Add free shipping to your order with these great books
Art and Praise in Kierkegaard's Works of Love : New Kierkegaard Research - Richard McCombs

Art and Praise in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

By: Richard McCombs

Hardcover | 15 December 2023

Sorry, we are not able to source the book you are looking for right now.

We did a search for other books with a similar title, however there were no matches. You can try selecting from a similar category, click on the author's name, or use the search box above to find your book.

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 Soren 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.

Industry Reviews
This outstanding work focuses the spotlight on an often-neglected aspect of Kierkegaard's authorship, arguing that much of it can be read doxologically, as an encomium to such Christian virtues as faith and love. Richard McCombs aptly observes that Kierkegaard was convinced that praising love was an essential strategy for building up love in the neighbor. For Kierkegaard this praise must employ Socratic pedagogy and aesthetic devices, even devious art, because love is offensive to merely human values. McCombs intriguingly suggests that the need for artful strategies is reinforced by the fact that loving properly is also an art, for love requires wisdom and practical know-how. This book emphasizes Kierkegaard's central contention that all people can become virtuosos of the art of love, artfully expressing essential human equality despite inessential worldly inequalities. -- Lee C. Barrett, Lancaster Theological Seminary It's hard to imagine a more illuminating and inspiring study of Kierkegaard's Works of Love than this one. But it is more. This book proposes that we read his entire authorship in a fresh, new way, as that of a poet whose primary task is to praise things admirable and to evoke our admiration of them. This includes faith, as presented pseudonymously in Fear and Trembling, and then love (in greater detail) as presented in Works of Love. The extensive use of illustrations from Middlemarch and The Brothers Karamazov lends concrete everydayness to the detailed textual analysis. -- Merold Westphal, Fordham University Boldly violating the shibboleth in Kierkegaard studies regarding the mixing of the esthetic and the ethical-religious spheres of existence, and provocatively situating his proposal within a study of Kierkegaard's Works of Love, McCombs proposes to reclaim art and esthetics as essential elements of the existential task of ethical-religious striving. Compelling, responsible, and sufficiently nuanced to engage any reader of Kierkegaard who is unwilling to dismiss the undertaking a priori. -- Christopher A.P. Nelson, South Texas College

More in Philosophy

The Choice : A true story of hope - Edith Eger

RRP $24.99

$23.75

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse - Charlie Mackesy

RRP $40.00

$29.35

27%
OFF
Ikigai : The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life - Hector Garcia
The Journey : Big Panda and Tiny Dragon - James Norbury

RRP $35.00

$31.75

The Road to Character - David Brooks

RRP $24.99

$23.75

Entitled : How Male Privilege Hurts Women - Kate Manne
The Republic : Penguin Classics - Plato

RRP $17.99

$17.25

Soul in the Game : The Art of a Meaningful Life - Vitaliy Katsenelson

RRP $46.99

$42.35

10%
OFF
Cancel Culture And The Left's Long March - Kevin dr DONNELLY

FREE SHIPPING

RRP $29.99

$20.95

30%
OFF
The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm

RRP $19.99

$18.95

Uncivilised : Ten Lies that Made the West - Subhadra Das
Walter Benjamin and Political Theology : Walter Benjamin Studies - Brendan Moran