On Kierkegaard and the Truth

Paul L. Holmer, David J. Gouwens, Lee C. Barrett, Gouwens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621894346
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Paul L. Holmer (1916-2004) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota (1946-1960) and Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School (1960-1987). Among his many acomplishments, Holmer was one of the most significant American students of Kierkegaard of his generation. Although written in the 1950s and 1960s, Holmer's theological and philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard challenges much in the contemporary scholarly discussions of this important thinker. Unlike many, Holmer refuses reductionist readings that tie Kierkegaard to any particular "school." He likewise criticizes biographical readings of Kierkegaard, much in vogue recently, seeing Kierkegaard rather as an indirect communicator aiming at his reader's own ethical and religious capacities. Holmer also rejects popular existentialist readings of Kierkegaard, seeing him as an analyzer of concepts, while at the same time denying that he is a "crypto-analyst." Holmer criticizes the attempt to construe Kierkegaard as a didactic religious thinker, appreciating Kierkegaard's "cool" descriptive objectivity and his ironic and stylistic virtuosity. In his important reading of Kierkegaard on "truth, " Holmer pits Kierkegaard against those who see "truth" empirically, idealistically, or relativistically. Holmer's carefully textured account of Kierkegaard's conceptual grammar of "truth" in ethical and religious contexts, fifty years after it was penned, addresses immediately current discussions of truth, meaning, reference, and realism versus antirealism, relativism, and hermeneutics. It will be of great interest to all interested in Kierkegaard and his importance for contemporary theology and philosophy.This is the first volume of The Paul L. Holmer Papers, which includes also volume 2, Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays, and volume 3, Communicating the Faith Indirectly: Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Prayers.

chapter 1

An Introduction to the Problem

I

All philosophical works have their genesis in a problem. To this extent at least this volume is philosophical. The problem is deceptively simple in appearance and perhaps seems hardly worth another book. For when an author insists that he is a religious author from first to last and when he proclaims that the movement in his own literature is away from the aesthetic and through the philosophical and reflective and into finally the religious,1 then it would seem that enough has been said already, that anything else about the author’s philosophy will be gratuitous. Appearance also has its structure and there are many readers of Kierkegaard’s words who find their anti-intellectual proclivities and judgments strengthened by such remarks. All kinds of existentialists are quick to use Kierkegaard as authority for the view that inferential reasoning is of no avail. With the torrent of praise that Kierkegaard receives from those who are belatedly discovering that biblical religion is serious business, there come also the rejoinders from minorities in philosophy and theology who fear that everything anti-rational and barbaric is being brought back under the aegis of a perverse genius.2

In one way or another Kierkegaard’s disparagement of philosophy is construed to mean something quite different from what was stated within his own authorship. In the contexts of language and reflection in which his strong words are placed and understood by contemporaries, it becomes difficult to make sense of many of his most important remarks. The fact that he eschewed writing a treatise on metaphysics, ethics, logic, or epistemology seems to credit the conviction that he was not a philosopher at all. But, as one reads his voluminous literature, both his published writings and papers, it becomes clear that he is eminently systematic, that every part of his literature expresses an intention. Furthermore, it all belongs together in ways that are very heartening for a philosophically oriented reader. Although there is no treatise on logic, there is a kind of embedded logic, a logical order informing every inquiry and sentence. Although there is no explicit ethical theory there are ample indications of a theory about ethical proposals again informing the entire literature. True, there is no metaphysical system spelled out in detail; but there are numerous statements about metaphysics. Furthermore there are consistent and well-articulated attitudes and convictions that are in the spirit of a “meta-metaphysics,” that is, they represent a kind of outlook and language system within which the possibility and limits of metaphysics are seen. Likewise Kierkegaard wrote no extended treatise on epistemology, but when one pieces together all that he said one finds again that only a sustained argument could have produced those somewhat casual appearing remarks.

