Kerkegaard & Wittgenstein-John Cook

Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein
Author(s): John W. Cook

Source: Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 199-219
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Rel. Stud.
23, pp. 199-219
JOHN
W.COOK
Santa
Barbara,
USA
KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN
In recent
years
there has been
a
tendency
in some
quarters
to see an
affinity
between the views of
Kierkegaard
and
Wittgenstein
on the
subject
of
religious
belief. It seems to me that this is a
mistake,
that
Kierkegaard's
views
were
fundamentally
at odds with
Wittgenstein's.
That this fact is not
generally
recognized
is,
I
suspect, owing
to the
obscurity
of
Kierkegaard's
most
fundamental
assumptions. My
aim here is to make those
assumptions explicit
and to show how
they
differ from
Wittgenstein's.
1
Everyone recognizes
that
Kierkegaard developed
his
philosophy
of
religion
in
opposition
to
Hegel.
What is not so
widely recognized
is that his
positive
account of
Christianity depends heavily
on
Hegelian
and Platonic
assump?
tions,
assumptions
which he took to be so
widely
shared
by
his readers that
he did not bother to state them
clearly.
These
assumptions
run
right through
most of
Kierkegaard's writings,
and it would be an enormous
undertaking
to
lay
them bare in all their various roles. I will confine
myself
therefore to
a
single, yet crucial,
instance:
Kierkegaard's representation
of the incar?
nation as the Absolute Paradox. To understand
this,
we must
begin by
reviewing
the features of
Hegelianism
that
Kierkegaard
was
reacting against.
What
Kierkegaard
found most
objectionable
in
Hegel's philosophy
will be
evident to
anyone
familiar with Part
in
of
Hegel's
Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion.
Here is a
philosopher purporting
to have
a
superior
understanding
of what
unphilosophical
devout Christians believe in
regard
to their own
salvation.
Hegel lays
out a
metaphysical system
in which
Christian doctrine is
supposedly
shown to be
an
expression
of certain
necessary
truths which
Hegel, merely by taking thought,
has discovered on
his own.
That God has reconciled himself with man
by
himself
becoming
a
man
and
dying
on the cross is treated
by Hegel
as a
metaphysical
truth
(or
partial truth)
which
any
philosopher
with a
properly
dialectical and
rationalistic
metaphysics
could
figure
out for himself.
Henceforth, then,
the
believer can
rise above mere
faith,
for he will have the
certainty
which
Hegel's
philosophy
makes available to him.
While
Kierkegaard
did not
reject Hegel's
rationalism
altogether (indeed,
many
of his own
writings
are
exercises in
rationalism),
he did
strenously
200
JOHN
W. COOK
object
to its
application
to the central
teachings
of
Christianity.
Rationalism,
which he often referred to as
'science',
has limited
application,
he
thought,
because of certain
inescapable
limitations in human
'understanding'.
Thus,
we find
Kierkegaard writing
in his
journal:
Until now
people
have
always expressed
themselves in the
following
way:
the
knowledge
that one cannot understand this or the other
thing
does not
satisfy
science,
the aim of which is to understand. Here is the
mistake;
people ought
to
say
the
very
opposite
: if human science refuses to understand that there is
something
which it
cannot understand... then all is confusion. For it is the
duty
of the human
understanding
to understand that there
are
things
which it cannot
understand,
and
what those
things
are.1
Kierkegaard goes
on to
say that,
instead of
acknowledging
its
limitations,
'human
understanding
has
vulgarly occupied
itself with
nothing
but under?
standing'.
And the chief instance of
this,
he
thought,
was
Hegel's
claim to
have
explained
away
('mediated')
the 'contradiction' found in the doctrine
of the incarnation.
'
In the Church
',
writes
Hegel,
"
Christ has been called the God-Man. This
is the
extraordinary
combination which
directly
contradicts the
Understanding_'2
But this
'extraordinary
combination' contradicts the
understanding, says Hegel, only
so
long
as we fail to
give
it a
proper
philosophical explanation.
Once it is so
explained,
we see that God's
becoming
a man was
necessary ;
we see that
'
the divine must
appear
in the
form of
immediacy'.3
When the doctrine of the incarnation is restated in a
proper philosophical
manner,
says Hegel,
it
expresses
'the truth that the
divine and human natures are not
implicitly
different. God in human form.
The truth is that there is
only
one
reason,
one
Spirit, [so that] Spirit
as
finite
has no true existence'.4 The
seeming
contradition in the God-Man resides
in
thinking
that
God,
a timeless
being,
entered
history
as a man
and
thereby
became
subject,
as all men
are,
to 'time determination'. But there is an
error,
says Hegel,
in
thinking
of the matter in this
way,
for even in the case of Man
the finite and
temporal
'has no true existence'. This demonstrable
philosophical
truth,
he
claims,
is what
we find
imperfectly expressed
in the
Christian doctrine that
God,
who is
timeless,
became
a man.
By 'appearing
in the form of
immediacy
',
God forced into consciousness the
knowledge
that
Man,
in his
essence,
is not finite and
temporal.
Man is
no more a
temporal
being
than is God.
Accordingly,
in
becoming
a
Man,
God did not become
subject
to time determinations: it is mere
appearance
that
Jesus
was born
1
The
Journals of
Sor en
Kierkegaard,
ed. and trans. Alexander Dru
(London:
Oxford
University Press,
1938), ?633.
Notice
Kierkegaard's qualification
here: it is human
science,
human
understanding,
that can
reach
only
so far.
This,
as we will
see,
is an
important escape
clause for
Kierkegaard,
for he is
prepared
to allow that God can understand
(can
conceive or
think)
what a mere human cannot.
2
G. W. F.
Hegel,
Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion,
trans. E. B.
Speirs (New
York: Humanities
Press,
1962),
vol.
m, p. 76.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
p. 77.
KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN 201
on a certain date in human
history
and was crucified
some
years
later. This
being
so,
the
paradox
of the God-Man is
dissolved,
explained
away.
Because
time is not
real,
there is
no contradiction in the doctrine of the incarnation.1
In this
attempt
at
'
mediation,' Hegel, according
to
Kierkegaard,
has failed
to
recognize
the limits of human
understanding.
He chides
Hegel by saying
that
Christianity
'
has
proclaimed
itself as the Paradox...
[and]
it would seem
very strange
that
Christianity
should have
come into the world
merely
to
receive
an
explanation;
as if it should have been somewhat bewildered about
itself,
and hence entered the world to consult that wise
man,
the
speculative
philosopher,
who
can come to its assistance
by furnishing
the
explanation'.2
In
Kierkegaard's
view
Hegel's attempt
to remove the
paradox
of the
God-Man
is,
and must
be,
a failure. The matter would be
otherwise,
he
says,
if
we were
dealing
here with
a 'relative
paradox',
i.e. with
something
that
strikes
us as
paradoxical only
because
we haven't
thought
about it
sufficiently,
for
a relative
paradox
can,
with
ingenuity,
be
explained
in such
a
way
as to remove the
appearance
of self-contradiction. But the doctrine
of the
incarnation,
the doctrine that God became
a
man,
is not such
a
paradox.
It is
an
'
absolute
paradox
'
(CUP,
p. 195),
and its
self-contradictory
character cannot be removed
by recasting
it,
as
Hegel
proposes,
in
'diplo?
matic
phraseology' (CUP, p. 200).3 Christianity, says Kierkegaard,
affirms
'
that the
paradox
it talks about
cannot be
thought,
and thus is different from
a relative
paradox
which
at most
presents
a
difficulty
for
thought' (CUP,
p. 498).
Such is
Kierkegaard's
view of the
matter,
and we must now
try
to
understand both what led him to this view and how he
attempts
to deal with
certain of the difficulties his view
presents.
11
The first
question
to consider is what made
Kierkegaard
so confident that
the
paradox
of the God-Man is an absolute
paradox. Why,
indeed,
did he
think it
a
paradox
at all? The answer to this second
question
is not hard to
find. It is
given
in the
way
Kierkegaard
states the doctrine of the incarnation.
For
instance,
he tells us that 'The
paradoxical
character of
Christianity
consists in its constant use of time and the historical in relation to the eternal'
(CUP, p. 88)
and that 'The
paradox
consists
principally
in the fact that
1
I have here
summarized, although
without all of
Hegel's categories,
the
argument implicit
in
Hegel's
thought (ibid. pp. 33-100).
A critical
point
is that
Hegel
held that God is timeless.
God,
he
says,
is
'beyond
time';
His
'eternity
is contrasted with time'
(ibid. p. 3).
2
Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
trans.,
David F. Swenson
(Princeton, 1944), p. 191. Subsequent
references to this volume will be
placed
in the text with the abbreviation CUP followed
by
the
page
number.
3
Kierkegaard's
most
directly
stated
opposition
to
Hegel
is this :
'
Christianity
is no doctrine
concerning
the
unity
of the divine and the
human;
nor is it
any
other of the
logical transcriptions
of
Christianity'
(CUP, p. 290).
202
JOHN
W. COOK
God,
the
Eternal,
came into existence in time
as a
particular
man'
(CUP,
p. 528).
