Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 22
This is a very fruitful distinction which I have myself tried in several other places to show is the one Kierkegaard also makes when distinguishing natural from spiritual goals.13 To call upon religion to satisfy a need when all natural remedies have failed is to treat it merely as a supernatural extension of ordinary remedy-finding. That is superstition. Spiritual goals are different; they are fixed by something other than the worshipper's 'natural' wants, goals and aims, and their content is presented in a paradigm such as the Virgin Mary, or, for Kierkegaard, the God-man. In faith, then, one is not choosing religious solutions to problems that in more favourable circumstances other solutions could also solve; choosing a religious solution is also choosing a religious way of looking at the problem – it might even be a way in which the original problem vanishes.14
However, Kierkegaard would not be satisfied with the distinction as a basis for marking out a specifically Christian form of religious belief. Certainly, the worshipper paying homage to the Virgin Mary is religious rather than superstitious
in her belief, because the Virgin Mary is for her a paradigm of Christian motherhood. She is seeking protection for her child on God's terms, not her own; as in Fear and Trembling, Abraham received Isaac again on God's terms, having written him off as a human possibility. But why does she accept this as her paradigm of wonder, gratitude, humility? Surely, it is because she has inherited a belief to the effect that there are such paradigms of absolute value in the world and that this is one of them; that is, the two thousand (and some) years have given weight to this paradigm, and the worshipper simply believes that the world contains such accredited paradigms of eternal values. Her religiousness is that of Kierkegaard's, pre-Christian, Religiousness A. She assumes that the truth which saves lies within her reach. She is blind to the absurdity of this belief and her belief therefore lacks the 'dialectic' that calls for 'thought-passion', which is a passionate desire to understand, not the paradox, but
what it means to break thus with the understanding, and with thinking and with immanence, in order to lose the last foothold of immanence, eternity behind one [the Platonic conception of a recoverable eternity], and to exist constantly on the extremest verge of existence by virtue of the absurd.15
3 That this talk of 'dialectic' is not just a strategic excursion into speculative idealism on Kierkegaard's part is shown by remarks in his journals, which it is reasonably safe to assume directly express his own thought, on how the quality of the believer's God-relationship is a function of the level of passion.16 Kierkegaard marks three levels on an ascending scale of religiosity. The weakest form of faith is merely an expression of a desire for God's approval of what one is. Next there is a desire to have one's accountable failures forgiven, which assumes a conscious disparity between the actual and an ideal self, the tension inherent in the introduction of moral space, one might say. Finally there is the 'dialectical' relationship to God, in which this tension assumes a quite different character: one's own wish is now in potential conflict with God's, and wish-fulfilment is not something attainable, or to be attained, by setting certain expedients in motion. A passage from Postscript comes appropriately to mind:
Prayer would seem to be something extremely simple, one might think it to be as easy as buttoning one's suspenders; and if there were no other hindrance, one ought soon to be free to take on world-historical problems. And yet how difficult! Intellectually I need to have an entirely clear conception of God, of myself, of my relation to God, and of the dialectics of the particular relationship which is that of prayer, lest I confuse God with something else, so that it is not God I pray to; lest I confuse myself with something else, so that it is not I that pray; and in order that I may be able to preserve, in the relationship of prayer, the distinction and the relationship.17
We have seen how someone seeking God's protection might be mistaken about her identity in this way. If the wish is an expression of her personal interest in her child and does not stem from the 'self' that for Kierkegaard is dialectically constituted in an absolute relation to God, then there is the possibility that her wish is not God's wish, while to be her true self's wish it must be God's wish too. But what about the second term in the prayer-relation? How could keeping the paradox in mind enable one positively to identify God as the recipient of one's prayers?
