On Kierkegaard and Non-Preferential Love
An interview with Sharon Krishek
Dr. Sharon Krishek is a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She specializes in the role of religiosity and philosophy of love as it relates to the wellbeing of humans. She is a scholar of the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the author of Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. During her visit in March, we had the opportunity to ask her about her philosophical views on Kierkegaard, love, faith, and subjectivity. We found her interpretation to be an interesting and provocative take on one of the most influential existentialists. We felt her perspective on the topics we discussed would provide a unique philosophical experience for the readers of Anamnesis.
Anamnesis: Why is Kierkegaard specifically relevant to us today? What can Kierkegaard tell us about the world socially and politically?
Sharon Krishek: I think that good philosophical work is always relevant. There are some truths about human existence and the nature of reality that are always calling for our attention and are always relevant. In that sense, Kierkegaard is an existentialist. What he has to say about human nature, the nature of existing with other people, and with reality is unfathomable in many ways. Of course, it is as relevant today as it was in the 19th century. He wasn’t a political philosopher, but I think that he is extremely relevant today regarding questions about how to treat people. For him, love was the center, and I am being careful here because it can easily sound like a cliché. But here I am in disagreement with him: He thinks that if we want to understand the nature of love, we have to turn to the commandment of love: “you should love thy neighbor as thyself.” I think that the commandment of love is extremely important, but neighborly love is only one kind of love. It doesn’t capture the essence of love. It is one important manifestation of this phenomenon of love. But if you think about this commandment, of course it is extremely relevant to the state of politics today with all the suspicion and hostility. So, I’m not a political scholar either, but I am very interested in how morality is important to politics. Kierkegaard gives us a very difficult moral ideal to fulfill, but I think it is a very admirable thing to truly love any given person. It sounds strange. What does it mean to love any given person? We hardly know what love is when we think about romantic love, about parental love, about friendship. It is difficult enough to understand what love is given these experiences. To take these experiences and then say “okay, take this love and give it to any given person including your enemy--” this sounds as if we are enduring some confusion here. But I think not. I think we can actually love. Of course, it’s not romantic love, it’s something else. But it’s love. So if we listen to Kierkegaard, if we are convinced by this ideal, I think the world would be a much better place. In that sense I think it’s very important.
A: It has been said that Kierkegaard’s thought sometimes tends to be sexist or chauvinistic. Do you agree with this, and if so, how would you sort of reconcile Kierkegaard’s philosophy with our understanding of sexism today? Is there a way to “save” Kierkegaard from being sexist?
SK: I don’t see anything sexist at all actually, but you should remember the context: It was the 19th century, and yes, there are things that he says that to our ears may sound sexist, but I don’t think that, essentially, he’s sexist. He’s a humanist, and you cannot be truly humanist [if you are sexist]. Maybe in his personal life he was sexist, I don’t know, I don’t care. From a philosophical point of view, it would have been inconsistent of him to develop humanistic ideals and then be sexist. Here and there you can find sentences that are sexist. Surely today we would have expected him to phrase things differently. But I think it is more a result of the time that he was writing, and not something essential in his work. This is true with regards also to his anti-Semitic sayings. You can find them here and there, but I don’t think it’s interesting. To focus on that is like putting too much emphasis on something that is marginal to his thought. I think the same is true with all the 19th century philosophers. For example, Nietzsche has sayings that you could think “wow what a chauvinist, what a sexist,” or “what an anti-Semite he was.” But I think you should go and see the essence of his philosophy, and if part of his philosophical thesis was chauvinistic, that would be a problem. But the sayings here and there about woman being, I don’t know…
A: Needs to love.
SK: The need to love, the need of love he attaches to every human being.
A: But he describes the essence of women as “needing to love.”
SK: I think he describes the essence of every human being as [needing to love]. This is in Works of Love. It is true here and there he can say something like “yes, the man does this and that, and the woman, she needs that the man will love her.” Or something like that. First of all, it’s not very repetitive. You find it here and there, and it’s not part of the major ideas.