He also
puts
it this
way:
'But that that which in accordance with
its nature is eternal comes into existence in
time,
is
born, grows up,
and
dies
-
this is a breach with all
thinking' (CUP, p. 513).
What is evident here
is that
Kierkegaard,
like
Hegel, thought
of God as a timeless
being,
as
'beyond
time'.1
Accordingly,
he berates those
priests
who
speak
of God's
eternity
as
everlasting
duration:
'
If the
priest
would
say eternity,
let him
say
eternity
-
yet
sometimes he
says...
"unto all the eternities of
eternity,
world
without end"'
(CUP, p. 528).
This
conception
of
eternity-as
ever
lastingness,
as an
endless
period
of time
-
is sheer
fantasy
and
confusion, says
Kierkegaard,
and one whose
conception
of God is
comprised
of such
fantasy
and confusion 'cannot become aware of the absolute
paradox' [ibid.).
God
is
properly
conceived of as a
timeless
being,
and that is
why Kierkegaard
speaks
of God as
'
that which
by
virtue of its essence cannot become historical
'
(CUP, p. 345).
Or as
he also
puts it,
'it is the
perfection
of the eternal to
have no
history,
the eternal
being [is]
the
only
existence that has
absolutely
no
history'.2
So
far,
of
course,
Kierkegaard
is in
perfect agreement
with
Hegel
:
the
doctrine of the incarnation is
(they agree)
a
paradox
of some sort
because,
on the one
hand,
God is a
timeless
being,
not
subject
to time
determinations,
and
yet
the doctrine states that some
hundreds of
years ago
God was
born,
grew up,
and
eventually
died.
On what
grounds,
then,
does
Kierkegaard
dismiss
Hegel's
'
mediation
'
of
the
paradox
and insist that the God-Man is not a
merely
relative
paradox?
It is no use his
formulating
the doctrine of the
incarnation,
as he does in the
passages just quoted,
as the doctrine that the eternal
came into existence in
time,
was
born, grew up,
and died. Let us
grant
that this is a
proper
formulation of the doctrine. Even
so,
it would be
merely question begging
for
Kierkegaard
to
dispute Hegel's position by simply declaring
that no other
formulation of the doctrine is
possible.
In
reply
a
defender of
Hegel
would
need
only say:
Look at
Hegel's philosophy,
for he has shown that the
self-contradictory
formulation is not the
only possible
formulation.
Plainly,
if
Kierkegaard
is to dismiss
Hegel's position,
he must somehow take issue with
Hegel's
claim that 'the finite has no true
existence',
i.e. that
men,
including
Jesus,
are not
subject
to time determinations. And
this,
in
fact,
is what
Kierkegaard
does.
It is
by
no means
easy
to
explain
how
Kierkegaard goes
about
this,
for
1
On this
point Hegel
and
Kierkegaard
are
echoing
a
long
tradition in Christian
theology,
which
includes
Anselm, Boethius, Aquinas,
and
Schleiermacher,
all of whom held that God knows all
things
in a timeless
present.'
The most direct influence
on
Kierkegaard
was, very likely, Schleiermacher,
whom
he studied
diligently during
his
preparation
for the
ministry.
Nelson Pike's God and Timelessness
(New
York :
Schocken
Books, 1970) provides
an excellent treatment of this
theological
tradition.
2
Philosophical Fragments,
trans. David F. Swenson
(Princeton, 1946), p.
62.
20?
here we encounter the most obscure feature of his
philosophy,
and mis?
understandings
of it abound in the literature. To remove one such
misunderstanding,
we will do well to
begin by considering
a
passage
in which
he takes issue with an
implication
of
Hegel's
claim
that,
because
man
is
immortal,
men
(including Jesus)
are timeless
(not subject
to time determi?
nations), namely,
the
implication
that
Hegelian philosophers,
too,
are
timeless
beings.
In the course
of this discussion he makes the
following
satirical
remarks,
which
might
remind one of the
style
of G. E. Moore's
philosophizing (CUP, pp. 271-2):
One must... be
very
careful in
dealing
with a
philosopher
of the
Hegelian
school,
and,
above
all,
to make certain of the
identity
of the
being
with whom one has the
honor to discourse. Is he a
human
being,
an
existing
human
being?
Is he himself
sub
specie aeterni,
even when he
sleeps,
eats,
blows his
nose,
or
whatever else
a
human
being
does? Is he himself the
pure
'I am
I'?_Does he in fact exist? And if he
does,
is he then not in the
process
of
becoming,
does he not face the future? And
does he ever face the future
by way
of action?_Was he born sub
specie aeterni,
and
has he lived sub
specie
aeterni ever
since,
so that he cannot even
understand what I
am
asking
about,
never
having
had
anything
to do with the
future,
and never
having
experienced any
decision? In that case I
readily
understand that it is not a
human
being
I have the honor to address.
One
way
to read this
passage
would be take
Kierkegaard
to be
insisting
that
a
philosopher
is
guilty
of an
obvious
absurdity
if he declares that human
beings
are not
temporal beings.
And on that
interpretation
we
might
think
that
Kierkegaard's position,
vis a
vis
Hegel,
is as
follows:
Hegel imagines
that
he can
explain away
the
self-contradictory
character of the doctrine of the
incarnation because he has made the mistake of
thinking
that human
beings,
including Jesus,
are not
temporal beings,
i.e. because he
mistakenly
thinks
that the doctrine does not
really
mean what it
appears
to mean when it
speaks
of
Jesus being
born,
growing up,
and
eventually being
crucified. That
is,
the
foregoing passage
might
incline us to think that
Kierkegaard
is
saying
:
The
doctrine of the incarnation is
an
absolute
paradox,
a
contradiction,
because
its
meaning,
when
fully
set
out,
is that an
essentially
timeless
being
became
a man
and
(inasmuch
as men are
temporal beings) thereby
became
subject
to time
determinations,
so that it
says
that God both is and is not timeless.
Let us
think about this.
If we are
inclined to the
foregoing interpretation,
this
may
be
owing
to
the influence of Moore's
essay
'The
Conception
of
Reality',1
where Moore
examines
Bradley's
claim that
Time,
although
it
exists,
is not real.
According
to
Moore,
Bradley mistakenly
thinks that he can
'
make a
distinction between
44being
real" on
the one
hand,
and
"existing", "being
a
fact",
and
"being"
on
the other hand
-
as if he meant to
say
that a
thing may exist,
and
be,
1
Reprinted
in G. E.
Moore,
Philosophical
Studies
(London, 1922), pp. 197-219.
204 JOHN
W. COOK
and be
a
fact,
and
yet
not be real'.1 The idea of such a
distinction
may
be
plausible,
says Moore,
until we
carefully
examine what it could mean to
say
that
something
is unreal. Moore
explains:
What, then, ought
Mr.
Bradley
to mean
by
'Time is unreal'? What would most
people
mean
by
this
proposition?
I do not think there is much
difficulty
in
discovering
what sort of
thing they
would mean
by
it. Of
course, Time,
with a
big
T,
seems to be a
highly
abstract kind of
entity,
and to define
exactly
what can be
meant
by saying
of
an
entity
ofthat sort that it is unreal does seem to offer difficulties.
But if
you try
to translate the
proposition
into the
concrete,
and to ask what it
implies,
there
is,
I
think, very
little doubt as to the sort of
thing
it
implies.
The moment
you
try
to do
this,
and think what it
really
comes
to, you
at once
begin thinking
of a
number of different kinds of
proposition,
all of which
plainly
must be
untrue,
it Time
is unreal. If Time is
unreal,
then
plainly nothing
ever
happens
before or after
anything
else;
it is never true that
anything
is
past;
never true that
anything
will
happen
in the future
;
never true that
anything
is
happening
now
;
and so
on_And
it is
clear, also,
that to
say
that the falsehood of all
propositions
of these kinds is
implied [by
'Time is
unreal']
is
equivalent
to
saying
that there are no facts of certain
corresponding
kinds
-
no facts which consist in one event
happening
before
another;
none which consist in one event
happening
before
another;
none which consist in
an event
being past
or
future,
and so on_We
may, then,
I
think, say
that what
'Time is unreal' means is
simply...'There
are no
temporal
facts.'2
Moore
goes
on to
argue
that
this,
which
Bradley ought
to
mean,
is
also,
in
part
at
least,
what he does mean and that
therefore,
when he
says
that Time
is
unreal,4
what he means is inconsistent with its
being
true that Time exists '.3
In
short,
Moore claims to have
shown, by
his method of
translating
into the
concrete,
that
Bradley
cannot make
any
such distinction as he thinks he has
made, namely,
between
reality
and existence. If Time is
unreal,
then there
are no
temporal
facts
(e.g.
no one has ever been
born, grown up,
and
died),
and
conversely
if Time exists
(if
there are
temporal facts),
then Time is real.
