This is defensible in light of two things: First, only at the last minute did
Kierkegaard make Concluding. Unscientific Postscript a pseudonymous work.
Second ...
Kierkegaard on Approximation Knowledge and Existential Truth: An Incompatibilist Interpretation Presented at the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division Meeting, 2012 (forthcoming)
Nathan P. Carson
1 Introduction To what extent can the human knower arrive at true knowledge about reality, and in what ways is this knowledge limited? This epistemological question has been the source of much debate in scholarly work on Kierkegaard, and answers range widely from Kierkegaard as a complete irrationalist skeptic, to Kierkegaard as a moderate epistemic realist.1 Johannes Climacus claims, for instance, that all knowledge of contingent (historical or empirical) reality is approximate, unfinished and uncertain.2 With Climacus’s addition that it is the non-cognitive passion of belief that nullifies this uncertainty, many scholars have declared Kierkegaard (via Climacus)3 to be the irrationalist Christian skeptic, par excellence. Others, of course, deny this interpretation.4 In what follows, I will examine the scope of the skepticism underlying Climacus’s position on knowledge and belief about sensible contingent reality. We will need to examine some of Climacus’s views on thought, modality, sense perception and belief. Additionally, any interpretation 1
Piety notes that while many scholars discuss the nature of knowledge in Kierkegaard, most remain ignorant of the “substance of his epistemology.” Piety notes that to her knowledge, there is only one monograph devoted to Kierkegaard’s epistemology, and that it has yet to be translated into English: Anton Hiigli’s Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivit?it und die Objektivitdt des Erkennens bei Soren Kierkegaard. Marilyn Gaye Piety, “Kierkegaard on Religious Knowledge,” in History of European Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1996): 105. 2 Climacus’s argument (a modus ponens with a conjunctive antecedent) runs like this: If human thought always translates actuality into possibility, if both empirical reality and human knowers themselves are in flux, and if empirical knowledge is perspectivally shaped by the data choice and will of the knower, then all human knowledge of empirical reality is at best, an approximation that remains always unfinished and uncertain. Cf. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (CUP) 149-150, 189-190. I am grateful to Anderson for drawing these many of these points together in a single place. Thomas C. Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” in Robert L. Perkins, ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 190. 3 Throughout the paper, honoring Kierkegaard’s own wishes (CUP, 627), I will largely cite the views presented as Climacus’s, rather than Kierkegaard’s. However, I also assume throughout that by and large, the views between the two are the same. This is defensible in light of two things: First, only at the last minute did Kierkegaard make Concluding Unscientific Postscript a pseudonymous work. Second, the themes we deal with in this paper are shared in common by both Fragments and Postscript, and indeed are prevalent throughout Kierkegaard’s wider corpus and journals. Throughout, we use the following translations: Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript vols. I and II, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4 Some of these perspectives are as follows: For Mackey, the entire Postscript is intended to show that “every belief and every truth claim about reality have no cognitive warrant.” Popkin claims that “When we search for true knowledge we end up in complete skepticism.” Others tie empirical knowledge in with religious knowledge, holding that it is in principle impossible for human beings, without God’s help, to know if any explanation of reality is true. For instance, Price: “What then can I know? ... Nothing, says Kierkegaard, nothing with any degree of real certainty; nothing about God, nothing about the world as it really is.” For similar views, see Nordentoft, J. Gill, and Hannay. All cited in Anderson, 187.
2 of the scope of Climacus’s skepticism must be able to account for both the negative (serving skepticism) and the positive (serving critical realism) functions of approximate knowledge, both of which Climacus (and Kierkegaard) seems to endorse. Ultimately, I will argue that Kierkegaard is a mitigated skeptic (or epistemic fallibilist), which is both compatible with the uncertainty of knowledge and allows for approximative knowledge that corresponds to reality. However, I will also argue that, for Kierkegaard, pursuit of approximative knowledge is a corrosive danger to the “essential knowing” of subjectivity that he (through Climacus) wants to commend. In Kierkegaard’s view, the approximative project should be eschewed in favor of the “essential truth” for an existing being, that is, the task of becoming a self.
