Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  The thinkers we are considering remained unaffected by this deeper crisis. This meant that their break with the Enlightenment was a correspondingly ambiguous affair. Often the Enlightenment is in retrospect spoken of as if it were based on a narrow conception of human rationality, reason in a 'thin' sense. It is not just more accurate but also more revealing to regard the Enlightenment as a movement of thought based on a basic trust in the human being's capacity to secure its own basis for the traditional supports of human life (morality, religion and the state); Enlightenment was to replace a capricious tradition and unsupported appeals to revelation, scriptural authority and the like. But then any nascent doubt in the ability of human powers of systematic reasoning on its own to perform this role need not in the first instance lead to an abandonment of the high aims of Enlightenment itself. One may suppose rather that the first natural reaction within the Enlightenment horizon will be to appeal to some other human capacity, or perhaps review the account currently given of what human capacity amounts to. Such a review may lead in the end to revision even of such a key notion as that of reason itself, as indeed happened in the cases of both Kant and Hegel. That is to say, one need not abandon the project of reconstituting human values and practices on a human basis simply because human reason as currently conceived proves inadequate to the task.

  An example of this was the new liberalism which appeared late in the eighteenth century in such figures as Schiller, Humboldt and Forster, though also Lessing and Jacobi were involved. Here we find the shrinkage of reason compensated by an attribution to individuals of a native ability to take care of their own welfare, religion and morality. The new liberalism urged characteristically that states should protect human rights but not actively intervene in promoting stability and welfare. That would be to inhibit an innate human capacity to promote these goods, and thus in the end to let it atrophy. Seen in this light, even the extreme form of liberalism – anarchism – is simply a projection of Enlightenment thought. It assumes an

  inherently human talent to produce organization at the level of the individual from below. A romantic dream no doubt, but still within the terms of the project.

  The same, however, can be said of Romanticism itself and the Sturm und Drang. Here too we have an extension of Enlightenment faith, even if the typical interpretation of Romanticism sees it, as did Hamann himself, as a polemic against the Enlightenment. Hamann, an early hero of Kierkegaard's, proposed the life of artistic feeling and expression, or indeed of lived experience in general, as the proper source of the truths humanity needed and to which reason had been inappropriately applied. One might say that Hamann saw in lived experience the locus or source of truths that would lead to a radical revision of the humanizing project of the Enlightenment, so that through Hamann that project in fact acquired a nature and dimension it had all along lacked, and that therefore this is a genuine polemic against the Enlightenment. But if we look at the Enlightenment in terms of its goals rather than its chosen method, we may also see both the liberal and the Romantic developments as attempts to save the project rather than replace it. Both developments involve typically 'immanent' points of view, pushing reason aside to give room to a power of appreciation and apprehension which has been unnecessarily ignored and suppressed. That this is not the normal way of looking at the Enlightenment project, least of all that of those like Hamann who began to criticize it, is due mainly to the project's being identified with those philosophers who, despite these criticisms, continued to believe that the crucial human truths could be established solely by reason, as they conceived that capacity.

  Hamann called his new sense of life and artistic feeling 'faith'. But there is no invocation here to look or leap beyond reason. Hamann, for whom the rational horizon merely defines the limits of a shallow, debilitating intellectuality, proposes instead a return to experience not a leap beyond it. As has often been pointed out, there is a strong 'existentialist' strain in Hamann to which Kierkegaard early responded.9 Not only does the appeal to lived experience as the place to which to address significant human questions, as well as the place from which to ask them, have its clear counterpart in the writings of Climacus, but what Hamann himself wrote based on his own lived experience provides an important source for just those psychological concepts Kierkegaard was to exploit in his own 'experimental' writings, for example. anxiety or dread. Kierkegaard is also clearly influenced by the way Hamann reappropriated the Enlightenment's hero, Socrates, to turn the tables on the Enlightenment by focusing on Socratic ignorance.10

  Hamann's thought, however, lacks dialectic. Although for Hamann 'faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attacks', there is no thought of faith being antagonistic to reason. And even if faith 'happens as little for reasons as do tasting and sensing',11 it still happens in much the same way as do these latter. Hamannian faith is an immediate trust in one's sense of things, and although Kierkegaard acknowledges Hamann's understanding of how the common understanding of religion errs, he does not see Hamann occupying the point of view of religion developed by Climacus in Postscript. Nor, whether it was

  due to inadequacy of perspective or to his own failure to do the perspective justice, did Hamann's criticism in fact survive in a way that would make him a suitable ally.