Now because
Kierkegaard
ridicules
Hegelians by making
them seem to
be
saying
that
they
are not 4in the
process
of
becoming'
-
that
they
have
never faced the
future,
never made a
decision and so
on,
we
may
be led to
suppose
that
Kierkegaard,
like
Moore,
meant to
reject
any
distinction
between
reality
and existence. And because he
repeatedly
insists that
whatever exists is cin
time',4
it
might
seem that he is
prepared
to
say, quite
flatly,
that
Jesus
was a
temporal being,
that his birth and death and so on
1
Ibid.
p. 199. Bradley, having argued
that time is unreal
(is
mere
appearance),
entertains an
objection
to
this, namely,
that time cannot be unreal because
change
'
is a matter of direct
experience
;
it is a fact
and hence it cannot be
explained away'.
He
replies:
This 'is indubitable.
Change
is a
fact_And,
if
we could not in
any way
perceive
how the
fact [that
this or that
changes]
can be
unreal,
we should be
placed,
I
admit,
in a
hopeless
dilemma.' But this dilemma doesn't
arise,
he
continues,
because it is
wrong
to think
'
that an
appeal
to
experience
can
prove reality.
That I find
something
in existence in the world
or in
myself,
shows that this
something
exists,
and it cannot show more.
Any
deliverance of consciousness... is
but a deliverance of consciousness_ It is a
fact,
like other
facts,
to be dealt
with,
and there is
no
presumption anywhere
that
any fact
is better than
appearance.' (Quoted by Moore,
ibid.
pp.
201-2,
from
Bradley's Appearance
and
Reality.)
2
Ibid.
pp. 209-11.
3
Ibid.
p. 214.
4
The
phrase
'whatever exists' does not include
God,
for
according
to
Kierkegaard,
'God does not
exist,
he is eternal'
(CUP, p. 296).
205
were
temporal
facts,
and that this cannot be
explained away
or
qualified by any
sort
of philosophical analysis.
Yet the truth of the
matter,
as we will
see,
is
just
the
opposite
of this:
Kierkegaard's position depends entirely
on
his
thinking
he
can
make
a
distinction that is similar
to,
although
more
complex
than,
Bradley's.1
In fact it is
quite
easy
to see that
Kierkegaard
must have had some such
distinction in mind. For had his
position
been similar to
Moore's,
his claim
that the God-Man is an
absolute
paradox
would have been tantamount to
his
saying
that
Christianity
is sheer nonsense
and that no one could
possibly
be a
believer. On Moore's view the
proposition 'Jesus
was born
many
centuries
ago, grew
to
manhood,
and was
eventually
crucified' cannot be
reduced to
(or
transformed
into)
a
proposition (or propositional fragment)
that states no
temporal
facts. It
is,
as we
might put it,
an
irreducibly temporal
proposition. Accordingly,
on
Moore's view the
proposition
'God,
a
timeless
being,
came into
being
at a
definite time as an
individual
man,
grew up,
and
was
crucified
'
can be
nothing
but
a
plain contradiction,
a
piece
of sheer
nonsense. If God is
timeless,
then it is
logically impossible
that he became
a
man,
and
conversely
if God did become
a
man,
then it is
logically impossible
that he is a timeless
being. Consequently, Kierkegaard,
because he holds that
God is
timeless,
must choose between
concluding
that
(a)
the doctrine of the
incarnation is
plain
nonsense,
so that no one in his
right
mind could believe
it,
and
concluding
that
(b)
it is
possible (while yet disagreeing
with
Hegel)
to draw a distinction like
Bradley's, according
to which
temporal facts,
although they unquestionably exist,
are not real.
The first of these alternatives could be embraced
only by
someone who
was
flatly opposed
to
Christianity.
It is
not, therefore,
surprising
that
Kierkegaard explicitly rejected
it.
Thus,
in the
Postscript (p. 504)
we find it
said that
...the
believing
Christian not
only possesses
but uses his
understanding...
;
but in
relation to
Christianity
he believes
against
the
understanding
and in this case also
uses
understanding...
to make sure that he believes
against
the
understanding.
Nonsense therefore he cannot believe
against
the
understanding,
for
precisely
the
understanding
will discern that it is nonsense and will
prevent
him from
believing
it,
but he makes so much use of the
understanding
that he becomes aware of the
incomprehensible,
and then he holds fast to
this, believing against
the
understanding.
Plainly, Kierkegaard
is
saying
here that the Christian will
recognize
nonsense
when he sees it and that therefore when he believes
something
he can
make
1
If one wonders
how,
in
keeping
with the
above-quoted passage ridiculing Hegelians, Kierkegaard
could
possibly agree
with
Bradley
that time is
unreal,
it need
only
be recalled that
Bradley,
while
insisting
that Time is mere
appearance,
also insisted that it would be absurd to
deny
that
appearances
exist.
'
For
the
present ',
he
says,
*
we
may keep
a fast hold
upon this,
that
appearances
exist. That is
absolutely certain,
and to
deny
it is nonsense_Our
appearances,
no
doubt, may
be a
beggarly show,
and their nature
to an unknown extent
may
be
something which,
as it
is,
is not true of
reality.
That is one
thing,
and it
is
quite
another to
speak
as if these facts had no actual existence_And I must
repeat
that such an
idea would be sheer nonsense. What
appears,
for that sole
reason,
most
indubitably is;
and there is no
possibility
of
conjuring
its
being away.' (Quoted by Moore, op.
cit.
pp. 198-9.)
206
JOHN
W. COOK
no sense
of,
he will insist that it is not nonsense.
Although
this is
plainly
a
bad
piece
of
reasoning (since
all sorts of
people
fail to detect
nonsense),
it
is nonetheless clear that
Kierkegaard rejects
the first of the aforementioned
alternatives. We
may conclude, therefore,
that he
adopts
the
remaining
alternative,
namely,
that
a
distinction of some sort can be drawn between
reality
and
existence,
so that one can
hold that
temporal
facts
(e.g.
that
Jesus
was
born, grew
to
manhood,
and was
crucified), although they exist, may
not be real.
Our
question
was
this
:
How,
in his
attempt
to show the doctrine of the
incarnation to be
an
absolute
paradox,
did
Kierkegaard
take issue with
Hegel's
claim that
man,
like
God,
is
'beyond time',
not
subject
to time
determinations? We have found reason to think that he did not take a
Moorean stand and hold that
any
temporal
statement about
a man
(including any
such statement about
Jesus)
is
irreducibly temporal.
For in
order to avoid the
consequence
that the absolute
paradox
is
nothing
but sheer
nonsense,
he needs to be able to
say
that in some sense
(or
in some
way)
temporal
statements about
Jesus may
not be
irreducibly temporal,
that the
temporal language
of these statements
may
in some sense
(or
in some
way)
be less than final. At the same
time,
he is most anxious not to let this become
a form of
Hegelianism,
wherein the
paradox
of the God-Man turns out to
be no more than a relative
paradox,
a
paradox
we can
explain away,
leaving
us with a doctrine we can understand.
has considerable
work,
some nice
maneuvering,
to do here.
Just
how he
goes
about this can
be shown most
clearly,
I
think, by eschewing,
for the
moment,
some of his
own
terminology. Accordingly,
in the section that follows I will formulate
Kierkegaard's position
in the
plainest
way
that I
can,
recognizing
that I have
not stated certain matters in
exactly
his manner. It will
be,
if
you like,
a
twentieth
century
version of
Kierkegaard.
in
As a
preliminary
to
stating Kierkegaard's position,
I will
simply
say
that he
held, contrary
to
Aquinas
and
others,
that there
can
be no
proof
that God
exists and
accordingly
held that no one can know that God exists. And
now,
having
said this much in
my
own
voice,
I will affect the voice of
Kierkegaard
himself,
so that the remainder of this section is to be taken as what he
might
say
were he
explaining
himself to
philosophers
of our
century.
Because
we cannot know that God
exists,
we cannot take it to be a
philosophical
truth that there is
a
timeless
being
that beholds and
compre?
hends our
temporal
lives
timelessly,
i.e. as fixed and
unchanging.
On the
contrary, philosophers,
so
long
as
they
are
engaged
in
purely philosophical
thinking,
must concede
thatybr
all
we know there
may
be
no
reality
save that
world of
change
and succession that Kant called the
phenomenal
world.
207
Even
so,
one datum that exists for
philosophers
is a
book
commonly
referred
to as
Holy Scripture,
wherein
a
Creator of all
things,
God,
is
spoken
of and
wherein it is said that God became
a man
and that we humans are
promised
eternal
happiness
if
only
we shall believe.
Moreover,
this
Holy Scripture,
as
the
name itself
suggests, represents itself,
not as some
story
invented
by
mere
mortals,
but as the word of
God,
as his communication to us. Now while there
are some
among
us who will receive this communication in the
spirit
of
simple
faith and
gratitude,
there are also some
among
us
-
Hegel,
for instance
-
who
will think about various
passages
in this book and become
puzzled by
them.
One occasion for such
puzzlement (although
there
are other occasions as
well1)
is that certain
passages speak
of
a man
-
a man born centuries
ago
in Bethlehem
-
as
having
been God himself. A thinker will find this
puzzling
because,
on the one
hand,
he understands God to be
a
timeless
being,
a
being
who cannot
rightly
be
spoken
of in
temporal
terms,
while on the other hand
this
man,
Jesus,
who is said to be God himself is
spoken
of in
Scripture
in
ordinary temporal language,
i.e. in the
language
in which
you
and I
speak
of the events of
our own lives.
