Symposium:
Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought Vol 8/No 1 (Spring 2004)
A Conversation with Calvin O.
Schrag
MARTIN
BECK MATUŠT³K,
George
Ade Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Calvin O. Schrag came to
MATUŠT³K:
Professor Schrag, why did you choose philosophy as your vocation?
SCHRAG:
It is extraordinarily difficult to answer questions about the motives that
underlie the major decisions in one’s personal and professional life. There are
always multiple factors at work that play themselves out against the backdrop
of the particularities of being born at a particular time and place, family
history, and events in one’s early development. In my particular case, what
would motivate someone to become a philosopher who was born and reared on a
farm on the plains of
Simplifying, and I suspect doing so to the
extreme, I would highlight two factors that played a formative influence on my
vocational choice. The one has to do with my family, and the other involves the
challenging and influential mentors during my early educational experiences.
Along with being a farmer, my father was also a pastor of a Mennonite
congregation that espoused the teachings of the radical reformers of the
Anabaptist movement of sixteenth-century
These early family influences need to be
coupled with the stimulation and encouragement by elementary and high school
teachers who allowed their students to proceed at their own pace and pursue
interests that extended beyond the confines of a prescribed curriculum. This
fostered a desire for exploring uncharted pathways and new horizons. It thus
was not unexpected that upon entering college I would be attracted to courses
in philosophy, and as a result my vocational goals began to take on a more
definite configuration.
MATUŠT³K:
The name Calvin Schrag has come to stand for one of the founding and leading
voices of contemporary North American Continental philosophy. This assessment
is made against the inherited legacy of the twentieth-century split among
analytic, Continental, and pragmatist approaches to professional philosophy.
But at your graduation from
SCHRAG:
One could not be a student of philosophy in an American college during the
1940s and 1950s and not encounter the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. His
book, Process and Reality, was discussed both in the classroom and
in the hallways, and there was much ado about the need to avoid the twin
fallacies of misplaced concreteness and simple location! It was, of course,
known that Whitehead had spent the last years of his illustrious career at
Harvard, and that one of his brilliant students, Raphael Demos, had been
appointed to the philosophy faculty to continue the Whiteheadean tradition.
This clearly was a factor in my desire to study at Harvard. I still recall
Professor Demos reminiscing on how Whitehead had set aside a day to lay out for
him the terrain of his entire philosophical explorations! Somewhat ironically,
however, Demos took Whitehead’s assessment that the history of Western
philosophy was but a series of footnotes to Plato with such seriousness that he
decided to devote his own professional career to a study of the main text! As a
result Demos became one of
In the end, however, it was Demos’s
colleague, John Wild, who played a more decisive role in my professional
development, leading to my opting for the “Continental” track in philosophy.
John Wild had studied with Martin Heidegger as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1930–31,
and later with two of his graduate students at Harvard he made available a
paraphrase translation of Heidegger’s Sein
und Zeit. It was principally through my association with Professor Wild,
serving as his Teaching Fellow for two semesters, that the direction of my
future graduate study program was set. It was his suggestion that I apply for a
Fulbright Fellowship to enable me to spend a year of study abroad.
You ask about my vocational choice amidst
the inherited legacy of a philosophical situation of the time in which
analytical, Continental, and pragmatist approaches were becoming significant
voices in the American philosophical academy. Clearly, the dominant voices came
from the analytical camp, although this camp itself was in a transition from
analytical positivism to analytical linguistic philosophy. Signs of a revival
of classical American pragmatism were already discernible during the 1950s, and
Continental philosophy was beginning to receive a hearing, but in a quite
limited manner. This was generally the state of affairs in North American
professional philosophy during the days of my graduate studies. Anyone
interested in this mix of philosophical currents would have been particularly
interested in developments at Harvard and Yale, and those attracted to a more
specific Continental orientation would have investigated the philosophy
departments at
MATUŠT³K:
What were your key formative experiences and who were your teachers at Harvard?
How was it to work with Paul Tillich?
