Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

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  Part II

  CONNECTIONS AND CONFRONTATIONS

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  INTRODUCTION

  The question of what and how much some thinker means for a certain philosophical tradition, or even just for another thinker, is a fearfully complex one. Many factors intervene to distance a thinker's own or even his contemporaries' conception of his work from the place it receives, though always only provisionally, in a current history of ideas. Often a thinker's writings may influence a culture not only in ways never intended but also in ways the thinker could never have imagined; indeed there may have been no long-term intention or expectation on the thinker's part to influence the future at all.

  This is particularly true of a polemical author like Kierkegaard, where the authorship unfolds within a clearly defined arena in response mainly to locally defined targets. Indeed Kierkegaard provides an excellent illustration. Take Either/Or, which is perhaps the work of Kierkegaard's that has made the widest impact outside Denmark. Kierkegaard claims in his journals that he was quite prepared for the work to have no impact whatever, it might even be 'meaningless', but whatever happened it would at least have proved something: namely that it was possible 'without the warm poultice of sympathy' both to write a large literary work in Copenhagen and do so without anyone noticing it was being written. And if it did turn out to be meaningless, as far as he was concerned it was still 'the pithiest epigram' he had written over 'the gibberish' of his 'philosophical contemporaries'.1 Yet this epigram over local gibberish is the book Alasdair MacIntyre, in his widely read After Virtue, says presents a discovery of the greatest possible cultural importance, namely the fundamental arbitrariness of our moral culture. Either/Or, says MacIntyre, is 'the outcome and epitaph of the Enlightenment's systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality'.2

  We are led to ask, when identifying the influence of a thinker, how far the way in which the manifest content is understood by later generations, or even the thinker's own contemporaries, reflects their own preoccupations rather than the author's. In MacIntyre's case we may be fairly sure that the significance he attaches to the manifest content of Either/Or mirrors a later generation's preoccupations more than it mirrors Kierkegaard's. MacIntyre reads into Either/Or the post-existentialist and practically post-modern idea of a criterionless choice. This leads to many difficulties with his interpretation: for example, why just the two alternatives presented in the text, and why does Either/Or have, in spite of everything, the

  form of a dialogue? But leaving this particular problem aside, let us just focus on the general point, namely that the influence a thinker exerts may as often as not depend on a lack of understanding of what lies in the texts.

  The essays in this section discuss or criticize the 'connections' found or made between Kierkegaard and other thinkers – not only later thinkers: they include Aquinas and Rousseau. They are in general critical of comparisons of Kierkegaard with these thinkers, for tending to exaggerate the similarities, suggesting perhaps that we have learned what we can from him, and are indeed able to pinpoint the shortcomings of his thought. That Wittgenstein acknowledges his debt to Kierkegaard in regard to religion leads one to assume that the two think alike in this matter, but that is not quite the case. Lukács, along with many other influential thinkers early in the twentieth century, was both influenced and provoked by what he knew of Kierkegaard's writings, but later held Kierkegaard partly responsible for the existentialist cult of 'fetishized inwardness'. An important feature of Kierkegaard's treatment of subjectivity, a dialectical aspect which, as an Hegelian, Lukács should have appreciated but didn't, sets Kierkegaard apart from the existentialists. Though Nietzsche never read Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard couldn't have read Nietzsche, cultural historians still find it easy to say what these two pioneer critics of their age have in common, and slide easily into the misinterprtetation that they had much of their thinking in common too.

  What I think we observe in general when looking at the alleged influence of Kierkegaard on any tradition at all is that the readings tend, like MacIntyre's, to say more about the tradition than they say about Kierkegaard. This is true also outside Anglo-American traditions. It is true, for instance, in German philosophy. True but unfortunate, because there is a tendency in this to obscure whatever critical potential may still lie in Kierkegaard's thought. Of course, to think along the lines of Kierkegaard's own thought, their latent 'offence' to philosophy may be part of the very motive to secure this domestication.

