Comics As Philosophy by Jeff McLaughlin (Editor)

Author:Jeff McLaughlin (Editor)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Comic
Published: 2011-01-18T06:00:00+00:00

126 Deconstructing the Hero

37. It is perhaps not too great an over-simplification to point out that a significant strain of the intellectual (or “spiritual,” geistlich) history of the last few centuries can be sketched as a series of battles in the on-going conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticism: The Enlightenment throws off the “dogmatism” of a religious worldview; Romanticism rejects the triumph of Enlightenment rationality as sober but unsatisfying; the existentialists seek to rehabilitate Romanticism’s call for meaning within a broadly Enlightenment framework; Berlin and other liberals reject this Romantic counter-revolution as politically disastrous and call for a return to the Enlightenment; postmodernists rebel against this return to the privileged metanarrative of Reason while nevertheless reviving its suspicion of heroes, master-concepts, and so on.

38. See Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, p. 10. These

“neo-Enlightenment” views may (as with Berlin) or may not (as with postmodernism) share the Enlightenment belief that reason is sufficient for happiness, a view Nietzsche denigrates as “Socratic optimism” in The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

39. If nothing can be an X, then nothing can be made into an X. No liquid, no liquefaction; no heroes, no heroization, and so on. (Someone might object, e.g., that while there are no demons, there are certainly demonizations. But a person “demonized” is transformed rhetorically into something that does not actually exist, which helps explain why such rhetorical moves are so objectionable. As I observed in note 35, however, even Kant himself proved incapable of abiding—in his rhetoric—by this strict logic of Enlightenment).

A would-be “enlightened Kierkegaardian” might try to avoid this problem by insisting that, since Kierkegaard distinguishes the “knight of faith” from the “tragic hero” in Fear and Trembling, he does not in fact “heroize” faith. Yet, not only is Kierkegaard’s distinction quite idiosyncratic (since a knight is the very paradigm of the medieval hero), but the distinction turns on Kierkegaard’s questionable claim that we can understand the tragic hero, but not the knight of faith. (Can one really “understand” Hector, let alone Oedipus? Not, I would argue, without becoming like them). As Andrew Cross shows, moreover, Kierkegaard’s knight and hero stand in a relation of isomorphic interdependence, each completing the other (each is the other’s “better nature”); see Cross, “Faith and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,” Inquiry 46:1 (2003). If Cross is right, and I think he is, then even within Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic conceptual vocabulary, one can say that Kierkegaard gives us a “poetic heroization” (or “heroic poeticization”) of faith.

(Obviously, however, the concepts of the hero I have analyzed here are significantly broader than Kierkegaard’s own). Alternatively, the post-modern Kierkegaardian might try to argue that we cannot say that the Knight of Faith is a heroization of Kierkegaard himself, since Kierkegaard entirely disappears behind (or into) his pseudonymous masks (with even his journals being masks). That, however, only extends the parallel with Rorschach (who also disappears into his masks), while missing the general point that there is almost never a superhero

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