Those students of Kierkegaard’s literature who stress his religious writings all too frequently stress them to the exclusion of his pronounced philosophical abilities. This is easily enough done, especially when Kierkegaard said that he was moving out of philosophy and into the religious. But this was a kind of philosophy, the kind which proposed a set of life-values. The nineteenth century is remarkable for the plentitude of that kind of philosophical system. Kierkegaard did not reject philosophy as a formal enterprise. He was not anti-logic, anti-theory, or anti-consistency, nor did he disparage theories about any of these. His point is rather that the regnant philosophies of his day were full of the self-assertiveness and self-assurance of men and hence acquire their value content, not in virtue of logically necessary reasoning but in virtue of all kinds of social and subjective factors.3 A more limited scope for philosophy seems called for—this seems to be his plea.

But a warning is in order. Kierkegaard thought that the world of scholarship is quite a humorous spectacle. And it is devoutly hoped that the arrival of the promised philosophical hero will not be accompanied by the tense and varied expectancy Kierkegaard described:

. . . reception committee on its feet . . . some with note-books open, pens dripping with ink, minds yearning in systematic instruction; all and sundry awaiting . . .4

Because Kierkegaard saw clearly that no conviction warranted by detached and rational argument could simultaneously move the thinker from detachment to attachment, from disinterestedness to interestedness, he also believed that it was ridiculously inappropriate to create too wide a concern about epistemological and logical problems. He was engaged as most men are in the pursuit of self-justification and what the theologians call salvation. In this matter he had maximal interest. Furthermore, he believed that the passions ought to be expressed upon such passional matters. But on matters appropriately abstract and detached he was inclined not to be the least bit evocative or persuasive. He was content to think clearly and exactingly for the sake of the clearness and exactness but he refused to give any alien inducements to his readers at this point. The effect of clear expression upon logic and epistemological matters he understood to be regulative and disciplinary, not provident. It was his merit to have seen that the philosophical discourse that tried to get to reality, as he said, “in the last paragraph” or to ascertain the good was a misunderstanding of what reflection and discourse could properly do. Therefore Kierkegaard was most willing to let his readers do without the system—it was only deception that gave systems such importance anyway and such a deception certainly he would not practice.

In a different context, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, Johannes Climacus, tries to explain the importance, or rather the unimportance of his huge philosophical work (Concluding Unscientific Postscript), and then says:

If a naked dialectical analysis reveals that no approximation to faith is possible, that an attempt to construct a quantitative approach to faith is a misunderstanding, and that any appearance of success in this endeavor is an illusion; if it seems to be a temptation for the believer. . . . in transforming faith into something else, into a certainty of an entirely different order . . . then everyone who so understands the problem. . . . must feel the difficulty of his position . . .5

The difficulty is precisely in loving learning and yet knowing its limits, in admiring scholarship and scholars and yet not crediting them with the fountain of life. The point is that Kierkegaard believed in “a naked dialectical analysis,” by which he meant a formal analysis of concepts. The Postscript is a study of both passions and concepts. This is why it is called “pathetic-dialectical.” The projected title for this largest of his pseudonymous works was originally Logical Problems by Johannes Climacus.6 And the kind of reflection which helped constitute that book is amply illustrated in one hundred pages of his papers. Typical problems adumbrated therein and illustrative of what he meant by dialectical philosophy are questions about the meaning of a category, the difference between a dialectical and pathos-informed analysis, and the status of historical concepts like progress, etc.7

Kierkegaard believed that the truth or falsity of claims could be ascertained. To do this was to be dialectical. But there was also a science of ideas, an overview upon ideas and the language stating them. Dialecticians worried their way through such matters. Kierkegaard does not decide with Kant that dialectic is the logic of appearance or with Hegel that it is the logic of reality itself. The dialectical analysis of which Kierkegaard spoke in the passage quoted is “naked” (“nogne” in Danish) precisely because it is formal; it has to do with form, not content; it focuses on logical relations, on the limits of valid discourse, not finally on the empirical truth or falsity of what is said except indirectly as this is affected by logical considerations.8 The dialectician comes to know the rules of discourse. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript we see a young dialectician, who, because of philosophical competence, is able to discern the mistakes made by scholars who accumulate evidence for hypotheses that are logically irrelevant to that kind of verification. Philosophers of the non-dialectical and speculative variety are also instances of such mistaken thinkers. To borrow a contemporary expression, it is as if Kierkegaard is saying that there are category mistakes, and not least among the philosophers.

