Debate

My focus in this paper is on the theological value of the philosophy of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. My task is to address Kierkegaard's philosophical compatibility with and contribution to Christian theology and the significance Kierkegaard may (not) have for the tasks of the Christian theologian. What frames this issue for my purposes here is the supposed irrelevance of Kierkegaard to theology, as some would have it, while others take an even dimmer view, arguing that Kierkegaard leaves theology in an irrationalist and subjectivist quagmire and that he is best avoided by Christian thinkers.

The question, then, is this: Is Kierkegaard a friend or foe of Christian theology? Over and against those who see him as an irrelevant or even malevolent conversation partner for Christian theology, I will argue that his contribution is more positive.

But before we arraign Kierkegaard before the theological tribunal, we will need to clarify the exact nature of the charges against him. From an historical point of view, it might appear ridiculous to say that Kierkegaard is an enemy of theology for the simple reason that some of the most important theologians of the mid- to late-twentieth century—such as Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth (to name only a few)[1]—were deeply indebted to Kierkegaard! From this perspective we could argue that not only has Kierkegaard been an indispensable value to Christian theology, but also that we are yet to realize the full import of Kierkegaard's contribution to theology. But of course, those who incriminate Kierkegaard on theological grounds do not view the above-mentioned theologians in a favorable light either, and that is often the source of their disapproval of Kierkegaard. These Kierkegaard-friendly theologians are believed to err precisely insofar as they are infected by Kierkegaard's philosophy. So we should clarify our topic a little more.

When I say that I am going to discuss Kierkegaard's compatibility with and contribution to Christian theology, what I really mean to specify, then, is his relation to what we may call conservative Protestant theology – or even more accurately, broadly evangelical theology, which takes seriously God's revelation to us in Jesus Christ and subsequently the entire concept of special revelation. The rejection of Kierkegaard by these thinkers stems from the perception that he is some sort of modern correlationist who privileges philosophy over theology, at least to the degree that he cuts off revelation, Scripture, and the truth of Christian doctrine from rational foundations. This view of Kierkegaard, which is found in so many introductory philosophy and theology textbooks, stems from an interpretation of him as the “Father of Existentialism” and who provided the basic philosophical impetus for the atheistic existential philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger as well as the non-cognitivist existentialist theologies which proliferated after World War II. In other words, Kierkegaard is perceived as jeopardizing the truth and authority of Christianity because he believes that we cannot rationally know God's revelation to us in Jesus Christ or the Scriptures, and who subsequently advocates a blind, irrational faith – a faith that has no resources to combat modern atheism and no ability to ground Christian belief and practice.

It is this picture of Kierkegaard I wish to challenge throughout the rest of this paper, but there is an important distinction to be made from the outset, which will foreclose one particular line of argumentation. We could call a genetic connection between ideas when one idea shares a basic conceptual root and substantial ideational content with another idea, so that they are derived from a common conceptual origin. On the other hand, ideas are often connected historically in that they were associated together in some way through some historical circumstance, but they are not conceptually connected in the above genetic sense. My point is that while Kierkegaard does have an historical connection to the existentialisms of Sartre and Heidegger and the existential theologies of Tillich, early Barth, Bultmann and so on, in that these thinkers received from Kierkegaard the inspiration for some of their core philosophical and theological ideas, the connection is not genetic in most cases. In my view Kierkegaard does not, on the whole, endorse important aspects of the sort of existentialism embodied in these thinkers' works,[2] and so to charge him with irrationalism or subjectivism merely on the basis of a historical connection with these thinkers is a little like sentencing the parents of a murderer along with the son because they contributed to the son's overall perspective and situation, which eventually led to murder. Kierkegaard should be evaluated on his relative merits and not on a tenuous historical connection he may (or may not) have to certain existentialists in the mid-twentieth century.

My argument, then, is that Kierkegaard's invective against reason and objectivity is not an abandonment of those concepts tout court. I will rebut some of the important arguments that claim that he is an irrationalist and subjectivist and argue that Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is grounded in the intrinsic, practical concern for eternal happiness.

Before we look into the allegations against Kierkegaard, a few background comments are in order to orient us to his thought and his writings. In Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis (a pseudonym of Kierkegaard's) writes that “Each generation has its own task,” and so, too, it seems that Kierkegaard set himself to address the task of his generation.[3] Kierkegaard had an emerging diagnosis of the times in which he lived and set in motion a literary production as (a partial) remedy. Subsequently, Kierkegaard was sensitive to the relationship between the philosophical and theological content of his works and their literary form perhaps more than any other philosopher before him or since – a point that many casual Kierkegaard exegetes stumble over and fail to give proper attention to.

One of the primary obstacles to the interpretation of Kierkegaard's texts is making sense of his bewildering use of pseudonyms, which he employed as literary devices to write some of his most important works. Kierkegaard published some of his key works under a variety of pen-names – mostly Latin names – not because he wanted to hide his authorship from the public, but because the nature of what he wants to communicate requires that he write certain texts under pseudonyms. In “A First and Last Explanation,” which Kierkegaard attaches under his own name to end of the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard writes: “My pseudonymity or polynimity has not had an accidental basis in my person (certainly not from a fear of penalty under law…and the censor qua public official has always been informed who the author was), but an essential basis in the production itself.”[4] He continues on to deny that he is the author of the pseudonymous literature and asks that his readers take the pseudonyms seriously as independent writers separate from his own personality.[5] But Kierkegaard also published works under his own name, primarily in the form of what he called “upbuilding discourses,” or sermons, and further acknowledges that he is “very literally and directly the author of…every word in them.”[6] Thus, a tradition in Kierkegaard studies has emerged, begun by Kierkegaard himself,[7] according to which the authorship is divided into two streams. On the one hand there are the “esthetic works,” which are more philosophical or non-Christian and pseudonymous in nature, and on the other hand we have the “religious works,” which are published under Kierkegaard's own name and concern biblical and theological matters. It would seem, then, that Kierkegaard chose specific pseudonyms for particular works because of the relationship the name and personality of the pseudonym had to the work and the effect that indirection would have on his audience. Thus Kierkegaard appears very early on to have conceived of a definite strategy for his publishing career.[8]

