Posted on

Kierkegaard at Princeton

From left to right: Lara Buchak, Hans Halvorson, Austen McDougal, and Z Quanbeck

I attended a Kierkegaard workshop at Princeton University last month and it was such a delightful experience I thought I should post about it. The papers were uniformly good and thought provoking. Many of the presenters, including Alexander (a.k.a Z) Quanbeck, who organized the conference, were young and that certainly bodes well for the future of Kierkegaard scholarship. I was also encouraged to learn that Princeton has two tenured members of the philosophy department, Lara Buchak and Hans Halvorson, who are Kierkegaard enthusiasts, and that bodes even better for Kierkegaard scholarship. 

Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that neither Buchak nor Halvorson has a background in continental philosophy. Buchak focuses on “decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy or religion,” and Halvorson “focuses on applications of category theory in mathematical logic,” as well as the philosophy of physics. That is, both have the kind of highly technical math, logic, and science-based backgrounds that used to dominate Anglo-American philosophy and for which there is still a strong favorable bias on the part of most philosophy hiring committees. 

That two such traditionally-trained analytic philosophers would have an interest in Kierkegaard may seem strange to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. Kierkegaard, contrary to popular belief, was highly analytical and generally averse to speculation. That’s actually a conspicuous difference between Kierkegaard and George MacDonald, while both have very similar theologies at the most fundamental level, MacDonald’s prodigious imagination was drawn to speculating on issues such as the spiritual status of animals and the fate of souls whose moral progress is, on his view, merely interrupted by death, while Kierkegaard was far most skeptically inclined. 

Buchak presented a fascinating paper called “Why Should We Defer to Authority?” that reminded me very much of my paper, “The Social Implications of Epistemic Obligation in Kierkegaard’s Epistemology” (presented at a conference entitled “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism, and Conspiracy Theory,” at the University of Southampton, in September of 2024). There were lots of differences, of course, but I anticipate that Buchak’s paper will soon be published and that I will then be able to make a comparison of the two the subject of a future blog post.

Halvorson presented an equally compelling paper entitled “Climacus on the Objective Way.” My notes are too sketchy, sadly, to facilitate a responsible reconstruction of either Buchak’s or Halvorson’s that paper. I can summarize here very briefly, however, a paper Halvorson published earlier that I think every Kierkegaard scholars should read because of the massive implications it has for future Kierkegaard research. That paper is “The Philosophy of Science in Either-Or.” It originally appeared in Cambridge’s Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Critical Guide,and is available for download from PhilArchive. 

Halvorson argues in this paper that Either-Or “contains Kierkegaard’s argument against the predominant Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of scientific objectivity” and that this rejection “is a forerunner of Niels Bohr’s ‘epistemological lesson of quantum theory.’” That is, Halvorson argues very persuasively that “Either-Or is a central text for the transition from and enlightenment picture of scientific objectivity to the new picture that began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (pp. 1-2). 

The argument, very roughly, goes something like this. A, the protagonist of the first volume of Either-Or is paralyzed by indecision precisely because his perspective on his existence, or on existence more generally, is too objective. Objectively, everything simply is, and there is no reason to chose one thing, or one course of action, over another. Halvorson then traces this view of the existential effect of an extremely objective stance relative to one’s existence back to Kierkegaard’s teacher, Poul Martin Møller and, in particular, to Møller’s novel En Danske Students Eventyr (A Danish student’s adventure) which presents a character who, like Kierkegaard’s A, is paralyzed by indecision brought on by what Halvorson describes as “a hypertrophied capacity for reflection.” 

I’m ashamed to admit that while I own a copy of Møller’s collected works, I’m not much of a novel reader, so I had never read En Danske Students Eventyr (which is probably the best-known work of Møller’s, at least to contemporary Danes). One doesn’t have to have read it, though, to follow Halvorson’s argument. The only problem I have with the argument is that I think putting Hegel in the same class as Descartes, and the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity with which he is associated, is problematic. Everything Halvorson says about Kierkegaard’s attitude toward this ideal is, I believe, unassailable. I’m just not entirely confident that Kierkegaard would ascribe such an ideal to Hegel.

