Kierkegaard’s dual individual: reconciling selfhood in the existentialist and analytic traditions

Kierkegaard and later existentialists were centrally concerned with the irreducibility of the first person perspective. Kierkegaard sought to defend this perspective from the objectivizing tendencies of Idealism, while philosophy today, with its near-universal commitment to some form of naturalism, likewise struggles to accommodate, or simply dismisses, subjective properties. We find ourselves caught between an understanding of persons as a type of object, and existentialist analyses of the self as a subject structurally incapable of coinciding with itself. We thus need, to use a phrase from Sellars, a form of “stereoscopic” vision-for which Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood provides important resources.