It would be nothing like what Kierkegaard is describing. Accounts in the gospels that relate to demons or demon possession make Kierkegaard's look more like Plato's as you describe it.
You are right, that he uses both of the meanings you describe (acting against the good/deity, and Plato's daimonion). I doubt that more than one word is used for the demonic or demon in Danish. The application of that word is what I am thinking about and find interesting.
The only one in F&T who resembles, say, the [url="https://www.esv.org/Matthew+8:28–9:1;Mark+5:1–21;Luke+8:26–40/"]the demoniac at Gerasenes, [/url], is actually Abraham, the man of God; God's chosen.
See the first story in Tuning Up and later, when Abraham is described as insane.
The only one in F&T who resembles, say, the [url="https://www.esv.org/Matthew+8:28–9:1;Mark+5:1–21;Luke+8:26–40/"]the demoniac at Gerasenes, [/url], is actually Abraham, the man of God; God's chosen.
I realize you're not saying that Kierkegaard's Abraham is deliberately styled after the demoniac at Gerasenes, but, even just in terms of randomly noticed similarities, on what basis do you see a resemblance?
Because the demoniac, pre-exorcism, is totally alienated from society(like a Knight Of Faith)? Or something about the way he interacts with Jesus post-exorcism? Or...?
The only one in F&T who resembles, say, the [url="https://www.esv.org/Matthew+8:28–9:1;Mark+5:1–21;Luke+8:26–40/"]the demoniac at Gerasenes, [/url], is actually Abraham, the man of God; God's chosen.
I realize you're not saying that Kierkegaard's Abraham is deliberately styled after the demoniac at Gerasenes, but, even just in terms of randomly noticed similarities, on what basis do you see a resemblance?
Because the demoniac, pre-exorcism, is totally alienated from society(like a Knight Of Faith)? Or something about the way he interacts with Jesus post-exorcism? Or...?
Certainly the alienation. That's why both the demonic and the religious categories are outside of the sphere of the ethical/universal.
But I was thinking specifically of the depiction of Abraham the first variation in Tuning Up:
"He climbed Mount Moriah, but Isaac did not understand him. Then he turned away from him for a moment, but when Isaac looked upon Abraham’s countenance for the second time, it was transformed: the look in his eyes was wild, his form one of terror. He seized Isaac by the breast, threw him to the ground, and said: “Foolish boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you think this is God’s command? No, it is my desire.” "
Of course, de silentio is imagining this scene as a way that Abraham could protect Isaac from losing trust in God, by acting like a madman. But this scene makes Abraham look more like the demoniac roaming the caves than the Father of Faith.
Yeah, in philosophical terms, Abraham in that scene wants Isaac to continue believing that God is operating within the ethical.
That passage, of course, has as its accompanying symbolization the mother blackening her breast, in order to trick the child(Isaac) into believing that the breast(Abraham) has changed, but the mother herself(God) has not. I recently read that when Soren broke off his engagement with Regina, he told her a bunch of unflattering lies about himself, so she wouldn't be too pained about the break-up.
Yeah, in philosophical terms, Abraham in that scene wants Isaac to continue believing that God is operating within the ethical.
Yep. That's the problem with all the variations that show up throughout the book.
I thought it was interesting how Abraham is depicted here, though, as one who could be seen as demonic in the eyes of traditional church goers, in order to maintain the ethical. More irony.
Yes, there are references to the broken engagement all through the book and others, I believe. The Merman section has clear references about the possibility of driving Agnete away. But really, it's all over the book.
It certainly was a significant event in his life, or a significant metaphor. I will be keeping a look-out for more related to it as I read more of his works and diaries. And I will be looking for whether/how his treatment of the event develops or changes over time, in what context he brings it up, etc.
He won't have been the first person to have done such a thing and had unresolved feelings about it. His personality also seems to have tended to be a bit obsessive as well as very sensitive. With his inclination toward the Romantic (as a cultural technical term), this is also not surprising.
I think the thing that is really surprising is how open he was about it in his work. From some of the things I've read about him, (sorry, I'd have to look through things for a reference), it sounds like his readership was quite small in his lifetime, and he knew it. A local writer of sorts. If that is accurate, then nearly his entire audience likely know what had happened with Regine. And also the Coursaire Affair, which I think he also references quite often with jabs at publisher and assistant professors.
Oh. Sorry. I see I'm rambling here.
So, where do you all want to go with this discussion? Are we done with Agnete and the Merman (I think they would make a great electrified Danish punk-folk music group)? I feel like we've barely discussed it, but maybe it's not interesting to anyone else.
I hope we don't leave out the sections on doubt and irony. I think there is a lot of great stuff there, but I haven't gone back over those, because I was going over A & M.
Please, let's not leave out the very end of Problema III and the Epilogue.
Well, the following is from NEAR the end of Problem III, and has been bugging me since I last posted about it.
First and foremost, he does not say anything, and it is in this form he says what he has to say. His reply to Isaac has the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and do not say anything. Isaac interrogates Abraham on the supposition that Abraham knows. So then if Abraham were to have replied, "I know nothing," he would have uttered an untruth. He cannot say anything, for what he knows he cannot say. So he replies, "God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."
***
[Abraham] utters no falsehood, because it is of course possible that God could do something entirely different. Hence he is speaking no untruth, but neither is he saying anything, for he speaks a foreign language.
Okay. As quoted, the actual line is...
"God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."
From which Kierkegaard derives the paraphrase...
...in virtue of the absurd, it is of course possible that God could do something entirely different.
It seems to me that there is a certainty in Abraham's words("God will...") that is somewhat qualified in Kierkegaard's rendering("...it is of course possible...").
Or am I reading too much into the word "possible" there?
By the way, there's at least one
anecdote from my Existentialism class class that you will find more interesting than I did...
Once, a Welsh philosopher named Christopher Norris was delivering a guest lecture on Kierkegaard, and so our class all got herded into going to listen.
