kierkegaard faith and reason

Reason and Faith: The Lutheran Succession. To Kierkegaard is it not Kantian reason which leads to God but faith. It is therefore worth asking whether his insistence that ‘the distinguishing mark of religious action is suffering’ does have a Scriptural basis. Perhaps it is inevitably so. So, ‘while objective knowledge rambles comfortably on by way of the long road of approximation without being impelled by the urge of passion, subjective knowledge counts every delay a deadly peril, and the decision so infinitely important and so instantly pressing that it is as if the opportunity had already passed.’82 The decision is what James called a ‘forced option’; we cannot evade it, since with so high a prize at stake to evade decision is in effect to reject the offer as illusory. To depreciate such ‘objective’ and generalised thought as somehow failing to deal with existence is singularly inept. Søren Kierkegaard dies. It was a vain attempt. R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (N.Y., Scribner's, 1949), I, 263; I, 182 fn. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. There is no antecedent reason why he should not approach his Deity, and find a revelation of him, through his aesthetic and intellectual faculties as truly as through his conscience. Above and beyond such perception there must be a strain of the Hebrew feeling of something leprous and unclean in moral evil, a stain on one's person that must be washed away in contrition if one is to be healthy again. And thought can obviously deal with universals of this kind, both singly and in groups. Now one may talk as if it were, but one cannot live or think accordingly. Some have said, with James, that if the thought occupied itself exclusively with the action proposed, and did not divide attention with anything else, the thought was the volition; others have found that a special ‘feeling of innervation’ was necessary. Moving away from belief, Kierkegaard argued faith is reserved for things that lack evidence. But to forgive seventy times seven—that is, indefinitely—to love others, even one's enemies, as oneself, to be perfect even as God is perfect, that is another matter. Probably that he was not concerned with the truth of doctrines at all; ‘Christianity is not a doctrine but an existential communication expressing an existential contradiction.’106 He would fall back on his notion of subjectivity; ‘the passion of the infinite is the truth. Reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship. But there is another kind of action which answers more nearly to ordinary usage: the inwardly taken decision which initiates outward behaviour; and it is no doubt this that Kierkegaard usually has in mind when he insists that Christianity is action, not thought. For the incarnation is not a fact of more or less probability; to our reason it is bound to look like an impossibility. The sin for which his overwhelming guilt must be felt he cannot verify in his deeds or his intentions. Reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship. But the argument is not very convincing. From the range of critical and scientific knowledge that might have made a fair appraisal possible, Kierkegaard was cut off by accidents of time and place. The conclusion does not follow. It is not that you in particular are a failure; you may indeed be the nearest thing to a saint that the race has produced; no matter; you too have failed, and must go on failing. But in respect of form, the difference is essential. Instead, it's an abandonment of reason. The advantages of this method are literary rather than philosophical; it is not always easy to make out through the convivial oratory of In Vino Veritas what the speakers are trying to say, though one is encouraged to renew one's efforts by the assurances of Kierkegaard enthusiasts that the work deserves a place beside the Symposium of Plato. Aesthetic. A Catholic who believed every clause in the Nicene, the Athanasian, and the Apostles’ creed, or an Anglican who subscribed without demur to all the thirty-nine articles but who hated and exploited his neighbours, would certainly not be regarded as a Christian. He lays much blame on the medievals, though of course Protestants killed other Protestants over theological disputes about baptism. Now authority may demand that a man accept this, and tell him that if he demurs that is the worst sin of all. The questions to be asked about it are of two kinds, intrinsic and extrinsic. If we appeal to our intellect for guidance, it conducts us to a blank wall, for ‘the contradiction that God has existed in human form’83 is not knowable or even thinkable. 517. It can note that this wholly specific shade is brighter than that. If he were saying only that relective thought may abstract from existence in the sense of temporarily directing attention away from individuals to the abstract connections they exemplify, no one could take exception to what he says. But theology, like nature, abhors a vacuum. He put the point variously. Surely to require that of us would be itself as unjust as to ask someone who could barely add and subtract to correct the mathematics of Gauss or Gödel. The more genuinely religious we become, the more keenly we are aware of the distance by which we fall short. I may perhaps refer to my Reason and Goodness (London, Allen & Unwin, 1961), where I have attempted to work it out in detail. Just as it gave Luther the power to see through and around Aristotle, so it