  What about Jacobi? In spite of his zealous criticism of current exponents of Enlightenment thought, Jacobi still held on to the 'humane' goals of the Enlightenment. Since he was also satisfied that he had identified the limits of reason, for him the choice was obvious. If you cannot prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in the way that, for instance, Moses Mendelssohn thought one could,12 you must accept these vital truths on faith. For Jacobi, reason's cognizance of its own limits leads the rationalist to atheism, but in his uncritical refusal to countenance that conclusion he too is a proper heir of the Enlightenment and his faith merely a change of horses in midstream – from faith in reason to faith in faith itself. Anticipating one side in the recent debate between Popper and his critics as to whether rationalism is inherently irrational because itself the result of a basic choice, which therefore cannot itself be rational, Jacobi saw faith as a basic human attitude to which even the rationalist must resort to choose reason.13 This and a continued belief in revelation, and also his 'leap of faith', earned for Jacobi an anti-Enlightenment and irrationalist label. But exactly as with Hamann's so-called 'irrationalism', Jacobi's was merely a concern to keep reason within its own bounds – bounds that do not define the limits of human understanding in a large sense but, when defined, allow for another mode of this understanding.

  Later on in Postscript, in the conclusion of his chapter on subjective truth, Climacus acknowledges the contributions of both Hamann and Jacobi but finds neither suitable for his project. Typical of the tone of high irony preserved throughout the two chapters on Lessing, Climacus's manifest reason for not allying himself with either of these thinkers is the inherent or simply de facto inability of their work to resist Hegelian compartmentalization.

  I won't hide the fact that I admire Hamann, though freely admitting the pliancy of his thought lacks proportion, and his extraordinary vitality lacks self-control for working in any coherent way. But his aphorisms have the originality of genius, and the pithiness of the form is entirely suited to the casual throwing off of a thought. Life and soul, and to the last drop of his blood, he is captured in a single phrase: a highly gifted genius's passionate protest against an existential system. But the System is hospitable, poor Hamann! you have been reduced by Michelet to a §. Whether some stone marks your grave I do not know; whether it is now trodden under I do not know; but this I do know, that with the devil's might and main you have been pressed into the §-uniform and pushed into the ranks.14

  Certainly, Hamann's single-minded and passionate protest against a rational metaphysics of life was a blow in the right direction; and it was a shame, if true, that he had been rendered impotent by being acknowledged by the System. B
ut

  Kierkegaard's real criticism of Hamann is that the appeal to lived experience is still the expression of an aesthetic point of view. This is made clearer by noting that, in Hamann's case, reason and faith are not actually in conflict with each other; they simply have different roles, lived experience now being given the due of which the Enlightenment's 'thin' reason had unfairly deprived it. Hamann's understanding of the roles of faith and reason is not unlike that commonly ascribed to Wittgenstein, a language-game view in which reason and faith each has its independent part in the complex structure of our language-based practices; so that it would be wrong to apply the standards of one language-game to the practices of the other. But if reason is not in conflict with faith, then faith neither is nor requires a leap beyond reason; one merely switches from one game to the other, simply making sure not to confuse the standards appropriate to each.

  Jacobi too is dismissed for surviving merely as a section in the System's Encyclopaedia.

  Poor Jacobi! Whether anyone visits your grave I do not know, but I know that the §-plough overturns all your eloquence, all your inwardness, while a few scant words are registered as what you amount to in the System. There it is said of him that he represents feeling with enthusiasm … .

  As Climacus says, 'a reference like that makes game of both feeling and enthusiasm, whose secret is precisely that they cannot be reported second-hand …'.15

  But, in Climacus's words, 'now to Lessing'.16 If Jacobi's weakness was to have said too much, clearly Lessing's merit is to have said very little and, in respect to what he did say, to have 'remained a riddle'. His strength, as Climacus says, is that 'it was quite impossible to have Lessing killed and world-historically butchered and tinned in a §'.17 That could be said to be the ironical explanation to be read as evasive humour by those able to grasp only second-hand explanations. The serious point, to be picked up first-hand by subjective thinkers, has to do with the leap and what it means to have faith. It is here that Climacus turns the 'riddle' of Lessing to his own, and he would have us assume Lessing's, advantage.

  The third thesis, an actual thesis of Lessing's in this case, is that 'accidental truths of history can never serve as proof for eternal truths of reason, and the transition by which one would base an eternal truth upon historical testimony is a leap'.18 According to Climacus, what Lessing 'constantly' opposes is the 'direct transition from the historically reliable to the eternal decision',19 or any attempt to 'quantify oneself into a qualitative decision'.20 Lessing uses the distinction between historical contingency and necessary truths of reason to mark the illegitimacy of any attempt to convert the purely historical facts on which Christianity is based into the eternal Facts constitutive of Christian faith. As historical contingencies they cannot amount to the eternal truths embodied in Christian belief. As Lessing says, 'The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion, so that

  objections against the letter, or against the Bible, are not ipso facto objections against religion.'21 Climacus reminds us that Lessing describes the unbridgeable gap between letter and spirit as a 'ditch' that is 'repugnant' and 'wide',22 and also that Lessing says he has tried, 'often and earnestly' but without success, to leap over it.23