A: I am curious about how that plays an important role in this idea of non-preferential or neighborly love. Is there a specific metaphysical framework required to uphold this category of “human” that you described as all-desiring of that baseline level of love? How do you come to that category, and is there room for flexibility? For instance, coming at it from outside of a humanistic perspective, is there a way to talk about preferential love without having to come to a definition of a human subject?
SK: I’m not very sure I understand the question, but I think that part of being human is to have preferences. I think there is something misleading and very problematic in Works of Love that drove this dichotomy between preferential and neighborly love. I think part of it is for the purpose of rhetoric…I think Kierkegaard is confused. On the one hand, he does affirm preferential love. He does say specifically that it is okay to love in this way. On the other hand, he contrasts it with neighborly love. There is a very complicated story going on there, and I think that Works of Love is unsatisfying. But I think, of course this neighborly love and preferential love are reconcilable. I mean, there is no contradiction. Of course we have to understand there are many questions we have to ask before we can address your question. We have to understand what love is. What are we talking about when we are talking about love? And then we have to see what is the common basis between neighborly love and, for example, romantic love, and then we can see whether it is reconcilable or not. Under a certain understanding of love which is not entirely Kierkegaardian, but it is reconcilable with things that Kierkegaard is saying. Under a specific understanding of love, you can both love any given person in a certain way and you have special relationships and different kinds of love with other people. It’s like friendship and romantic love, they work together, right? You can have ten friends and one husband or wife, right? It’s not a problem. You can have this attitude. It’s very difficult of course, but in principle you can love any given person and that does not mean that you cannot romantically love onlooker y one person.
A: What about something that is non-human?
SK: What do you mean by…
A: Kierkegaard’s thought and your thought kind of takes for given that we are only talking about humans. What distinguishes humans—and I’m assuming you mean from other forms of life—is that humans have this ability to love.
SK: Yes. You mean like animals?
A: Sure, let’s use animals.
SK: No, that’s a different question. And I admit that I don’t think Kierkegaard is interested in that question. For him, the affirmation of life and of the world includes not just humans. But when he speaks about love, he is interested, first of all, in love for God and then in love for humans. Because he is going with the two commandments: love God, love your neighbor. So, when he talks about love, this is what interests him. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t think we can have love for animals, love for nature, love for the world--he even talks about love for nature when he wants to give an example how you can have the same kind of love while acknowledging the diversity of objects. He says, consider love for nature. When you love nature, you love the lily and you love the tree, and on each level of nature you will see the difference between different kinds of flowers and different kinds of trees, but you love them in the same love. So, he wants to say the same is possible in regard to humans. But he doesn’t give us a theory about what it means to love animals and nature, even though of course he doesn’t exclude them. It doesn’t mean you can love only humans.
A: We were hoping to talk about a problem we saw with preferential love: You talked about preferential love being potentially selfish. If you choose to love someone preferentially because of certain characteristics, couldn’t that slip into a justification for avoiding certain races, or groups of people, or other religions, and avoiding preferential love because of stereotypes? Matt Rosen, a student in the Junior Seminar class wants to know: “Today, at a time during which it seems that welcoming the stranger is very much in peril as a practice and as an ideal worth upholding, do you worry that preferential love sometimes gets in the way of loving those who are truly other to us?” So obviously, we have the neighborly love thing going on, but what about how preferential love privileges certain people, and what if I only choose to love other people that are like me?
SK: So, of course this is wrong in Kierkegaard’s point of view. When he condemns preferential love, this is precisely because he is afraid that we will love only those that it comes naturally for us to love. We have natural tendencies, natural inclinations, but he condemns that, of course. First of all, I think he would say that nobody is really other than us because we are all humans, and you should love the enemy as well, [even though] your inclination is not to be with him, but even there Kierkegaard demands you to love him. So, of course, the idea of neighborly love or universal love addresses this concern. And, as I said, I think that both are reconcilable. I mean, it’s not either/or. Kierkegaard doesn’t so much tell us a lot about the nature of love, he more tells about how it is correct to love, and part of loving correctly is to have this openness to loving any given person. Nobody expects you to love everybody romantically, right? It’s not desirable. So, it’s not a problem that you will romantically love only one or two or three. Nobody in any moral theory expects that everybody will be your friends. No, this is not the point. There is a certain attitude that you are required to address to any given person and the interesting question is why to call this love. I think there is an answer to that question.
