This study is dedicated to examining how the principles and values that mark the difference between the ancient Greco-Roman and biblical traditions help us to think about what (and who) we look at when we look at art. We begin with the Bible's self-reflexive communication to its readers regarding the status of its own images and then consider works by Michelangelo, Tejo Remy, and Charles White—while also calling on Shakespeare, Hegel, and Kierkegaard—to show that art in the biblical tradition presupposes (...) and expresses love as the transformation of life's finite immediacies, the transformation of its finite givens, into the gift. We argue, overall, that the art of the biblical tradition demands that viewers pose the question of whether, where, and how deeply they find in those works—and in themselves—the principle of love as the redemption of finitude, the redemption of existence. (shrink)

This study is dedicated to exploring the ways in which Kierkegaard provides a criterion for thinking about the principles of plurality when, in the context of distinguishing between Socrates and Christ, between different conceptions of difference—between those that support the difference of the other and those that do not—he writes that, just as no one must separate what God has joined, so no one must join what God has separated. When Kierkegaard then makes central to faith the incommensurability of single (...) individuals, he indicates that the inviolable singularity of self and other is the one principle that can be true for all—that can be plural—since it is the one principle that is inclusive of all. In my paper I argue through Kierkegaard that the relationship between the singular and the plural embraces the paradox of absolute difference, the paradox of difference as absolute: the single individual exists only by standing in absolute relation to all others as absolute; the plural exists only insofar as it involves the commitment to the singular standard that, as absolute, preserves the difference of all. (shrink)

Through reading Kierkegaard and Derrida together I argue that deconstruction has its historical origin in, and goes no further than, biblical principles. I begin with an analysis of the complexities in Kierkegaard’s exposition of the biblical command to love the neighbor: in showing the command to express the deconstructionof originary presence, Kierkegaard appears to invoke as central to it the apparent binary opposition between divine and human being. I next turn to the Derridean deconstruction of binary opposites and particularly to (...) Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is justice and that it never proceeds without love. In then engaging Kierkegaard’s critical distinction between ancient Greek and biblical thought, as well as Derrida’s response to issues posed by such a distinction, I show that the deconstruction of Kierkegaard can proceed only on the basis of principles whose origin is biblical and, therefore, that ideas central to Derridean deconstruction, including différance and the supplement, presuppose and express the biblical concept of neighbor. (shrink)

The extreme asceticism that Kierkegaard attributes to Christianity in The Moment and Late Writings is discussed in this essay as the challenge to the single individual in the present age. His polemic against Christendom is examined in terms of the interrelationship between the concept of neighbor, which he develops in Works of Love, and the concept of history, which he develops in both his pseudonymous and his acknowledged texts and which involves the distinction between the ancient Greek and biblical worlds. (...) I argue that it is the interrelationship of these two concepts—neighborly love and history—that allows us to see the way in which his texts provide the hermeneutical principles through which the extreme asceticism of the Moment and thus his challenge there to the single individual can be appropriated. (shrink)

When, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche poses the question of how the natural sciences are possible, he insists that they depend not on a principle that is natural but on the will to truth, the will not to deceive even oneself, with which, he holds, ?we stand on moral ground.? Yet, that the natural sciences stand on ground that is moral also means, for Nietzsche, that their origin is to be located in ?a faith that is thousands of years old,? (...) a faith that, in the Genealogy of Morals, he develops as presupposing what he calls the ascetic ideals of Judaism and Christianity. Further, in holding that the natural sciences have their origin in principles that are biblical, Nietzsche goes on to indicate that, like the natural sciences, his own critical position, unconditionally honest atheism, is, in forbidding itself ?the lie involved in belief in God,? not opposed to, but is rather an expression of, Judaism and Christianity's ascetic ideals. In addressing the interrelationships among the religious, the secular, and the natural sciences in light of Nietzsche, I argue that the natural sciences have their origin in principles that are not natural but that are no less religious than secular. (shrink)

In my paper I examine the relationship between biblical principles and modern western philosophy. I begin with various biblical passages, including the twice-told tale of the miracle of the loaves and fish from the Gospel of Matthew, the story of creation, and the story of Adam and Eve, contrasting them with what I argue are the non-tales of Plato’s Republic. I then move on to modern philosophical texts—Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard in order to examine the idea that what (...) constitutes the ‘twice’ in our modern twice-told tales is the biblical, self-reflexive recognition that it is the core of values underpinning our stories—love of neighbor—that is itself the story that we tell. (shrink)