Kierkegaard on Faith and Philosophy: IV. Theology

The God-man (Jesus) is not the union of God and Man – such terminology is a profound optical illusion. The God-man is the unity of God and an individual human being. That the human race is or is supposed to be in kinship with God is ancient paganism; but that an individual human being is God is Christianity, and this particular human being is the God-man. Humanly speaking, there is no possibility of a crazier composite than this either in heaven or on earth or in the abyss or in the most fantastic aberration of thought…The God-man is the paradox, absolutley the paradox.

Therefore, it is altogether certain that the understanding must come to a standstill on it…The possibility of offense is the crossroad, it is like standing in the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith, but one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense.

– Soren Kierkegaard, Practise in Christianity (1850), in The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton UP, 2000), pp. 373-375.

Kierkegaard thought that theology, by nature, was in the business of producing paradoxes. The above quote on the Christian belief in the incarnation of God in the man Jesus illustrates this vividly. Kierkegaard rejects a philosophical abstraction which could do some work to tidy up the Christian belief, in order to embrace the messiness and confusion of the theological proposition. God did not, in some sense, become one with humankind, but the one person Jesus was a man and the one God. Confused?

Kierkegaard held that this is crazy, that this is a paradox, and that it is something which the understanding can only get so far with. He held that the Christian faith was full of such paradoxes, and the particular field of inquiry of theology was suitable to look into these things in a very limited sort of way, and not in a way which aspired to philosophically abstract or synthesize away the paradoxes.

However, he thought these were extremely significant and fruitful paradoxes, and were in fact not to be overcome. The reason for this is because paradox contains offense and offense leads to authentic choice.

When the mind is presented with a paradox and furthermore told that it is true, it is reasonable for the mind to be offended – to feel intellectually insulted. Kierkegaard thought that this is exactly what theology should be striving to do. Once such an offense is produced in the mind of the hearer, the hearer is faced with a choice: to either accept the paradox and move in faith towards to partly-known Other, or to remain offended and be done with religious things and especially their paradoxes. Kierkegaard believed that making such a choice was of extreme importance in religious matters, and theology ought to be of instrumental importance in functioning as a kind of antagonist which pushes an individual to such a moment of choice. Only out of such a moment could someone come to faith.

This conception of the role, aim, method and abilities of theology is far from uncontroversial in religious communities. Some vehemently oppose it, arguing that it combines a kind of pseudo-humility with mysticism and sacrifices a commitment to Truth. Many Christians insist that theology ought not be satisfied with paradox, but ought to strive after clarity and accuracy, or to act as a sort of translator which is able to translate the divine things into ordinary language. What do you think? Has Kierkegaard hit on something important, or is he totally off track?

This is the last post in the series on Kierkegaard. Check out also Knowledge, Ethics and Politics here.

Kierkegaard on Faith and Philosophy: III. Politics

In our age nobody stops at faith but goes further…In those olden days it was different; then faith was a lifelong task because it was assumed that proficiency in believing is not achieved in either days or weeks. When the tried and tested oldster drew near to his end, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which disciplined the youth and was well-controlled by the man but is not entirely outgrown by any person…Where those venerable figures arrived, there everyone in our age begins in order to go further.

Not only in the commercial world, but also in the realm of ideas as well, our age is holding a veritable clearance sale. Everything is had so dirt cheap, that it is doubtful whether anyone will bid at all.

On one occasion when the price of spices in Holland became somewhat slack, the merchants let a few loads be dumped at sea in order to drive up the price. This was a pardonable, perhaps a necessary strategy. Do we need something similar in the world of spirit? Does the present generation need an honest earnestness that fearlessly and incorruptibly calls attention to the tasks, an honest earnestness that lovingly preserves the tasks, that does not make people anxiously want to rush precipitously to the highest but keeps the task young, beautiful, delightful to look upon, and inviting to all, yet also difficult and inspiring for the noble-minded?…Faith is the highest passion in a human being. There are perhaps many in every generation who never come to it, but nobody goes further.

–Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843: Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 5, 3, 107-108.

Kierkegaard had very strong views about the place of Christianity in society and culture, and the main mode in which Christianity should be engaging with society at large. That is, he knew what Christianity should be for a society and what it’s main political objective should be. This can be summed up as: pushing up the price of faith.

In Nineteenth-Century Copenhagen, Kierkegaard noticed two things about Christianity and culture. It was at once very easy to be a Christian and to be a member of society, and as a consequence it was very easy not to take Christianity as the most important description of an individual. That is, it did not involve any real sacrifice or significant decision to be a Christian, and if one was a Christian, there was many more important things to be doing in society than simply being a Christian. Christianity was both assumed and toothless.  In the above quotes, Kierkegaard reflects on how this used to not be the case, and how Christianity has become a weak and mundane feature of society.

For Kierkegaard, the political project of Christianity then should be to both make it harder for people to be Christians and to make Christianity a much more powerful idea in society. Through his economic metaphor, this will involve chiefly the throwing away and discarding of societal features which block this path – which make it easy to be a Christian, and which make Christianity safe and pedestrian. It involves taking an axe to norms, worldviews and institutions which keep the price of faith cheap, which make faith something of a boring and irrelevant given. Kierkegaard thought Christianity should go to the bargain basements of the world of ideas and, like that guy on Antiques Roadshow, expose the true value of ideas, and when necessary, to grab some excess ideas and throw them overboard to make the ones which remain even more valuable. What would this look like?

An interesting question to ask of Kierkegaard at this point is: does he envision a society in which almost everyone is a Christian and jumps on board with the life-long project of faith, or a society in which Christianity is the most dangerous, potent, destabilising and effective voice of social criticism? Or is one a means to the other?

Kierkegaard on Faith and Philosophy: II. Ethics

An ethics that ignores sin is an altogether futile discipline, but if it asserts sin then it is for that very reason beyond itself.

– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843, Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 86

This remark from Kierkegaard on ethics really fascinates me, and I’m not sure I completely understand it. I have heard it explained that it is at once asserting that any ethical system which does not treat sin as a category is completely useless, but if an ethical system does make a place for sin then it is beyond the area of inquiry that ought to be called ‘ethics’ and is ultimately talking about something else and directing attention to something other than a human system.

That is, if an ethical system does not have an explanation for the inherent weaknesses of the human will and the cognitive and beneficent limitations of the human capacity, then it will be a silly system that can hardly claim the title ‘ethics’ for its project, and will have a small chance of prescribing action-guiding principles which are actually able to co-ordinate human behaviour for the better.

But, Kierkegaard says, if an ethical system recognises sin deeply, it will come to the conclusion that no human system is able to function as a remedy for this problem. The very moment that one acknowledges the deep human problem that Christians call ‘sin’, is the same moment that all human designs which aspire to finally escaping this problem begin to look absurd. If the problem of sin is the problem that an ethics is trying to solve, how could an ethics produced by a sin-marred agent or community ever do this since this candidate would necessarily have traces of the problem mixed in with the solution?

A moment soon follows when such a person would look to God to be rescued from this condition, and this moment then takes the person out of a sphere of life in which they care deeply about justifying normative prescriptions, and begin to listen unreservedly to what they believe is the voice of God, the voice of their Rescuer, about how they ought to live.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard has a specific conception of ‘the ethical’ as a type of life, and ‘the religious’ as a better kind of life. The ethical life is characterised by a desire to justify ones outer activities to their society – their actions need to be seen as right and appropriate in the eyes of those around them. The religious life is characterised by a complete devotion to God, and a desire to do what is right only in the eyes of God, recklessly ignoring the watching eyes of society, and not even attempting the task of ethical justification or explanation, since those who do not have this immediate relationship with God will not be able to follow or comprehend anything you say.