  Sometimes it is less a case of Kierkegaard influencing the tradition than of the brand name 'Kierkegaard' providing it with more or less specious sponsorship. This is regrettable, not because the connections made are always altogether wrong; the risk is rather that they miss the deeper point, the crucial difference. Thus, though MacIntyre's perception is that Either/Or's 'meaning' today is its 'discovery' that modernism is unsustainable – that is to say, that the project of rational justification, be it of morals or knowledge in general, is impossible – looking back we see that Kierkegaard's most sustained intellectual enterprise was to defend religion against philosophy, not to show philosophers where they should turn, or to where they should turn back, within philosophy if they were to re-establish morality or knowledge. The material Kierkegaard presents is offered to readers as a stimulus to 'self-activity',3 a project which Kierkegaard accused Hegelian philosophy of doing away with. Most who call themselves philosophers today would agree that it was a project their philosophy had never even contemplated.

  The new Nietzscheans preach the end of history and the redundancy of philosophy. The same can be said of philosophers satisfied that the nature of the

  human spirit can be settled for ever by science. For both it is all over bar the shouting (or scholarly backbiting). The paradox, as many besides Kojève have remarked, is that spirit's final satisfaction should occur just as humankind seems to be reverting to barbarism. If they are right, but hope is to be preserved, some space must be negotiated in which to present the aim of the restoration of humanity in an alternative idiom. Should we call it philosophical and the space philosophy? Adorno said that '[p]hilosophy should not let itself be talked out of doing what it has not succeeded in doing simply because humankind has not yet succeeded in doing it'.4 That seems to be saying yes. Putnam, expressing the hope that 'philosophical reflection may be of some real cultural value' even if it has not been 'the pedestal on which the culture rested', thinks we should not let 'the failure of a philosophical project – even a project as central as "metaphysics" – [lead us to] abandon ways of talking and thinking which have practical and spiritual weight'.5 Indeed, if talking and thinking can bring the clarity essential to self-activity, and peace on earth, then perhaps they can have that effect. In that case we might still want to call this talking and thinking philosophy, even if the professionals still submerge themselves in 'internal' problems. The term 'philosophy' is certainly resilient enough, but then so is philosophy. Gilson said: 'Philosophy always buries its undertakers.'6 If we were to give Kierkegaard the last word, he might point out, however, that there is an inveterate tendency to talk too much and grasp too little.

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  9

  COMMITMENT AND PARADOX

  Kierkegaard's claim that Christianity came into its own in this modern age yet with a contradiction in its heart sounds excitingly paradoxical.1 It's as if the momentum that carried the Christian tradition well beyond the Enlightenment check-point had finally been halted but now had to be set deliberately in motion again in outrageous breach of the Enlightenment's commitment to science and reason. For those who glimpse deep insights in Kierkegaard on moral and/or religious issues, the claim that authentic religiosity is based on an absurdity is an embarrassment. It is understandable, therefore, that much has been attempted by way of mitigation of the scandal. I believe, however, that such efforts are misguided. In support of this I shall address three increasingly comprehensive targets. I exa
mine first the attempt to foist on Kierkegaard a Wittgensteinianism, to which there is indeed a slight family resemblance in his thoughts on religion but which I believe has been exploited uncritically to obscure and domesticate those very features which set him radically apart. Secondly, I look at these features in order to bare the wires, so to speak, and let whatever sparks emerge fly where they will, dying out in nothing maybe, but possibly forging new links with discourse about the moral life and about religion. Finally, I address the general issue of rationalism and the claim that has been made that where basic options can genuinely be faced, commitment has already given way to rationality, and rationality so that rationality is 'really a part of our way of life'.2 I suggest that rationality forms just one side of that way of life and commitment forms another.