I can only report...
1. The lecture was VERY focused on irony.
2. I didn't understand a single thing the guy was saying.
Based on informal conversations around campus, I did get the impression the lecture was well-received by those with an interest in the topics covered.
By the way, there's at least one
anecdote from my Existentialism class class that you will find more interesting than I did...
Once, a Welsh philosopher named Christopher Norris was delivering a guest lecture on Kierkegaard, and so our class all got herded into going to listen.
I can only report...
1. The lecture was VERY focused on irony.
2. I didn't understand a single thing the guy was saying.
Based on informal conversations around campus, I did get the impression the lecture was well-received by those with an interest in the topics covered.
I just scanned over Norris's wikipedia page. No question he would not be understandable. He worked with postmodern criticism. Read any? It's the hardest stuff I have ever tried to penetrate as a reader. A brief article by Foucault was 8 hours that ended as it had begun, but with more eye strain.
Summer be for last I participated in a discussion of a book by a reader of PoMo as well as Kierkegaard. It was a hard read. There was a chapter that dealt heavily with Kieriegaard's work with irony, and it almost killed me. (Well, not really, but I never understood the section.)
I can understand why Norris's lecture would have been like Greek.
The writing style, development of arguments, logical sequences, and use of vocabulary are all very different and often built in relation to an ongoing discussion you are only entering into and from the side.
I am returning to this reading and starting it by backing up to Kierkegaard because of that summer book discussion. It was time to see what he says and to return to and expand on PoMo.
I should havenplenty to read and think about for a very long time.
Well, the following is from NEAR the end of Problem III, and has been bugging me since I last posted about it.
First and foremost, he does not say anything, and it is in this form he says what he has to say. His reply to Isaac has the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and do not say anything. Isaac interrogates Abraham on the supposition that Abraham knows. So then if Abraham were to have replied, "I know nothing," he would have uttered an untruth. He cannot say anything, for what he knows he cannot say. So he replies, "God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."
***
[Abraham] utters no falsehood, because it is of course possible that God could do something entirely different. Hence he is speaking no untruth, but neither is he saying anything, for he speaks a foreign language.
Okay. As quoted, the actual line is...
"God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."
From which Kierkegaard derives the paraphrase...
...in virtue of the absurd, it is of course possible that God could do something entirely different.
It seems to me that there is a certainty in Abraham's words("God will...") that is somewhat qualified in Kierkegaard's rendering("...it is of course possible...").
Or am I reading too much into the word "possible" there?
This paragraph is discussing two things:
1) how A's use of irony indicates he has followed both movements (infinite resignation of Isaac, and faith that he will regain Isaac in finitude (the present))
2) how the use of irony allows A to say nothing, in that he both speaks no lie and gives no information. He speaks the entire truth without telling what he knows to be true about God's command.
What he knows is that he has been commanded to sacrifice Isaac by his own hand. Isaac, the child promised and given by God miraculously. God has provided the ram in this way.
God could provide a substitute ram also. Something entirely different.
Abraham's irony is open ended enough that it allows for a number of true interpretations which can only really be understood in hindsight.
I agree with you on alot of "postmodern" writing. Though given the way that label sometimes gets used as a catch-all for "Any piece of recent humanities scholarship I personally don't understand", I'm reluctant to attribute the incomprehensibility of Christopher Norris to his supposedly being postmodern.
Derrida's essay on Nietzsche, called Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, is actually a fairly coherent analysis of Nietzsche, and that's possibly because Nietzsche's writing lends itself well to deconstruction. I think the same thing might be true of Kierkegaard, especially as he explicates the ideas in Problem III.
I found a book by Norris in my library's ebook collection in Ebook Central (from Proquest), which addresses deconstruction and has two chapters on Kierkegaard. I downloaded them. I'll take a look later. (See below for book info.)
Thoughts on Abraham, irony, a ram and "something different?"
Norris's book:
The Deconstructive Turn (Routledge Revivals) : Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy
Christopher Norris
Description
What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? When first published in 1983, Christopher Norris' book was the first to explore such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy, opening up a new and challenging dimension of inter-disciplinary study and creating a fresh and productive dialogue between philosophy and literary theory.
Table of Contents
1 Deconstruction and ‘ordinary language’: speech versus writing in the text of philosophy
2 The insistence of the letter: textuality and metaphor in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy
3 ‘That the truest philosophy is the most feigning’: Austin on the margins of literature
4 Fictions of authority: narrative and viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s writing
5 Image and parable: readings of Walter Benjamin
6 Forked paths to Xanadu: parables of reading in Livingston Lowes
7 Deconstruction, naming and necessity: some logical options
Methodological postscript: deconstruction versus interpretation?
Appendix: on Henning Fenger’s ‘Kierkegaard: the myths and their origins’
Reading some old articles and letters in the LRB, it seems that Norris was a somewhat significant player in the mid-1980s controversy over Paul de Man's nazism. This woulda been only a few years before he lectured at our university.
Thoughts on Abraham, irony, a ram, and "something different?"
Yes, as a matter of fact. Does Kierkegaard anywhere actually appear to hold up the possibility that the statement "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son" means that Isaac himself might be the sacrifice? I'm not sure I can see anywhere that that is implied.
I've only checked out a couple of bible-analysis sites, but at least one that looks sorta MOTR-to-conservative seems to leave the question up for debate as to the meaning of the line, with the two suggested interpretations being a) God will provide a real lamb, and b) Isaac is the lamb.
Also, someone argues that it's meant to be understood as "God will provide a lamb for Himself", rather than "Himself" being used to emphasize the significance of the actor.
Sorry to be so late in answering today, and at the end of my day. I'll try to be coherant. I think there are more examples than I will come up with tonight, but it's also the entire undercurrent of the book.
--The Knight of Faith gives up his greatest desire in infinite resignation but believes he will receive it back by virtue of the absurd. Because, as reported in F&T, Abraham had been told to sacrifice Isaac, the assumption seems to be that after the process of sacrificing Isaac, Isaac would be dead.