(By no means do I wish to communicate that Kierkegaard was a kind literary master-architect who had a fully detailed plan that he flawlessly executed or that he was in full control of his authorship. Instead I simply mean to indicate that from the beginning of his formal authorship he had a general idea of what he wanted to accomplish and how he wished to go about it. Whether he was successful in executing this strategy, and what exactly it all means, is a matter of some debate.[9] Some elements of the pseudonymity appears ad hoc. If we take Practice in Christianity, for instance, which was published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, we find Kierkegaard scratched out his own name on the way to the publisher, thereby transforming a work originally written under his own into a pseudonymous one!)

While there are good reasons to see Kierkegaard's literary production as a whole rather than breaking it up into two separate parts, the result is a very tricky hermeneutical situation. To make matters worse, Kierkegaard does not write in typical academic prose and constantly employs a host of literary devices – especially irony and humor – to make his point, which often involve his saying one thing by saying something else. The result is that Kierkegaard's texts, whether signed or pseudonymous, demand a high level of reflection on the complexity of each text in terms of the relationships between its literary construction, its social context and the content it is putting forward.

The strategy of interposing pseudonyms between himself and his texts is a key part of a wider theory of indirect communication, whose goal is not just to communicate objective knowledge, but an ability or capacity (Danish: Kunnen). Kierkegaard identifies two kinds of communication, which have two kinds of truths that correspond to them.[10] First, there is direct communication, which communicates accidental or objective truth in the form of information. This is required when the problem addressed by communication is a lack of objective knowledge, and the basic form direct communication takes is propositional asseveration in the form of declarative sentences. Indirect communication, however, involves essential or subjective truth, which cannot be directly communicated. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Postscript, tells us that “essential truth” is “the truth that is related to essentially to the existing person by pertaining essentially to what it means to exist…all other knowledge is accidental, its degree and scope is indifferent.”[11] Climacus is referring here to a way of believing – a personal connection one has to the beliefs one has – as well as a particular type of belief whose content can only be known by being able to perform some particular task, such that we may equally call essential truths capacities. Kierkegaard's favorite term to refer to the communication of this kind of truth is “existence-communication.” In general, essential truths are ethical and religious beliefs that are part of and emerge from our moral and spiritual practices. In particular, they pertain to those truths that are importantly connected to how we are to be as humans – they relate to the issue of how we are to live, and are part of “The Good” for humans. These truths are much more like competences that are necessary to and flow from our being able to be good, than they are like the sort of beliefs we have with abstract propositional knowledge: We only have competence knowledge of this kind when we are able to perform the practice connected with an essential truth successfully. For example, knowing that confessing sin is an important aspect of salvation because we engage in the practice of repentance and have experienced the freedom and removal of guilt associated with it is very different than our knowing this just because we have read it in a theology book or heard about it in a sermon. Because essential truths cannot be known in a disinterested, objective and uninvolved way (i.e., we only get them by being involved in the practices associated with them), Kierkegaard argues that they must be communicated indirectly. Thus, indirect communication involves using a variety of literary devices – including pseudonyms – that induce the audience to engage the texts with their imaginations and in so doing enable the audience to gain an existential capacity for the essential truth. In this regard Jolita Pons helpfully points out that “Indirect communication is, among other things, an attempt to bring the abstract language of thought closer to concrete reality.”[12] The techniques of indirect communication are designed to move the audience/readers existentially by engaging them imaginatively so that they may come to grasp truths existentially in connection to a certain ways of being/acting.

Caleb Miller articulates an all too common (mis)reading of Kierkegaard when he writes: “Chief among those who have defended the view that reason undermines faith, and that Christian faith should spurn reason, is surely the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard.”[13] There are several versions of the charge that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist and/or subjectivist, and I will consider four of the most common forms of it here. The general character of the objection asserts that Kierkegaard believed that truth, meaning and value (whether moral or religious) is ultimately a matter of the will; that one should, as Cyril Connolly is reported to have said, just “select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion.” The problem, of course, is that if Christianity is fundamentally irrational and subjectivist, it also follows (or so the argument goes), first, that Christianity cannot be known to be true, and secondly, that theology has little positive value as it consists in a set of arbitrary and ungrounded propositions. There some very good reasons for this charge to be levied against Kierkegaard, primarily because he seems to have used language deliberately to provoke this exact response from his detractors. He unquestionably was opposed to certain uses of reason, and held to a version of the Kantian maxim that we must limit reason in order to make room for faith. Whether this amounts to a denial of any role for reason in connection to faith is another matter.

One might get the idea from a cursory reading of certain of a few of his texts that Kierkegaard recommends something of the prosaic version of Tertullian's claim to have believed that Jesus was the Son of God simply because it was absurd. I would like to disabuse us of this idea right from the start.