I. From Thought to Knowledge According to Piety, “Knowledge (i.e., Erkjendelsen), on Kierkegaard’s view, is the result of reality being brought into relation to ideality.”5 One key piece of evidence for this is found in Kierkegaard’s discussion of doubt in his journals: Doubt is produced either by bringing reality into relation with ideality. this is the act of cognition. insofar as interest is involved, there is at most a third in which I am interested—for example, the truth. Or by bringing ideality in relation with reality. this is the ethical. that in which I am interested is myself.6
The act of cognition mentioned on line two is that of bringing reality into relation with ideality, and appears to refer simply to the act of construing a perceived object under the aspect of an idea. This kind of cognition seems to be equated elsewhere, by Climacus, with the inferential judgments a
5
Piety, 106. JP I 891 IV B 13:18, 19 n.d., 1842-43. Cited in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, transl. Howard V. Hong and Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), 399. 6
3 person makes on the basis of immediate cognition, or initial and unproblematic sense perception.7 While immediate cognition or sense perception never gives rise to doubt, a judgment about that perception is occasion for doubt (or belief), and it is this tenuous activity of cognition that seems roughly equated, between Climacus and Kierkegaard, with the activity of knowing.8 For Kierkegaard as well as Climacus, the problematic character of knowledge (taken in this way) does indeed stem from the activity of thinking itself. If knowledge is the bringing of reality into relation with ideality, then when the object of knowledge itself is abstract, as is the case with mathematics, knowledge is unproblematic, for the actuality and ideality of the object in question coincide perfectly.9 However, where the object of knowledge is anything in the concrete world of empirical actuality and its particular entities, such knowledge is more problematic. This stems from the fact that thought, a precondition for knowledge, always fails to grasp the actuality of any empirical concrete particular thing. For example, while discussing existence as that which pertains to being a particular individual, Climacus makes a more general claim, saying that “thinking must disregard existence, because the particular cannot be thought, but only the universal” (CUP 326). In his journals, Kierkegaard agrees: 7
PF, 79-80. For instance, in his journals Kierkegaard states that “Climacus has already shown [that]…To conceptualize is to dissolve actuality into possibility.” JP I 1059, cited in Thomas C. Anderson, “The extent of Kierkegaard’s skepticism,” in Man and World 27 (1994), 273-74. But, Climacus himself equates such conceptualization with knowledge: “genuine knowledge is a translation [of actuality] into possibility” (CUP 316). Further, in Fragments Climacus seems to nearly equate “apprehension” with “knowledge”: “If what is apprehended is changed in the apprehension, then the apprehension is changed into a misunderstanding.” The immediately subsequent discussion is then about knowledge, and how knowledge of either past or future confers no necessity on it, “for all apprehension, like all knowing, has nothing from which to give” (PF, 80). 9 This is an indication of what numerous commentators have noted, namely, that Kierkegaard upholds the basic Leibnizean distinction between the necessary truths of reason and the contingent truths of fact (or history). Cf. his journal entry on concepts whose existence and ideality perfectly coincide, and are thus unproblematic for knowledge: “In all the relationships of ideality it holds true that essentia is existetia, if the use of the concept existentia is otherwise justified here. The Leibnizian statement: If God is possible, he is necessary--is entirely correct. Nothing is added to the concept whether it has existence or not; it is a matter of complete indifference; it indeed has existence, i.e. concept-existence, ideal existence. But existence corresponds to the individual; as Aristotle has already taught, the individual lies outside of and is not absorbed in the concept. For a particular animal, a particular plant, a particular human being, existence (to be—or not to be) is very crucial; a particular human being is certainly not concept-existence. The very way in which modern philosophy speaks of existence shows that it does not believe in the immortality of the individual; it does not believe at all; it comprehends only the eternity of ‘concepts.’” JP 1067 X2 A 328 n.d., 1849-50, in Hong and Malantschuk, 460. 8
4 …actuality cannot be conceptualized. Johannes Climacus has already shown this concretely and very simply. To conceptualize is to dissolve actuality into possibility—but then it is impossible to conceptualize it, because to conceptualize it is to transform it into possibility and therefore not to hold it as actuality.”10
