies its facticity in this way becomes ‘a king without a country,
absolutely ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the
dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment’ (SUD, 69/SKS 11, 183).
In this form of despair, the self uses its ‘infinite form’, its capacity to detach and
distinguish itself from its environment, history, and psychological make-up to try
(and ultimately fail) to create itself ex nihilo (SUD, 68/SKS 11, 182). For both Anti-
Climacus and Judge William, free human beings have—and in order to become
selves must have—a way of referring to or thinking about themselves as something
distinguishable from their externalities and particulars; but a human being who uses
this power to decline its concrete history or situation fails to become a self. To take off
one’s concretion and leave it off is to be a complete non-entity (EO, 2:256/SKS 3,
244); instead, truth lies in the ‘identity’ of the factors of ‘isolation’ and ‘continuity’
(EO, 2:262/SKS 3, 249).
85
Davenport 2001a, p.104.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
Fine, Davenport and Rudd might say: all the passages cited above can support a
reading whereby the ‘naked self ’ is essentially just an abstraction, or perhaps a
somewhat poetic way of describing the human capacities for self-reference or spon-
taneous self-reflection. Conversely, theorists of the minimal/narrative self split, such
as Zahavi, have insisted that the minimal self is not a mere abstraction, but something
figured phenomenologically in our experience.86 So the question that arises here is
this: does this naked self that we find in both Judge William and Anti-Climacus, and
in a more indirect form in the upbuilding discourses, correspond to the minimal
self of contemporary phenomenology? To answer this, I’d like to consider a recent
disagreement between Davenport, Rudd, and myself over whether narrative selfhood,
such as they take Kierkegaard to endorse, requires a minimal self in order to be
intelligible.
The Four-dimensional Problem

A problem for narrative approaches, particularly those that take narrative identity to
aim at the intelligibility of a whole life, is the apparent bifurcation of the self as a
narrative totality and the self as a present, conscious agent.87 It’s just this bifurcation,
and how we overcome it, that we’ve been discussing throughout this book: the gap
between the remembering and remembered self, between me* and my past and
future person-stages, between the self I take myself to be now and the human
being I’ve been in the past and will become in the future. But it’s a bifurcation that
narrative theorists haven’t always taken seriously (Schechtman is a major exception
to this, as we’ve seen) or have actively rejected. Consider this from Rudd:
When I ask whether ‘particular aspects of [my] life hang together’ I can’t help but do so against
some (more or less explicit) sense of what my ‘life as a whole’ is; after all, it is the whole of me
that will be, say, moving to America or getting married, not just an aspect of my life!88
But if my self is a temporally extended, narratively constituted being, this won’t be

quite right: my entire narrative is not moving to America. Rather, a portion of my
narrative—maybe a short one, maybe one that extends right to the end—will now
take place in America (we might then ask whether my moving to America makes
good sense, or specifically narrative sense, in the context of my life). My narrative
doesn’t change location in the way my body does; we can ask where a person is now,
but not where his narrative is now.
We look like running afoul of something analogous to a standard objection to
four-dimensionalist accounts of personal identity. Four-dimensionalists claim that
while ‘person-stages’ may be said to exist at any one time, a person only exists across
86
Zahavi 2005, p.130.
87
For a much fuller version of the problem outlined in this section, see Stokes 2012.
88
Rudd 2007, p.544.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
time as an aggregate of person-stages.89 But as Schechtman notes, whatever we could

point to as a ‘person-stage’ will be a talking, rational, self-referring agent with at least
some degree of temporal duration; in short, on any reasonable construal of the
properties that a person has, person-stages will themselves count as persons—
which means we explain the identity conditions of one person at the cost of positing
a second person occupying the same space.90 And a similar fissure opens up in the
moving-to-America example: in the declaration ‘I am moving to America tomorrow’
the referent of ‘I’ is distinct from the narratively structured lifespan that includes time
in America. The self-as-narrator and the self-as-narratively-conditioned-diachronic-
person have here come apart.91
Narrativists have been at pains to repudiate any sort of Cartesian picture of the self
as a ‘bare locus’ of experience, precisely because it is hard to see how such a bare locus
could support the things we apparently care about in personal identity. What we care
about in, for example, survival is, they argue, no featureless token of identity but ‘a
distinct personality with his or her own unique character, history, way of being’.92
Rudd concedes that this rich, narratively expressed self is distinguishable from ‘a
mere first-person perspective’ which, though a necessary condition for having a self,
can, in cases such as brain damage, detach from the self as narrative entity.93 Yet he
also repudiates the idea of the minimal self as something separate from the narrative
self; he takes it ‘A Self is not a bare I plus some extra ingredient; a bare I is a drastically
diminished Self ’,94 and ‘in normal cases, the narrative self is as basic as it gets . . .
There is no more basic level of selfhood at which experiences are had before being
interpreted in narrative terms.’95 Even if there are valid reasons to sometimes talk
about the core or minimal self, this should not mislead us into reifying this concept as
if it ‘exists as an actual entity alongside or underneath the developed narrative self.
Each of us has—or, better, is—just one self.’96 Davenport likewise accepts that ‘A
Kierkegaardian can still allow a formal distinction between the present operations of
a person’s consciousness and agency and their full practical identity, while holding
that this is not a real distinction between entities.’97
Both Davenport and Rudd want to reject the idea that there is any ontologically
serious split between the self-as-subject and the self-as-object. For Davenport, it is the
person qua narravive that identifies with or repudiates itself from the perspective
of its present state: ‘The present agent, we might say, is the dynamic living face of
a narravive identity moving into the future.’98 Rudd accepts that ‘we do think of
89 90
Lewis 1983. Schechtman 1996, pp.56–60.
91
Note that this rather inelegant phrasing gets around one of the rejoinders Rudd has offered to this
argument: that I wrongly impute to him the view that selves are narratives rather than the subject of
narratives. Rudd 2012, p.191.
92 93
Rudd 2005, p.416. Rudd 2005, p.421; see also Rudd 2012, p.195.
94 95
Rudd 2005, p.421. Rudd 2012, p.196.
96 97 98
Rudd 2012, p.222. Davenport 2012, p.154, my emphasis. Davenport 2012, p.154.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
ourselves (our selves) as both wholly present, and as spread out over time’,99 but that
these are simply two, sometimes divergent or opposed, ways in which a single self can
look at itself. For both Davenport and Rudd, each of us is ultimately not a minimal
self that relates to a narrative self, but rather just a self that relates to itself in a
narratively qualified way.
Yet the minimal/narrative self split needn’t be thought of in the decidedly meta-
physical way that both Davenport and Rudd seem to understand it. Rather we might
say that identity or non-identity with my past and future person-stages is an
experiential reality, whatever metaphysical stories we want to tell about the identity
and persistence conditions of selves. What we see in the various splits we’ve seen in
this book up to this point—between me/me*, the self I am now, and the person
I recall being in the past and anticipate becoming in the future, the experience of
identity or non-identity with the notional subject of remembered or imagined
scenarios, and so forth—is a phenomenal experience of being a self that must relate
itself to past and future selves in a way that identifies or fails to identify with these on
an affective level. And this experience contains a sense of being wholly present now,
rather than being only part of a temporally extended whole. We experience ourselves,
as William James put it, as being ‘as fully present at any moment of consciousness in
which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such moments’.100 That doesn’t mean we
don’t also experience ourselves as diachronically extended in the way that Strawson’s
Diachronics do. But we nonetheless do, I’d suggest, have a sense of being a unified,
wholly present subject, of being all here now. Our past person-stages then become an
object for that subject, an object with which we are to identify or repudiate.
As this is a point about phenomenology rather than metaphysics—or better, about
the metaphysics figured in our phenomenal experience of ourselves101—I think
Davenport’s adoption of a ‘leading edge’ metaphysics of time to get around the
four-dimensionalism objection is probably overkill. He takes Trenton Merricks and
myself to be implicitly committed to either presentism (the view that only the present
moment is ontologically real) or eternalism (the view that all moments in time are
equally real)102 and argues that ‘existential narrative realists’ should instead subscribe
to the view that the past is real and the present moment is the ‘leading edge’ from
which the past is, so to speak, being generated.103 But in fact my four-dimensionalism
objection is, at least in the context of our discussion of Kierkegaard, essentially
indifferent to the metaphysics of time. I can relate in an appropriative way to my
past and future selves even if presentism is true and the past and future are not
ultimately real.
Similarly, Rudd worries about ‘a danger of ontological inflation that Stokes’
terminology threatens’,104 even while accepting some of the phenomenology:
99 100
Rudd 2012, p.191. James 1950, p.299.
101
On the idea of metaphysical claims built into self-experience, see Stokes 2013b.
102 103 104
Davenport 2012, p.154. Davenport 2012, p.154. Rudd 2012, p.226.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
What it comes down to is that at any moment I can see myself—the whole of me—as now
bearing responsibility for who I am. There is this ‘vertical’ element. But this ‘naked,’ present-
tense self is not an entity distinct from the narrative self. (Stokes says it both is and transcends
the narrative self). I agree that I have the capacity to step back from and take responsibility for
what I have been, but this can be accommodated within the understanding of the self as the
protagonist of its narrative or, to recall Davenport’s image, the ‘leading edge’ of its narrative . . .
There is not one ‘narrative’ self that leads a temporal existence and another ‘naked’ one that
lives in an ‘eternal now.’ There is just the one self—me (or you)—who has done all these things,
who is trying to do all those things, and who may be conscious of standing at each moment in
the light of eternity. That I can think of myself in this intense present tense way is certainly
important, but this does not show that the minimal self is more than an abstraction.105
Rudd thinks that I mistakenly conflate the self, the protagonist of a narrative, with the
narrative itself, which ‘leaves [Stokes] having awkwardly to postulate two selves,
which are then said to both be and not be identical with one another’.106 Hence my
account of the narrative self ends up metaphysically over-populated. Despite this
ontological worry, Rudd nonetheless insists that the unity of the present-tense self
and diachronic narrative self is a phenomenological rather than metaphysical
point.107 He tells us that his self-experience is robustly diachronic: he experiences
himself as a being who was in the past and will be in the future, not merely as a
transient self of the sort Strawson and Damasio posit.108
Two things, however, need to be said here. The first is that neither Damasio nor
Strawson claim that the transient selves they assert to exist must lack a sense of
diachronic extension. Rudd claims that insofar as Zahavi ascribes an Husserlian
structure of temporal experience to his ‘minimal’ selves, these can’t be the same
thing as Damasio’s ‘core’ self. For Zahavi, following Husserl, every moment of
experience contains, in addition to a primary impression of the present moment,
both a retention of the previous moment and a protention of the moment to follow.
Rudd seems to think this must be impossible for core selves, living as they do in
each individual ‘pulse’ of consciousness. But presumably a ‘pulse’ of consciousness
could—like any moment of consciousness according to Husserl109—contain both a
retention of the past and a protention of the future. So it’s not clear that a radically
transient self such as Damasio and Strawson take to exist would necessarily lack a
sense of having existed in the past and of projecting into the future. And in any case,
as I’ve argued here, the point I’m making is best understood as a from-the-inside
description of self-experience rather than a point about the ‘objective’ duration of
minimal selves.
Secondly, as we saw in Chapter 5, Rudd doesn’t take the phenomenology of
alienation from past and future person-stages particularly seriously, viewing the
experiences of non-identity the Serious Matron and Young Russian describe as
105 106 107

Rudd 2012, p.226. Rudd 2012, p.227. Rudd 2012, p.196.
108 109
Rudd 2012, p.198. The locus classicus is Husserl 1991.
 PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
merely metaphorical. If, like Rudd, we don’t regard such experiences of temporal
alienation as being real experiences of profound disidentification with our remem-
bered past and anticipated future, the gap between self and person, or minimal self
and narrative self, loses salience. Rudd thinks of these reports of non-identity as
simple hyperbole. What I’ve suggested here is that they rather point to a profound
gap between the self I experience myself as being right now and the past and future
I imaginatively encounter, a gap that must be overcome. The phenomenal experience
of self-identity across time is, in short, much more of an achievement than Rudd
implicitly allows.
Davenport makes a further, related objection to my view: as the narrative self
includes character traits (i.e. dispositions that must be diachronic given that we only
express them episodically) and as our choices and actions express these character
traits, then ‘if character traits are real phenomena rather than a convenient fiction,
then the Stokes/Zahavi bifurcation cannot go “all the way down”.’110 (This is related
to the live problem of what Strawson calls the ‘ontic depth’ of minimal selves.)111
A minimal self, on this view, could not express a diachronically and narratively
qualified trait like resentment or friendship, for these are features of a narratively
extended self. On this basis, and citing Stanley Hauweras on character, Davenport
concludes that ‘the presently choosing agent is never the “naked self” that Stokes
finds in some of the writings of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William—a self
momentarily standing outside all its acquired dispositions’.112 But again, if the naked
self is understood as a phenomenal datum rather than a metaphysical entity, I don’t
think this is in fact a problem: I experience myself as a wholly present subject, here-
and-now, whose actions express character traits that were formed by the past actions
of the human being I now am. I can’t somehow step outside my character, but I can
make my character, and the history that has formed it, into an object for myself and
take up a position on it. Of course my character will still be transparently operative in
the way in which I take up such a position on my character: if I am, say, someone who
is easily embarrassed, then I may make my embarrassment an object of my evalu-
ation and may find myself embarrassed by how easily embarrassed I am. In that way
I am both expressing my character trait while simultaneously experiencing that trait
as something separable from what I am, something I can identify or disidentify with.
Hence I think Davenport is too quick to dismiss the Sartrean point, made by
Lippitt following Mulhall, that ‘because the self as object of reflective consciousness
does not coincide with the subject doing the reflecting, any narrative it can “tell”
about itself will fail to include this very act of narration’.113 Davenport thinks this is
no threat to the narrative view because such a threat requires the (erroneous)
assumption that a narrative identity must be entirely the result of reflection and
articulation; in his view, most of the content of our narrative self-understanding is
110 111
Davenport 2012, p.30. Strawson 2009, pp.330–1; cf. Johnston 2010, p.71.
112 113
Davenport 2012, p.34. Davenport 2012, p.34.
PRACTICAL AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY 
more implicit than this. But the Sartrean point has another kind of significance too:
the very fact that I can make myself an object to myself opens up the possibility of
experiencing a sense of identity or non-identity with that object. The sense of being a
present subject, a minimal or naked self, is thus the experience of being more than or
beyond the concrete human being that I am. I say ‘experience’ because this is not
simply something we discover reflectively, but in the experiences of affective identi-
fication, alienation, and ownership that we’ve been discussing.
Hence, I don’t think that imputing something like a narrative/minimal self dis-
tinction to Kierkegaard runs a risk of needless over-ontologization. In fact, I think
such a conception, understood as a subjective dimension of experience rather than
a feature of any metaphysical theory, helps to make sense of Kierkegaard’s talk of
a ‘naked self ’ as well as cohering with the affective gap between self and person,
or present subject and diachronically extended human being, that we’ve seen
haunts both Kierkegaard’s work and contemporary discussions of self-experience.
In Chapter 8, I will hopefully make this point clearer, by pointing to the specifically
eschatological dimensions of this ‘naked self ’ and the experience of time it engenders.
8
Survival and Eschatology
Identity and the Survival Problem

In Chapter 7, I argued that when Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms speak somewhat
obliquely of a ‘naked self ’, this is not to be understood as mere abstraction, nor
simply a poetic way of describing our capacities for reflection and self-reference, but
as a real phenomenal datum, a part of lived experience. One helpful way to explicate
this experiential reality of the ‘naked self ’ in both Either/Or and The Sickness Unto
Death is, perhaps surprisingly, to consider how each work approaches the issue of
posthumous survival. The question of how the same person can exist successively in
earthly existence and an afterlife is the historical wellspring of personal identity
theory itself, from the Patristics down to Locke, and continues to pop up in both
personal identity discussions and philosophy of religion.1 Even for writers who reject
the notion of an afterlife, the thought-experiment provided by posthumous existence
can help us get clarity about what we care about in survival: working out what would
have to be the case for posthumous existence to count as survival can help us get
clearer about the nature of survival in less dramatic circumstances as well.
One way into this topic is to begin with Kierkegaard’s discussion of the desire,
which most of us have probably experienced at some point, to become someone else.
As the language suggests, this is precisely a problem about personal identity, and both
Judge William and Anti-Climacus discuss it in those terms. Both pseudonyms
diagnose an apparent incoherence at the heart of such a desire: someone who wishes
they could acquire the history, properties, and projects of some other person none-
theless imagines that doing so would somehow leave their identity intact. William
tells us that one who forms the desire to be completely changed in all his particulars
‘is nevertheless continually of the opinion that he would be himself even if everything
were changed’ and that ‘there is something within him that in relation to everything
else is absolute, something whereby he is who he is even if the change he achieved by
his wish were the greatest possible’ (EO, 2:214/SKS 3, 206). He imagines the future
scenario as if it would still be him in the future, albeit in radically altered life
circumstances, and perhaps even with a totally different personality. This certainly
1
See e.g. Perry 1978; Hick 1976, pp.278–95; Audi 1976; Mavrodes 1977; Quinn 1978; Inwagen 1978;
Baker 2007; Buckareff and Wagenen 2010.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
sounds suspiciously like a substantialist picture in which a featureless but identity-

