Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Tragicomedy, the doubledemands of ethics, and ethical communication

This dissertation offers an alternative reading of the tragic-comic prescriptions in Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Friedrich Nietzsche's Gay Science over against the critical readings of Alastair MacIntyre and others. I frame my reading with what I call the "ethics of double-demands", and the task of communicating and undermining the rational prejudice in ethics, which blocks the actual practice and continual engagement with these double-demands. I construct the ethics of double-demands by borrowing from concepts and ideas of the "Neurathian" view found in the works of John McDowell, Margaret Urban Walker, and others.;The tragic marks the first demand of ethics, the Aristotelian starting point regarding the priority of practice as the source of value. Recognizing the tragically inescapable situatedness of our values in practices, however, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard each makes the second of the double-demands in prescribing the comic. The comic serves as "corrective laughter" and "safeguard" to remove and prevent comic contradictions between the practices we engage and commitments we proclaim. Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's prescriptions for the continual double-movement of the tragic-comic mark the double-demands of continually standing on practices in order to stand over them critically, which is never finished.;Engaging these tragic-comic double-demands, however, is blocked by the rational prejudice in ethics, which demands that we legitimate our values from a standpoint external to our practices, for example, universal reason, or disenchanted nature. But because of the power of practices, and because confidence in this ideal is itself conferred by deeply entrenched social-historical practices, its prejudice does not appear as such. By structuring their respective works in terms of the tragic-comic double-movement Nietzsche and Kierkegaard each offer a counterstory for communicating and undermining the rational prejudice. Kierkegaard's unpublished lectures on communication and posthumously published retrospective The Point of View of My Work as an Author further support this reading in terms of the "duplexity" of Kierkegaard's maieutic method of indirect communication, which requires communicating first in terms of the prejudicial practice and only then introducing comic contradictions from within that unsettle and make one aware that the prejudice lay open to judgment.