Climacus argues in both his books, Philosophical Fragments (hereafter Fragments) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (hereafter Postscript), that Christianity cannot be grasped by human reason and is in fact a fundamental offense to human reason. Climacus claims that Christianity asks us to believe in the “Absolute Paradox”: that the infinite, eternal God entered time and lived a human life, died like a mortal human being, and was raised again. This, says Climacus, is absurd to human reason.[14] But when he says that Christ's incarnation is the Absolute Paradox and that Christianity is absurd Climacus does not mean that it is logically contradictory or that it is sheer and utter nonsense to human reason. Climacus does use the word “contradiction” in reference to the paradox and absurdity of Christianity but does not use it to mean “logical contradiction.”[15] As a matter of fact, Climacus repeatedly upholds the “law of contradiction” and criticizes Hegel for having cancelled it in his philosophical logic.[16] In one of the later sections of the Postscript Climacus asserts that,

[T]he believing Christian both has and uses his understanding . . . [and] does not explain someone's not believing as a lack of understanding . . . Therefore he cannot believe nonsense against the understanding, which one might fear, because the understanding will penetrating perceive that it is nonsense and hinder him in believing it.[17]

So, Climacus (and Kierkegaard) is not claiming that Christianity violates that laws of human logic, neither does he imagine that believing in Christianity is like believing in round circles, or in married bachelors, or in 2 + 2 adding up to 7, or some such piece of plain nonsense. Neither Climacus nor Kierkegaard suppose that Christianity is to be believed without using human reason at all – in fact the passage just cited describes that as a doxastic impossibility. The Christian must use her capacity to think and reason. We cannot not-use (i.e., avoid using) “the understanding” in regards to our beliefs and when we do the understanding plays a normative role, prohibiting us from being able to believe what is nonsense. In other words, Kierkegaard believes that if we think that Christianity is simply ridiculous, we simply will not be able to believe it – and we shouldn't believe it. It is fair to assume that on Kierkegaard's view it is doubtful that Christianity could exist at all without Christians who use their reason to articulate the conditions of their faith – but he is very clear that this use of reason is not yet faith. What makes Jesus' incarnation the Absolute Paradox for him is that the eternal God has come into time – something that Kierkegaard (following St. Paul in 1Cor. 2:7-9) says could never have occurred to human reason. The truth of Christianity required that God reveal it to us – by becoming like us.[18]

Kierkegaard, then, views faith and reason as working together in the life of the believer. They are only at odds when we try to grasp by reason what can only be grasped by faith – or when we behave as if what we grasp by faith may also be grasped by reason.

So how exactly does Kierkegaard see faith and reason working together? In an important journal entry Kierkegaard describes faith as going beyond reason.[19] “Human reason has boundaries,” says Kierkegaard, and “reason does not comprehend what faith believes. . . . The activity of reason is to distinguish the paradox negatively – but no more.”[20] Once again, the idea here seems to be that the paradox or absurdity of Christianity is not like any old piece of plain nonsense. Reason sets the stage for faith, and faith completes the work that reason starts. What is nonsense to reason makes perfect sense to faith. Faith, in other words, is the evidence of things not seen; it provides the substance of things hoped for. Reason's job in it all is to identify properly the right kind of “nonsense” – the kind that actually goes beyond reason. Faith needs reason, in other words, to keep it on track; to make sure it does not believe just any absurdity whatsoever.

One might also be tempted to object to Kierkegaard's value to theology if one interprets Climacus' thesis that “truth is subjectivity” as indicating a subjectivist position which asserts that the truths we countenance and believe as human beings are relative to properties that are unique to each of us as individuals. “Truth is subjectivity” may be read as saying that “truth is subjective.” In other words, it is easy to read Climacus, particularly in the Postscript, as arguing for the position we hear so much of today – that truth is whatever is “true for you.” And admittedly Climacus often sounds as if he is saying this at certain points. In “Chapter Two: Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity” of Postscript Climacus defines truth as subjectivity thus:

Despite the fact that this isolated paragraph has all the markings of a subjectivism and irrationalism, I want to argue that this is not the case. We should begin by noting that only four pages later Climacus claims that the truth of subjectivity is that subjectivity is untruth. That is to say, whatever else he means by claiming that truth is subjectivity, he does not mean to assert with Protagoras that “Man is the measure of all things.”[22]

But note as well that in the above passage Climacus is identifying the subjectivity of truth with our earlier distinction between essential or subjective truth versus accidental or objective truth. In other words, Climacus means first and foremost that the truth of subjectivity is not about the world, but about oneself and how to live well. It is modeled on Socrates famous dictum: Know thyself! Climacus believes that objective truth exists. He believes that there is such a thing as objective knowledge about the universe, and his idea that truth is subjectivity is not meant to replace that notion as much as supplement or add to it.

What is important about Climacus' idea that truth is subjectivity is that he is really contrasting two different ways of approaching truth – and just life as a whole. You can, he says, approach your life and its meaning, value, etc. (or Christianity) objectively as if it were a thing about which you get information. Or, he says, you can approach your life (meaning, value and so on) as something you are intimately involved with and something that matters to you deeply because you care about being right. Kierkegaard does not think that objective truth and subjective truth are mutually exclusive, but when one takes the objective approach exclusively one ends up canceling out subjective truth. In other words, the more objectively I approach life, the less I will develop my personal perspective and character – the less I will know about how to be a good person.

The same is not true, however, of subjective truth. Subjectivity does not cancel out objective truth as much as it directs or channels it, or better yet, contextualizes it. Objective truth is impossible without subjectivity because it results from our personal, passional engagements with reality. Yet it is also true that in an important way subjective truth also depends on objective truth, insofar as being well, being a good human, etc., is not possible without any truths at all about the universe and ultimately, for Kierkegaard, depends upon factors outside the self – namely, standing before God. The point, however, is that if you adopt the subjective way of approaching truth, reality, Christianity, and just life in general, you will end up with all kinds of truths that one could call objective truth, but you will also have the subjective truth – that is, you will know how to be a good person.[23]

Climacus tells a theologically controversial and much misunderstood story to try and illustrate what he means by his emphasis on subjective truth with respect to Christianity, which in the end has only fueled the theological reservations of his detractors:

Now, if the problem is to calculate where there is more truth . . . whether in the side of the person who only objectively seeks the true God and the . . . truth of the [idea of] God . . . or on the side of the person who is infinitely concerned that he in truth relate himself to God with [subjective truth] . . . then there can be no doubt about the answer for anyone who is not totally botched by scholarship and science. If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in untruth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore worshipping an idol.[24]