II. Modalities of Necessity and Possibility The epistemic force of saying that conceptualization always translates actuality into possibility is more readily understood when we examine Climacus’s treatment of modality. In his argument against Hegel’s introduction of logic and necessity into history, Climacus argues that history is the sphere of flux and change (kinesis), of coming into existence and going out of existence (75).11 History is thus the sphere not of necessity (though the past is unchangeable), but of possibility and actuality, as the latter always annihilates the former.12 Hence, Climacus contends that “the actual is no more necessary than the possible,” while the necessary itself is other than both of these. Perkins notes that here, Climacus brings together two concepts of necessity: (1) a Parmenidean concept of necessity as that which always is, and (2) the Leibnizean and Humean epistemic requirement for necessary propositions (that they be impossible to deny).13 With this more modest (than Hegel) treatment of necessity, Climacus keeps the spheres of necessity and
10
JP I, 1059. Cited in Anderson, 273-74. Evans reiterates this in saying that for Kierkegaard, “thinking always employs universal concepts: to think about some concrete reality is always to apply it to some concept, and for Kierkegaard, a concept is essentially a possibility, a possible way of being. This means that the concrete actuality of the object of thought cannot itself be made an object of thought.” C. Stephen Evans, “Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 38. 11 Climacus carefully distinguishes here between the past as necessary, and the past as unchangeable (PF, 79-80). Perkins adds that the chief presupposition of Climacus’s entire argument is that “every historical cause finally terminates in a freely effecting cause” Robert L. Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s Epistemological Preferences,” in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 4, no. 4 (Winter, 1973), 208. Cf. also PF, 90-95. 12 For Climacus, “all coming into existence is a suffering,” and hence cannot be necessary. This suffering occurs when “the possible…turns out to be nothing in the moment it becomes actual, for possibility is annihilated by actuality. Precisely by coming into existence, everything that comes into existence demonstrates that it is not necessary, for the only thing that cannot come into existence is the necessary, because the necessary is” (PF, 74). Climacus advances this argument, in part, to combat the Hegelian supposition that necessity is the unity of possibility and actuality, which makes the past itself necessary and the future fatalistically determined. In Hegel’s words, “real possibility, because it contains the other moment, actuality, is already itself necessary…. Real possibility and necessity are therefore only seemingly different” (Science of Logic, 549; cited in PF, 299 note 12). 13 Cf. PF, 73-75. Perkins, 208.
5 possibility/actuality separate, leaving history empirical reality as the sphere of freedom, where everything is in a contingent process of becoming and could have been otherwise.14 Of course human beings as knowers are themselves included in this contingent flux of coming into existence, but theirs is a double contingency. In addition to the contingency of nature, there is the contingent coming-into existence of agential human activity; we ourselves are always actualizing possibilities.15 So, epistemically, Climacus recognizes that any human knowledge of contingent being must arise from within this flux of becoming. The key passage in this regard occurs in Philosophical Fragments, where Climacus discusses the related issues of “immediate sensation” and “belief” [Tro] as the “organ” of the historical.
III. Perception, Doubt and Belief In his discussion of “immediate sensation,” Climacus clearly reflects Kierkegaard’s own endorsement of the ancient skeptics’ acceptance of “appearances.”16 For Sextus Empiricus, who Kierkegaard frequently cites, the immediate appearances of sensory objects can be taken as a given, while doubt preserves ataraxia, through the withholding of judgment or inferences based on those appearances. Likewise, Climacus holds that “immediate sensation and immediate cognition cannot deceive,” for appearances are “known immediately.”17 Beyond this kind of immediate knowledge
14
In terms of his larger aims, Climacus succeeds on two fronts: He (1) upholds the Leibnizean distinction between necessary truths and contingent facts, and (2) reconfigures Lessing’s conundrum in terms of historical knowledge and eternal happiness (PF, title page). This both denies Hegel’s view of necessity, and (ultimately) eliminates Lessing’s temporal, metaphysical and existential ditches in the service of clarifying the relation between Christianity and speculative thought. This, in part, is the point from which Climacus proceeds to eliminate any place for proofs about miracles, proofs from Scripture, proofs of God’s existence, proofs from religious experience, and proofs from history (in light of the church and her eighteen centuries). For in-depth analysis of Kierkegaard’s response to Lessing’s threefold ditch (temporal, metaphysical, existential), see Matthew A. Benton, “The modal gap: the objective problem of Lessing’s ditch(es) and Kierkegaard’s subjective reply,” in Religious Studies 42 (2006): 27-44. 15 PF, 81. 16 J. R. Maia Neto, The Christianization of Pyrrhonism: Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Shestov (Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 65-73. 17 PF, 81. Cf. 82, where Climacus credits the ancient skeptics with this insight.