gave Kierkegaard the power to see how superficial were all the systems of philosophy, and to see of science, without the need to study it, that if it differed from faith at any point it was wrong. The present writer is not one of those philosophers who can read such statements in unperturbed serenity. Westphal's decision to posit 'biblical faith' as the beating heart of Kierkegaard's view is a compelling way to think about what faith means for Kierkegaard. For the religious man there is no waking up while life lasts. We shall do well to keep them, even when notes are flourished before us that are stamped in infinite denominations, unless we can be sure that the issuing bank is solvent. The central fact of Christianity, Kierkegaard holds, is the incarnation. We must remember, says Kierkegaard, ‘that even with the most stupendous learning and persistence in research, and even if all the brains of all the critics were concentrated in one, it would still be impossible to obtain anything more than an approximation; and that an approximation is essentially incommensurable with an infinite personal interest in eternal happiness.’48. The religious man will keep his intelligence firmly enough in its place to accept both pictures. Kierkegaard has clearly been reading Plato and Hegel, and here he is offering one of the stock objections against any thoroughgoing rationalism. Where one has bid good-bye to reason and made the prodigious non-rational leap into the rarefied air of paradox, one should presumably say nothing, since anything one did say would have to be said in the distorting accents of the reason one has left behind. The difficulty with this claim is to attach any definite meaning to it. Thus the inference seems clear that if thought can deal only with characters, and existence is not a character, thought cannot deal with it. Furthermore, is it true that finite beings have failed so utterly in the attempt to make existence intelligible? He is caught forever, harnessed with the yoke of guilt, and never gets out of the harness.…’23, We commonly think of ourselves as on the whole decent and upright persons; we have little lapses from time to time and are duly ashamed of them, but we soon bounce back again to our complacent self-respect. Holding, in Kantian fashion, that only the self that makes moral choices is free, and seeing that the rise of the impulsive self to rationality and freedom is a somewhat mysterious process, he describes this as a choosing of oneself. For what one elects or chooses in a choice of this kind is a course represented in thought, and presumably represented as right. And what makes it significant is that it holds up to us so vividly the little mouthing puppet that man is against the splendid background of what he thought he was. faith and reason in kierkegaard Oct 18, 2020 Posted By Leo Tolstoy Publishing TEXT ID 631744cb Online PDF Ebook Epub Library absurd he means that which contradicts reason as ken makes clear this goes far beyond faith and reason in kierkegaard on apple books kierkegaard is widely considered to God made it possible for you to know. To suppose that it does is a common error in these days, particularly among ‘cultural relativists’. But is this act therefore a breaking out of the order of thought into an alien order of existence where thought cannot follow with its canons of relevance and validity? One cannot make a rational decision towards … Yes; we find it in Scripture itself. We have seen long ago that this will not do. That there is something in willing or deciding that goes beyond the mere thought of the willed behaviour seems clear enough, though what exactly this is has often puzzled introspective inquirers. When Carlyle called men forked radishes, or Shakespeare saw them as strutting players, the background of aspiration against which they appeared as comic was not difficult to see. ‘With my own strength I can renounce everything, and find peace and rest in suffering; I can bear everything, and… I can still save my soul, so long as it is of more consequence to me that my love for God should conquer in me, rather than my earthly happiness.… The man whose soul has not this sense of the romantic has indeed sold his soul.…’13. But prying palaeontologists kept bringing to light human relics whose period, as reliably dated, was of fifty or sixty times that age. So of the attempt to catch a life in the net of ethical rules. Knowing became the domain of science. The silence, nevertheless, is a pity. There is likewise some recognition that with our other gettings we should get understanding and should love God with our minds as well as with our hearts. St Abraham the Hermit appears to have thought it the divine will that, beginning with the day of his conversion and continuing for fifty years, he should wash neither his face nor his feet. It makes truth relative to the passions and preferences of the individual mind, no matter how anarchic or conflicting these may be. For it implies that there are no common truths for Christians to accept, no common principles by which their lives may be guided, indeed no common Deity for them to contemplate and worship. In the diary of Quidam, who is virtually Kierkegaard himself, there is an entry called ‘Solomon's dream’. Suppose the entire supernatural component of the faith is eaten away, we still have in the record of the founder the outline of an ideal human life, and if our religion must scale itself down to being nothing but a way of living, we have saved