ABSTRACT
The essentials for a moral or spiritual life don’t wait quietly for us in simple slogans or even in lengthy texts. Kant tried to set out the jurisdictions for art, knowledge, and morality in a map of the prerogatives of each. But the very generality and necessary abstraction of that map meant that it failed to make contact with the hopes and fears and loves of particular individuals negotiating not a general world, but their very local ones. We crave, it seems, the specificity of a particular life that, in its vivid detail, can exemplify one that could be ours. Kierkegaard brings moral knowledge and its art, the lively artistry of the soul, down to earth, letting it speak there in its varied plenitude, in its alluring, halting, terrifying energies.
