Joint Seminar in Philosophy and Theology

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this class we will read two of the great thinkers of the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Writing during a time of increasing prosperity, liberty, and enlightenment, both found much that was troubling or naïve in the age’s conviction in the liberating and transformative power of reason, and provided analyses of the human condition and the self whose power and insight continue to provoke and challenge. We will focus on three themes that unite this analysis of the human condition: suffering, freedom, and transformation through love. Suffering makes us conscious of our limitations, our helplessness, our lack of control, and yet every human being must form the self in freedom. Can suffering lead to increased self-knowledge and transformation? When does suffering lead us closer to God? Does suffering purify love, or poison it? What is the relationship between suffering and freedom? To what extent does one's suffering limit the exercise of freedom? Can the suffering self make choices out of love that increase one's freedom, transforming the self? When freedom is made subject to nothing but reason it becomes trapped in its own irresolvable perplexities concerning its origin and its destination. The course will raise the question of what “the self” is, how suffering, freedom, and love are related to the self; how relationships structure, limit, and potentially transform the self; in what sense the suffering of despair represents the disordered self; and the different ways that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky envision faith and love as unifying and completing the self.