Hegel certainly thought he was objective, but he was no victim of the paralysis that characterizes both A and the protagonist of Møller’s novel. Kierkegaard appears to believe that, rather than exemplifying the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity, Hegel suffered from a kind of intellectual megalomania that was pathological. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Kierkegaard, who is generally averse to speculation, is so often lumped together with Hegel as one of those “weak-minded continental thinkers” to which analytic philosophers have such an aversion. The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity arguably does lead to indecision, as Halvorson argues, and in that way, precludes the kind of wild speculations in which Hegel engaged. That is, it would preclude the conclusion that one had achieved absolute knowledge of the sort Hegel claimed (hence the practice of the Pyrrhonists, the paradigmatic objective inquirers [Σκεπτικό], of allowing assent only to appearances, or impressions concerning the nature of reality, rather than to beliefs about it).   

In support of this view is the fact that most contemporary Anglo-American philosophers trace their own philosophical stance back to the Enlightenment, but few see Hegel as an embodiment of that ideal, and more than a few have strongly negative reactions to him. Of course it’s conceivable that Kierkegaard thinks hewing too closely to the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity could eventually drive a person mad and that this was what had happened to Hegel. So from that perspective, I suppose, Hegel could be considered at least an anomalous exemplar of this ideal.

Whether Hegel is properly classed with Descartes is a minor point, however, in the context of Halvorson’s argument and hence in no way weakens it. Halvorson’s argument is that the role of subjectivity in knowledge formation was passed from Møller, to Kierkegaard, from Kierkegaard to Rasmus Nielsen (a friend of Kierkegaard’s and a professor at the University of Copenhagen), from Nielsen to his student Harald Høffding, and from Høffding to his student (drumroll…) Niels Bohr! 

Fascinating, eh? It’s no wonder that Halvorson, who has a background in in physics, has developed an interest in Kierkegaard. There is so much work to be done in the area of Kierkegaard’s relevance to, and influence upon, contemporary empirical science, and physics in particular. My hope is that Halvorson will lead that scholarly charge and that there will soon be a growing body of work in this area of Kierkegaard scholarship. 

Posted on

Kierkegaard and Current Religious Discourse

MDPI has two open-access journals that are worth a look. John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans recently edited a special edition of the journal Religions entitled “Kierkegaard, Virtues and Vices,” and, Lee Barrett, formerly of Lancaster Theological Seminary and now of Moravian Seminary, and Dr. Andrzej Slowikowski, of Uniwersytet Warminsk-Mazurski w Olsztynie, Poland, have just come out with a special edition of Philosophies on “Kierkegaard’s Religious Thought in Relation to Current Religious Discourse.” 

My “Was Kierkegaard a Universalist” is the first one you’ll see when you go to the webpage for the special edition. There’s been a lot of discussion among theologian in the last few years about universal salvation. Universalism, as its known, is increasingly popular among these thinkers, hence it seemed relevant to address Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this issue. The paper examines evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there is reason to believe that he may have been a universalist.

After my paper comes a paper by René Rosfort, of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. Rosfort argues in “The Humanity of Faith: Secularization of Christianity,” that “Kierkegaard’s famous existential approach to Christianity amounts to a secularization of Christianity and as such can be seen as a critical development of and not a rejection of the Enlightenment critique of religion.” 

After Rosfort there’s a paper by David J. Gouwens of Brite Divinity School, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Descriptive Philosophy of Religion: The Imagination Poised Between Possibility and Actuality.” Gouwens argues that Kierkegaard “imaginatively deploys conceptual and rhetorical strategies maieutically to both describe and elicit self-reflection aimed at transformation, thus expanding the imagination’s uses for his readers.” 

Next comes Joseph Westfall, of the University of Houston, with a paper entitled “Abraham’s Faith: Both the Aesthetic and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling.” Westfall examines Johannes de Silentio’s presentation of the faith of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, and argues that a new way of conceiving Kierkegaard’s “notion of faith as a paradoxical co-inhabiting of both the aesthetic and the ethical stages, rather than as a rejection, synthesis, or overcoming of them” can be derived from this presentation.

After Westfall’s paper there is a paper by the aforementioned Andrzej Slowikowski, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Theories of the Stages of Existence and Subjective Truth as a Model for Further Research into the Phenomenology of Religious Attitudes.” Slowikowski uses Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages of existence as a kind of template for sorting out ”the complex world of human religiousness” by reducing that world “to a few very basic existential attitudes.” 

