Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic (eBook)

Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion

Will Williams (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
226 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-7715-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Kierkegaard makes a controversial and little-understood claim: irony, humor, and the comic are essential to ethics and religion. This account, grounded in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, explicates that idea for a philosophical and theological audience with a level of conceptual analysis never seen before in Kierkegaard scholarship.

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While some see the comic as trivial, fit mainly for amusement or distraction, Soren Kierkegaard disagrees. This book examines Kierkegaard's earnest understanding of the nature of the comic and how even the triviality of comic jest is deeply tied to ethics and religion. It rigorously explicates terms such as "e;irony,"e; "e;humor,"e; "e;jest,"e; and "e;comic"e; in Kierkegaard, revealing them to be essential to his philosophical and theological program, beyond aesthetic interest alone.Drawing centrally from Kierkegaard's most concentrated treatment of these ideas, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), this account argues that he defines the comic as a "e;contradiction"e; or misrelation that is essentially (though not absolutely) painless because it provides a "e;way out."e; The comic lies in a contradiction between norms and so springs from one's viewpoint, whether ethical or religious. "e;Irony"e; and "e;humor"e; play essential transitional roles for Kierkegaard's famous account of the stages of existence because subjective development is closely tied to one's capacity to perceive the comic, making the comic both diagnostic of and formative for one's subjective maturity. For Kierkegaard, the Christian is far from humorless, instead having the maximal comic perception because he has the highest possible subjective development. The book demonstrates that the comic is not the expression of a particular pseudonym or of a single period in Kierkegaard's thinking but is an abiding and fundamental concept for him. It finds his comic understanding even outside of Postscript, locating it in such differing works as Prefaces (1844), Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), and the Corsair affair (c.1845-1848).The book also examines the comic in contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. First, it argues that Deconstructionists, while accurately perceiving the widespread irony in Kierkegaard's corpus, incorrectly take the irony to imply a lack of earnest interest in philosophy and theology, misunderstanding Kierkegaard on the nature of irony. Second, it considers two theological readings to argue that their positions, while generally preferable to the Deconstructionists', lack the same attentiveness to the comic's role in Kierkegaard. Their significant theological arguments would be strengthened by increased appreciation of the legitimate power of the comic for cultivating ethics and religion.

Autor

Will Williams is lecturer at Baylor University

Inhalt

IntroductionPart I. Kierkegaard’s Conception of the ComicChapter 1. Kierkegaard’s Conception of the Comic Set ForthChapter 2. Kierkegaard’s Conception of the Comic Illustrated in Other WorksPart II. Kierkegaard’s Comic LegacyChapter 3. Irony and Deconstructionist Readings of KierkegaardChapter 4. Theology and Kierkegaard’s Conception of the ComicConclusionBibliography

Produkt-Details

• Verlagsort: Lanham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Schlagworte: Aesthetics • Christian Ethics • Climacus • Corsair Affair • Deconstruction • Elsebet Jegstrup • Emotions • ethics • German Romantic irony • History of Philosophy • Humor Studies • Literary Studies • Louis Mackey • Mark C. Taylor • Murray Rae • nineteenth-century philosophy • notabene • Philosophy of Religion • Religious Studies • Roger Poole • Romanticism • Taciturnus • Theology • W. Glenn Kirkconnell
• ISBN-10: 1-4985-7715-6 / 1498577156
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4985-7715-1 / 9781498577151