On the Virtues and Vices of the Singular Will: Seeking “One Thing” with Kierkegaard

Abstract

In this essay, I follow the example of recent Kierkegaard scholarship in the attempt to consider Kierkegaard’s work from a personal point of view. Accordingly, I begin with a biographical account of my first encounter with Kierkegaard’s notion that “purity of heart is to will one thing”. I explain that were it not for the intervention of one of my early professors, David Kangas, the idea might have prevented me from getting married. I then offer a reading of “An Occasional Discourse”, where that idea is worked out, and suggest that Kierkegaard faces a serious challenge of what I call “empty formalism”. The worry is that his account offers general suggestions without any practical direction on how to live. By showing how the notion of singularly willing the eternal can be productively understood as a kind of virtue, I contend that Kierkegaard both avoids empty formalism and also manages to resist an overly determinate model of ethical life that eliminates the ambiguity of morality and the riskiness of faith.

Keywords

• Kierkegaard
• David Foster Wallace
• David Kangas
• virtue
• lived existence
• singular will