Next comes Heiko Schulz, of Goethe-Universität, in Frankfurt a.M, with “Thankfulness: Kierkegaard’s First-Person Approach to the Problem of Evil.” Schulz argues that Kierkegaard offers promising resources for address the problem of evil. Schultz argues that “in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery.” I’m inclined to think that Schulz is right here, though I confess I haven’t read the paper yet. 

The last piece in the special edition is by Curtis L. Thompson of Thiel College in Greenville, PA. That piece is entitled “Dancing in God in an Accelerating Secular World: Resonating with Kierkegaard’s Critical Philosophical Theology.” The intent of his paper, explains Thompson, “is to demonstrate how [Kierkegaard’s] religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world.”

I haven’t read any of these papers yet, alas, because I am hard at work on a paper I’m scheduled to present at a conference in the UK in early September. The conference is entitled “The Existential Dimension of Doubt,” the launch conference of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism and Conspiracy Theory.” Once I’m back from this conference, however, I’ll check out each of these papers and let you know what I think of them.

Posted on

Kierkegaard on Nature and Miracles: A Reply to Hampson

I promised in the post entitled “Scholarly Protocol” which addressed the form of UK theologian Daphne Hampson’s extended comment on my earlier post “Getting Kierkegaard Wrong” that I would address the substance of her comment as well. As I said, I addressed that substance in the first of this series of posts in that Hampson’s comment merely summarizes an argument she makes in more extended form in her book Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique. It is clear, however, that Hampson still hasn’t understood where her interpretation of Kierkegaard goes wrong, so I feel obliged to address that issue in more detail.

Hampson argues that Kierkegaard rejects “causality,” and more specifically, that he rejects the idea that there are laws of nature. It is this rejection, she asserts, that conveniently allows him to believe in miracles. Her argument makes sense. That is, it’s coherent. It’s just that it’s wrong. First, Kierkegaard clearly accepts both causality and the idea that there are laws of nature. Second, it is far from clear that Kierkegaard believed in miracles in the supernatural sense that sees them as a violation of those laws.

The first charge, that Kierkegaard rejects causality and the idea that there are laws of nature, can be swiftly and easily refuted. I already addressed the issue of Kierkegaard’s acceptance of causality in my remarks on Hampson’s misinterpretation of Kierkegaard’s treatment of the two distinct Aristotelian senses of change in my original post “Getting Kierkegaard Wrong,” so I won’t revisit that argument here, but will look more specifically now at the issue of whether Kierkegaard rejects the idea that there are laws of nature.

Kierkegaard writes in one of his notebooks sometime between 1841-42 that “[i]n nature everything is bound by law and hence governed by necessity” (SKS 19, 263). One might be tempted to argue that this reference comes very early, before Kierkegaard published his most famous works, and that it is thus possible that he changed his mind later. There is no evidence, however, to support such a view.

What’s worse for Hampson, is that an equally unequivocal reference to the reality of laws of nature occurs in the very work Hampson cites in support of her claim that Kierkegaard didn’t believe in the reality of laws of nature. This reference appears on the last page of the second volume of Either-Or, at the end of a discourse entitled “The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We are Always in the Wrong.” Kierkegaard refers there to “the law which carries the stars on their paths across the arch of heaven” and observes that it would be a “terrible catastrophe” if “the law of nature lost its power and everything disintegrated into dreadful chaos.”

Kierkegaard is no friend of chaos. He falls squarely on the Apollonian side of the Apollonian/Dionysian divide. Not only does Kierkegaard believe in the reality of laws of nature, he believes that these laws are essential to giving order to our experience and hence provide the conditions under which it is possible for that experience to have meaning.

But if Kierkegaard accepts that there are laws of nature, what are we to make of his apparent rejection of “naturalism” that Hampson cites in her comment? The answer is that “naturalism” is synonymous for Kierkegaard with an all-encompassing physical determinism. It isn’t the idea that there are laws of nature that Kierkegaard rejects, but the idea that these laws necessarily determine human behavior.

Kierkegaard clearly holds something like a Kantian view of the relation between the phenomenal and noumenal view of a person. This view can be found, for example, in the section of Either-Or Part II entitled “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage.” It may be challenging to make sense of how the phenomenal and noumenal aspects of a person can be brought together in such a way as to preserve human freedom, but Kant asserts they can be, and Kierkegaard appears to follow Kant in this respect. In fact, Kierkegaard distinguishes between “rationalism” and “naturalism” in a journal entry that examines this aspect of Kant’s thought (SKS 19, 159).

