The Limits of Faith

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, or rather his pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, shares the idea of the individual as it deals with the universal. One of the main themes that consistently runs throughout Fear and Trembling is the theme of the universal versus the ethical. By telling and retelling the story of Abraham and Isaac, the author (or storyteller? narrator?) provides a variety of different ways of approaching this story of a Knight of Faith. While clearly it is an agonizing decision for Abraham to follow through with God’s plan, he knows that in the end, God will make sure that everything works out just fine. This ordeal truly is a test of faith, a leap of faith, if you will. Basically, it would seem that the overall moral of the story is that our biggest goal as an individual is to forgo our personal individuality, and to be able to reach out and connect with the universal. In doing so, one’s actions no longer are for personal immediate gratification, but for the greater good as it were. The personal type relationship with God, is actually considered to be individual for it is between the individual and God. The Knight of Faith, like Abraham, must be willing to deal with the absurd, the paradox, and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty in the relationship. As someone who has never had any type of major religious experience, especially not to a Biblical, Knight of Faith inspired extent, the idea that a single individual person can join with God in a personal, private, universal relationship fascinates me. I suppose, having gone to religious-based schools for a large portion of my educational career and having daily interactions with religious figures like nuns and priests I can appreciate the hard work and devotion that goes into forming this type of relationship. Even so, I still have a difficult time imagining having a relationship with God that is that intense, much less one that requires such a leap of faith, one that transcends the ethical. I had commented on another post and said that I would be interested in what a very religious person would say if a situation like Abraham and Isaac’s were to happen in present day. I can’t help but wonder if their similar faith would allow them to sympathize with the so-called criminal, or if they could just sympathize yet still have serious doubts about the action. I like the idea of being able to have such strong faith and trust in God, but if faced with the judgment of an individual like Abraham, I really can’t say whether or not my faith would be strong enough to keep me from punishing them.

The Knight of Faith

The position of the knight of faith is particularly odd. One acting as a knight of faith has a direct relation to God on the one hand, and alienation from all his peers on the other. To be a knight of faith, one has to act in obedience to God while acting contrary to the ethical. So while the knight of faith obeys God’s command and does right in that way, he acts against the universal, which appears wrong to all other people making him an outcast. The relation the knight of faith has with God is singular and cannot be communicated to any other humans. What a lonely state that would be. While the knight of faith gets to have a real communication with God and fulfill God’s will, which presumably is a position all of the knight’s peers desire to have, he has to pay the price of alienation. The knight of faith appears to have no choice in the matter either. If God picks an individual out and asks them to do something against the ethical, that individual is probably going to be compelled to obey God’s will. God is supposed to be all powerful so he must be able to find better ways to test people than by putting them in a position in which they have to alienate themselves from all other individuals in order to do right by him. It appears as though the knight is cornered by God and ends up losing all his friends. Is this God some sort of bully? If the individual in question does not want to live in exile for the rest of his days, then he can disobey God’s orders, but there’s no telling what waits for him upon his passing away. It seems obvious to me that if God exists, in the way that Christianity tells us he does, then you simply must obey his commands. In other words, one has an absolute duty to God. If God created everything, then he created morals and the like as well, so his word overrules all else. These days it is rare someone is reached out to by God the way Abraham was. If someone solved word hunger and said “God told me to” everyone would be happy. If someone did something bad, like Abraham almost was forced to, and said “God told me to” the people would rise up against them and call them mad. The relation the knight of faith has with God is only between the two of them and not relatable to anything else. In this way, the knight of faith has no choice but to follow God as he has no way to prove he is not real.

Kierkegaard and Dickinson?

Abraham to kill him- by Emily Dickinson

Abraham to kill him—
Was distinctly told—
Isaac was an Urchin—
Abraham was old—

Not a hesitation—
Abraham complied—
Flattered by Obeisance
Tyranny demurred—

Isaac—to his children
Lived to tell the tale—
Moral—with a Mastiff
Manners may prevail.