Accordingly,
a thinker cannot but wonder
whether there is not here a
perfectly plain
contradiction: a timeless
being
who is
spoken
of in
temporal
terms.
Moreover, (and
this is
a most critical
point,
to which
we will
return)
one
may
think that a
contradiction
here,
in
this book called
Holy Scripture,
is like a
contradiction
anywhere else,
i.e. that
a
contradiction in
Scripture
is fatal in the same
way
a
contradiction is fatal
in
something
a man
might
write
or
say.
And if one does think that
a
contradiction here is
no
less disastrous than
a
contradiction
elsewhere,
then
one
may,
like
Hegel
and all those
Hegelian theologians,
want to
try
to rid
Scripture
of this evident contradiction
-
may want,
that
is,
to invoke some
philosophical theory
which makes it out to be no more than a relative
paradox.
Yet herein lies
a
great mistake,
which I will endeavour to
explain.
First of
all,
it must be realized that there is but one avenue
open
for
explaining away
the
contradiction, namely, by maintaining
that the life of
Jesus
was not
really
an
historical,
temporal, episode,
so that the
temporal
language
of
Scripture
can
be
replaced by non-temporal language.2 This,
of
course,
is what
Hegel
maintained. In
place
of the
proposition
that God was
born at a certain moment of
history
and that he
grew up
and
was
eventually
crucified
-
a
proposition,
be it
noted,
that contains
temporal language (past
tense
verbs,
etc.), Hegel gives
us the
proposition
that there is
a
unity
of God
and
Man,
a
proposition
that he takes to be as free of
temporal language
as
1
Kierkegaard
states another of the Christian
paradoxes
as follows: 'That
"original
sin" is
guilt
-
that
is the real
paradox.
How
paradoxical
that is
may
best be seen thus. It is formed
by compounding
qualitatively
different
categories.
To "inherit"
[in
Danish
'original
sin' is 'inherited
sin']
is a
natural
category [a category
of
nature]
;
guilt
is an ethical and
spiritual category.
Now who would ever
think,
says reason,
of
putting
them
together,
of
saying
that
something
is inherited which
by
definition cannot
be inherited.' The
Journals of
Sor en
Kierkegaard, op.
cit.
?
1061.
2
Kierkegaard
remarks that 'the
language
of
[Hegel's]
abstract
thought... ignores
the concrete and
the
temporal' (CUP, p. 267).
208
JOHN
W. COOK
is 'Twice two is four'.
Here, however,
is the catch. In
keeping
with
orthodoxy, Hegel
allows that
Jesus
was
fully
a
man,
that he
was a man
just
like
any
other
man.
Accordingly,
he cannot hold that the life of
Jesus
is not
in time without
holding
also that the lives of all
men,
including
his
own,
are
not in time. And this he is
quite prepared
to
do,
which is
why
he
explicitly
says
that there is
only
one
Spirit
and that
'Spirit
as finite has no true
existence'. In other
worlds,
one
consequence
of
Hegel's theory
is
that,
in
doing
away
with the
temporal language
that
Scripture
uses in
speaking
of
Jesus,
it also does
away
with the
temporal language (or conceptions)
we
employ
in
speaking
and
thinking
about ourselves. But this is absurd! I can
no more think about
my
life
-
about what I did
yesterday
and
plan
on
doing
this afternoon
-
in some
non-temporal
idiom than I can think about numbers
in a
temporal
idiom.1
Hegel,
in
short, forgot
that
no
one,
not even a
great
logician,
can
escape
his
temporal thinking processes
when
thinking
or
talking
about human
beings,
whether about himself or his
neighbour
or
Jesus.
Even
the
greatest logician
does not behold
everything timelessly,
in an
unchanging
consciousness in which there is
no before and after.
Consequently,
we are
stuck with
conceiving
of
Jesus
in the
temporal language
in which
Scripture
relates his life. And
this,
in
turn,
means that we are also stuck with the
contradiction in the doctrine of the God-Man.
At the same
time,
it must be remarked that the entire
Hegelian project
rests on a
questionable assumption, namely,
that
a
contradiction in
Scripture
is like
a contradiction in
something
a man has said. If we notice
a
contradiction in
something
a man has
said,
then we have to dismiss the
contradiction
as
something
we can make no sense
of,
as
something
that
cannot be true or be acted
on. We don't think
that,
despite
its
being
a
contradiction,
it
may
be true
anyway.
And if I someone told
you,
'Close the
door and also do not close
it',
and if he insisted that this was no riddle but
exactly
what he
meant, you
could
only
dismiss what he has said and
pay
it
no attention. Here contradiction is fatal. But
why
should
we think that
a
contradiction is
similarly
fatal in
Scripture?
For after
all,
Scripture represents
itself,
not as some
story
told
by
a
man,
but
as the word of God. This
being
so,
it is
open
to us to think that what
we,
who are in
time,
can
only
see as
a
contradiction is not a contradiction for the author
(supposing
there is such
an
author)
of this
communication,
this author
being
a timeless
being.
Admittedly,
an atheist could not allow
this,
since for him this
book,
the
Bible,
is
just
another of the books
composed by
men,
so that for him
a
contradiction
1
Kierkegaard
writes that the
existing
individual
'
thinks before and after'
(CUP, p. 293)
and also that
'an
existing
individual... translates all his
thinking
into terms of
process' (CUP, p. 79).
Here, however,
he has stated the matter
carelessly,
for he
surely
does not mean to
suggest
that we must
invariably,
no
matter what the
subject
matter,
think in
temporal
terms. He would no doubt allow that I can think of
the
square
root
of, say, 625
without
thinking
of the
square
root in
temporal
terms
-
without
thinking
that at
present (or
for the time
being) 25
is the
square
root of
625.
Also, Kierkegaard
is
prepared
to allow
that
-
indeed,
he insists that
-
the
plain
man's
concept
of God is the
concept
of a timeless
being,
of a
being
that is not 'in time'. It is when
we think of ourselves and the
phenomenal
world that we cannot
but think in
temporal
terms.
Possibly,
he
thought
of himself as
simply following
Kant here.
209
here is
no
different
from,
no less fatal
than,
a
contradiction in
any
other book.
Matters are
otherwise, however,
for
a
Christian believer.1
Believing
as
he does
that
Scripture
is the word of
God,
he
can
also believe that
something
in
Scripture
can
be true
(true,
that
is,
for
God) although
for a man it is and
must remain
a
contradiction.2 In the case of the
God-Man,
for
instance,
a
believer
can think of the matter as follows. God beholds and conceives of all
things timelessly,
i.e. without
change,
without
past
and future.3 Yet in
communicating
with his creatures He must
speak
in the
temporal language
that
goes
with the human
condition,
the
only language
in which
a man can
grasp
what is said of himself or another.4 For
instance,
when we are
promised
1
Kierkegaard explicitly says
that the non-believer will see nonsense where the believer will not :
'
The
absurd,
the
paradox,
is
composed
in such a
way
that reason has no
power
at all to dissolve it in nonsense
and
prove
that it is
nonsense; no,
it is...a
riddle,
a
compounded
riddle about which reason must
say:
I cannot solve
it,
it cannot be
understood,
but it does not follow
thereby
that it is nonsense.
But,
of
course,
if faith is
completely abolished,
the whole
sphere
is
dropped,
and then reason becomes conceited and
perhaps
concludes
that, ergo
the
paradox
is nonsense.... Faith
[on
the other
hand]
believes the
paradox.'
(Soren Kierkegaards Journals
and
Papers,
ed. and trans,
by
Howard K.
Hong
and Edna H.
Hong
(Bloomington
: Indiana
University Press, 1967-70),
vol.
1,
?7.)
I take
Kierkegaard
to be
making
three
claims here :
(
1
)
Since it cannot be
proved
that there is no
God,
it cannot be
proved
that the
paradox
is
nonsense;
nevertheless
(2)
if someone does not believe that God
exists,
he will
als6\believe
that the
paradox
is
nonsense,
whereas
(3)
the believer will not take the
paradox
to be nonsense
-
on the
contrary,
he will believe it is true
despite
the fact that he cannot see in it
anything
other than a
contradiction.
2
There are two
points
to be noticed here.
First,
the
phrases
'for God' and 'for man' are essential to
any proper
statement of
Kierkegaard's position.
That
is,
when he
speaks
of the God-Man as a
paradox
or a contradiction or an
absurdity,
he does not do so without
qualification.
On the
contrary,
he
says
that 'it involves the contradiction that
something
that can become historical
only
in direct
opposition
to all human
reason,
has become historical'
(CUP, p. 189),
that it is 'an
absurdity
to the
understanding'
(CUP, p. 191),
that it is
'contradictory
to all
thinking' (CUP, p. 513),
and so on.
