Enlightenment Heroes and the Ideal of Moral Clarity

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Notes

1. Neiman devotes much of her book to commenting on the current political scene in the United States.

2. In not systematically providing annotation for her references, Neiman, it seems to me, forsakes her grown-up readers. In the case at hand, she does not give precise references to Scripture. While she does direct the reader to Fear and Trembling, she does not actually cite Kant's statement as found in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Part II, General Remark (and also see The Conflict of the Faculties, First Part, Conclusion).

3. Neiman also writes that “the civil rights movement began as a demand to realize the Socratic principles the Enlightenment maintained: All men have equal rights to justice if all men are created equal. The women's movement began by extending the same argument” (68).

4. Neiman, in other words, fails to see that she and Kierkegaard share a common critique!

5. Neiman makes no mention of other works of Kierkegaard, e.g. Either/Or, Part II, Works of Love, and Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, in which he views the golden rule as embodying the Kantian concept of duty and so as at once religious and ethical. She also does not mention Kierkegaard's observation in Works of Love that Socrates, like paganism, generally, did not know the neighbor.

6. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), Erich Auerbach writes that, unlike the Bible that “is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content,” “the Homeric poems [the Iliad and the Odyssey] conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed … but he cannot be interpreted” (15, 13). Auerbach also observes that “the concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things” (8).

7. Perhaps the reason why Neiman does not turn to the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare for examples of Enlightenment heroes of moral clarity is that she confuses Greek tragedy (based on fate) with Shakespearian tragedy (based on freedom, i.e. on the moral law of the golden rule). See my Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will (forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press).

8. Neiman does not make clear that, for Kant, we do not (cannot) know the thing in itself. Kant holds, rather, that we know things solely as natural objects of possible (scientific) experience. In contrast, in thinking, willing, desiring things in themselves, as subjects (not objects), we belong to the kingdom of ends in which reason embodies the practice of enacting the categorical imperative of treating all human beings as our neighbors, as ends in themselves.

9. In her presentation of Socrates Neiman omits consideration of the central role that ignorance plays in his life (and death).

10. Neiman has a very reductive notion of original sin within the Christian tradition. While it is true that Christendom has been riddled with notions of original sin as involving opposition between human corruption and divine grace, strong thinkers in the Christian tradition (e.g. Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and Milton in Paradise Lost) eschew this Neoplatonic dualism between body and soul in the name of a concept of sin as self-conscious knowledge of (responsibility for) good and evil.

11. When Neiman invokes Machiavelli, Descartes, and Hobbes, she fails to see that their basic ideas are fundamentally biblical (modern), not pagan (ancient). Machiavelli, in addressing (in The Prince) the relationship between truth and deception, clearly recognizes that, if we are going to undertake to deceive others in the name of the truth, we must know and be responsible for the truth (since we ourselves do not want to be deceived in deceiving others). In other words, he acknowledges that deception depends on and in that sense provides a defense of the truth (see 65–66.) Descartes, in undertaking (in the Meditations and Discourse on Method) to prove the existence of God, explicitly rejects mathematics as the standard of truth held by the ancients and shows (against the ancient skeptics) that to doubt is to affirm existence (see 219–20 and 145). Hobbes, in holding (in the Leviathan) that the state of nature represents the war of all against all, explicitly founds civil society on the golden rule (see 32–36).

12. Ethics, III.9 Scholium.

13. This is what is called in Fear and Trembling at one and the same time the universal, the ethical, and the eternal and is associated with the tragic hero, whether Agamemnon or Socrates.

14. Let me note here that, just as the difference (opposition) that Neiman posits between the two Abrahams of Genesis collapses when each is properly understood, so the difference that she posits between Kant (reason) and Kierkegaard (faith) collapses when each is properly understood to embrace the golden rule as constituting the ethical life. It is equally the case that, while the difference that she posits between Odysseus (the Odyssey) and Achilles (the Iliad) is critically unacceptable, we must maintain a critical distinction between Socrates (the ancients) and Abraham (the moderns in the biblical tradition), which she effaces.

15. See the extraordinary discussion on the part of Kant (in the Critique of Pure Reason, A 230–232) in which he shows that, precisely because we must distinguish moral (or absolute) possibility from both logical possibility and empirical (natural) possibility, what is practically possible is not found outside the actual. In other words, absolute possibility is but another name for what is absolutely actual.

16. Neiman argues (in Chapter 6) that happiness was not viewed as central to and consistent with the good life until championed by Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century. It seems to me that this cannot be true, for surely covenantal relations, based on the golden rule—love of neighbor—are what constitute human happiness as it involves the dignity, personal worth, equality, and freedom of all human beings to determine their own lives, in concert with their neighbors. Love of neighbor is now—yet possessing depths of spirit whose richness is always still to be tested (revealed).

17. See the Conclusion to Concluding Unscientific Postscript where Kierkegaard comments at length on Matthew 18.2–4. Here Jesus stuns his disciplines with the paradox that only those who, as adults, become (idealists!) “like children” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Kierkegaard views as childish those Christians who have not grown up to face the fear and trembling that, he insists, the Christian life entails.