one human being '('Ein Notschrei kann nicht grosser sein, als der eines Menschen').73 In order to account for the 'faculty of mind' Kierkegaard calls 'spirit', as a sense of distance from the finite world, we must allow for both a widening and a transforming of the contexts in which it makes sense to talk of privation (the root sense of the German Not here translated 'distress') and correspondingly of refuge or restitution. Thus, beyond the inhibiting of behaviour, we have to focus on the expansion in or of a person's consciousness which occurs 'in conjunction with his power to dissociate his inclinations from their immediate natural expression'.74 The solitary individual's cry of distress to which Wittgenstein refers is of course not a natural expression, but a manifestation of sensibility possible only for an expanded consciousness involved in a complex and many-levelled relationship with its environment.
These remarks indicate a way of linking Kierkegaard's thought to a discussion in philosophy of mind that has flagged in the years under review. Attention to Kierkegaard might help to revive it. They also define an area where the question of the status of the ethico-religious framework might be fruitfully discussed without prejudice or prior commitment. Hitherto work within or on the expanded consciousness of the 'spiritual' faculty has tended to place itself, and be placed, outside the thronging publicity of the philosophical mainstream. Some of the best of it has appeared in journals of religion and theology.75 It will be interesting to see what developments, or what expansions of the general philosophical consciousness, the chronicler of future work will have to report.
* * *
3
FAITH AND PROBABILITY
Some twenty years back, but given a new lease of life by its inclusion in a recently published textbook, Robert M. Adams's 'Kierkegaard's Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion' gave a fairly detailed account of those passages in Postscript that deal with faith and history. Adams claims on its basis that the passages in question contain some faulty reasoning. I will begin by briefly outlining Adams's case against the reasoning and then suggest that no such reasoning is to be found there. In fact there is no reasoning at all as such. What Kierkegaard's pseudonym does there is make something more like what Wittgensteinians call a grammatical observation. (Except where I am quoting Adams I shall, in deference to Kierkegaard's appended remarks on the pseudonymity of the relevant texts, refer simply to Postscript.)
1 Adams claims that Postscript contains an Approximation Argument (to which I shall refer as the Argument) designed to show the unsuitability of objective reasoning with regard to historical claims when the latter are motivated by a passionate interest in their truth. He also claims it is a 'bad' argument.1
Put into the kind of language Adams uses, the Argument says that where an interest in the belief assumes the scope and intensity appropriate to religious conviction, no possibility of error can be disregarded on normal prudential grounds. Any possibility of error at all arouses an anxiety that it requires a decisive choice to disregard. The choice to go ahead all the same is faith.
The connection with prudent disregard of the possibility of error might be illustrated in this way: even where a historian, who is concerned professionally with the truth of some statement made in the Bible, might take some given risk of error to be too small to bother about, if in addition to his professional interest he had a 'passionate and infinite interest' in the truth or falsity of the very same claim, it would be impossible for him personally to disregard the distance, however small, from what would make him certain. As Adams points out, this allows Kierkegaard to say what he wants to say in any case, namely that belief in an eternal happiness based on historical facts is possible independently of the evidence for them. For that is how Christians must believe.2
There are two features of the Argument to bear in mind in what follows, and whose connection will emerge as we proceed. First, the Approximation Argument is distinguished from two other arguments: the Postponement Argument and the Passion Argument, also recoverable from this part of Postscript's text. Secondly, it involves a kind of re-enactment in the would-be believer of the conditions of philosophical scepticism, those conditions that lead the philosopher when 'talking shop' to deny from the very possibility of doubt, understood here as lack of objective certainty, the possibility of knowledge. But whereas the philosopher can leave his profession on a clothes peg in the office, the religious believer has no such day-dividing recourse. Instead of logical scruples about making an illegitimate inference, scruples one may ignore over a game of billiards, what makes the gap – however little – insuperable here is the 'infinite' importance to the would-be believer of the truth of the belief in question. This also allows Adams to construe the argument in the language of probabilities. When the stakes are 'infinitely' high, a belief which, if one's interest in it were merely historical, it would be both rational and unproblematic to maintain in spite of the deficit, calls for a decisive personal choice. The rational case for disregarding the possibility of error has run out, so the Argument goes, and, if the possibility of error is still to be disregarded, something else – or, rather, we ourselves qua sheer will – must take over.
As Adams sees it, the Argument fails because Kierkegaard has not seen that there can be a reason for disregarding the possibility of error that is not ruled out by a passionate infinite interest. Instead of the lively risk of the possibility of error being something the religious believer must decisively discount in the absence of objective reasons, objective reasoning can itself dictate that the possibility of error be discounted.