--How many times does Jds emphasize that Abraham sharpened the knife and drew the knife? What else would the knife be for, except to kill Isaac as a sacrifice.
--Some Jds's alternate stories depict Abraham as killing himself, rather than Isaac.
--Even in the irony section of Problema III, an alternate was that God would have to kill Isaac himself, perhaps by striking him by lightening.
--The endless repetion contrasting ethical behaviors (the father must love the son, for example) and murder.
--How many uses of the word "murder" in the book?
--The empahsis on the work of drawing the knife as part of faith.
I'm sure there are more examles. I don't see any reason to read the book assuming that Jds or SK imagined "giving up Isaac" did not include killing him.
But think specifically about the Knight of Faith, such a central concept to the book. While there are other examples of "giving up" a greatly desired thing or person, God had told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. And Abraham was prepared not only to kill Isaac, but to roast his body on an alter fueled by the wood that Isaac had carried. This is truly "giving up." This was the act that was required, and there is no indication that Abraham thought otherwise.
Yeah, in philosophical terms, Abraham in that scene wants Isaac to continue believing that God is operating within the ethical.
This post caught my eye, when I was scrolling up the thread and randomly reading back. I had misread this sentence, and replied based on my misreading. I'd said: Yep.
No. Abraham is not attempting to place God back into the ethical. Not by Jds's standards. Jds never assumes in the book that God behaves within the ethical and that is part of Abraham's dilema.
In the vignettes in Tuning Up, we see Jds imagining how different versions of the story might affect Abraham's or Isaac's faith.
In the first vignette, where Abraham poses as a madman, he does it to take the horror of God's command on himself, so that Isaac doesn't have to deal with the horror of knowing that God told his dad to kill him. This is not the same as trying to put God in the ethical, where he never was. Abraham is attempting to shelter Isaac from a terrible reality.
Thanks. Just to be clear, yes, I've always assumed that jds means us to understand that Abraham was prepared to go all the way and kill Isaac if God didn't change the orders; it's basically a sine qua non for his being a Knight Of Faith. So, I wasn't trying to rebut that particular idea.
I'm gonna have to give your post a closer read and collect my thoughts. Thanks again for the detailed reply.
I don't think F&T offers it as an option, but do you think it would make a difference to the direction of the book if Abraham a) was hearing voices that were not the deity or b) the deity did not exist?
In his (favourable) discussion of Socrates as an exemplar, is SK implying that the Greek gods exist?
I don't think F&T offers it as an option, but do you think it would make a difference to the direction of the book if Abraham a) was hearing voices that were not the deity or b) the deity did not exist?
Hmmm. Interesting question. What do you think?
I'm mulling,
Thinking about this question and earlier ones about SK's choice of stories and philosophers used in F&T, if this jumble is a deliberate emphasis on the jumble that the church had made of theology and philosophy. Not sure. Unless there is extra-trembling evidence, it probably can't be established, but the mind wanders at times.
Thanks for the discussion. Have not been able to fond one elsewhere.
My view is, as I suggested before, that Kierkegaard was talking about a form of belief that isn't Christianity.
He seems (to me) to do two contradictory things.
First he seems to be continually encouraging readers to think hard about the things taken for granted within one's own worldview (meaning Christianity for the majority of readers).
But at the same time he seems to be continually saying that one can only be a true believer by existing right at the edge of that belief system - and attracting the scorn and anger of the other believers - and uses examples from *outside* to make the point.
For me, the only way to reconcile these is to say that Kierkegaard believed in something amorphous outside of all religious beliefs, but which could be reached by believers (presumably of all kinds) if they listened to the voice of conscience from deep within themselves and accepted the irony that believing the things they say they believe inevitably leads to confrontation with it.
My view is, as I suggested before, that Kierkegaard was talking about a form of belief that isn't Christianity.
He seems (to me) to do two contradictory things.
First he seems to be continually encouraging readers to think hard about the things taken for granted within one's own worldview (meaning Christianity for the majority of readers).
But at the same time he seems to be continually saying that one can only be a true believer by existing right at the edge of that belief system - and attracting the scorn and anger of the other believers - and uses examples from *outside* to make the point.
For me, the only way to reconcile these is to say that Kierkegaard believed in something amorphous outside of all religious beliefs, but which could be reached by believers (presumably of all kinds) if they listened to the voice of conscience from deep within themselves and accepted the irony that believing the things they say they believe inevitably leads to confrontation with it.
I agree that he's working to get his readers to think beyond their own world view, but the world view that he's addressing is a specific, and corrupted, form of Christianity. This understanding is supported in F&T and in other work where he directly contrasts the differences between what he calls "New Testament Christianity" and the form of Christianity that was be practiced during his lifetime in Denmark.
In F&T, if J ds is promoting a view that is anything like SK held, he is not saying that a true believer exists at the edge of the system; he's saying that the Christian believer who has faith can only exist OUTSIDE the then existing system of Christianity. Jds is very clear that faith cannot exist anywhere within the sphere of culturally-accepted Christianity, and that a direct relationship with God (the absolute) can only exist outside the mediation of the church. He even states that the church is (or is like) the universal, and this is after he has explained that the act of faith takes place outside of the universal, by a single individual who has asserted her indivuality, thus moving outside and above the universal.
I'm not seeing how you reach your conclusion about a belief in something amorphous, etc. But my assumptions are different. I don't find it all that unusual that SK's character Johannes pulls in all sorts of examples from outside Christianity. There is a long history of Christian theologians relying on ancient Greek philosophers and their concepts. Jds is a fairly "over the top" character, and it seems reasonable for him to do this, particularly if he is parodying low-level academics, which I think he does do.
If I remember right, Socrates is the only "pagan" knight of faith mentioned. I saw his inclusion as a further affront to the church members the piece is intended to confront. "Even this pagan can get it right!"
