3 As we have seen, according to Adams, Kierkegaard says that someone with an infinite passionate interest can never admit that the risk is too small to be worth worrying about, and faith is then having that worry and going on, on the assumption that the finite facts are not as one still nevertheless fears they may be. The Argument has to do with a belief in historical fact simpliciter, divorced from what gives it its religious significance, the latter merely supplying the strong desire to adhere to the true historical opinion, a desire which, like the wife's in the counterexample, must go into the equation. Adams says that although the believer's strong desire to adhere to true historical opinion may depend on a belief 'for which no probability can be established by purely historical reasoning, such as the belief that Jesus is God', nevertheless 'any difficulties arising from this point are distinct from those urged by the Argument, which itself presupposes the infinite passionate interest in the historical question'.11 I contest this. Again, the passage quoted above from Postscript links a too-strong desire for the true historical opinion with fanaticism. This points to what is surely otherwise fairly obvious: the approximation 'argument' actually to be found in Postscript includes the presupposition in its premise. Indeed the presupposition is what is required for the conclusion to follow, as it then does. If (the first premise) faith must be unconditional and global, then (the conclusion) for absolutely any approximation object, however closely we can approach it epistemically, there will be a zero probability that it is identical with the object of our infinite passionate interest. Accordingly, no practical argument about whether or not to disregard some possibility of error with regard to a claim about such an event will be relevant. A fortiori, then, and pace Adams, there can never be, in the case of an infinite passionate interest, any occasion for such an interest overruling a practical reason for some possibility of error. And, as for his example of there being a greater risk in not ignoring such a possibility than for disregarding it, that, as we noted earlier, also treats the histor
ical event merely as historical and thus fails to come within range of Postscript's actual approximation 'argument', though, as I have said, it is less in the nature of an argument than of an explication of the grammar of faith.
That said, it has to be admitted that the explication is not stated in these unequivocal terms in the chapter(s) in question. There is, however, a contextual reason for that. The notion of a qualitative as opposed to quantitative change relies on the notion of the leap still to be introduced in the two chapters on Lessing that follow. What Postscript's chapter on 'The Historical Point of View' does is point out that approximation objects are mistakenly identified as targets of religious belief, and that this has to do with the externality of these objects. It is when the 'subject[-matter]' is treated in an 'objective manner' and the 'object of faith' has thus become an approximation object that the Argument applies, but of course inappropriately as far as the subject-matter is concerned. (So, in saying that '[w]hen the subject is treated in an objective manner it becomes impossible for the subject to face the decision with passion', Postscript is not implying that the same subject-matter could be dealt with in a subjective manner.) What looks like an approximation argument actually points to this inappropriate objectivity that arises when the world of facts is treated as though among the facts it contained are facts of a specially religious kind. Postscript's vision, if one may call it that, is that we can never be in a position to know or even think that, not at least in conceptual terms. The question then is, of course, on what is faith directed if not the alleged historical events on which Christianity builds?
One might think that the expressions 'the truth of Christianity'(which occurs in the heading of the third of the three sections of Postscript dealt with here and by Adams) and 'the object of Christian faith' were interchangeable. However, the former has an ambiguity the latter lacks. Often one means by it the truth of claims about there being the Christian's God, the Incarnation, and its implications for personal salvation – in other words quite general theological claims of a cosmological kind. Their falsity would be implied by there being no such implications, or no such God, or no God at all. But Postscript's question is not about truths of this general kind ('the objective question of the truth of Christianity'), it is about 'what Christianity is'.12 Along with the infinite passionate interest noted by Adams, the objective truths are presupposed or simply omitted. The truth of Christianity in Postscript's sense is not what can be established, say, in the letter once it is established as canonical, but of the manner of one's adherence to what one may immediately grasp in the letter independently of the precise circumstances of its origin or of the accuracy with which it has been transmitted through the centuries.
* * *
4
HAVING LESSING ON ONE'S SIDE
Why does Kierkegaard have his pseudonym give prime space in Postscript to a long-dead littérateur? Surely not to seek respectable sponsorship for unfashionable ideas; that would be contrary to the work's manifest message that authority has no place in matters of faith. Indeed in the very first sentence of the main chapter, Climacus himself assures us he is not invoking Lessing to have someone to 'appeal' to.1 Nor is it just a matter of giving credit to sources; the two chapters dedicated to Lessing form far too elaborate an expression of gratitude for that. There are other possibilities: Kierkegaard may have seen in Lessing's scant comments on the leap a conveniently sketchy and therefore congenial basis upon which to define his own conception. Further, as an able apprentice of Lessing's ironic style, he might hope that favourable comparison would allow some of the great man's literary prestige to rub off on his own efforts. Not least, an advertised alliance with such a cultural eminence could show those who refused to recognize his genius locally that his talent might well have made its mark. In less parochial surroundings.
