SYNOPSIS
Friday, December 2, 2016, 7:15 pm -10:00 pm, Combination Room, Trinity College, Univ. Of Toronto, 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto
Brayton Polka
The Spirit of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Spirit: Reflections on the Aesthetic and the Religious in Kierkegaard's Works of Love
Abstract
I undertake in my talk to reflect on the implications, at once aesthetic and religious, of the following observation that Kierkegaard makes in Works of Love: "All human speech, even the divine speech of Holy Scripture, about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical speech." If the spirit of both human and divine speech is essentially and so equally metaphoric, what, indeed, is the difference between the human and the divine, between secular scripture and holy scripture, between the word of human beings and the word of God? Like for like: God does to you as you do to others (as you do to others God does to you). Yet, in Works of Love, Kierkegaard strongly opposes the poetic to the religious, erotic love to spiritual love, the pagan (indeed, the idolatrous) to the Christian, Christendom (baptized paganism) to Christianity. However, since works of love, whatever the mode in which they are expressed, are spiritual and so essentially metaphoric, does it not follow that works of art, insofar as they are metaphorical, are spiritual and so works of love? I shall argue, consequently, that the essentially poetic, i.e., the truly aesthetic, is metaphorically religious and that the essentially religious, i.e., the truly spiritual, is poetically metaphorical. In short, it is essential for us to learn to distinguish between like and like, between metaphor and simile, between image and idol, between the spiritual and the sensate-psychical, between, on the one hand, true art and religion and, on the other hand, false art and religion. We may remember 1 John: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God... Little children: keep yourselves from idols."
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Brayton Polka
Professor Brayton Polka (Ph.D. 1964, Harvard) has for his research areas European philosophy, religious studies, literature, and fine arts, including Kierkegaard studies. His relevant recent publications include Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), Modernity Between Wagner and Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), In the Beginning is Philosophy: On Desire and the Good (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). He is currently at work on a book entitled Death: Life's Paradox--On Reading Sacred and Secular Scripture.
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