Art and Praise in Kierkegaards Works of Love

Since art is essential to the love of ones neighbor as oneself and to loves chief goal of building up one another, we cannot understand love without also understanding its art. Observing that praise is ubiquitous in Søren Kierkegaards writings, Richard McCombs interprets Kierkegaards Works of Love as a eulogy of loves arts of forgiveness, peace-making, and building up ones neighbor in maturity and charity. Kierkegaard stresses love's ability to achieve results, calling love irresistible and almost magical in overcoming obstacles to its purposes; living the life of faith and love involves skillful attention to the specificity of the episodes in an individuals life, and the creative imagining of new ways of enacting these virtues. McCombs argues that Kierkegaards ideas about the art of love reveal limits or exceptions to his individualism and to his anti-consequentialism in ethics. Art and Praise in Kierkegaards Works of Love explores Kierkegaards distinct praises of love through texts like Works of Love, The Brothers Karamazov, and Middlemarch to illustrate, complement, and sometimes correct Kierkegaards profound account of loves art and wisdom, suggesting ways that the art of praise bears on other questions in aesthetics, ethics, and religion.