Søren Kierkegaard and Science Fiction: How Love Can Help Us Navigate The Future
When people think about Søren Kierkegaard, what often comes to mind is his work Fear and Trembling, and its glorification of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac. While artistic representations of this biblical narrative often portray it as a horrific act, and while theologians have struggled to reconcile this story with a vision of a just God, Kierkegaard unabashedly praises Abraham’s unquestioning faith. As a result, many people tend to see Kierkegaard as a proto-fascist, one who praises blind obedience above personal judgment, and who therefore sees zealotry as superior to a more reasoned approach to ethical life.
However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, what Kierkegaard is attempting to demonstrate is how love is “beyond” proof. That is, try as we might, we cannot prove our love to others, nor can they prove their love to us, because ultimately, recognizing love depends on our ability to receive it. For instance, we can think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and how, to so many, King’s call to “lovingly” break unjust laws appeared as an attack on the very fabric of society. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, it seemed to be a sacrifice of everything they held dear. In this light, Kierkegaard argues that recognizing love not only depends on the presence of love, but also, on our ability to receive it. In other words, because love cannot be proven, we have to take it on faith.
Working through Kierkegaard’s complicated interpretation of the sacrifice narrative, we will get a better sense of the intricacies of the problem of “proving” love. However, beyond this, we will also see how popular culture has adopted these themes to deal with some of our current instabilities. Provoked by our own anxieties over a fast approaching future—a future that threatens to “sacrifice” many of the things that we hold most dear—science fiction has made use of distinctly Kierkegaardian themes to offer us a measure of comfort in an increasingly unstable world. While love might require a terrifying leap of faith, in works like Spike Jonze’s movie, Her, and the cult classic television show, Battlestar Galactica, we will see how love can also provide us much needed stability in a world (and in a future) that offers us so little.
9/16 – Nick Riggle
(Lafayette College)
10/14 – Jamie Aroosi
(Yeshiva University)
11/3 – Alice Crary
(The New School)
11/24 – Liz Camp
(Rutgers University)
I know what you’re thinking. “Can’t summer just be over already? Are there going to be any great public philosophy events in Brooklyn soon? And are authentic romantic relationships even possible?”
Well, I’m here to tell you: yes, yes, and maybe.
Coming up on Tuesday, 9/1 at 7:00 P.M., Skye Cleary (Columbia University), author of the recently published Existentialism and Romantic Love, joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share some of her work on the subject. Here’s a bit more about the talk, in Dr. Cleary’s own words:
Existentialism and Romantic Love
Romantic love suggests images of perfect happiness, harmony, understanding, and intimacy that make the lovers feel as if they are made for each other. The ideal is alluring but flawed, because romantic loving often involves conflicts and disappointments.
While every existential philosopher interprets being in the world differently, there is a common emphasis on concrete personal experience, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, individuality, awareness of death, and personal determination of values. It is therefore not surprising that they also consider the question of romantic loving.
This talk draws on the philosophies of Max Stirner, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir in order to examine the roots of disappointments and frustrations within our everyday ideas about romantic love, as well as possibilities for resolution and creating authentically meaningful relationships.
Tell your friends/students/countrymen! Bring a date!
As usual, we meet at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (10 Grand Army Plaza), in the Info Commons lab.
See you there, I hope!
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the founding document of our nation as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet nowhere is the method of this pursuit clearly defined. What, exactly, does it mean to be happy, and how can such happiness be sustained over the long-term? Can happiness be accurately gauged or measured? How does the paradoxical relationship between happiness and pleasure shape our quest to lead the good life? And what does modern science have to tell us about this universal yet elusive pursuit? Attorney and author Kim Azzarelli, historian Darrin McMahon, and social psychologist Barry Schwartz join forces to share their research and insight on happiness, pleasure, and the coveted good life.
*Reception to follow.
Featuring
Kim Azzarelli, JD
Adjunct Professor at Cornell Law School and Founding Partner of Seneca Point Global
Author of “Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose”
Darrin McMahon, PhD
Professor of History at Dartmouth College
Author of “Happiness: A History”
Barry Schwartz, PhD
Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College
Author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”
Moderator
Steve Paulson
Executive Producer, Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally-syndicated program To the Best of Our Knowledge
Registration — Individual Lecture Prices
| Member | $5 |
| Member (Student / Postdoc / Resident / Fellow) | $5 |
| Nonmember | $15 |
| Nonmember (Student / Postdoc / Resident / Fellow) | $7 |
The Redemption of Feeling: The Religious Existentialists
Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon logic or reason as its primary or sole access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings or emotions have typically been viewed as secondary, at best, accompanying reason, or, at worse, clouding or misleading reason. This conference attempts to revisit how the movement of existentialism—and more specifically, the religious existentialists—have contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience for the philosophical enterprise in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions. This rethinking of our subjective experience is what we are characterizing as the redemption of feeling. As such, this includes anything and everything that can be thought of as outside of a rationalistic approach such as feelings, emotions, moods, intuitions, etc.
