Abstract

How does the question of grace--its reality or not--affect self-understanding and moral aspiration? Søren Kierkegaard believed that conviction of grace, or of divine kindness at the heart of things, is crucial for human flourishing. This notion serves as a lever for critical reflection on perspectives concerning the secular turn Charles Taylor and others describe. The essay contrasts Kierkegaard’s thought with Iris Murdoch, Philip Kitcher, and co-authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Each of the secular perspectives, it turns out, maps onto a different one of three “stages” of human development that precede Kierkegaard’s highest, or Christian, form of existence. This provides an angle for assessing secularism as reflected in three contrasting accounts. Kierkegaard’s elaboration of the Christian ideal, and the shortfalls he saw in earlier stages, become the basis for a “justification” of grace as a premise for the well-lived life.