To capture such a case, Adams first distinguishes it from another. In this other case a personal but not yet infinite interest is at work. What this case shows is how prudence (conclusions arrived at by objective reasoning about what, given certain desires, it is rational to do) can do the job, that is to say, provide a reason for disregarding a possibility of error. A woman with a profound interest in her husband's love for her finds nevertheless some room for doubt about his really loving her, just a tiny doubt but still enough to cause her anxiety. However, given that among her desires is the desire not to be deceived, a desire that is at least as strong as her desire not to 'hedge her bets' if he does love her, objective reasoning tells her she should disregard that risk of error. If, say, the tiny amount is a one in one thousand chance, the objective evidence in favour being 99.9 per cent, then in acting upon it there would be 999 times as great a risk of 'frustrating one of these desires'. (Actually, I am not sure that the smallness of the chance of error is so important here, for one could think of cases where the evidence against was quite massive and still the decision to believe might be rational. Someone might be unsure as to whether their dead parent had really loved them, where there were not insignificant indications that it was not the case that the parent did so. Yet, if it is more comforting to believe the quite slight
evidence that exists in favour of the opposite opinion, the choice to stick by it might still be rational.3 A caution against wishful thinking is always in place, yet it too is subject to a notion of rationality that takes into consideration the situation and general interests of the would-be believer.)
Adams reads the Argument against this kind of case. What it says, as we saw, is that where the interest is infinite as well as passionate, the practical solution is unavailable. That is so because the doubt will always be too needling to give the practical consideration a chance. What Kierkegaard has failed to see, according to Adams, is that the rational consideration can still be seen to work in favour of the belief the believer is interested in holding. In the crucial case, we are to imagine someone trying to base an eternal happiness on a relation to Jesus, and with an infinite passionate interest in whether it is historically true that Jesus declared Peter and his successors to be infallible in matters of religious doctrine. We are further to suppose that the historical evidence makes it 99 per cent probable that he did. Now, although the 1 per cent deficit will indeed make a person anxious, objective reasoning its
elf should here lead the person to a commitment to the probable conclusion, thus disregarding the risk of error. As Adams says, 'the risk of not disregarding the possibility of error would be greater than the risk of disregarding it';4 or in other words, the person can take the possibility of error rationally in his or her stride even in the interests of a passionate desire for the truth. It is surely, as Adams says, 'prudent to do what gives you a 99 per cent chance of satisfying your strong desire, in preference to what gives you only a one per cent chance of satisfying it'.5
Kierkegaard is accordingly mistaken in thinking that the passionate believer must defy objective reasoning in disregarding the possibility of error, however small. What the case shows is that, even in the case of an infinite passionate interest, it can be more dangerous (and therefore imprudent) not to ignore the possibility of error (and so more prudent to do so) than to ignore it.
2 Without devoting too much space here to textual evidence, it is certainly fair to say that some of Postscript's comments lend themselves to being read in the way Adams requires. He quotes two premises: (1) 'certainty with regard to anything historical is merely an approximation', and (2) 'an approximation, when viewed as a basis for an eternal happiness, is wholly inadequate'.6 Kierkegaard might well be read as wanting to conclude from these that 'objective reasoning cannot justify [a would-be believer] in disregarding any possibility of error about the object of faith',7 so that something subjective has to be coupled in if the need for certainty that faith caters to is to be satisfied.
However, there are textual indications that this is to turn Kierkegaard's point altogether around. It is not that faith comes in where normal epistemic reasoning will no longer allay one's anxiety; rather, wherever normal epistemic reasoning is in place, we are no longer talking about faith. What is wrong in the question of faith is to start out looking at history. In historical terms Christianity is, as Postscript says in the first sentence of Book I, a res in facto posita.8 That is how
both the historical and the speculative points of view regard it and also what makes them regard Christianity as something the truth of which is to be investigated 'in a purely objective manner'. This latter is the position that Postscript is out massively to subvert, and it does so by making the case for a subjective grasp of the object of faith. Whatever that means, it will not mean that subjectivity is to be brought to bear on history. On the contrary, the focus on history is misdirected from the start. Or rather, it is a diversion that (Postscript would say designedly) postpones the difficult decision that religious belief is: 'When the subject is treated in an objective manner it becomes impossible for the subject to face the decision with passion.' Note how the passage continues:
It is a self-contradiction and therefore comical to be infinitely interested in that which in its maximum still always remains an approximation. If in spite of this, passion is nevertheless imported, we get fanaticism. For an infinitely interested passion every jot will be of infinite value. The fault is not in the infinitely interested passion, but in the fact that its object has become an approximation object.9
That 'every jot will be of infinite value' for an infinitely interested passion might sound like the point just attributed: no possibility of error will be too small to ignore, the claim glossed critically by Adams in pointing out that it can nevertheless be irrational not to ignore it. But the passage says other things that once explicated present the sentence 'every jot will be of infinite value' in a different light.
