Kierkegaard as a Thinker of Immanent Ethics

This chapter situates Kierkegaard’s approach to ethics in terms of Deleuze’s distinction between a “transcendent” morality, operating on the basis of moral rules, and an “immanent” ethics, operating in terms of the realization of essential features of one’s singular nature. This account goes by way of a consideration of Deleuze’s accounts of ethics in Spinoza: Practical Philosophyand The Logic of Sense, and a comparison of the notion of immanent ethics in those places to Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christian ethics in Fear and Trembling and several of his “signed” discourses. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a possible point of contention between the two philosophers: namely, whether the project of “becoming” contained in the notion of an immanent ethics ought to be understood in terms of a concept of immanence, of whether it ought to be understood in terms of a concept of transcendence. Through a consideration of the contents of each of these terms, the chapter concludes that in fact the difference between these philosophers’ choice of focus is largely terminological in nature, and that both concepts serve primarily in order to point towards the notion of open-ended “becoming” that is crucial to their normative worldviews.