The Passion of Infinity
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Daniel Greenspan
About this book
The Passion of Infinity generates a historical narrative surrounding the concept of the irrational as a threat which rational culture has made a series of attempts to understand and relieve. It begins with a reading of Sophocles' Oedipus as the paradigmatic figure of a reason that, having transgressed its mortal limit, becomes catastrophically reversed. It then moves through Aristotle's ethics, psychology and theory of tragedy, which redefine reason's collapses in moral-psychological rather than religious terms. By changing the way in which the irrational is conceived, and the nature of its relation to reason, Aristotle eliminates the concept of an irrationality which reason cannot in principle dissolve. The book culminates in an extensive reading of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, who, in a critical retrieval of both Greek tragedy and Aristotle, prescribe their apparently pathological age a paradoxical task: develop a finite form of subjectivity willing to undergo an unthinkable thought ‑ allow the transcendence of a god to enter into the mind as well as the marrow, to make a tragic appearance in which a limit to the immanence of human reason can again be established.
Author / Editor information
Daniel Greenspan, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Table of Contents
ix -
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Introduction
1 - Part I Ancient Greece
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Chapter 1. Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus
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Chapter 2. Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles
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Chapter 3. Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy
70 -
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Chapter 4. Psuche Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology
95 -
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Chapter 5. Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics
107 - Part II Golden Age Denmark
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Chapter 6. Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama Reflected in the Modern”
140 -
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Chapter 7. Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity
158 -
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Chapter 8. Fear and Trembling: Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism of Abraham
195 -
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Chapter 9. The Concept of Anxiety: Fate and the Tragic Logos of Second Ethics
209 -
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Chapter 10. Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method
237 -
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Chapter 11. Ethics Contra Ethics: Climacus on Eternal Happiness and Tragic Virtue
265 -
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Chapter 12. Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship
293 -
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Backmatter
317
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