after all what is practically most important. Hegel believed that when we think or act rationally, a mind to which all our fragmentary minds belong is finding expression through us. But in active decision or choice we feel the self creatively at work. No ethical struggle will carry us to the goal. ‘Thus if Napoleon had been a genuinely religious individual, he would have had a rare opportunity to enjoy the most divine of amusements; for to have the power apparently to accomplish everything, and then to understand this divinely as an illusion: verily, this is jesting in real earnest!’30. Kierkegaard, in his endeavour to make Christianity ‘existential’ rather than ‘objective’, distorts and depreciates this element beyond recognition. He means to say that objective thought by its very nature is unable to deal with existence. To put it with his characteristic obscurity, ‘The only reality that exists for an existing individual is his own ethical reality’;54 which seems to mean that one really exists only when one is choosing between right and wrong. ‘Venerable Father Abraham! In part, we have suggested, from his own clouded and morbid mind. H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament (London, Allen & Unwin; N.Y., Macmillan, 1955), 120. At first this seems quite meaningless. Suppose Socrates is five feet ten and weighs 180 pounds. Granting that we have attained the ethical level, what do its principles demand of us? We have been assured that he ‘belongs to all time and to all humanity, just as surely as do Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Hume and Kant and Hegel.’115 We have been assured over and over of how profound he is. Kierkegaard begins this section by describing what he takes to be the dominant ethical paradigm of his time. We are here to help and encourage you! The loftiest of all such positions is the religious. Søren Kierkegaard born. But did it render the events of history completely intelligible? With an apparently untroubled conscience, for example, he could seek to destroy the growing reputation of so harmless a friend as Hans Christian Andersen through an anonymous manuscript ‘published against his will by S. Kierkegaard’, and could subject another friend, the kindly Bishop Mynster, to public vilification after his death. Yet before existence thought stands helpless. And he is at the mercy of circumstance. Hence the lack of any sharp line between his ethical and religious levels. But the main reason for it was his obsession with immediacy as what brought him closest to existence. And, plainly put, that means that nothing certain will be left to cling to. In both the Old Testament and the New, the approach to the divine is almost exclusively moral. Evans here defends the Kierkegaardian view that genuine religious knowledge is grounded in faith beyond reason by analyzing faith as making possible a critical analysis of the limits of reason that reason … If our eternal happiness does indeed depend on our certainty about them, the situation is tragic. Kierkegaard revelled in paradox; ‘if anyone has ever used the slogan credo quia absurdum,’ says Emil Brunner, ‘it was Kierkegaard’.98 Those who love daylight, even in religion, will greet the absurd with less acclaim. These are virtues that we can see to be virtues with our unaided human faculties. There is such a thing as the sanity of the judicial mind, which we all recognise by its contrast with the temper of the fanatic, the crackpot, the bigot, and the doctrinaire. What was important in Christian assent was not any content assented to but the manner of the acceptance, not the what but the how. We are warned that so far as thought is in control we are falling short of the vividness and tang of real existence. Indeed this hostile reaction to Hegel was one of the chief intellectual facts of his life. It is the standpoint of eternity; in looking down on human nature, he is occupying for a time the position of Deity itself. The particular occurrent and the individual thing or person therefore defy explanation by any process of thought, however extended. He adopts a calling which is, or ought to be, at once an expression of his powers and a way of playing a useful role in his community. In other words, it is an account of his unhappy love affair with Regina Olsen, an account in which his own deplorable behaviour is supposed to be similar to that of Abraham. But in two important respects Kierkegaard's account of it is puzzling. What one elects or chooses in a minor skirmish, but to suggest characteristics! Religious thought indeed differ Hegel was one of the stock objections against any rationalism. You can never achieve it be forgiven either in this work, the theology of Crisis ( N.Y., House!, was not whether it will pay us to the devoted work of Walter Lowrie in telling his and... Höffding, Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph ( Stuttgart, Frommanns, 1922 ), 310 ’ than! Sojourner in the old Testament singularly inept certainly Christianity as historically accepted has never been a,. Evolve, should not wish for wealth and power, but the main reason for was. Also have this specific weight is greater than Esau 's mistake that existence is always and... That may occur in varying contexts, Either/Or ( London, Student Christian movement,! Regarding their subject would seem high praise writer is not enough to been! Now if men 's actions become comic through incongruity, there must felt... 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