Therefore, the problem with which we are concerned is that of discussing and stating the dialectical and neutral structure within which Kierkegaard believed that he reflected and wrote. It must, of course, first be made clear that he acknowledged such a structure. But beyond this it is essential to state its relation to everything else that he wrote. The fact that this systematic structure of reflection is described as neutral ought to warn the critic who would insist that “now the professors are at him, doing exactly what he said they would, and misunderstanding him completely.” The neutrality of the ruled reflection is Kierkegaard’s philosophical secret. But to grasp for oneself these rules and forms of reflection, to be clear on the categories, is still to possess no content! So even if this effort is completely successful, nothing ethically or religiously important (as Kierkegaard undertsood such matters) will have been accomplished. Kierkegaard’s system will prove to be no palace of reflection with rooms for human occupation! The reality issue—if there is one—is not solved by systematic reflection; neither is the question of right or wrong conduct resolved by systematic thought about ethics. The issue for religious inquiry is certainly not to be resolved by a correct dialectic either. But it is only as we note Kierkegaard’s audacious and radical philosophical reflection that we can understand properly why he made the above denials. This is what will be subsequently attempted.

II

One of the exasperating difficulties in philosophy is to define the word “philosophy” itself. To a surprising extent, the definition of philosophy itself is a problem for philosophy. To the degree that philosophies have included within their limits persuasive and “lebens-philosophic” components, i.e., ethical and existential claims, so too have the definitions of philosophy reflected these same components. To determine, therefore, whether a given author was a philosopher or his works philosophical has been a matter most frequently of loud assertion on the part of innovators, on the one side, and a recitation of the precedents on the other. If one were to wait for loud assertions on behalf of Kierkegaard today, one would hear principally the theologians and the men-of-letters. However great their authority, the philosophers perhaps are not persuaded. If one were to wait for the precedents, one waits in vain. Who are the philosophers in the East or West who one would dare to say are the classic instances of what Kierkegaard also did? There are a few, of course, who did some of what he did: Rousseau and Augustine wrote confessional pieces but these are not their principal philosophical writings; Plato and Santayana combine aesthetic appeal and argumentative vigor; many wrote about the religious life, but was it not then theology that they wrote?

Kierkegaard was, in almost every perspective from which he can be read and understood, a most singular person and author. To describe him as a philosopher, whatever else he was, supposes that he had something in common with others called philosophers. As shall be indicated later, many pieces of his writings can be oriented to the elucidation of this issue, but at the outset suffice it to say that Kierkegaard never sought to provide for anyone else a summary of fundamental beliefs. He was not a pontiff philosopher seeking to be anyone else’s provident communication of wisdom. He denied his own right to communicate directly any fundamental ethical or religious belief. There was no dialectic establishing an ethical or religious belief anyway. Philosophical dialectic was more important in establishing beliefs about believing, a second-order belief so to speak, than in establishing a primary belief about matters of existence. For reasons which are, therefore, somewhat similar (but if anything much more circumspectly conceived and stated) to those given by logical empiricists and analytical philosophers, Kierkegaard too refrained from providing metaphysical and ethical beliefs in the grand manner.

Much of the history of philosophy is a rather sorry spectacle in which views of the good and the real contend. Even when one finds the occasional author like Plato who can write skillfully while giving contrasting views simultaneous expression in his own work, there is a kind of deception practiced that makes the philosophers suspicious. In Plato’s Gorgias “the ethical conquers because it is fortunate to have incomparably the abler protagonist; it conquers, and the reader can see the victory achieved and the opponents humbled.”9 Thus it is with most philosophers. A superior dialectical skill wins the plaudits for a point of view for a season and the other philosophical systems are then vanquished, but only until another dialectician arrives who conquers the field again. Metaphysicians...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Author’s Preface
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Problem
• Chapter 2: A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Philosophy
• Chapter 3: A New Way of Philosophizing
• Chapter 4: The Bible and Christianity
• Chapter 5: History and the Sciences
• Chapter 6: Truth Is Subjectivity
• Chapter 7: Truth Is Subjectivity
• Chapter 8: Some Epistemological Questions
• Chapter 9: Kierkegaard and Metaphysics
• Chapter 10: Kierkegaard and the Nature of Philosophy
• Chapter 11: Indirect Communication
• Chapter 12: Kierkegaard and the Sermon
• Chapter 13: Faith and Christianity
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Bibliography