  1 First the scandal of Kierkegaard. The central work here, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is a seemingly ramshackle but nevertheless coherently constructed monster of a book and presumably written to some purpose. But to what purpose? A popular view among Kierkegaard's detractors was once to see him as mainly destructive, an irrationalist, his reputation to be saved perhaps only by tracing an ancestry to those early critics of the Enlightenment, revilers of the thin formalism of neo-classical intellectualism, who saw greater truth in the full-bodied understanding of a life embedded 'concretely' in situation and tradition, and not least in the life of poetic feeling that has its source in these. Apart from the fact that de(con)struction is nowadays the thing and those who see Kierkegaard as a destroyer are no longer his detractors, a Romantic attachment

  can hardly be the clue to his polemic on behalf of the passion of faith. Kierkegaard's works definitely oppose the idea that poetry, in a wide sense, is where you find truth; on the contrary, poetry vaporizes reality, it does not provide or uncover it, for the poetic life absolutizes the creative moment while refusing to fix itself in its creation.

  Another way of saving Kierkegaard from irrationalism has been to put a strategic interpretation on Postscript. It is a cautionary work, demonstrating what happens when two distinct 'spheres' of life – science and religion – are confulated. Some see its pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, as an assassin hired to take the stuffing out of Hegelianism, employing its concepts playfully in order to wean people away from the false assumption that faith mixes with science. Others read Kierkegaard's purpose more positively, as guiding the reader into a subjective approach to the problem of becoming a Christian, away from the search for 'results'. A related reading even makes Fragments and its Postscript into prolegomena to any future philosophy of the Christian religion: in short a revolutionary apologetics.

  But it is far from clear that Kierkegaard needs saving. The irrationalism, or what counts as that, may well be serious and essential to what he means by faith. The notoriety, then, if called for, may have to stick. Let us begin to see why that may not be so scandalous by first noting what seem to be obvious defects in the 'language-game' model that has been offered as a way of bringing to light the distinctive 'logical grammar' of religious practices and utterances. The significance of the language-game metaphor is that it offers a palliative to the paradox by supporting a kind of compartmentalization of religion and science (and poetry for that matter) into self-contained practices with distinctive, not mutually applicable, criteria of acceptability and appropriateness. Thus one may read Postscript as saying, through the ideas of paradox and absurdity, that although from a scientific point of view religion must be regarded as absurd, that is no criticism of religion, because religious practices and discourse have their own criteria of appropriateness.

  2 I borrow the framework here from D. Z. Phillips's 'Religious Beliefs and Language-Games'.3 Apart from its inherent virtues as a discussion of religious belief, the essay puts us well on the road by offering a second-line defence of the language-game approach to religious belief in general. Phillips acknowledges the force of criticisms made against what we can call a 'vulgar' language-game conception of religious beliefs – criticisms which we may here accept so that we can conveniently begin already with Phillips's own more refined account, in order to throw light on the paradox in a way that shows how it functions as a necessary ingredient in Kierkegaard's concept of faith.

  According to Phillips, we must not see religion as so 'distinctive' a language-game that it can have no connection with other aspects of life, for otherwise it would be difficult to see any point in religious beliefs; if they are to be intelligible, they must be more than 'esoteric games, enjoyed by the initiates but of little significance outside the internal formalities of their activities'. It seems wrong,

  furthermore, that religion should be allowed to carry on thus in isolation and 'outside the reach of any possible criticism'.4 On the other hand, while religious beliefs must have a point, the price of their having it must not be that the 'why' of faith is made to look as though it were just another case of ordinary rational justification. What Phillips stresses in particular is that the distinctively absolute nature of religious judgements of value must not be lost from view.5 Opening religious beliefs to criticism does not mean that they can be judged according to criteria of rationality common to believers and non-believers alike.