The problem is the requirement that the object of faith be the absurd. Henry Allison puts it succinctly when maintaining that Postscript, viewed as a 'relatively straightforward albeit bizarre argument for the "subjective truth" and uniqueness of the Christian faith … is a colossal failure'.18 Kierkegaard, Allison claims, is unable to distinguish Christianity as the unique object of a passionately inward faith directed at what is unthinkable. Indeed the project is hopeless from the start. Even if one assumes that the religious individual needs 'the belief that our eternal happiness is based on an objective absurdity … to raise passion to its highest level', this does not single out Christianity as the sole absurdity; indeed, as far as the argument goes, Kierkegaard is unable to distinguish Christianity from any other common-or-garden nonsense. Since the project is evidently an 'utter failure' and Kierkegaard is no fool, Allison concludes that Postscript in its entirety must be interpreted as a prolonged joke, a Socratic sting designed to undermine apologetics as a whole.19
I think Postscript is indeed designed to undermine apologetics. But not in the form of a joke. Moreover, the attempt to give merely rhetorical status to the claim that the object of faith is 'the absurd' meets at least one objection. The same claim appears in journal entries, which is a strong indication that this is indeed what Kierkegaard himself really came to believe,20 though perhaps not as eagerly as the paradox-loving image many have of him would suggest, something that could prompt the reflection that a thinker's devotion to rational belief, too, can be a 'dialectical affair' exposed to moments of weakness when one finds it a disadvantage that one's devotion is so absolute. But there could be a way to dispose of the apologetics without losing the absurdity claim nevertheless, a solution suggested by the notion of a 'language-game'. What we have to do is to revise the conventional way of treating Kierkegaard's 'stages' or 'spheres of existence' as separate phases in a biographical development, each connected by a blind leap and the last of them landing us in Christianity. A reading of the texts shows that what ordinarily counts as religious belief, according to Phillips's stereotypes, can be found throughout the stages, as is quite obvious in the case of the ethical stage exemplified by Judge William, but even in the aesthetic stage. What these stages lack, for Kierkegaard, is not religion, one might say, but religiosity proper: something stronger and less context-dependent than a specifically religious reaction to isolated crises. Instead, therefore, of taking Postscript to be a piece of revolutionary apologetics, homing us in on the true object of faith, as if (contrary to its own
message) the dialectic can deliver this 'result', we can regard it as a kind of device, a thumb-screw perhaps, forcing us to arrive at a consistency that has belief apply to all aspects of life – not just fortune and misfortune and moments of existential agony – and forcing us to base that consistency clearly upon the understanding that in this serious matter human understanding provides no support. What Postscript 'teaches' in that case is that a 'dialectic', or tension, otherwise manifested merely externally in alternating patterns of behaviour, going in and out of the language-game of religious believing, must be turned inward and become a stable, synchronic feature of a unified, religious consciousness, the tension being held fast in the believer's mind.
4 But does this help us to understand the precise point of the paradox? Not obviously, because one can still think of this synchronic tension being a feature of someone praying under religiousness A assumptions. Thus the mother seeking protection for her child is prepared to accept it in a form that would not have occurred to her had this paradigm not presented itself as an independent source of value, of absolute value. So what further condition might there be that would tak
e us over into religiousness B?
We have already had one suggestion. The mother's submission to the paradigm is not 'hers' in the strong sense required, because although she may have 'broken with the understanding' by doing something she cannot understand, she still believes there are people who do understand, or that there are authorities that know and on whom she relies. To be hers the submission must be consciously made in full recognition of the unthinkability of the Incarnation. The question then is whether this difference should be crucial. Why put so much weight on a requirement that makes this obviously good, and in all reasonable senses Christian, woman fall short of genuine Christian faith?
Here is a possible answer which gestures slightly in the direction of those who like to see the hired assassin at work in Kierkegaard's 'dialectical' works. The requirement matters much more for people, like Hegelians, who think they have solid backing for the view that these things can be known – indeed that faith will give way to knowledge – than it does for someone who does not approach the rigours and crises of life with the backing of this complacent, abstract and radically mistaken assumption. Postscript, then, is designed for professors rather than serving-maids, but this is quite compatible with Johannes Climacus's optimism about an eternal happiness awaiting both.21 In this case it is clearly the professor (representing the apotheosis of the rationalist tradition) who has got himself into trouble, but his error does at least pave the way to a clearer view of their shared faith.
Against this discriminatory background we can now read what Kierkegaard himself has to say to our question. In Postscript we read that the 'believing Christian … uses understanding to make sure that he believes against the understanding'.22 And in the posthumous papers we read:
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 the negative mark of faith.
The passage goes on to say that the absurdity of the Paradox is the negative side of the frame of mind properly characterized as faith: 'The absurd rounds off the sphere of faith, which is a sphere for itself.' It 'throws light on faith negatively'.23
We could draw the following conclusions. First, that the Christian believer must keep in mind that what he believes is unthinkable, absurd, on pain of not entering as himself into the God-relation, or if as himself, then not into relation with God. This is the negative factor, not because it marks a boundary between faith and something else, for example scientific understanding, but because, considered in this way, it is really a blank wall and the occasion for despair. Secondly, there is a positive counterpart, or alternative, to despair, namely faith, which takes you beyond the blank wall. But there is a slight problem.