6 nothing is certain, for the historical “cannot become the object of sense perception” because it has the additional “illusiveness of coming into existence.”18 On the basis of his modal arguments, coupled with discussion of immediate sensation (or knowledge), Climacus offers what appears to be the epistemic framework and limitations of the human knower, complete with the “double uncertainty”: …when a perceiver sees a star, the star becomes dubious for him the moment he seeks to become aware that it has come into existence. It is just as if reflection removed the star from his senses. It is clear, then, that the organ for the historical must be formed in likeness to this, must have within itself the corresponding something by which in its certitude it continually annuls the incertitude that corresponds to the uncertainty of coming into existence—a double uncertainty: the nothingness of non-being and the annihilated possibility, which is also the annihilation of every other possibility. This is precisely the nature of belief [Tro], for continually present as the nullified in the certitude of belief is the incertitude that in every way corresponds to the uncertainty of coming into existence. Thus, belief believes what it does not see; it does not believe that the star exists, for that it sees, but it believes that the star has come into existence.19
This passage (and many others) makes it clear that for Climacus, knowledge of anything contingent is what he calls elsewhere “objectively uncertain,” and this uncertainty is nullified by belief in a certain upholding of uncertainty. However, doubt is an equally viable option for nullifying objective uncertainty and thereby preserving it. To arrive at any kind of knowledge of contingent reality, the options for the human knower are doubt or belief, which are passional rather than cognitive capacities, standing as two “opposite passions” or modes of interest whereby the uncertainty is nullified while remaining uncertain.20 But whereas doubt nullifies the objective uncertainty by perpetually also nullifying interest, belief does the opposite in its intensification of interest.21 Either 18
PF, 81. PF, 81. 20 Because the claim that “the god has come into existence” is a historical (and thus contingent) point, it involves coming into existence and is thus the object of belief (or doubt), whether for the contemporary or for the one who comes later. This is the main point Climacus hopes to demonstrate in this whole Interlude section, inasmuch it then precludes the viability of any rationalistic apologetics. 21 Cf. Neto, 77-78. This simultaneous nullifying of uncertainty and interest seems to be the main reason why Climacus says that “All skepticism is idealism” (CUP 352). Zeno, for instance, tried to have complete skeptical integrity by being unaffected by all he encountered. Even he, however, had to admit, when avoiding a mad dog, that even a skeptical philosopher is a human being. Being aware of what it means to exist, the ancient skeptics’ attempt to reach ataraxia was, for Climacus, “an existential attempt to abstract from existence” (CUP 282). Moreover, all skepticism, for Climacus, relies on a “basic certainty” hidden by its doubting activity (CUP, 335). 19
7 way, doubt and belief are the conscious nullification of uncertainty that “keep the wound of negativity open,” precisely by acknowledging that certainty apart from either passion leap is a chimera.22
IV. Knowledge as Approximation Much like Kant, then, Climacus places the limits of human knowledge at the border of appearances.23 Beyond this, says Climacus, everything is ultimately uncertain apart from the passional movement of either doubt or faith, and these in fact preserve the uncertainty. Now is the point at which we can best make sense of that with which I began the inquiry, that all knowledge about the world is at best, an approximation. Early on in Postscript, Climacus states that “with regard to the historical the greatest certainty is only an approximation,” even under the best efforts of all the angels united together.24 What is more, in discussing the correspondence theory of truth, Climacus holds that “truth is an approximating whose beginning cannot be established.”25 This, together with what I’ve discussed above, gives us Climacus’s basic argument: If human thought always translates actuality into possibility, if both empirical reality and human knowers themselves are in flux, and if empirical knowledge is perspectivally shaped by the data choice and will of the knower, then all human knowledge of empirical reality is at best, an approximation that remains always unfinished and uncertain.26 When we add to this that it is the non-cognitive passion of belief (or doubt) that nullifies objective uncertainty in its preservation, then we arrive at a view of 22
As Johannes de Silentio remarks, in the opening pages of Fear and Trembling, everyone in the present (“positive”) age wants to go further than either doubt or belief, which Climacus sees as a sign that they are in fact the truly deceived, and indeed the real skeptics. Thus he holds that nullification of uncertainty must be conscious: “He is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he constantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm is sometimes the condition for cure. The others let the wound heal over and become positive; that is to say, they are deceived” (CUP 78). 23 I am grateful to Evans for drawing the connection to Kant (37). 24 CUP, 23, 30. 25 CUP, 189. 26 As I’ve stated above, in note 2, this can be formulated as a basic modus ponens with a conjunctive antecedent in the initial conditional.