  There are two things to note about Phillips's account. First, the examples he uses to illustrate religious believing (a boxer crossing himself before a fight; a mother placing a garland on a statue of the Virgin Mary; parents praying for their child lost in a wreck)6 are excellent stereotypes, but what they most clearly typify are manifestations of religious belief either in not completely industrialized and urbanized societies, or in those enclaves of industrial and urban societies which have resisted Weberian 'rationalization' (and Entzauberung), or at the level of particular persons in such societies on 'existential' occasions, for example, birth, danger and death, where anyone with sufficient sensitivity, and despite all principled resistance, may find him- or herself praying. At least it would be wrong, I think, to regard them as stereotypes of that modern age into which Kierkegaard actually claimed that Christian belief had come into its own.

  Secondly, the way Phillips describes the difference between the attitude of fact-finding and of religious believing plays down the way these might actually compete with one another for the same ground. As he states it, the normal activity of fact-searching and fact-finding involves guessing and then checking against experience; beliefs here are, as he points out, 'testable hypotheses', scientific or everyday. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, 'are ways of reacting to and meeting [certain] situations'.7 That seems a too narrowly anthropological way of describing such beliefs. The believers themselves will not be content with being told that they were reacting to certain situations.8 They will not like to be told that their religiousness is just a way of reacting to birth, danger and death. They will want to say more, namely that birth, danger and death are rightly conceived in the religious way from the start, and their reactions are appropriate to that conception. Even when an urbane, highly civilized person, say an eliminative materialist jetting to a philosophy conference, finds herself in a moment of sudden danger and prays, then, subsequent protestations to the contrary notwith-standing, she would not at that moment correctly describe her way of belief as a reaction, but as the momentary takeover of another – she will no doubt insist antiquated or primitive – way of interpreting the scheme of things. There is an inescapably factual aspiration in religious belief; at the time it is held it wants the scheme of things to be true that makes the reaction appropriate.

  There is a passage in the journals often cited as evidence of Kierkegaard's acceptance of the factual import of faith. It says that 'there is a "how" which has this quality, that if it is truly given, the "what" is also given; and that is the "how" of "faith" '.9 This is surely reasonable. Even if truth is subjectivity, in the

  end there must be, in some wide sense of 'objective', an objective correlate of faith, some particular scheme of things answering to the maximum degree of inwardness wh
ich is what Kierkegaard identifies as faith. It is not that religious belief is only a matter of acquiring the right ('authentic') frame of mind while factual discourse is something altogether alien to it. It is only alien in the sense that fact-finding can be of no help in establishing the frame of mind appropriate to the particular scheme of things when a necessary ingredient in that scheme is a contradictory thought: that 'God has existed in time'.10 This essential truth is one that Postscript says we shall never 'lay hold of'.11

  Now the paradox is not merely a rhetorical device saying, 'The road of science is not the way!' We should read it literally and positively as saying, 'The way is in part to see that it is paradoxical.' To show this let me again have resort to Phillips, who recognizes that defending the distinctiveness of religious beliefs vis-à-vis science will be a futile task unless they can be distinguished in turn from mere superstition. To pinpoint this latter distinction, Phillips offers the example of a mother seeking the Virgin Mary's protection of her new-born child. This, for Phillips, would be a case of superstition if (i) the mother put her trust in 'non-existent, quasi-causal connections', in the hope that some long-gone historical personage, referred to as the Virgin Mary, can, if she so desires, protect the child, and (ii) the Virgin Mary is seen as a means to ends also intelligible without reference to her (for example, a long, healthy and prosperous life, for which good food, vaccination, non-exposure to pollutants, violent people, fast-moving traffic, and so on, would be alternative means). Where these conditions are satisfied, the Virgin Mary is reduced, as Phillips says, to a 'lucky charm'; and 'the homage has no independent status in itself'.12 As against this, a religious attitude would involve the belief that the protection must be understood in terms of the special beliefs and attitudes (wonder, gratitude, humility, and so on) contained in the person of Mary, she being for the believer a paradigm of these. Here, instead of the protection determining the result, the holiness of the Virgin determines the nature of the protection.