Religious Lightness in Infinite Vortex: Dancing with Kierkegaard

Varieties of Virtue Ethics, 2016

"[W]ith regard to something in which the individual person has only himself to deal with, the most one person can do for another is to unsettle him (sic)" (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 387). Introduction Moral education, whether the cognitive-developmental approach of Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) or the character approach advocated by Thomas Lickona (1992), is fundamentally optimistic. It is hopeful that teachers can set in motion the ethical agency of students, imparting an ethical core that endures. The transition between frameworks from amoral to moral is thought to be a reasonable goal. Yet philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his tale on the discord of contemporary moral discourse in After Virtue, casts doubt on such optimism (1981). After Virtue portrays contemporary moral utterance as "a confrontation between incompatible and incommensurable moral premises and moral commitment as the expression of criterionless choice between such premises, a type of choice for which no rational justification can be given" (ibid., p. 39). Given such disarray, the promise of moral education is indeed questionable. If the transition from amoral to moral frameworks is fundamentally irrational or does not avail itself to reason, how can teachers hope to cultivate moral growth? They certainly cannot do so irrationally. One of the major culprits in MacIntyre's tale of woe is Søren Kierkegaard. It is Kierkegaard who, according to MacIntyre, enticingly argues that frameworks that guide human choice are fundamentally incompatible. The decision to choose one framework over another involves an irrational, arbitrary "leap." While criteria may inform action within a particular framework, the choice to cross the threshold into another framework is without criteria. MacIntyre's interpretation of Kierkegaard is not without dispute; the arguments center on the nature of transition, how it occurs, and whether it occurs rationally, irrationally, or in some other way. 1 Though sensitivity to pedagogy infuses all of Kierkegaard's writings, Kierkegaard's voice in education, and moral education specifically, is scant. This is striking considering the range and depth of his influence in philosophy and theology. While Kierkegaard is not as optimistic as Kohlberg or Lickona are about pedagogies that inculcate ethical virtue, neither is he as pessimistic (or incoherent and irrational across spheres) as MacIntyre suggests. Given the ethico-religious telos that animates Kierkegaard's project, and the amazing variety of texts that illuminate and enact the existential journey into lived virtue, Kierkegaard offers a wealth of resources for pedagogies that aspire to cultivate virtue. Yet Kierkegaard does, as his pseudonym Johannas Climacus intends, create difficulties. Specifically, he exposes how difficult it is to become and remain virtuous. Moreover, he reveals how difficult it is to teach others how to become virtuous, all the while enacting a pedagogy that intends to do just that. Rather than a life of virtue, Kierkegaard exposes how we are incessantly drawn by the lure of the aesthetic sphere, characterized by a love of pleasure, unbroken immediacy, distraction, a constant flight from boredom, and an ultimately an evasion of becoming a substantive self. Kierkegaard's aesthete, a precursor of today's distracted and perpetually amused self, poses an intractable challenge for pedagogies that aspire to cultivate virtue. The aesthete, while more than capable of 1 Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, (eds. Davenport & Rudd, 2001). MacIntyre's position on this point has arguably evolved, most notably In Three Rival Versions of Inquiry, where he argues that traditions, rather than insular and incomprehensible, are intelligible across time. Truths are made intelligible within a tradition and that tradition (T1) which understands a conflicting tradition (T2) on its own terms and is able to resolve its (T2) intractable problems with a better account (i.e. Galileo's answer to Ptolemy) is or should be the prevailing tradition. This is in effect is what B attempts with A in Either/Or-explaining A's modality within B's terms. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous editor, Victor Eremita, notes that A and B's manuscripts offer no clear resolution. This makes sense for A, as I will argue, needs more than cognitive persuasive.

International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View, vol. 22, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 359-376. (2011), 2011