8 Kierkegaard (via Climacus) as the irrationalist Christian skeptic, par excellence.27 Popkin, for example, holds that the inability to “attain true knowledge” of anything certain leads Kierkegaard to a “purely fideistic Christianity, devoid of all reasons for belief.”28 Thus does Kierkegaard “surpass” even the most “extreme-anti-rationalism” of Christian skeptics like Pierre Jurieu and Pierre Bayle.29 While Kierkegaard’s position (through Climacus) certainly places serious restrictions on human knowledge, I think there are reasons to doubt that he was as purely irrationalist and fideistic as Popkin and others have suggested. For starters, let’s take Popkin’s view that Kierkegaard surpassed even Pierre Bayle in his skeptical irrationalism. In one of his journal entries, Kierkegaard comments on an exchange between Leibniz and Bayle: Leibniz is most certainly right over against Bayle, that by making man the sole measure of all things one gets entangled in contradictions. Bayle, like many others, has given the elemental impression that man has received the distinguished appointment in life to judge everything et quidem in relation to this position of man in creation. Leibniz shows that everything is linked together; he establishes a teleology which includes mankind. See para. 119 in Theodicy.”30
Interestingly, Kierkegaard here compares Bayle’s view to the skepticism of Protagoras, and favors Leibniz over Bayle in avoiding the “contradictions” involved in such a position.31 It is also apparent in Kierkegaard’s treatment, that unlike Bayle, he does not think that human beings have the
27
For a sampling of scholars holding a view similar to this, cf. footnote 4 above. Richard H. Popkin, “Kierkegaard and Skepticism,” in Daniel W. Conway, ed., Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers vol. II (London: Routledge, 2002), 249, 252. 29 Popkin, 244. 30 JP 40; IV C 32 n.d., 1842-43 (cited in Hong and Malantschuk, 17). There is a lot more to be said on the Kierkegaard Bayle connection, which will be clarified in Karl Verstrynge’s article, “Pierre Bayle: Kierkegaard¹s Use of the Historical and Critical Dictionary,” forthcoming from Ashgate (July 2009) in Kierkegaard’s Sources: Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions. Unfortunately, I could not obtain an early copy of this article. 31 The comment regarding contradictions must call to mind the numerous times that Climacus, in agreement with Kierkegaard’s journals, upholds the objective truth of both logic and mathematics. For instance, though logic is from our temporal perspective a “hypothesis,” a system of logic can in fact be given (CUP 109-111) and mathematical truths are unhypothetically and “objectively given” (CUP 110-111, 204). In addition, defense of Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction is standard fare throughout Kierkegaard’s corpus (Cf. PF, 108-109), and Climacus thinks that even wondering about the truth of a “necessary construction” is itself a “contradiction” (PF, 80). Though these “necessary truths” of reason do not pertain to our inquiry regarding knowledge of contingent reality, they do mitigate the charge of total irrationalism. For instance, Kierkegaard’s clear assumption of their unproblematic truth calls into question Popkin’s claim that for Kierkegaard, even true knowledge of logical and mathematical truths are unavailable to us, for they are still “part of our intellectual biographies” (249). Popkin of course needs this supposition, in order to sustain his depiction of Kierkegaard as a complete irrationalist, all the way down. 28
9 distinguished position of judging everything with singular reference to the human position within creation. Indeed, the teleology cited by Kierkegaard in Leibniz’s Theodicy involves a complex and harmonious order within which human beings find their proper place as reasoning beings. In light of ubiquitous comments like this one, I think Kierkegaard’s approximation knowledge exhibits a robust realism about the world external to the knower.32 For, as numerous scholars have noted, what can “approximation” mean if there is nothing toward which such approximation aims? The possibility of some adequate knowledge of this world is likewise involved here. As Anderson point out, if empirical reality is unable to be truly known, then “approximative” is meaningless, since we’d have no way of knowing which explanations are closer or further away from the truth.33 In support of this, Climacus does claim that the existing subject, though abstracting from his own existence, “comes to know much about the world” through approximative historical knowledge.34 Additionally, in light of Kierkegaard’s pervasive truth-claims (through Climacus or otherwise) about contingent reality and the situation of the human knower, it can’t be the case that every interpretation of reality is equally arbitrary, or has an equal claim to truth.35 So, it would seem that even if Climacus rejects this in theory, human beings such as Kierkegaard must be able to have some knowledge about contingent beings that is approximatively more adequate than others. In addition, there is strong evidence that in both Fragments and Postscript, Climacus targets the illusion of the complete epistemic certainty of “pure thought,” as peddled by the Hegelian 32