Accordingly,
we find
Climacus
saying
in the
Postscript:
'
If
speculative philosophy
wishes to
say...
that there is no
paradox
when
the matter
[of
the
God-Man]
is viewed
eternally, divinely, theocentrically
-
then I admit that I am not
in a
position
to determine whether the
speculative philosopher
is
right,
for I am
only
a
poor existing
human
being,
not
competent
to
contemplate
the eternal either
eternally
or
divinely
or
theocentrically' (CUP,
p. 190). Making
the same
point,
Climacus
says
that
'only eternity possesses
the
explanation' (CUP, p.
499).
It is
important
to bear in mind here that Climacus
says
that he is not a
Christian,
and that is
why
he,
unlike a
believer,
can
say
no more than that it is
possible
that if the matter were viewed
eternally (in
a timeless
consciousness)
there would be no
paradox,
no
contradiction.
By contrast,
Kierkegaard,
the
believer,
writes in his
Journal
:
'
The
paradox
in Christian truth is
invariably
due to the fact that it is
truth as it exists for God. The standard measure
[of truth]...
is
superhuman;
and
[for
a
man]
there is
only
one
relationship possible:
faith'
(The Journals of
Soren
Kierkegaard, op.
cit.
?1061).
3
This is
implied
in
Kierkegaard's
remark: 'It is
impossible
to conceive existence without movement
[i.e. change
and
succession],
and movement cannot be conceived sub
specie
aeterni'
(CUP, p. 273).
Inasmuch as
Kierkegaard
assumes that God does conceive whatever it is he does conceive sub
specie aeterni,
it follows from the
foregoing
that he holds that that which God conceives is timeless.
(Many passages
suggest
that he assumed that the
objects
of God's
thought
are Platonic
ideas.)
In another context he writes:
'For God it
may
be
so;
because he has in his eternal
[i.e. timeless]
consciousness the medium which alone
provides
the needed
commensurability
between outer and inner. But the human
spirit
cannot see the
world-historical in this manner...'
(CUP, p. 126).
4
We find
Kierkegaard remarking: 'Language
is an
ideality
which
every
man has
gratis.
What an
ideality
-
that God can use
language
to
express
his
thoughts
and thus man
by
means of
language
has
fellowship
with God'
(Soren Kierkegaard's Journals
and
Papers, op.
cit. vol.
m,
?2336). Although Kierkegaard
does not here
say so,
it
may
be that he found it remarkable that God can
express
his
thoughts,
which
are
thoughts
of matters beheld
timelessly,
in the
temporal language
men understand. Of
course,
if I am
correct,
Kierkegaard
also
thought
that it would be a mistake to
regard
the
language
of
Scripture
as
being
merely
human
language,
so that where we find a
contradiction we can
judge
it to be sheer nonsense.
And in fact we find him
saying
:
'
The Christian
language
uses the same words we men
use,
and in that
respect
desires no
change.
But its use of them is
qualitatively
different from our use of them...'
(Ibid.
?2333). Although
the
example Kierkegaard goes
on to
give
is an
example
of a moral
teaching,
I take
it that what he
says
here about
Scriptural language
was meant to cover also the use of
temporal language
in
Scripture
to
express
God's
thought
of what is not
(ultimately) temporal.
210
JOHN
W. COOK
life
everlasting,
this is
represented
to us as
something extending
into the
future. Such
language
will not
represent
the matter in the
way
God himself
beholds
it,
sub
specie
aeterni,
and so what is said in this
language
will
not,
in
case God
exists,
constitute the last
word,
so to
speak,
on
the
matter,
since
what,
in human
language,
is called 'life
everlasting5
will not be
everlasting
but
eternal,
timeless.1 In
short,
the believer
can
allow that the
temporal language
used in
Scripture
when God or
Jesus
is
spoken
of is not
really (not irreducibly)
temporal language.2 (Or
to
put
the matter in another
way,
the
man
of faith
can allow that where the
language
of
Scripture
is
concerned,
we are like the
prisoners
in Plato's
Allegory
of the Cave: because humans know
only
appearances
not
Reality (the Forms),
the
language
of
Scripture, although
it states eternal
(timeless)
truths,
is
adjusted (by
means of tensed
verbs, etc.)
to what mere humans
can
comprehend.)
Nevertheless,
one needn't think that
because God must resort to
temporal language
in order to communicate with
His
creatures,
and because this
generates
certain contradictions in
Scripture,
God cannot communicate all that needs
communicating.
That the
temporal
language
of
Scripture,
with its
consequent paradoxes,
serves God's
purposes
quite adequately
can be seen if we take
proper
notice of what God wants
of men.
God's aim is not that of a
professor
of
history, say,
who would have his
students come to believe various
propositions.3
Rather,
God communicates
with men in order to
change
their lives
-
or,
more
exactly,
in order to offer
them the
opportunity
to
change.
And the
change
wanted of us is
a
change
from hubris to
humility.
The
message, roughly,
is this : if
you
will become
properly
humble,
become
a servant of the
Lord, you
shall have eternal
happiness.
Moreover,
as a test of one's
humility,
God makes a demand of
us,
namely,
that we believe that he
appeared
on earth as a man. But what
we are here asked to believe
can
only
strike us as a
contradiction,
so that
1
In the
Postscript Kierkegaard
writes
:
'
Is it not the case that
eternity
is for an
existing
individual not
eternity,
but the
future,
and that
eternity
is
eternity only
for the
Eternal,
who is not in
process
of
becoming?_It
is
undoubtedly
for this reason that
Christianity
has announced
eternity
as the future
life, namely,
because it addresses itself to
existing [i.e. temporal]
individuals'
(CUP, p. 273).
In his
Journal,
however,
he writes that 'in
eternity
a
person
is not in the succession of
time', meaning
that in
surviving
death a
person
ceases to be in time
(Soren Kierkegaards Journals
and
Papers, op. cit.,
vol.
1,
?842).
Elsewhere he uses the
phrases
'as
long
as I live in time'
(Ibid. ?705)
and 'so
long
as one is in time'
(CUP,
P- 499)
2
In The
Concept of
Dread
Kierkegaard
remarks that a
'
perfect spirit
'
has no
history,
and adds : '... hence
no
angel
has
history.
Even
though
the
Archangel
Michael had recorded all the missions
on which he
was sent and which he
performed,
this
[record]
nevertheless is not his
history' (Princeton, 1957), p. 44.
?
'The
object
of faith is not a
doctrine,
for then the
relationship
would be
intellectual,
and it would
be of
importance
not to botch
it,
but to realize the maximum intellectual
relationship_If Christianity
were a
doctrine,
the
relationship
to it would not be one of
faith,
for
only
an intellectual
type
of
relationship
can
correspond
to a doctrine.
Christianity
is therefore not a doctrine...'
(CUP, pp. 290-1). Kierkegaard's
assumption
here seems to be that if
religious
belief were belief in the
ordinary
sense,
i.e. belief that such
and such is the
case,
then
Hegelian philosophers
could undertake to
establish, by philosophical
means,
the truth of these
religious propositions. Accordingly,
he
thought
that the
only thing
that could
prevent
philosophy
from
replacing
faith with
knowledge,
and thus
making
faith
obsolete,
is that the
object
of
faith should be
something
that,
for human
beings,
is a
contradiction, something
we can make no sense
of
(see CUP, p. 195).
our salvation is conditioned on
believing (not
a
contradiction
but)
what is
for
us,
even if not for
God,
a
contradiction.1 But this means that belief here
is
something unique, something
other than
a
propositional
attitude. Belief
here is
a
passion.2
Moreover,
we must
put away
all
hope
of
understanding,
making
sense
of,
what we are
asked to
believe,
which
means,
of
course,
that
no
philosopher
can undertake to make it the conclusion of some
piece
of
reasoning.
Yet,
while we can make no sense of
it,
one who does believe will
allow that God's communication that He became
a man
is
not,
finally
and
irrevocably,
nonsensical and
incapable
of
truth,
for he will allow that what
becomes
self-contradictory
when cast into human
(temporal) language
may
very
well be a truth for
God,
a truth when beheld sub
specie
aeterni.
IV
Two
questions
remain.
First,
are these view of
Kierkegaard's compatible
with
Wittgenstein's
views about
language
and
religion.
Second,
has
Kierkegaard
given
a
plausible
account of
Christianity?
I will take these in order.
This much is true: both
Kierkegaard
and
Wittgenstein recognized that,
for
philosophers
at
least,
there is
something problematical
about the
language
(or phraseology)
of Christian
teachings. Beyond
that I can
find no
agreement
between them. For
Kierkegaard
the
problem
is that certain Christian
teachings
have the
appearance
of
being self-contradictory
and hence non?
sensical,
and he was anxious to address this
problem very differently
from
Hegel.
He did so
by maintaining
that the
language
in which human
beings
are addressed
by Scripture,
while it is
perfectly
suitable inasmuch as
we,
who
are in
time,
could understand no
other,
has the
peculiarity
that we cannot
discern whether or not what
appear
to be contradictions
(pieces
of sheer
nonsense) really
are contradictions. The
believer,
he tells
us,
is
a
person
who
1
Kierkegaard
writes : '... God also handles
everything
in such a
way
that he can
only
become the
object
of
faith, always making
the
relationship
one that contends
against
reason.Take all the difficulties in
Christianity
which free-thinkers seize hold of and
apologists
want to defend...