In so far as the believer believes, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it; but in every weak moment it is, for him, again more or less the absurd. The passion of faith is the only thing that has the measure of the absurd – if not, the faith is not faith in the strictest sense but a kind of knowing.24
A straightforward reading suggests that the absurdity of the absurd has to be blurred in the believer's mind by the force of his faith, and when the faith weakens, the absurdity comes back into view. However, that cannot be right since the affair would no longer be dialectical, but a see-saw, disjunctive relation that remains indecisively either the one or the other: in weak moments when faith falters, one has the absurdity in mind, then faith again takes over and the absurdity slips into the background. The structure of a situation called 'dialectical' is one in which one term is internally related to the other, and the internality must in some sense be part of what is represented in a mind, in a vertical, or synchronic, tension of some kind. What Kierkegaard means by faith having the measure of the absurd is perhaps simply this: that the kinds of interest distinctive of religious belief motivate faith at different levels of critical awareness of human limits. Kierkegaard is addressing the modern age, and he is saying that for a modern consciousness these interests have to be sustained in the face of a clearly acknowledged lack of understanding.
In tentative rebuttal, then, of Allison's reason for describing Postscript as a total flop as apologetics, namely that it cannot distinguish Christianity from nonsense in general, let me link what has just been said with the fact that Kierkegaard himself clearly thinks the object of faith is not indistinguishable
from ordinary nonsense, and that once we grasp that something is indeed a piece of pure nonsense we simply find it impossible to believe:
Nonsense … he cannot believe against the understanding, for precisely understanding will discern that it is nonsense and prevent him believing it; but he makes enough use of the understanding to become aware of the incomprehensible, and then holds on to this believing against the understanding.25
Couldn't we say that if the believer can go on believing the absurd in the case of Christianity, that is because its doctrines have a hold on his deeper instincts, and due to the special and fundamental accommodation a Christian faith makes with human reality, particularly that of each individual? Unlike sheer nonsense, the utterances and practices of Christian belief make some kind of sense by virtue of their embeddedness in fundamental human interests. So however unintelligible the doctrine of incarnation may be, the promise to which it is attached can still 'inform' a person's practical life and motivate a desire to retain it in the face of the unintelligibility. Moreover, the unintelligibility may be attributed to insurmountable limitations of the human perspective, so that the option of faith remains open at least to non-rationalists. As an appendix to the remarks on language-games, it might even be argued that the level at which beliefs of the kind have a grip on our activities is such as to prevent their amenability to rational criticism. Postscript then reappears as a cautionary tale about what happens when professors insist on bringing religion to the level of the concept; religious beliefs are immune not because they have their own criteria of appropriateness, as the language-game interpretation has it, but because there is little chance of testing them against anything so articulate as a criterion.
5 Rationalists will of course be unimpressed. The idea that there are more basic well-springs of action than a clearly conceived thought is entirely inimical to the rationalist outlook. One attempt to undermine rationalism has been to allege that rationalism must itself be the outcome of a choice, but that such a choice cannot be rational in the required sense, so that rationalism is really at root as much a form of irrationalism as any of its opponents. It may help to throw light on our discussion if, in conclusion, we look at one reply to this 'tu quoque' argument that rationalism rests ultimately on a commitment that cannot itself be rational. Agassi argues that where basic options can genuinely be faced, commitment has already given way to rationality. Moroever, rationality is, to borrow a phrase, the form of life in which we all presently engage, rationalists and irrationalists alike. To put a finer point on it, one could add that at the level of truly basic commitment there simply is no choice as such. Choice presupposes preferences, and where options are not preferentially ordered we can only pick, we cannot choose.26 Fundamental commitment is the limiting case where principles of preference are themselves what we are supposed to choose between, so that if we can choose to commit ourselves to an irrationalism, we are already beyond the alleged form of commitment. The crux is that the true option is between rationalism and commitment. The rationalist's dedication is to experimental open-mindedness, while commitment is the opposite. So the rationalist can regard commitment only as an attempt to retreat to a naïve way of life that is neither his nor the irrationalist's. Of course, commitment is something the rationalist is free to prefer, but just because he is in a position to choose it 'he is already beyond that choice'.27 His real options are, therefore, liking rationality or not liking it, 'driv[ing] it to its limits and
expand[ing] it or tak[ing] it as it comes and be[ing] content or even try[ing] to avoid it and repress it'. He may even succeed in the latter.28 Since the 'life' that rationality is part of is shared also by the irrationalists 'in our midst', the latter's advocacy of commitment is inherently objectionable. The 'immorality' of the irrationalists is that they 'willingly recommend a leap of faith … that we take as above or beyond criticism at least one major dogma, religious, social, or political'. The main objection, however, is 'the recommendation that the leap of faith should be final – that the act of leaping should be one act that should suffice for a whole life-time'.29