The Spirituality of Pets Book

I'm grading this book, like others in the Kierkegaard literature, on the curve; for the vast majority of what is written on SK struggles incredibly to be as much as half-right, and, as one person told me, one must catch as catch can.

Well, what may one catch from Professor Rudd? In this case, one may get a pretty good idea of what Kierkegaard's system may look like if transposed into the language, mood, and situation of contemporary (i.e., post-Rawlsian, post-Plantingian) analytic philosophy. What does this amount to? Rudd claims that his book is a work of conceptual clarification, and that is what you get: a pretty fair account of the ethical as the free taking up of one's own materials and unifying these by means of projects; of the personal virtues (temperance, courage, and prudence) and civic virtues (justice, benevolence) as emerging as necessities for such projects, the former universally so, the latter or sometimes so; and a fairly straightforward, if abrupt, account of what is gained by the transition from the ethical to the religious existence spheres.

Rudd notes the shifting status of SK's own conception of the religious, as it varies between more-temporal and less-temporal forms. He doesn't explain why that might be, or clarify what concepts are in tension to produce this shifting commitment; and in fact it is not that clear why a person, rather than a philosopher, should want the kind of unity that he claims marks the religious sphere. He places the accent of the religious sphere on the possession of an absolute telos (whereas the ethical telos is always marked by its being personal or relative to a given society, in a certain sense); but this doesn't seem to correspond to the kind of reasons that SK himself recommended the religious existence sphere.

I think that Rudd encounters this difficulty because passion, and love, are not large enough features of his reconstruction of Kierkegaard's thought. However, this move would be very ungainly in an analytic reconstruction, because it would imply that was essential to the self, and to the completion of the ethical and religious spheres, was something that someone experienced and was passive with respect to acquiring, rather than something that could be clarified and chosen or not chosen as rationally recommended. The situation of the Knights in F&T, however, is precisely that of someone to which something (acquisition of infinite passion) has happened, and who are then called upon to respond to it, rather than to freely define themselves merely in terms of their material; and this passion introduces numerous complications, but also clarifies everything, on the demand to go beyond the ethical sphere to the religious sphere to find a way of responding to the vulnerability such passion exposes a person to.

On the whole, very useful, but only in a certain key. Valuable to anyone who wants to bring SK's ideas into analytic philosophy but to be read with a certain circumspection.