preserving Cartesian ego passes from one factical set to another—and as we’ve seen,
even by this early stage Kierkegaard has long since rejected ego-substantialism.
Judge William is adamant that the person who wants to be someone else is
mistaken in thinking ‘he could be changed continually and yet remain the same, as
if his innermost being were an algebraic symbol that could signify anything whatever
it is assumed to be’ (EO, 2:215/SKS 3, 206). The subject cannot surrender her entire
concretion and still be herself, because the only way to be herself is to choose herself
in that concretion. Anti-Climacus deploys the same thought-experiment, this time
directed against the ‘man of immediacy’ who understands himself as nothing more
than the totality of his social identity:
The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the
clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities . . . So when the externals have
completely changed for the person of immediacy and he has despaired, he goes one step
further; he thinks something like this, it becomes his wish: What if I became someone else, got
myself a new self. Well, what if he did become someone else? I wonder whether he would
recognize himself. (SUD, 53/SKS 11, 169)
For ‘practical’ approaches to the question of personal identity, the claim that some-
one who only knows herself as the externalities that constitute her social identity
wouldn’t be able to recognize herself if those externalities changed completely
actually sounds pretty reasonable. If I try to envision a version of myself deprived
of my body, personality, name, job, and set of social relations, what’s left to enable me
to see that person as being continuous with me in any satisfying respect? Absent a
Cartesian ego, we seem drawn to the Parfitian reductionist conclusion that there is no
‘further fact’ about identity underlying these factors.
So it’s fortunate, then, that according to Anti-Climacus such ‘ludicrous’ things as
becoming someone else never happen. But just two pages later, we find this:
The question of immortality has often occupied him, and more than once he has asked the
pastor whether there is such an immortality, whether one would actually recognize himself
again—something that certainly must be of very particular interest to him, since he has no self.
(SUD, 56/SKS 11, 171)
A person composed of nothing but his social relations and qualifications simply
would not exist if he passed into an afterlife in which those relationships no longer
held; there is nothing that could pass into the afterlife and still be him. And as we’ll
see, Kierkegaard’s references to the afterlife emphasize just such a radical discon-
tinuity between this life and the next. And yet Anti-Climacus is not suggesting the
‘man of immediacy’ will somehow evade posthumous judgement. Rather, the imme-
diate person’s ‘ludicrous mistake’ was just to assume that social relationships and
designations were exhaustive of what he is, for ‘a self is indeed infinitely distinct from
an externality’ (SUD, 53/SKS 11, 169). The question is what this ‘infinitely distinct’
self might be: if ego-substantialism is off the table, and if the self has been stripped of
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
all its external determinants, what could there be of oneself to recognize in some
posthumous existence, or to sustain existence from this world to a resurrection
world?
This question of post-mortem survival would also seem to present a problem for
any narrativist who wants to preserve the idea of posthumous existence—and that
includes Kierkegaard, if, as narrativists like Rudd and Davenport claim, Kierkegaard
is one of their number. For Kierkegaard, a human being becomes a self by ‘relating to
itself ’ in a particular way. But as Adorno puts it in his critical engagement with
Kierkegaard, ‘No theology has ever conceived the idea of hope for a “relation”, or for
the indeterminate substratum of the relation, but solely as hope for the mortal
creature’.2 What self-constituting narrative relationship could hold between a living
human being and a self that exists in some radically different post-mortem or post-
resurrection world? How could a narratively constituted self persist after biological
death? How could we now regard that future posthumous self as being narratively
connected to us? These aren’t meant to be fatal objections, but they are questions that
a narrativist would need to answer if they wanted posthumous existence and narra-
tive identity to be compossible. Of course, if we just accept that there is no posthumous
existence, then the problem disappears entirely, or becomes purely hypothetical. For
Kierkegaard, however, immortality is essential and non-negotiable, concerned as he is,
as Tamara Monet Marks has argued, to show his reader just what’s at stake in believing
orthodox Christian doctrines such as bodily resurrection.3 So any reading of Kierke-
gaard that takes Kierkegaard himself to be internally consistent has to explain how his
account of selfhood is compatible with his eschatological views. And as I will explain in
Chapter 9, those of us who reject the idea of posthumous consciousness can still find
something very important in Kierkegaard’s discussions of immortality.
In a sense this ‘survival problem’ is related to, though importantly different from,
the broader ‘mortality problem’ that besets narrative approaches to identity: if what I
am is something constituted by a narrative, and narratives depend on their endings in
order to give them the narrative shape and meaning they have, then what I ultimately
am is unknowable to me.4 In literary narratives, the timing of any given death is
determined by the logic of the narrative structure; what the death means and when it
happens mutually determine each other. As Peter Goldie notes, when we talk about
the ‘beginning’, ‘middle’, and ‘end’ of a narrative (including the narrative of a whole
life, even though Goldie rejects that level of generality) ‘these are already narrativised
notions: there is already something “fitting” about them in the narrative’.5 But while
Pascal lamented that ‘the last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play’,6 death
doesn’t always arrive according to a neat five-act structure. Death, notes Kierkegaard,
is ‘a denouement, and then it is over, one is buried’ (WL, 252/SKS 9, 251), but he also
2 3 4
Adorno 1989, p.82. Marks 2010, 2011. I discuss this problem in Stokes 2006.
5 6
Goldie 2012, p.165. Pascal 1995, p.53.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
notes that many lives ‘go on until death comes and puts an end to life, yet without, in
the sense of a conclusion, bringing the end with it’ (BA, 7/SKS 15, 93). Johannes
Climacus imagines responding to a party invite with the profound jest: ‘I will come,
definitely, believe me, except in case a roof tile falls down and kills me, because then
I cannot come’ (CUP, 1:88/SKS 7, 87)—a stunning example of both the ‘certain-
uncertainty’ of death (TDIO, 91/SKS 5, 460), that is, its radical contingency with
respect to timing, and the way in which it can intervene suddenly in a life in a way
that seems to make a mockery of our desire to understand that life as a coherent
narrative.
For narrativists, the meaning of a given life-experience or event is determined by
its place in a larger weave of narratively structured events and meanings. My sitting
down to write these words is an event in the larger narrative of writing a chapter,
writing a book, being a philosopher, and so forth. If, as MacIntyrean narrativists do,
we want to talk about a final level of narrative intelligibility that encompasses a whole
life, then events up to and including death7 will determine the meaning and signifi-
cance of those events. But given that the events of my future, including how and
when I will die, are necessarily unknown to me, then the ultimate meanings of my
life-events may turn out to be radically different to what I take them to be.
Davenport offers two main lines of response to this mortality objection, the second
of which also bears on the survival problem. The first is that it is exaggerated: many
people do have ‘well-justified beliefs that they will probably die soon (even within
some specified time period)’8 and can use the little time left in ways that cement
the narrative meaning of their lives. The second—and arguably more successful—
response is that, even acknowledging the radical contingency of death, we can live in
such a narratively and volitionally unified way that not even sudden death can alter
the meaning of our lives. Davenport’s MacIntyre-inflected reading of Kierkegaardian
teleology employs fundamentally Aristotelian terms, noting the sense in which
Kierkegaard also shares with Augustine and Aquinas a belief that ‘virtues are qualities
of character connected to the attainment of beatitude as the final end and highest
good of human life’.9 The very contingency of death should focus us upon the
possibility that our lives might suddenly be cut short without this telos being reached.
In that sense, the idea of a final judgement might amount to the merely heuristic
thought of a point in time at which there will no longer be any prospect of attaining
such a state of virtue, as Davenport has recently argued: at death, our life acquires ‘an
objective significance that no longer changes, that is eternal . . . at death, our practical
identity is eternally what it has become: our leeway-liberty ends and our character is
7
And possibly even beyond: for example, the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge is a crucial episode for
how we understand and evaluate the life of its creator, John Roebling, even though Roebling didn’t live to
see it completed.
8 9
Davenport 2012, p.158. Davenport 2001b, p.273.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
forever fixed’.10 We die, a life is completed, and the capacity to change our despairing
self-relation disappears.11
This form of concern, however, is quite a long way from the traditional picture of
personal posthumous survival, which seems to require a self that is more than just the
sum of its virtues, something that transcends the narrative of earthly life and can be
present both here and in the posited resurrection world. Something needs to survive
between this world and the next. Following the infusion of Platonic susbstantialism
into Christianity, an immaterial, immortal soul came to be seen as the vehicle of this
transcendence. After Locke, as we’ve seen, that sort of substantialist claim became
unavailable. Yet it’s telling that despite their rejection of substantialism, both Anti-
Climacus and Judge William seem to equate the ‘naked self ’ that sees itself as
radically distinct from its history and externalities with this transworld bearer of
eschatological judgement. William continually argues that this naked self, a self that
can transcend and take a position upon the diachronic human being that it relates
to, is the basis upon which we can choose ourselves in our ‘eternal validity’ (e.g. EO,
2:211/SKS 3, 203). Anti-Climacus, too, frequently describes the self ’s coming to see
itself as distinct from its environment and brute facts about its personality as its
becoming aware of ‘something eternal’ within it. The ‘naked self ’ then, seems
inherently bound up with notions of eternality and, by extension, eschatology. Yet
if Kierkegaard is—rightly—read as a non-substantialist, what is this ‘something
eternal’ that is the subject of personal immortality and eternal judgement? When
we are told that the man of immediacy has forgotten ‘his name, divinely understood’
(SUD, 33–4/SKS 11, 149), what are we to understand as the referent of such a name?
Death and the Divided Self

Both the survival and mortality problems point, I’d suggest, towards the very split
that we’ve been discussing throughout this work: a split between the self understood
as the present locus of experience and the diachronically extended person. This is not
surprising, for as Mark Johnston has very convincingly argued, this split is reflected
in our concernful attitudes towards death itself.12 Say I see a notation on today’s
calendar that says ‘PS dentist appointment 1:30pm’, I might feel pity for PS that he
has to go to the dentist. I may think something like this: ‘That poor guy. I mean,
I hate going to my dentist; there’s always some pain, and a hefty bill, and a lecture
about flossing, and—wait a minute, those are my initials! I’m PS! Oh no, I’m going to
the dentist today!’ This (admittedly quite artificial) train of thought, with its sudden
shift from other-regarding pity to egocentric fear, seems to turn on the realization
of some further fact. But what new fact is introduced by this ‘I am PS’ that isn’t
10 11
Davenport 2011, pp.170–1. Davenport 2012, p.156.
12
See also Fischer 2009, p.70 for a discussion of the role ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ selves play in the related
question of who is harmed by death.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
contained in the thought that ‘PS is PS’?13 How does knowing that it’s me that is
going to the dentist change things?
As we saw in Chapter 5, according to Johannes Climacus the earnest thought that
I will die and the thought that a sort of ‘I-in-general’ will die are importantly different
in just this sort of way. Likewise, for Strawson, there’s something different in the
thought that GS did this terrible thing and that I* did this terrible thing. For
Johnston, this difference is figured in the gap between person-identity and self-
identity, and fearing the death of the person is correspondingly different to fearing
the death of the self. ‘Person’ refers to a human being who exists across time and has
certain properties, relationships, projects, and so forth. In fearing death, I may fear
that there will no longer be a person called PS, who looks like me, looks after my kids,
writes my books and papers, teaches my students, and indirectly pays off my dentist’s
mortgage. There will be no person doing what I do in the world, and insofar as
I believe the things I do are worth doing, that is prima facie a bad thing and its
prospect worth fearing. But this isn’t all we fear when we fear death. Our more
fundamental fear is our loss of self, the thought that this subjective ‘arena of presence’
as Johnston puts it will no longer exist. It’s not just that I fear there won’t be a person
in the world who answers to my description; I fear, more basically, the extinguish-
ment of the subject figured in my perspectival experience of the world. Experiences
like this show what I take to be myself as distinguishable from my person, and that
I can care about them in different ways.
Johnston is, I think, right that ‘Self identity, the identity that guarantees the
continuation of one’s immediately available arena of presence over time, is more
basic in its importance than personal identity, the identity over time of the public
person who happens now to be at the centre of one’s arena of presence’.14 But he also
thinks there are no selves in this fundamental sense: ‘The putative substance sortal
“arena of presence and action”, like “consciousness” or “self”, is a busted substance
sortal; busted, I take it, by the empirical fact that there are no mental substances.’15
There are persons (and we can and do care about the survival of persons), but the self
that appears to be at the centre of my perspectively ordered experiences is only
‘virtual or apparent’.16 In Chapter 3 we saw a distinction between ‘notional’ and
‘actual’ subjects of memory and anticipation. In Johnston’s picture, all subjects are
merely notional (‘merely intentional’ in Johnston’s terms) and so not ‘objective’.
And, Johnston adds, as ‘the identity of merely intentional objects is not an objective
matter’ it is ‘not an important matter’ either.17 In a world without souls or immaterial
substances—the world that we, and Kierkegaard, inhabit—there can be no ontologic-
ally respectable selves worth worrying about. Hence the answer to the question ‘what
is this “something eternal” that is the subject of personal immortality and eternal
judgement?’ can only be: nothing at all.
13 14 15
Johnston 2010, pp.146–8. Johnston 2010, p.163. Johnston 2010, p.175.
16 17
Johnston 2010, p.164. Johnston 2010, p.165.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
Johnston goes on to outline a way in which, in his view, we can achieve a kind of
survival by identifying with the persons who will live on after our death. Insofar,
however, as I here want to explore what Kierkegaard can (and cannot) show us about
personal identity, I want to linger for a moment with the implications of Johnston’s
view for Kierkegaard’s account. If Johnston is right, then in appealing to a ‘naked
self ’ that experiences itself as something over-against the diachronically extended
person, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms get the person/self distinction right but then
wrongly reify the self. If the self is not an immaterial substance then, in Johnston’s
view, it can have no real ontological significance, and the Kierkegaardian subject is
wrong to place such soteriological weight upon it. Yet I think Johnston has here
made the same problematic move that Strawson makes: getting the phenomen-
ology of the present-tense self correct but then trying to turn that phenomenology
into an ‘objective’ metaphysical account of the diachronic existence of such selves.
With Strawson, this metaphysical move leaves us with an unimaginably large
number of infinitesimally short-lived selves, while for Johnston the self simply
can’t have diachronic extension at all, because ‘arenas of presence’ don’t admit of
re-identification; speaking of such selves ‘can only provide for ways of picking
ourselves out at a time and not over time’.18
Common to both these approaches is an assumption that persons and selves (or
human beings and selves, PS and me*, narrative and minimal selves etc.) must be
analysed with reference to a single temporal frame. Say that an average Strawsonian
self lasts a single second; we could then say that the lifespan of a human who lives 70
years contains about 2.2 billion selves. But as we saw in Chapter 6, Kierkegaard’s
work resists this sort of move, which is akin to the category mistake of introducing
temporal categories into the eternal (EO, 1:41/SKS 3, 48). It insists on seeing the self
as an irreducibly present-tense matter. To be a self is to relate here and now to the past
and the future of the person/human being you are in a particular, appropriative way.
In other words, what Kierkegaard draws our attention to here, in explicating the
self/person split and how it operates in the context of contemporary discussions of
identity, is the way in which each of these elements has its own distinct temporality,
and that these temporalities are not to be conflated or folded into a single temporal
schema. We must not, in other words, turn the present of the self into the discrete
moment in the life of a human being to which it corresponds.
That in turn means that the survival problem takes on quite a different complex-
ion: posthumous survival is a problem about persons, but is a problem for selves,
whose temporality is quite different to that of the diachronic persons they relate to. If
narrativists want to recruit Kierkegaard to their ranks, without either denying that
Kierkegaard does take soteriology seriously or imputing some sort of deep incoher-
ence to his view, they will therefore need to accept that Kierkegaard’s concern for
18
Johnston 2010, p.169.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
salvation means identity cannot just be narrative for Kierkegaard. The narrative,
diachronic person must also be supplemented by a naked self that appropriates the
person to itself even as it knows itself to transcend that person. Essential to this naked
self is its present-tense character—and as we’ll see shortly, for Kierkegaard, the
present of this present-tense self is not merely a moment, but the moment
(Øjeblikket): the place where time meets eternity.
Naked Self and Eternity