The redemption of feeling, then, can be thought of as a rethinking of subjective experience as a whole, and its role in our philosophical enterprise, which may include a re-evaluation of the non-rational approaches to reality introduced above (emotions, moods, intuition, etc.) Expanding our understanding of philosophical thought to include these subjective experiences opens the door for the possibility of a mode of philosophizing that does not reject human experience as philosophically significant, thus reframing the significance of feelings in general for philosophical inquiry. We are interested in papers that creatively explore the importance of feeling within philosophy, but in particular, how the religious existentialists have contributed to such a re-valuation of feeling.
Preference will be given to papers generally related to the following topics:
· Kierkegaard’s, Marcel’s, Levinas’ (or any other religious existentialist) contribution to our understanding of feeling
· What role can feeling/emotions have in relation to our faith or relation to God? (note: by feelings we do not mean just the emotions)
· What cognitive importance do feelings have for any particular existentialist?
· What role do feelings have in moral/ethical questions or behaviors?
· What might be the role of feelings/emotions, if any, with respect to our knowledge of God?
· A discussion on the range of human experience, or feelings
· How do any two religious existentialist relate to one another on this issue?
· A discussion on lesser known religious existentialists, such as Ebner, Berdyaev, etc. will also be given preference
We are especially interested in papers on the following thinkers:
Soren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, Nikolai Berdyaev, Miguel de Unamuno, Lev Shestov, and Simone Weil
Conference website: http://www.redemptionoffeeling.wordpress.com
Is Valentine’s Day an opportunity for meaningful celebrations of love, or is it merely a chocolate-covered con? As lovers, should we resist being seduced into spending billions of dollars annually on red roses and teddies (be they bears or lingerie)? Or should we surrender to the superficial satisfactions they represent? Be there as Skye Cleary takes us on an existential look at the hype and the possibilities for authentic loving. And bring someone you love.
Friday, February 12, 2016 at 6pm at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $9, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319).
Skye Cleary, PhD is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She lectures at Columbia University, Barnard College, the City University of New York, and the New York Public Library. Skye is a co-founder of the Manhattan Love Salon, an advisory board member of Strategy of Mind, an associate editor of the American Philosophical Association’s blog, and a certified fellow with the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. Skye has written for The Huffington Post, ABC Radio National, YourTango and others.
Abstract: On the standard reading, Heidegger’s account of authenticity in Being and Time amounts to an existentialist theory of human freedom. Against this interpretation, John Haugeland reads Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a crucial feature of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology: i.e., Heidegger’s attempt to determine the meaning of being via an analysis of human beings. Haugeland’s argument is based on the notion that taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right. Specifically, Haugeland says that our ability to choose allows us to question and test the disclosure of being through which entities are intelligible to us against the entities themselves, and he adds that taking responsibility for our existence involves transforming our disclosure of being when it fails to meet the truth test. Although I agree that Heidegger’s existentialism is a crucial feature of his fundamental ontology, I argue that the details of Haugeland’s interpretation are inconsistent. My objection is that if, as Haugeland claims, entities are only intelligible via disclosures of being, then it is incoherent for Haugeland to say that entities themselves can serve as intelligible standard against which disclosures can be truth-tested or transformed. Finally, I offer an alternative to Haugeland’s truth-based take on authenticity and cultural transformation via an ends-based onto-methodological interpretation of Heidegger and Kuhn. Here I argue that the ends pursed by a specific community determine both the meaning of being and the movement of human history.
Bio: Aaron James Wendland completed his PhD at Somerville College, Oxford and he is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the HSE’s Center for Advanced Studies in Moscow. Aaron is the co-editor of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Routledge, 2013) and Heidegger on Technology (Routledge, 2018), and he has written scholarly articles on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kuhn. Aaron has also published several pieces of popular philosophy in The New York Times, Public Seminar, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He currents serves as an art critic for The Moscow Times and Dialogue of Arts. And as of January 2019, Aaron will be the Director of the Center for Philosophy and Visual Arts at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.