| 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. |