[These]
difficulties are
simply
introduced
by
God in order to make sure that he can become
only
the
object
of faith
(although
it is also
necessarily implicit
in his essence and in the
disproportion
between the two
qualities
: God and
Man).
This is
why Christianity
is a
paradox;
this
explains
the contradictions in
Holy Scripture,
etc'
(Soren
Kierkegaard's Journals
and
Papers, op. cit.,
vol.
i,
? 1144).
2
Kierkegaard
makes this
explicit
when he writes: 'Faith has in fact two tasks: to take care in
every
moment to discover... the
paradox;
and then to hold it fast with the
passion
of inwardness
'
(CUP, p.
209).
Further on he writes: 'The
thing
of
being
a Christian is not determined
by
the what of
Christianity
[i.e. by
the content of
any doctrine]
but
by
the how of the Christian. This how can
only correspond
with
one
thing,
the absolute
paradox.
There is therefore no
vague
talk to the effect that
being
a Christian
is to
accept,
and to
accept,
and to
accept quite differently,
to
appropriate,
to
believe,
to
appropriate by
faith
quite differently (all
of them
purely
rhetorical and fictitious
definitions)
;
but to believe is
specifically
different from all other
appropriation
and inwardness. Faith is the
objective uncertainty
due to the
repulsion
of the absurd held fast
by
the
passion
of
inwardness,
which in this instance is intensified to the
utmost
degree' (CUP, p. 540).
In his
Journal,
where he is
speaking
with his own
voice, Kierkegaard
seems to be
endorsing
this when he writes:
'
It is clear that in
my writings
I have
given
a further definition
of the
concept
of
faith,
which did not exist until now'
(The Journals of
Soren
Kierkegaard, op. cit.,
vol.
1,
?1147;
see also
?843).
212
JOHN
W. COOK
will allow that
Scripture
is the word of God and
that,
because God is
a
timeless
being,
the
apparent
contradictions in
Scripture
are not
really
contradictions because the
temporal
terms used in
Scripture
are
not,
so to
speak,
the final word
on the matters
spoken
of
there,
i.e. that what must be
self-contradictory
for humans
may
be the truth for God. Is there
anything
in this that
Wittgenstein
could
accept?
Surely
not!
Wittgenstein emphatically rejects
the idea that we cannot
know whether
a
given
form of words is or is not nonsense. If we can see
that
it has a use in human
life,
then we know that it is not nonsense. On
Wittgenstein's
view,
it cannot be that
language (or
more
narrowly
:
religious
language)
has a
'logic'
that is somehow hidden from us.
For,
as he
puts it,
'a word hasn't
got
a
meaning given
to
it,
as it
were,
by power independent
of us_A word has the
meaning
someone has
given
it.'1 Yet it is essential
to
Kierkegaard's
view that the real
meaning
of
Scriptural language
-
if,
indeed,
it has
any meaning
at all
-
has been
given
to it
by
a
power
independent
of us. As we have
seen
(p. 209,
fn.
1),
he
thought
that
a
philosopher
with
Wittgenstein's
ideas about
language
could
only
conclude
that
Christianity
is sheer
nonsense.
That was
not,
of
course,
Wittgenstein's
conclusion,
but his reason for not
drawing
that conclusion would have been anathema to
Kierkegaard.
The
latter took it for
granted
that
Christianity
is concerned with
-
and
essentially
concerned with
-
transcendental
matters,
with matters that are not a
part
of the world
we are all familiar with in our
daily
lives. He was
entirely
confident,
for
example,
that the
promise
of eternal
happiness
was a
promise
regarding
man's immortal soul.
Wittgenstein,
on the other
hand,
maintained
that
'Christianity
is not...a
theory
about what has
happened
and will
happen
to the human
soul,
but
a
description
of
something
that
actually
takes
place
in human life.'2 In the
same
spirit
he writes: 'It strikes me that a
religious
belief could
only
be
something
like a
passionate
commitment to a
system
of reference.
Hence,
although
a
belief,
it's
really
a
way
of
living,
or
of
assessing
life.'3 In
short,
Wittgenstein adopts
a
reductionist account of
religion.
He even
goes
so far as to
say
that 'the historical accounts in the
Gospels might, historically speaking,
be
demonstrably
false and
yet
belief
would lose
nothing by
this'.4 The Christian believer would lose
nothing by
this,
he
thinks,
because the Christian does
not,
in the first
place,
hold
any
such
beliefs.
Rather,
in
Wittgenstein's
view,
the believer takes from the
Gospels
the
same sort
ofthing
he
might
take
from, say,
a
reading
of
Tolstoy's
didactic
stories, namely,
the ideal for a
way
of
living
one's life. Because he
was,
in
a
general
way,
philosophically opposed
to the
very
idea of transcendent
entities and
events,5
he could make
nothing
more of
religious
belief.
1
The Blue and Brown Books
(Oxford, 1958), p.
28.
2
Culture and Value
(Chicago, 1984), p.
28.
3
Ibid.
p. 64.
4
Ibid.
p. 32.
5
See,
for
example, ?ettel (Oxford, 1967), ?256-60.
213
Kierkegaard,
of
course,
could
only
have
regarded Wittgenstein's
view as
leaving
out the heart and soul of
Christianity.
He would have
thought
of
Wittgenstein
as
reintroducing
in a
disguised
form the idea that man is the
measure of all
things,
an idea which
Kierkegaard
took to be the antithesis
of
religiosity.
In answer to our first
question,
then,
I think it would be fair to
say
that
no two
philosophers
could be further
apart
on fundamental issues than
Kierkegaard
and
Wittgenstein.
In
saying
this,
I am not
overlooking
the
well-known fact that
Wittgenstein
held
Kierkegaard
in
high
esteem.1
Indeed,
it is
fairly
obvious that
Wittgenstein thought
of himself as
endorsing
certain
of
Kierkegaard's
views. For
instance,
in Culture and Value we find him
saying:
I believe that one of the
things Christianity says
is that sound doctrines are all
useless. That
you
have to
change your life. (Or
the direction of
your life.)
It
says
that wisdom is all
cold;
and that
you
can no more use it for
setting
your
life to
right
than
you
can
forge
iron when it is cold.
The
point
is that
a
sound doctrine need not take hold of
you ; you
can follow it as
you
would a doctor's
prescription.
-
But here
you
need
something
to move
you
and
turn
you
in a new direction_
Wisdom is
passionless.
But faith
by
contrast is what
Kierkegaard
calls a
passion.2
In lectures
Wittgenstein
undertook to
expound
this
Kierkegaardian
idea that
religious
belief
(faith)
is not
actually belief "(in
the
ordinary sense) by saying:
'In a
religious
discourse
we use such
expressions
as: "I believe that so and
so
[e.g.
a
Judgement Day]
will
happen",
and use them
differently
to the
way
in which we use them in science.' The
difference,
he
says,
is that 'here
[in
religion] believing obviously plays
much more this role
:
suppose
we said that
a certain
picture might play
the role of
constantly admonishing
me,
or I
always
think of it.
Here,
an enormous
gulf
would be between those
people
for whom the
picture
is
constantly
in the
foreground,
and the others who
just
didn't use it at all.'3 Now while it is
plain
that in
passages
such as
these
Wittgenstein
took himself to be
endorsing Kierkegaard's position,
I also think
that he cannot have understood the essentials of that
position.
As we have
seen,
Kierkegaard
does indeed hold
that,
in the case of
Christianity, religious
belief
(faith)
is not a
propositional
attitude since that which
might pass
for
the content of faith is
(for humans) self-contradictory.
He sums this
up by
saying
that 'the
object
of faith is not a
doctrine'
(see p.
210,
fn.
3 above)
and that
'
the
thing
of
being
a
Christian is not determined
by
the what of
Christianity
but
by
the how of the Christian'
(see p.
211,
fn. 2
above).
So
far there is at least a
superficial
resemblance between
Kierkegaard's
view and
1
M. O'C.
Drury reports Wittgenstein
as
having
said that
'Kierkegaard
was
by
far the most
profound
thinker of the last
century
'
and that
Kierkegaard
'
is too
long-winded
;
he
keeps
on
saying
the same
thing
over and over
again.
When I read him I
always
wanted to
say,
"Oh all
right,
I
agree,
I
agree,
but
please
get
on with it."
' '
Some Notes on Conversations with
Wittgenstein',
in Recollections
of Wittgenstein,
ed. Rush
Rhees
(Oxford, 1984), pp. 87
and 88.
2
Op.
cit.
p. 53.
3
Lectures and Conversations
(Oxford, 1966), p. 57
f.
214
JOHN
W. COOK
Wittgenstein's.
But the resemblance is no more than
superficial.
