Something About Kierkegaard

Continued from here.

A note on Kierkegaard. In his time, the nation of Denmark believed itself to be Christian because each and every citizen could state confidently that he had been instructed on the dogmas of the Christian faith and that he believed them to be true. The primary focus of Kierkegaard's mission was to unsettle the Danes from this notion by making a stark distinction in his authorship between knowing something intellectually and religiously-ethically incorporating that knowledge into one's heart and soul. As far as Christianity was concerned, the former did nothing, was nothing. The latter, however, meant not only a changed heart but a changed life - a new birth, if you will.

 In this mission, Kierkegaard was explicitly working on the assumption that for a changed life to occur as Christianity demanded, work must be done by each individual person within their subjective personality, work that only they could do. Rote following of commands, dogma of the Church, or Kierkegaard's own authority as an eminent thinker in Danish society, would not activate this potential in his readers. So he highlighted in both the structure and arguments of his books and in the plan of his whole authorship to withhold satisfaction from normal reader expectations, so that each reader would begin to do that deep, mysterious human agency thing that was needed.

Whether he was successful or not, whether he was altogether too artful in his production, is for the literary and philosophical critics to say.  But it is not true in the slightest to find in him support for the post-modernist presumption that all talk of faith or morality is groundless or nonsense. Contra Conant, the Postscript was not a work dedicated to branding high philosophical speculation about faith and morals as nonsense; to the contrary, it mapped a road of rationality to its pinnacle of perfection in a Paradox, and said, "No further." In doing so, Kierkegaard was not denigrating rationality or the truths of human reason, but bounding it all within its proper sphere where it is most effective. In this, he was in solidarity with the tradition of Kant, Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.

Crooked Timber

Okay, Whit, I give. You want to talk philosophy, then let's talk.

Christianity (in)famously describes us all as the crooked timber of humanity.

There is a wealth of philosophy in that phrase. But the aspect I want to highlight is the anthropic angle. This crooked timber idea is not a singular concept because it presumes in the saying something else: what a straight timber would look like. There is no getting away from this, a very common, ordinary observation is built or rests on … something else.

This is a duplexity in human agency that is not a byproduct of something else, an unintended consequence or epiphenomenon, but something absolutely fundamental: the bifurcation within the psyche of how we view the world from our singular peculiar viewpoint. Such a standpoint is utterly unique in the life of Planet Earth - an organism that fashions (in Richard Rorty's paradigm) conceptual mirrors of a world, but mirrors that always reflect two things - that which is and that which has been or will be or ought to be - and somehow make them seamlessly into a single conception about what is going on.

I am reminded for some reason of the mystery of music. We hear notes on a scale, but we don't really hear just the individual notes as they are played because that would be a schizophrenic cacophony. We hear a musical composition, a musical event, because each note has a context within the ones that went before and the anticipation of the ones that will come after. In other words, each note is a duplexity (or multiplexity), both itself in tonal purity and all its brothers and sisters that preceded and will proceed from it.

And we do this naturally; historical anthropology tells us that music is a primeval impulse that has always been a part of us  - almost as if it preexisted  the first homo sapiens.  And if received wisdom can possibly be true, music may even have been that which created us unto what we are and might become.

What we are and might become - there is the duplexity again. We are both, crooked and straight, and which e'er path we tread depends not on me but Thee.

Tracking the Wild Rino

With the continued carping from the Republican back benchers, the NeverTrumps, it seems like a moment to clarify who is and who is not a republican in name only - a Rino.

Rino's have been a Republican bane for upwards of 40 years now, weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth at other Republicans at whatever inopportune moment they can find. They appear to have originated in the northeast of these United States, and that remains their natural habitat, but have spread across the fruited plains into almost every political jurisdiction in the land. Over the years there have been confirmed sightings in Florida, Ohio, and also Arizona, and now Utah has drawn this grumpled beast to its jurisdiction.

And many other places as well. Wherever they are, they never boast significant numbers, but are hard to ignore because of the characteristic incessant, loud, grating noises they make.

So, what exactly makes a Rino rino-like? …

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