The most compelling evidence that Kierkegaard is not planting deliberate mistakes is that his performance under Postscript's pseudonym was something he clearly felt proud of. When Hans Lassen Martensen's Dogmatics came out three years later, Kierkegaard exclaimed: 'Gentle Father of Jesus! My own most popular work is more rigorous in its conceptual definitions, and my pseudonym Joh. Climacus is seven times more rigorous in his'.8 That Climacus should, on his own terms, have every reason to sustain a distinction between nonsense and absurdity seems clear enough. His main question is, 'What does it mean to become a Christian?' The very question presupposes Christianity's ability to engage his will, and it turns out, as we know, that it is in the will that the intensity of inwardness required of the answer is to be generated. How could Christianity possibly engage the will if the only expressions of it were transparently nonsensical?
What engages the Christian is of course the narrative of the Incarnation, something which towards the end of Postscript Climacus gives the formulation 'God fusing with man'.9 There is, he says, no difficulty understanding this, that is to
say, Christianity, as a 'project',10 even if, as Climacus is also at pains to stress, to do so is a misunderstanding. But it is a necessary misunderstanding. The would-be Christian must begin with something that appears intelligible, something 'apparently familiar', even if in the end it turns out to be 'absolutely foreign' (absolute fremmede).11 What is absolutely foreign is the idea of an actual event such as the form of words 'God fusing with man' purports to represent. Although the words can say something to us, as a description of an event they are actually unintelligible.
This idea that something foreign can be grasped in a way designed to keep it within range of the familiar is no innovation on Kierkegaard's part. Whether he realized it or not, the notion had a solid precedent in Kant's so-called 'schematism of analogy'. To have any hold on what lies beyond the limits of reason, human understanding must employ figurative forms of expression, typically in poetry and scripture (also largely a form of poetry). Though the resort is indispensable, we must be careful, says Kant, not to take the pictorial versions to provide additions to our knowledge. According to Kant, to transform a schematism of analogy into 'a schematism of objective determination' involves an anthropomorphism that has serious moral consequences.12
In Postscript Kierkegaard's closest philosophical interlocutor, however, is not Kant but Hegel. We know that in Hegel the narrative version of the Incarnation was supposed to be replaced by a conceptual, that is to say, philosophical grasp. Indeed, the philosopher will be able, retrospectively, to grasp the narrative of the Incarnation as a metaphor for the real fusing of infinite with finite in reason. Hegel was able to regard the narrative version as poetically rich but conceptually degenerate because merely pictorial rendition of what would become clear in quite other terms under the all-embracing grasp of the speculative idea. The Incarnation was foreign only in the sense of our not yet having found the proper vehicle for its familiarity. This differs from Kant's case, of course, since for Kant the narrative strives usefully but unavailingly to capture a reality that must and should remain foreign. But that is because Kant sees in what he calls the 'practical point of view' all the reality we need to put us in touch with what forever eludes the understanding: our 'morally legislative reason' embodies the ideals of Christian belief in as real a way as we can or should expect.13 The important point is that the ideals are available to reason and that they work practically, as they are designed to. To try to penetrate, impossibly, to an objective moral reality beyond reason's limits would merely distract and demoralize us.
In terms of what Kant and Hegel share, it is easy to see the combined address of Kierkegaard's Climacian riposte. As against Hegel, Postscript says that the narrative grasp of the foundational Christian belief has to be converted into something non-pictorial, namely a form of the will. This, at least in so many words, would also have been Kant's objection to Hegel. But unlike Kant, Climacus insists upon the absolute foreignness of the saving truth itself and all that follows from it for morality. For Kierkegaard, Kant's moral rationalism implies a complacent domestication of God according to which a rational prin
ciple is already at work in Creation needing only to be discovered. God has been painlessly reduced to a regulative idea and morality – in a way not so very different from Hegel – to something already embedded in our actual practices. Absurdity, or Climacus's insistence that the narrative of the Incarnation is 'inaccessible to all thought',14 comes to the fore in Kierkegaard simply because where Kant thinks you can translate an intellectually impenetrable narrative into the universal discourse of a rationally moral will, Postscript claims that appreciation of the impenetrability of the narrative is itself a precondition of the individual's appropriation of truths that do and should resist representation.
Whether the text and conceptual apparatus of Postscript contain the resources to clarify and establish a distinction between nonsense and absurdity is another matter. Postscript is not a work of philosophy in the ordinary sense; it doesn't stop to analyse or argue for the distinctions and assumptions it needs for its purposes. But then why should it? They are, after all, fairly obvious distinctions and the work's title tells us not to expect too much professionalism. It is an 'unscholarly' (uvidenskabelig – a little misleadingly translated 'unscientific') work.
On the other hand, and in light of the comparisons just made with Kant and Hegel, we should expect the alternative to those two philosophers' accounts to be offered as a serious option. Yet according to another argument offered by Allison, it fails to do so; and its not doing so Allison takes to be a further indication of the special rhetorical role played by the work's 'argument'.
