Dylan Bailey

In this paper, I develop an account of “maieutic understanding” as the proximate goal of Kierkegaardian maieutics (midwifery). Maieutic understanding entails grasping one’s failure to know essential truths and the inability to know those truths through objective understanding. I argue that the concept of maieutic understanding, which is a purely negative, preliminary form of subjective understanding, best explains how Kierkegaard aimed to get his readership to transition from a mode of objective understanding to subjective understanding proper (e. g., faith), serving as a bridge between the two and being taken up into the latter.

Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche speaks of science [Wissenschaft] with a high degree of ambivalence, sometimes blaming it as a primary contributor to an increase of spiritual illness and decay in societies and individuals, sometimes praising it as a means of alleviating that same illness and promoting spiritual health and intellectual cleanliness. In this chapter, I identify what factor(s), for Nietzsche, distinguish science which is inimical to life from science which is life promoting. Focusing on the (so-called) middle period, I argue that the crucial difference between the two is the health of the thinker and the resultant reason why they are employing science: out of a “metaphysical need” or as part of a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Nietzsche’s project can be understood as an attempt to undermine this metaphysical need inhabiting so much of our science (especially speculative and theoretical thought) with a hermeneutic of suspicion, and he argues that scientific knowledge and methods in the narrow sense (especially psychology), are instrumental for this task. In fact, he views scientific knowledge as uniquely capable of cooling down our overheated metaphysical imagination, replacing our need for, and trust in, certainty and systematicity with an attitude of skepticism and indifference to such absolutes. Nietzsche thus hopes that science properly used can become a tool for health, liberation, and flourishing rather than a cause of Western cultures’ continued decline.

The Theaetetus’s midwife metaphor contains a puzzling feature, often referred to as the “midwife paradox”: the physical midwives must have first given birth to their own children in order to have the necessary experience to practice their art. Socrates, however, seems to disavow having any children of his own and thus appears to be unqualified to practice philosophical midwifery. In this paper, I aim to dissolve the midwife paradox by arguing that it rests on problematic assumptions, namely, that Socrates never gave birth to a child at all or the child of wisdom in particular, and that he is primarily an intellectual midwife. I offer a new interpretation of Socratic midwifery, arguing that what Socrates may have birthed in the past which qualifies him for midwifery is his virtuous recognition of his ignorance, and that this “epistemic virtue” is also the proximate goal of Socratic midwifery.

Recent debates over the role of recognition by the community for one’s development and flourishing generally discuss community in a univocal sense: the way that recognition functions in particular communities is not fundamentally different from the way it functions in the larger community. They also tend to logically prioritize a fundamental human identity over particular religious, ethnic, or societal identities, which are understood to be secondary to, and derivative of, this basic identity. In his depiction of how communal recognition contributes to individual selfhood, Søren Kierkegaard challenges these accounts by (1) differentiating between how communal recognition occurs in society in general and in one particular community, the Christian church and (2) questioning the idea that the self created in the former is more fundamental than that created in the latter. For Kierkegaard, one’s identities as both a Christian and a fully-developed self depend essentially on recognition by the Other: initially and fundamentally on recognition by God alone, and secondarily and derivatively on recognition by the human Other.

In this paper, I use a comparative analysis of mysticism in Zen and the Abrahamic faiths to formulate a phenomenological account of mysticism “as such.” I argue that, while Zen Buddhism is distinct from other forms of mystical experience in important ways, it can still be fit into a general phenomenological category of mystical experience. First, I explicate the phenomenological accounts of mysticism provided by Anthony Steinbock and Angela Bello. Second, I offer an account of Zen mysticism which both coheres with and problematizes these accounts, arguing that Zen demonstrates the inadequacy of these accounts as descriptions of mysticism as a universal religious category. Lastly, I use this investigation to propose that Zen mysticism does generally cohere with the mystical experiences of other religions, but only if we devise a new formula for speaking phenomenologically about mystical experience as such which captures this phenomenon in all of its manifestations.