Thanks for understanding the challenges of dealing with the distractions and intrusions of Real Life™ on the fraught attention spans and limited reading time of participants here. My Ivory Tower™ is ontologically cluttered and chronologically incoherent. That I have managed to be able to keep up with this discussion at all in the last few weeks "is the only marvel."
Do you really think Kierkegaard was describing anything which could be described as conventional Christianity?
He certainly describes it as 'Christendom', but isn't the truth that his criticisms could largely be of almost all forms of Christianity?
I think the thing about being outside of Christendom still means being at the edge of Christianity.
On Socrates, it seems to me that SK particularly respects him (or Plato's story of him) because of the whole irony thing. The part that he likes about the narrative of Socrates is him being the gadfly.
Luther has been said to have placed At Augustine's doctrine of faith in conflict with St Augustine's doctrine of the Church. Kierkegaard seems to me to be doing the same for Luther.
Luther has been said to have placed At Augustine's doctrine of faith in conflict with St Augustine's doctrine of the Church. Kierkegaard seems to me to be doing the same for Luther.
@Dafyd could you talk a bit more about what you mean regarding Luther?
I was just reading an interesting thesis (to be clear, I know little to nothing about this) on the 17 century English sects - the seekers and diggers and finders and ranters and various others.
Anyway, maybe you all know more about this than I do (and maybe this is just exposing how little English history I know) but one interesting side point that I didn't appreciate before was the impact of church/state organisation from the Westminster Assembly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Assembly
What was interesting to me is that there appeared little dissenting to the idea that the state had a clear role in managing the church. Of course that's largely because the dissenters were not invited!
Anyway, I don't know if this is relevant or if there were similar things happening in Denmark, or if the echoes came down to Kierkegaard in the early 19 century.
Do you really think Kierkegaard was describing anything which could be described as conventional Christianity?
I may have mentioned before that I think we cannot know from F&T how SK would describe any particular form of Christianity, except perhaps, the corrupted form that F&T addresses. Do you understand his view of "conventional Christianity" (and what that is) from any of his other works?
I think the thing about being outside of Christendom still means being at the edge of Christianity.
Ok.
I understand J ds's descriptions as beyond the pale of official state Christiandom. Once one is beyond the pale in absolute relation with the absolute, I'm not quite sure how to measure any more.
On Socrates, it seems to me that SK particularly respects him (or Plato's story of him) because of the whole irony thing. The part that he likes about the narrative of Socrates is him being the gadfly.
Definitely both of those things.
I think he gets additional points, at least from J ds, for suffering, tenacity, infinite resignation,.... I'm sure I'm missing a few things here.....
And definitely the gadfly.
It takes real skill and heart to be a good one. I think I've met a quality gadfly only once in my life. He claimed to be a dilettante, but I think he was just bluffing about that.
What was interesting to me is that there appeared little dissenting to the idea that the state had a clear role in managing the church. Of course that's largely because the dissenters were not invited!
Anyway, I don't know if this is relevant or if there were similar things happening in Denmark, or if the echoes came down to Kierkegaard in the early 19 century.
Kierkegaard may have wanted to separate the church from the state, but I think his longer-reaching telos was to separate the individual from the church, so that the individual may then become a true Christian.
Found Copleston's History Of Philosophy on-line, and skimmed the Kierkegaard chapter. A relatively small section on Fear And Trembling, and nothing, as far as I can tell, on Problem III.
Which makes me think that my recollection from Existentislism class of Problem III going un-discussed might actually be accurate(as opposed to "Maybe I just skipped class that day"). I don't recall mentioning anything about the P3 topics in my Kierkegaard paper, and I got an okay(albeit not outstanding) mark on that.
Also came across an EWTN article lionizing Copleston, and quoting his description of an essay he wrote as a teenager, in which he castigated the C of E, while praising the RCC for "not equat[ing] true religion with being an English gentleman." He then says that while he was unaware of Kierkegaard at the time, the essay's "line of thought bore some similarity to his attack on the State Church of Denmark."
Yeah. I think Problema I seems to get the most attention. Problema III is pretty "out there." It seems like most writers give up by the time they get into it and just say "This can't possibly mean anything."
Which I think seems like a very good reason to dig through. Not that Kierkegaard would attempt to hide his message in any way. : )
Yeah. I think Problema I seems to get the most attention. Problema III is pretty "out there." It seems like most writers give up by the time they get into it and just say "This can't possibly mean anything."
Which I think seems like a very good reason to dig through. Not that Kierkegaard would attempt to hide his message in any way. : )
Yeah, as I quoted a few weeks back, in Problem II he gets into some pretty dry but clearly-expressed philosophy about the universal and the absolute, and you can pretty much follow what he's saying.
But it all kinda goes off-the-rails, presentation-wise, in III. I think I can basically boil it down to "By the judgement of God, Abraham was justified in concealing his purposes from others because it means he will be acting entirely alone."
What was interesting to me is that there appeared little dissenting to the idea that the state had a clear role in managing the church. Of course that's largely because the dissenters were not invited!
Anyway, I don't know if this is relevant or if there were similar things happening in Denmark, or if the echoes came down to Kierkegaard in the early 19 century.
Kierkegaard may have wanted to separate the church from the state, but I think his longer-reaching telos was to separate the individual from the church, so that the individual may then become a true Christian.
Right. It seems like he is envisioning something which seems like early Quaker (or perhaps even the Seekers, a group which some consider proto-Quakers from the 17 century) with an emphasis on the "inner light", no buildings or sacraments or rituals or even, perhaps, consistent doctrine.
What was interesting to me is that there appeared little dissenting to the idea that the state had a clear role in managing the church. Of course that's largely because the dissenters were not invited!
Anyway, I don't know if this is relevant or if there were similar things happening in Denmark, or if the echoes came down to Kierkegaard in the early 19 century.
Kierkegaard may have wanted to separate the church from the state, but I think his longer-reaching telos was to separate the individual from the church, so that the individual may then become a true Christian.