It is crucial to observe that in context this is a fictitious counter-example constructed to refute the concept of an “objective Christian” – i.e., of a Christian who does not believe Christianity as an essential truth, a truth related to her existence. It is doubtful Climacus (or Kierkegaard) even believes his story is a real possibility, and he is not making any comment at all about the fate of the heathen. He places his counter-example in the subjunctive mood: “if the problem is to calculate where there is more truth….then there can be no doubt about the answer.” But nowhere does he indicate that he is providing us with what he believes to be a real-life issue. We should also note that Climacus does not say that the person who prays to the idolatrous image is praying to God! In the story neither person in his example is praying to God rightly. The contrast here is between two less than ideal examples, and Climacus is asking which one of the two makes the better of an imperfect situation. The contrast is between two different ways of approaching God: in his example, the pagan approaches God through subjectivity while the pseudo-Christian is content to contemplate the idea of God objectively, in a manner disassociated with the rest of his concrete existence. Climacus responds that it is the pagan, who realizes that he is lost but does not objectively know God and so desperately cries out to his false god to save him, who is closer to the total truth. Again, note that Climacus never says that the pagan prays in truth to the true God, but rather that the pagan is praying to his false god in the right way.

The pagan in this example (and note that not all sincere pagans will fit in this example – it is not even clear that any actual pagans ever could) understands what Proverbs describes as the fear of the Lord (which is the beginning of wisdom) much more clearly than the “Christian” person who has all the correct objective information but doesn't fear God or cry out to God for His salvation. The pseudo-objective-Christian's God is only an idea to be explored intellectually. Kierkegaard is saying that of the two persons in his example, the pagan would make a better Christian if he were to receive God's revelation. The pagan in the story embodies essential Christian truth more correctly than the pseudo objective Christian because his emphasis is subjective – on his relation to the truth, his salvation – while the objective Christian is content just to think about God abstractly without ever relating the concept of God to his life. Kierkegaard is trying to get us to see that the objective Christian is just as much of an idolater as the pagan – even more so, in fact. The pagan is subjectively prepared to receive and respond positively to God's revelation, and thus it is that he is more in the truth than the objective “Christian.”

To sum up this point, nowhere does Climacus or Kierkegaard indicate that the truth of subjectivity annuls or disregards the objectivity of truth. Climacus' claim that truth is subjectivity is better understood as an affirmation that the sort of objectivity that is available to humans and is appropriate for us occurs in and through our passionate pursuit of subjective concerns. It is not a denial of an objective pole to reality or truth-claims.[25]

The third form of the irrationalist charge against Kierkegaard comes from one of the better-known aspects of his thought: His theory of “existence-spheres” or “stages” of a person's life. The pseudonym Frater Taciturnis, in Stages On Life's Way, characterizes these “stages” as: 1) the esthetic, 2) the ethical, 3) the religious[26] – Climacus later in Postscript split the religious sphere into religiousness A, which is a generic sort of religiousness, and religiousness B, which is distinctively Christian religiousness.[27]

The source of the “Blind Leap of Faith” objection comes from Kierkegaard's account of the movement between or transition from one sphere to another. However, it is important to note that the existence-spheres are not to be conceived as linear “stages” of a life, in which one progresses through a stage and beyond to the next, leaving behind the former stage forever. They are really about the various relational spheres of a human person. As such, the existence-spheres delineate the possible modes of historical existence available to a human self, rather than naming an evolutionary series of stages through which the self progresses.[28] The terminology Kierkegaard most often uses to describe these transitions from one qualitative form of existence to another is “the leap” [Spring],[29] and sometimes he uses the Greek construction meta-basis eis allo genos [change or shift from one genus to another].[30] The charge of irrationalism finds its basis in Kierkegaard account of the “leap” or transition between spheres in terms of faith or belief [Tro]. Certain of Kierkegaard's detractors infer from this that believing Christianity is for him a “blind leap of faith,” implying that the leap to faith is also made by faith.

Francis Schaeffer made this reading of Kierkegaard popular in evangelical circles in the late-Sixties and one finds it in different forms throughout his writings. (One might be tempted, in fact, to label this “The Schaeffer Objection.”) In Schaeffer's Escape From Reason we read that once the Kierkegaardian leap enters Western thinking, all rationality is necessarily pessimistic and all optimism must be non-rational. “What is particularly important,” Schaeffer writes, “…is the Kierkegaardian emphasis on the necessity of the leap. Because the rational and logical are totally separated from the non-rational and the non-logical, the leap is total.”[31] The result is “the New Theology” in which the “new theologian” has no ability to speak about God, “the ‘leap theology’ centers [sic] everything in the undefined word.”[32] Elsewhere Schaeffer characterizes Kierkegaard as the first modern thinker “below the line of despair,” and argues “Kierkegaard came to the conclusion that you achieved everything of real importance by a leap of faith. So he separated absolutely the rational and logical from faith. The reasonable and the faith bear no relationship with each other.”[33]

It is not difficult to show the inadequacy of Schaeffer's assessment of Kierkegaard. To begin with, he offers us nothing by way of textual evidence to support his claims. When we check Kierkegaard's texts we find that in Fragments Climacus argues that whenever one is inquiring into the nature of existence one finds that belief is generated by “meine Zuthat [my contribution]” in “letting go” of rational demonstrations.[34] Climacus further asserts that this transition to belief is what he means by the leap [Spring]. This transition to faith or belief that occurs whenever we believe in the existence of anything is an archetypical instance of Kierkegaard's category of “leap of faith.” Thus we can say that the Kierkegaardian leap is best characterized as a leap to faith, not of faith. The Kierkegaardian leap refers to the qualitative transition to a particular mode of being-in-the-world that results in a change of belief or faith in a person. Jamie Ferreira makes the critical observation that while the leap to faith is central to Kierkegaard's thought, he never uses the Danish equivalent of the circular English phrase “leap of faith”, where it is implied that the leap to another mode of being is made by faith, in an overtly question begging fashion as some form of decisionism.[35] In this case, Kierkegaard's leap language is not a wildly subjective and blind abandonment of all human reason, as Schaeffer would have it. It is perfectly compatible with a form of practical reason (phronesis).

