Ferreira, M. Jamie. Love's Grateful Striving: a Commentary on Kierkegaard's "Works of Love."

Review of Metaphysics, The, June, 2003 by Vanessa Rumble

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi 316 pp. Cloth, $45.00--M. Jamie Ferreira's Love's Grateful Striving is a noteworthy contribution to Kierkegaard studies. Her informed and insightful explication de texte brings Kierkegaard into dialogue with his better known critics, such as Adorno, MacIntyre, and Logstrup, as well as with more closely allied thinkers such as Luther, Levinas, and contemporary scholars of Christian ethics. The result is what Merold Westphal calls "a close reading in the best sense of the term"--one which combines "massive but unobtrusive scholarship" (including judicious reference to the Danish text and Danish etymologies) with the commentator's own careful but decidedly original exploration of the text.

Works of Love, like Kierkegaard's authorship as a whole, may be regarded as an extended corrective to Luther's own (corrective) emphasis on the primacy of grace over works. Ferreira points out that Kierkegaard first began reading Luther in earnest at the time of writing Works of Love (1847). In 1850, in one of his many retrospective analyses of his authorship, Kierkegaard explicitly aligns his cause with that of Luther, remarking that his purpose has been to prevent people from taking the significance of Luther's life in vain. Works of Love, in Ferreira's reading, gives substance to this assertion by augmenting Kierkegaard's repeated appeal to the individual's inward relationship to a transcendent deity with an insistence on the responsibility of each person to his or her neighbor.

Works of Love, however, contains passages which seem to retract or severely qualify this focus on the neighbor's alterity. In response to critics (Adorno and Logstrup) who argue (1) that Kierkegaard's notion of love is abstract and ideal, eschewing any focus on the concrete individuality of the beloved, and (2) that Kierkegaard is a social conservative whose ethics protects the status quo, Ferreira counters that the evidence for these assertions has been lifted out of context. To reestablish the proper frame for interpretation of the notorious proof texts, Ferreira provides meticulous cross-referencing, not only within Works of Love, but to the authorship as a whole. Given the variety of narrative voices employed in the Kierkegaard's oeuvre, these references are indispensable in establishing the relevant continuities of viewpoint and doctrine.

More importantly, Ferreira asserts that Kierkegaard's one-sided emphasis on faith's hidden inwardness in Fear and Trembling and much of the early authorship is rectified in Works of Love. The latter, she argues, effects a finely woven integration of the respective claims of the inner and the outer, as heralded by the title of the work's first chapter: "Love's Hidden Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits." She sees this tendency toward mediation, too, in Kierkegaard's adjudication of the ethical significance of good intentions (works of love are not to be recognized by their consequences and are in this sense inward) versus that of works (loving the neighbor we see in his or her concreteness). Love's demand for impartial, equal, nonexclusive, nonpreferential giving is to be complemented by a responsiveness to the actual needs of the other. The parallels which Ferreira draws in this connection between Kierkegaard's notion of love and Levinas's conception of responsibility underline the degree to which each would steer clear of Kantian formalism. Ferreira insists on the compatibility of koerlighed's dual demands for impartiality and recognition of individuals in their finite particularity. She concludes that, "in the last decade, discussion about neighbor love or interpersonal ethical relations have tended to assume a classical historical divide between two major opposing positions: these positions represent a contrast between an ethic of self-sacrifice and one of communion, [and] between an ethic that emphasizes impartiality and equality and one that emphasizes mutuality and responsive partiality" (p. 255). Ferreira sees this divide, which "falls roughly between the Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions," as bridged by Kierkegaard's book on love, previous readings of which have focused too narrowly on a "Reformation ethic at its most crude."

Ferreira's work is an intellectual tour de force. My only reservation concerning her approach is her tendency to downplay the pervasive Kierkegaardian irony, which one may argue is as significant in Works of Love as in the earlier pseudonymous writings. Throughout the later authorship, statements concerning love and the Christian requirement are often self-referential, that is they place in question the extent to which Kierkegaard's writing, or his own activity as a writer, could fulfill the ethic he is concerned to depict. This questioning may be understood to undermine the authority of the text; to what end it does so is a pressing issue for interpretation.

One encounters only rarely a scholarly work which is the worthy fruit of a life. Ferreira has written such a work. The concerns of her earlier book on Kierkegaard, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), are carried forth in this commentary, but they are enriched by her more extensive engagement with the body of Kierkegaard's writings and with contemporary debates in ethics and phenomenology. While her earlier work treats the role of imagination in bringing the ideal into proximity with the actual, Ferreira here treats the complex unity of the actual and the ideal in Kierkegaard's ethics.--Vanessa Rumble, Boston College.