SCHRAG:
The key formative experiences during my graduate program career included
associations with a number of faculty and fellow students. First and foremost,
I would have to acknowledge the director of my doctoral program, John Wild; but
there were also other professors who had a significant impact on my vocational
decisions. These included the already mentioned Raphael Demos; Harry Austin
Wolfson, who taught me pretty much all the medieval philosophy and philosophy
of Spinoza that I know; and Henry Bugbee, one of the more marginalized American
philosophers of the twentieth century, whose contribution is currently
receiving long overdue attention. Henry Bugbee was deeply interested in the
existentialism of Gabriel Marcel, made frequent trips to
You ask about my association with Paul
Tillich. It was during my year abroad that Tillich came to Harvard from
I need also mention that it was Tillich who
introduced me to Herbert Marcuse and put me into communication with Hannah
Arendt. Marcuse was teaching at
MATUŠT³K:
Who among your student peers became influential in your lifetime?
SCHRAG:
A number of student peers during my graduate studies later became quite
influential during their own professional careers, and from whom I learned
much, both during our student days and beyond. These included Hubert Dreyfus
and David Crownfield, both of whom were graduates of
MATUŠT³K:
During your studies at
SCHRAG:
My Fulbright year at
Plainly enough, the philosophical climate
at
Also, I would be remiss in not mentioning
the opportunity occasioned by my year at
MATUŠT³K:
What were your impressions of Hans-Georg Gadamer?
SCHRAG:
Actually, I knew very little about Gadamer when I enrolled at
So clearly there is much that I learned
from Gadamer during my student days, and no doubt certain deposits of his
contribution remain in my own philosophical reflections, even though I have
become increasingly critical of what I consider his overly accentuated
anti-Enlightenment stance and his heavy emphasis on truth as tradition. The
impact of Gadamer on my studies at
MATUŠT³K:
Your university career bears marks of an extraordinary, almost monastic
stability of place—Purdue was your first and only tenured appointment from 1957
to 2000—yet the shape of its philosophy department has undergone dramatic
developments. In your lifetime it has evolved from an unknown liberal arts unit
to a department with a strong Continental presence and then to what is today
one of the top Ph.D. programs in the United States, where a pluralistic study
of philosophy can be pursued with integrity and faculty support. After half a
century in the profession, what is your prognosis for the future of philosophical
pluralism in the
SCHRAG:
Purdue was my first professorial appointment. I joined the faculty in the fall
of 1957, immediately following the completion of my graduate studies, and
overriding the objections of my major professor. This was a time when teaching
appointments in philosophy were readily available, and Professor Wild had a
hard time comprehending why anyone would want to be stuck in a mid-western
agriculture and engineering institution with no graduate program in philosophy!
I could not bear to tell him that at the time Purdue did not even have an
undergraduate major in philosophy on the books! But I very much liked the young
faculty of philosophers in what was then called the Department of History,
Government, and Philosophy, which itself was part of the
As the Department of Philosophy developed
it became evident that we had significant resources, both in personnel and
higher administration support, to chart a rather unique mission of
philosophical pluralism, accommodating differing perspectives and fields of
inquiry. Analytical philosophy, pragmatism, and Continental philosophy were all
given a voice. At the time that we were building our program there were
graduate schools that were predominantly Continental in approach and there were
schools that were entirely analytical, and students were required to follow one
direction or the other. We found this to be unacceptable and made a commitment
to foster an environment of pluralism. It would be presumptuous on my part to
say that we inaugurated a trend, but over the years we were able to discern
increasing recognition on the part of philosophy departments of the need to
accommodate a plurality of philosophical perspectives. Given that the world of
tomorrow will indeed be a multicultural global village, such an accommodation
of multiple perspectives becomes a veritable requirement, lest we all fall
victim to a profound metaphysical embarassment. And here I am reminded of
Thomas Carlyle’s classic response to Margaret Fuller’s heroic self-affirmation:
“I accept the universe!”—to which Carlyle replied, “Gad, she’d better!”
