Abstract

One way to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is as an all out assault on the Enlightenment ideal of moral autonomy from a religious point of view. Kant is the locus classicus of this ideal, just as Descartes and Locke are, respectively, for the correlative ideals of epistemic and political autonomy. Since these three components belong to the central core of what we have come to think of as the modern understanding of the subject, Kierkegaard’s critique has a distinctively postmodern flavour. But, as we shall see, it is postmodern precisely by the way it is biblically premodern.The first thing Kant says about the relation of religion to morality in his ‘Fourth Critique’ is that “morality does not need religion at all.” Because morality presupposes “man as a free agent who, just because he is free, binds himself through his reason to unconditioned laws, it stands in need neither of the idea of another Being over him, for him to apprehend his duty, nor of an incentive other than the law itself, for him to do his duty.”Kant has a more positive way of relating morality and religion. “Religion is the recognition of all duties as divine commands.” But this moral role of religion is qualified in three important ways. First, it presupposes only faith and not theoretical knowledge of God. Second, as we have already seen, the God relation cannot play any essential role either in determining the content of my duty or in motivating me to do it. The autonomy of the moral agent precludes both possibilities. Third, it involves no “special duties” to God “over and above the ethico-civil duties of humanity ...”Kierkegaard will agree to the first proviso . But his ethics is theonomous, and thus heteronomous, and he will vigorously reject the second and third constraints on the ethics of divine command he develops in Works of Love