For Allison, this argument, as we saw, concerns the truth of subjective reflection, a truth which Climacus seems, just like Kant and Hegel, to want to tell us how and how not to get hold of. As with them, truth is understood as a fusion of finite and infinite, or vice versa. Allison notes that Climacus nevertheless admits that the truth which is the truth of subjective reflection – or subjective reflection's truth – namely that unity of finite and infinite (the eternal in time) which is Christianity's absurd proposal, 'can only take place in the imagination' (p. 295). That does sound serious. For isn't union in imagination only a virtual union? If so, then the whole project of Christian faith must be in vain. And if this is all Climacus can offer as an alternative to Hegel and Kant, the project he is engaged upon seems truly pointless. The more reason, then, for regarding his whole undertaking as an elaborate joke.
But let us follow Climacus's actual words. He says two things: that the 'existing' individual can 'be in a unity of infinite and finite' but only momentarily (momentviis) – '[t]his moment', says Climacus, 'is the instant of passion' – and that the individual can be in it 'in imagination'.15 The first of these certainly sounds unpromising – how can an instant of passion provide anything but a feeling of unity in relation to what is said to be aimed at? As against this, however, the second part says nothing about the unity being 'only' in imagination. On the other hand, there is a hint of this in the Swenson/Lowrie translation's introduction of a term of art not found in the original. Allison quotes a sentence which in literal translation says: 'In the passion the existing
subject is made infinite in imagination's eternity, and yet remains at the same time most definitely himself.' Swenson/Lowrie render the passage as: 'In passion the existing subject is rendered infinite in the eternity of the imaginative representation.'16 This seems to be where the problem lies.
At least in traditional philosophical terms, to imagine some state of affairs is to have a representation of it. It is at least true whenever what is imagined is some external circumstance. But external circumstances are not all we can imagine. Or as Kant observed, not all our notions correspond to or are expressible in the form of representations. Conspicuous among those that cannot be so expressed is the 'I think', the condition of representation that cannot it
self be represented. 'Imagination' (Phantasien), as used by Kierkegaard's pseudonyms (at least when they are not convicting philosophers of 'fantastically' forgetting that they exist), refers to a faculty in which the self envisages its own possibilities. Among these possibilities is that of orienting itself beyond the world of finite representations. As the later pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, says: 'Imagination is in general the medium of infinitization.'17
How might being a unity of finite and infinite be among the existing self's possibilities? To revert again to Kant, the possibility might be possessed in the form of a regulative idea that structures its actions, the 'I think' now properly extended into the existential format of 'I do'. The unity would not be real, even though the idea of it would inform action itself suitably and genuinely unified in the instant of passion. But so long as one retains the idea of there being a God's point of view outside existence, as Climacus does (it is part of his job), that there is such a point of view must be part of the object of faith. What for the existing individual can never be more than a regulative idea may, for all we know, be being cashed in divine currency into the actual fact of unification. The thought is this: what cannot be cashed into representational form can, for that very reason, possess possibilities exceeding the bounds of what can be represented. The thought may strike us as lunatic but that doesn't prevent it being one that Climacus would wish his reader to retain. True, Postscript provides no conventional philosophical defence of the view and even fails to make this particular claim explicit. But that imagination is the faculty by which the self imagines its possibilities does become an explicit thesis in the writings of Climacus's successor and partial reincarnation, Anti-Climacus.18
One way of looking at Postscript's own project is to see it as designed to effect a reversal of the direction in which philosophy has traditionally assumed to take its devotees. Rather than making its readers familiar with the foreign, its line of thought is the gradual transformation of the familiar to the foreign. In Climacus's version what we have in Christianity is a set of beliefs which, as Climacus, to this extent echoing Kant, insists,19 could never have occurred to man – so that any version devised by reason (for reason devises, it doesn't divine), just as much as by poetry, is not Christianity. But of course, as we have noted, before Christianity can take shape in the human will in a form appro
priate to its foreignness, it must plant itself in the human mind. In other words, the mind must grasp it in one way before it can grasp with its own powers of reason that it cannot be grasped in that way, thus leaving the way open to the proper appropriation of its truth.
That makes it perfectly sensible for Climacus to provide, as Allison says, an 'elaborate dialectical analysis', an analysis which requires 'a good deal of understanding'. To Allison, however, since the analysis ends in a misologism, its presence merely accentuates the paradox of the work's intellectual anti-intellectualist stance (p. 306). Conant claims similarly that the 'central contradiction embedded in the dialectical structure of the Postscript lies in the fact that Climacus's argument also seems to require that the believer retain his understanding in order to use it to discriminate between the objective absurdity of Christian doctrine and less repulsive forms of nonsense'.20
If it were truly paradoxical that in order to 'crucify' reason you must keep enough reason to be able to see that it is properly crucified, then Kant's entire critical enterprise would be paradoxical. And if reason is required in the crucifixion of rational metaphysics and rational psychology, why not also in the critique of faith? Reason, surely, has a place in any attempt to set its own limits.
