Unhappily Kierkegaard was peculiarly unqualified to pass judgement on it. Thus the inference seems clear that if thought can deal only with characters, and existence is not a character, thought cannot deal with it. Lost in all the fuss was Benedict's subject: the relationship of faith and reason in the Christian tradition. Henceforth CUP. 4 Protestant theologians struggled heroically to remain loyal at once to their religion and to their intellectual conscience. But the rationality of healthy-mindedness had no appeal for Kierkegaard. If that irrational faith is accepted, the principles on which reflection conducts itself are everywhere impugned. Kierkegaard's habits of thinking did not lend themselves to precise analysis and such pronouncements as ‘reality is the interest in action’ and ‘the category of transition is itself a breach of immanence’ are not very helpful. R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (N.Y., Scribner's, 1949), I, 263; I, 182 fn. With all respect to the religious devotee, it is not very convincing to say that the life of an Aristotle himself or a Kant or a Hegel lacks commitment and therefore reality as compared with that of a Salvation Army worker untroubled by a doubt. But the fact that we do refer to existence is surely more obvious than any antecedent generalisation about what thought can or cannot do, and Kierkegaard would have done better to engage in a little sharp analysis than to indulge in a priori pronouncements about thought and existence. But his philosophy terminates in a rejection of those very principles of logic on which he proceeded as a philosopher. If one wished to preserve one's faith, it was safer not to play the philosophical game at all. Such renunciation of human desires, drastic as it is, belongs to the lower stage of religiousness because it can be achieved by a sufficiently heroic effort of the will. They may recall Halevy's remark that ‘virtue is more dangerous than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the restraints of conscience’. He had done wrong; he knew it; and if he was to retain his picture of himself as genius and saint, he must explain his action by lofty motives. 48 What was the truth that Kierkegaard saw? ‘My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil/or excludes them.’ Ibid., 143. For what one elects or chooses in a choice of this kind is a course represented in thought, and presumably represented as right. ‘By coming into existence… he becomes a sinner.’8 He did not accept the Lutheran machinery of a literal inheritance of Adam's sin.9 The doctrine seems, nevertheless, to have had a strong hold on him, and the thought of it was made harder to bear by the suspicion that his own father bore an exceptional load of sin. [4] Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids: Wm. Is it not precisely as we lay aside subjective desires, purposes, and prejudices and look at things objectively that we can hope to see things as they are? Thus Kierkegaard's attempt to connect humour with religion ends in denying that such humour has any intelligible ground. Instead, it's a belief and trust in the "strength of the absurd." Luther despised the Greeks and exalted St Paul. But if it is thus universally invalid, then in no case does the assertion of something as true exclude the truth of its denial, and nothing is true rather than untrue. For Hegel, faith represents the “immediate” that is, the point of departure in a path towards an intellectually well-founded position: Faith is to be nullified, mediated. The term appears in Fear and Trembling to describe the movement of faith Abraham makes to regain Isaac. There is now, I take it, agreement among disinterested scholars that, for example, the order of Old Testament Books bears no relation to the order of their composition, that in a given book conflicting narratives from different hands and different times are often pieced together, as in the early chapters of Genesis, that many of the books of both Testaments are not by the authors traditionally accepted, that none of the gospels, as we now have them, were written until a generation or two after the death of Christ, and that these at many points give conflicting accounts of fact and doctrine. Such reflections proved, after some centuries, to have been the beginning of the end for the older conception of nature, which has been crumbling slowly away under the attrition of newly discovered fact. Fear and Trembling, trans. Søren Kierkegaard born. But what would be left of the ‘real’ emotion in either of these cases if the ‘unreal’ thought were taken away? Kierkegaard is widely considered to be an irrationalist. 36 All these confusions may have contributed to Kierkegaard's insistence on subjectivity. There is force in the charge against the Greeks, for example, that as compared with the Hebrews they are hardly in earnest about their religion, precisely because of this absence of any effective sense of sin; even Socrates has been accused of being ‘too much at ease in Zion’. One cannot make a rational decision towards … He clearly means to say something more important. The leap of faith is a daring, passionate, non-rational commitment to the paradoxical and the unintelligible. We may multiply our principles, qualify them, and conform to them always more closely; we shall still never be wholly good. No doubt we should take perfection as our goal, both intellectually and morally, but that means that we should do our best to reach it. This you can do with perfect right. Rather than just sitting around saying 'I hav… The more genuinely religious we become, the more keenly we are aware of the distance by which we fall short. Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. I may clearly conceive a character; I may conceive your height for example; but can I in the same way conceive its existence? The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Christianity requires a commitment to certain beliefs. If you have an immediate prayer need, please call our 24-hour prayer line at 800-700-7000. A Catholic who believed every clause in the Nicene, the Athanasian, and the Apostles’ creed, or an Anglican who subscribed without demur to all the thirty-nine articles but who hated and exploited his neighbours, would certainly not be regarded as a Christian. But whatever form the defence may take—the appeal to principle, to consequences, to conscience, to authority, to ‘inner light’—thought, implicit or explicit, is always involved. ‘Be ye therefore perfect’ is what ethics tells us. We never do or can reach pure immediacy, as has been seen; we leave it behind in infancy, if indeed we ever experience it; by the time the child recognises a ball or a milk-bottle, he has lost his innocence and eaten of the tree of knowledge. Religiousness B, as henceforth it is to be called, or the paradoxical religiousness, as it has hitherto been called, or the religiousness which has the dialectical in the second instance, does on the contrary posit conditions, of such a sort that they are not merely deeper dialectical apprehensions of inwardness, but are a definite something which defines more closely the eternal happiness (whereas in A the only closer definitions are the closer definitions of inward apprehension), not defining more closely the individual apprehension of it, but defining more closely the eternal happiness itself, though not as a task for thought, but paradoxically as a repellent to produce new pathos.’ CUP, 494. Furthermore, he seems never to have worked out what was involved for the normal exercise of reason by its breakdown at crucial points—for ethics by the suspension of its clearest rules, and for logic by the admission of contradictions to the status of higher truths. Now that's easier said than done, because his writing is dense and his style tempts the reader to rename him "Snoring Kierkegaard." Faith and Reason. Now a person to whom the exalted status of the man with the top-hat or the emperor or the duchess conveyed no meaning would see nothing comic in their abject condition; the cream of the jest lies precisely in the deflation of high pretensions by humble fact. He prefers to write about it in parables, but the reference is unmistakable. He may be maintaining that even if we take the characters of an individual in their completely specific form, their totality is not enough to constitute the man. Only look at Hegel.’ Very well, look at Hegel; a glance will suffice to show whether he is an appropriate object for such derision. He put the point variously. In it, a person is a subjective being whose “ telos ” is the ethical.This ethical force is objective and universal, meaning it is true independent of humans perceiving it and it is true in all contexts for all time. He is not a composite of humanity as such, plus height that is no height in particular, plus weight with no definite poundage, plus colour of no specifiable shade. We are here to help and encourage you! He must remind himself that though this is a sick and twisted mind, such minds have, on occasion, shown a sharp eye for truth. His Enlightenment contemporaries looked to science, reason, and philosophy to take humanity “further than faith, ” whose work we continue and benefit from to this day. He at last declared himself, led her on to a wholehearted reciprocating passion, then threw her abruptly over and went off to Berlin, where he wrote up his experience in The Diary of a Seducer and other edifying discourses. Every man, he said, ‘is born in sin and as a sinner’. Let us turn to these in order. In favour of what? Intelligence is healthy so long as it adjusts its beliefs to the evidence and succeeds in maintaining harmony among them. We are warned that so far as thought is in control we are falling short of the vividness and tang of real existence. And what counts here, he insists, is the decision or choice, not the thought. It was an act in which every human consideration was lined up on one side and on the other nothing at all but the command from on high to kill. If we were told that though a certain belief was improbable we should try to make ourselves believe it, that would be intelligible, whether ethical or not. 21 The four conditions we have now considered—resignation, suffering, guilt, and humour—are requisites for the first stage of religion, called by Kierkegaard stage A. He takes the case of Pilate, called upon to judge whether the prisoner before him had committed a capital offence, and maintains that Pilate erred because he tried to deal with the issue objectively. The first important thing to note in our assessment is that, as explained above, Kierkegaard believed that “reason” and faith were in some way at odds with one another [1]. This is a most unconvincing position, which Kierkegaard was unable to maintain consistently. Nevertheless, it supplies nothing decisive against the objective rightness of any of them. I recall that, stimulated by such fair words, I approached his books with high expectations. In short, Kierkegaard's view attests to Blaise Pascal's statement that "faith has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." It is therefore worth asking whether his insistence that ‘the distinguishing mark of religious action is suffering’ does have a Scriptural basis. Woe unto me in time, and still more dreadfully when He gets hold of me in eternity! If there were any sort of reasoning by which this misery could be shown to be necessary to the greater good of mankind, a rational mind might accept this theology. We are like a person in a nightmare who, with some dreadful form pursuing him, tries to run, only to find that his legs have turned to lead. The philosopher ‘contemplates all time and all existence’ much as a spectator looks at a landscape; he does not create the objects before him; they are there to see if he opens the eyes of his mind. Press; Princeton Univ. Late 19th C. Danish philosopher ; Christian existentialist ; Argues that it is not possible to prove the existence of God through reason, since it is difficult to prove the existence of anything. If thought can deal with such characters, both singly and in sets, and the individual is made of them, why should Kierkegaard say that intelligence is helpless in dealing with the individual? It carried suggestions, to be sure, that we should consider the heavens, the work of God's hands, and consider the lilies how they grow, but these whispers are all but lost among the trumpet-calls to morality. We must in fairness agree that among the chaos of claimants to supernatural direction Kierkegaard might be right and all who differ from him wrong. We may pity his unhappy and diseased temperament, but neurosis is a poor qualification for setting up as a religious guide.… Self-centredness is the very antithesis of religion; and if the paradox of faith is—as he says—a willingness “to do the terrible and to do it for its own sake” (as well as for God's sake), then the less of this kind of faith we have the better.’114, 47 This is a grim note on which to end our study of Kierkegaard. But I do not wish to conceal my own belief that psychological causes as distinct from logical reasons had much to do with his conclusions. It can note that this wholly specific shade is brighter than that. His contention that thought cannot deal with existence is put so obscurely that there is difficulty in extracting from it a meaning definite enough to refute. We reach the third or religious level when we see that the duty that governs our life is not some merely human rule of reason or advantage but a divine imperative, and when we feel that our failure to do it is an affront to God. If he is a married man, he will unhappily recognise that he has chosen the worse part. Press, 1944), I, 20. Perhaps his insolence in trying to understand a form of life so complicated and superior (God, the universe, whatever you want to … Kierkegaard’s leap of fate is closely related to Albert Camus’ concept of the absurd. Because men have assumed this linkage of events through their characters, they have achieved that mastery of nature, theoretical and practical, which is called modern civilisation. 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