Theodor Sandal Rolfsen holder prøveforelesning for ph.d.-graden i humaniora og samfunnsvitenskap, over følgende emne: "The Affirmation of Life".
Publikum kan følge prøveforelesningen digitalt: Ved å følge denne lenken.
Avhandlingen er publisert i Munin.
Prøveforelesningstekst:
«The Affirmation of Life»
Disputasen holdes kl. 12.15 samme dag, i samme lokaler, hvor det vil være offentlig forsvar av avhandlingen "Enjoyment and Transcendence".
Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag:
In the present thesis, I ask why immanence (the world) and transcendence (God) has often been thought to be in conflict with each other, and attempt to think their relation differently. Both are done by interpreting immanence as revolving around the phenomenon of enjoyment. I argue that the Christians of the early Church saw detachment from worldly pleasures through ascetic practice as a requirement for orienting oneself towards God. Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical critique of Christianity, I explore the argument for why belief in that which transcends the world necessarily leads to a condemnation of worldly life, and why Nietzsche believed that faith in transcendence is borne out of a hostility towards life. I then turn to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his understanding of the relation between enjoyment and transcendence, which occupies the larger part of the present thesis. I track the development of his analysis of enjoyment throughout his works, and demonstrate how thinking enjoyment and transcendence in a non-oppositional way is a core aspect of his project. My worldly existence is, according to Levinas, oriented around the possibility of enjoyment and the happiness it leads to. The fact that human life has a relation to transcendence entails for him that humanity is concerned with more than happiness, namely my responsibility to other human beings. I thus learn to give away and sacrifice what I enjoy. This, however, is not opposed to enjoyment. I conclude with a discussion of how the themes of enjoyment and transcendence appears in of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s celebrated novel The Brothers Karamazov.