KIERKEGAARD AND NEWMAN

September 4/6, 2006

In his retrospective essays on what he had published, Kierkegaard insists that he was from first to last a religious writer. The literature describes two movements, one, away from the poet, the other, away from philosophy, towards a realization of what it really means to be a Christian. A variety of pseudonyms present works which incorporate the aesthetic and ethical spheres. The idea seems to be that the nominal Christian actually lives his life, not in Christian, but in aesthetic or merely ethical categories. These pseudonymous works are meant to provide their reader with a basis for seeing the inadequacy of these two spheres.

The inadequacy of the aesthetic or poetic sphere is manifested in despair. It is a standard move in classical moral philosophy to present arguments that profess to show that human happiness cannot consist in pleasure, fame, wealth, etc. However compelling such arguments are, they compel to agreement rather than to a decision to give up a life lived for pleasure, etc. Of course they provide remote motivations for such a move, but the arguments can scarcely be expected to change one’s life. (It is significant that after Thomas Aquinas has, in the Summa, given argument why pleasure, etc. cannot constitute human happiness, he adds that the best proof of their inadequacy is in enjoying or having them: call that an existential or experimental proof. It would seem close to what SK means by despair.)

The aesthete, typified by the seducer, seeks to live his life in the moment. 1003 conquests in Spain alone by Don Juan suggest the inadequacy of the single conquest, the need to repeat the moment, but without, Kierkegaard suggests, acquiring a history. Nothing binds the moments together save their similarity to one another. They do not add up to a coherent life. As it happens, living in the moment, a completely unreflective life, is impossible for human persons, they being what they are. The motto of Volume I of Either/or is taken from the English poet Young: Are passions then the pagans of the soul, reason alone baptized? The aesthetic life is the impossible attempt to live solely on the level of passion, but reason cannot be expunged.

The inadequacy of the ethical is differently shown. The type of the ethical is the spouse, the husband. The married person’s life incorporates a lifetime commitment, children underwrite it, there is a satisfying procedure from youth, through middle age, to senior status. The married exhibit the universally human, as the aesthete is a protest against it, a failure to meet its demands. Hence the ethical advice: Get married, to the young man.

The breakdown of the ethical is most often exhibited by a broken engagement: one takes himself out of the unuiversally human, not to sink to the aesthetic, but to rise to the religious. Hence the type of the religious is the celibate. To turn away from marriage, from an engagement, requires a justification, but one, at least as SK presents it, that cannot be made intelligible to others. The story of Abraham and Isaac as recounted in Fear & Trembling , is a far more dramatic way in which the religious person is asked to act outside and above ethical categories. A morally prohibited act is commanded by God; a murder becomes an act holy and pleasing. Thus, the religious is presented not merely as above and beyond the ethical, but in contradiction to it.

We will return to all this.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy, like the aesthetic and the ethical, can present an obstacle to the Christian life. Obviously, we have to know what ‘philosophy’ means here in order to see that it presents such an obstacle.

1. The first step we take is an examination of the unfinished work Johannes Climacus or De omibus dubitandum est. A young man for whom thinking has become a passion akin to being in love, is attracted by what philosophers say. Philosophy seems to be what he is looking for. His curiosity is piqued and he notices that there seems to be a basic thesis presupposed, namely, that one must doubt everything, and there are three different theses presented as to how this thesis relates to philosophy.

*philosophy begins with doubt

*in order to philosophize, one must have doubted

*modern philosophy begins with doubt.

2. Since none of these statements clarifies de omnibus dubitandum est, Johannes is on his own, and he turns to the thesis itself. The discussion ends, abruptly and unfinished.

*the effort to define doubt relies on somewhat convuluted Hegelian terminology, and you will find it difficult to follow. No matter. Since the discussion is unfinished, we must look for clues as to why this is the case.

*the undeveloped contrast between wonder and doubt as the starting point or pressuposition of philosophizing indicates Johannes’ preference for the classical (Plato, Aristotle) view, not as a competing theory, but simply the way it is. Doubt is a contrived and incoherent starting point; wonder is something everyone has experienced.

*the leit-motif is the suggestion that only faith overcomes doubt.

But what is faith. Is it Santayana’s faith in the veracity of sense experience and thus of the reality of the external world? Or is it religious faith?

3. When Johannes Climacus becomes the author of Philosophical Fragmetns and its postscript, we see what SK’s real concern is.

*Kant and religion within the limits of reason alone.

*Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is the truth of religion.

Kant, in What is Enlightenment? gives as the mark of enlightenment the refusal to take anything on faith or authority; the mind, reason, is autonomous and can only assent to what demands assent on a rational basis.

Such thinkers as Kant and Hegel, far from simply rejecting Christianity, redefined it in such a way as to make it acceptable to the Enlightenment outlook.

Miracles and the like are set aside as irrelevant; Christianity becomes a moral message (The Sermon on the Mount) that is pretty much wehat any rational person would come up with. Christianity is redefined in such a way that its acceptance is indistinguishable from the acceptance of any other proposal.

4. Hegel and the Preface to The Philosophy of History

We are called not only to love God but to know Him. How is this to be done? Not by cosmological proofs, e.g. the proof from motion to an Unmoved Mover, but from history. History is God manifesting Himself in time: Providence.

But history seems full of chance and happenstance. This is an allusion. The task of philosophical history is to show the necessity with which history unfolds.

This in tun requires us to concentrate on world historical figures.

Christianity emerges as a necessary consequence of what went before.

Christianity has thus become a scholarly problem, one only philosophers are equipped to handle.

5. Key clues in De omnibus dubitandum est

*the contrast of wonder and doubt indicates SK’s sense that modern philosophy had not advanced over classical philosophy (p. 145)

* the discussion of authority (e.g. p. 152

*contrast of religious and ethical knowledge with speculative\ (p. 151)

**statements that implicate the speaker: interest (p. 170)