Right. It seems like he is envisioning something which seems like early Quaker (or perhaps even the Seekers, a group which some consider proto-Quakers from the 17 century) with an emphasis on the "inner light", no buildings or sacraments or rituals or even, perhaps, consistent doctrine.
Yeah, I mean, if you're kinda wondering how a church reformed along kierkegaardian lines would harmonize a hyper-individualized connection to God with "Where two or more etc", Quakers and their inner-light may very well provide an example. Though I think Kierkegaard would still want his church to be more doctrinal than the Friends.
Luther has been said to have placed At Augustine's doctrine of faith in conflict with St Augustine's doctrine of the Church. Kierkegaard seems to me to be doing the same for Luther.
could you talk a bit more about what you mean regarding Luther?
Augustine believes that human beings are saved by faith in God, which faith is entirely God's initiative. He also believes that there is no salvation outside the worldwide (catholic) church, which is a community independent of secular structures organised around the bishops who inherit their teaching office from the apostles. Luther and the other Reformers argued that if the former were true the latter couldn't be true. Salvation by faith excludes salvation through the church. So instead of the church being a community independent of secular structures Luther makes it a community of all the faithful organised by those secular structures. The churches are departments of the State and are responsible to the State's ruler. Meanwhile, for Luther although faith may manifest in good works it isn't itself those good works: it's an individual stance. (Faith is behind the left nipple, Luther once said.)
So what it seems to me is that Kierkegaard is saying that if faith is an individual stance towards God as Luther says it is, then the body of believers can't be organised as a department of the secular community and State.
Well it's just an idea. It's hardly the whole truth and I'm not addressing any differences between the ways in which Luther and Kierkegaard conceptualise faith.
The specific objection of Kierkegaard's nephew in disrupting his burial was that Kierkegaard would personally not have wanted a burial by the state church.
Luther has been said to have placed At Augustine's doctrine of faith in conflict with St Augustine's doctrine of the Church. Kierkegaard seems to me to be doing the same for Luther.
could you talk a bit more about what you mean regarding Luther?
Augustine believes that human beings are saved by faith in God, which faith is entirely God's initiative. He also believes that there is no salvation outside the worldwide (catholic) church, which is a community independent of secular structures organised around the bishops who inherit their teaching office from the apostles. Luther and the other Reformers argued that if the former were true the latter couldn't be true. Salvation by faith excludes salvation through the church. So instead of the church being a community independent of secular structures Luther makes it a community of all the faithful organised by those secular structures. The churches are departments of the State and are responsible to the State's ruler. Meanwhile, for Luther although faith may manifest in good works it isn't itself those good works: it's an individual stance. (Faith is behind the left nipple, Luther once said.)
So what it seems to me is that Kierkegaard is saying that if faith is an individual stance towards God as Luther says it is, then the body of believers can't be organised as a department of the secular community and State.
Well it's just an idea. It's hardly the whole truth and I'm not addressing any differences between the ways in which Luther and Kierkegaard conceptualise faith.
@Dafyd thank you, this is really helpful! I will read it some more and think it over.
The specific objection of Kierkegaard's nephew in disrupting his burial was that Kierkegaard would personally not have wanted a burial by the state church.
What a family!
Nothing like a raucous funeral!
SK also refused communion on his death bed, unless it were administered by a layperson. He ended up doing without.
This is from my digital edition of "The Essential Kierkegaard" (82%)
On October 2, 1855, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street and died November 11,1855. A few weeks earlier, at a party with friends, he had slid from the sofa to the floor. As people gathered around him, he looked up, winked, and said, "Oh, leave it--let--the maid--sweep it up--in the morning." There was this characteristic sense of humor also in the series of writings during the last year, but in the keenly sharpened form of hard-hitting criticism and, at times, caustic caricature. An authorship that began as indirect communication ended as direct.
Linklater has the line uttered out of context by a random passerby, leaving the impression that it was SK's last words on his deathbed, likely meaning "Sweep me to heaven".
Hmm. Dunno. Maybe our man thought a lot about sweeping.
I've come across references to what I quoted in a number of places, but haven't attempted to track them down. They might all lead to one single, unreliable source, and Linklater has it right?
Does he mention where he has this from? (Never heard of the guy before, btw.)
Hmm. Dunno. Maybe our man thought a lot about sweeping.
I've come across references to what I quoted in a number of places, but haven't attempted to track them down. They might all lead to one single, unreliable source, and Linklater has it right?
Does he mention where he has this from? (Never heard of the guy before, btw.)
Linklater is a film-maker. You've probably seen some of his movies. Before Sunrise and its various sequels are probably his most well-known pieces, but he's done alot of other stuff, most if it, like Waking Life, in the "aimless Gen X life" genre, with plot development kept largely at bay.
Waking Life also features an appearance by Robert C. Solomon, a professor of philosophy in Austin, who defends existentialism as the most valid philosophy he's encountered(or words to that effect). Presumably, that's part of the context for the later Kierkegaard quote.
Sorry. Just to correct myself, I'm pretty sure School Of Rock is Linklater's most well-known film. Among the films of his which still manage to maintain his earlier indie spirit in a convincing manner, the Whenever Whatever series are still likely the most popular.
Comments
I don't know anything about the theological concept of the 'demonic'
If you need info, this might help:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/demon-possession/
I don't speak Danish so I don't know which words he is using.
The only one in F&T who resembles, say, the [url="https://www.esv.org/Matthew+8:28–9:1;Mark+5:1–21;Luke+8:26–40/"]the demoniac at Gerasenes, [/url], is actually Abraham, the man of God; God's chosen.
See the first story in Tuning Up and later, when Abraham is described as insane.
Is there more to discuss?
I realize you're not saying that Kierkegaard's Abraham is deliberately styled after the demoniac at Gerasenes, but, even just in terms of randomly noticed similarities, on what basis do you see a resemblance?
