Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  'unintelligible' to others.4 The fact that these others numbered many who called themselves Christians testified, in Kierkegaard's mind, to the spiritlessness of the institutionalized religion he called 'Christendom'.

  Wittgenstein, on the other hand, though not it seems a professed Christian, clearly appreciated the kinds of need to which Christian faith might minister. And this provides us with the basis for a distinction I wish to make between an 'outside' point of view, from which Christian faith is understood as a solution to a problem that is not in itself inherently religious, and the 'inside', or believer's, point of view, from which Christian faith – it might seem paradoxically – is precisely not intelligible as a solution to that, but only to a religious problem. We can begin to chart the boundary between these two points of view by indicating four ways in which Wittgenstein's remarks implicitly depart from the views expressed by Kierkegaard and those of his pseudonyms who represent the (supposedly authentic) Christian viewpoint.

  1 Take Wittgenstein's idea of Christian belief as a 'refuge' (Zuflucht). This sounds as if it were some kind of shelter in an emergency. But Kierkegaard writes of Christianity less as a refuge than as a special vantage-point. True, he often describes faith in the traditional way as an absolute certainty; but if this is a refuge it is also a 'fortification' in which 'the good man … is stronger than the whole world'.5 And although faith does indeed protect – the advantage of Christian over natural love, we are told, is that the former is 'eternally secure against every change',6 and Christian faith in general screens one from the vicissitudes of nature and 'fate'7 – Kierkegaard wants to say that faith confers a unique advantage which means that the emergency that leads one to take refuge in it is not one that a person ought to seek to avoid. On the contrary, in order to secure the special advantages of the Christian life this kind of emergency should be cultivated. Whatever it is, it offers people their only insight into the true nature of human fulfilment, and thus their only chance of actually being fulfilled. 'The possibility of [despair]', says the strictly religious Anti-Climacus,

  is man's advantage over the beast … an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit … to be aware of [it] is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of [it] is the Christian's blessedness.8

  Far from authentic Christian faith's being a refuge for the despairing soul, from Anti-Climacus's own vantage-point the sanctuary which despairing souls seek is worldliness and the respect of their fellows.

  2 Wittgenstein connects the idea of Christian faith with that of sickness. He writes: 'People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as sick. … Anyone who is half-way decent will think himself

  utterly imperfect, but the religious man thinks himself wretched.'9 But then so does Kierkegaard. The original words replaced by 'despair' and 'it' in the immediately preceding quotation are 'this sickness'. Thus Christianity is a cure for a sickness, the recognition of which, and therefore also its very possibility, are prerequisite for that fulfilment unique to human beings in which the cure consists.

  Now Wittgenstein's remark could be interpreted in various ways. It might be read as saying that to be religious amounts in itself to being ill; that is, having religious beliefs, or specifically Christian ones, is either a symptom of sickness or (if this is different) itself a manifestation of sickness. More likely, however, Wittgenstein means that the kind of help religion provides is only suitable for people who diagnose their own condition as sickly and who then turn to or apply Christian faith as a cure. This, of course, might simply mean that what makes a person religious is a sickly surrender to wishful thinking, but the interesting reading would be that faith requires belief in a constitutional incapacity to attain fulfilment without the special kind of help that Christian faith provides. We can thus distinguish between (i) a person's being sick just because his faith is itself a form of illness, or (ii) a person's having faith just because he is pathologically weak-kneed or irrational, and (iii) a person's having faith in so far as he believes the incapacity he suffers from is one for which, unlike other kinds of unfulfilment, he believes he needs 'infinite' help if it is to be remedied.

  But none of these captures Kierkegaard's meaning. What we have in Kierkegaard, or more exactly in Anti-Climacus, is a concept of illness, or sickness, which already assumes the framework of the cure. In (iii) one first acquires the belief in one's sickness, then reaches out to religion as the framework in which health can be recovered. In Anti-Climacus, however, there is no room for a non-religious state of deprivation (a sickness of the soul, let us call it) to remedy which one then adopts religion in order to exploit the resources uniquely available there. The sickness which is the 'sickness unto death' is not one which has religion as such as its cure; it is a sickness which has faith as its cure, a sickness all of whose symptoms are to be described as forms of sin, that is, in terms which already presuppose the religious framework. The despair which is the sickness Kierkegaard is concerned with is therefore not a condition in which 'natural man', however solitary and abandoned, can find himself. It is the condition in which someone, who more or less consciously acknowledges his divine origin, fails in practice or refuses outright to conform to the requirements of that origin. The sickness of despair, for Kierkegaard, is resistance to the challenges of the promise of everlasting life. It is the attempt to reject that challenge, in effect an attempt to die. But it is a useless attempt, because the project of becoming merely finite is countermanded by the more basic project, on pain of total isolation, of standing alone before God. The sickness of despair is a self-inflicted sickness, defined against the background of this more basic project which Kierkegaard's pseudonym regards as constitutional for humankind. If Christian faith were to be construed as some kind of response appropriate only to people who feel 'ill' or 'wretched', this on Kierkegaard's

