Love Among the Post-Socratics

Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2013 (1) (2013)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Victor Eremita proposes that the reader understand parts I and II of Either/Or as parties in a dialogue; most readers in fact view II as a devastating reply to I. I suggest that part I be read as a reaction or follow-up to Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Much of part I presents reflective characters who are aware of their freedom but reluctant or unable to adopt the ethical life. The modern Antigone and the Silhouettes are sisters of Alcibiades—failed students of Socrates. I articulate and defend their modes of loving, which are significantly different from Don Giovanni’s and Johannes the Seducer’s purely aesthetic approaches to love. Such feminine love, I argue, dwells in the disputed territory between passion and action, substance and freedom, the aesthetic and the ethical. Antigone’s love is a passion she both suffers and tries to appropriate. The Silhouettes’ devotion to their beloved makes them dependent on him. I defend this dependence even though it is undoubtedly a form of despair. By appealing to Sartre’s account of love, I argue moreover that this love involves a recognition and appraisal of the beloved absent in the love exemplified by Fear and Trembling’s knight of infinite resignation.

Similar books and articles

Love’s Vision.Troy Jollimore - 2011 - Princeton University Press.
Love: a history.Simon May - 2011 - New Haven: Yale University Press.
Communion and True Self-Love.Stephen Post - 1988 - Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (2):345 - 362.
The Dance of Love.Peter Murphy - 2002 - Thesis Eleven 72 (1):65-90.
The pre-Socratics: a collection of critical essays.Alexander P. D. Mourelatos (ed.) - 1974 - Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Self Love.Stephen David Ross - 2010 - International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series:129-152.
Love.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Review: Love in Contemporary Christian Ethics. [REVIEW]Stephen J. Pope - 1995 - Journal of Religious Ethics 23 (1):165-197.
Love as a Problem of Knowledge in Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Plato's Symposium.Ulrika Carlsson - 2010 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (1):41-67.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-11-18

Downloads
449 (#39,163)

6 months
78 (#49,055)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Ulrika Carlsson
Yale University (PhD)

Citations of this work

Kierkegaard's Phenomenology of Spirit.Ulrika Carlsson - 2014 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (3):629-650.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references