Because the demoniac, pre-exorcism, is totally alienated from society(like a Knight Of Faith)? Or something about the way he interacts with Jesus post-exorcism? Or...?
Certainly the alienation. That's why both the demonic and the religious categories are outside of the sphere of the ethical/universal.
But I was thinking specifically of the depiction of Abraham the first variation in Tuning Up:
"He climbed Mount Moriah, but Isaac did not understand him. Then he turned away from him for a moment, but when Isaac looked upon Abraham’s countenance for the second time, it was transformed: the look in his eyes was wild, his form one of terror. He seized Isaac by the breast, threw him to the ground, and said: “Foolish boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you think this is God’s command? No, it is my desire.” "
Of course, de silentio is imagining this scene as a way that Abraham could protect Isaac from losing trust in God, by acting like a madman. But this scene makes Abraham look more like the demoniac roaming the caves than the Father of Faith.
Yeah, in philosophical terms, Abraham in that scene wants Isaac to continue believing that God is operating within the ethical.
That passage, of course, has as its accompanying symbolization the mother blackening her breast, in order to trick the child(Isaac) into believing that the breast(Abraham) has changed, but the mother herself(God) has not. I recently read that when Soren broke off his engagement with Regina, he told her a bunch of unflattering lies about himself, so she wouldn't be too pained about the break-up.
Yep. That's the problem with all the variations that show up throughout the book.
I thought it was interesting how Abraham is depicted here, though, as one who could be seen as demonic in the eyes of traditional church goers, in order to maintain the ethical. More irony.
Yes, there are references to the broken engagement all through the book and others, I believe. The Merman section has clear references about the possibility of driving Agnete away. But really, it's all over the book.
It certainly was a significant event in his life, or a significant metaphor. I will be keeping a look-out for more related to it as I read more of his works and diaries. And I will be looking for whether/how his treatment of the event develops or changes over time, in what context he brings it up, etc.
He won't have been the first person to have done such a thing and had unresolved feelings about it. His personality also seems to have tended to be a bit obsessive as well as very sensitive. With his inclination toward the Romantic (as a cultural technical term), this is also not surprising.
I think the thing that is really surprising is how open he was about it in his work. From some of the things I've read about him, (sorry, I'd have to look through things for a reference), it sounds like his readership was quite small in his lifetime, and he knew it. A local writer of sorts. If that is accurate, then nearly his entire audience likely know what had happened with Regine. And also the Coursaire Affair, which I think he also references quite often with jabs at publisher and assistant professors.
Oh. Sorry. I see I'm rambling here.
So, where do you all want to go with this discussion? Are we done with Agnete and the Merman (I think they would make a great electrified Danish punk-folk music group)? I feel like we've barely discussed it, but maybe it's not interesting to anyone else.
I hope we don't leave out the sections on doubt and irony. I think there is a lot of great stuff there, but I haven't gone back over those, because I was going over A & M.
Please, let's not leave out the very end of Problema III and the Epilogue.
Well, the following is from NEAR the end of Problem III, and has been bugging me since I last posted about it.
Okay. As quoted, the actual line is...
From which Kierkegaard derives the paraphrase...
It seems to me that there is a certainty in Abraham's words("God will...") that is somewhat qualified in Kierkegaard's rendering("...it is of course possible...").
Or am I reading too much into the word "possible" there?
By the way, there's at least one
anecdote from my Existentialism class class that you will find more interesting than I did...
Once, a Welsh philosopher named Christopher Norris was delivering a guest lecture on Kierkegaard, and so our class all got herded into going to listen.
I can only report...
1. The lecture was VERY focused on irony.
2. I didn't understand a single thing the guy was saying.
Based on informal conversations around campus, I did get the impression the lecture was well-received by those with an interest in the topics covered.
I just scanned over Norris's wikipedia page. No question he would not be understandable. He worked with postmodern criticism. Read any? It's the hardest stuff I have ever tried to penetrate as a reader. A brief article by Foucault was 8 hours that ended as it had begun, but with more eye strain.
Summer be for last I participated in a discussion of a book by a reader of PoMo as well as Kierkegaard. It was a hard read. There was a chapter that dealt heavily with Kieriegaard's work with irony, and it almost killed me. (Well, not really, but I never understood the section.)
I can understand why Norris's lecture would have been like Greek.
The writing style, development of arguments, logical sequences, and use of vocabulary are all very different and often built in relation to an ongoing discussion you are only entering into and from the side.
I am returning to this reading and starting it by backing up to Kierkegaard because of that summer book discussion. It was time to see what he says and to return to and expand on PoMo.
I should havenplenty to read and think about for a very long time.
This paragraph is discussing two things:
1) how A's use of irony indicates he has followed both movements (infinite resignation of Isaac, and faith that he will regain Isaac in finitude (the present))
2) how the use of irony allows A to say nothing, in that he both speaks no lie and gives no information. He speaks the entire truth without telling what he knows to be true about God's command.
What he knows is that he has been commanded to sacrifice Isaac by his own hand. Isaac, the child promised and given by God miraculously. God has provided the ram in this way.
God could provide a substitute ram also. Something entirely different.
Abraham's irony is open ended enough that it allows for a number of true interpretations which can only really be understood in hindsight.
Did I answer your question?
I agree with you on alot of "postmodern" writing. Though given the way that label sometimes gets used as a catch-all for "Any piece of recent humanities scholarship I personally don't understand", I'm reluctant to attribute the incomprehensibility of Christopher Norris to his supposedly being postmodern.
Derrida's essay on Nietzsche, called Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, is actually a fairly coherent analysis of Nietzsche, and that's possibly because Nietzsche's writing lends itself well to deconstruction. I think the same thing might be true of Kierkegaard, especially as he explicates the ideas in Problem III.
Thoughts on Abraham, irony, a ram and "something different?"