To see the intended role of his pseudonym's dialectical analysis, we need only consult Kierkegaard himself:
When … I believe this or that on the strength of everything's being possible for God, what is the absurd? The absurd is the negative property which ensures that I have not overlooked some possibility still within the human range. The absurd is an expression of despair: humanly it is impossible – but despair is [just] the negative mark of faith.21
This can be set alongside other remarks in which recognition of the absurdity of Christian doctrine is presented as essential to faith:
Hence the unholy confusion about faith. The believer is not dialectically consolidated [dialektisk consolideret] as 'the single individual', and cannot put up with this double vision – that the content of faith, seen from the other side, is the negative, the absurd. – This, in the life of faith, is the tension in which one must hold oneself. But the tendency everywhere is to construe faith in the straightforward manner. Such an attempt is the science which wants to comprehend faith.22
Dialectical consolidation seems as good a goal as any for reason to contribute to, and the elaborate dialectic would be particularly apt for anyone disposed to believe that faith can be part of a science of man.
Allison rightly observes a difficulty here, however. Isn't the understanding required to satisfy the negative condition of faith beyond the scope of the
'simple believer' who Climacus is always praising 'at the expense of the pretentious speculative philosopher' (p. 306)? Are only those who are able to follow an elaborate argument in a position to acquire faith? The question seems to invite either of two answers: the required tension might be produced in other ways than by reflection, for instance by giving due weight to the manifest presence of evil, of suffering, doubt and despair; or faith is something you can 'get' to without any such tension.
Perhaps because his main role seems to be the chastening of intellectuals, Climacus is ambiguous on this matter.23 Perhaps his guiding hand, Kierkegaard, has two but not mutually inconsistent considerations in mind: on the one hand, 'ordinary' people should not be impressed by the reputation the philosopher-theologians of the time enjoyed as experts in matters of faith; but, on the other hand, although intellectuals have the opportunity to appreciate better than others how faith fits into a life in which reason and understanding also play a part (in addition, that is, to imagination and feeling), their own commitment to understanding means they have an extra hurdle to surmount – on the by no means certain assumption that it is faith they are after. To grasp its truth they must (rationally) lose their faith in reason. In another entry, where Kierkegaard reflects that it is 'impossible that [the paradox] should ever become popular', he says that this is not because people cannot understand that it is the paradox, but because 'it flatters human vanity to presume to comprehend'.24 A typically Kierkegaardian addendum would be to say that it can also flatter human vanity to comprehend that the paradox is truly paradoxical. To suppose that one has a superior form of faith just because one takes pains to ensure that it goes against the understanding might be to flatter one's vanity just as much.
What, then, are we to conclude about misology and Postscript? 'Misology' is Plato's term and it means hatred of reason. But Kant has a more recent use of it that brings us more directly to the point. According to Kant, this hatred can arise particularly among those who are committed to reason. When they find it produces difficulties they start 'envying, rather than despising, the more common stamp of men, who keep closer to the guidance of mere instinct, and do not allow their reason much influence on their conduct'.25
Kant believes the role of reason is to form in us an inherently good will, so that we can rise above instinct. However, on the reading of Postscript proposed here, we can take its message to be essentially Kant's but concerning specifically the will – though with a twist. With regard to the will, unlike Kant, reason in Kierkegaard has a negative role: we need reason to know that our wills are not driven by respect for the authority of reason. Only then can we know that when we have faith it is we that have faith and also that faith is what we have.
So what is Kierkegaard saying? Reasoning can make things harder rather than easier, and one may come to envy the insouciance of those who do not reason hard enough to realize just how difficult faith is. In other words, feeling the strain of the repulsion of the absurd due to the co
nclusion of the elaborate
dialectic may lead one to resent reasoning and to envy those of an easier faith. So far, not so very far from Kant.
Yet misology would not be Climacus's main concern. There is something else and more important about intellectuals – we might call it logomania26 – an excessive love of reason. By employing their reason in the way Climacus tries to counteract, that is to say, in trying to comprehend faith, they escape rather than induce the tension due to the repulsion of the absurd. It would be an unusual suggestion to say that the resort to reason was a surrender to instinct, and many would regard it as a scandalous one. But how sure can we be that the resort to reason is not at times, indeed often, if not as a rule, instinctive? The very prestige of reason that tends to excuse one from ever asking the question can arouse suspicion. Such a well-protected resort can easily serve as a refuge, an impersonal realm of understanding from which the conflict out of which faith should emerge becomes lost from view.
And there is something very misleading about describing the believer who does maintain his faith in the face of the crucifixion of his reason (about faith) as misologistic, at least in Kant's sense. The elaborate dialectic, if and once you follow it, must effectively destroy any instinctual component left in a faith that survives the dialectic and its negative conclusion. The point of the dialectic is exactly to remove faith from the realm of instinct and thus place it within the grasp of the will.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 3