So much for Kierkegaard’s purported rejection of the idea that there are laws of nature. What about his position on miracles? The journal entry Hampson cites where Kierkegaard indicates that he rejects “naturalism” also includes a somewhat ambiguous reference to miracles. “Unfortunately,” it reads, “we know far too well what people in our day think of miracles” (SKS 24, 72). Those words are not Kierkegaard’s, however, but Bishop Mynster’s. Kierkegaard is quoting Mynster. But even if Kierkegaard is in agreement with Mynster’s words, it’s not clear exactly what those words mean. Do they refer to a pervasive rejection of the idea that are such things as miracles, or to the view that once there were miracles, but that miracles don’t happen any longer? Or could they be a disparaging reference to a propensity to focus on the purportedly supernatural aspect of miracles?

What is clear about Kierkegaard’s interest in miracles is that it is not their purportedly supernatural aspect that interests him. Kierkegaard is, in fact, openly contemptuous of people who focus on the supernatural rather than the edifying aspects of the accounts of miracles in the New Testatment. He asks, for example, in a discourse on Matthew 11:30 “My Yoke is Beneficial and My Burden Is Light” “is it really a greater miracle [Under] to change water into wine than for the heavy burden to continue to be heavy and yet be light!” (UDVS, 233).

What makes a burden that remains (one might be tempted to argue, according to natural law) heavy, nevertheless light, is not some violation of natural law. The “miracle” here is psychological, not physical.

The same emphasis on the miraculous as a psychological phenomenon rather than a physical one can be seen in Kierkegaard’s observation that

[a]t times, the circumstances determine that a penny signifies little more than it usually signifies, but if someone wants to perform a miracle [gjør et Vidunder], he makes the one penny signify just as much as all the world’s gold put together if he gives it out of compassion and the penny is the only one he has” (EUD, 362.)

That kind of generosity, or compassion, is certainly extremely rare but it doesn’t violate any natural law.

Kierkegaard’s interest in the miracle stories in the New Testament relates not to their purportedly supernatural aspect, but to the sense in which they can be subjectively meaningful, or more particularly, edifying. This can be seen yet again in his observation in his journal on the story of the feeding of the five thousand in John 6:1-15.

Since it was through a miracle [Mirakel] that enough food was procured [skaffet] to feed five thousand men, one would [be inclined to] believe that no thought would be given to the leavings [der blev ødslet med Levningerne]. But no, God is never like that. Everything was carefully gathered up according to the Gospel. The human is to be unable to perform miracles [Mirakler] and yet to waste the leavings [at ødsle med Levninger]. The divine is to perform the miracle [Miraklet] of abundance and yet to collect the crumbs [samle Smulerne op] (SKS, 20, 110.)

Kierkegaard’s point here is not to emphasize that Christ had supernatural powers, but to communicate something about God’s nature that would have an edifying effect on the reader, as is clear from his retelling this same story in one of his published “Discourses on the Communion on Fridays.”

God is and can be just as scrupulous as he is great and can be great in showing mercy. For example, God’s nature always joins opposites, just as in the miracle [Mirakel] of the five small loaves. The people had nothing to eat–through a miracle a superabundance was procured [skaffes], but see, then Christ commands that everything left over be carefully collected. How divine! One person can be wasteful, another thrifty,; but if there were a human being who through a miracle [Mirakel] could at any moment divinely procure [skaffe] a superabundance, do you not think that he humanly would have disdained the crumbs [Smulerne], do you think that he–divinely would have collected the crumbs [Smulerne]! So also with God’s greatness in showing mercy. (CD, 295-96).

Don’t be misled by the fact that the term that is translated as “miracle” in the first passage is “Under,” the term that is translated as “miracle” in the second is ”Vidunder,” and the term that is translated as “miracle” in the third passage is “Mirakel.” Kierkegaard uses the terms “Under,” “Vidunder,” and “Mirakel” interchangeably, and indeed, they are synonyms according to both Ferrall-Repp and the venerable Ordbog Over det Danske Sprog. Kierkegaard’s references, for example, to “the miracle of faith” are sometimes “Troens Mirakel” (cf., e.g., WOL, 295; CD, 115) and other times “Troens Vidunder” (cf., e.g., FT, 18 and SLW, 163).