Norris's book:
The Deconstructive Turn (Routledge Revivals) : Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy
Christopher Norris
Description
What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? When first published in 1983, Christopher Norris' book was the first to explore such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy, opening up a new and challenging dimension of inter-disciplinary study and creating a fresh and productive dialogue between philosophy and literary theory.
Table of Contents
1 Deconstruction and ‘ordinary language’: speech versus writing in the text of philosophy
2 The insistence of the letter: textuality and metaphor in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy
3 ‘That the truest philosophy is the most feigning’: Austin on the margins of literature
4 Fictions of authority: narrative and viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s writing
5 Image and parable: readings of Walter Benjamin
6 Forked paths to Xanadu: parables of reading in Livingston Lowes
7 Deconstruction, naming and necessity: some logical options
Methodological postscript: deconstruction versus interpretation?
Appendix: on Henning Fenger’s ‘Kierkegaard: the myths and their origins’
Reading some old articles and letters in the LRB, it seems that Norris was a somewhat significant player in the mid-1980s controversy over Paul de Man's nazism. This woulda been only a few years before he lectured at our university.
Yes, as a matter of fact. Does Kierkegaard anywhere actually appear to hold up the possibility that the statement "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son" means that Isaac himself might be the sacrifice? I'm not sure I can see anywhere that that is implied.
Do you think there is a reason not to read it in such a way? I'm curious why.
Can you cite a passage that seems to suggest that?
(And, for the record, I'm quite prepared to believe that there are such passages, and I missed them.)
Also, someone argues that it's meant to be understood as "God will provide a lamb for Himself", rather than "Himself" being used to emphasize the significance of the actor.
--The Knight of Faith gives up his greatest desire in infinite resignation but believes he will receive it back by virtue of the absurd. Because, as reported in F&T, Abraham had been told to sacrifice Isaac, the assumption seems to be that after the process of sacrificing Isaac, Isaac would be dead.
--How many times does Jds emphasize that Abraham sharpened the knife and drew the knife? What else would the knife be for, except to kill Isaac as a sacrifice.
--Some Jds's alternate stories depict Abraham as killing himself, rather than Isaac.
--Even in the irony section of Problema III, an alternate was that God would have to kill Isaac himself, perhaps by striking him by lightening.
--The endless repetion contrasting ethical behaviors (the father must love the son, for example) and murder.
--How many uses of the word "murder" in the book?
--The empahsis on the work of drawing the knife as part of faith.
I'm sure there are more examles. I don't see any reason to read the book assuming that Jds or SK imagined "giving up Isaac" did not include killing him.
But think specifically about the Knight of Faith, such a central concept to the book. While there are other examples of "giving up" a greatly desired thing or person, God had told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. And Abraham was prepared not only to kill Isaac, but to roast his body on an alter fueled by the wood that Isaac had carried. This is truly "giving up." This was the act that was required, and there is no indication that Abraham thought otherwise.
This post caught my eye, when I was scrolling up the thread and randomly reading back. I had misread this sentence, and replied based on my misreading. I'd said: Yep.
No. Abraham is not attempting to place God back into the ethical. Not by Jds's standards. Jds never assumes in the book that God behaves within the ethical and that is part of Abraham's dilema.
In the vignettes in Tuning Up, we see Jds imagining how different versions of the story might affect Abraham's or Isaac's faith.
In the first vignette, where Abraham poses as a madman, he does it to take the horror of God's command on himself, so that Isaac doesn't have to deal with the horror of knowing that God told his dad to kill him. This is not the same as trying to put God in the ethical, where he never was. Abraham is attempting to shelter Isaac from a terrible reality.
Thanks. Just to be clear, yes, I've always assumed that jds means us to understand that Abraham was prepared to go all the way and kill Isaac if God didn't change the orders; it's basically a sine qua non for his being a Knight Of Faith. So, I wasn't trying to rebut that particular idea.
I'm gonna have to give your post a closer read and collect my thoughts. Thanks again for the detailed reply.
In his (favourable) discussion of Socrates as an exemplar, is SK implying that the Greek gods exist?
I'm mulling,
Hmmm. @stetson could you talk more about the section/s of F&T you have in mind?
@Dafyd that's an interesting point.
Thinking about this question and earlier ones about SK's choice of stories and philosophers used in F&T, if this jumble is a deliberate emphasis on the jumble that the church had made of theology and philosophy. Not sure. Unless there is extra-trembling evidence, it probably can't be established, but the mind wanders at times.
Thanks for the discussion. Have not been able to fond one elsewhere.
He seems (to me) to do two contradictory things.
First he seems to be continually encouraging readers to think hard about the things taken for granted within one's own worldview (meaning Christianity for the majority of readers).
But at the same time he seems to be continually saying that one can only be a true believer by existing right at the edge of that belief system - and attracting the scorn and anger of the other believers - and uses examples from *outside* to make the point.
For me, the only way to reconcile these is to say that Kierkegaard believed in something amorphous outside of all religious beliefs, but which could be reached by believers (presumably of all kinds) if they listened to the voice of conscience from deep within themselves and accepted the irony that believing the things they say they believe inevitably leads to confrontation with it.
I agree that he's working to get his readers to think beyond their own world view, but the world view that he's addressing is a specific, and corrupted, form of Christianity. This understanding is supported in F&T and in other work where he directly contrasts the differences between what he calls "New Testament Christianity" and the form of Christianity that was be practiced during his lifetime in Denmark.
In F&T, if J ds is promoting a view that is anything like SK held, he is not saying that a true believer exists at the edge of the system; he's saying that the Christian believer who has faith can only exist OUTSIDE the then existing system of Christianity. Jds is very clear that faith cannot exist anywhere within the sphere of culturally-accepted Christianity, and that a direct relationship with God (the absolute) can only exist outside the mediation of the church. He even states that the church is (or is like) the universal, and this is after he has explained that the act of faith takes place outside of the universal, by a single individual who has asserted her indivuality, thus moving outside and above the universal.