At this point we need to take note of the divergent understandings of eternality that
characterize Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death, and their correspondingly
different understandings of the temporality of selfhood. Part of the reason Judge
William’s description of selfhood appeals so much to narrativist Kierkegaardians is
that his self is explicitly temporally extended in a historically developmental fashion,
one in which the self-constituting moment of repentance itself becomes a moment in
that history:
The self he chooses has a boundless multiplicity within itself inasmuch as it has a history, a
history in which he acknowledges identity with himself. This history is of a different kind, for
in this history he stands in relation to other individuals in the race and to the whole race, and
this history contains painful things, and yet he is the person he is only through this history.
(EO, 2:216/SKS 3, 207)
At the moment of self-constituting choice, the self does not construct itself ex nihilo,
but instead binds itself to its past and to the human race from which it arises (EO,
2:239/SKS 3, 228); the subject ‘repents himself back into himself, back into the family,
back into the race, until he finds himself in God’ (EO, 2:216/SKS 3, 207). On this
picture, self-constitution through repentance is the acquiring of a qualitatively new,
ethically charged form of continuity with my past and future. I take ownership and
responsibility for both my personal past and the communal past in which I am
embedded.19 Thus William’s self has a robustly in-the-world quality about it; the
seemingly worldless naked self exists for just a moment before re-immersing itself
(but with a new form of self-consciousness and volitional coherence) into the flow of
concrete social life.
William still uses the language of traditional Christian soteriology; for instance, the
self-constituting choice of myself in my ‘absolute validity’ (EO, 2:219/SKS 3, 209)
amounts to discovering ‘my soul’ or ‘innermost being’ (EO, 2:221/SKS 3, 211). But
what’s interesting about the way William uses such apparently religiously-freighted
terms as ‘soul’, ‘judgement’, and ‘eternity’ is that he does so in ways that seem to
denude them of their eschatological meanings. The admonition respice finem, ‘think
of the end’, offered to one whose moral well-being we are concerned for, is for
19
Lillegard 2001, p.223.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
William no memento mori but rather a carpe diem that has nothing deathly about it:
‘the word finis does not mean death, because even that is not a human being’s most
difficult task, but life, that there comes a moment when in reality the thing to do is to
begin to live’; here our concern for our friend’s soul is that he will end up ‘a defective
specimen of a human being instead’ in this life (EO, 2:327/SKS 3, 308–9).
William is keen to make his younger aesthetic friend aware that time is running
out, but then proposes that through self-constituting choice (such as the commit-
ment to marriage), the self can attain an ‘eternity’ within life. Thus the married
man has fought ‘the most dangerous enemy, which is time’ but has ‘not killed time
but has rescued and preserved it in eternity’, and so ‘solve[d] the great riddle, to
live in eternity and yet to hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking
does not shorten but lengthens his eternity’ (EO 2:138/SKS 3, 137). The ‘continuity’
attained in marriage gives love an inner ‘eternity’ that shields it from the corrosive
effects of time. But this eternity, measured out by the hall clock’s chime and
successive wedding anniversaries, doesn’t seem to amount to anything more than
open-ended continuity within time; it’s sempiternal rather than eternal. It’s cer-
tainly a long way from the eschatological notion of a future judgement after a life is
concluded. The ethicist’s eternity ‘does not come afterward, as for the knight, but
he has had eternity in time, has preserved eternity in time’, an eternity that is to be
preferred to that found in ‘a story from the Middle Ages about a poor wretch who
woke up in hell and shouted “What time is it?”—whereupon the devil answered,
“Eternity!” ’ (EO, 2:138–9/SKS 3, 137).
In Sickness Unto Death eternity plays a rather different role. The Anti-Climacan
conception of the self is robustly theological in character, and thus we are told that ‘to
have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man,
but it is also eternity’s claim upon him’ (SUD, 21/SKS 11, 137). And this ‘claim’ has a
distinctly fatal hue. Eternity, for Anti-Climacus, refers not to continuity within time,
but instead to a point at which ‘the hourglass of temporality’ has run out and worldly
distinctions such as sex, class, and relative fortune have been dispensed with (SUD,
27/SKS 11, 143). In this context, eternity is a situation in which one’s life as a totality
receives a final judgement:
Eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing:
whether you have lived in despair or not . . . And if so, if you have lived in despair, then,
regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not
acknowledge you, it never knew you—or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known
and it binds you to yourself in despair. (SUD, 27–8/SKS 11, 143–4)
For Anti-Climacus, a human being who does not relate to itself in a self-constituting
way (that is, who is in despair) fails to qualify as a self. It is whether a person has
attained this status of selfhood that is at issue in the scenario of eternal judgement:
‘No matter how much the despairing person avoids it . . . eternity nevertheless will
make it manifest that his condition was despair’ (SUD, 21/SKS 11, 136). As we saw in
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
Chapter 6, this threatens to lead us into a range of apparent contradictions about the
circumstances under which selves can be lost and regained. You’ll recall that the key
to resolving these contradictions comes—ironically enough—from Judge William,
who claims that we make a mistake when ‘the eternal is drawn too much into
temporal qualifications’ (EO, 2:41/SKS 3, 48) such as continuity, duration, and
completion. It seems clear from the discussion above that William himself makes
this mistake in his discussion of the eternal as open-ended continuity. In Sickness
Unto Death, however, this thought finds expression in the form of the thoroughly
present-tense character of despair, which can only be asked about in terms of its
presence or absence in the present moment. The judgement that one is in despair and
thus not a self—the judgement of eternity—is a judgement of an entire human life,
but one based upon its status as it is now. In that sense, we cannot speak of having
been a self, only of whether this human being, if exposed to such a judgement right
now, is a self.
In trying to understand what Kierkegaard means by describing the human being
as a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal, Rudd discerns three possible readings
of ‘eternity’. The first is, he takes it, a deflationary one, and ‘certainly weaker than
Kierkegaard himself intended, though it is true to Kierkegaard as far as it goes’: the
‘eternal’ element of the self is simply a poetic way of describing our reflective capacity
to transcend the present moment in memory, anticipation and planning agency.20
The second sense of ‘eternal’ picks out an orientation towards an unchanging Good
(in keeping with the Platonic rather than Aristotelian teleology Rudd sees at work in
Kierkegaard). The third possible reading of ‘eternity’ here is the strongest: the
expectancy of a salvation outside of time, a perspective that ‘will give us a perspective
on what our lives have been as a whole—and one in which all possibility of self-
deception has been stripped away’.21
Rudd’s first option maps neatly onto the view that the ‘naked self ’ is merely a
poetic way of describing our capacity for self-transcendence in planning and recol-
lection. Alastair Hannay notes Sickness Unto Death’s assumption that ‘human beings
are peculiar among other beings by not being exhaustively identified by finite
properties. There is an irreducible particularity, an “I”, for which each “definite”
collection of properties is its own collection’, but goes on to speak of this particularity
as a mere ‘vantage point’ that human beings can take upon themselves.22 As we’ve
seen, both Rudd and Davenport resist the idea that the ‘naked self ’ could be anything
more than this. However, Rudd also agrees with Marks that Kierkegaard does have
‘an entirely realist belief in personal immortality’,23 but avers that we can go along
with Kierkegaard quite a long way without holding such a belief ourselves, by taking
immortality to be a regulative ideal rather than a metaphysical reality.24 I agree
wholeheartedly with Rudd both that Kierkegaard is a realist about immortality and
20 21 22
Rudd 2012, p.164. Rudd 2012, p.166. Hannay 1998, pp.339–40.
23 24
Rudd 2012, p.166. Rudd 2012, p.166.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
that if we instead take immortality as a regulative ideal we can still find much to agree
with in his work. But these claims do open up the point that the ‘naked self ’ needs the
sort of experiential dimension I’ve been ascribing to it here: a sense of itself as being
more than the totality of a human life, precisely because it is answerable for that
totality. My human life, what I am, have been and will be, presents itself to the subject
I experience myself as being now as the thing for which I am to answer, something
I must subjectively appropriate—and which I can fail to appropriate properly.
Rudd rejects the idea that the ‘minimal self ’ of Damasio, Strawson, and Zahavi,
which I’ve here identified with William/Anti-Climacus’ ‘naked self ’, exists atempo-
rally, outside of time.25 As we’ve seen, it might seem truer to say that the naked self
exists in a sort of eternal present, always in the here-and-now, such that we can’t
meaningfully speak of its duration or of conditions for its re-identification (which,
for Johnston, is precisely why such entities cannot ultimately matter). But Kierke-
gaard does not leave things at that. Rather, in being concerned for how the naked self
interacts with the human being—the phenomenal correlate of the human being
relating to itself—Kierkegaard articulates a bivalent temporality to match this bifur-
cate selfhood. As we’ve seen, the here-and-now subject relates in the present to its
past and its future, but it does so in a way that points in the direction of eternity
understood as a final judgement over the whole. As such, a key part of Kierkegaard’s
phenomenology of selfhood is that, insofar as we are both present-tense subjects and
diachronically extended human beings, we simultaneously live both in time and in
eternity. And that ramifies through our experience of time itself.
Eternity as Judgement
For someone who writes as extensively as he does on death, Kierkegaard is surpris-
ingly reluctant to say much about the nature of posthumous existence. I’ve argued
elsewhere that Kierkegaard steers around this topic because he regards asking such
questions as a means of evading the existential import of death: the thought of death
should focus our attention on how we live our lives, not how we might live after our
deaths.26 He makes this point most forcefully in the discourse ‘There Will Be a
Resurrection of the Dead, Of The Righteous—And The Unrighteous’, which dis-
misses any doubt over the reality of immortality: ‘Fear it, it is only all too certain; do
not doubt whether you are immortal—tremble, because you are immortal’ (CD, 203/
SKS 10, 212). Once we equate immortality with judgement, all other words expended
on the nature of immortality become a waste of precious time: ‘There is not one more
word to say about immortality; the one who says one more word or a word in another
direction had better beware of judgement’ (CD, 206/SKS 10, 215). In the light of final
judgement, wondering what the afterlife will be like or whether your childhood pets
25 26
Rudd 2012, p.200. See Stokes 2013a.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
are waiting for you in heaven becomes an indefensible squandering of your remain-
ing moments of life.
So it’s quite consistent that Kierkegaard says very little about what immortality
would be like. But he is nonetheless clear about what immortality is not. In Christian
Discourses Kierkegaard insists that ‘Immortality is not a continued life, a continued
life as such in perpetuity, but immortality is the eternal separation between the
righteous and the unrighteous; immortality is no continuation that results as a matter
of course but a separation that results from the past’ (CD, 205/SKS 10, 214), while in
‘An Occasional Discourse’ (better known as ‘Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing’)
we read that ‘eternity is certainly not like a new world, so that the person who had
lived in time according to the ways of time and busyness, when happy and well he
had arrived in eternity, now could try his hand at adopting the customs and practices
of eternity’ (UDVS, 66/SKS 8, 174).27 Hence we are not to think of eternity as some
other state that is somehow continuous with our present existence. Rather, eternity is
presented to us as a sort of atemporal state of final judgement. To be immortal is to be
subject to an eternal judgement over one’s life.
And it is the whole of one’s life that is at issue in this judgement. To return yet
again to where we started, recall that Locke’s ultimate concern with regard to
personal identity is the soteriological imputability of each moment in a life. This
raises, as we saw, a question about the relation between memory and imputability,
and about whether we are ultimately (eschatologically) responsible for parts of our life
we no longer have memory access to. I’ve argued that in his account of contemporan-
eity, Kierkegaard rejects the intuition that we are somehow less responsible for those
parts of our life that are further away from us in time—an eternal judgement, being
outside of time, is, so to speak, equidistant with all moments in time, including all
moments in any given life. The experience of contemporaneity, of a past event’s
happening for me now, is the phenomenal expression of that equidistance. But beyond
parts of our life that we might be affectively alienated from, Kierkegaard also insists that
we are responsible for those to which we have no memory access at all:
What a terrible responsibility when at some time, if not sooner, then in eternity, a person’s
recollections rise up accusingly against him, recollections of the many times and the many
ways God spoke to him, but futilely, in his inner being. Recollections, yes, because even if he
himself has long forgotten what was wasted, so that he therefore does not recollect it, God and
27
See also JP, 1955/SKS 26, 169; NB32:72: ‘But people go along living in the foolish opinion that one
automatically continues the life one leads here on earth in all eternity, that one takes the city in which one
lives, everything, everything directly into eternity. That is why men who would shudder at the changes and
isolation of emigrating to another continent nonetheless think they will live for eternity.’ See also
Whittaker 2000, p.194: ‘In eternity, there are no “customs” and there is no “busyness.” There are no
means at all by which one’s wishes are brought to fulfillment, since eternity is removed from all striving and
gaining and succeeding.’
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
eternity have not forgotten it; he is reminded of it, and in eternity it becomes his recollection.
(CD, 253–4/SKS 110, 267)
In ‘An Occasional Discourse’ we’re further told that the God before whom we are to
make this eternal accounting is omniscient, and ‘knows every thought from afar,
knows clearly all its paths, even when it sneaked past the person’s own consciousness’
(UDVS, 22/SKS 8, 136, my emphasis). So what we are to be judged for doesn’t simply
extend to the sins we’re conscious of, or those we’ve forgotten, but those that we were
ignorant of as well. Once again, it seems that the extension of our eschatological
responsibility can extend significantly beyond the boundaries of our consciousness—
meaning that we take soteriological responsibility for something without completely
knowing what we are answering for. This ultimate unknowability is acknowledged in
a passage later in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ where it is made clear that we must
simply believe that this seemingly impossible self-transparency will be brought about
in eternity:
Yes, in temporality, where we are cross-questioned about one thing and another, in the
multifariously compounded complexity of interaction we certainly would think it a delusion,
a figment of the imagination, that each one of these countless millions of people could
separately be convinced, accurately down to the very least detail, of what constitutes his life;
but in eternity it can be done, because each one separately becomes the single individual.
(UDVS, 131/SKS 8, 230)
Kierkegaard continually emphasizes this astonishing comprehensiveness of the

account of our lives that we will be judged upon in eternity; ‘An Occasional
Discourse’ tells us that ‘every idle word must be repeated in the transformation of
eternity!’ (UDVS, 15/SKS 8, 131) and that eternity comprehends ‘everything, down to
the least detail, down to the needless words that are spoken, has everything ready at
every moment’ (UDVS, 66/SKS 8, 174). In his discussion of the problem forgotten
misdeeds pose for Locke’s eschatological view of identity, Strawson argues that Locke
is making ‘the commonsense point (it’s common sense relative to the story of the Day
of Judgment) that human beings won’t on the Day of Judgment be responsible for all
the things they have done in their lives, but only for those that they’re still Conscious
of and so still Concerned in.’28 Hence there is no problem of forgotten misdeeds for
Locke’s account: what we answer for on the Day of Judgement is whatever we can
remember on the day, and that is the boundary of our (forensic) personal identity.
After all, says Strawson, ‘It would be very odd, given our ordinary understanding of
moral being, if one’s wrongdoings simply piled up without any possible remission
(although some enthusiasts of hellfire would have it so)’.29 Kierkegaard, it seems, is one
such enthusiast. Unless we view his claims that we are to answer for ‘every idle word’
purely heuristically, as a way to motivate his reader to care about the soteriological
28 29
Strawson 2011a, p.54. Strawson 2011a, p.56.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
valence of their actions in a particularly thoroughgoing way (and that’s an entirely

reasonable and workable reading), then it seems he is claiming that every action, even
those we no longer remember, have salvific (dis)value.
The same points is made in The Sickness Unto Death:
The arrangement is such that through the conscience the report promptly follows each
guilt, and the guilty one himself must write it. But it is written with invisible ink and
therefore first becomes clearly legible only when it is held up to the light in eternity while
eternity is auditing the consciences. Essentially, everyone arrives in eternity bringing along
with him and delivering his own absolutely accurate record of every least trifle he has
committed or omitted. Thus a child could hold court in eternity; there is really nothing for
a third party to do, everything down to the most insignificant word spoken is in order.
(SUD, 124/SKS 11, 235)
In other words, viewed soteriologically we carry a repository of sins for we will

have to answer in eternity. To this basis, we need to overlay the specifics of
Christian harmatiology and soteriology: as we saw in Chapter 1, Kierkegaard
views guilt as a totality-category, not a mereological function of individual sins,
and there is also the ever-present possibility of divine forgiveness. (There is also a
very important difference for Kierkegaard between guilt and sin, but we can set this
theological point aside for present purposes.) But that too is only to be expected
given the temporality of despair we noted above. Our soteriological status is
indexed to a human life we have led, are leading and will lead into the future,
but our assessments of the status of this life are always made from a given point in
time, a single moment where death—and therefore final judgement—looms over
the whole.
Once again, we see a split between the present-tense self, the being that knows itself
as subject to final judgement, and the totality for which that self is answerable.
Eternity for Kierkegaard is judgement—a judgement that constantly threatens the
subject at any moment, and which is linked to the totality of a life. This is made
clearest in ‘An Occasional Discourse’, where we see most perspicuously how Kierke-
gaard thinks we live in both the narrative time of the physical-psychological human
being and in eternity, in a confluence that is captured phenomenologically in his
account of ‘the eleventh hour’.
Purity of Heart: Narrative and Eternity

The fact we could die at any time pushes us to contemplate what would happen if we
did die right now. Davenport here invokes Kierkegaard’s discussion of ‘the eleventh
hour’ (ellevte Time) in ‘An Occasional Discourse,’ the experience of ourselves as if ‘we
are already dead and our story finished, absolutely unchangeable’, thereby giving us
what Davenport takes to be a metaphorical experience of being out of time. Thus we
can metaphorically experience the existential urgency conferred by the omnipresent
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
possibility of death as an experience of already having run out of time.30 Davenport

endorses my reading of Kierkegaard as offering us an experiential ‘co-presence’ with
our own death through what the reader will now recognize as samtidighed. However,
by now you may also be able to guess where I disagree with Davenport here: in his
relegation of this experience to the merely metaphorical. It is true that we are not dead
when we contemplate our lives as if the clock has already run out, but as will become
clearer, I think there is something more than merely metaphorical about this way of
viewing ourselves. Throughout the discourse ‘At a Graveside’ Kierkegaard sees the
significance of death as being captured in the phrase ‘then all is over’, but, as
Davenport points out, after contemplating this thought we realize that we’re still
alive, that all is not over, and return to life with renewed energy and purpose. Yet for
Kierkegaard, we live in the ambiguity of being always in time and in eternity, alive
and dead, both living our lives and answering for them after the fact. The phenom-
enology of the ‘eleventh hour’ captures just that ambiguity.
In ‘An Occasional Discourse’ a key concern is the contrast between human life,
with a narrative trajectory through time, and the eternal—with the complication that
the individual lives in both registers of time simultaneously. Human time, the realm
spoken of in Ecclesiastes in which ‘everything has its time’, is a realm of transition
and change, characterized by an increasing narrowing of possibility. At one end of
our lives, we enter the world with a vast range of possibilities spread out before us, but
as we pass through life these possibilities are either actualized or pass us by. At the
other end of our biological lives, the elderly person has more or less exhausted his
possibilities, and lives ‘only in reflective recollection’, a life devoid of anticipation:31
The time of work and exhaustive effort is over, the time of desire and dance; life makes no more
demands upon it; by being present, one thing is no closer to him than another, does not change
his judgment in the expectation, does not change it in the decision, does not change it in regret.
It has all been equalized by the pastness that as something completely past has nothing present
to relate to. (UDVS, 8/SKS 8, 124)
The elderly person eventually has no future-regarding prospects and has nothing left
to look forward to;32 however full his life has been, for such a person ‘life was over
and done with and he had become an absentee’ (UDVS, 8/SKS 8, 124). Kierkegaard
suggests that the author of Ecclesiastes, being an old man himself, should have
stressed that for ones such as him, there was a time for everything rather than is
a time for everything—a statement that sets up a contrast between a human life
30
31
On the asymmetry of our attitudes towards past and future events in Kierkegaard, see Stokes 2010b.
32
Adam Buben points out to me that Kierkegaard may be being a bit harsh here: surely there are some
possibilities—perhaps a very large number of them in fact—that are still on the table even for the very old?
Quite possibly. But even so, presumably that set is still smaller in old age than in youth; the twenty-
five-year-old can train for a marathon and feed the pigeons in the park, while only the second of those
options might be open to the ninety-five-year-old. That said, it may be that there are possibilities that only
open up for the elderly, which Kierkegaard doesn’t allow for.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
regarded atemporally (which would licence saying there is a time for everything,
if, viewed atemporally, all times are equally real) and time as it appears for us as
temporally emplaced, mid-stream humans, caught between a past that is no longer
and a future that is not yet. For us, there will come a time when the Lucretian banquet
is all over bar the coffee,33 and we find ourselves bereft of possibilities for action. As
David Kangas notes in his dialogue with Martin Kavka, this is why Kierkegaard’s
discourse uses the biblical figure of Anna to illustrate the virtue of ‘patience in
expectancy’: ‘She is old, childless, widowed; her life is essentially over. Of time she
has nothing left to expect.’34 Interestingly, in arguing for the narrative interpretability
of our lives, Velleman notes that while almost any beginning could be the beginning
of a good life, by the time we hit old age the things we do and the things that happen
to us are unlikely to shift our understanding and evaluation of our life: too much of it
is simply set in stone for genuinely radical revisions to be possible.35
Thus human life is temporally schematized in a broadly narrative way. In what has
become known as A-Series time,36 human beings experience moments in time, and
the events they contain, as having changing temporal properties: not yet present,
present, no longer present. Moreover, life follows a certain biologically determined
narrative of birth, growth, and decay, whereby possibilities arise and decline in an
inexorable movement towards death. What’s interesting is that Kierkegaard explicitly
says that humans share this narratively schematized temporal character with animals
and even plants (UDVS, 9–10/SKS 8 125–6). Even for flowers everything ‘has its
time’, and the flower will come to a point where all of its stages of life have passed
from potentiality into the past. So the temporality in which everything has an
appropriate time and in which possibilities eventually run out is essentially a feature
of the human qua organism. The possibilities open to us may be infinitely richer in
variety and scope than those available to a plant or a nonhuman animal, but they are
nonetheless finite and exhaustible. Hence there is a temporality that pertains to
human beings regarded as bounded organic systems: what Locke called our ‘man’
identity, in contrast to our identities as persons or selves. Of course what pertains to
the human here is more than merely biological and may include social factors as
well—there may be a socially conventional ‘time’ to marry, have children, or retire,
for instance—though these still fall within a temporal structure that is on some level
determined by our organic constitution.
But for humans, according to Kierkegaard, this progressive exhaustion of possi-
bilities is only half of the story. ‘If there is something eternal in a human being’
33
‘Why do you bemoan and beweep death? If your past life has been a boon, and if not all your blessings
have flowed straight through you and run to waste like water poured into a riddled vessel, why, you fool, do
you not retire from the feast of life like a satisfied guest and with equanimity resign yourself to undisturbed
rest?’ (Lucretius 2001, pp.92–3).
34
Kangas and Kavka 2008, p.131.
35
Velleman 1993, p.341; for a helpful discussion, see Behrendt 2014.
36
As originally outlined in McTaggart 1908.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
(UDVS, 11/SKS 8, 126) then there is another order of things that pertain to the lives
of human beings and that is not subject to change: ‘Only the eternal applies at all
times and is always, is always true, pertains to every human being of whatever age’
(UDVS, 9/SKS 8, 124). Hence if there is something eternal in humans, then there is
a solution to the problem of exhausted possibilities: while possibilities relating to
our organism-identity (or some extension thereof) will eventually run out, some
other set of possibilities is immune, as it were, to the ravages of time. There may be an
appropriate time for playing hide-and-seek, for partying until dawn, for raising
children, and for spoiling your grandkids, but eventually these activities will in
turn cease to be fully possible. But some set of tasks remain fully and equally
realizable (and insofar as they are tasks in Kierkegaard’s sense of normatively binding
possibilities,37 always required) no matter how young or old the human may be. Thus
there is always something still to be done.
As we’ve seen, there are divergent understandings of ‘eternity’ at work across
Kierkegaard’s corpus, but in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ the emphasis is, as in The
Sickness Unto Death, on a thoroughly soteriological sense of the term. As noted, the
temporality in which possibilities arise and decay is a function of our organic identity,
one that we share with animals and plants. If nonhuman animals could talk, they too
could declare that there is ‘a time to run with the herd and a time to go apart and die’
and so forth (UDVS, 10/SKS 8, 126). This is the inexorable fate of the organic,
including the human. But Kierkegaard also takes it that we are immortal—and this
changes everything. To be immortal is to live simultaneously in the organic time
proper to us as human beings, and in the eternity that pertains to us as eschatological
subjects. ‘Being immortal’ is a qualification that is eternal both in the sense of
involving an ‘eternal life’ outside time, and in the sense that a person’s immortality
must be present at all moments of their otherwise changeable life (UDVS, 10–11/SKS
8, 126).
As we’ve seen, Kierkegaard insists immortality cannot be understood as continu-
ous with our earthly life; the afterlife will not partake of the A-Series, will-be-
present/is-present/was-present temporal structure of our earthly life.38 Immortality
instead refers to an eternal state that as such is both changeless and omnipresent;
while we speak of an afterlife and ‘the life to come’, these states are strictly speaking
atemporal and so present at all moments (and therefore, in Davenport’s term,
‘accessible from any point in historical time’ and ‘always meaningful as a present
possibility for mortal persons, which is accessible to them throughout “profane”
time’.)39 The ‘eternal separation of the righteous and unrighteous’ is simultaneously
both yet to occur and always present.
37
Elrod 1975, p.57.
38
On the ‘ambiguous temporal character’ of the hereafter and its ‘paradoxical relation to the linear
sequence of time’, see Davenport 2002, p.44.
39
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
The human being, then, finds themselves at the intersection of two radically
different and seemingly incompatible realms, one temporal and characterized by
shifting properties of past, present, and future, the other eternal and atemporal.40
This is precisely the model of temporality that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Virgilius
Haufniensis had outlined three years earlier in The Concept of Anxiety. Here we are
introduced to the category of ‘the moment’ (Øjeblikket) as the ‘ambiguity in which
time and eternity touch each other . . . whereby time constantly intersects eternity and
eternity constantly pervades time’ (CA, 89/SKS 4, 392). For humans, time is not
simply immersion in the flow of events, nor immersion plus the ability to project into
the past and future (the Heideggerian ekstases). Rather, once consciousness has
become qualified by the realization of answerability or responsibility for a whole
life, we live simultaneously in the flow of time and in a concernful survey of our
whole life. We are concerned both for the self we are now, with the possibilities and
tasks appropriate to our stage of biological, cultural, and social life, and with the
overall assessment of our life as a whole. To re-use an analogy I’ve used elsewhere,41
one ultimately indebted to the early anti-narrativist Louis O. Mink,42 on Kierke-
gaard’s view we are simultaneously in the middle of the river and high above it,
surveying the whole from source to sea. Note, however, that—as with so much in
Kierkegaard’s picture of selfhood—this is as much a task as a description of how
selfhood simply is. Once we are concerned for both our life in the present moment
and the character of the whole, then, as M. Jamie Ferreira puts it, ‘The task is to try to
be in two places at the same time’,43 to be simultaneously in the infinite and the finite.
For Kierkegaard, it’s soteriology that achieves this: ‘the expectancy of an eternal
salvation is able (which otherwise seems impossible) to be in two places at the same
time: it works in heaven and it works on earth’ (EUD, 259/SKS 5, 255).
The Eleventh Hour