For
according
to
Kierkegaard
the 'how' of the Christian is the
passion
with which he 'holds
fast' to the absolute
paradox,
and he holds fast to it
because,
although
it can
only
strike him as
self-contradictory,
he believes
(apparently
in the
ordinary
sense of the
word)
that the
self-contradictory
form of words conceals a
truth
-
an
'eternal
truth',
as
Kierkegaard puts it,
i.e.
something
that
only
a
being
outside of time can see to be the truth. For
Kierkegaard
it is this eternal
truth that makes all the difference. If he had
come to think that there is
no
supernatural
agency
that
can
forgive
men's
sins,
he would also have
concluded that
Christianity
does not merit
our
attention. And had he
encountered
a
philosopher stoutly maintaining
that there is no
possibility
of
eternal
happiness beyond
the
grave,
he would have declared that this
philosopher
could not reconcile his views with
Christianity.
For
according
to
Kierkegaard, Christianity
is
only
for those who have an
'
infinite
passionate
interest in an eternal
happiness' (CUP, p. 51). Wittgenstein, however,
was
firmly opposed
to this idea of a Christian
promise
of
happiness beyond
'this
earthly
life'.
On.
the one
hand,
we find him
opposing Kierkegaard's
own
conception
of the
promised
state as an
'
eternal
[timeless]
consciousness
'
when
he alludes
sardonically
to
Philosphers
who
say:'after
death a timeless state will
begin',
or: 'at death a timeless
state
begins',
and do not notice that
they
have used the words 'after' and 'at' and
'begins'
in a
temporal
sense,
and that
temporality
is embedded in their
grammar.1
There
are,
of
course,
Christians who
can
agree
with this criticism because
they
take
Christianity
to
promise
us,
not
'
timeless
'
existence,
but
everlasting
life. But
Wittgenstein,
as we have
seen, goes
further and declares that
Christianity
does not
promise
even this
: it does not tell us
'
what will
happen
to the human
soul,
but is a
description
of
something
that
actually
takes
place
in human life'.
and
Wittgenstein
are at odds
on the
most fundamental matters.
Our second
question
was whether
Kierkegaard's
account of
Christianity,
so far as we have
surveyed
it
here,
is
plausible.
In order to answer this
question,
it is
necessary
to be reminded of
a
general
feature of his account
that I have not mentioned. This is that
Kierkegaard
did not mean to be
devising
an account of
Christianity
that satisfied
preconceived philosophical
requirements
but instead meant to be
describing something
familiar to even
the
simplest
of believers.
Indeed,
he was
repelled by
the
Hegelian
version of
Christianity partly
because it seemed to
give
intellectuals
an
advantage.
Thus,
we find him
saying
:
...
I cannot abandon the
thought
that
every
man,
absolutely every man,
however
simple
he
is,...
can nevertheless
grasp
the
highest, namely, religion.
I cannot
forget
that. If that is not
so,
then
Christianity
is
really
nonsense
?
1
Culture and
Value, op.
cit.
p.
22.
215
Think of the
highest
of all
things,
think of Christ
-
only imagine
that he came into
the world in order to save a few
really
clever
people,
for the others could not
understand him.
Horrible,
disgusting.
No human
suffering repelled
him,
nor
any
limitations
-
but the
society
of clever
people,
that would
certainly
have
repelled
him.1
One
implication
of this is
that,
since
Kierkegaard
held that one
requisite
for
becoming
a Christian is that one
recognizes
the doctrine of the God-Man
as
being
an absolute
paradox,
he must also have
thought
that
every
Christian,
however
simple,
conceives of God as a timeless
being,
so that for
even the
simplest
the God-Man is
an absolute
paradox.
And
this,
in
fact,
is
what
Kierkegaard
says
:
'
When
Christianity
came into the world there were
no
professors
and Privatdocents at all
;
then it was the
paradox
for
everyone
'
(CUP, p. 198).
And
again: 'Christianity
as understood
by
the
speculative
philosopher
is
something
different from
Christianity
as
expounded
for the
simple.
For them it is a
paradox;
but
speculative philosophy
knows how to
abrogate
the
paradox' (CUP, p. 200). Plainly, Kierkegaard
believed that
everyone
conceives of God as timeless. But is he
right
about that?
We have
already
noticed that
Kierkegaard
takes occasion to chide the
clergy
for
speaking
of God as
everlasting
rather than as eternal
(timeless).
He himself knew full
well, then,
that his own notion of God as timeless was
not
universally
received. He should also have known that his own notion is
not that found in the Bible. For
as
John
Marsh
observes,
'
For the
philosopher
God is
eternal, dwelling
in an eternal "now"
entirely apart
from succession.
But the Bible
speaks
with unashamed
anthropomorphism
about
a
God who
acts in
history
and meets with men.'2 And Nelson
Pike,
in God and
Timelessness,
sums
up
his examination of the
issues,
as
well
as
his
survey
of the relevant
doctrinal
literature,
as follows
:
...
there
appears
to be little reason to think that this doctrine
[that
God is
timeless]
is
implied by
the basic Christian
concept
of
God...,
nor have I been able to find
any
basis for it in biblical literature or in the confessional literature of either Catholic
or Protestant Churches.
Again,
on this last
point,
the evidence I have
uncovered... seems to
point
rather
clearly
in the other direction.3
Kierkegaard
can
hardly
have been
right, then,
in
thinking
that his
philo?
sophical conception
of God is also the common
conception.
But in that case
his insistence
that,
to be
a
Christian,
one must
recognize
the God-Man as
an
absolute
paradox
has the
consequence
of
making Christianity
unavailable
to the vast
majority.
His timeless God is the God of
only
a
handful of
philosophers
and
theologians.
And in that case his definition of'faith'
is,
at
best,
highly idiosyncratic.
While it
may
be that
Kierkegaard himself, qua
Christian,
did
not,
in the
ordinary
sense of the
word,
believe
anything
1
The
Journals of
Soren
Kierkegaard, op.
cit.
? 1031.
2
'Time and
Eternity',
in A Handbook
of
Christian
Theology (Cleveland, 1964), p. 107.
3
Op.
cit.
p. 190.
Pike marshals his evidence
regarding
confessional literature on
pp. 180-7.
2l6
JOHN
W. COOK
regarding
the doctrine of the incarnation and related matters
(that, instead,
he had
only
a
'passion'
of some
sort),
this is not how it is with the
typical
Christian, who,
when
reciting
the
Apostle's
Creed or
the Athanasian
Creed,
for
example, certainly
means to be
reaffirming
various beliefs.
In his
journals Kierkegaard expressed
the
hope
that in his
writings
he had
managed
at least to
provide
an
'exact
description
of
Christianity',
so that
others
might
have the
guidance
that he had lacked.1 I think we must
conclude that that
hope
went unfulfilled.
Kierkegaard
was a
nineteenth
century philosopher,
and his
'
description
'
of
Christianity
was
given
in the
philosophical categories
in which he felt at home. It seems never to have
occurred to him to describe
Christianity
without the use
of
philosophical
terms,
in the
way
that an
anthropologist,
for
example, might
describe it.
Perhaps
it would have seemed to him
-
and not
unreasonably
so
-
that such
a
description
would leave
Christianity
vulnerable to some
plain-spoken
and
unanswerable criticisms.
v
I have
argued
that while
of himself as
agreeing
with
certain of
Kierkegaard's
central
claims,
in fact he did not understand those
claims. This
misunderstanding
has led others to misunderstand
Wittgenstein
himself.
Taking
him to be in substantial
agreement
with
Kierkegaard,
some
of his followers have assumed that his
philosophical
views are
compatible
with
Christianity.
The fact of the
matter, however,
is that
Wittgenstein
remained
an
empiricist
to the
end,
with the
consequence
that he could find
no sense in the idea of
supernatural beings
and
supra-empirical
events. Yet
for various reasons he refused to think that
Christianity
is worthless
nonsense,
and so he undertook to make sense of it within his
empiricism,
which is to
say
that he
sought
to
give
a
reductionist account of
Christianity.
The
realization of this should
put
an
end to
religious philosophers calling
Wittgenstein's
views to their assistance in
disputes
over what
sense,
if
any,
can be found in Christian
teachings.
Drury reports:
'When he
[sc. Wittgenstein]
was hard at work on the
manuscript
of the
Philosophical Investigations
he said to me: "I am not a
religious
man,
but I can't
help seeing everything
from a
religious point
of
view."'2 I think we cannot
dispute
that
Wittgenstein
was not a
religious
man,
but I should think that a
Christian
-
whether
a
Kierkegaardian
or
not
-
would have to
dispute Wittgenstein's
assertion that he saw
things
from
a
religious point
of view. How could he have when he dismissed the
very
idea
that men are
creatures,
owing
their existence and their devotion to a
1
The
Journals of
Soren
Kierkegaard, op.
cit.
?849.
2
O. M'C.
Drury,
The
Danger of
Words
(New York, 1973), p.
xiv.
7
supernatural being?
