Kierkegaard and the rebirth of tragedy: Philosophy, poetry and the problem of the irrational (with constant reference to Aristotle and Sophocles)

My dissertation, Kierkegaard and the Rebirth of Tragedy, explores Kierkegaard's return as both philosopher and religious poet to the ancient moral problem of reason's relationship to the irrational, a practical matter of cultivating virtue in both individual souls and the cities they compose. Kierkegaard, I illustrate, responding to a moral crisis in the second enlightenment, returns to the first, devising an interpretation of this problematic relation and a prescription that draw as much on the concepts developed by Greece's tragic poets as they do the moral-psychology of the philosophers supplanting them. This ancient narrative, dramatically-philosophically augmented and transformed by Kierkegaard in the play of his pseudonymous cast, turns, I claim, on two exemplars of virtue: Sophocles' Oedipus and Aristotle's phronimos. Kierkegaard's return to tragedy, his philosophical embrace of the irrationality of tragedy's daimones, leads, I conclude, to a radically different understanding and valuation of both reason, the passions, and their virtuous relation in the philosopher's care of the soul.