While temporality and eternity are, strictly, two irreconcilable and mutually exclusive
elements, when they meet in the sort of experience Kierkegaard describes, the
experience of the øjeblik (which like the German augenblick literally refers to the
blink or glance of an eye) the result is quite distinctive. We mentioned in Chapter 2
the contrast, as discussed by Charles Taylor, between ‘higher’ or sacred time and
‘ordinary’ time, ‘the time which is measured in ages, over against higher time, God’s
time, or eternity’.44 And a key feature of higher time is that while it is non-temporal,
it also represents a conclusion or ‘gathering’ of time, understood in the eschatology of
the Abrahamic faiths as a final justification of existence. The judgement of eternity is
40
See also the discourse ‘How Glorious It Is to Be a Human Being’: ‘Since, then, the human being is
consciousness, he is the place where the eternal and the temporal continually touch each other, where the
eternal is refracted in the temporal’ (UDVS, 195/SKS 8, 292).
41 42 43 44
Stokes 2014. Mink 1970. Ferreira 2010, p.14. Taylor 2007, p.265.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
a denouement of the narrative of existence. As Taylor, very pregnantly for our

purposes, puts it: ‘The idea here is that the whole story belongs to the end, and not
just the last state it arrives at . . . The final meaning of any incident is given in the
whole, the “judgment” on it is made in the light of the whole.’45
Hence, as J. M. E. McTaggart also noted, in his lesser-known follow-up to his
seminal paper ‘The Unreality of Time’, while eternity is atemporal it presents itself to
us in time as radically futural.46 Being the completion of the whole, eternity appears
to us as not yet47 even though strictly speaking eternity cannot bear temporal
predicates. As Haufniensis puts it in The Concept of Anxiety, in ‘a certain sense the
future is the whole of which the past is only a part’ (CA, 89/SKS 4, 392), for ‘the future
is the incognito in which the eternal, even though it is incommensurable with time,
nevertheless preserves its association with time’ (CA, 89/SKS 4, 392). For Haufnien-
sis, this futurity of the eternal gives the categories of human, A-series time (past,
present, future) a decisiveness that they lack on their own, for in human time without
the eternal, ‘the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption are lost in the
world-historical significance and lost in the individual historical development’ and
‘the concepts of resurrection and judgment are destroyed’ (CA, 90/SKS 4, 393). If,
however, I see myself as located at the intersection of eternity and temporality—that
is, if I see myself as an immortal subject who will have to answer for this particular
human life in eternity—then the past is not simply past and gone, but something I am
to repent for, while the future is not simply not yet to come but contains an
eschatological completion that could come at any time and in light of which I am
to live in the present in a certain way. Hence, this intersection is a troubled place to
find ourselves. In a journal entry from 1854, Kierkegaard describes the ‘frightful
restlessness’ in the thought that ‘Before you lies an eternity—your fate is decided in
this life, by how you use it. You have perhaps thirty years left, perhaps ten, perhaps
five, perhaps one, perhaps, perhaps only one month, one day’ (JP, 4807/SKS 26, 49;
NB 31:67).
In ‘An Occasional Discourse’ this transfiguring of our experience of time by
awareness of the eternal—or the awareness of temporality as the refraction (Brydn-
ing) of the eternal (UDVS, 90/SKS 8, 195)—serves to overcome the sense of
exhausted possibilities that, as we saw above, is the fate of human beings viewed
organically. For beings who are bi-located in time and eternity, there is always
something that must be done, and even if all our possibilities are exhausted there
still remains the work of repenting for our past failings (UDVS, 13/SKS 8, 128). This
requirement to repent represents both the ways in which the eternal and temporal are
coordinate in earthly life, and the order of priority between them. The things of
earthly life may have their specific time, but repentance does not: it is an omnipresent
duty and as such craves immediate fulfilment (UDVS, 13/SKS 8, 128).
45 46 47
Taylor 2007, p.277. McTaggart 1909. Erlandson 1978, p.138.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
As we’ve seen in our discussion of contemporaneity, soteriological repentance also

changes our relationship to the past and the future from one of linear distance to one
of phenomenal presence. Kierkegaard contrasts a person who merely strives within
human time and who ‘hurries ahead to something new, to something new—perhaps
also away from the [past] experience’ with someone who, by regretting that past
event, ‘laboriously gathers up [samler] the experience’ (UDVS, 14/SKS 8, 129). Thus
while in an earthly sense our past misdeeds are continually moving further and
further away from us, regarded as objects of repentance in the context of eschato-
logical time, this distance is cancelled; they are equally omnipresent. As we’ve already
seen, there is no transmission loss of soteriological valence. We become contem-
porary in Kierkegaard’s phenomenological sense with our past when that past is
understood as something we are, at every moment, fully answerable for in the
eschatological time-context.
Equally, with regard to the future, repentance understands itself as oriented
towards a final judgement that looms not as a temporally distant event but as
something perpetually imminent:
Repentance and regret belong to the eternal in a human being, and thus every time
repentance comprehends the guilt it comprehends that it is in the eleventh hour, that
hour which human indolence knows very well exists and will come when it is spoken of
in generalities, but not when it applies personally to the indolent person himself, for even the
old man believes that there is still time left, and the indolent youth fools himself if he thinks
that age difference is the main factor with regard to the closeness of the eleventh hour.
(UDVS, 15/SKS 8, 130)
Again, note that the orientation towards an eternal judgement draws a contrast
between narrative-biological time and eschatological time. For both the old and the
young, eschatological regret arises at the same time, the ‘eleventh hour’, the context
in which judgement looms immanently; any other regret is merely ‘temporal’ regret,
‘fortifie[d] with a deceptive and busy notion of the length of life’ and not oriented
towards eternity (UDVS, 15/SKS SKS 8, 130). According to this understanding, the
attitude that I can simply do what I want and then repent on my deathbed, or that
I have plenty of time left to make amends to the friend I wronged last year, or that
while I am living selfishly now I can devote myself to charitable causes in my
retirement, are all false forms of repentance. They evade the ‘eleventh hour’ urgency
imposed on us by the thought of an eternal judgement, and treat repentance as just
another possibility that ‘has its time’ in linear human temporality. Eternity appears as
something infinitely far away: to use a phrase from later in the discourse, to such a
person ‘eternity is the deceptive illusion of the horizon, for him eternity is the bluish
boundary of time’ (UDVS, 63/SKS 8 171). Conversely, ‘When regret wakes up
troubled, be it in the youth or in the old man, it always wakes up at the eleventh
hour’ (UDVS, 15/SKS 8, 130). For beings aware of their status as answerable for their
lives, time is always phenomenally qualified as the eleventh hour; eternity looms as a
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
judgement that is always imminent and invests all moments of mortal life with the
sense that time’s almost up.
This picture of human beings as located at the meeting point of two temporal
orders, a realization that transfigures the understanding of merely human time, also
finds expression in the discourse ‘We Are Closer to Salvation now than when We
Became Believers’. Here, Kierkegaard claims that just as we need to fix a point on a
map as ‘here’ to make sense of the term ‘there’, so too we need to specify a fixed point
in time to make sense of the term ‘now’:
If I am to determine where I am now, I must have another definite point in time in relation to
which I determine this now. Therefore the verse chosen as the subject of this discourse quite
properly has another determinant with the aid of which those speaking determine this now:
We are closer to salvation now than when we became believers. This makes excellent sense. If a
man says, ‘I am now further along in this and that work than when I began,’ it makes sense and
there is a determination of time; he has one point of time with the aid of which it is firmly
established that he has begun, and he measures the distance from the beginning to see where
he is now. But if this man had never begun this work, well, then his talk makes no sense; it
is meaningless to say that one is closer now than when one began if one did not begin at all.
If someone who had never become a believer were to repeat unthinkingly these words, ‘We
are closer to salvation now than when we became believers,’ it would be meaningless. (CD, 216/
SKS 10, 224)
At first blush, this seems to posit salvation as a future event in straightforward

continuity with the past and present. If we are believers, then our eventual salvation
is nearer at hand than it was at any point in the past, just as today is closer to the year
2099 than yesterday was. Conversely, if we are not believers, there is no salvation in
our future, and therefore we are no ‘closer’ to it, for we can have no specifiable
distance to something that does not exist. Nothing in this specific text pushes us away
from this simple reading, but the ambiguity of eschatological time noted above might
lead us to read these passages differently.
Kierkegaard’s map analogy is interesting in that connection. Drawing on David
Lewis’ use of a similar analogy to explain how we come to relate our propositional
knowledge of the world to our self-ascription of properties,48 Velleman argues that a
symbol on a map telling us that ‘This map is here’ (or more commonly ‘You are
here’) serves as a principle of translation between the representational scheme of the
map and the topography I see before me. The indexical ‘here’ acts as a common co-
ordinate for the two systems of reference, and as such allows me to translate between
them.49 In a similar way, the ‘now’ that Kierkegaard describes—the moment—has a
48
Lewis 1979, esp. pp.519–22.
49
Velleman 2006a, pp.175–8. Velleman uses this analogy to answer a concern of Nagel’s: if I can give a
complete, objective account of the world, including all the facts about a person TN, it seems I cannot locate
within that account the fact that I am TN. The worry—a version of which Lewis shares—is that there might
be some sort of knowledge that is subjectively accessible but not objectively so. Velleman thinks the map
analogy shows us the way out of this problem: the thought ‘I am TN’ serves to co-ordinate a decentred view
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
double indexicality. ‘Now’ picks out the present time we see around us (just like the
‘here’ I see by looking around), but to someone who has previously became a believer,
this ‘now’ has a reference in soteriological time as well. Of necessity, we are closer to
any future event now than we were in the past; but only if one has become a believer is
one underway in soteriological time: as soon as one becomes a believer, it is the
eleventh hour with respect to eschatological judgement, and salvation (or damna-
tion) appears infinitely closer (though still necessarily futural) than it did previously.
This explains the fact that we don’t need to specify some past moment in calendar
time when we became a believer: ‘It is not important whether it was at twelve o’clock
noon and the like. No, it is all a spiritual matter and therefore has true earnestness,
which certainly does not ask the hour or the minute’ (CD, 217/SKS 10, 225). It is not
the precise distance between past and present that matters, but that one’s status as a
believer situates them at the soteriological eleventh hour.50 Hence for the believer,
there is a principle for translating between the two different temporal contexts: ‘now’
refers to ‘n years since I became a believer’ (regardless of whether we can specify the
value of n or not) in human time and ‘the eleventh hour’ in eschatological time. The
problem, as Kierkegaard sees it, is that many self-professed believers, who simply
assume that they became believers at some forgotten point in the past (CD, 218/SKS
10, 226), live in the simple continuity of human time.
Implications for Narrative Selfhood

In the above discussion of human time and eternity I’ve tried to show that the former
is a function of our status as organic entities, while the latter relates to our status as
eschatological subjects, beings who will have to answer in eternity for our lives and
who will be subject to some sort of eternal judgement. This dual temporality follows
the ontology of self articulated in The Sickness Unto Death, where there is a key
distinction between the diachronically extended human being (mennesket) and the
here-and-now self (selvet). Thus when Anti-Climacus declares that ‘It is Christian
heroism—a rarity, to be sure—to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual
human being, this specific human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious
strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility’ (SUD, 5/SKS 11, 117), this ‘oneself ’
exists at the juncture of two identities: a human identity, stretched across time, and
an eschatological identity that mediates that human’s life and a future eternal
judgement. But what is the significance of this soteriological picture for narrative
accounts of selfhood, and indeed for personal identity more broadly?
of the world (like the map) and a centred view (like my perspectivally structured view of the topography it
represents).
50
See also Taylor 2007, p.55 on the way in which ‘higher times gather and re-order secular time’ and
thereby ‘introduce “warps” and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering’.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
As we’ve seen, both Rudd and Davenport, as representatives of the narrativist

interpretation of Kierkegaard, reject any attempt to view the ‘naked self ’ of Judge
William and Anti-Climacus as an ontologically distinct, significant being. Rather,
they regard Kierkegaard’s correlate of the minimal/core self of contemporary dis-
cussions as either a mere abstraction, or a poetic reification of our capacity to
transcend our immediate situation in freedom of reflection and action. That is,
I think, an easier position to maintain if we stick to Judge William, whose minimal
self is like a mathematical vanishing point, an almost extensionless moment between
aesthetic immediacy and ethical choice. This ‘naked’ self is the condition for effecting
the detachment from what the human being immediately is, and is therefore a formal
requirement for becoming a narratively integrated self; but ultimately it’s a mere
staging post on the journey to integrated practical selfhood. The Anti-Climacan
naked self, by contrast, is a feature of all self-experience. It too lacks temporal
extension, not because it is a vanishing moment within the event of choice, but
because the self ’s entire existence qua self (i.e. as transcending and appropriating its
facticity) is always present-tense. Selves are always ‘in the moment’, not in the
aesthetic sense of living with no thought to the past or future, but in the sense that
the naked self continually stands before the ever-present possibility of eternal
judgement as responsible for the concrete narratively schematized person that it
both is and transcends.
Thus each work can be understood as offering different accounts of how the
minimal and narrative selves interact. But one of these approaches is considerably
more compatible with the narrativist project than the other. The focus of Judge
William’s discussion of selfhood is the self as a site of historical continuity, integrated
through a conscious choice back into the factical context from which it momentarily
distinguished itself. In that sense it does indeed resemble the sort of narratively
emplotted, socially embedded self that philosophers like MacIntyre seek to describe.
Undeniably, there is much in Sickness Unto Death that also seems prima facie
compatible with narrativist readings of Kierkegaard; after all, eternal judgement’s
concern with the meaning of a whole human life (rather than some portion thereof)
has obvious resonances with the whole-life-intelligibility that writers like Rudd posit.
However, the resolutely present-tense nature of the Anti-Climacan naked self aligns
it far more with the minimal self of Zahavi et al., a sense of presence-to-self that is the
condition for the self-appropriation needed in order to constitute the narrative self.
The Anti-Climacan self that ‘rests transparently in the power which established it’
(SUD 14/SKS 11, 130) is a point of consciousness that takes eschatological respon-
sibility for a concrete self which it must nonetheless take itself to transcend. Judge
William’s self attains eternity in time, within its own narrative; Anti-Climacus’ self
exists in ‘the moment’—the intersection of time and eternity—and thus has a sense of
itself as always already beyond its own narrative.
Yet this divergence between Judge William and Anti-Climacus may point in a
productive direction for utilizing Kierkegaard in discussions of both narrative
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
identity and personal identity more broadly. In wrestling with the mortality and
survival problem for narrative theories, both Rudd and Davenport both concede that
the ultimate meaning of our lives, the ‘gathered story’ in Taylor’s terms, may be
permanently beyond us. But they also thereby begin to treat death, and the idea of
eschatological judgement, as presenting us with a sort of regulative ideal; we are to
live as if we are heading towards an ending that will make sense of our lives in a
certain way. Hence Kierkegaard has served to make the sense of ‘narrative meaning’
aimed at by narrativists slightly more modest, and thereby more credible:
Kierkegaard’s Journals argument about living forwards but understanding backwards clearly
does renounce the ambition to have a narrative understanding of one’s life that is ‘complete’ or
‘total’ while one is still living it. And he is obviously right that I can't, while still alive,
understand my life as whole in the same way that my biographer might understand my life
as a whole after my death. But, as Kierkegaard also insists, this does not mean that I am just left
floundering in the ocean of time with no perspective beyond the present moment . . . my
narrative self-understanding is not just an ability to tell a story about my past while looking
back in a quiet moment; it is the implicit sense of my life that I have as I live it and carry it
forward. And although this narrative self-understanding is not a total or complete one, there is
still a sense in which he is an understanding of a whole life, and not just of particular episodes
in it.51
The specifically soteriological character of Kierkegaard’s account too helps to bring