The Hongs appear to have had a misguided ambition to consistently translate “Vidunder” as “wonder” rather than “miracle.” Yet even the Hongs couldn’t help but realize that “Under,” “Vidunder,” and “Mirakel” are synonyms for Kierkegaard and hence translated Kierkegaard’s “Dette er Christendommens Undergjerning, vidunderligere end det at forvandle Vand til Viin” as “This is the miracle of Christianity, even more miraculous than turning water into wine.”

It actually makes sense that Kierkegaard chooses to focus not on the objective aspect of miracles but on the sense in which they can be subjectively meaningful in that there are no references to “miracles” in the authorized Danish New Testament of Kierkegaard’s day. Every single reference to a “miracle” in the King James Version of the New Testament appears not as “Mirakel” in the Frederik VI’s New Testament, but as “Tegn,” i.e., “sign.” This, in turn, makes sense because every single reference to a “miracle” in the King James Version of the New Testament appears as σεμεἰον, i.e., “sign” in the original Greek. Signs require what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called an “interpretant.” That is, they are meaningful only subjectively. There is no such thing as an objective sign.

The question remains, of course, as to whether Kierkegaard believed miracles were supernatural events, but simply chose not to focus on that aspect of them. That’s a difficult question to answer. I argue in my book on his epistemology that Kierkegaard viewed all of empirical science as merely probabilistic and that suggests there is room for him to view miracles as merely exceptionally unusual, or highly improbable, events rather than events that violated laws of nature.

Support for this view can be found in the fact that Kierkegaard refers repeatedly to “the paradox” of Christianity as “improbable” rather than “impossible” (cf., e.g., Crumbs, 123, 159 and CUP, 195, 196). Support can also be found in the fact that when Kierkegaard refers to the feeding of the five thousand, he writes that food was miraculously “procured” (skaffet, see Ferrall-Repp) not “created” (skabt) that was sufficient to feed five thousand people. Who knows how it was procured. The implication of the word choice, however, is that the means used to secure it were not necessarily supernatural.

That said, even if Kierkegaard believes miracles are supernatural events, he does not reject the reality of laws of nature. There clearly are such laws, according to Kierkegaard, as the quotations with which this post began demonstrates even if, as I argue in my book Ways of Knowing, Kierkegaard believes the correspondence to reality of any particular interpretation of these laws cannot be shown to be certain.

Hampson is deluded in thinking that Kierkegaard rejects the idea that there are laws of nature and that he does this to make room for his belief in miracles. There is undoubtedly someone in the history of thought who holds the view Hampson attributes to Kierkegaard. It just isn’t Kierkegaard. Hampson’s Kierkegaard is a fantastical creation of her own imagination, concocted, it would appear out of the ambition to present a grand, over-arching theory about the development of thought after the Enlightentment. And she has been spreading the contagion of this erroneous interpretation of Kierkegaard all over the globe. First in 2013 at the bi-centenary of Kierkegaard’s birth in Copenhagen, Australia, and then in the United States, and then later in Budapest.

That is one of the dangers of what philosophers call “big picture” work: a grand over-arching theory that attempts to explain a particular development in the history of thought almost always requires that its author include thinkers on whose thought he or she is not expert. That’s why philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition tend to avoid it. It’s virtually impossible to do it well. It’s almost inevitably flawed, and sometimes very conspicuously so.

Theologians, on the other hand, appear not to have the same fear of error that generally characterizes philosophers. Hampson, by her own admission is working on a grand, over-arching theory that she plans to present in a book “provisionally entitled ‘Enlightenment and After.’” My guess is that she is going to fit her fantastical Kierkegaard into this development in a manner analogous to that in which Alasdair MacIntyre fit his fantastical Kierkegaard into the picture he presents of the historical development of ethical thought in his book After Virtue, though the distinction Kierkegaard makes in the journal entry cited above between “rationalism” and “naturalism” does not bode well for such a project.

The good side to this is that just as MacIntyre’s distortion of Kierkegaard’s thought provided an occasion for some really first-rate Kierkegaard scholarship, as is exemplified in John Davenport and Anthony Rudd’s excellent book Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, so will Hampson’s distortion of Kierkegaard, both in her book on him and in her forthcoming book, provide an occasion for much excellent Kierkegaard scholarship.

The really pressing question is how a book containing such a conspicuously and spectacularly erroneous interpretation of Kierkegaard could ever be published by a publisher such as Oxford? Something would appear to have gone horribly wrong with the process of peer review.