Take Off Your Shoes: Between Religion and Ethics

In this paper I reconsider Kierkegaard’s famous distinction between aesthetic, ethical and religious values, arguing that he sees them as more harmonious with one another than is often supposed, and that this is consistent with what I take to be his basically Platonic understanding of value in general. The paper has two main parts. In the first I try to show that, despite a certain ambivalence, Kierkegaard has a largely positive account of the significance of the arts for the moral life, and that this can be seen as providing an implicit response to Plato’s notorious critique of the arts - but one made from within an essentially Platonic framework. In the second main part of the paper I consider the idea that God might require a “teleological suspension of the ethical” and then critically examine the claim (made by Steve Evans among others) that Kierkegaard advocates a form of divine command theory. I argue, exegetically, that nothing shows Kierkegaard to have been clearly committed to such a theory and, substantively, that it is unnecessary for a Christian Platonist (as I take Kierkegaard to be) to appeal to further divine commands.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1992

A prevalent interpretation of Fear and Trembling suggests that the book offers a religious model of existence in which moral obligations are overridden by religious ones. According to this interpretation, Abraham is the "knight of faith" because he suspended the ethical and followed the divine command ordering him to sacrifice his son, rather than heeding the moral obligation which would have compelled him to refrain from this act. Accordingly, morality and religion are perceived as separate realms, and God's mandates and absolute obedience to them appear as religion's central elements. Some advocates of this approach went even further and argued that this model of religious existence was not "invented" by Kierkegaard but faithfully reflects Lutheran tradition, in which morality appears as independent of and removed from religion.1 In this paper, I intend to reexamine the relation between morality and religion or, more specifically, the status of morality visa -vis religion in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. 2 I shall argue that not only are moral duties not removed from the realm of religious life but, quite the contrary, religion itself endows moral obligations with central importance. 3 As the starting point for this discussion, I shall introduce the two Kierkegaardian approaches to the relation between religion and morality. According to the first approach, morality is not removed from religion, since even those religious duties ostensibly opposed to morality can be morally justified. Thus, Abraham's duty to sacrifice Isaac does not contradict morality and, furthermore, might even be considered a moral duty. According to the second approach however, some religious duties are incompatible with moral obligations, and the paradigm for this type of * I wish to thank my friend Danny Statman for his careful reading of the manuscript and his very useful comments.

The Heythrop Journal, 2007

This paper contains a discussion of the idea of using what could loosely be called an 'aesthetic attitude' (stemming largely from Kantian notions of disinterest and explicitly articulated by such writers in the 20 th century as Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz) in the context of the encounter between religions. The 'problem' that is addressed is formulated as an attempt to find a space in which the participation of those with committed faith positions (e.g. conservative evangelicals) in sympathetic and empathetic meeting with other faiths can be facilitated. To this end, the paper is critical of the use of spirituality (or inter-spirituality) as an oft-suggested mode by which religions meet and 'converse' in depth-encounters. That is, it is argued that the language of inter-spirituality that is employed by some interfaith writers often betrays liberal assumptions that are unsettling for more committed religious persons. Thus, it is suggested that by changing the language of encounter from 'inter-spirituality' to a more aesthetic (or playful) mode of discourse, one is creating a different, but nonetheless experientially recognisable, space of empathetic meeting and encounter that might be deemed 'safer'. I believe play is often experienced as enjoyable because it celebrates the distinctive human capacity to simultaneously do one thing and its opposite and to be aware of the process by which it is possible to do the impossible 1

International Studies in Philosophy, 2010

My aim here is to probe the possibility of a reflection on "religious ethics" as a category for political and social philosophy in interrogating the current conundrums that the relation between politics and religion poses. And so I am hoping to offer an attempt at understanding religious ethics as, on the one hand, inseparable from the vexation as one realizes that fully arguing, securing, and justifying responsibility out of faith is impossible. On the other hand, I also hope to offer a way of conceiving of religious ethics as political ethics that is committed to critique and social justice and that compels us to take leave from tenants of creeds and to refuse to turn away from injustices of past and present. In short, I would like to offer an understanding of religious ethics as between passion and politics and will attempt to do so by engaging the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Benjamin.

Kierkegaard is habitually identified with fideism, yet a significant aspect of his primarily ethical criticism of established Christendom is its confusion of what is appropriately religious and what is appropriately secular. Kierkegaard’s critical assessment of modern secularization is well-known. Less appreciated is his critique of the politicizing Christendom that fails to recognize its difference from the secular, thereby conflating redemptive faith with worldly power. Contrary to overly simplifying fideistic interpretations that excessively subordinate the secular to the religious, I argue that the religious and the secular both have their own ethical significance for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard interpreted Christianity as the ethical renunciation rather than the intensification of worldly authority and power, including making war and controlling marriage, calling on Christendom to become more genuinely Christian by turning away from coercion and calculations of power, status, and wealth. Kierkegaard consequently radically differentiates the secular and the religious for the sake of Christianity itself by turning it toward individual and self-reflexive issues of freedom, responsibility, and redemption.

The author argues that there is a deep congruity between disinterestedness, which is considered a typical characteristic of the aesthetic attitude (we approach a work of art without immediate reference to practical concerns), and the ideal of detachment that is seen to be typical of the mature religious attitude described by mystical theologians. Disinterestedness refers to a non-instrumentalising attitude in relation to the thing of beauty. In order to be captured by the piece of art—i.e. in order to be involved—I have to be disinterested. This is not indifference; it is the exact opposite. It is openness, receptivity, which takes delight in the sheer beauty revealed to us. Similarly, the ideal of detachment (or radical self-lessness) as described by mystical theologians such as Eckhart, John of the Cross or Simone Weil suggests how we can engage with God and world in a non-possessive manner. Weil's notion of attention is nothing else but the cultivation of this disinterested-ness. The paper implies a critique of those who want to drive a wedge between aesthetics and religion.

In this article Kierkegaard's two models, the aesthetic and the ethical, respectively, are reconstructed with a view to showing how each represents a different approach to art (or alternatively to the human subject, the social or the body politic). Briefly, in the aesthetic model one encounters what is referred to in structural terms, today, as the postmodern, and in the ethical, what is known as the modern. The former comprises a fragmented structure and dynamic or, alternatively, a 'schizophrenic' temporality, while the latter entails a constantly unifying structural dynamic, accompanied by a 'developmental' temporality. It is argued that these two models provide the parameters for two diametrically opposed approaches to art, architecture, the human subject, and so on, and that poststructuralist theories like those of Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Deleuze can be understood as ways of mediating these two extremes. Moreover, these poststructuralist mediations have significant consequences for the 'objects' (or subjects) in question. Particular attention is given to Deleuze's work on time to be able to formulate the possibility of an art that can explore the creative modifications of time. This, it is argued, potentially has transformative effects on social reality or life.

2014