This paper provides an exposition and critical assessment of a fundamental disagreement between Løgstrup’s and Levinas’s otherwise closely aligned ethical phenomenologies. The disagreement concerns the putative (in)compatibility of ethics and ontology, where in stark contrast to Levinas’s ethics, which proceeds from a critique of the ‘primacy of ontology’ in Western thought, Løgstrup brands his own ethical project as ‘ontological ethics’. First, I provide an interpretation of Løgstrup’s ontological ethics, clarifying in particular the influence of hermeneutic and existential analysis on Løgstrup’s methodology. Second, I bring Løgstrup’s ontological ethics into critical dialogue with Levinas’s thought. Here, I home in on two Levinas-style worries that appear to have traction against Løgstrup’s ontological ethics. However, ultimately, I argue that both can be defused.
In his pioneering work, A Case for Irony (2011) Johnathan Lear has advanced a powerful and novel case in support of Søren Kierkegaard's striking thesis that "no genuinely human life is possible without irony." Lear can be credited for attempting to show not only that irony can play a positive role in living a genuinely human life, but that the role played by irony is genuinely distinctive. However, in this paper, I argue that Lear's use of psychoanalytic theory in making his case for irony is problematic; and I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's own writings contain resources to provide a stronger defense of the stated thesis. In this way, I aim to provide a critical defense of Lear's case for irony by arguing for a return to Kierkegaard in place of psychoanalysis. On my Kierkegaardinspired account, the experience of irony erupts as a disciplinary force in cases where an individual's concrete, practical deliberation has been substituted or "swallowed up" by disinterested theoretical contemplation, which has come to function as an uncanny simulacrum of practical deliberation. Here, the experience of irony potentiates a change in thinking.
| INTRODUCTIONI am inclined to agree with Alasdair MacIntyre's assessment that: Jonathan Lear has put us all in his debt once again. Irony had for some time been a subject left to literary critics and to scholars of linguistics. But what they have had to say, although often instructive, has thrown insufficient light on the part that irony might or should play in our lives. Lear, by taking up where Kierkegaard left off, has reopened some old questions and opened up some new ones, in both cases with insight and elegance. (Lear & MacIntyre, 2012)
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