Objectively Subjective

In the Introduction to Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard's Writings (2018 Bloomsbury Academic), the editor Joseph Westfall says this:

[James] Conant - following the early Wittgenstein, and relying heavily upon both Witgenstein's and Keirkegaard/Climacus's uses of revocation in these particular works - argues that language, as an instrument for the communication of objective concepts, cannot accommodate meaningful (i.e., "sensical") discussion of those aspects of human existence capable of being approached or apprehended only subjectively, such as faith or morality. Because subjective moods and passions cannot be objectively communicated, and because language is a medium suited only to the communication of objectivity, all language about things like faith and morality ultimately must be shipwrecked on silence, whether by ceasing communication altogether (as in the famous final line of the Tractatus) or in nonsense (as, Conant argues, in Climacus's "objective" account of faith or of truth "as subjectivity").

To those of you not in the circle of Wittgenstein's fame, the final line of the Tractatus is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Except, of course, when the unspeakable steps forth you may speak to tell others to be silent. Other than that, Ludwig would ask you to keep your mouth shut.

Actually, don't get me wrong, no one has more admiration for Wittgenstein than I do. Both his early and late philosophies are manifestly brilliant, and there is much to be learned from him. But the notions Conant explicates have seeped into the intellectual culture over the last century and spawned a vast network of philosophical and "academic" studies known as post-modernism, resulting in a fatuousness not seen since Socrates had to stay up late a couple of nights to help Philebus and Thrasymachus. And like many before him, Conant simply misunderstands Kierkegaard (and Wittgenstein). I must respond.

Things like 'faith and morality' denote actions in the real, empirical, material world, and as such I certainly agree with Conant that they call for something other than speech. But this is an obvious observation, bordering on the banal. The chief modern exponent of this view can reliably be traced to John Wayne, who often said, "Talk is cheap." Before him you can go all the way back to the blessed St. James in his Epistle written somewhere in the first century, A.D., wherein he proclaimed that faith without works - action - was dead.

So these 'subjective … aspects of human existence' most certainly do not involve speechifying of any kind, and in that sense are sub specie silence. One may talk while practicing faith, but such is irrelevant to the essence of the practice; the practice at its core is a non-verbal action - even when the act of faith is to encourage others in a sermon to have faith - and therefore Conant can safely describe these things as demanding silence.

So far, I am with him all the way. Where I cannot go … Continue

… is with the radical inference that this means these concepts cannot be conveyed to anyone because language is an objective tool and therefore inadequate for conveying subjective information.

Overlooked by Conant (but not by Kierkegaard, most definitely not by Kierkegaard), is that the easy case for language, conveying purely objective information, also involves another human being to do something 'silent.' And that is to translate the jumble of sentences and words spoken into something cognitively meaningful.  This is not a shallow activity of the mind; if it were so, then communication between two would be rote - the same pattern of words spoken would always be greeted with the same response. Manifestly, this is not the case. Human beings seem viscerally original, sometimes to the point of obstreperousness, and are always coming up with something different in response.

Computers do this rote thing, and can do it much better than human beings. But this is because human beings do not hear language in rote, but in meaning. They process the sentences and words deep within the psyche into a meaning in a process that is quite invisible to any science we have devised thus far. This is the mystery of consciousness and self-awareness which our science, so magnificently successful in so many fields, has feared to tread.

They have played this fear out by attempting to reduce this mystery to something familiar like atoms or quarks or DNA or neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. But there is no substitute for what the mind does when it comes to language and communication, even when that communication is about something objective. The mind's activity is permanently original.

But back to Conant's harder case, subjective activity involving things like 'faith and morality.' As he says, language is an objective tool, formed not be any people or person, but by the community as a whole that uses the language. Its purpose, in simplified terms, is to convey meaningful information between the people of the community such that they can coordinate (or not) their various activities as a relatively cohesive group. But let us not forget that the community is composed of human beings, each capable of human agency, and for language to perform its function, a major part of what it does is convey meaningful information about those subjective states that human agency entails. What would a society look like in which we could not tell our children or our neighbors that we need them to be courageous in times of trouble, or to grieve in full for a lost grandparent, or to show integrity and quit lying, or to be steadfast in the face of false accusations, or to be loyal to their family or friends, or that behind all of these things to first have faith in God Who took human form and died in a great sacrifice so that you might live?

It would literally be a non-starter of a human community, a community that in Darwinian fashion would quickly die and whose traces would be covered over in the obscurity of time. Fortunately, all of these communications and more are common types of communications that we have with each other as life's trials and tribulations present themselves, and none of these will stop simply because the philosophers insist that we are speaking nonsense and ought be silent. Agency endowed human beings communicate these meanings just fine without the philosophers, and have done so for millennia upon eons - to spectacular success as measured against the (admittedly) low expectations of a class curve of animal life on Planet Earth.

What is happening when things like 'faith and morality' are communicated? Much the same as when we communicate the 'easy' case of objective knowledge. The recipient takes the words and sentences in, conjures deep within himself the meaning, and proceeds to respond. And since this meaning is about something subjective, he knows he is being prompted to do the subjective thing (or not). How does he know what the subjective thing is? Well, he is a human being, capable of agency, which means he has personal experience of what the subjective activity is that the words refer to and what it calls him to do. He knows he is not called to make a speech or write a thesis on the objective/subjective distinction; he is called to re-orient his mind and heart and perform a task. I say, 'Take courage!' and he knows that he needs to set his feet in mente, push away fear and doubt, and take the next step to …. a task.

So the 'silence' demanded of concepts like faith and morality is not something mysterious in itself, no matter what post-modernism might think. It is mysterious to a computer programmer, because he can't figure out how to write a program that will make his computer's internal processor actually do what the concepts require. It is mysterious to a physicist who cannot explain consciousness in terms of his four fundamental forces of nature. It is mysterious to the mathematician who cannot find anything in his equations that can move in real space and time like notions of faith and morality move the most ordinary of human beings. But for ordinary human beings with agency, the concepts make perfect sense - ridiculously so, as evidenced by small children who readily pick them up - and reliably point them towards those subjective activities that human agency is entirely capable of.

In truth, post-modernisms affinity for this notion is really nothing more than a visceral anxiety about both faith and morality and a consequent desire for anyone talking about such things to shut up and leave them alone.