SECTION IV: What is it worth?

With this reading, we move from the relatively formal and objective theory of moral value to approaches focused more closely on individual personal experience. Existentialism is that branch of philosophy concerned specifically with this topic, seeking both to describe the nature of felt personal experience and to determine how best to conduct oneself in this mode. Kierkegaard is an important first developer of this form of philosophy. In this reading, look for a difference in how Kierkegaard approaches "moral questions" and for the recommendations for living that Kierkegaard seems to make.

Click here for the Reading File in pdf format.

"The difficulty that inheres in existence, with which the existing individual is confronted, is one that never really comes to expression in language of abstract thought, much less receives an explanation. Abstract thought ignores the concrete and the temporal, the existential process, the predicament of the existing individual arising from his being a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal situated in existence."

A sketch of Kierkegaard, by his cousin, Niels Christian Kierkegaard, c. 1840

How would Kierkegaard assess the authenticity of the firing-squad practice of the "conscience round", in which one rifle is loaded with a blank, but none of the squad knows which rifle is so loaded?

Go on to Sartre.

Go back to Bentham.