  view, can be coherently expressed only by saying that the state of illness or misery is one which people must ascribe to themselves in view of a prior acceptance of the Christian way of defining humankind, that is, as sinning, in need of redemption, and so on. Of course, an abandoned, solitary person might choose that self-definition in order to escape a certain kind of natural deprivation (particularly the kind one would be inclined in purely naturalistic terms to classify as a sickness of the soul), but, at least for Anti-Climacus, this choice can only occur to a person who, by adopting the self-definition, knows he is dealing with the 'sickness unto death'. And the sickness unto death is not a natural deprivation. On the contrary, it is a vain attempt to accept that natural deprivation is the only kind of deprivation there is.

  3 Wittgenstein's remarks are at least compatible, however, with the deprivation being of some normal, let us say, naturally remediable, kind. The refuge of religion would then be a resort for those unfortunates who are deprived in practice, but not necessarily (that is, qua human beings) in principle, of the means of satisfying these normal, natural demands of human fulfilment. Religion is a resort where what is possible in principle is not so in practice. But once natural remedies are applied and favourable conditions restored, the refugees can return once more to their homeland of normal daily rounds and humanly fulfilling occupations. Religion is presented here as a surrogate satisfaction of essentially natural needs, that is, of needs whose ultimate satisfaction consists in providing the human species with what is already naturally congenial to it.

  On the other hand, Wittgenstein might have meant something else. He might have meant that the problem to which religion is a solution is one that first emerges in the ultimate distress. This could be understood trivially, as merely saying that so long as you avoid the distress of solitary abandonment you escape the problem, but the best solution is to avoid solitary abandonment. This would not be Kierkegaard's view, and perhaps it is not the one we should attribute to Wittgenstein either. His remarks may have been intend
ed to convey the view that such abandonment gives the solitary individual privileged access to a problem which in the normal daily round goes unnoticed; and one might even surmise whether Wittgenstein approached the characteristic Kierkegaardian position that the normal daily round is in some sense exploited, more or less consciously, to keep the problem at a distance.

  If the problem to which Christian faith is a solution is indeed one which emerges first in the emergency of that ultimate distress, then this makes it harder to dismiss the beliefs forming the solution as merely ideological. It is quite easy, of course, to see a religious solution to human misery as being chiefly significant for its ability to ameliorate the natural needs of those who endure undue oppression and loneliness in this life, by not only enabling them to look forward to restitution or better in a life to come, but also lending some ultimately positive cosmic significance to their wretched condition in the present. But it is easy only if it is assumed that the problem would vanish were the oppression and loneliness to be remedied in this life. If the problem raised is some new form of misery, and it is not a problem to which any possible remedies in this life can be applied, then it is plausible to conceive of Christian faith as in some sense an appropriate, or at least not a specious, remedy.

  But thinking of it in this way is to go beyond Kierkegaard. Nowhere outside the journals will one find in Kierkegaard's writings the notion that Christian faith is a solution to a problem. On the contrary, the Christian framework defines the problems and whatever options are open to the problem-solver. There is no room in the Kierkegaardian universe for a problem of solitariness or forsakenness that the problem-solver might decide to leave unsolved rather than accept the solution which Christianity offers. If a person is confronted with the choice of believing in Christ or rejecting Christianity, the latter alternative is specified within the Christian framework as sin, indeed as the 'highest intensification' of sin, as the final page of The Sickness unto Death has it. There is no position from which the framework itself presents itself as a genuine option, that is, as an alternative the rejection of which might be accorded the status of an authentically human choice. As for conceiving Christianity as a remedy that humankind has hit upon or devised to minister to its utmost distress, Kierkegaard tries hard to scotch that idea by insisting that no human intellect could ever have contrived the paradox of the Incarnation.10

  4 The very idea of refuge or escape suggests that the remedy Wittgenstein speaks of should afford protection from the suffering he mentions. But although I think it is true that Kierkegaard means to say that there is some aspect of the suffering that the remedy is supposed to banish, according to him religious belief is not a protection against normal suffering, against misfortune or those kinds of unwanted eventualities that defeat our hopes and expectations and which lie outside our control. Rather it is a way of coming to terms with suffering, of seeing normal suffering not as an expungeable blot on the human landscape, or even as an unexpungeable blot, but as an integral part of life itself.11 In this way it is not a flight from suffering so much as a preparation, or at least a preparedness, for it.12 It would be proper in this context to refer to it as a way of 'accommodating' suffering. Admittedly, there is a connection between 'normal' suffering and Kierkegaardian despair. Too much normal suffering may cause a person to despair of authentic selfhood before God, just as too little may enable a person to live through life without realizing that his attitude to good and bad fortune is due at bottom to fear of the challenge of such an ideal of selfhood. But this again does not mean that Kierkegaardian despair has normal despair as its 'intentional' object. Nor does it mean, therefore, that the solution to despair (for Kierkegaard, or Anti-Climacus, faith) is also a means of circumventing or mitigating normal suffering. Indeed, not only does the solution to despair not mitigate normal suffering, it introduces a further dimension of suffering: the notion of guilt that can deprive one of the

  consolation even after the 'solution' of faith has been applied. The thought that one may not deserve the consolation, says Climacus, 'reduces [what is] absolutely the only consolation [to its] minimum'.13