The last two lines help me to vocalize my questions about Kierkegaard's philosophy. Some argue that Dickinson's skepticism of God was made evident in her usage of the last two lines to paint God as a figure who uses intimidation to get humans to do his will. Now let's back up, Emily Dickinson was pretty tragic with her dashes and obsessions with snakes in the grass and what not, but I think she's also making a point about the lesson she garnered from the story of Abraham. By using the word "Mastiff" I think Dickinson intended to describe God as an intimidating figure, as one who uses his size to belittle those under him. I also think Dickinson could be making a point here that God uses the story of Abraham to instill a fear based on the threat of being hurt by God so that we may obey his will. Because it seems like that's all this really breaks down to, right? Who should we obey, our morals or our God? But didn't God put an idea of morality in our mind so that we may have the free will to decide if an action is in line with the moral or not based on our own opinion? All questions that have been asked before this blog post, yes, but I think Emily's poem asks them in a more tongue-in-cheek way. "Morals--with a Mastiff." I think Dickinson is using this specifically dueling imagery to make a criticism that morals aren't really serving their full function unless the imminent threat of harm is tied to them. The "Mastiff" would then be the impending punishment from God if Abraham were to decide not to go through with God's plan for his son. But we must also note that morals do prevail because God TELLS Abraham that His word should not be acted upon. God goes back on his words! Why is God allowed to pull the bait and switch on Abraham, but Kierkegaard writes a whole philosophy about Abraham pulling the bait and switch on Isaac? Maybe Dickinson's poem is saying that our ideal of moral is what ultimately prevailed because it was the decision enforced, not necessarily the decision that was carried through. I think Dickinson did not have any faith in the absurd, (which is sort of odd for a poet, but I'll buy it) to influence her decision to write such a controversially unorthodox view of the Biblical event.

Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works

During the last class we discussed the fact that Kierkegaard wrote most of his works under varying pseudonyms. I found this very interesting and in looking into some of his other works I found that he wrote a piece, which was published posthumously, called The Point of VIew where he explained his use of pseudonyms in his writings. In this text he discusses how he does not take ownership for any of the words written by his pseudonyms quite clearly divorcing himself from his pseudonymous works. I found this quite interesting because he actively disowns his own writing as if to preempt any negative backlash for his ideas. With this in mind are we as readers supposed to accept Kierkegaard’s writings as belonging to him or to their corresponding “authors” and what does it say of Kierkegaard’s philosophy if he himself is unwilling to take ownership of it? Is it that he was afraid of backlash for ideas or was it a built in death of the author so that each individual text would be read without taking into consideration the aspects of Kierkegaard’s life. I feel that Kierkegaard was most likely trying to create a piece of text that would be read without delving into its point of origin; in other words he was trying to create self-contained arguments that were meant to be interpreted based on what they actually contained and removed from extra-textual information. If this is so Kierkegaard could be seen as a sort of self-aware post-structuralist in that he was forcing readers to set aside any intent the author may have had and focus on the meaning that was perceived in the reading. This makes Kierkegaard, as Dr. J said, a very literary writer. His “philosophy” is wide open to varying interpretations from readers; as none of his pieces were meant to be seen as elements of a body of work but rather as individual pieces that were unrelated.

Faith is a substitute for the immediate

Kierkegaard claims in the second Problema on page 69 that recent philosophy has reduced faith to a substitute for the immediate, consequently placing it on the level of mood and feelings. Kierkegaard claims that this is incorrect and that nothing justifies philosophy in using such language. To explore this issue I will argue that faith is indeed something along the lines of a mood or feeling.

Isn’t faith, by virtue of being illogical, at best a feeling and at worst bad logic? I may be in a great mood having set a record running time recently, and so when confronted by a pack of hungry dogs have faith that I can outrun them. However doesn’t the hungry pack of dogs overtaking me and devouring me evidence that my faith yields no better results than feelings? One might object that in that instance I was being foolish, and that I was consulting feelings and not faith, an absolute connection with God. What if God tells me run from those dogs? What if I do? Now having faith that I will out run the dogs because God said I would won’t change the speed of the dogs, or my painful death. Isn’t faith just the same as feelings but with a different name? It seems to me that Abraham could have just been mad, despite Kierkegaard’s claims, and merely acted on his feelings.

A second objection to this idea of faith is the part of the paradox it creates in which it cannot be mediated and understood by anyone else. Hegel famously claims that if something cannot be said, it is not true. Kierkegaard dismisses this idea, but really, how can anything exist if it cannot be verified by anyone. Allowing something to be true because someone has an experience of it that cannot be explained to anyone else seems to me like giving people a license to populate our world with as many fictional things as they can think of.

