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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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Mistake in Hongs’ Translation

MolbechIs it possible, according to Kierkegaard, for a person to appreciate, on his own, that he is outside the truth, or in error? It would appear that Kierkegaard’s answer in Philosophical Crumbs is both yes and no. That is, on the one hand he says that since this is actually our situation, “the Socratic applies,” which is to say that we can “recollect” it, or come to appreciate it on our own. On the other hand, it looks like we can’t, at least according to the Hongs’ translation of Philosophiske Smuler.

The Hongs translate the following passage:

Dersom et Menneske oprindeligen er i Besiddelse af Betingelsen for at forstaae Sandheden, da tænker han, at Gud er til, derved at han selv er til. Dersom han er i Usandheden, da maa han jo tænke dette om sig selv, og Erindringen skal ikke kunne hjælpe ham uden til at tænke dette. Om han skal komme videre, maa Øieblikket afgjøre (om dette end allerede var virksomt i at lade ham indsee, at han er Usandheden). (Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Vol. 4, p. 229.)

as

If a person originally possesses the condition to understand the truth, he thinks that, since he himself is, God is. If he is in untruth, then he must of course think this about himself, and recollection will be unable to help him to think anything else but this. Whether or not he is to go any further, the moment must decide (although it already was active in making him perceive that he is untruth) (Philosophical Fragments, Princeton, 1985, p. 20).

The parenthetical remark asserts that “the moment” is active in helping people to understand that they are outside the truth, despite the fact that Kierkegaard had earlier said this was something we could discover on our own. So is Kierkegaard contradicting himself here or is there a problem with the Hongs’ translation?

The answer is that there is a problem with the Hongs’ translation. Here is how I translate this same passage.

If a person is originally in possession of the condition for understanding the truth, then he thinks there is a God, in that he exists himself. If he is in error, he may think this about himself, but recollection could not help him to think anything else. If he is to progress beyond this, the moment must decide (even if it were already active in allowing him to see that he was in error) (Philosophical Crumbs, Oxford, 2009, p. 97).

The parenthetical remark is what philosophers call a “counter-factual.” It is not saying that the moment had, in fact, been active in a person’s coming to understand himself as outside the truth, but that even if it had been active – i.e., had helped him to understand that he was outside the truth – he would need it again to get beyond this realization. That is, Kierkegaard is not taking a position here on whether one needs the moment to help one to the insight that one is outside the truth. He’s saying even if the moment had been active in helping one to this insight (a qualification that is perfectly consistent with its not being active), it would be needed again to get beyond the insight.

Of course you shouldn’t just assume that I know what I am talking about here. I need to marshal some evidence to support my claim that my translation: “even if it [i.e., the moment] were already active in allowing him to see that he was in error” is accurate whereas the Hongs’: “although it [i.e.., the moment] already was active in making him perceive that he is untruth” is not. So let’s go to the relevant reference works: Ferrall-Repp does not have “om end,” but only “om” which it translates as “if.” Vinterberg-Bodelsen has “(even) if,” before “(even) though.”

The really decisive proof that the parenthetical should be in the subjunctive comes from Christian Molbech’s Dansk Orbog from 1859 (this is the second edition and hence more reliable for questions of usage in the 1840s than is the first edition from 1833). Molbech lists a number of instances where “om” means either “if” or “whether,” but then gives the following example for “om end”: “Jeg tror det ikke, om end Alle sværge derpaa,” which translates as: “I don’t believe it, even if everyone would swear to it.”

Of course this begs the question in that I have chosen to translate “om end” as “even if” instead of “even though.” The justification for my translation comes after the first formulation. That is, immediately following the example “Jeg tror det ikke, om end Alle sværge derpaa” is a parenthetical clarification that reads “(Forskielligt i Meningen fra: ‘omendskiøndt han sværger derpaa,’ hvor der mere bestemt udtrykkes, at han sværger.)” This translates literally as “(Different in meaning from: ‘even though he swears to it,’ where the fact that he swears is expressed more definitively”.)

Hence it is clear that “om end” means “even if,” not “even though,” or “although” as the Hongs’ translation has it. The Hongs translation thus takes what is legitimately a question in the original and turns it into a fact, and a misleading fact at that.