Another of his
remarks,
also
quoted by Drury, puts
this
matter in
proper perspective
:
It is a
dogma
of the Roman Church
[said Wittgenstein]
that the existence of God
can be
proved by
natural
reason. Now this
dogma
would make it
impossible
for me
to be a Roman Catholic. If I
thought
of God as another
being
like
myself,
outside
myself, only infinitely
more
powerful,
then I would
regard
it as
my duty
to
defy
him.1
I take it that the sense of this
passage
is this : if God is conceived of
as
being
the
possible subject
of
an existence
proof,
so that
by
means of
a
proof
one
might
come to know of his
existence,
then he is
being
conceived of
as a
being
outside
oneself,
i.e. as a
being
with whom one must reckon because he holds
one's fate in his hands.
Wittgenstein
found the idea of
proofs
to be
unacceptable
because he found abhorrent the
conception
of God that
goes
with such
proofs.
But in
rejecting
the
conception
of God
as a
being
outside
oneself, Wittgenstein
was as much at odds with Protestantism
as with
Catholicism and
as much at odds with Islam as with
Christianity.
For all
these,
God is not God unless he holds dominion
over all.
The fact that
Wittgenstein
nonetheless
imagined
that he saw
everything
from
a
religious point
of view tells
us
something important
about his
philosophical
views. On the
one
hand,
he held that
people
make the mistake
of
resorting
to the idea
of'spirit'
or 'the immaterial'
or 'the aetherial' when
they
fail to see how one sort of word
(or phrase)
in the
language
differs from
another,2
and it seems
likely
that he would have said that the idea of God
as a
being
outside of oneself is the
product
of
just
such
a
confusion,
i.e. that
because 'God' is
grammatically
a
proper
name
philosophers
make the
mistake of
thinking
that there is some sort of
being (although plainly
not a
material
being)
named 'God'. On the other
hand,
his
propensity
to invoke
reductionist accounts as a means
of'saving
the
language'3
led him to think
that in
religion,
as
elsewhere,
a
reductionist
account
brings
out the actual
meaning
of
religious
terms and thus saves them from the attacks of
philosophical sceptics.
Finally,
it is
necessary
to address
a
question
that
inevitably
arises out of
certain
things Wittgenstein
said when he
was not
engaged
in
philosophizing.
For
instance, Drury reports
him
saying
:
'
I seem to be surrounded
now
by
Roman Catholic converts! I don't know whether
they pray
for me. I
hope
they do,'4
and on another occasion
saying:
'...of this I am
certain,
that we
1
'Conversations with
Wittgenstein',
in Recollections
of Wittgenstein, op.
cit.
pp. 107-8.
2
The Blue and Brown
Books, pp. 4
and
47
and
Philosophical Investigations, ? 36.
3
In
my essay
'The
Metaphysics
of
Wittgenstein's
On
Certainty' (Philosophical Investigations, April 1985,
pp. 81-119)
I have
argued
that
Wittgenstein
never did abandon the
phenomenalism
that was so
prominent
in his
writings
and lectures of the
1930s.
I am also
prepared
to
argue that,
despite
his
protestations
to the
contrary,
he was a behaviourist
-
albeit,
not a behaviourist of the sort
represented
by
either
J.
B. Watson or the
logical positivists.
4
'Conversations with
Wittgenstein', op.
cit.
p. 148.
2l8
JOHN
W. COOK
are not here in order to have
a
good
time'.1 In these
remarks,
as in
many
others,
Wittgenstein
seems to be
talking
as
though
he
accepted
certain
orthodox
views, e.g.
that there is a God who hears and
may
respond
to men's
prayers
and who has created us for a
purpose.
But how can
that be? Is there
not an
inconsistency
between his remarks of the sort
just quoted
and his
declaration
:
'
I am not a
religious
man
'
?
How,
after
all,
could
an atheist
hope
that his friends are
praying
for him?
The answer to this
question
is that
Wittgenstein
did not think of himself
as an
atheist. On the
contrary,
his
philosophy
-
his
empiricism
-
eliminates
the
possibility,
not
only
that there is
a
supernatural being
who hears men's
prayers,
but also that there is
no
such
being. (The negation
of
a
piece
of
nonsense remains
a
piece
of
nonsense.)
Because atheists hold that there is no
such
being, Wittgenstein
could
only
think that atheism is muddleheaded. On
Wittgenstein's
view,
the difference between believers and non-believers lies
in their attitudes towards life and in whether
they participate sincerely
in
the observance of certain rituals. Now I think it is fair to
say
that
Wittgenstein
did share at least
some of
(what
he took to
be)
the Christian attitudes towards
life.2 And because he
did,
he also found it
appropriate,
on
occasion,
to use
certain
religious expressions.
For
example,
I should think that when he said
that we are not here to have
a
good
time,
he did not mean to
imply
that
there is a creator whose
purposes
we are to serve but meant
only
to
express
his
agreement
with Christian attitudes about
life,
about how one
ought
to
live. And I
suspect
that his
hope
that his Catholic friends
prayed
for him
was
only
the
hope
that
they
were concerned for
him,
such concern
being
what
he took that sort of
prayer
to
express.
And the same sort of
explanation
holds,
I should
think,
when
we find
Wittgenstein occasionally calling
on
God,
as
he did when he wrote :
'
God
grant
the
philosopher insight
into what lies in
front of
everyone's eyes.'3
One
may
wonder how
Wittgenstein,
who holds that
God is not a
supernatural being
outside of
himself,
could make such
a
supplication.
The
explanation
is that
that such
supplications,
even when made
by
the most orthodox
Christians,
do not
presuppose
belief in a
supernatural being.
Thus,
in his remarks on
Frazer,
we find him
saying:
Was
Augustine
mistaken, then,
when called
on
God
on
every page
of the
Confession?
Well
-
one
might
say
-
if he was not
mistaken,
then the Buddist
holy-man,
or some
other,
whose
religion expresses quite
different
notions,
surely
was.
But
none
of them
was
making
a
mistake
except
where he was
putting
forward
a
theory.4
1
'Some Notes on Conservations with
Wittgenstein', op.
cit.
p.
88.
2
On one occasion he remarked to
Drury:
'There is a sense in which
you
and I are both Christians'.
'Conversations with
Wittgenstein', op.
cit.
p. 114.
3
Culture and
Value, op.
cit.
p. 63.
4
'Remarks on Frazer's "Golden
Bough"',
The Human
World,
in
(May, 1971), pp. 28-9.
2ig
Wittgenstein
is
alleging
that whatever is said in
a
truly religious spirit
does
not
express
or
presuppose any theory (any belief
about the
universe,
about
what exists
or
doesn't
exist,
and that therefore different
religions
do not
contradict one another so that
only
one can
be true. So when
Augustine
4
called on God on
every page
of the
Confession ',
he was
not,
as we
might
think,
making supplication
to a
supernatural being. Accordingly Wittgenstein,
too,
can 'call
upon
God
'
(so
he
thought)
without
running
afoul of his
empiricism,
for he will
only
be
doing
whatever it was that
Augustine
was
doing.
When
reading Wittgenstein,
it is
important
to remember that reduc?
tionists,
when
they
think
they
have reduced #'s
tojy's,
also think
they
have
saved the
language
in which x's are
spoken
of,
as Hume did with the words
'cause',
'power',
and
'necessity'.1 Wittgenstein
and some of his followers
have
attempted
to reduce
religious
belief to ethical attitudes solemnized and
memorialized in
ritual,
and
they
think that this entitles them to use
religious
terms and
phraseology despite
their denial of the transcendent. But
just
as an
unbiased look at the use
of the word 'cause'
(and
related
words)
shows that
Hume had
no
right
to continue
(as
he
did) speaking
of the causes of
things,
so an
unbiased look at the actual use of
religious
terms shows that
Wittgenstein
and his followers have
no
right
to continue
(as they do) using
such terms.2 It is time for atheists to talk like
atheists,
for when
they
do
otherwise,
they only
mislead.
1
In the Treatise Hume writes :
'
Thus
upon
the whole we
may
infer that when we talk of
any being...
as
endow'd with a
power
or
force,
proportion'd
to
any effect;
when we
speak
of a
necessary
connexion betwixt
objects,
and
suppose
that this connexion
depends upon
an
efficacy
or
energy,
with which these
objects
are endow'd
;
in all these
expressions,
so
applied,
we
really
have no distinct
meaning,
and make use
only
of common
words,
without
any
clear and determinate ideas. But as 'tis more
probable
that these
expressions
do here lose their true
meaning by being wrongly apply'd,
than that
they
never have
any
meaning;
'twill be
proper
to bestow another consideration on this
subject,
to see if
possibly
we can discover
the nature and
origin
of those ideas we annex to them'
(Bk.
i,
Part
in,
?xiv).
What Hume
goes
on to
do in his further consideration of this
topic is,
of
course,
to invent a reductionist
meaning
of the word
'cause,'
so as to accommodate that word to his
empiricist metaphysics.
2
See Kai
Nielson,
'
Wisdom and Dilman on the
Scope
of Reason in
Religion ', Philosophical Investigations,
Autumn, 1980, pp. 1-14;
and his
'Philosophy
and
Religious
Commitment: A
Response
to
Dilman',
Philosophical Investigations, Spring, 1981, pp. 58-60.

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