None of these trivial explanations, whatever partial truths they hide, hits the mark. The real explanation is of a far more subtle and strategic character and is to be found in the text. Ostensibly, Climacus presents his tribute to Lessing as an independent thinker's call for outside help. A poor lodger, he looks down wonderingly from the heights of his garret and sees all that is being done to expand the building itself and to improve the façade, but cannot help worrying about the foundations. Commentators often identify the building with Hegel's System, but it can be in every sense more closely identified with the cultural Hegelianism of J. L. Heiberg. Heiberg was a professed and professing Hegelian but as it happens, in light of his eclectic reputation as poet, dramatist and critic, also Copenhagen's best-qualified candidate for the status of a local Lessing. The real Lessing, of course, was not a Hegelian. So much the better. Nor indeed, though professing himself a Spinozist, had Lessing articulated any consistent or systematic philosophical position. Indeed, so eclectic had been the real Lessing's contribution to late eighteenth-century German culture, and so piecemeal his expressed views on philosophical matters, that all attempts to place him in the philosophical landscape would be in vain. In a comment, whose style also gives excellent support to one of our subsidiary explanations, Climacus says:
Lessing, of course, has long since been left behind, a vanishing little way-station on the systematic railway of world-history. To rely on him is to damn oneself, to confirm every contemporary in the objective judgement that you cannot keep up with the times, now that one travels by train – and the whole art is to jump into the first and best carriage and leave it to world-history.2
For Climacus the advantage of Lessing is that he is a writer whose work the expanding Hegelian edifice has been unable, or not even sought fit, to accommodate. Deference to Fragments' motto 'Better well hanged than ill-wed' would always lead Kierkegaard to do all he could to prevent having his work interpreted and judged by the System. But in a polemic against the System it would serve his purpose well if he could find an ally in someone the System itself had been unable to assimilate. Better well hanged than ill-wed, but better still a good marri
age if only the virtues of the match can be expressed in a way that does not automatically make it a bad one.
Climacus's irony tells us there would clearly be no harm in a marriage with someone so passé as Lessing. But such a high-profile wedding needs some more solid tie than the mere ability to survive the System. What might that be? The answer could be a common (but of course in Lessing's case posthumous) interest in presenting exclusion from the System as due to a shared point of view from which the System itself can be successfully debunked. This indeed is essentially the gist of my discussion. Its arguments lie on a scale of increasingly defeasible but never altogether implausible claims: first a thesis directly confirmable by the text to the effect that Kierkegaard presents Lessing in the guise of a subjective thinker; second, a claim that this provides the affiliation Kierkegaard needs to place his own authorship on the immediate and recent cultural landscape, not least in relation to a notion much current in the late eighteenth century, that of the leap of faith; third, the not implausible contention that, of the main actors on the cultural scene from that period, an alliance with Lessing alone afforded the negative identification Kierkegaard needed; and, finally, the significant but here unargued suggestion that the alliance constitutes not just another philosophical position but a point of view from which the limits of rational inquiry become visible.
We must note how carefully prepared is Climacus's portrait of Lessing. First everything upon which Lessing's fame rests is stripped off; we are told to disregard the scholar, the legendary librarian, the poet, the turner of phrases, the aesthetician, sage, and so on.3 These are the externals which have been duly flagged on the map of eighteenth-century German culture, though fortunately too scattered to be collected under a single rubric suited to the System. Once out of the way, they can be replaced by a plausible portrait of a subjective thinker. Accordingly, in the second and longer of his two chapters on Lessing, Climacus begins by attributing two of his own theses to Lessing rather than positions textually attributable to the historical Lessing himself. One of these clarifies the difference between objective and subjective thinking and introduces
the notion of double reflection as characteristic of the subjective thinker. The other ties comedy and pathos to the same subjective thought, presenting the idea that what sounds like a joke can nevertheless be meant and grasped as deep earnest. In this way Lessing becomes an even better match. The plan clearly is to present Lessing as someone whose ironical remarks can be interpreted in a Socratic vein as expressions of subjectively reflected thought. The theses crucial to Climacus's own exposition are linked to Lessing's name via Socrates and then used as boundary markers to define the hermeneutic horizon within which to interpret the theses 'actually' attributable to Lessing.
Chief of these latter is Lessing's use of Leibniz's distinction between contingent truths and truths of reason to state that eternal truths of reason cannot be inferred from accidental truths of history. This thesis forms the background to the problem raised by Fragments: how to base an eternal happiness on something historical. Then in Postscript to Fragments, our topic here, Leibniz's distinction defines the parameters of what Climacus, following Lessing, calls the leap, and which, whatever it turns out to mean, is central to Climacus's notion of faith. Since faith is in turn the principal topic of Postscript, we can see how, under Climacus's astute direction, Lessing is rescued from systematic oblivion and placed polemically in centre-stage.
