Art and Praise in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

Since art is essential to the love of one's neighbor as oneself and to love's chief goal of building up one another, we cannot understand love without also understanding its art. Observing that praise is ubiquitous in S ren Kierkegaard's writings, Richard McCombs interprets Kierkegaard's Works of Love as a eulogy of love's arts of forgiveness, peace-making, and building up one's neighbor in maturity and charity. Kierkegaard stresses love's ability to achieve results, calling love irresistible and almost magical in overcoming obstacles to its purposes; living the life of faith and love involves skillful attention to the specificity of the episodes in an individual's life, and the creative imagining of new ways of enacting these virtues. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's ideas about the art of love reveal limits or exceptions to his individualism and to his anti-consequentialism in ethics. Art and Praise in Kierkegaard's Works of Love explores Kierkegaard's distinct praises of love through texts like Works of Love, The Brothers Karamazov, and Middlemarch to illustrate, complement, and sometimes correct Kierkegaard's profound account of love's art and wisdom, suggesting ways that the art of praise bears on other questions in aesthetics, ethics, and religion.

Author: Richard McCombs
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 12/19/2023
Series: New Kierkegaard Research
Pages: 194
Weight: 1lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9781666936056