Evans, Perkins and Anderson have each noted this as well. Due to space limitations, we will only deal with knowledge of the world external to the knower. However, Climacus does hold, in numerous places that, that there is one form of “infinitely certain” knowledge, and that is of the ethical actuality of the knower’s own self (CUP, 81) Moreover, for the self, the movement from possibility in thought-ideality to concrete actuality can be opposite of what that movement is with respect to other actual beings. I can know about another person’s actuality only by thinking it, and hence translating actuality into possibility. However with my own agential activity, I actualize thought possibilities, and have an immediate knowledge of my own actuality as such: I translate possibility into actuality. (Cf. CUP 32, 317 and esp. 320). As Evans notes, this certainty of self-actuality and existence meets the knowledge requirements of classical foundationalist epistemology, but total skepticism about the external world could still be in play. (Evans, 38). 33 Anderson, 191. 34 CUP, 81. 35 Climacus argues, for instance, that the negative posture of the person who (against the deceived “positive” Hegelians) knows that human knowledge is always uncertain, is in fact his advantageous position, for he knows the truth of things in this respect (CUP, 78).
10 system builders.36 As Evans notes, a robustly fallibilist epistemological realism is perfectly compatible with the claim that no knowledge of contingent reality is wholly certain.37 Even without knowledge as approximation, one can be a skeptical realist, affirming mind-independent reality while denying any human knowledge of that reality.38 It seems clear then, that the approximation addition can coherently affirm both the fallibility of human knowledge and the mind-independence of the reality at which such knowledge can indeed aim. Putting the pieces together from Fragments and Postscript in light of these things, it seems fair to say that for Kierkegaard (through Climacus), the human knower can have some knowledge of contingent reality, but that such knowledge is never certain, and is always funded by the passional movement of belief. Evans further suggests that, although Kierkegaard is critical even of a correspondence theory of truth as an always unfinished ideal, he does not object to correspondence as an ideal at which approximative knowledge aims.39
V. The Nihilism of Approximation Having reviewed a number of reasons why Kierkegaard, through Climacus, ought not to be interpreted as a thoroughgoing skeptic (or irrationalist), I think there are reasons to think that Kierkegaard is severely critical of correspondence approximative knowledge as an ideal. This will place my current view in tension with those who see the approximative pursuit of knowledge as benign or neutral (Perkins), or as something Kierkegaard overtly promotes (Anderson), or as the only ideal that makes sense to him (Evans).40
36
Perkins, Anderson and Evans each make this point in their articles. C. Stephen Evans, “Kant and Kierkegaard on the Possibility of Metaphysics,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 59-60. 38 Evans, “Realism,” 36. Evans adds that in his view, “Kierkegaard would affirm the coherence of such a position” (36). 39 Evans, “Realism,” 42. 40 Evans, 42 (citing PF 81-82); Perkins, 216; Anderson, 194. 37
11 This takes us into the much-debated section, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, on truth as subjectivity (CUP 190-203). After dispensing with the truth as the idealistic identity of being with thinking as a tautology, Climacus takes up the correspondence view of truth as “agreement between thinking and being.”41 Climacus clearly favors the correspondence view, while also affirming that such an agreement is only finished for God himself.42 But Climacus not only allows for the real possibility of the correspondence project, he also treats this “objective reflection” as a form of nihilism that makes the subjective individual a disappearing accident. Indeed, the practical upshot of this correspondence project is suicide.43 While objective reflection asks about the truth so that the individual can relate to it as an object, “subjective reflection” wants to relate to the truth by “existing in it” through passional inwardness; any mediation of this disjunction reverts to idealism.44 The way of objective reflection is an “accidental knowing” that “leads to abstract thought, to mathematics, to historical knowledge” in such a way that “essential knowing” in relation to the existence of the subjective individual becomes “infinitely indifferent.”45 The point is that an objective reflection that forgets inwardness becomes madness, thinking itself secure in a way that subjectivity cannot be, ultimately making subjectivity vanish.46 What is crucial to note, however, is that Climacus endorses the opposite mode of forgetting, such that “subjectivity as such becomes the final factor and objectivity the vanishing.”47 It is not just that
41