A third of objection to this idea of faith is Kant’s critique of metaphysics. In its desire for unity our reason tries oversteps it’s self and leaves experience behind to create a priori concepts full of error. How can we even comment on things such as faith and God? They are beyond our knowledge. Even if this paradox of faith exists, but we can have no knowledge of it and so it is useless to argue about.

The Arational Leap of Faith

It seems that there's been some confusion in dealing with Kierkegaard's articulation of faith as an embrace of paradox. Let's keep in mind that a paradox is a statement that is logically impossible. This could be something as simple as A=~A (for those of you who haven't taken Logic yet, that's to be read as "A equals not-A") or the much more complex example that Kierkegaard gives us, which he takes to be the very model of Judeo-Christian faith. Let's try to explicate this paradox a bit.

Before all this binding and murder business happened, Abraham asked God for a son, which was a tall order because he and his wife were both very old (though, let's not forget, Abraham did have a son, Ishmael, with Hagar, a slave woman. This is a rather dramatic story, kind of like an Old Testament-themed episode of Dynasty). God tells Abraham that he will be the father of many nations and gives him Isaac. There was much rejoicing. A few years down the line, God says to Abraham, "Kill me a son." Rather than replying (as the prophet Bob Dylan would have it) "Man, you must be putting me on," Abraham dutifully takes his son up the mountain and gets ready to slaughter him.

Okay, we all know this story, right? Kierkegaard tells it five different times, for christ's sake (religion joke!). The key to understanding the paradox, though, comes with that first part of the story, where God tells Abraham that Isaac will have lots of babies. Now, we're dealing with the Old Testament God here, which means that he's not messing around; this God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent (yeah, I know), and others. He's also without sin, which means he's not lying when he says anything. So when he tells Abraham that Isaac will have lots of babies, he absolutely means business. The same goes for when he tells Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice.

This is the paradox, then; God, an infallible deity, guarantees two things: first, that Isaac will have many children; second, that God wants Abraham to kill him. In the end, God changes his mind, but that doesn't mean that his intention for Isaac to die was untrue. The point, then, is not that God is asking Abe to believe a lie, but rather to believe in two incommensurable truths, which is to say that God is saying, "A=~A. Have fun." Abe has faith because he believes in both incommensurable truths. His faith, then, is not a belief in one true thing and one false thing that he thought was true, but a belief in something that is completely impossible given the laws of logic or reason.

Abraham, then, did not "rationalize" the situation. To do that would have been impossible. God's command doesn't "make sense," not even to Abraham. It is absolutely senseless. This means that faith has absolutely nothing to do with reason. He calls this the "leap of faith": it doesn't make sense, it won't make sense, and when you do it everyone else is probably going to think that you're insane. Faith is the philosophical equivalent of a trust-fall off of the Burj Dubai. But it isn't irrational; irrationality implies having the knowledge that taking the leap is, in fact, a bad idea, and doing it anyway. The leap of faith, then, is arational, meaning that the decision makes no appeal to reason whatsoever. Does it make sense? Of course not. But that's the point.

Saying It

What strikes me about Kierkegaard's reading of the Abraham story is not the absurd implications of faith (that Abe actually does go to the top of the mountain with the intention of killing his son but believe that his son will not die) but that he admits to it later. Hearing the voice of God and following his orders makes sense. Pure faith could drive a person who truly believed to commit sins if they were ordained by the big man himself. However, it seems so odd that after the event he would climb down the mountain and tell everybody all about it.

It is an example of a truth that cannot be communicated. A distinctly private relationship that has no place in the public realm of ethical. This clear rejection of Hegel's idea of truth being something that one must be able to communicate strikes me. However, I am unsure if that for something to be true one must be able to make it comprehensible for another. Is just saying it enough? There are so many incomprehensible things that still seem like they could be true (like the existence of god, for example).

Abe could have said anything when he came down from that mountain. God never told him that he had to communicate this event to anyone else. But it almost seems as if he felt an obligation to attempt to communicate this incommunicable truth. This leave me wondering if truth is something that is necessarily comprehensible or communicable. But, maybe, the will to communicate a truth, believable, comprehensible or otherwise, holds some truth in and of itself. Maybe a mere gesture or suggestion of a possible truth can contain a truth of the agent attempting to communicate: that they believe what they are saying to be true.