MATUŠT³K:
During your lifetime, you reflected in your works on the rise, division, and
overcoming of various trends within Continental philosophy itself. You
witnessed among these at first the rise in prominence of phenomenology and
existential philosophy (and the philosophical society bearing that name), to be
eclipsed by the emergence of hermeneutics and poststructuralism, and issuing
into a broader intellectual sparring between modernism and postmodernism
lasting through the turn of the century. With works by philosophers such as
Rorty and Habermas, Ricoeur and Derrida, or Davidson and Brandom, this last
division would seem to displace the one among Continental, analytic, and
pragmatist orientations of the l950s, thereby returning us to the space of
interrupted Central-European conversations among logical positivists,
phenomenologists, and critical theorists of the l930s. You revisit this very
space in your timely Husserl lecture delivered to
SCHRAG:
The development of Continental philosophy during the twentieth century, as you
indicate, was not that of a serene and untroubled unfolding. It underwent
numerous turns and twists, exhibiting shifts of inquiry as it moved from
phenomenology to existentialism, to existential phenomenology, to hermeneutics,
to critical theory, to structuralism, to poststructuralism—and at times to a
combination of all of the above! All this now appears to have culminated (if
indeed the grammar of “culmination” is appropriate here) in an agon between the
modernists and the postmodernists. Yes, the tenure of my professional career
allowed me to visit these changing philosophical scenes. Indeed, it was
mandatory for anyone laboring in the vineyards of recent Continental thought to
become involved with the undulating cross-currents of philosophical reflection.
And add to this already mixed panoply the different stages of analytical
philosophy and a quite vigorous revival of American pragmatism, the
philosophical situation of our time has indeed become a quite crowded and
variegated landscape.
My own research and teaching during the
later half of the twentieth century very much reflected this mix as I made
efforts to navigate my way through it. You mention the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Yes, I was very much a part of the
inauguration of this Society, which was convened for the first time in October
of 1962 at
But then structuralism emerged on the
scene. In 1968 the students at the
It was surely not wholly unexpected that a poststructuralist reaction would follow on the heels of
widespread dogmatic pronouncements about superstructures and infrastructures.
All of these structures had to be de-constructed.
Such was the requirement of the times. So everybody started deconstructing
pretty much everything in sight, including, and indeed first and foremost, the
human subject and anything that resembled a structure of subjectivity. Communicative Praxis and the Space of
Subjectivity was my response to the poststructuralist demand for
deconstruction, and as you know in the work I espoused a critical position that
was sympathetic to certain strategies of the deconstructionist stance,
commending the poststructuralists for calling our attention to the vagaries of
classical metaphysical definitions of the subject as well as modern
epistemological efforts to secure a zero-point foundationalist epistemological
subject. However, contra certain excesses of deconstruction, I argued for a
vibrant human subject as self-interpreting speaker and agent that could be
found within the folds of communicative praxis as an amalgam of discourse and
action.
As you observe in your question, however,
the scene appears now to have changed again, situating philosophical discourse
against the backdrop of the modernism versus postmodernism debate. This
requires that one broaden the philosophical conversation to include
representatives of pragmatism and the new analytical philosophy as well as the
more standard figures in recent Continental thought. Along with Derrida,
Riceour, and Habermas, one needs to extend the conversation to include Rorty,
Davidson, and Brandom. This does appear to require returning to an earlier,
pre-1950 space of inquiry. Yes, as you point out, I did revisit this space in
my Prague lecture of March 2000, and I revisited this space against the
backdrop of Edmund Husserl’s famous Prague lecture of 1935, “The Crisis of
European Sciences and Psychology,” which later made its way into his massive
and groundbreaking posthumously published work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy.
I specifically chose as the title of my
Prague lecture “The Task of Philosophy for the New Millennium” in commemoration
of Husserl’s profound contribution in his very last work, in which he set the
task of philosophy for the future as that of retrieving what he called “the genuine sense of rationalism,” after the
naive rationalism of the eighteenth
century had declared bankruptcy. This call for a genuine sense of rationalism
is a task that needs to be undertaken time and again, and in my lecture I made
an attempt to address the principal issues in this task by sketching a
refigured concept of reason as transversal,
navigating a passage between the Scylla of unredeemable claims for a hegemonic
universality and the Charybdis of a historically relativistic procession of
particularities. I had already developed in some detail the requirement for an
understanding of reason as trans-versal
rather than uni-versal in my 1992
book, The Resources of Rationality: A
Response to the Postmodern Challenge. In my
There is another facet to the requirement
of returning to the space of philosophical inquiry during the earlier decades
of the twentieth century that needs to be mentioned. This has to do with
revisiting the contributions of the stalwarts in the classical period of
American philosophy, namely the triumvirate of Peirce, James, and Dewey. These
pioneers of American intellectual history forged new pathways in their
explorations of the resources of reason in its praxial orientation. Peirce
called our attention to the fortunes and limitations of language for
philosophical reflection; James attuned us to the resident intentionality in
what he called “the world experienced”; and Dewey sought to enlighten us on the
public and its problems. As we make our way about in the new millennium, we will
be enriched by a remembrance of the accomplishments of this indigenous American
philosophy.