"Just as the wind drives the mighty ship but does not understand itself, just as the river drives the wheel but does not understand itself, so a human being can achieve amazing things, encompass a multifariousness of knowledge without, however, understanding himself." (UDVS, 256) Summary Kierkegaard's emphasis on the daily life concerns has been often criticized as simple subjectivism. Surely one can also read him as a master of intellectual and objective reflection about the subjective world. By following the narrative of "The Point of View," we have been allowed to peek into the nurturing of his existential thoughts. There, we found two layers which read like subplots to his story of upbringing: 1) the transformation of "Tungsind" (heavy-heartedness) as an individual process of transcending one's suffering and 2) the transformation of the God image via the process of individual appropriation. Both, transcending suffering as well as appropriation have become central concepts in the writer's philosophy. 1) The journey of Tungsind started out with that heavy impression from childhood, which the young man had to relate to and to struggle through in order to make sense out of it. This way the struggle with heavy heartedness became the author's source of creativity and spiritual depth, and the lost childhood immediacy found its renewed meaning in the metaphor of the "thorn in the flesh" as a marker of the encounter with the infinite (PV, 83). Even if the writer could not leave Tungsind behind, he could transform its meaning by relating differently to it. Here despair marks the boundary situation in which the self can either close itself up in itself, or courageously walk through the despairing moments to find the self anew. Psychologically, we have learned how suffering (in the writer's case, Tungsind) can serve a maieutic function, namely, to help some one into an inward contemplation as the starting point of learning anew about oneself and one's essential relations. 2) The second layer to the narrative can be read as a story of religious appropriation. This marks the struggle of the writer to free himself from the frightful and confining God image of childhood and to develop a more graceful and personal image of God as Father. To achieve this one has to reflect, struggle with, and suffer-through the process; one must learn anew. This involves reconciling with what was before, creating one's own meaning and taking it to heart, appropriating it. "And now I am not interesting any longer" says Kierkegaard in his chapter about Governance (PV, 92). Such daily life struggles, he concludes, must seem boring to those who are looking for the extraordinary. Still, it might be inviting for some who have not yet found their answers in the extraordinary.

This thesis explores dance beyond entertainment, psychological, behavioural or cognitive theory; beyond conventional interpretations of performance, and beyond the disciplinary categories that tend to separate practices in contemporary Western culture. This is a study of "Daggering," the Jamaican style of dancing marked by violence and raw sexual licentiousness inna di dancehall (in the dancehall)-a male-dominated dance space in Jamaica. The problem of daggering analyzed stems from the so-called "causes" of violence. Cultural theorists argue the violent situation in the dancehall and throughout Jamaica is related to the history of colonialism and slavery, poverty, the polarization of the country's political parties, and politicians who first issued guns. Some philosophers argue the myth of 'poverty' is an illusion and world-historical logicomathematical thinking is delusional. Primary texts studied are: The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Kierkegaard. I am interested in the inseparability, the embeddedness of Dionysus in all the phenomena of life. The myth of Dionysus contains statements about society and the individual not easily accessible by purely objective techniques. Nietzsche writes: the invisible forces of nature, "through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and wisdom of 'illusion,' together with its beauty, speak to us." Kierkegaard's aesthetic philosophy of subjectivity challenges the myth of poverty. Thus, this thesis marks a connection between daggering, the myth of Dionysus, and subjectivity. The essential question asked: 'what' knowledge is of the most worth to transform the individual and a society in crisis?

Christological dimension, especially as developed in his narrations of the human's relation to Christ in the late theological discourses. Current treatments of Kierkegaard's anthropology fall into two broad categories: (1) If a theological dimension is recognized, it is only the vaguely theistic notion of "before God"; or, (2) an a-theological philosophy of the self is extracted from Kierkegaard's works. These approaches distort Kierkegaard's anthropology by either relativizing the role of Christ, or eliding Christ altogether. Kierkegaard insists, however, that the human being can only become a self (properly speaking) in the peculiarly Christian dialectic of existence initiated by Christ, who is both the human exemplar and the divine redeemer who vicariously atones and forgives. Therefore, my goal is to provide a much-needed reconstruction of Kierkegaard's highly contextualized Christological anthropology. In short, I contend that when we add the oft-overlooked voice of the late theological works, a clearer, more robust understanding of Kierkegaard's polyphonous anthropology emerges-an anthropology best characterized as Christological. Thus, my reconstruction includes: (1) establishing the basic contours and terminology of Kierkegaard's anthropology; (2) contextualizing Kierkegaard's polemically-conditioned anthropological writings and illuminating his critical appropriation of select idealist and Romantic anthropological categories pervasive in nineteenth-century Copenhagen; and (3) analyzing the ways in which Christ and Christology eventually come to condition and determine Kierkegaard's anthropology. The reconstruction proceeds by showing that Kierkegaard's late anthropological writings constitute a logical development of his earliest philosophical and theological intuitions about human existence. Despite particular shifts and developments in Kierkegaard's thought, a fundamental coherence within the development of Kierkegaard's anthropology is also evident-a traceable trajectory from the earliest writings to the latest. Put another way, while Christ figures absolutely decisively in Kierkegaard's anthropology, there remains a sense in which the parameters of the issue are still dictated by Kierkegaard's polemical engagements with then-current anthropological ideas and concerns. My reconstruction complete, I end the dissertation with a brief assessment of Kierkegaard's Christological (yet deeply contextualized) anthropology, and suggestions for further study.