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Title: Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy
Subtitle: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate
Author(s): WESTPHAL, Merold
Journal: Ethical Perspectives
Volume: 5    Issue: 4   Date: December 1998   
Pages: 263-276
DOI: 10.2143/EP.5.4.563074

Abstract :
One way to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is as an all out assault on the Enlightenment ideal of moral autonomy from a religious point of view. Kant is the locus classicus of this ideal, just as Descartes and Locke are, respectively, for the correlative ideals of epistemic and political autonomy. Since these three components belong to the central core of what we have come to think of as the modern understanding of the subject, Kierkegaard’s critique has a distinctively postmodern flavour. But, as we shall see, it is postmodern precisely by the way it is biblically premodern.

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