something important to salience for narrativists. As we’ve seen, narrativists such as
MacIntyre and Rudd see narratives as securing the coherence of lives rather than
merely of actions or episodes. They are therefore linked to the ultimate intelligibility
and meaning of a given human life. And it’s that ultimate meaning that is centralized
by soteriology, with its thought of a final, comprehensive judgement of everything
I am, have been, and will be. In other words, to the extent that we do in fact have such
a concern, a concern for what we are and what the ultimate value of our lives might
turn out to be, our concern is already soteriological. What Kierkegaard’s discussions
of our accounting for ‘every idle word’ show us, therefore, is what it is to be
concerned in this way, in precisely the way that Locke envisaged when he inaugur-
ated the modern discussion of personal identity: concern for every moment of our
lives, linked to ‘fatal’ responsibility, without ‘transmission loss’ across time.
By situating the subject at the intersection of time and eternity, Kierkegaard brings
out something crucial for the narrativist: the way in which, like any narrator, ‘we live
beyond any tale we happen to enact’ as Galen Strawson has recently put it.52 Our
separateness qua experiencing subjects from our lives qua human beings is, as we’ve
seen in our discussions of alienation and contemporaneity, a deep phenomenal fact
about us. There is a structural gulf between our experience of ourselves as present-
tense subjects and our understanding of ourselves as beings stretched out across time.
51 52
Rudd 2012, p.190. Strawson 2012.
 SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY
This gulf must be bridged through an act of phenomenal appropriation motivated by

fatal concern, seeing our past and future person-stages as ourselves. Though I don’t
claim to speak for narrativists, I think they should in fact welcome this finding, rather
than trying to downplay the minimal/narrative self split: it brings out the extent to
which narrative identity, if narrative is in fact how we constitute ourselves, is a task
and achievement rather than something automatically given.
Moreover, this account of living at the intersection of narrative-biological-human
time and the eternity of a final judgement over a whole life points the discussion of
personal identity in a new, and I think deeply important, direction. We opened this
book with an overview of the mess that fifty years of metaphysics has left us in with
regard to personal identity. Part of this mess is, I’d suggest, the result of a standing
assumption that selves can be reduced to an objective (that is, not dependent upon
any particular perspective) set of subpersonal persistence conditions, whether phys-
ical, psychological, or both. It has, at least, gradually become clear in discussions of
personal identity that the first-person perspective is irreducibly important in getting
to grips with personal identity. More than twenty years ago, Geoffrey Madell warned
us that a ‘relentlessly third-personal approach’ to this topic will ‘stand no chance of
working’, 53 while Bernard Williams before him had noted that perspective matters
greatly in discussing questions of survival,54 and metaphysicians of the self such as
Baker55 have gone on to make an irreducible first-person perspective part of their
account of the self. Kierkegaard, with his radical emphasis on subjectivity, seems to fit
in well with this increasing emphasis on the first-person perspective in discussing
what it is to be a self.
But Anti-Climacus’ work suggests that selves are not mere irreducibly first-person-
perspectival, but also present-tense-perspectival. Narrativists can perhaps tell us
much about how we understand and articulate the ways in which we fill out
diachronic careers. But we always understand and articulate from here and now—
an unavoidable fact about what it is to be a first-personal subject. We can never get
out of the present moment, so to speak. The gap this fact opens up at the heart of
subjectivity is something the literature is only just beginning to come to grips with.
What I think Kierkegaard points us towards is a way of thinking about personal
identity that refuses to collapse the first- and third-person perspectives, and the
present-tense and diachronic perspectives on a self into a single perspective. As we’ve
seen, the moment we try to derive a straightforward metaphysics of continuity from
Anti-Climacus’ account of the constitution of selfhood, we end up wrapped up in all
sorts of apparent paradoxes. The only way to avoid these is to keep the present-tense
perspective of the subject and the diachronic, third-personal continuity of the human
separate rather than collapsing the former into the latter, seeing the ‘now’ of the
subject as just one moment in the career of the human being. That means renouncing
53 54 55
Madell 1991, p.127. Williams 1973, pp.46–63. Baker 2000.
SURVIVAL AND ESCHATOLOGY 
the ambition to provide an account of how we can re-identify selves (in the sense of
present-tense phenomenally-figured subjects, I*s) across time, but this needn’t mean,
as it does for Johnston, that such selves cease to be worth worrying about. I think it’s
truer to say that we cannot stop worrying about them.
In pushing us towards the øjeblik as the place where our lives as human beings in
time and our ultimate soteriological status outside time intersect, Kierkegaard draws
our attention to what I think may well be the next move in the personal identity
debate. Rather than trying to give one master account of what selves ultimately are,
Kierkegaard draws our attention to how these different, irreducible perspectives on
the self interact. That’s a question that’s already nascent in some of the discussions
we’ve looked at, such as Strawson and Schechtman. But Kierkegaard fills in the
details in a very fulsome way, providing rich accounts of ways in which we qua
subjects can appropriate, misappropriate, or fail to appropriate our lives qua human
beings. He both draws our attention to where the interesting problematic of selfhood
lies, and gives us a rich account of what it is like to be both a present-tense self and a
diachronic human, concerned for what we ultimately are and for the ultimate
justification of our lives.
That, I think, is as far as Kierkegaard can take us here. But not all of us would want
to follow him even this far. In Chapter 9, I’ll consider some important objections to
where this discussion has led us.
9
Objections and Future Directions
Summing Up
At this point, it might be helpful to summarize where this dialogue between Kierke-
gaard and analytic philosophy of personal identity has left us, before going on to
consider possible objections and limitations of the position we’ve developed here.
We started where the modern discussion of personal identity begins, a beginning
which has conditioned the entire debate ever since: with Locke’s account of self-
constitution through becoming ‘self to oneself ’. For Locke, this is closely connected
to memory, though not, as we’ve seen, in the straightforward way in which Locke’s
critics imagined. For Locke, a subjective concernment in memory, not the simple fact
that memory connections obtain between two person-stages, is crucial. Locke also
sees this concernment as inherently linked to moral imputability and ultimately to
eschatology, in such a way that our account of identity must be adequate to these
concerns. What we ultimately are will be revealed to us on the Day of Judgement. For
now, a model of identity based on concernful memory is enough for practical, moral,
and soteriological purposes.
Kierkegaard too, as we’ve seen, sees a kind of concernful memory as critically
important for selfhood. In distinguishing erindring from hukommelse, Kierkegaard
claims that not all memory is equally constitutive of selfhood. What matters for
selfhood is a distinctively self-reflexive kind of memory, one that relates what one
remembers to oneself in an ‘essential’ sense that is indexed to one’s ultimate
soteriological status. The experiential character of this sort of memory became clearer
through our examination of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of samtidighed. Here we
saw that the self-constituting form of memory presents with a property of ‘for-you-
ness’, a special way of relating back to the remembering subject that gives memories a
property as if they are happening right now (the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for
imaginative anticipation). Again, this is tied to final soteriological status: events
which connect with the experiencing subject in this way are ‘contemporary’ in that
they present with the same urgency and significance for the subject as events
happening directly in front of us. This serves, as we saw in our discussion of Velle-
man and Wollheim, to cancel out the distinction between the notional and actual
subject of a visualization: the notional and actual subject are unified through this
property of phenomenal contemporaneity. This sense of soteriological urgency also
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
serves to overcome the ‘transmission loss’ of responsibility across time that has
sometimes been viewed as a problem for the neo-Lockean approach. The undeniable
facts that we change over time, that our cares and concerns evolve, that the triumphs
and injuries of life alter the fabric of who we are, and that we can become affectively
alienated from the persons we were or expect we will become, sit uneasily with our
more all-or-nothing intuitions about moral imputability. But by describing a form of
subjective appropriation that makes all moments of the past and future equally close
by virtue of their soteriological valence, Kierkegaard shows how this problem can
be overcome. In so doing, he gives us a picture of what it is like to close the gap
between our objective awareness of our careers across time as human beings, and
our subjective, here-and-now sense of who we are. Moreover, he gives us reasons to
think that we should appropriate the past and future in this way, reasons that are
considerably stronger than what has been offered in the literature to date.
Thus far, we have already found in Kierkegaard resources that I’ve suggested are
useful in the context of existing approaches to the problem of personal identity.
A neo-Lockean reader could, if they wish, stop there. But I think this misses what is
arguably Kierkegaard’s most important contribution to this debate: not just showing
us a richer account of neo-Lockean psychological continuity, but disrupting the
metaphysical project of identity-as-continuity itself. The curious once-and-for-all
character of despair (selflessness) makes talking about the duration of selves highly
problematic. Humans or persons have continuity and exist across time, but selves are
always present-tense affairs. To talk of their duration, even if this is metaphysically
possible (as in the punctual selves of Strawson and Damasio) is to miss the point that
this present-tense perspective is irreducibly essential to what selves are. We live in the
present and know ourselves as a phenomenally given self that relates to a remem-
bered past and an imagined future (in ways more complex than I’ve allowed for
here—for instance, much of what we ‘remember’ is semantic rather than episodic
memory, anticipation is conditioned by uncertainty, and so on).
Of course, what selves relate to is not the entire past and future, everything from
stegosauruses to starships, but the past and future of a specific human being. And we
do so because we are related to and concerned for that human being in a distinctive
way. For Kierkegaard, that way is soteriological in nature. I relate concernfully to a
given past and future as my past and future because that human life forms a totality
for which I am ultimately answerable. Such affective identification is not a given, as
the examples of alienation from one’s own life demonstrate. Rather, for Kierkegaard,
such relation is an achievement, and it’s something we should attempt to achieve.
This normativity is not driven by the psychological benefits we might receive by
identifying emotionally with our past and future selves, nor even by the intelligibility
conferred by understanding our lives in narrative terms. Rather it’s driven by the idea
that at the present moment I find myself answerable for that life, a fact which gathers
my whole life up into a looming, ever-present possibility of final judgement. This
realization changes our experience of time: the present moment that the self lives in
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
turns out to be phenomenally conditioned as the next-to-last moment, the perpetual

eleventh hour.
This somewhat brisk account of the trajectory of this book reveals a number of
points at which a reader might object, not simply to the fine detail, but to the overall
project and to the results it yields. Seeing as Galen Strawson has been such a
significant figure in this book, in this concluding chapter I’ll borrow one of his
more striking authorial techniques: the first-person use of an imagined critical
interlocutor.
So that’s me, then?
Exactly.
Well as it happens, I do have at least three main objections to what you’ve written here. Shall we?
Let’s.
Changing the Subject

I mentioned in the introduction that some readers would find this Kierkegaardian
contribution to the analytic debate over personal identity deeply dissatisfying. Our
italicized friend is one such reader:
Look, I picked up this book expecting to learn something about personal identity. You led me to
believe that this Kierkegaard chap had something of interest to say on this topic. But eight
interminable chapters later this has turned out clearly not to be the case. Let’s go back to basics:
personal identity is a matter of what makes a person the same person across time. That’s what
I’m interested in. Not what it feels like to identify with someone in memory. Not what it feels like
to experience responsibility for the past or future. I’m not interested in subjective, perspective-
dependent properties such as these. (These experiences may presuppose personal identity, but
they do not constitute it). No, I am interested in the facts of the matter about identity—if there
are any—not how we subjectively relate to those facts. And from what you’ve said, Kierkegaard
says nothing much at all about that topic. You haven’t solved the problem of personal identity.
All you’ve done is change the subject.
As might be apparent, I find myself sceptical of there being a problem of personal

identity, or rather, a problem that can be distilled to one (set of) question(s) that
admits of one (set of) answer(s). And I’m certainly sceptical that we can give a purely
metaphysical answer to the question that is wholly independent of phenomenology
and therefore wholly objective. If we can’t do so, it’s certainly not for want of trying.
Despite decades of constant discussion there are no signs of anything like an
emerging consensus on that question, unless the eventual consensus is that we all
simply give up and resort to a de facto eliminativism that leaves our everyday
experience untouched. Various metaphysical research programmes addressing this
topic have popped up and have simply continued on in parallel—because each
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
manages to address important sets of intuitions about identity that the others either
ignore or simply rule out of court.
And all of these metaphysical approaches struggle to accommodate something that
has been increasingly acknowledged at least since Williams: that you simply can’t get
at the core of what we’re talking about when we talk about personal identity without
giving the first-person perspective its due. Take a step back to consider why it’s
personal identity, rather than other identity problems (such as the Ship of Theseus)
that we’re so concerned with. As we’ve seen in our reading of Schechtman, personal
identity connects with practical questions that are uniquely important to us, ques-
tions that excite our self-reflexive concern in distinctive ways. We’ve also seen that
the question of personal identity ultimately has its origins in questions of ultimate
concern, namely, questions of soteriology. A metaphysician might reasonably reply
that this historical origin is irrelevant: the circumstances that lead us to ask a question
needn’t necessarily impact on the content of the question itself. But in this case, the
impetus for the question colours the entire discussion. We care about what we are in
ways that partly determine what we need to ask about in considering personal
identity. Hence it’s increasingly realized that if we want to talk about identity, then
we need to talk about how first-person perspectives figure in identity.
Giving the first-person its due, however, may mean more than simply grafting
such a perspective onto a metaphysical picture, for the first-person perspective itself
may resist such incorporation. For one thing, a first-person perspective is also a
temporally located perspective. It’s a perspective from here-and-now. But metaphys-
ics doesn’t ask about the self-here-and-now, but about the duration of selves across
time. Attempts to incorporate the phenomenal first-person perspective into an
implicitly impersonal metaphysics, such as are offered by Strawson and Dainton,
therefore have to elide the temporally perspectival character of that phenomenal
self by asking about its duration, and so end up either having to appeal to sub-
phenomenal factors to explain the continuity of self (Dainton) or posit a succession
of short-lived selves (Strawson).1 To ask how long a present-tense perspective lasts is
to miss precisely what is essential to that perspective.
Kierkegaard’s implicitly present-tense self, which subjectively appropriates a dia-
chronically extended human life, brings into view the necessity of not collapsing first-
personal and third-personal, and temporally bounded and atemporal, perspectives
on the self and identity into a unitary metaphysical account.2 We can’t talk about
what selfhood is like without allowing the first-personal-here-and-now aspect of
selfhood to stand on its own terms. And doing so leaves us with a much more
complex problem of personal identity than the one we started with. Instead of
treating the self as a special sort of object and asking how long it lasts, the problem
of personal identity now becomes a question of how different perspectives and forms
1
For a fuller exposition of this argument, see Stokes 2014.
2
On the possible combinations of these perspectives, see Stokes 2013b.
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
of continuity interact and influence each other, and of the forms of subjective
appropriation that are an essential part of that process.
If someone still wants to insist that what I’m talking about here isn’t ‘real’ identity,
and that only an impersonal metaphysical account can tell us what we really are, I can
only respond by stealing a line from Guy Debord: ‘I have scarcely begun to make you
understand that I don’t intend to play the game.’3
Setting Boundaries
You can refuse to ‘play the game’ (or ‘do proper metaphysics’ as I’d prefer to call it)
all you like, but what you offer here is still useless. For one thing, you’re linking
identity to moral imputability: I am everything I am to answer for. But it seems
Kierkegaard never gives us any criteria for determining what we are and are not
responsible for. If you want to talk about the present-tense subject relating to a
diachronic human being in a responsibility-taking way, you have to delimit that
human somehow.
This is basically true, but I’m not sure it’s a fatal problem. Kierkegaard, both under
his own name and as Anti-Climacus, claims that there is something distinctively
individuating about being a self before God. ‘An Occasional Discourse’ equates ‘living
in such a way that you are conscious of being a single individual [en Enkelt]’ with ‘the
earnest question about what each person is according to his eternal destiny, about
what he is to be conscious of being, and when is this question more earnest than
when before God he considers his life?’ (UDVS, 127/SKS 8, 227). The discourse also
stresses in several places that it is as this single individual that each human being is
to face judgement,4 and that this soteriological ‘inspection’ individuates each of
us out of the mass-category of human beings: ‘the most pernicious of all evasions
is—hidden in the crowd, to want, as it were, to avoid God’s inspection of oneself as a
single individual, as Adam once did when his bad conscience fooled him into
thinking that he could hide among the trees’ (UDVS, 127/SKS 8, 228).5 In eternity
there is no crowd, merely each individual alone with the voice of conscience that
probes ‘the single individual about whether he as an individual has done good or evil,
and about his not wanting to be an individual while he lived!’ (UDVS, 128/SKS
3
Debord 2003, p.39.
4
For example, ‘Indeed, in eternity the single individual, you, my listener, and I, will be questioned as an
individual, alone by himself as an individual, and about the particulars in his life’ (UDVS, 148–9/SKS 8,
245); ‘Above all, each one separately is to become a single individual with all his responsibility before God;
each one separately is to endure this rigorous judgment of singularity’ (UDVS, 150/SKS 8, 247); ‘Everyone
must make an accounting to God as an individual; the king must make an accounting to God as an
individual, and the most wretched beggar must make an accounting to God as an individual’ (UDVS,
128/SKS 8, 228).
5
Christian Discourses speaks of Christ knowing each person individually by virtue of sacrificing himself
for every individual, not for the race as a whole—and this is in fact a necessary corollary of the nature of
salvation, for Kierkegaard claims human beings have to be saved individually (CD, 272/SKS 10, 290).
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
SKS 8, 228). Awareness of the judgement of eternity just is ‘awareness of being a

