On Thinking The Modern Philosophical Revolution in Light of the Bible

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Notes

1. It is important to note that Walsh, like so many commentators on Kierkegaard, fails to see that what is called “the ethical” (and also “the universal,” and that is identified with the tragic hero, who is also called the knight of infinite resignation) in Fear and Trembling is not to be identified with the ethical when understood as relationship, responsibility, duty: love of neighbor. Indeed, in a passage in Fear and Trembling that is regularly ignored we read that, when the religious is understood to be higher than the ethical/universal (to which, as its telos, the single individual is subordinated), “the ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression, such as, for example, that love to God may bring the knight of faith to give his love to the neighbor” (70). In other writings, including Either/Or Part II and Works of Love, Kierkegaard makes absolutely clear that the ethical, when understood as love of neighbor, is properly universal, i.e. that the self, as Hegel demonstrates, is at once individual and universal (social), both itself and the other of its self. This is important to emphasize since Walsh fails to indicate that the “religious,” as “the absolute relationship to the absolute” in Fear and Trembling, is in essence identical with Kant's concept of reason as rational practice: that willing the good (love of neighbor) is the universal (the public or absolute) standard that is true for all persons without exception. (Kierkegaard points out in Works of Love that it is the neighbor who is the exception, i.e. that our neighbor, every human person, is exceptional. He also indicates there that “the neighbor is the first you” [57].) In my review-essay I cite the Princeton editions of Kierkegaard. I also want to note that in citing his pseudonymous works I identify the “intention” (or meaning) of the text with “Kierkegaard.” All texts, by whatever author and in whatever medium, are pseudonymous or “indirect” in the sense that their ironic self-presentation can be mastered as paradoxical only by the reader who reads them as he wills to be read by them. Finally, I want to thank Grant Havers for providing me with critical comments on my review-essay.

2. Strangely, Walsh writes a few pages later: “That thinking and being are the same is the pivotal insight of Heidegger's immense philosophical effort” (281).

3. It is regrettable that Walsh does not clearly indicate whether Levinas understands Buber's I-Thou to embody the paradox that in the beginning is relationship (see 314 and 332). In the beginning neither God nor the neighbor “precedes” me (as the single individual), for neither God nor the neighbor can be thought to exist outside the paradoxical relationship of I-Thou, the obligation to love your neighbor as yourself. You do not begin either, first, with the neighbor or, first, with yourself. You begin, first, with (that is, your priority is) relationship.

4. I have modified the English translation in order to render the Latin more faithfully.

5. The “Christendom” understood as the rationalization of pagan values in Christian terms we know historically as Neoplatonism (in its ever-varying amalgams of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics). This is the old metaphysics that Kant dismantled by his revolutionary restoration of biblical ethics as the practice of reason, as rational (faithful) practice.

6. The Cretan liar does not and cannot will the truth, for there is no concept of will as truth or of truth as will in the Greek world. Thus, Kant distinguishes between the universality of lying (we are all liars) and the fact that lying is not and cannot be made into a universal law. There is no universal law of lying. Our very recognition that the lie is not the truth presupposes the categorical imperative of willing the truth as the universal standard for all. Is, then, the reason that Jesus (in the Gospel of John) remained silent when asked by Pilate – What is truth? – because he saw in him a representative of the Cretan liar? Kierkegaard concludes Philosophical Fragments by noting that, if, “in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy,” we simply repeat what has been said earlier, we shall never end because we shall never have truly begun. “If we begin with ‘that great thinker and sage Pontius Pilate, executor Novi Testamenti’ [the executor of the New Testament], who in his own way merits a good deal of gratitude from Christianity and philosophy. . . how shall we ever manage to begin?” (109-10). (This passage is the final response of the [pseudonymous] author to his interlocutor in their ongoing dialogue as found in the final paragraphs of each of the work's chapters.)

7. In Either/Or Part II Judge William points out in one of his letters to his young, aesthetic friend that the “ethical individual” (in contrast with the “esthetic individual”) knows himself. “The phrase ‘know yourself’ is a stock phrase, and in it has been perceived the goal of all a person's striving. And this is entirely proper, but yet it is just as certain that it cannot be the goal if it is not also the beginning. The ethical individual [who is not here to be identified with Socrates as the ethical hero of Fear and Trembling] knows himself, but this knowing is not simply contemplation, for then the individual comes to be defined according to his necessity [and not according to his freedom]. It is a collecting of oneself, which itself is an action, and this is why I have with aforethought used the expression ‘to choose oneself’ instead of ‘to know oneself’” (258). As Kierkegaard has already made plain to us, Greek striving to know oneself (as the good) is always shown (by Socrates) to demonstrate ignorance of the good, ignorance of the self. Judge William, we see, transforms the “stock phrase” of Greek wisdom into biblical willing of the good (love of neighbor) through his revolutionary, paradoxical insight that we can will only that which we have willed from the beginning, i.e. what we freely and lovingly choose (will) to be the good—in the beginning as in the end. To know yourself is fundamentally the action of willing to be yourself in and through the act of choosing the other as the truth of your self, consistent with Kant's concept of reason as loving practice.

8. See also 44 and 57.

9. Our great philosophers make the Bible central to their critique of reason: Spinoza (in the Theologico-Political Treatise); Vico (by way of his critical distinction between the Gentes and the Hebrews in The New Science); Kant (in his works dealing with religion, plus his essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”); Hegel (in, above all, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, arguably his greatest work [yet Walsh ignores it], including his commentaries, both there and elsewhere, on the story of the Fall); Kierkegaard (nearly everywhere. Particularly poignant is the statement that Kierkegaard makes, now in his own name, at the very end of the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript: that he has intended nothing other with his pseudonymous authorship than “once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human-existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers” [629-30]); Levinas; Derrida; and even Nietzsche. One thinks also of the works of the left-wing Hegelians: Strauss, Feuerbach, and Wagner (in his play Jesus of Nazareth). A telltale sign of the philosophic failure of Schopenhauer to abide by existence philosophy is, consistent with Gnosticism, his rejection of the Hebrew Bible as the true “beginning” of Jesus and thus his reduction of New Testament ethics to the contradictory claim that the true aim of the will is to will itself out of existence, i.e. to extinguish itself. Self-love is literally self-annihilation.