But there are better and more careful versions of this argument, and we find a particularly influential one in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. MacIntyre does not focus so much on the leap language as on the specific nature of the transitions between existence-spheres, particularly as portrayed in Kierkegaard's first major pseudonymous work, Either/Or.[36] Either/Or is a two-volume work that presents a series esthetic papers (aphorisms, critical essays, etc.) of A, the esthete, in Part 1, and in Part 2 a series of personal letters from B, Judge William the ethicist, to A urging him to make the shift to the ethical sphere. Both points of view are presented with little or no editorial commentary. We are left in the dark as to Kierkegaard's personal view as the ethical and esthetic are represented by pseudonymously authored papers of A and B, which are then edited by yet another pseudonym (Victor Eremita). MacIntyre describes Kierkegaard's work as “at once the outcome and the epitaph of the Enlightenment's systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality.”[37] According to MacIntyre Either/Or offers us with “a criterionless choice” between the ethical and esthetic points of view that is completely arbitrary – and MacIntyre extends this analysis to include Climacus' account of Christian belief too.[38] Thus MacIntyre concludes that Kierkegaard's text indicate that the authority and justification for any normative choice or belief is derived from principles that are themselves rationally ungrounded.

Only a partial response to MacIntyre can be made in terms of an appeal to the nature of the leap language in the Kierkegaardian texts. One of MacIntyre's primary charges is that there is a deep incoherence in Kierkegaard's conception of the ethical. The trouble with Kierkegaard (for MacIntyre) is that he wants to ground moral value on an arbitrary choice, and yet at the same time maintain that these operate as authoritative “reasons.”[39] MacIntyre rejects this as an irrationalist emotivism.

The key to understanding MacIntyre's reading lies in his implicit assumption that Kierkegaard's existence-spheres are entirely incommensurate with each other, so one is either completely and totally immersed within (or defines themselves entirely within) the aegis of one sphere, or one has made a (blind and irrational) leap to some other sphere and defines themselves entirely within that one. The main point for MacIntyre is that on Kierkegaard's view one is never able to inhabit the overlap or interstices between spheres, imaginatively or otherwise. Existence-spheres are epistemologically and rationally isolated from each other. This being the case, there can be no effective rational communication or evaluation of beliefs across the spheres.[40] According to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard suggests that because judgments or normative evaluations are always made from within one particular sphere of a person's existence, those judgments and evaluations can have no rational claim on the range of choices that belong to some other sphere of existence. In short, cross-sphere dialogue is impossible on Kierkegaard's view.

Ed Mooney has convincingly countered MacIntyre's analysis of the transition between spheres, arguing that there is cross-sphere dialogue possible in Kierkegaard's account of the existence-spheres.[41] Mooney argues that according to the Kierkegaardian texts, “It cannot be that a person first is thrown into a life-crisis (constituted in part by pervasive moral ignorance about the way out) and then reacts by mustering the will to choose despite complete lack of moral guidance – thus enacting, as it were, an irrational blind choice, a leap in faith and desperation.”[42] MacIntyre's reading fundamentally fails to take into account the literary form of the text. If MacIntyre's view were correct, “we would have to believe that the Judge's letters are not really to be read as letters addressed to A.”[43] What the text of Either/Or displays, though, is an inter-personal communication between two friends in which normative dialogue between conflicting existence-sphere's is not only presupposed, it actually happens![44] And reasons are given (by the Judge) for why one sphere (the ethical) should be chosen rather than another. Mooney's summation is worth citing:

It is as if the Judge…were to say to the aesthete: “Here's the best case I can make for your adopting a radical change in your life. I've tried to address your cares and needs with sensitivity and respect, and to consider how my different sort of life might have answers that could be of benefit to you. Of course you may see things quite differently. But these words are coming from a friend who has your best interests at heart. And if not today, perhaps at a later time you may remember what I've said.”[45]

As Mooney goes on to note, the simple fact that the esthete might not be convinced or for one reason another fails to make the shift to the ethical does not mean that cross-sphere dialogue has not happened or is always doomed to fail. Furthermore, “[n]othing in [Kierkegaard's] text[s] rule out the plausible assumption that [rational and] moral evaluation is underway within a world shared by the Judge, A, and third-party readers.”[46]

So we have good reason to assert that in Ether/Or (or any other Kierkegaardian text) the transition between existence-spheres is not based on a criterionless choice. To be sure, the spheres operate as relatively autonomous rational paradigms that provide criteria for rational evaluation that are largely internal to that sphere. What counts as a good reason within one sphere cannot simply be transposed across the others, thereby placing us in an irreducible hermeneutical situation. But the spheres are not mutually exclusive in the sense that they have no shared rational basis or that a person cannot simultaneously inhabit multiple spheres. The spheres are overlapping (existentially, imaginatively, and cognitively) thereby making rational dialogue across the spheres possible.

MacIntyre furthermore fails to discern that there is an implicit teleology in the Kierkegaardian texts with respect to our choices and existential commitments. As Anthony Rudd explains, Kierkegaard supposes that humans have an inescapable “desire for coherence and meaning in our lives.”[47] I have made a similar argument elsewhere, with the additional claim that (at least for Climacus and Anti-Climacus) this desire is really a concern (Bekymring) over salvation – our eternal blessedness or happiness (evig Salighed) – that is expressed by something like a concern for personal unity.[48] Thus, when Judge William engages the esthete in moral dialogue a practical concern over self-unity is operative that not even A can avoid – a fact that is borne out in A's texts themselves.[49] This adds force to the above point against MacIntyre's reading, as it entails not only that the exercise of practical reason is possible in cross-sphere dialogue, but that the intrinsic concern over eternal happiness means that practical reason is always operative – even for the esthete – in the choices through which one ratifies one's existential comportment within one sphere or another. At the end of the day, Christian faith is not, for Kierkegaard, a blind, irrational leap in the dark, but is grounded in our inescapable practical concern over eternal happiness.