single individual’; the fact of eternal judgement ‘disperses the crowd’ and individu-
ates ‘by giving each person separately an infinite weight by making him heavy—as the
single individual’ (UDVS, 134/SKS 8, 233).6
Thus being before God in consciousness of one’s sinfulness involves a separation
from the species and the receipt of a radically new identity beyond that available to us
regarded purely as human beings. Yet Anti-Climacus also explicitly tells us that the
individuality of a self before God, its irreducible particularity, cannot be compre-
hended in thought. As Kierkegaard reiterates again and again across his writings, the
speculative tendencies of the nineteenth century subsume individual human beings
into mass-categories, such as ‘what Aristotle calls the animal category—the crowd’
(SUD, 118/SKS 11, 229), precisely because the category of the human is thinkable
while individual human beings are not: ‘The individual human being lies beneath the
concept; an individual human being cannot be thought, but only the concept “man” ’
(SUD, 119/SKS 11, 230). Thus there is an aspect to individuals that cannot be
captured in their status as tokens of the species Homo sapiens, which is why, as
Haufniensis puts it in The Concept of Anxiety, ‘each man who is mindful of himself
knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is’ (CA, 78–9/SKS 4,
381–2). The idea that there is an irreducible particularity to individual persons, one
that cannot be captured by universalizing systems of ethics or anthropology, is one
that links Kierkegaard to twentieth-century figures such as Levinas and Derrida. But
in The Sickness Unto Death this unthinkable residue is cashed out in specifically
soteriological terms: ‘The category of sin is the category of individuality [Enkelthe-
dens Kategori]. Sin cannot be thought speculatively at all’ (SUD, 119/SKS 11, 230).
Thus there is an ‘earnestness’ (alvor) associated with being a ‘single individual’ qua
sinner that is completely incomprehensible to an abstracted, metaphysical way of
thinking that can only comprehend ‘single individuals’ as tokens of a type:
That is precisely why there is no earnestness about sin if it is only to be thought, for earnestness
is simply this: that you and I are sinners. Earnestness is not sin in general; rather, the accent of
earnestness rests on the sinner, who is the single individual. With respect to “the single
individual,” speculation, if it is consistent, must make light of being a single individual or
being that which cannot be thought. If it cares to do anything about this line, it must say to the
individual: Is this anything to waste your time on? Forget it! To be an individual human being
is nothing! Think—then you are all mankind: cogito ergo sum. (SUD, 119/SKS 11, 230–1)
So while being a ‘self before God’ in Kierkegaard’s terms—that is, being a self that
knows itself as the subject of final judgement over its entire life—does provide a
distinctive principium individuationis, the identity thus conferred turns out to exceed
6
He also at one point, referencing Daniel 5:27 (‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found
wanting’) and offering his own image of psychostasia (see the following section, ‘How Far Can Non-Theists
Go with Kierkegaard?’), speaks of our being ‘weighed’ by eternity (UDVS, 311/SKS 8, 403–4).
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
the capacities of impersonal, rational thought. The quasi-metaphor of an eternal

accounting gives us an idea of how this individuation works: the soteriological self,
which understands itself as the subject of an always-immanent final judgement
outside of time, takes responsibility for the events in the life of this specific human
being. Thus the self-reflexive relationship is, as in the Lockean sense, one of con-
cerned moral appropriation of our past and future. But this tells us nothing about
where the bounds of what we are to appropriate begin and end. Am I responsible
for things I did in early childhood? What about responsibilities that go beyond
my individual life? What of the unintended consequences of seemingly innocent
actions—including consequences that occur well after my death?
Kierkegaard doesn’t answer questions like this, and on his own account, cannot do
so: the identity conferred by soteriological responsibility exceeds rational explication.
But that may in fact be a feature rather than a bug. As we’ve seen, the earliest attempt
(in Locke) to split the human qua organic entity and the self qua rational moral being
responsible for whatever it can extend its consciousness to led to serious problems
about imputability. And like Locke, Kierkegaard sees the self as a being that is
ultimately answerable not just to human ethical norms, but to a final judgement in
which the criteria of responsibility may well be different. On ‘posthumous memory
restoration’ readings of Locke, at the final judgement selves will attain a pure self-
transparency both to God and to themselves, such that ‘In that moment selves will
appear whole and complete, consciousness uniting not just those elements to which it
has access under ordinary conditions, but everything that rightly belongs to the self,’
whereby it attains ‘not mere knowledge of its states of mind, but knowledge of its
responsibility, and of the fate such responsibility entails’.7 Even if that is what Locke
meant, however, it means that the full extension of the self understood in Locke’s
forensic sense is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, while we live.8
Ultimately, Kierkegaard offers no more satisfactory answer to the question of the
limits of eschatological responsibility than Locke does. The self that answers for the
human being’s actions cannot know the full extent of what it will be called to answer
for, only that it will be called to such an accounting. In Kierkegaard’s relational
account of self, there is always a limit to the extent to which we can achieve self-
transparency. But just as Locke can convincingly be read as a ‘theological pragma-
tist’9 on this question, rather than just a metaphysician who has painted himself into
7
Seigel 2005, p.102; cf. Ayers 1991, p.272: ‘it may be that Locke would have envisaged as a possibility
that the fragmented and imperfect ‘persons’ which, from our human point of view, we see successively
realized in a forgetful (not to say, drunken) man will somehow be continued at the resurrection in an
eschatologically more satisfactory individual, embracing them all. For if the resurrection is going to involve
some divine reconstruction anyway, a certain amount of constructive improvement in the direction of
what is remembered might not seem out of order.’
8
A conclusion that Seigel accepts: ‘Those of us who do not believe that such a third moment of selfhood
will ever arrive must content ourselves with the incomplete modes of being selves to ourselves’ (Seigel 2005,
p.103).
9
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
a corner and is using an appeal to the supernatural to get him out of it, so too
Kierkegaard can be read as saying something similar. On this reading of Locke, his
point is simply that while the account of identity he proposes has clear limits and
deficiencies, it’s good enough for us as beings trying to live lives that will be found
worthy in that eschatological scheme of things. We cannot, ultimately, know what
we will be judged for, but we have an account of identity that is plenty to be going
on with.
Likewise, Kierkegaard might say that while his view of selfhood doesn’t yield any
sort of decision procedure for working out boundary cases, most of our morally
freighted human identity is not in question most of the time. Where the diachronic
person begins and ends may well be hard to discern. I’ve often referred in this book to
what we are to appropriate as ourselves as a ‘human’ identity or the identity that
maps onto the career of a human animal. But even if we wanted to specify that
when Anti-Climacus says menneske, for instance, he means something perfectly co-
extensive with the life of one specific human animal, the boundaries in such cases can
still be unclear, may involve problem cases where different perspectives come into
conflict (such as false memory), and might involve genuine puzzles about imputability
and agency.10 Some of these problems are arguably more serious than a ‘theological
pragmatist’ position would allow, and might genuinely benefit from metaphysical
investigation, or at least careful philosophical description and exploration of the
various forms of continuity and discontinuity involved. But existentially, and first-
personally, there is plenty within our life-world that’s non-problematic for each of us
to appropriate to ourselves.
This pragmatic point also sits within Kierkegaard’s larger concern to avoid using
knotty intellectual problems as a means of sidestepping practical responsibility. For
example, as Paul Muench argues, much of what Climacus is doing in the Postscript
is trying to slow his over-eager philosophical reader down, to show us that the
fundamental tasks of our life are not things we can simply carry out without further
ado and then move on to more intellectually challenging problems. Some tasks
remain tasks, and should properly preoccupy us for an entire lifetime.11 In For Self-
Examination, Kierkegaard claims that when reading scripture, with all the ethical
demands it makes of us, we are enjoined to actualize what we do understand of it
rather than spend time trying to decipher the bits we don’t understand. There are,
in Kierkegaard’s view, important ‘upbuilding’ reasons to avoid giving too precise a
specification of where our responsibilities begin and end, because doing so will
pander to our all-too-human desire for evasion and relief, showing us loopholes and
avenues of escape—including distracting ourselves with the very activity of deter-
mining the limits of our responsibility! In the same way, Kierkegaard’s final word
on our eschatological identity, were he to supply one, might be this: just repent of
10
As an example, consider the question of contemporary responsibility for historical injustices.
11
Muench 2011.
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
everything you see to repent for, and one day you will ‘know even as [you are]
known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). Philosophically this is rather unsatisfying; but there’s
no reason to think that the imperatives of philosophical inquiry and of ethical
practice can never be in tension.12
Not surprisingly, there is an element of faith in all this. Ayers notes that ‘Locke’s
Christian believes that somehow the world will eventually turn out to be a morally
more straightforward place than our everyday experiences of forgetting might
suggest’,13 and likewise the Kierkegaardian believer hopes, in Tamara Monet
Marks’ phrase, for a ‘disambiguated creation’,14 a state which cannot be fulfilled in
time.15 Yet it is in some ways a more modest view of identity-as-responsibility than
we find elsewhere in the literature. It needn’t, for instance, lead to the Levinasian
vision of a self that is an ever-expanding locus of responsibility and boundless guilt,
the ‘I’ defined as ‘a point of the universe where such an overflow of responsibility is
produced’,16 for those who find such a view troubling. And acknowledging our
ignorance of the precise boundaries of our responsibility—while accepting we do
know a vast amount that clearly does fall within our field of responsibility—is truer to
how we experience the world in practical terms. We may not be able to pin down
exactly where our lives begin and end, where the border between what we are and are
not answerable for lies; but we can nonetheless take responsibility for the whole,
whatever its extension turns out to be.
How Far Can Non-theists Go with Kierkegaard?

Even if all that’s true, we’re still ignoring the elephant in the room: God. I don’t
believe in anything that answers to the Abrahamic conception of Yaweh/God/
Allah, and I don’t believe in the possibility of post-mortem survival such as would
be required by Abrahamic eschatology. I suspect you don’t believe in these things
either. Surely that makes everything you’ve said here moot?
It’s certainly the case that non-theist readers cannot follow Kierkegaard all the way.
And there is always a real danger of distorting Kierkegaard by using him outside the
pervasively religious context of his thinking. Nonetheless, there is much in Kierke-
gaard that I think can be salvaged for non-theistic contexts, provided we are careful
to distinguish between what we take to be Kierkegaard’s own view and applications of
Kierkegaardian concepts. (Whether I have succeeded in exercising such care in this
book is for others to judge). So, what of this soteriological account of personal
12
Compare the Buddhist parable of a man wounded by a poisoned arrow, who refuses to have the arrow
removed until he has been told the caste, age, occupation, birthplace, and motive of the person who shot
him—regardless of whether his curiosity is warranted or not, he will die before he gets the answers he seeks
(Majjhima-nikaya, 63; Nanamoli and Bodhi 1995, pp.534–5).
13 14
Ayers 1991, p.272. Marks 2011, pp.282.
15
On the central role of ‘eschatological hope’ in Kierkegaard, see Davenport 2008; 2012.
16
Levinas 1969, p.245.
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
identity? If we reject Kierkegaard’s theistic premises, what, if anything, survives? The

familiar version of Genesis 4:8 is quite terse: Cain lures Abel into a field and murders
him. In the Targum Neofiti (an Aramaic elaboration of the Hebrew Tanakh)
however, Cain launches into a spontaneous atheistic lecture, telling his brother that
‘There is no Judgement, there is no Judge, there is no other world, there is no gift of
good reward for the just and no punishment for the wicked.’ Abel insists there is such
a judge, and is promptly dispatched to meet him.17 For those of us who suspect Cain
was on the right side of the theological argument at least, what could, or should, be
salvaged from Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of temporally bivalent self-experience if
there is no judge and no world to come?
I think the key here is to be found in the curiously passive nature of final
judgement, as noted in The Sickness Unto Death:
Essentially, everyone arrives in eternity bringing along with him and delivering his own
absolutely accurate record of every least trifle he has committed or omitted. Thus a child
could hold court in eternity; there is really nothing for a third party to do, everything down to
the most insignificant word spoken is in order. (SUD, 124/SKS 11, 235)
This image of a written record of the deceased’s soteriological status is well attested in
Abrahamic faiths, from the Book of Jubilees 5:13’s ‘And the judgement of all is ordained
and written on the heavenly tablets in righteousness’, to Revelation 20:12’s ‘And I saw
the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another
book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things
which were written in the books, according to their works’,18 to Surah 17:30–1 of the
Qur’an: ‘And [for] every person We have fastened his fate upon his own neck, and We
will produce for him on the Day of Resurrection a record which he will encounter
spread open. [It will be said], “Read your record. Sufficient is yourself against you this
Day as accountant.”’19 The last example suggests a more comprehensive recording, in
which a person’s entire life, not just their election or damnation, is recorded—the ‘every
idle word’ of Matthew 12:36 which Kierkegaard stresses again and again.
What’s interesting, and what the quote from Sickness above brings out, is that in
such a scenario the judge is in one sense superfluous, for the written record already
condemns the deceased. The book simply says whatever it says, independent of any
judgements made about it. This is equally clear in an even older image of post-
mortem judgement: the psychostasia or the weighing of souls to determine their
soteriological status. This image goes back as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
17
McNamara 1992, p.67.
18
Compare the thirteenth-century hymn Dies Irae: ‘Liber scriptus proferetur | In quo totum continetur |
Unde mundus iudicetur’ (‘The written book will be brought forth | In which all is contained | From which
the world shall be judged.’)
19
See also Surah 10:61 ‘And you are not (engaged) in any affair, nor do you recite concerning it any
portion of the Qur’an, nor do you do any work but We are witnesses over you when you enter into it, and
there does not lie concealed from your Lord the weight of an atom in the earth or in the heaven, nor any
thing less than that nor greater, but it is in a clear book.’
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
which depicts the deceased’s heart being weighed on a scale against the feather of
Ma’at, symbolizing truth, while similar depictions of souls being weighed against
some (morally loaded) standard, or the deceased’s good and bad deeds being weighed
against each other, occur in Vedic literature,20 Shinto,21 the Qur’an,22 and Medieval
Christian artistic depictions of the last judgement, in which the Archangel Michael
is often shown carrying out this role.23 Yet psychostasia is here presented as not
so much a judgement of the dead as an impersonal measurement. There is, as S. G. F.
Brandon noted, a tension in such an eschatological scene between the ‘impersonal
and automatic’ operation of these scales and the notion of trial, defence, and
judgement.24 The ‘judge’ does not decide any facts of the matter, but simply certifies
the verdict and applies punishment or reward. The soteriological status of the
deceased is therefore not dependent upon any decision on the judge’s part.
I think we can see in all this where something might be recoverable for non-
believers. What all these judgement myths have in common is a soteriological focus
on the final whole-life status of the deceased. In each case, the deceased arrives with
her fate already sealed: her life was whatever it was, and its value or disvalue as a
whole is now forever fixed. At death, it is too late to change this total evaluation of
a life—which is why the mechanism of ‘judgement’ is presented as operating in an
automatic and impersonal way. The contents and final meaning of a life can no
longer be changed. This, as commentators such as Rudd and Davenport have noted,
is one of the key meanings of death for Kierkegaard: the point at which the meaning
of my life is fixed once and for all, and where no further possibilities for making
amends are available. And that is a thought we can make sense of, and find
compelling, even without a belief in posthumous survival or final divine judgement.
We do have a concern for the ultimate value of our lives as a whole, the sort of thing
we are concerned about when we ask questions like ‘If I died right now, would it all
have been worth it?’ We have a way of caring about the totality of our life, of its value
or disvalue (including and perhaps especially in moral terms) that has a particular
20
Śatapatha Brāhmana: XI 2, 7, 33 ‘Now, as to that balance, the right (south) edge of the Vedi. Whatever
good deed man does that is inside the Vedi; and whatever evil deed he does that is outside the Vedi. Let him
therefore sit down, touching the right edge of the Vedi; for, indeed, they place him on the balance in yonder
world; and whichever of the two will rise that he will follow, whether it be the good or the evil. And, verily,
whosoever knows this, mounts the balance even in this world, and escapes being placed on the balance in
yonder world; for his good deed rises, and not his evil deed.’ Thanks to Leesa Davis for her assistance with
this quote.
21
The judgement of the deceased before Emma-Ô, judge of the dead, involved both a comprehensive
written record and the use of scales. Cf. Brandon 1967, p.191.
22
Surah 21:47 ‘We shall set up scales of justice for the day of Judgment, so that not a soul will be dealt
with unjustly in the least. And if there be (no more than) the weight of a mustard seed, We will bring it (to
account): and enough are We to take account.’
23
Brandon 1967, pp.120–6.
24
Brandon 1967, pp.24, 32. As Brandon notes, there were two, seemingly incompatible strands within
the Egyptian funerary texts: the automatic, impersonal weighing of the heart, and the deceased’s personal
declaration of innocence before judges. It could be argued that something of the same tension attends the
later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatologies as well.
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
final status as the object of its concern. The significance of that status doesn’t turn on
what, if anything, follows afterwards.
And thus, as Rudd puts it, a non-believer can ‘take the thought of looking back on
our lives from eternity as a sort of regulative ideal’25 and still find meaning and
significance in it, without believing there will be any punishment or reward for
having lived in a certain way. John H. Whittaker makes a very similar point, which
bears quoting in full:
We get some idea of what the eternal might mean as an absolute notion because we all know
that a time is coming when we will have no more time, when the opportunity for change,
improvement, growth, etc. will have passed. When that moment comes, our earthly lives will
be over and we will changelessly (i.e. eternally) be what we have been, since the whole span of
our lives will then be caught in the irrevocableness of the past. Thinking about ourselves from
this point of view, we want to know what our lives will have amounted to when they are
completed wholes. What will we have been when the time to change has passed? There is
something of the eternal in such reflections because the judgments that we pass on ourselves
from this perspective loom with the absoluteness of unchangeable verdicts.
That is why Kierkegaard follows Christian practice in speaking of the eternal as a judge who
comes to separate the just from the unjust. It is not so much that there is a being who will judge
us, or that there is a particular day of judgment that will come; it is only that the spectre of an
unwelcome finality looms over our own self-assessment. One does not have to believe in
Christianity to know what this means.26
In caring about the ultimate significance of the lives we lead, we care about a final
status that gathers together our lives as an implicitly finished totality in the same way
as we find in the ancient imagery of the psychostasia and the Book of Life. Of course,
things are different for believers: for a start, believing in the reality of punishment or
the possibility of forgiveness and mercy may give radically different significance to
the thought of such a final status. And yet the idea of caring about such a status does
seem to be perfectly intelligible from the perspective of non-belief. Hence something
of the concern that motivates Kierkegaard to try and bridge the gap between objective
awareness of human continuity and subjective appropriation of our lives can survive
even in non-theistic discussions of these issues. If we care about the whole of our lives
in this deep, unifying way, we don’t need the thought of punishment or reward to
care about whether our lives will ultimately have been of value.
Conclusion: Where Next?