MATUŠT³K:
Some philosophers, even if they do not become kings, try to influence the
course of the world, others pursue philosophical arguments in a thoroughly apolitical
and acosmic manner, still others grant philosophy an existential role of
non-political politics. You at times speak of “transversal rationality” as an
aid to global dialogue across cultural differences. Is there a place for
philosophy in public affairs, or do you think that many ills of the world would
be cured when philosophers stopped meddling in politics?
SCHRAG:
Philosophy is in danger of losing its birthright if it evades its
responsibility of addressing the ills of civil society. This is why we need to
be reminded time and again of the questions that Plato raised in The Republic. We might not arrive at the
same answers that Plato did, but we cannot shirk the responsibility of
addressing the questions that he asked. What is the good state and what are the
resources for setting it up? These are intensely practical-political questions
that are constitutive of the inquiring beings that we ourselves are. Personal
identity is inseparable from socio-political identity; personal goals and
aspirations are inextricably entwined with that which is deemed to be good for
the polis.
Although I have not written any books
specifically in the genre of what is commonly referenced as social or political
philosophy, as you have indicated I have at times called upon the notion of
“transversal rationality” to help us navigate the churning rapids of social and
political strife by steering a course toward a global dialogue that strives for
cooperation amidst cultural differences. The concept/metaphor of transversality—basically
a generalization of orthogonality, delineating a convergence without
coincidence—is able to do service in an understanding and critique of civil
society by setting the requirement for a recognition of the need to coexist
with the other while acknowledging her or his otherness. It provides a sheet
anchor against hegemonic aspirations to absolutize a particular political
platform, or a set of prescribed folkways and customs, or an established
religious institution. In times of accentuated cultural crises, such as events
of racial and ethnic genocide, it issues a call to acknowledge the other as a
citizen inhabiting a common earth, who may indeed illustrate differences of
race, creed, or color, but with whom I am destined to work out my civic responsibilities,
seeking convergence without coincidence, congruence without identity,
assimilation without absorption, cooperation without the sacrifice of
difference. This is the truth of transversality as the dynamics of
understanding and communication in its applicability to the social order.
MATUŠT³K:
What you say assumes that philosophers can always be helpful in public affairs,
and that is why they should take a stance, but what about those philosophers
whose attempts at changing the course of the world have actually made things
worse? Both left and right politics have had their saints and demons among
philosophers. What is a philosopher’s responsibility or role in the world?
SCHRAG:
How does transversal rationality as a conceptual bulwark against both universal
hegemony and anarchic particularity translate into concrete political
responsibility? This strikes me as being the brunt of your question—and it is a
question most difficult to address—as I guess all good questions are! What is the vocation, the calling, of the
philosopher as a servant of civil society? Here I am of course reminded of
Marx’s paradigm shift, calling for a changing
of the world rather than a simple understanding
of it. Clearly philosophers, who carry a social identity as do all other human
beings, are called upon to make decisions that have political consequences for
their time and place. And these decisions, as you suggest, can be fraught with
miscalculations and misjudgments. Plato gave his support to the Tyrants of
Syracuse; Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher, overlooked violations of
human rights as Emperor of Rome; Heidegger’s reticence and retreat from
politics is well known, and this reticence and retreat is doubly disturbing
because we know from his writings during the mid and late thirties that he was
profoundly concerned about the distortions of political power in the hands of
what he called “global master criminals”—a quite explicit reference to Hitler.
But Heidegger did not respond to this corruption of power; instead he withdrew
from the political arena. The situation was quite different in the professional
life of Paul Tillich . As professor at the
Clearly, political responsibility is always
a matter of responding to the contingencies of the times, and to do so with
unavoidable risks. Yet, respond one must. Currently we find ourselves in the
midst of an Iraqi crisis, which some political pundits of the day define as a
clash of cultures in which Judeo-Christian civilization is pitted against the
alien “other” of Islamic civilization. A fitting response requires that we
reject this exclusion and demonization of that which is other and strive for
communication and compromise across political and cultural differences. There
is much talk of making the world free for democracy, but we tend to define this
democracy on our own terms, again failing to acknowledge the contributions of
other political voices and the possibility of alternative democratic procedures.