CUP 189-190. CUP, 190, 43 CUP, 197. Though Fichte’s fantastical I-I does crop up in this section, and Hegel’s project is elsewhere characterized as an endless approximation through which the self is lost (CUP 81), it is clear that the “objective reflection” under consideration here largely applies to the project of correspondence, the conformity of thinking with being. At CUP 190, Climacus shifts his concern from a Hegelian coherence view, to a correspondence view of truth. Cf. also 193, and 196, where the reader is reminded of the correspondence view in question. However, cf. CUP 197, where Climacus explicitly rejects both correspondence and coherence ways of knowing in favor of “essential knowing,” that is, knowledge “related to the knower…as an existing person.” 44 CUP, 191-192. Notably, the mediation between these two reflective ways, whereby the self becomes a fantastical Fichtean I-I or subject-object, is a reversion to tautological abstraction and ruled out of consideration (192-193), or simply made fun of (198). 45 CUP, 193, 197. 46 CUP, 194. 47 CUP, 196. 42
12 existence must never be “forgotten,” but that the whole project of approximative knowing, while a bona fide possibility, should be left behind in favor of subjectivity.48 The possibility of the objectively reflective project stands at that intersection of Socratic ignorance where “the road swings off,” and to follow that approximative road is, it seems, to give up on the essential knowing that is existence in the truth.49 In this latter posture, it seems, it is not only that “objective uncertainty” is acknowledged as an epistemic reality for all finite knowers, but rather that it must be intentionally accented and held fast in order that passionate inwardness may deepen toward infinity and the God-relation. In other words, approximative knowledge about the world must decrease, so that the self in passionate subjectivity might increase: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person. At the point where the road swings off...objective knowledge is suspended. Objectively he then has only uncertainty, but this is precisely what intensifies the infinite passion of inwardness, and truth is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.50
Conclusion: Now, perhaps my interpretation misconstrues Kierkegaard’s intentions, specifically his focus on the relation of inwardness to God, and the objective reflective project as, in part, the errant pursuit of eternal truths.51 I do think it is clear, however, that in the relevant section of Postscript, a variety of ordinary objects of knowledge are mentioned in relation to the approximation project, and in nearly every case, such a project is seen as an extreme danger to the subjective relation that Kierkegaard (through Climacus) wants to commend. So, it seems unsatisfactory to portray Kierkegaard as a domesticated realist with a quasi-fallibilist epistemology, while omitting his severe 48
CUP, 196 CUP, 203. Cf. also 200-201, 206, and Kierkegaard’s journal entry in CUP volume II, page 51 (JP II 2291, Pap. VII1 A 31, n.d. 1846. 50 CUP, 203. 51 Cf. CUP, 200. 49
13 critique of pursuing correspondence knowledge. In other words, defending the fact the Kierkegaard’s skepticism allows for fallibilist knowledge of the world, in order to save his project, obscures the main point he wants to communicate. I hope to have shown, through Climacus, that Kierkegaard holds a mitigated skepticism compatible both with the uncertainty of knowledge and with an approximative knowledge-correspondence project. This should be taken together, however, with Kierkegaard’s strong opposition to any such project, in favor of the “essential knowing” involved in the passionate inwardness of existing in the truth.
14 Bibliography Anderson, Thomas C. “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge.” In Robert L. Perkins, ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 187-204. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997. Anderson, Thomas C. “The extent of Kierkegaard’s skepticism.” Man and World 27 (1994): 271289. Benton, Matthew A. “The modal gap: the objective problem of Lessing’s ditch(es) and Kierkegaard’s subjective reply.” Religious Studies 42 (2006): 27-44. Evans, C. Stephen. “Kant and Kierkegaard on the Possibility of Metaphysics.” In Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays, 47-66. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. ________. “Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” In Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays, 29-46. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Neto, J. R. Maia. The Christianization of Pyrrhonism: Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Shestov. Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript vols. I and II. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. ________. Philosophical Fragments. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ________. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967. Perkins, Robert L. “Kierkegaard’s Epistemological Preferences.” In International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 4, no. 4 (Winter, 1973): 197-217. Piety, Marilyn Gaye. “Kierkegaard on Religious Knowledge.” History of European Ideas 22, no. 2 (1996): 105-112. Popkin, Richard H. “Kierkegaard and Skepticism.” In Daniel W. Conway, ed., Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers vol. II, 237-256. London: Routledge, 2002.