  What these four points of divergence mark is a difference of viewpoint as between that on a problem (an utmost distress) and that on the solution (the adoption of the Christian framework). Wittgenstein's remarks are those of one who understands that there can be an emergency which only Christian faith can deal with. Kierkegaard writes as a committed religious author for whom that help has arrived. Let us call these the 'outside' and the 'inside' viewpoint.

  The outside viewpoint is humanistic, or perhaps one might call it anthropological. Its topic is human response and reaction, and its perspective relates these to common experience, human needs and human problems. The inside view denies itself that perspective because its framework relates those experiences, needs and problems to solutions that redefine them. You might think that all a person calling on infinite help is looking for is some exotically new form of solution to an already identified problem, all 'finite' remedies for which have proved fruitless. This makes the natural man's situation analogous to that of the driver who resigns himself to the fact that no normal procedures (tinkering with the engine, filling the tank, reinflating the tyres) will get the car moving again and in jest or desperation admits that only magic or a miracle will do the job. Similarly, if anything is to help the natural man in his 'utmost distress', it has to be 'infinite' help.

  It might be right to say his need (Wittgenstein's Not also translates as 'need') is of the kind that only infinite help will satisfy, and that only those placed in such a predicament resort to such measures. But this is how it looks only from the outside point of view. It doesn't admit the perspective from which the person in need can say, 'There is a form of infinite help and now I need it!', as the would-be driver might, though most likely would not, say, in all seriousness, 'We can still hope for a miracle!'. Infinite help is not grasped at as one more resort, only this time the last, and offered from a 'beyond'. One can only grasp at it by reconceiving oneself as a being with the enlarged range of possibilities necessary for receiving help from such a source. Natural man must first reconceive himself as more than natural. By the same token, it might be said, he must reconceive himself as sick or handicapped; not 'naturally' handicapped in the sense that he might have been complete qua natural, but handicapped precisely qua natural, that is, handicapped even if naturally whole. And the point of calling the help he now avails himself of 'infinite' is that the distance between his present repertoire of abilities and his ideal of fulfilment, as now conceived, is not one he can close either by his own effort or by the efforts of others. For a person to believe that religion will help him, he must first take the step of redefining himself as congenitally handicapped as a 'mere' human being but as not thereby condemned to (in Wittgenstein's words) imperfection and wretchedness.

  Careful account must be kept of the disparity between the problem and solution as seen from the outside, and the problem and solution as seen from the

  inside. From the outside point of view, religion is the way out of a nihilistic alternative. If one grants Kierkegaard's Climacian conception of the incoherence or fundamental unintelligibility of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Christian faith is a desperate way out, and therefore not desirable in general or in itself, although it will be desired – though not necessarily accepted – by someone with the appropriate need, and one may understand why a person does accept it. But it is not possible for such a person to construe his faith as an escape from a nihilistic alternative, since his adopted framework leaves no room for that alternative. From the point of view of the solution, the notion of being rescued from that option is redefined as that of being rescued, or of rescuing oneself, from the sin of renunciation of one's divine origin. Faith is now the avoidance of untruth, not of nihilism, and nihilism itself is a sin. This means that from the point of view of the solution, faith is no longer the solution to the problem that leads one to faith.
Nor therefore can it any longer be considered a desperate solution to that problem, as one that is not desirable in general or in itself but only for people in a pitiable condition. From the point of view of the solution, what the pitiable condition allows one to do is reap the rewards of one's properly human advantage.

  Our distinction between an outside and an inside viewpoint corresponds significantly to that between 'left' and 'right' as applied originally in the interpretation of Hegelian theology and Christology. Those on the left, conspicuously Feuerbach, saw Christianity as a symbolic representation of purely human goals of fulfilment; religious concepts were to be explained and justified by reference to basic human psychology, and God and Christ were fashioned in the image of a fulfilment projected onto the natural human future. Those on the right saw Christianity and its key concept of the Incarnation as betokening the divinity in principle of finite persons and events. In terms of this distinction, talking of the Christian vision as a refuge is decidedly leftist, while talking of it as though it were literally true is rightist. Kierkegaard's authorship is consistently rightist, and this invites the judgement that he is a kind of half-way modernist who, although he rejects the traditional rationalist epistemology, retains in a religious form the traditional rationalist conclusions that the epistemology was once (and more recently again in Hegel) thought to justify.