Love and Death

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is love? How is love related to the ideal and how does the attempt to live out love's ideals bring the ideal and the real into collision? Why does love so often seem to fail, or even to open us up to greater kinds of failure than had we never loved? Why is love so often bound together with - death? We will explore these questions by philosophically working through the most prominent philosophical project devoted to understanding the nature and implications of this collision, the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and his psychology of passion and the self. We will read selections from the foundational works in which he develops a variety of perspectives concerning the collision of passion and life (including Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death), paying caring attention to the difference between the three different perspectives he provides on love: the "aesthetic" understanding of love, the "ethical" understanding of love, and the "religious" understanding of love. We will be particularly concerned with how love can be incorporated (or not incorporated) into the structure of the self and the results of so incorporating it. We will therefore also pay careful attention to idea of the self, temporality and anxiety, and the possibility of the self's misrelation, that is, despair - especially focusing on his analysis of the ultimate cause of despair and the possibility of its being overcome.Following Kierkegaard's lead, we will frequently recur to theater and drama in order to bring these ideas to bear upon narratives of love. We will be particularly concerned with classical ballet, the form of art most persistently concerned with just this collision of the ideal of passion and the reality of love lived out in action. We will analyze the basic aesthetic elements of ballet - how it utilizes music, motion, and narrative to develop an idea?and use this knowledge to carefully observe the collision between the ideal and the real, the relation between anxiety, temporality, and love, and the danger posed by despair to the fulfillment of love in Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Adolph Adam's Giselle, Minkus's Don Quixote, Prokofiev's Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. We will also consider Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.