The last form of the charge of irrationalism may be called “The 'No Objective Reasoning' Argument.” Caleb Miller finds in Climacus “the approximation argument,” which concludes that we cannot or should not use objective reasons to bolster or support the truth of Christianity.[50] Christianity asks us to base our eternal happiness on an historical phenomenon – God's incarnation in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. However, according to Climacus the most certainty we could ever have with respect to an historical phenomenon is merely an approximation.[51] Climacus, though, believes an approximation cannot operate as a sufficient basis for eternal happiness because the infinite interest an individual has in her eternal happiness requires absolute certainty. Or, as Climacus puts it, “an approximation is too little to build an eternal happiness on and is so unlike an eternal happiness that no result can ensue.”[52] Therefore, Miller summarizes, Climacus believes that “we should not have a faith that is based on, or supported by, objective reasoning.”[53]

Miller counters Climacus' approximation argument by observing that it does not really demonstrate that objective reasoning is of no value to the religious believer. Climacus mistakenly apportions existential commitment to evidence (or lack thereof). Miller understands Climacus to assume “that the only degree of commitment that can be supported by objective reasoning is exactly equal to the degree of support from objective reasoning, for the truth of the belief.”[54] Miller responds by noting that “relatively low probabilities can rationally support very high degree of commitment and very high probabilities can support very low degrees of commitment.”[55] For example, suppose the probability of my 4-year-old daughter being struck by a car in our neighborhood is relatively low (we live on a back street with an exceptionally low rate of traffic, and it is unpaved and narrow, so cars are unlikely to speed). This low probability does not change the fact that I have a fairly strong commitment to her not playing on the street, nor should it. Conversely, the evidence that there are craters on the backside of the moon might make that probability very high but still I am not deeply committed to this truth and could easily revise it. The upshot of Miller's charge is that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist about Christian faith insofar as he disconnects objective reasons, such as evidence or probabilities, from Christian commitments and believes that Christians cannot and should not use evidence or probabilities to support or establish the validity and/or truth of its propositional claims and apportion our commitments accordingly, because of the incommensurability between the infinite passion of Christian faith and the finitude of human reason.

Much depends on how Miller understands Climacus' concept of objectivity used in the sort of statements cited earlier, in which Climacus declares that subjective truth is “an objective uncertainty, held fast through an appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.” Miller seems to take Climacus to refer to a notion of objectivity according to which a belief is objective if it is one that a majority of rational persons can recognize there are reasons that rationally support its probable truth.[56] In other words, when Climacus rejects objective reasoning and declares that truth is subjectivity he is affirming that truth is subjective. Miller just assumes, contrary to the arguments presented here, that Climacus' notion of subjectivity excludes objectivity and is a form of subjectivism. Over and against this, Miller contends that objective thinking or evidence is important to Christian faith as objective reason continues to play a role in supporting faith even though it does not completely close the certainty gap.

There are several problems with this interpretation of Climacus' concept of objectivity. First, when Kierkegaard or Climacus inveighs against objectivity or states that a Christian can and should not attempt to base faith on objective reasoning, he has in mind a type of objectivity he finds endorsed by Descartes, Hegel and all of modern philosophy. The problem is that this type objectivity, as Climacus sees it, banishes subjectivity by seeking to remove all subjective, personal considerations from the pursuit of truth.[57] Not only is this type of objectivity wrongheaded and problematic for Climacus, he wants to argue that it is impossible. We simply cannot be objective in this way.[58] Such objectivity is possible for God, but not humans. Climacus' main point in the passages disputed by Miller is that no how much “evidence” one has, all instances of historical knowing – which includes knowledge of all contingent, empirical facts – involves an acceptance of the proposition in question, and the force which moves the will to accept the belief is a passion; that is, a feature of subjectivity.

Subsequently, when Climacus states that subjective truth is an objective uncertainty he means (at least) two things. First, the exercise of human reasoning always involves subjective passions and interests of individual human beings and the degree to which this is forgotten and neglected is the degree to which objectivity is false, subjectively speaking. Disinterested objectivity takes us away from the essential truth. Second, Climacus means to indicate that objective reason does not ground itself and as such is always fallibilist and defeasible – subject to further review. His favorite terms for this are “approximation” and “objective uncertainty.” And it is this fallible character of objective reasoning that is incommensurate with the infinite passion one has over eternal happiness or salvation. The real point of the so-called “approximation argument” is that the degree to which one genuinely pursues one's eternal happiness is the degree to which one will have one's subjective interests and concerns in the foreground. To fail to pursue those interests is precisely what it means to fail to pursue eternal happiness. Climacus is not, however, saying that the pursuit of eternal happiness rules out reason and reasoning in every sense. To repeat an earlier point, the Kierkegaardian thesis “truth is subjectivity” does not deny the validity of objective truth or reasoning; subjectivity only resituates objectivity within the overall context of a persons subjective concerns and passions.

So, when Miller contends that probability continues to inform our commitments and that objective reasoning is an important part of human belief and our commitments, Kierkegaard would undoubtedly agree.[59] Miller's position is one that takes into account the subjective interests and concerns of the believer and does not focus solely on the abstract, disinterested objectivity of the belief. The structure of Miller's argument hinges on objective reasoning providing us with the best way to make sense of and act according to our subjective concerns and interests. Climacus would find little in this with which to quarrel. Taken in this light, it does not seem that the “No Objective Reasons” Argument presents a telling portrait of Kierkegaard's irrationalism.

