Nathan Carson

Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? There is something paradoxical about this little folk saying. For, if one is genuinely familiar-possessing the goods of having a high epistemic grade of cognitive or appreciative contact-with some piece of reality, then why should contempt follow on the heels of such genuine epistemic and existential intimacy? At first glance, this seems both bizarre and incongruous. And yet, as anyone who has relegated their most intimate beloved to the status of persona non grata knows, such appreciative failure is the common stock of human experience. This is a 'commonplace' mystery I propose to examine, with a focus on another experiential state parasitic on or constitutive of familiarity: jadedness. In what follows, I will attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy's unique philosophical contributions. Percy's contributions suggest, I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness-a narrow, domain specific psychological type and a global, existential type-that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I will then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human (as homo viator, a creature), offering a distinctive and philosophically integrated account of why being jaded involves a fundamental distortion of our humanity. Finally, insofar as jadedness involves failures of humility, I will argue that Percy's philosophical and theological work on our "unsignifiable" uniqueness provides an important critical alternative to prevailing philosophical accounts of humility, and also a unique solution to the problem of being jaded.

How can metaphysics be a guide to morals? For twentieth-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, this was the central question of philosophy, and I argue that her answers to it converge with those of nineteenth-century writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For both thinkers, a transcendent evaluative reality places moral demands on their characters, defines the general terms of their moral consciousness, and influences their experience of the presence or absence of moral coherence in a way that shatters self-consoling myths and opens their imaginations toward the possibility of goodness. Ultimately, both connect transcendent value realism to immanent evaluative consciousness in surprisingly congruent ways.

Nearly all of the scant comparative work on Søren Kierkegaard and Confucius places the two starkly at odds with each other. Kierkegaard is pictured as the paradigmatic exemplar of the Western self: a discrete rights-bearing and volitional atom who is quite alone in the world, while Confucius, by contrast, is the paradigmatic exemplar of the Eastern self: a complex and irreducibly embedded communitarian bundle of relations and rich social roles. In this article I challenge this oppositional approach, since it is both erroneous and obscures fruitful dialogue between the two on conceptually commensurate problems. In this article, I argue (1) that Kierkegaard offers a relational ontology of the self that moves in a Confucian direction, (2) subjectivity and relational reciprocity not fundamentally at odds in the two thinkers, (3) that both thinkers value a life of harmonious integration that entails right relation to others, and finally (4) that Confucius' appeal to Heaven as a source of normativity allows for salutary social critique of prevailing ethical norms and practices, in a way that provides important comparative insights with Kierkegaardian theism.

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard’s skepticism and irrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective” and “approximate” knowledge. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approximate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion of belief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions, he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate” knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further argue that we cannot ignore his criticisms of such knowledge because of its intrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial in developing religious selfhood before God.