“Globalization” is a term that is very much in the news nowadays, and there
clearly is a sense in which our world is increasingly becoming a global
village. But as we deliberate on how to make our way about in this
multicultural village, we need to attend to the subtle insinuations of economic
imperialism and global domination. Our current national political philosophy
appears to be very much of a war machine mentality, boastful of a military
superiority superseding that of any other nation or indeed cluster of nations,
resonant with the rhetoric of pre-emptive war and unilateral regime change. A
fitting response, we urge, would give more attention to peace-making resources
amidst the panoply of cultural differences.
I have given you a very sketchy response to
your difficult question, but I hope that I have at least laid down some markers
that might put us on the path to a more extended discussion of the issues at
stake.
MATUŠT³K:
The most admirable thing about your lifework is its freshness and vitality,
marked by your sustained capacity to learn anew what it means to engage in
“communicative praxis.” When the new generation of students brought feminist,
gender, class, and postcolonial concerns into your classroom, you were among
the first in your generation to support them as legitimate questions for
mainstream philosophy. How did these voices stimulate your thinking and
professional engagements, and how did they enter into your writing?
SCHRAG:
My notion of “communicative praxis” is a kind of companion piece to that of
“transversal rationality.” Indeed, there is a sense in which the latter is a
further explication of the dynamics operative in the former. The project of
communicative praxis culminates in a call for the “ethic of the fitting
response,” as this response is a response to an amalgamated discourse and
action that is always already there when one’s ethical reflections begin.
Transversal rationality guides the resources that enable one to make a response
that is fitting.
You are correct in suggesting that the new
generation of students that brought feminist, gender, and class concerns into
the conversation played a formative role in the shaping of my understanding of
communicative praxis. Plainly enough, an ethic of the fitting response to the occurrent
discourse and action requires responding to the voices of gender, race, and
ethnicity by acknowledging their integrity. As instructor in the classroom and
as participant in colloquia at professional meetings it soon became evident to
me that pockets of systemic discrimination were still operative. Currents of
gender bias and racism were subtle and almost imperceptibly embedded in
established linguistic and social practices. I was forced to face up to this in
a quite personal way. As founding editors of the international philosophical
quarterly, Man and World, John
Anderson, Joseph Kockelmans, and I had it brought to our attention, principally
by our feminine readership, that there was an insidious sexism within the very
title of our journal! Fortunately, with the help of the newly appointed
Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Robert Scharff, we were able to persuade the
publisher to change the title to Continental
Philosophy Review.
The concept of “praxis,” of course, extends
all the way back to the classical period of Greek philosophy, and particularly
the works of Aristotle. The notion of the “fitting response” also has its
forerunner in the Greek concept of “kathakonta,”
used by Aristotle and later by the Stoics. My linking of “praxis” with
“communication” was designed to highlight the dialectics of conversation and
the role of rhetoric in the shaping of our social practices. To be sure,
Gadamer had already moved in this direction, and he too made much of the Stoic
requirement to do that which is fitting. I am certainly ready to acknowledge
the influence of my former mentor in shaping my own take on the dynamics of the
fitting response, and such is the case even when I criticize him for putting
too much capital in the economy of retrieving and conserving the tradition
which stimulates the drive toward his envisioned goal of a “fusion of
horizons.” Sometimes the call for the fitting response requires a more robust
acknowledgment of the alterity and integrity of the other and a more radical
intervention, revision, and at times overthrow of traditional modes of thought
and practice. On these matters I find Iris Marion Young and Patricia J.
Huntington’s use of the grammar of “asymmetrical reciprocity” to be most
suggestive. The notion of asymmetrical reciprocity provides a space for the
ethical relation in communicative praxis that does not occlude the “otherness”
of the other. The voice and visage of the other is heard and seen as exerting
ethical claims that solicit a reciprocity of dialogic interaction that keeps
the conversation of humankind going in spite of differences—and indeed because of differences.
MATUŠT³K:
Many of your students speak affectionately about you as their teacher. Socrates
never wrote anything, and your impact too, wholly apart from your publications,
could be felt simply through your students. We read in Plato many shrewd
philosophical arguments advanced by Socrates, and yet we know that the Socratic
effect reaches deeper than merely exercising logical vigor and clarity of mind.
