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Kierkegaard and Danielson on Foreknowledge and Free Will

I’ve been working on a collection of short, short philosophical articles that I hope to publish under the title Flash Philosophy. I conceived the idea of the genre flash philosophy because I am very fortunate to be in a department of English and Philosophy that is home to a number of creative writers who exposed me to the genre of flash fiction. Flash fiction is basically very short short stories, often only a page or two and sometimes even shorter than that. 

Philosophical articles have increased in length over time. Quite a bit has been written about this, actually, including “A Plea for More Short Journal Publications,” “Are journal articles getting too long,” and my own article “Flash Philosophy,” which appeared in Philosophy Now. The problem is that as philosophical articles get longer, they take longer to write. It can take a year or more just to draft a decent philosophical article, and then, of course, even longer than that before it gets into print. Authors are increasingly asked to basically include surveys of all the literature relevant to their argument in any article they submit for publication, even if much of that literature isn’t actually directly relevant to their argument. Not only does that make the drafting of philosophical articles very tedious, it makes the reading of them very tedious. Quite simply, it is bad form. As I explain to my students over and over again, don’t put anything in your argument that you do not absolutely have.

Philosophical articles have not always been so long, however. It turns out that many of the most highly esteemed philosophical journals such as Mind, Thought, and Philosophical Review used to publish very short articles. So I got the idea to put together a collection of some of these articles and to publish it under the title Flash Philosophy. The purpose of the collection is to demonstrate just how short a really good philosophical article can be and hence to resurrect the art of writing such short articles. Short articles are both easier to write than longer ones and easier to read. Despite that the heyday short philosophical articles appears to have been around the middle of the last century, they are uniquely suited to the digital age in that they facilitate a far more rapid development of philosophical discourse than do longer articles. To resurrect the art of writing short philosophical articles would, I believe, go a long way toward  revitalizing the discipline of philosophy.  

I got a grant several years ago to hire one of my former students as a research assistant to help me track down short philosophical articles that we could then put together in this collection. My research assistant, Daniel Wiedinmyer, combed through hundreds of volumes of old journals and produced a list of more than one hundred articles that were five pages or less. Not did that take some time, after he’d found all those articles we had to read through them to see which would be suitable for the collection. Some were obviously going to be too technical for a general readership of the sort we hoped to have. The collection is actually intended for professional philosophers as well as philosophy students and grad students, but if you are working in ethics or the philosophy of religion, some of the more technical articles in epistemology, metaphysics, or the philosophy of language, for example, are going to be hard to process. We wanted articles that made important points and made them very persuasively, but we also wanted them to be easily digestible even for philosophers from other subfields. 

That reading process actually took more than a year. After that, I had to write a preface and an introduction. I got a decent start of both, but then got distracted with other projects, such as the Drexel-Yale conference on George MacDonald that took place last December, and a number of articles on Kierkegaard that I owed to the editors of various books. Fortunately, I’ve recently been able to return to the Flash Philosophy project. I’m working on the introduction now. Basically, I am going through the collection and drafting very short summaries of the articles. That has necessitated rereading them, of course, and while I was doing that, I came across an article that it seemed to me would be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars. 

The articles is “Timelessness, Foreknowledge, and Free Will,” by Dennis Danielson. It appeared in Mind, July., 1977). God’s purported foreknowledge is often used by philosophers to support arguments against free will. Dennis Danielson argues, however, that since God’s knowledge is timeless, God can be said to have foreknowledge, or knowledge of things that have not yet happened, only from the perspective of a temporal agent. This knowledge, Danielson points out, does not in itself entail any limits on human freedom. That is, what temporal agents can claim God foreknew is “unchangeable not because it is or was foreknown but quite simply because it is past. Yet no one,” he continues, “would want to say that the unchangeableness of the past dispenses with free will.”

Does that not ring a bell with those of you who are familiar with the “Interlude” section of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs? Kierkegaard argues quite explicitly there that the unchangeableness of the past is not the same thing as necessity and that “knowledge of the past confers no necessity.” Kierkegaard was not speaking there of God’s knowledge, but of our own knowledge of the past. What he says about knowledge being unable to confer necessity because “knowledge has nothing to give” (p. 146) could arguably be extended to God’s knowledge in the way Danielson does and Danielsen and Kierkegaard are in perfect agreement concerning the significance of the unchangeableness of the past.  

One wonders if Danielson ever read Kierkegaard. 

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Kierkegaard and von Balthasar on Anxiety

41yorNv6sLL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_My sister-in-law Kelly Foley is a devout Catholic with a growing interest in theology. She has begun reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Christian and Anxiety. (Way to jump in at the deep end. My sister-in-law is no intellectual slouch!) She asked me if I were familiar with the book because it begins with a reference to Kierkegaard. I was familiar with von Balthasar, of course, but not with that particular book. This was obviously a significant lacuna in my theological background, so I promptly purchased an ebook version of it and began reading it.