We started this book with a dispiriting picture of a field of inquiry that is becoming
ever more fragmented. The metaphysical discussion of personal identity, for all its
value, seems to be simply grinding further into an ever more complex stalemate.
25 26
Rudd 2012, p.166. Whittaker 2000, pp.194–5.
 OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
As C. Stephen Evans puts it, ‘Kierkegaard’s understanding of selfhood points us

beyond this argument between metaphysical and interpretivist theories.’27 In par-
ticular, as I’ve tried to show here, Kierkegaard suggests that we should see selfhood
not simply as an objective metaphysical matter—a question about a class of objects
called ‘persons’ and how long they last—but about how a temporally perspectival
first-person subject relates to the totality of a human life. That is not simply a
metaphysical question. Enticingly, though, it’s not simply a phenomenological one
either. Rather it calls us to notice how first-person perspectives interact with the
deliverances of metaphysics, of how subjects relate to psychological, physical, and
social (dis-)continuity. Consider a relatively simple, prosaic example: you and I are
reminiscing about times past, and discussing, let’s say, a particularly memorable
party. You tell a heart-warming story about how you met the love of your life,
Cordelia, at that party. But I then point out that Cordelia couldn’t have been at
that party, because it took place during the year when she was living overseas. In this
simple vignette we see various forms of continuity and identification all intersecting.
The continuity of your memory is called into question, while your narrative under-
standing of your life is problematized by the narratives of others (revealing, thereby,
the crucial intersubjective dimension of narrative selfhood), narratives which in turn
involve facts about physical and spatio-temporal continuity (namely, where your
body and Cordelia’s body were in space during that period of time).
The temptation here is simply to fold everything into a single set of objective facts
that settle any questions of identity that may be in play here: your memory is simply
wrong, as Cordelia couldn’t have been at that party. But as we’ve seen, a single
account of the metaphysics of personal identity that answers to all our core intuitions
here has proven elusive, particularly when it comes to capturing the importance of
the first-person perspective. What’s more productive, more philosophically interest-
ing, and truer to our lived experience of selfhood, is to turn our attention to the ways
in which the different identity claims figured in such a scenario interact; how the
objective and subjective inform, colour, and modify each other.
Making predictions is something of a mug’s game, but I’d suggest this turn to how
perspectives interact is the direction in which discussions of personal identity, with
their increasingly apparent differentiation between ‘selves’ and ‘persons’, needs to
move. Instead of trying to collapse everything we care about in identity into a unitary,
objective account of something called the self, we need to attend, using all the tools at
our disposal, to the ways in which irreducibly first-personal elements of identity
interact with objective elements. What this engagement with Kierkegaard has allowed
us to see is that selfhood may be an achievement on the part of a present-tense subject as
it interrelates these various kinds of identity-claims—and, in a way that perhaps Locke
27
Evans 2006, p.265.
OBJECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 
would have approved of, he does this in a way that’s fundamentally normative.
Metaphysics becomes the handmaiden of ethics, not the other way around.
So Kierkegaard, perhaps to the surprise of some, turns out to be a useful guide in
showing Anglophone philosophers of identity a way out of the metaphysical thicket
they’ve found themselves in over the last half-century. Not everyone can or will want
to follow Kierkegaard all the way down his thoroughly eschatologized path. Martin
Buber once wrote of Kierkegaard that ‘We have much to learn from him, but not the
final lesson’.28 Perhaps so. But as Robert Nozick said, ‘There is room for words on
subjects other than last words’.29
28 29
Buber 2007, p.65. Nozick 1974, p.xii.
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Index
Absent-mindedness 135–7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 47, 54, 60, 66

Absurdity 166 Book of the Dead (Egypt) 227–8
Adorno, Theodore 194 Boredom 40–1, 102
Aesthetic, the 40–2, 46–7, 102–3, 148, 150, 158, Borges, Jorge Luis 37, 119
180, 200, 214 Brain death 5
Afterlife 9, 35, 192–3, 202–3, 208, 227 Brain wipe 141–2
Hegelian 11 Brandon, S.G.F. 228
Agency 6, 37, 63, 105, 123, 169–70, 187, 201 Branson, Jan 123
Akrasia 87 Bridge problem 151
Alienation from past and future 7, 18, 22–3, 69, Brook, Andrew 94
90–1, 101, 117–40, 189–91, 203, 215, 219 Broughton, Rhoda 118
Allison, Henry 31, 33, 36 Bruin, Leon de 37
Alzheimer’s disease 5, 142 Buben, Adam 206
Amnesia 5, 82, 141–2, 164, 181 Buber, Martin 231
Andersen, Hans Christian 13–14, 48 Buchanan, Allen 4, 122
Animals, nonhuman 9, 26, 207–8 Buckareff, Andrei A. 192
Anna (biblical figure) 207 Buddha 64
Anticipation 6, 22, 23, 45, 69–70, 74, 77, 85–91, Buddhism 120, 169, 226
93, 98, 101, 107, 112–15, 118, 123–4, Burgess, Andrew 43
132, 139, 163, 190, 201, 206, 218–19 Butler, Joseph 2, 29, 30
Anxiety 20, 99, 107, 112–13
Aporia 126–7, 157 Cain and Abel 227
Aquinas, Thomas 195 Carr, David 173–4
Aristotle 37, 144, 158, 178, 195, 201, 223 Cartesianism 2, 8, 12, 13, 25, 94, 144–5, 179,
Arnim, Ludwig Achim von 153 181–2, 187, 193–4
Athenagoras, 8 Castañeda, Hector-Neri 73
Atonement 210 Character 111, 124, 141, 171, 178–80, 184, 187,
Audi, Robert 11, 192 190, 195–6
Augustine 8, 195 Characterization 147, 165–6
Augustus (Gaius Octavius) 143 Childhood, children 43–4, 74, 119–20, 149,
Autonomy 121, 126, 169, 172, 176 157, 161, 224
Austin, J. L. 142–3 Choice 13, 67, 78, 106, 158, 171–2, 183–4, 193,
Authenticity 100, 126, 169 199–200, 214
Autopsy 50–1, 66, 70 Christ 15, 21, 47–54, 60–1, 63–8, 78–80, 105,
Ayers, Michael 25, 28, 35, 224, 226 126, 222
Christianity 8, 14–15, 20, 33, 55, 80, 157, 196,
Baker, Lynne Rudder 97, 139, 142, 177, 199, 205, 227–9
192, 216 Clarke, Samuel 88
Barresi, John 1, 7–9, 34–6, 88, 224 Collins, Anthony 88
Becconsal, Thomas 33 Collins, Arthur 30
Beck, Simon 122–4 Commitment 135, 139 see also choice
Behan, David P. 32, 36 Compensation 148, 168
Behrendt, Kathy 114–15, 174, 207 Concern, concernment 21, 30–3, 36, 65, 81–2,
Belshaw, Christopher 5 111, 118, 130–2, 134–5, 139–40, 155,
Belzer, Marvin 77, 90 164, 177, 183, 204, 209, 215, 218–19
Beowulf 173 Prudential 4, 6, 7, 128
Biography 38–9, 175, 215 Egocentric 4, 6–8, 27–8, 77, 84, 89, 91–2,
Bloom, Anthony 53 113–14, 123, 126, 148, 163, 168,
Body swaps 4, 5, 31, 146 196–7, 221
Bonaparte, Napoleon 72, 74–7, 79, 87 Connell, George 14, 41
 INDEX
Consciousness 12, 27–8, 94, 99, 130, 147, Despair 20, 63, 149, 151, 155–62, 185, 196,
150–1, 154, 161, 180–1, 197, 204 200–1, 205, 219
Non-positional 2 Deutscher, Max 74
Extension of 9, 21, 26–32, 34, 35, 43, 45, 119, Diachronic self-experience 18, 22, 93–116, 128,
130–1, 149, 224 138, 188–9
As interest 27 As illusory 94–6, 99–101, 106, 116
As scalar 27, 28 Required for ethics 96
Contemporaneity (samtidighed) 21–2, 45–68, Need for non-reductive account 95–6,
78–82, 85, 95, 101–7, 109, 112, 114–15, 101–1, 106–7, 115–16
132, 137–41, 159, 203, 206, 211, Disposition 141, 149, 171, 184, 190
215, 218 Distance
Inability to recreate 46–7, 81 temporal 53, 57, 60, 133–4, 159
As phenomenal feature 46–8, 59–62, 65–6, Imaginative 54–9, 62, 63, 105
68, 78–80 Dreams 71
And action 48, 67–8 Dreyfus, Hubert 13, 144, 157
Historical 46–50, 54, 62–5, 67, 78 Dualism 8–9, 144, 146
As co-presence 53–9, 60, 64–6, 78–9, 81–2, Duckles, Ian 167
90–1, 93, 102, 104–5, 114, 203, 206,
211, 218 Earnestness 132, 137, 223
As for-me-ness 59–62, 64–5, 80–1, 83, 104, Eckersberg, Cristoffer Wilhelm 72–3
115, 137, 218 Eich, Eric 82
As normatively claiming 64–6, 79–80, 82, 85, Eleventh Hour 24, 205–6, 211–13, 220
95, 104–5 Elrod, John 144, 208
Immediately self-reflexive 65–6, 79, 87, 104 Embarrassment 107–9, 112, 115, 123, 129,
Unavoidability 105 131, 138
Agent-referentiality 105 Embodiment 145–6
Continuity 148–51, 158, 160, 168, 172, 176, Empathic access 123–4, 128–9, 131–2, 138–40
185, 199, 201, 214, 222, 225 Emotional Priority Thesis 109
Conversion 210 Emotions, reflexive 95, 107–12, 123
Corcuera, Alfonso Muñoz 127 Enlightenment 1, 9, 11, 16, 57–8
Corpse problem 4 Epicurus 54, 114
Crop rotation (aesthetic method) 40–2, Episodic self-experience 22, 93–120, 127, 128
102, 148 As deficient 94–5, 100, 107–12, 115, 128–9
Cross, Andrew 184 Erlandson, Douglas K. 2010
Czakó, Istvan 10 Eschatological judgment 8–11, 15–16, 19, 24,
33–6, 44, 118, 130, 132–4, 145, 154,
Dainton, Barry 62, 89, 142, 151, 180, 221 162–3, 191, 193, 195–6, 199–200, 202–5,
Dalsgaard, Matias Ml 167 208, 210–16, 218–20, 222–9, 231
Damasio, Antonio 5, 118, 180–1, 189, 202, 219 Exhaustiveness of 133–4, 139, 162, 204–5,
Davenport, John J. 14, 19, 23, 95, 103, 121, 144, 215, 227–8
150, 158, 163, 167–9, 171–3, 175–6, Eternalism 188
179–80, 183, 185–91, 194–6, 201, 205–6, Eternity, the eternal 15, 23–4, 42, 44, 132–4,
208, 214–15, 226, 228 149, 152, 155–63, 176, 189, 196–213,
Davis, Leesa 228 222, 229
Death 54, 120, 136–7, 139, 156, 175, 194–200, Ethical, the 42
202, 205–6, 215 Evans, C. Stephen 53–4, 126, 157, 163–4, 169,
Fear of 95, 112–15, 137, 196–7 179–80, 230
Debord, Guy 222 Evasion 56–7, 225
Debus, Dorothea 70, 82 Existentialism 20, 166
Deconstructionism 166 Extraordinary, the 56–9, 60–1, 63–4
Defiance 161, 185
Dehistoricization 47–8, 65–6 Fabritius, Elisabeth 72–3
Demonic, the 149–50, 161 Faith 50–2, 57–9, 149, 155, 180
Deonna, Julien A. 138 Fantasy 88, 106, 136
Dennett, Daniel 7, 167, 177–8 Feinberg, Joel 121
Derrida, Jacques 166, 223 Ferreira, M. Jamie 80, 209
Descartes, Rene 12, 144, 223 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 12–13, 144, 170
INDEX 
Finitization 154–5 Hick, John 11, 192

Fischer, John Martin 196 History 47–50, 52, 54–6, 58–61, 65–6
Fission 5, 22, 88–91, 164 Sacred 58–60, 80–1
Fission rejuvenation 91 Holbein, Hans the Younger 73
Flew, Anthony 33 Hong, Howard V. and Edna H. 51, 119, 144–5
Forgetting 41, 44, 102–3, 130, 132–3, 148, 226 Howitz, Franz Gothard 12
Forgiveness, divine 205, 229 Human being 13, 40, 83, 88, 91, 94–6, 98, 101,
Forstrom, K. Joanna S. 10, 33–5 107–9, 117, 119, 136, 138, 143–4, 153–4,
Fraasen, Bas van 142 159, 161, 194, 219, 225
Frank, Anne 85 As animal/organism 25–6, 33, 142, 223
Frankfurt, Harry G. 6, 166, 170, 172 Continuity/persistence of 94, 115, 119,
Freedom 20, 166, 170, 178, 185 123–4, 127, 164
Friendship 190 As synthesis 143–4, 146, 158, 176–7, 182, 201
Furtak, Rick Anthony 19 See also person-self distinction
Fusion 164 Hume, David 2, 6, 9–10, 38, 57–9, 120
Husserl, Edmund 2, 62, 104, 142, 181, 189
Gadamer, Hans Georg 47–8, 54 Hutto, Daniel D. 167, 172, 177
Gallagher, Shaun 37, 93, 132, 180
Garrett, Brian 30 Idealism 10, 12
Garrett, Don 32 Idem and Ipse 167, 178
Gift 126 Identity
Giles, James 74–5, 106, 142 as similarity 4, 28, 30
Gilleleje 182 numerical 9, 28–30, 89, 113, 120, 142, 165–6,
Givenness, first-personal 74, 98, 104, 181 168–9
Glenn, John D. 49 of objects 25
God 9, 15, 33–5, 59, 65–6, 85, 126, 133, 149, of organisms 25–6
155, 157–8, 170, 199, 203–4, 224, 226 transitivity of 29–30, 89, 153
Goldie, Peter 1, 40, 71, 75, 82, 104, 120, 125, See also personal identity, transitivity
139–40, 167, 172–3, 177, 194 objection
Goldschmidt, Meïr 48 Identity crisis 5, 120
Göschel, Karl Friedrich 10 Imagination 20, 22, 45, 49, 51, 59–63, 68, 78,
Gouwens, David J. 78 105, 123, 135–6
Grice, H.P. 30, 141 Difference from memory and
Ground projects 14, 170, 172 anticipation 70–1, 73–4, 75–82,
Grn, Arne 145, 148 84, 86–8
Guardini, Romano 47, 154 Psychological repertoire 75–6
Guilt 43–4, 107, 109–11, 132–4, 205 Imitation 60–1, 67–8
Gustafsson, Johan E. 151 Immediacy 154–5, 158–9, 176, 183, 185,
Gyllembourg, Thomasine 11, 13–14 193, 196, 214
Immortality 42, 193, 201–3, 208
de Haan, Sanneke 37 and Hegelianism 10
Hallucination 93 as judgment 202–5, 208, 226–9
Hamilton, Andy 30 Incarnation 48–52, 55, 59, 63, 65–7, 78–81
Hamman, Johann Georg 57–8 Unrecognisability of 49–52, 61
Hannay, Alastair 20–1, 161, 179, 201 Inclosing reserve 160
Hartley, L.P. 56, 118 Infinitization 63
Hauweras, Stanley 190 Intention 69, 77, 86–9, 123, 171
Hazlitt, William 22, 74 Interest, interestedness 27–8, 132, 135–6,
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 10–11, 12, 39, 139, 181
47, 65–6, 127, 144 and disinterest 28
Hegelianism 10–11, 15, 65–6, 144 the interesting 40
Heiberg, Johan Ludvig 10–12, 57 Inwagen, Peter 192
Heiberg, Johanne Louise 11 Inwardness 43, 59, 105–6, 132
Heidegger, Martin 2, 13, 15–16, 20, 74, 158, 209 Irenaeus 8
Hell 9, 200, 204 Irony 41, 148, 166, 184
Helm, Paul 36 Islam 8, 227–8
Henriques, Salomon 72–3 Izenberg, Gerald 16
 INDEX
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 42 Fear and Trembling 63

James, Henry 118–19 For Self-Examination 53, 136, 225
James, William 1, 11, 16, 22, 35, 74, 164, 188 Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus
Jenson, Matt 48, 54, 66 Dubitandum Est 27, 161, 181
Judaism 8, 227–8 Journals and Papers 50, 67, 119, 133–4,
Judgment Day 33–6, 83, 85, 130–1, 133, 204, 152–3, 182, 203, 215
218, 224 Letters and Documents 39
Johansson, Jens 3 The Moment 44, 47, 67–8
Johnston, Mark 9, 24, 77, 84, 114, 118–19, 137, Philosophical Fragments 21, 48–53, 57, 61,
168, 190, 196–8, 202, 217 66, 78
Jones, Karen 173–4 Practice in Christianity 21, 53, 56, 59–60,
Justice, human vs divine 35, 44 62–3, 80, 104, 170–2, 176–7, 185–6
The Sickness Unto Death 14–15, 23, 27, 63,
Kavka, Martin 207 85–8, 136, 143–52, 154–65, 170, 175–6,
Kangas, David 12–13, 15, 39, 103, 126–7, 184–5, 192–3, 196, 199–201, 205, 208,
184, 207 213–14, 223, 227
Kant, Immanuel 6, 9, 10, 12 Stages on Life’s Way 37–40, 42–4
Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen 133 Three Discourses on Imagined
Kierkegaard, Sren Occasions 54, 114, 137, 195, 206
Awareness of Locke 10 Two Ages 39, 60
As non-substantialist 13, 17, 145, 159, 184, Upbuilding Discourses in Various
193, 196, 200 Spirits 15, 52, 132–3, 203–11, 222–3
Status as philosopher 19–20 Works of Love 110, 194
Pseudonyms: Kitchener, Herbert, 1st Lord 65
A 40–2, 85, 88, 102 Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne 10
Anti-Climacus 14, 23, 27, 53, 56, 59, 61–3, Kleinig, John 121
80–1, 85–8, 104, 136, 138, 143–52, Korsgaard, Christine 6–7, 166, 169–70, 177–8
154–65, 170, 192–3, 196, 200, 202, Kosch, Michelle 53, 57, 144, 184
213–14, 216, 222–3, 225
Johannes Climacus 11, 27–8, 43–4, 48–52, Lamarque, Peter 167
54, 57–8, 61, 65, 78, 81, 135–6, 139, 164, Langerak, Edward 91
184, 195, 197, 225 Leap, the 184
Johannes the Seducer 41, 46, 61–2, 64, 81, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 33–4
102–3 Levinas, Emmanuel 2, 223, 226
Petrus Minor 54, 57, 59 Lewis, David 77, 141, 187, 212
Judge William 13–14, 23, 38, 42, 135, 157, Life-view (livs-anskuelse) 13–14
162, 171–2, 176–9, 183–6, 190, 192–3, Life, totality of individual 81, 84–5, 111, 159,
196, 199–202, 214 162, 164, 173–7, 194, 200, 202–5, 209,
Vigilius Haufniesis 150, 162–3, 184, 214–16, 219, 225–6, 228–30
209–10, 223 Lillegard, Norman 160, 199
William Afham 37–40, 42–3 Lippitt, John 19, 110, 167, 174, 176, 179, 190
Works: Locke, John 2, 5, 7–10, 15, 21, 25–36, 40, 44–5,
The Book on Adler 54–7, 59–61, 195 76, 81, 83, 85, 88, 93, 111, 118, 127,
Christian Discourses 63, 157, 202–4, 129–32, 134, 140, 142, 146–7, 149, 152,
212–13, 222 168, 192, 196, 203–4, 218, 224–6, 230–1
The Concept of Anxiety 15, 150, 162–3, Soteriological focus 10, 21, 33–6, 42–3, 130–2
182, 184, 209–10, 223 Ethical readings of 31–6
The Concept of Irony 148, 184 As theological pragmatist 34–6, 85, 224–5
Concluding Unscientific Postscript 11, Lowrie, Walter 166
28, 43–4, 135–6, 139, 195, Lübcke, Poul 14
197, 225 Lucretius 207
Early Polemical Writings 13–14 Luther, Martin 144, 166
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 15, 27, Lgstrup, Knud Ejler 17
155–6, 182–3
Either/Or 13–14, 40–2, 46, 85, 88, 102–3, MacIntyre, Alasdair 7, 14, 16, 167, 173–4,
135, 148, 157, 170–2, 175–9, 183–5, 195, 214
192–3, 196, 198–201 MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians 176–7, 180, 195
INDEX 
McIsaac, Heather K. 82 Milinda Panha 169