Since all philosophical traditions—never mind their quarrels—claim some of the
Socratic mantle for themselves, it might be worth asking the hardest
pedagogical, if not philosophical, question of all. In the final and deepest
instance, what does the teacher teach?
SCHRAG:
Yes, the question “What does the teacher teach?” is one of the most difficult
of all questions in philosophical pedagogy, and it is a question that every
philosophy instructor needs to ask time and again. It would be presumptuous on
my part to say that I have an answer to this question, even though I have spent
forty-three years in the classroom at various universities. It is doubly ironic
that I have no definitive answer to this question, given that I entered the
profession primarily because of an interest in teaching! How can it be that
after forty-three years in the business of teaching no fully satisfactory
answer appears to be forthcoming?
Your reference to Socrates in the framing
of your question is clearly of utmost relevance, for I still believe that it is
the dynamics of Socratic inquiry that offers the most productive response to
your query. Teaching philosophy involves a combined utilization of dialectics,
ignorance, irony, and maieutics—and to this day Socrates stands as the
incomparable exemplification of this so-called “socratic method.” Teaching
philosophy involves the dialectics of a yes and no, affirmation and negation,
method of thinking and discourse. It requires a posture of Socratic ignorance
whereby one achieves the knowledge of knowing when one doesn’t know. It
illustrates the use of irony in disclosing both to oneself and to others the
hidden discrepancies between what is said and what is meant, and between what
is preached and what is practiced. And it is a process that is maieutic in
character, eliciting from the student potentialities of thought and action that
are able to stand in service of the Socratic ideal of self-knowledge and
creative participation in the affairs of the polis. This is what a teacher of
philosophy should teach—clearly not a string of propositions tied into a bundle
of assertoric claims, but rather a logic of questioning wherewith to
interrogate the resources of self and societal constitution. And in following
this Socratic method one will quickly become aware that one learns more from
one’s students than one either realizes or is prone to admit.
MATUŠT³K:
Although in your earlier career you wrote a few articles in the general area of
philosophy of religion, you never wrote a book on the subject until recently, God as Otherwise than Being: Toward a
Semantics of the Gift. During the past decades, philosophy of religion in
SCHRAG:
Even though I had been teaching general courses and seminars in philosophy of
religion from time to time during my tenure at Purdue and at some sister
institutions on visiting appointments, I had never planned to write a book
specifically in the genre of philosophy of religion. So it is a bit of an
accident that my book, God as Otherwise
than Being, came into existence.
Professor Eugene Long of the
MATUŠT³K:
Are you currently working on any future project?
SCHRAG:
I have just completed a manuscript bearing the title Convergence Amidst Difference: Philosophical Conversations Across
National Boundaries,
which
is scheduled for publication by the State University of New York Press. The
format is structured by five essays presented at five different foreign
universities and Academies of Science (Bulgaria, England, France, Russia, and
the Czech Republic), engaging my interlocutors on topics including the
hermeneutics of sense and reference, the fate of the human subject in the wake
of its deconstruction, the delimitation of the project of metaphysics in
response to postmodern assaults on metanarratives, and a revised notion of
rationality designed to meet the needs of the philosophical world of tomorrow.
This very likely will be my last major work. I am now a bona fide senior
citizen and need to entrust the task of philosophy to my younger colleagues.
MATUŠT³K:
Putting aside the questions about your vocational and professional path, what
does it all add up to for you existentially and personally?
SCHRAG:
Your final question may turn out to be the most difficult of all! You request a
statement on how my professional activities in teaching and research over the
years “add up existentially and personally.” In seeking a launch pad to respond
to your query, I find myself recalling the challenge that one of my professors
at
At the end of the day one needs to
address the concrete existential question
(not to be confused with an inquiry into the abstracted ontological structure
of Existenz!) of what one is to do
with one’s life within the short span between birth and perishing—which is the
lot assigned to all of us. Socrates, of course, is of some help in getting the
conversation going with his requirement to “know thyself” and its corollary,
“the unexamined life is not worth living.” But even here one needs to be wary
of having Socrates’s existential musings solidify into the abstract
metaphysical speculation that has found such a congenial residence in the
history of Western philosophy. Kierkegaard also, and particularly when we take
him seriously rather than merely historically, helps us add up that which is of
existential and personal relevance in our own stages along life’s way. Then in
adding up the account in the more explicit ethico-religious register of our
existential predicament, we all do well to heed the call of the ancient
prophets of