“Schelling, Hegel, and Baader … were the immediate influences” writes von Balthasar in his introduction,

that prompted the Dane to treat this theme as a theologian, even if only in an introductory manner (as he puts it, “psychologically” rather than “dogmatically”). He never could bring himself to write a dogmatic tract, and he deliberately posed his questions within a psychological framework-intending, of course, to let the inquiry lead eventually into inevitable dogmatic truth. As a result, anxiety remains for him a matter of the finite mind horrified by its own limitlessness, and God and Christ are rarely mentioned explicitly in this work, which was in fact meant to be an exclusively Christian book. (31-32).

“[I]f a theologian is to give this topic the treatment that is due to it,” observes von Balthasar he must “continue along more dogmatic lines the work that Kierkegaard began” (34).

“[I]t will become evident,” writes von Balthasar, “whether the biblical approach can be more instructive and more profound than the great-Danish thinker’s “psychological” approach” (38).

My immediate response to this assessment of Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety was the judgment that von Balthasar had failed to take into account what is arguably the companion volume to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety — The Sickness Unto Death. While the former is indeed described by its pseudonymous author as “a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin” (emphasis added), the latter is described as “a christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening” (emphasis added). That is, The Sickness Unto Death involves precisely the dogmatic approach to the psychological phenomenon of despair that von Balthasar faults Kierkegaard for failing to involve in his analysis of anxiety in his eponymous book.

Ah yes, you may be thinking, but anxiety and despair are different psychological phenomena. But are they? “[D]eep deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness,” writes Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death, “there dwells also anxiety, which is despair” (SUD, 25). Some readers might object that the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death is the most problematic of all their translations and that the equation of anxiety with despair there may be the result of an error in translation. It isn’t. The Danish for the passage reads: “[I]nderst inde i Lykkens Forborgenhed, der boer ogsaa Angesten, som er Fortvivlesen” (emphasis added). Anxiety and despair are two different phenomenological expressions of the same ontological state — sin. Anxiety is, arguably, despair that refuses to recognize itself as such.

There is, thus, a limit to which anxiety can be understood when approached merely psychologically. Von Balthasar is right about that. It would appear that he fails to appreciate, however, that Kierkegaard was well aware of this. The very last line of The Concept of Anxiety reads: “Here this deliberation ends, where it began. As soon as psychology has finished with anxiety, it is to be delivered to dogmatics” (CA, 162). That is, arguably, precisely what Kierkegaard did five years later in The Sickness Unto Death where he identifies anxiety with despair.

The introduction to The Sickness Unto Death begins with a quotation from The Gospel of John where Christ responds to the news that Lazarus is ill with the declaration that “This sickness is not unto death” (John 11:4). This clearly indicates the dogmatic, as opposed to merely psychological, nature of book’s approach to understanding the experience of sin. Sin, which is to say despair, is the sickness unto death according to Kierkegaard.

“Sin Is Not A Negation But A Position” is the heading that begins chapter three of The Sickness Unto Death. “That this is the case,” continues Kierkegaard,

is something that orthodox dogmatics and orthodoxy on the whole have always contended, and they have rejected as pantheistic any definition of sin that made it out to be something merely negative—weakness, sensuousness, finitude, ignorance, etc. Orthodoxy has perceived very correctly that the battle must be fought here, or as in the preceding portion, here the end must be fashioned very firmly … orthodoxy has correctly perceived that when sin is defined negatively, all Christianity is flabby and spineless. That is why orthodoxy emphasizes that there must be a revelation from God to teach fallen man what sin is, a communication that, quite consistently, must be believed because it is a dogma (SUD, 96.)

So von Balthasar’s claim that Kierkegaard “never could bring himself to write a dogmatic tract” on anxiety and that “[a]s a result, anxiety remains for him a matter of the finite mind horrified by its own limitlessness” is simply false. The Sickness Unto Death is Kierkegaard’s “dogmatic tract” on anxiety. Von Balthasar failed to appreciate this for the simple reason that anxiety is subsumed there under the larger heading of “despair.”

This brief examination of von Balthasar’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety is an example of a new philosophical genre known as “flash philosophy.” Flash philosophy takes its name from flash fiction, which is essentially very short short stories. Flash philosophy is thus very short philosophical articles. I’ve created a website, Flash Philosophy, dedicated to publishing such short philosophical articles. I invite interested readers to take a look at the website and to send me any material they have that they think might be appropriate to publish there.