I find this suggestion both attractive and a little scary. What do you think? Can non-religious ethical systems accomplish great good, or are they inherently limited and confused things?

Kierkegaard on Faith and Philosophy: I. Knowledge

Even if one were able to convert the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that one has comprehended faith, comprehended how one entered into it or how it entered into one…Philosophy cannot and must not bestow faith but must understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away and least of all trick people out of something by making them think that it is nothing.

– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843: Cambridge UP, 2006) p. 5, 27

The Danish Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thought a great deal about the relationship between Christianity and philosophy. In the next few posts I’ll be putting up some quotes of his that shed unique light on what the relationship could be between Christianity and various fields of philosophy. There will be four posts: knowledge, politics, ethics, and the practise of theology. Kierkegaard is an extremely unique and rich thinker, both as a Christian and a philosopher, and he has exerted considerable influence over various streams of Christianity from Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy to the current New Calvinists in the United States.

The above quote shows Kierkegaard’s firm belief in the limitations of philosophy and therefore it’s inability to scrutinize Christianity. Whilst he no doubt believed that philosophy was a worthwhile activity to pursue (himself churning out scores of philosophy books and papers) he held strongly to the notion that the religious sphere was an area of life and experience that human thinking, no matter how profound or comprehensive, would never be able to fully grapple with. For Kierkegaard, the being of God, the Christian experience, and the act of a faith commitment are the kind of things which are not able to be analyzed by or taken apart by philosophy’s tools.

The reason for all this is because Christianity involves choice and subjectivity. Kierkegaard coined the now famous phrase ‘a leap of faith’, and he held that this is what real Christianity demands of a person. It requires an individual to personally choose to commit to propositions which are beyond the realms of certainty, and it involves a radically personal choice to become a certain type of person and live in a certain way. Christianity demands an individual make an intensely personal decision about the kind of individual they will commit to becoming and the kind of life they will lead, and it requires them to do so not on the grounds of certainty (which philosophy likes to think of as its turf), but in asking the individual to throw themselves before God, and in the same motion, to throw away their all too human ways of knowing.

I think this is what Kierkegaard is getting at when he says ‘Philosophy cannot and must not bestow faith but must understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away and least of all trick people out of something by making them think that it is nothing.’

Philosophy, for what it can do, is a valuable thing. But it should never be in the business of criticising people’s faith commitments or attempting to adjudicate on theological propositions. When it does this, it often tells people of the epistemological weaknesses of their beliefs, or the contingency, predictability or transparent nature of their faith experience and so convinces people that where they thought they had beliefs, they in fact have nothing, and where they thought that they made a crucial individual choice, they were in fact just slotting themselves into a certain psychological type. I think Kierkegaard wants to limit philosophy from doing this as it is stepping into an arena of life in which it is not apt to function.

Perhaps it is a little like a physicist and a chemist getting together and convincing a pair of lovers that where they thought they were in love, they are in fact only experiencing certain chemical reactions which are explainable through reference to a causal network of neurons and stimuli, and where they thought they were taking in a glorious sunrise together, they are in fact only seeing particular light rays bouncing off particular particles of random matter (pardon the amateur science!).

I think Kierkegaard is saying that just as the physicist and the chemist aren’t the best ones to describe what is going on as two lovers watch the sunrise, so a philosopher is not the best one to describe what is happening when someone becomes a Christian, or says something like ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.

What do you think? Are you attracted to this view of faith and knowledge? Do you think Kierkegaard (as I’ve construed him) is off target in any way?

Truth or Liberation?

A friend of mine suggested to me that contemporary philosophy can be divided into two different camps, each harboring some mild-to-serious discomfort that the other also uses the label philosophy to describe their activities. The first could be called philosophy-as-liberation. This approach believes the purpose of philosophy is to provide the means to scrutinize social relations, to reveal inequality and oppression at the most fundamental level, and provide the tools to move forward. Naturally, this type of philosophy sees the goal of philosophy as revolution, and its default stance is suspicion of the status quo in all arenas. 