A contemporary admirer of Kierkegaard, Professor Rasmus Nielsen, put the matter thus with regard to 'approximation'. He says it 'is a category [Bestemmelse] based on degrees of difference within the same quality, which is to say it is a quantitative category'.10 What the Postscript passage seems clearly to say is that, in treating the object of passion objectively, one treats it in such a way that it becomes an approximation object, but that such an object can never be an object of faith, just because it is an approximation object. The passage is not saying that, in the case of any approximation object, there is an uneliminable possibility of error that a passionate interest in its truth can never discount and can therefore only be ignored by an act of faith. It links an interest in every jot not with faith but with fanaticism. The smallest jot becomes 'infinitely' important not because an interest in something historical is in this case itself 'infinite', but because an infinite interest is wrongly focused on an approximation object. Concern with such objects, in the case of faith, will inevitably lead to an anxiety about the ability of jots to destabilize one's belief in exactly the way the Argument shows.
Adams may be right to describe Postscript's faith as a form of decision-making, but it is not of the kind he describes. Kierkegaard is made to say, within the framework of probabilistic reasoning supplied by Adams, that an infinite passionate interest makes an otherwise superable possibility of error too vivid to be overcome without a correspondingly passionate commitment to disregard it.
The decision is to disregard the possibility of error. Adams's counterexample then shows that passionate interests can actually be served by probabilistic reasoning. Yet according to Postscript it is a 'misunderstanding to seek an objective assurance' in any case. The way Adams presents it, the Postscript's comment that '[i]t goes without saying that it is impossible in the case of historical problems to reach an objective decision so certain that no doubt can disturb it' is a way of saying: 'That is why with regard to these problems faith is needed.' But the comment can also be read as saying: 'That is why such investigations have nothing to do with faith.'
If there is anything that can be called an approximation argument in Postscript it is one whose conclusion is that no historical fact, even one assumed to contain the possibility of an eternal happiness, can be the proper concern of someone passionately interested in that possibility. Again, it is not because in the epistemic nature of the case there is an inexpungeable element of doubt or possibility of error. Even if (per impossibile) the fact in question were presented immaculately before us, in a way that our doubts would have no chance of surviving, the concern thus appeased would still not be faith. The difference between this and the (Approximation) Argument is marked. While the latter has a passionate infinite interest make an otherwise superable possibility of error too vivid to be overcome without a correspondingly passionate commitment/decision to disregard it, here what faith amounts to is not our courageously taking a critical possibility of error in our stride, but our rising above the question of objective truth and error. Thus the decision made by the believer is not to treat the residue of uncertainty as if it wasn't there; it is to leave the problem of residual jots aside and focus on the object of faith.
Before commenting on what that object might be, let me try to give flesh to this idea of 'rising above'. Take the case of bomb-disposal experts, whose mortal interest in residual jots of uncertainty pertains to the future rather than the past. Their lives are obviously on the line in a way that is not true of historians or weather forecasters. If historians always disregarded the possibility of error, we would be unable to sift history from hearsay, just as for them never to disregard the risk would be to leave history unwritten. But, as Adams's account shows so well, once a mortal interest in the truth obtrudes, sceptical considerations are reintroduced for reasons other than the traditional sceptical ones but with the same result. A historian who took his life to depend on some historical truth would be unable to write the piece of history that included that truth without a personal decision to treat it as all other historical truths. The bomb-disposal expert is dealing with such 'truths' all the time. Even when all professional bomb-disposal rules have been followed, there is still that life-threatening possibility of error that calls for a personal extra beyond the dictates of objective reasoning. But note a crucial difference here between two possible attitudes such a professional may take. One attitude would consist in putting any residual errors exceeding his professional capacity into the care of God. He trusts in God to see him
through. That is certainly a kind of faith, but it is not rising above the question of jots. It is coping with them in this special way. One might even call it superstition. The
other attitude would consist in disregarding the dangerous contingencies that outreach professional capacities. The bomb-defuser places himself in the hands of God whatever the outcome.
It strikes me that the latter exemplifies better than the former the manner in which an infinite passionate infinite interest rules out a reason for disregarding the possibility of error ordinarily thought to be too small to worry over. The first attitude is no different from that of the historian who 'decides' to keep believing the history at the appropriate point, a decision that copes with this particularly sensitive because, he assumes, mortally interesting area of uncertainty. That his mortal interest should be directed differently is another thing. In the second attitude the sensitive extra is not passed on to God to be taken care of by Him but simply taken out of the reckoning. The defuser's finite interest in staying alive is replaced by an acceptance that he may not, together with an understanding that sub specie aeternitatis his anxiety in this respect would prove exaggerated. He has adopted, chosen, decided upon, a position above, or beside, or in some way independent of that of 'approximation'.
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