Improvisation - Dancing With Complexity Fear and Trembling

Movement improvisation is a transformational practice that offers embodied understanding of complex systems and relationships. Group improvisation helps develop a capacity to respond to complexity, the unforeseen and the unforeseeable with increased creativity and cooperation. These are the kinds of “creative, complex and collaborative competencies” (Montuori, 2014, p. 20) that are needed for systemic health today. When we practice improvisation together, not only does it promote mindful movement (Eddy, 2016), it also offers powerful ways to establish and affirm, in the flesh, an ontology of mind that embraces mind, body, heart, soul and world as one interconnected and unified whole. Wholeness, in this sense, is not only saine (French for healthy) but also provides access to information we need to navigate the challenges of co-existence in the twenty-first century in ways that support life, and honour our highest potential as intelligent, sentient, social, and creative beings. Mindful movement may, in fact, be one of the critical ‘technologies’ needed in these “liquid times” (Montuori, 2014, p.1). Movement improvisation is worthy of particular attention because it offers the opportunity to experientially practice, study and explore relationship, ecologies, and creative engagement.

Kierkegaard's Socratic Alternative to Hegel in Fear and Trembling

Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.

The Augmentation of Existentialism: Robinson Crusoe’s Character

The novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, theme depicts the philosophy of existentialism. Existentialism argues the existence of humans through freedom of choice of the existence of who or what to become. The Robinson Crusoe character’s struggle to realize his freedom of life and defend his existence exemplars the existentialism. Robinson was adamant to his fathers’ advice and went to the sea. This paper discusses the characteristics of existentialism evident in the novel Robinson Crusoe. These aspects include the essence of existence, existence precedes essence, human alienation or estrangement, Fear and Trembling Anxiety, The Encounter with Nothingness, and Freedom. The relationships between existence and freedom of choice in human life establish the fact on augmentation of existentialism, as seen in Robinson Crusoe Character.

On Fear and Trembling’s Motif of the Promise: Faith, Ethics and the Politics of Tragedy

This article interrogates the concepts of faith, the ethical, and tragedy in Fear and Trembling by examining Johannes De Silentio’s allusions to heroic characters. I argue that these heroes are emblematic of faith or tragedy through their orientation to a promise in their respective mythic narratives. Abraham’s faith in the covenant with God commits him to the reconcilability of virtue and the good life, while the tragic heroes’ commitments to the ethical reveal their inability to transcend the (tragic) presumption that virtue and the good life are ultimately incommensurable. I conclude by sketching a politics corresponding to De Silentio’s conception of tragedy.