A: What would you say to people who don’t agree with the basic premise in Kierkegaard’s thought that he’s working from a religious, specifically Christian, framework? I know we talked about this in the seminar, but people are concerned that if you don’t accept this initial truth, then how can you accept the rest of it? And what would you say to someone who is fundamentally against that first premise?
SK: This is a very difficult question. Again, it goes beyond Kierkegaard. As a theistic person myself, I wonder--and this is, again, these are open questions for me—I don’t have an answer yet. But, I wonder if you can truly be moral, you know, to fulfill morality at its highest, if you are not theistic. I know that many people, of course, will disagree with me. But again, this is why I frame it as a question. I’m not saying that this is my claim. But, specifically with Kierkegaard it depends on what kind of atheist you are. I mean, if you are an open-minded atheist, then you can, you know—again, my colleagues in Israel are all atheist, and they read my work and can communicate with me even though they don’t accept my conclusions. This is part of my challenge: to show how basic things that are most important for me can resonate if you do not accept the theistic framework. But it is difficult. It is difficult, and I think that for someone who is an atheist there will be a point in Kierkegaard that he will not be able to move forward. He will say, ‘this is where our ways depart.’ And this is fair enough. Sometimes you just don’t share the same assumptions. It doesn’t have to be theism against atheism. I mean, someone who has a material world-view and someone who has an idealistic worldview will maybe not be able to find a common language. Yeah, this is disturbing because we believe—I believe that there is truth, OK? And, and so we all have the access to the truth, but, yes, I suppose that part of our finitude and limitedness is that those of us who don’t agree with each other, maybe we will have to continue to try to show [our logic]. What I’m trying to do—and I have many students who are atheists—I’m trying to show them the logic. You can even take it as a thought experiment: just for the sake of this discussion let’s assume that there is a loving god. What do we gain by that? Now of course this is not enough—this is not enough at all because we want to know the truth: if there is God or if there isn’t a God. I don’t know if I can do this, philosophically, maybe this is something like the leap of faith. But I think that if you’re open minded enough so that you can at least try to listen, what you can learn about reality or how your attitude to reality can profit by this. OK, don’t agree with me, just listen. Just see that this is, again, brings us back to the uniqueness of Kierkegaard and why I love Kierkegaard so much. You know he’s not a dogmatic philosopher. Of course, he has these dogmas, he has these beliefs, and as I said in the seminar he doesn’t bother to justify these beliefs: “this is what I believe in: take it or leave it.” But he doesn’t start with that, he starts with something universal, with existential concerns that are related to theists and atheists alike, and then he’s showing us how a religious framework addresses these concerns. You can maybe be convinced by that, or you can say, “no this is not good enough for me because I want something more…” you know, more convincing. This gives me a more harmonious way to live with the world. But to be truly religious as Kierkegaard demands of you it’s not an easy life. It demands a lot of sacrifice. So, again, it is a very complicated question and, you know, I still struggle with it myself.
A: So, you would at least hope that the atheist isn’t completely turned off by Kierkegaard and at least entertain this possibility of a God, and to even read a lot of his work not looking to maybe get the same thing out of it that you are. Certainly it’s beautiful writing, and there are other things about it that you can gain—
SK: And again, I think you can go a long way with him before you should decide if you are committed to his theism or not. This is his existentialism, you know, he does a lot of existential work before getting in the theistic framework that addresses this existential work. So in that sense I think, yes, that many people can find many interesting things in Kierkegaard, but of course if you are not in some sense attracted to a spiritual kind of thinking then that’s fine, it’s not that everybody has to love Kierkegaard or to find value in him. I think it’s a shame but OK, people with different sensitivities will find they are not drawn to Kierkegaard.