I have been arguing that Kierkegaard is not the bald irrationalist that some might think him and that he really does think truths can be communicated. The most common objections to him on this score stem mostly from a hermeneutical failure to read the text carefully or take into account the wider purposes and techniques of his authorship, such as his method of indirect communication. Contrary to appearances, Kierkegaard does not believe that Christianity is a logical contradiction nor does he believe that the Christian could even believe it if it were. We have also seen that his controversial thesis, “truth is subjectivity,” does not mean that truth is subjective, but that the most important truths – essential truths – can only be accessed by taking into account our subjective passions, interests and concerns. Insofar as Kierkegaard advocates a leap to faith, this is never a blind, irrational leap that involves passionately willing to believe something completely arbitrary or excludes rational considerations. The transition to faith is the product of a practical rationality grounded in the intrinsic practical concern for personal unity and eternal happiness that characterizes all human existence. I have presented a reading of Kierkegaard's account of subjectivity that does not exclude objectivity or reason, but rather resituates those within the context of our personal interests and concerns. Kierkegaard, then, is not an irrationalist.

But for all this, there is a degree of appropriateness to the charges against him. We encounter in the Kierkegaardian texts a manifest and undeniable hostility to a particular understanding of reason that was dominant in nineteenth century Denmark – one that modern philosophy inherited from Descartes. This version of reason was a radical departure from the conception of reason operative in the Medieval and Ancient worlds, where reason, while not ungrounded was grounded outside itself in the rational structure of the world (in the form of logos). For Descartes, Hegel and modern philosophy, reason was self-grounding, and not only that it was disinterested, autonomous and essentially disconnected from the universe. Kierkegaard understands that this view of reason is not only a pipe-dream but has dramatic ramifications for Christianity, for if Christianity is approached under the terms of Cartesian, Hegelian and modern reason it is either irrational or transformed into an objective piece of information. Either way, Kierkegaard believes essential Christianity has been destroyed. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard launches his strategy of indirect communication and develops its corresponding philosophical thesis “truth is subjectivity.” Christianity, he believes, is an existence-communication; it is connected to our deepest passions and concerns, and involves the interest of our entire being and is fundamentally concerned with living well – i.e., our capacity to be in the truth. Doctrines are not irrelevant to this, but the cognitive apprehension of the objective, disinterested truth of the propositions of Christian orthodoxy is not yet Christianity, the essential truth of Christianity. In a situation where people believe they have the truth already, in the form of objectively true propositions, one must use indirect communication to provoke them to re-examine what they think they already know in relation to their lives. This is what Kierkegaard's method of indirect communication is aimed to do.

Kierkegaard is often perceived as jeopardizing the truth and authority of Christianity because he believes that we cannot know God's revelation to us in Jesus Christ or the Scriptures, and who subsequently advocates a blind, irrational faith – a faith that has no resources to combat modern atheism and no ability to ground Christian belief and practice. Kierkegaard is certainly no friend of modern rationalism, but as I have argued he does not deny that some form of reason or objectivity plays a normative function in Christian belief and practice. Thus, on my view, Kierkegaard is comfortable with the broadly evangelical thesis that God speaks to us in Jesus Christ and the Bible (and only in these) and that this is not mere subjective whim; it is, in fact, the sober truth. Kierkegaard further supposes that believing this way is not irrational or absurd or logically contradictory and believes that if it were, we should not believe Christianity. I am not arguing that Kierkegaard is an evangelical in our (North American) sense or that he would have nothing to say against evangelical Christianity in the West. Undoubtedly he would have much with which to dispute. But I am saying is that Kierkegaard supports what I take to be the basic premise of evangelical Christianity—that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ and Scripture, and that this revelation is authoritative for Christian belief and practice. Kierkegaard assumes that there is a kind of rational structure to our faith, but that this is not appropriately understood in modern epistemological and/or theological categories, which tend to pit faith against reason and objectivity versus subjectivity. The result (for Kierkegaard) is that theology loses something critical in modernity, which it can only recapture by overcoming modern categories. It is just this getting past modernity that a Kierkegaardian approach to theology can help us achieve, and do so without jettisoning the truth of the Gospel and God's revelation to us.

[1] Others that immediately spring to mind are: Emil Brunner, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many more. One could say, in fact, that virtually every major theologian and theological movement of the late-twentieth century accrued a debt to Kierkegaard.

[2] I am not alone in this. The reading of Kierkegaard as a proto-existentialist has all but died out. These days he is understood largely in connection with post-phenomenological, post-foundational and post-structural continental philosophy (i.e., postmodernism), owing to his Nietzsche-like critique of modernity. See C. Stephen Evans' article “Kierkegaard,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.

[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. and ed. by D.R. Thomte and A.B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 7. I am not using this as a proof-text indicating Kierkegaard's self-understanding, rather I am using this text as a jumping off point into the subsequent discussion.

[4] Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Two Volumes, trans. and ed. by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1.625; his italics.

[5] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1.625-630.

[6] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1.627.

[7] In “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” Kierkegaard divides the pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous works up, saying that “The first division is esthetic writing; the last division is exclusively religious.“ Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans and ed. by H.V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 31.

[8] There is abundant evidence of this thesis in the posthumously published “On My Work as an Author,” and “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” both found in Kierkegaard, The Point of View. Despite the problems associated with simply taking Kierkegaard at his word after the fact, as pointed out by Joachim Garff, “The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View on Kierkegaard's Work as an Author,” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. by J. Reé and J. Chamberlain, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) 75-102, Kierkegaard clearly had an emerging strategy or method of countering what he believed to wrong with his society.

[9] See Garff, “The Eyes of Argus,” for a thorough treatment of the issue of Kierkegaard's self-understanding of his authorship. While I disagree with Garff's overall conclusion about the nature of the authorship, he highlights the critical issues.

[10] See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1.205 for the distinction between essential and accidental truth; cf. pp. 1.189-250. See Postscript, p. 1.72-92 for a discussion of communication. See also Kierkegaard's draft copies of his “Lectures on Communication,” in Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, Volume 2, trans. and ed. by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), §648 - §658.

[11] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.205.

[12] Jolita Pons Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms and the Bible ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 45.