I'm not seeing how you reach your conclusion about a belief in something amorphous, etc. But my assumptions are different. I don't find it all that unusual that SK's character Johannes pulls in all sorts of examples from outside Christianity. There is a long history of Christian theologians relying on ancient Greek philosophers and their concepts. Jds is a fairly "over the top" character, and it seems reasonable for him to do this, particularly if he is parodying low-level academics, which I think he does do.
If I remember right, Socrates is the only "pagan" knight of faith mentioned. I saw his inclusion as a further affront to the church members the piece is intended to confront. "Even this pagan can get it right!"
Thanks for understanding the challenges of dealing with the distractions and intrusions of Real Life™ on the fraught attention spans and limited reading time of participants here. My Ivory Tower™ is ontologically cluttered and chronologically incoherent. That I have managed to be able to keep up with this discussion at all in the last few weeks "is the only marvel."
He certainly describes it as 'Christendom', but isn't the truth that his criticisms could largely be of almost all forms of Christianity?
I think the thing about being outside of Christendom still means being at the edge of Christianity.
On Socrates, it seems to me that SK particularly respects him (or Plato's story of him) because of the whole irony thing. The part that he likes about the narrative of Socrates is him being the gadfly.
I always understood him as saying that you have to leave Christendom in order to enter into Christianity.
@Dafyd could you talk a bit more about what you mean regarding Luther?
Anyway, maybe you all know more about this than I do (and maybe this is just exposing how little English history I know) but one interesting side point that I didn't appreciate before was the impact of church/state organisation from the Westminster Assembly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Assembly
What was interesting to me is that there appeared little dissenting to the idea that the state had a clear role in managing the church. Of course that's largely because the dissenters were not invited!
Anyway, I don't know if this is relevant or if there were similar things happening in Denmark, or if the echoes came down to Kierkegaard in the early 19 century.
I may have mentioned before that I think we cannot know from F&T how SK would describe any particular form of Christianity, except perhaps, the corrupted form that F&T addresses. Do you understand his view of "conventional Christianity" (and what that is) from any of his other works?
Which criticisms do you have in mind? And to what degree are those SK's or J ds's?
Ok.
I understand J ds's descriptions as beyond the pale of official state Christiandom. Once one is beyond the pale in absolute relation with the absolute, I'm not quite sure how to measure any more.
Definitely both of those things.
I think he gets additional points, at least from J ds, for suffering, tenacity, infinite resignation,.... I'm sure I'm missing a few things here.....
And definitely the gadfly.
It takes real skill and heart to be a good one. I think I've met a quality gadfly only once in my life. He claimed to be a dilettante, but I think he was just bluffing about that.
Kierkegaard may have wanted to separate the church from the state, but I think his longer-reaching telos was to separate the individual from the church, so that the individual may then become a true Christian.
Which makes me think that my recollection from Existentislism class of Problem III going un-discussed might actually be accurate(as opposed to "Maybe I just skipped class that day"). I don't recall mentioning anything about the P3 topics in my Kierkegaard paper, and I got an okay(albeit not outstanding) mark on that.
Also came across an EWTN article lionizing Copleston, and quoting his description of an essay he wrote as a teenager, in which he castigated the C of E, while praising the RCC for "not equat[ing] true religion with being an English gentleman." He then says that while he was unaware of Kierkegaard at the time, the essay's "line of thought bore some similarity to his attack on the State Church of Denmark."
Which I think seems like a very good reason to dig through. Not that Kierkegaard would attempt to hide his message in any way. : )
Yeah, as I quoted a few weeks back, in Problem II he gets into some pretty dry but clearly-expressed philosophy about the universal and the absolute, and you can pretty much follow what he's saying.
But it all kinda goes off-the-rails, presentation-wise, in III. I think I can basically boil it down to "By the judgement of God, Abraham was justified in concealing his purposes from others because it means he will be acting entirely alone."
Right. It seems like he is envisioning something which seems like early Quaker (or perhaps even the Seekers, a group which some consider proto-Quakers from the 17 century) with an emphasis on the "inner light", no buildings or sacraments or rituals or even, perhaps, consistent doctrine.
Yeah, I mean, if you're kinda wondering how a church reformed along kierkegaardian lines would harmonize a hyper-individualized connection to God with "Where two or more etc", Quakers and their inner-light may very well provide an example. Though I think Kierkegaard would still want his church to be more doctrinal than the Friends.
So what it seems to me is that Kierkegaard is saying that if faith is an individual stance towards God as Luther says it is, then the body of believers can't be organised as a department of the secular community and State.
Well it's just an idea. It's hardly the whole truth and I'm not addressing any differences between the ways in which Luther and Kierkegaard conceptualise faith.
The specific objection of Kierkegaard's nephew in disrupting his burial was that Kierkegaard would personally not have wanted a burial by the state church.
@Dafyd thank you, this is really helpful! I will read it some more and think it over.
What a family!
Nothing like a raucous funeral!
SK also refused communion on his death bed, unless it were administered by a layperson. He ended up doing without.
But contrary to Richard Linklater(*), his last words were NOT "Sweep me up!"
(*) Clip on YouTube
Do you mean he actually did say "Sweep me up!", but it was over a month before his death?
Linklater has the line uttered out of context by a random passerby, leaving the impression that it was SK's last words on his deathbed, likely meaning "Sweep me to heaven".
I've come across references to what I quoted in a number of places, but haven't attempted to track them down. They might all lead to one single, unreliable source, and Linklater has it right?
Does he mention where he has this from? (Never heard of the guy before, btw.)
Linklater is a film-maker. You've probably seen some of his movies. Before Sunrise and its various sequels are probably his most well-known pieces, but he's done alot of other stuff, most if it, like Waking Life, in the "aimless Gen X life" genre, with plot development kept largely at bay.
Waking Life also features an appearance by Robert C. Solomon, a professor of philosophy in Austin, who defends existentialism as the most valid philosophy he's encountered(or words to that effect). Presumably, that's part of the context for the later Kierkegaard quote.