Mackenzie, Catriona 6, 75, 88 Mineness 2, 7, 74, 181
Mackey, Louis 19 Mink, Louis O. 209
Mackie, J.L. 3, 30, 33 Miracles 57
McTaggart, J.M.E. 207, 210 Mirror metaphors 53, 85–8, 136, 138, 156
Madell, Geoffrey 216 Mjaaland, Marius 66
Majjhima-nikaya 226 Molyneaux, William 35–6
Malantschuk, Gregor 51, 67 Moment 102, 162–3, 165, 202, 209,
Malpas, Jeff 174 212–13, 217
Marino, Gordon 20 as intersection of time and eternity 24,
Marlowe, Christopher 134 162–3, 199, 209, 212, 214–17
Marriage 14, 120, 176, 200 Monty Python 26
Marks, Tamara Monet 10, 16, 194, 201, 226 Mood 137, 148
Martin, Raymond 1, 7–9, 34–6, 77, 88–9, 91, Mooney, Edward F. 19, 170–1, 178
100, 113, 224 Moral imputability see responsibility
Martens, Paul 48 Moral status 111
Martin, C. B. 74 Moses 56
Martensen, Hans Lassen 10–11 Muench, Paul 135, 225
Materialism 9, 12, 94 Mulhall, Stephen 190
Mavrodes, George I. 192 Mynster, Jakob Peter 12, 39
Me/me* distinction 96, 98–102, 104–5, 107–15, Mller, Poul Martin 10
119, 124, 128, 137, 186, 188, 197–8, 217
Memory, 20, 22–3, 25, 35, 41–7, 51–2, 69–72, Nāgasena 169
93, 101–07, 123–5, 132–4, 139, 141, 148, Nagel, Thomas 212–13
163, 171, 190, 201, 203–4, 206, 218, Narration 39, 159
220, 230 Narrative, narrativity 94, 96, 167, 172,
anticipatory recollection 41–2 207, 230
as assuming identity 29–30, 76 vs chronicle 44, 173, 177
centred vs. acentred 70–1, 73, 82 literary 173, 175, 194
cogency of 46–7 continuity 173, 230
concernful 31–2, 36, 42, 85, 130, 218 Narrative identity 5, 7, 14, 17, 23, 82, 124, 127,
episodic 22, 36, 45, 70–1, 73–4, 75, 77, 81–2, 162, 165–7, 172–82, 186–91, 194–6, 198,
91, 96–8, 106, 118–19, 219 213–16, 230
false 83–5, 169, 225, 230 antirealist 167, 177–8
field 70–1 centre of narrative gravity 7
involuntary 37–9 death problem 194–5, 215
observer 70–1, 82, 85, 130 holism 174–5
passivity of 37 intelligibility 7, 172–4, 186, 207
procedural 36 realist 167, 173, 175, 188
vs recollection 21, 36–40, 42–4, 81, 91, teleological 173–4, 176, 178, 195
134, 218 trajectory 172–3, 178, 206
reflexive 17, 30, 36, 38–40, 42, 44–5, 70–7, Narravive 175, 187
81, 102, 218 Naturalization 9
semantic 5, 36, 74, 82, 219 Neisser, Ulric 70, 82
quasi-memory 30, 52 Neo-Lockeanism 3, 13, 15, 17, 23, 30, 32–3, 40,
Menary, Richard 177 45, 69, 84, 94, 118, 129–30, 132–3,
Merricks, Trenton 188 141–3, 145–8, 150–2, 154, 159, 163, 165,
Metaphor 18, 120, 126–7, 190, 206 169, 172, 176, 179, 219
Absolute figures 126–7 Neo-Platonism 8
Metaphysics 2–12, 17, 21, 23, 32–6, 69, 76, 132, New Testament 47, 49, 52–3, 55, 64, 78, 133
140, 142–3, 152–4, 159, 168–9, 172, 1 Corinthians 226
219, 229 Hebrews 157
vs phenomenology 6, 18, 24, 30–2, 36, 45, James 126
81–5, 100, 109, 113, 122–4, 163–5, Matthew 227
188–91, 198, 216–17, 220–2, 229–31 Revelation 227
Metzinger, Thomas 142 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19
Michael (archangel) 228 Nigro, Georgia, 70, 82
 INDEX
Nishitani, Keiji 8, 64 priority of metaphysical over practical 6, 18,

Noonan, Harold 3 31, 83–5, 220–2
Nordentoft, Kresten 43 psychological continuity 2, 17, 23, 28, 30, 84,
Normativity 6, 14, 18–19, 22–3, 42, 45, 64, 67, 88–9, 94, 122–3, 125, 127, 133, 139,
80, 85, 91–3, 95–6, 100, 104, 106–7, 141–3, 145, 148–51, 158, 163–6, 168,
114–16, 124, 128–9, 131–3, 136, 172–3, 177, 216, 219 see also neo-
139–40, 168–9, 179, 219, 231 Lockeanism
Nozick, Robert 89, 152, 231 practical 6–8, 13, 17, 23, 165–72, 179,
193, 221
Oedipus 139 reductionism 100, 118, 120–3, 131, 152, 154,
Offense 49, 58, 63 164, 166, 168–9, 193
Old Testament as scalar 28–9, 130–2, 147, 179–80
Genesis 227 see also Narrative identity
Daniel 223 Person-self distinction 22–3, 31, 83, 88, 94,
Ecclesiastes 206 101, 107–9, 114, 117–19, 122–4,
Jubilees 227 127–8, 131–3, 137–8, 167, 181, 186,
Olson, Eric 3–5, 26, 142 188, 190–1, 196–9, 202, 205, 213,
Origen 8 215–17, 230
Person-stages 7, 29, 107, 117, 120, 127–8, 134,
Paradox 55, 63, 66, 126–7, 185, 216 137–40, 141, 186–8, 216, 218
of self-constitution 177–81 Personality 14, 171, 184
Parfit, Derek 6–7, 18, 23, 28–30, 72, 81, 88–91, Perspective 22, 70–3, 97–8, 118
100, 113, 117–18, 120–4, 131, 134, 142, Perspectival access 70, 76–7, 81–3, 85–6, 88,
151–2, 168, 193 90–1, 123, 130
The Nineteenth-century Russian 121–7, 131, First-person 7, 21, 24, 72, 76–7, 86, 136, 142,
137–8, 189 158, 164, 181, 187, 197, 216, 220–2,
Parnas, Josef 69, 98 225, 230
Pascal, Blaise 194 Present tense 21, 122, 157–65, 189,
Pattison, George 15, 19–20, 160, 174 198–9, 201–2, 205, 214, 216, 219, 221–2
Paul, St 64–5 Phase sortals 3
Piety, Marilyn G. 19 Phenomenology 2, 13, 180–1 see also
Peacocke, Christopher 72, 76 metaphysics vs phenomenology
Pepperberg, Irene 26 Philipse, Herman 158
Perdurance 141 Plato 2, 37, 196, 201
Perry, John 119, 192 Podmore, Simon 15, 66
Persistence belief 99 Poetic, the 59, 102
Persistence conditions 3, 9, 15, 17, 20, 25, 120, Poole, Roger 166
132, 143, 147–8, 163–4, 166, 188, 216 Possibility 86–8, 159, 206–10
Persistent Vegetative State 3–4, 26, 145–6, Postmodernism 2
157, 170 Poststructuralism 166
Person Premonition 152–3
as natural or nonnatural kind 7 Presentism 188
as distinct from object and animal 26–7, 127, Pride 107, 109–10, 138
142, 224 Probability 55
as ‘field of concernment’ 28 Proust, Marcel 37, 39
as forensic concept 31–3, 168, 204, 224 Pseudonymity 40
see also human being, self, Psychology, empirical 9, 11, 166
person-self distinction Psychostasia 223, 227–9
Personal Identity
animalism 2, 3–4, 25–6, 84, 142, 145, 169 Qur’an 227–8
closest continuer 2, 89, 152 Quasi-indicators 73
constitution 2, 177 Quinn, Philip L. 192
eliminativism 142, 166, 220
four-dimensionalism 2, 186–7 Radden, Jennifer 121–2
intractability of 1–4, 216 Rae, Murray 68
memory criterion 21, 28–34, 40, 69, 73, 83, Rationalism 9
85, 141 Recanti, Francois 76
physicalism 2–3, 84, 145–6, 166, 216 Recognition 87
INDEX 
Reflexivity 20, 22, 26–7, 30, 53, 63–5, 70–6, 87, as arena of presence and action 137, 197–8
132, 134–7, 144–5, 159, 170, 172 as becoming 143
Phenomenal property approach 22, 74–5, 78, before God 15, 43, 155, 160, 213, 222–4
81, 88, 91, 93, 98 boundaries of 36, 81, 131, 222–6
Non-stipulation approach 22, 75–8, 88, 92, 123 duration of 94, 100, 164–5, 198, 202, 219,
Regret 99, 107–09, 123, 139, 206, 211 221, 230
Reichman, Edward 9 as ego 10, 12, 25
Reid, Thomas 2, 29–30, 152–3 embodied and enactive 94
Re-identification 3, 6, 143, 147–8, 163–6, 168, as having a history 14, 167, 175–6, 199
198, 202, 217 loss of 23, 149, 150–6, 162, 201
Reflection 38, 40, 64, 66–7, 135, 191, 201 Minimal/core 23–4, 117, 167, 179–82,
Religious experience 52–4, 81 186–91, 202, 214, 216
Remorse 106, 107–12, 115–16, 129, 139 Naked 24, 117, 182–6, 189–92, 196, 198–9,
Repentance 15, 38, 44, 129, 184, 199, 210–11, 201–2, 214
225–6 narrative/autobiographical 23–4, 117, 167,
Resentment 190 180–2, 186–90, 216 see also Narrative,
Responsibility 4, 6, 24, 32–3, 35, 77, 80, 82–5, Personal identity
91, 93, 104–12, 116, 126, 129–35, 138–9, as object 94, 96, 132, 140, 142–3, 148,
148, 154, 163–4, 168–9, 171, 179–80, 221, 230
185, 199, 202–4, 209, 211, 213–14, as (self-)relational 13, 14, 23, 27, 78, 144–7,
218–19, 222–6 149, 151, 153, 159–60, 164–5, 168–71,
Resurrection 8–9, 35, 54, 194, 196, 210, 224, 227 176–7, 182, 184, 194, 196, 200, 224
Ricoeur, Paul 2, 5, 7, 14, 15–16, 167, 173–5, 178 sense of 94, 96, 101–2, 117, 124, 180–1 see
Roberts, Robert C. 138 also diachronic self-experience, episodic
Robinson, John A. 82 self-experience
Rocca, Ettore 48 as task 171, 176, 209
Rodogno, Raffaele 138 teleological 167, 176, 178, 183, 185
Rosen, Melanie 71 see also Person, Personal identity
Rosner, Fred 9 Self-appropriation 13, 23, 30, 40, 118–19, 124,
Rovane, Carole 31 127–8, 130–2, 134–5, 138–40, 150–2,
Rudd, Anthony 8, 14, 19, 23, 100, 108–9, 113, 159, 164, 178, 188, 199, 202, 216–17,
120, 126, 140, 145, 163–4, 167, 169, 219, 221–2, 224–5, 229
172–4, 176–80, 186–90, 194, 201–2, Self-evaluation 120
214–15, 228–9 Self-experience 1, 48, 83, 98, 189
Russell, Bertrand 17, 74 as biologically determined 96, 107, 112, 113
see also diachronic self-experience, episodic
Šajda, Peter 48, 154 self-experience
Sartre, Jean-Paul 2, 16, 178, 190–1 Shame, 138
Sass, Louis A. 69 Sheil, Patrick 50, 54
Śatapatha Brāhmana 228 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 93
Schechtman, Marya 4, 6, 8, 18, 23, 30, 62, 101, Shinran 64–5
109, 113, 117–18, 123–9, 131, 133–4, Shinto 228
138, 140, 148, 165–6, 168–9, 173, 175, Shipley, G.J. 91
186–7, 217 Shoemaker, Sydney 29, 30, 141–2
The Serious Matron 124–5, 128, 129, 131, Sibbern, Frederik Christian 12
137–8, 189 Sin 43–4, 149, 157–60, 185, 204–5, 223
The Less-serious Matron 124–5, 128 Single individual 15, 204, 222–3
The Mortified Matron 124–6, 129, 131, Sleep 35, 130, 151, 158, 164
138–9 Smith, Joel 71, 76
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 10, 12 Smith, Ludvig August 72–3
Schizophrenia 69 Söderquist, K. Brian 15, 148, 184
Schopenhauer, Arthur 114 Soldin, Hannah 135
Seigel, Jerrold 10, 16, 224 Soldin, Salomon 135–6
Selby, Peter 66 Solomon, Robert 1, 8
Self Soteriology 8–11, 15, 23–4, 33–6, 42–5, 80–1,
as achievement 140, 144, 178–9, 190, 216, 91, 118, 130, 132–4, 139, 154, 156–7,
219, 230 160, 162–3, 193–9, 201–5, 208–9,
as activity 12 211–19, 221–9
 INDEX
Soteriology (cont.) Teroni, Fabrice 138

without theism 19, 24, 134, 162, 194, 226–9 Tertullian 8
as individuating 66–7, 222–6 Testimony 57
Sosa, Ernest 77 Theil, Udo 29, 31, 33, 36
Soul 2, 8–9, 11, 15–16, 25, 34, 127, 145, 156–7, Thought experiments 4–5, 69, 91
161, 182–3, 197, 199–200 Tolstoy, Leo 136
Spinoza, Baruch de 49 Transitivity objection 29–30, 152–3
Spirit 52, 143–4, 149, 151, 156–8, 160, 176 Transplant intuition 4, 142, 146
Spiritualism 11 Tulving, Endel 70, 74
Stan, Leo 52, 67 Turnbull, Jamie 19, 145, 156–7
Stewart, Jon 10, 11, 12
Stillingfleet, Edward (Bishop of Worcester) 35 Ulysses 121
Strauss, David Friedrich 10–11 Unger, Peter 77, 89
Strawser, Michael 104 Upbuilding, the 126, 163
Strawson, Galen 1, 18, 22–3, 28, 31–3, 36, 40,
72, 93–116, 117–8, 124, 127–8, 131, 133, Van der Ruhr, Mario 10
167, 180–1, 188–90, 197–8, 202, 204, Vaczy Kragh, Jesper 11
215, 217, 219–21 Vedas 228
Strawson, P.F. 3, 148 Velleman, J. David 7, 18, 22, 30, 71, 74, 75–7,
Strickland, Lloyd 33 79, 81, 82, 86–92, 123, 172, 174, 207,
Subject, notional vs actual 22, 71–3, 75–81, 86, 212, 218
88, 91–3, 98, 105, 123, 188, 197, 218 Vice, Samantha 167
Subjective, the 59, 64, 112, 134–7, 139, Virtue 169, 195–6
166, 216 Vision 50–2
Substance, immaterial 7–10, 12–13, 25, 34, 127, Visualisation 22, 70–3, 218
144–6, 159, 161, 181–2, 193–4, 196–8 spatial organization of 70–4, 82, 97
Summers, Richard M. 14 structural indifference 72–4, 76,
Survival 4, 8–9, 17, 77, 84, 90, 120, 122, 148, 80, 97
163, 168, 187, 192–4, 196, 198, Volition 6, 14, 80, 106, 147, 151, 171–2,
215–16, 226 178–80, 199
Sutton, John 70, 71, 82 Vollmer, Fred 167
Swanson, Karen L. 82 Van Wagenen, Joel S. 192
Swedenborg, Emanuel 10
Swenson, David 166 Walton, Kendal 71
Swinburne, Richard 9, 141 Weinberg, Shelley 33
Synchronic experience of past and present Welz, Claudia 48, 146
102, 109 West, Caroline 7
Synchronic unity 69, 142, 159 Weston, Michael 176
Sympathy 113 Westphal, Merold 2, 67, 144
Whittaker, John H. 203, 229
Targum Neofiti 227 Wiggins, David 88
Taylor, Charles 7, 9, 16, 57–8, 166, 209–10, Wilkes, Kathleen 4, 104, 107
213, 215 Will see volition
Taylor, Gabrielle 44, 138 Williams, Bernard 7, 14, 64, 71–2, 113, 167–8,
Taylor, Mark C. 47–8, 50, 55, 59, 65, 159, 163 170, 175, 216, 221
Teleportation 5, 84, 168 Winkler, Kenneth 33, 34
Temple, William 26 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 115
Temporality 15, 20–1, 24, 102–3, 134, 158–65, Wollheim, Richard 22, 46–7, 70–1, 73–4, 75,
167, 188, 191, 198, 200–4, 219–20 76, 81, 218
Higher vs homogenized time 57–8, Wood, Allen 2
209–10, 213 Wood, Robert E. 39
Bivalent 202, 205–13, 227
Organic 24, 206–11, 213 Zahavi, Dan 2, 5, 6, 62, 74, 93, 98, 104, 118, 132,
A-series time 207–8, 210 169, 180–1, 186, 189–90, 202

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/8/2015, SPi

The Naked Self

The Naked Self

Introduction: Kierkegaard and the History of the Self 1

4. Diachronicity, Episodicity, Synchronicity 93

Setting Boundaries 222

– Some of Chapter 6 appeared as ‘Anti-Climacus and Neo-Lockeanism: Towards

Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works

xiv ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS

ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS xv

SKS 4 Gjentagelsen;, Frygt og Bæven; Philosophiske Smuler; Begrebet Angest;

xvi ABBREVIATIONS FOR KIERKEGAARD ’ S WORKS

SKS 20 Journalerne NB–NB5, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff,

xviii LIST OF PSEUDONYMS

J OHANNES DE SILENTIO Author of Fear and Trembling (1843). Silentio attempts to

The Self in Contemporary Philosophy: A Bleak Picture

persistence, or put another way, its conditions of re-identiﬁcation: the circum-

substance to which that phase sortal applies—what we essentially are—is an individual

Metaphysical vs Practical Identity

with a kind of deeper integration, giving it both a backward-directed explanatory

The disentangling of eschatology and personal identity within philosophy of mind

Kierkegaard on the Self

the subject in favour of one pursued through categories of self-consciousness:

Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy

laudable attempt to bring continental and analytic discussions of selfhood together,

nature of diachronic self-experience, the relationship between psychological con-

proto-phenomenology’, Kierkegaard’s faith-based authorship imposes ‘a clear limit

memory or imagination—and which is irreducibly normative in character. We

Locke and Becoming ‘Self to Oneself ’

Locke’s Three Forms of Identity

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

‘concerned and accountable’ for them.13 Yet in describing concern as an ‘unavoidable

The Memory Criterion

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

this one as claiming that ‘extension of consciousness’ is an active exercise of memory

Metaphysics, Concern, and Theological Pragmatism

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

themselves to be developing and improving the Lockean approach: ‘Locke’s account

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

Memory vs Recollection in Kierkegaard

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

Recollection, in Robert E. Wood’s phrase, ‘ripens’70 experience by bringing what is

 RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY

memory. As Peter Goldie puts it (in an explicit appropriation of the memory/

RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY 

commitment of watching a whole play or reading a whole book. He participates in