  There are several puzzling aspects to Lessing's remarks. Apart from the fact that, as Climacus immediately points out, they involve serious conceptual confusions, there is doubt even as to the direction in which Lessing would have us believe he has attempted the leap. As Climacus formulates the problem of Fragments, you might expect the problem to be that of the transition from the historical to the eternal. But as the quotation above indicates, Lessing seems already to be standing on the other side, the side of reason for which historical evidence is at least in principle neither here nor there. Did the historical Lessing think there was some basis other than the historical claims made both by and for the Bible that delivered the spirit which the letter could not, for instance something he might have called subjective thinking? From what Lessing says we cannot even tell that the ditch played any part at all in his own intellectual life. Why, then, should he use the term 'repugnant'? Was he saying no more than that, since no one could claim to bridge the gap from contingent to historical truth rationally, the very attempt would be repugnant because intellectually disreputable? Climacus himself suggests it may be just a 'stylistic turn of phrase' on Lessing's part.24

  Climacus focuses instead on the width of the ditch, and he points to two glaring mistakes in Lessing's account. First, the 'leap' is a decision ('the category of decision', says Climacus), which means that you either do it or you don't; there is nothing that can be called trying or failing to leap. The idea of 'having been quite close to doing something' has in itself something of the comical about it, but 'to have been very close to making the leap is nothing whatever'.25 Secondly, if there can be no trying to leap, then 'earnest' cannot pertain to the attempt, and Climacus's next comment is that the notions of trying and earnest can only apply here in the attempt 'with the utmost earnest to make the ditch wide', indeed 'infinitely wide', so that it becomes 'equally difficult for someone who cannot jump at all, whether the ditch is wide or narrow'.26 Here the attempt is in the intellect; whatever it is positively to make the leap of faith, it cannot be done unless one grasps the absolute nature of the distinction between the contingent and the eternal.27

  It is worth considering here what we ordinarily mean by leaping over a distance. Ordinarily, a leap is an attempt to treat the distance as if it were nothing, an attempt which, if successful, has the result that we take the gap 'in our stride'. Taking a gap in our stride, whatever training may have been involved in making our stride sufficiently long, is in effect to make nothing of the distance, which, before we trained for it, may well have seemed beyond us. But none of this resembles what Kierkegaard suggests we should be doing. What he calls the 'leap' is not a huge stride from one foothold to another; the trick is rather, as Johannes de silentio says, 'to transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the

  pedestrian absolutely'.28 In short, it is the leaper who changes, not the location. Outwardly the leaper just keeps going, and if there is anything corresponding to a space or a void, it is the thought that, for all the leaper knows, the ground over which he continues to walk might not be what in his faith he believes it to be – not the space of his own and of God's possibilities but what Kant once referred to as the 'black abyss' of a world without providence.29 From this it is tempting to conclude that Kierkegaard's notion of faith is badly represented by the notion of a leap, even that it is not a notion with which he would have liked to have become as closely associated as nowadays in the encyclopaedias of latter-day '§-ploughers'. We might even conjecture that the reason why Climacus resorts to the notion of a leap in the Postscript is mainly to provide Lessing with an opportunity to make a mockery of the whole notion, at least as conceived in the 'leap'-literature of the time. In any case, we should be wary of treating the notion too figuratively.

  One thing at least is clear. Climacus presents Lessing's words about the leap as essentially comical. Their comical nature is presented as the visible aspect of that Socratic combination of comedy and pathos which characterizes the existing thinker. Climacus goes so far as to concede that Lessing himself has in fact employed his earnest in the appropriate manner, that is, to make the ditch wide rather than 'try' to leap over it – wide enough to give room for this combination of pathos and comedy. He describes Lessing's whole account as that of a 'wag' (Skjelm),30 as indeed it would have to be if Lessing's earnest is that of a subjective thinker. In conclusion Climacus subtly brings Lessing's humour to bear on Hegel by introducing a 'more popular' way of poking fun at the leap: 'you shut your eyes, you seize yourself by the scruff of the neck à la Münchhausen, and then – then you stand on the other side, on the other side of sound common sense, in the promised land of the System'.31

  The presentation is a subtle mix of irony and polemical strategy, but the argument underlying i
t is no less subtle. Climacus admits that Lessing has 'very little to say' about the leap and therefore there is little to be said about 'Lessing's relation to the leap'. Nor is it 'altogether dialectically clear what Lessing has wanted to make of it'.32 Yet on the way he has been careful to bestow on Lessing just those features which would lead one to expect him to say very little. His words have acquired a Socratic 'complexion',33 and in addition to 'poetic imagination' he has the 'sceptical ataraxy and religious sensibility needed to become aware of the category of the religious'.34 Lessing's evasive facetiousness can, in short, be read as Socratic jest, just as the brevity of his comments can be taken to demonstrate his constant ability 'cleverly to exempt himself, his dialectical insight, and inside that his subjectivity, from every busy delivery service to the bearer'35 – all of which, again, is consistent with the thesis that Lessing is a subjective thinker. Climacus's argument in a nutshell is this: Lessing says little about the leap, but the little he does say is consistent with a genuine understanding of the leap, which will then explain why he says so little.

  The clearest picture we are given of Lessing as someone able to avoid answering in ways which would betray his grasp of what the question asked is in