If world history records only externals, then of course the Lessing brought to life in these two chapters is not the historical Lessing. The portrait may be nowhere near a likeness of the actual Lessing. On the other hand it may be, I simply cannot tell, which is just what the position to be outlined would lead you to expect. Whether or not the portrayal is fictitious, there is a sense worth noting in which any portrait of a subjective thinker cannot help but be based on guess-work and the result in that sense a fiction. However, the picture Climacus presents is on all accounts far from incredible, especially in light of the fourth thesis, in which Lessing confesses to being a searcher rather than a finder. Lessing says that, if offered the choice by God, he would prefer the lifelong pursuit of truth to truth itself,4 which underpins Climacus's admiring observation that Lessing has no 'result'. To his contemporaries Lessing appeared to personify the Enlightenment, but it would be nearer the truth to say that Lessing was the Enlightenment on the move. His thought was that of an inquirer who never adopted or attempted to develop a clearly defined position; his positions changed and evolved as he engaged with the movements of the time, upon which his comments exerted a great influence in turn – in his drama, his work on aesthetics, and above all in his criticism. So much was Lessing on the move, indeed, that it is often hard to say where his thinking counts as the current state of the Enlightenment art or forms the makings of fundamental criticism. Yet, throughout the changes, his attitude appears consistently to have reflected the kind of trust in human self-sufficiency, in the long run, that forms the deep basis of all Enlightenment thought. He saw humankind as he saw himself, as in constant development, not self-consciously on course towards absolute self-consciousness, as the System would later have it, but precisely with the kind of opportunistic contextuality which allowed his writings to
escape the System's clutches. Though not all of his actual views would appeal to Kierkegaard,5 something in Lessing's attitude to Christianity would certainly do so; always sympathetic to Christian ideals, Lessing remained neutral towards the ways in which these ideals were expressed in current forms of Christian belief and practice.
Thus the kinship Climacus seeks with Lessing, in the ironic spirit of Lessing himself, lies at the level of subjective thinking, that is, the thinking of someone in continual development and never resting on a 'result'. How deep a kinship he seeks we cannot tell, but we might test the plausibility-range here by boldly hypothesizing on Climacus's, or at least Kierkegaard's, behalf that Lessing's grasp of subjective thinking would have been good enough for him to write Postscript himself. What better way of having Lessing on your side, especially when you have elevated him to the stature of a Socrates, than by allowing that he could have written your book? Historically, of course, he could not have done that; world history was still awaiting Hegel's arrival. Climacus himself remarks that Lessing never had to drag the principle of mediation along with him.6
Nevertheless, kinship at the level of subjective thought would still not be a sufficient basis on which to forge an alliance with Lessing. If subjective thought were enough, Kierkegaard might have settled straightaway for Socrates. What is needed is to be found in the indications provided by scattered remarks to the effect that Lessing had a better grasp than his contemporaries of the notion of a leap of faith and, connected with this, as Kierkegaard writes in a journal from 1848, a considerably clearer notion of the true problem concerning the relation between Christianity and philosophy than 'the common herd of modern philosophers'. This problem is specified in the threefold theme of Fragments: how to reach an historical point of departure for an eternal consciousness; how such a point of departure can be of more than historical interest; and how to build a personal happiness on a piece of historical knowledge. Kierkegaard adds: 'Lessing uses the word Sprung [leap] as if its being an expression or a thought didn't matter. I take it as a thought …'7
Exactly what distinction Kierkegaard had in mind here is not clear, especially since Climacus will later tell us that the leap is not a thought but a decision. Maybe he means that the word expresses a thought about a decision; at any rate, as we shall see, Climacus does tend to think that when talking of a leap Lessing is playing with words and images rather than with concepts. In order to grasp what it is that Lessing has understood better than the common herd of modern philosophers, let us, by way of a contrast Climacus himself makes, look at the two representative thinkers mentioned in the chapters on Lessing: J. G. Hamann and F. H. Jacobi. It is significant that both are well known for their contributions to what is cal
led the spirit of the counter-Enlightenment. Accordingly, one question we face is why Kierkegaard, the alleged irrationalist, should cast in his lot with the great Enlightener himself, rather than with these two renegades and potential existentialists.
Answering that question requires uncovering some of the anatomy of the period during which the currently somewhat glibly named 'Enlightenment project' had lost much of its impetus and had begun to be undermined. What was undermining it was the apparent inability of the programme of free inquiry and criticism to achieve its anticipated political goals. As in any time when culture divides, parties form and thinkers are jockeying for position on one side or the other, it was also a time of creeds.8 The Enlightenment's own official creed had been reason but in the movements constituting the counter-Enlightenment it was exactly faith in reason that had begun to crumble, due as much as anything to the transparency reason had been able to bring upon itself, above all in the critical philosophy of Kant. Kant remained a rationalist, but in some quarters faith in reason gave way to – in a manner of speaking to be made a little clearer below – faith in faith. In others even the grounds for faith in faith appeared in turn to be crumbling as the conspicuous successes of natural scientific reasoning seemed to destroy the very humanist assumptions upon which the original Enlightenment goals were based.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 9