This kind of philosophy is often hesitantly dubbed ‘Continental Philosophy’ as the majority of literature produced with this bent has been produced from Continental Europe – think Karl Marx and Max Weber in the Nineteenth-Century, Michel Foucault, John-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt in the Twentieth, and movements like Critical Theory, Feminism, Anarchism, (Post-) Structuralism – though I believe anglo-phone philosophers like John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West would be at home with this conception of philosophy. This kind of philosophy often turns its attention to political and social theory, to theories of the self, and to philosophical questions which will, to borrow Foucault’s famous image, form tools in a toolbox which are ready to be deployed to smash down the next wall, lead the people in the next revolution. Philosophy provides liberation for real people suffering on the basis of their sex, race or creed; or under unjust working conditions or political institutions. It is sometimes remarked that philosophers of this bent are more socially aware, of more value and relevance to a culture, but have an implicitly casual attitude towards Truth.

The other option could be called philosophy-as-the-search-for-Truth. This approach holds that the purpose of philosophy is to be very serious about knowledge, language and mind; and sets as its goal something like ‘describing the world the way it actually is’. This conception of philosophy often has a lot of time for empiricism, conceptual analysis, science and reduction, and proceeds with something like these as its methodology. It favors the strictly logical, the verifiable and the empirically discoverable and it often tries to blur and at times erase the line demarcating science from philosophy (W. V. O. Quine once said ‘Philosophy of science is philosophy enough’). This kind of philosophy tries to reduce language to its bare necessities, rendering it as simple and precise as possible by doing away with metaphysical flourishes and colloquial imprecision. 

This kind of philosophy often turns its attention to philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language in an effort to describe with rigor and accuracy what humans are actually able to know with certainty. As part of this project, this kind of philosophy often takes upon itself the job of ridding the world of latent metaphysical pictures – labeling such things as ‘Platonic’, ‘Idealisms’ or ‘religious’ – in the cause of describing the world as it actually is and establishing an error-proof way of communicating about it. This kind of philosophy is associated with movements like Logical Positivism, Ideal Language Theories and Empirical Psychology and takes it lead from mostly anglo-phone philosophers from the UK and North America such as Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap, and is hesitantly labeled ‘Analytic Philosophy’. It is sometimes said that philosophers of this bent are extremely rigorous, precise, and concerned for what can qualify to have the label ‘True’ attached to it, but are often political quietists or socially irrelevant and disinterested conservatives.

It also ought to be noted that much philosophical effort has been exerted in the past half-century or so from within the different traditions to make each of these brief sketches pretty inadequate, although I believe these brief remarks still latch onto what each tradition thinks philosophy should be aiming at.

Reflecting on these two main approaches to philosophy reveals something about Christianity. It occurs to me that Christianity would be hard to map onto either approach. Put it this way: do you think that it is more accurate to say that Christianity is concerned with the search for, establishment, and promulgation of the Truth, or with the task of liberating individuals, communities and peoples from all sorts of injustices and oppressions? Most philosophers seems to think that both tasks are equally large and daunting and so you need to choose which one is more important, and so which one you ought to devote your effort to. I tried to take this suggestion seriously and think about if my church or my denomination were to devote itself almost exclusively to one which would it be. Truth or liberation? What do you think? What would you choose? Is there a more natural one for Christianity to focus on?

The thought arises that perhaps Christianity does not know how to make this decision, and will never be content to devote itself entirely to one. Perhaps, if Christianity were seen to be pursuing both tasks with passion, it would appear attractive in the eyes of disillusioned philosophy students/philosophers who were weary of pursuing one approach to life and thought as though the other weren’t important. What if Christianity came to be seen as both extremely concerned about Truth and of invaluable relevance to a people to throw off oppression– and did not know how to be anything else? After all, Jesus did say that the Truth will set you free.