[13] Caleb Miller, “Faith and Reason,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 139.

[14] See Kierkegaard, Fragments, 52, 104, 221, 294, 300; and Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.262, 1.429, 1.557-58, 1.211-12.

[15] Kierkegaard does use the word “contradiction” in reference to the paradox and absurdity of Christianity but I have chosen not to include those references so as to avoid confusion. In the places where Kierkegaard uses the word contradiction, he does not use it to mean “logical contradiction.” See C. Stephen Evans' very helpful discussions in his, Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 80-83; and Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1992), 96-118.

[16] See Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.203, 1.304-05, 1.421. Aristotle's law of noncontradiction was one of the fundamental “laws” of logic, hitherto until Hegel. It is generally expressed, “A is not non-A.” Or more colloquially put, a thing cannot be both what it is and what it is not in the same way, time, and space. Vigilius Haufniensis particularly takes Hegel to task on this in Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 9-14.

[17] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.568; my italics.

[18] This is in fact the entire point of Kierkegaard's Fragments.

[19] Evans makes a similar argument in Faith and Reason, 85ff.

[20] Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 7 Volumes, trans. and eds. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), §7.

[21] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 203; his italics.

[22] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 207.

[23] Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 45: “It is the divine side of man, his inward action, which means everything, not a mass of information; for that will certainly follow and then all that knowledge will be a change assemblage, or a succession of details, without a focusing point.”

[24] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.201; my italics.

[25] Kierkegaard holds out Socrates as a prototype of this subjectivity-as-objectivity in Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Volume 4, §4571: “Take Socrates…in danger he relates objectively to his own person . . . He is subjectivity raised to the second power…with this objectivity he relates to his own subjectivity. This is no mean achievement. Generally we get one of two things—either an objective something, an objective piece of furniture that is supposed to be a human being, or we get a jumble of accidental occurrences and arbitrariness. But the task [of subjectivity] is to relate objectively to one's own subjectivity. …[God] relates objectively to his subjectivity…in his being subjective there is no imperfection at all that should be taken away, nor is there anything lacking that should be added, as is the case with human subjectivity and which explains why being related objectively to one's own subjectivity is also a corrective.”

[26] Søren Kierkegaard, Stages On Life's Way, ed. and trans. by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 476.

[27] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.555-1.616. The terms “stage” and “existence-sphere” are used alternately in Kierkegaard's writings to denote his concept of the possible modes of existence for a human being. However, the term that occurs most often is “sphere,” especially in the more mature writing of Johannes Climacus's Postscript. The language of “existence-spheres” is therefore preferable to “stages” because, in Calvin Schrag's words, the term existence-spheres “avoids the imagery of a succession of levels of development that attaches to the grammar of stages. Also, it signals the peculiar qualification of esthetics, ethics and religion as manners or modes of existing.” See Calvin Schrag, “The Kierkegaard Effect in the Shaping of the Contours of Modernity,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, eds. Martin J. Matustík and Merold Westphal (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 4. See also “Historical Introduction,” x-xi, in Stages on Life's Way; and Stages on Life's Way, trans. and ed. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 335n-36.

[28] For more on the existence-spheres see Myron Bradley Penner, Subjectivity and Knowledge: Self and Belief in Kierkegaard's Thought ( Cheltenham , UK : Paternoster, forthcoming), Chapters Six and Seven.

[29] The term occurs first in Kierkegaard's published authorship in Climacus, Kierkegaard, Fragments, 43, and occurs throughout Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers. See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Volume 1, §26, §385, §653, §808, §972; Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Volume 2, §1248, §1603, §1607; Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Volume 3, §2704, §2807, §3247, §3598; and Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Volume 4, §4421.

[30] Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 73; and Kierkegaard, Postscript,1.98.

[31] Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1968), 46, 51.

[32] Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 52.

[33] Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who is (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press, 1968), 21.

[34] Kierkegaard, Fragments, 43.

[35] See M. Jamie Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207-08. Ferreira's work on Kierkegaard's category of the leap is arguably the most comprehensive and careful in the literature. See especially Ferreira, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), passim.

[36] MacIntyre's reading of Kierkegaard is taken up to good effect in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, ed. by J.J. Davenport and A. Rudd ( Chicago : Open Court , 2001), and MacIntyre's replies to the essays are included. I am particularly in debt to the following essays in this text: Marilyn Gaye Piety, “Kierkegaard on Rationality,” 59-74; Anthony Rudd, “Reason in Ethics: MacIntyre and Kierkegaard,” 131-150; and Edward F. Mooney, “The Perils of Polarity: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre in Search of Moral Truth,” 233-164.

[37] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 37.

[38] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 37, 41.

[39] See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 42: “[T]he principles of the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lie beyond reason, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason. Yet the ethical is to have authority over us. …The contradiction in Kierkegaard's doctrine is plain;” his italics.

[40] Cf. Edward Mooney, “The Perils of Polarity,” 240-41.

[41] This Ed Mooney's argument in, “Perils of Polarity,” 240-45. MacIntyre accepts this criticism in Alasdair MacIntyre, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, 340.

[42] Mooney, “Perils of Polarity,” 240.

[43] Mooney, “Perils of Polarity,” 243.

[44] One may further argue that all Kierkegaard's texts display the same structure of inter-personal address.

[45] Mooney, “Perils of Polarity,” 244.

[46] Mooney, “Perils of Polarity,” 244.

[47] Rudd, “Reason in Ethics,” 139.

[48] Penner, Subjectivity and Knowledge, Chs. 6 & 7. In Marilyn Gaye Piety, “Kierkegaard On Rationality,” Faith and Philosophy 10: (July 1993), 370, we also read that, “Kierkegaard maintains that we have an essential interest in determining or choosing the proper interpretation of existence. Our eternal blessedness, or eternal damnation is, according to Kierkegaard, ultimately dependent upon this choice.”

[49] For just two examples: A despairs in Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part One, trans. and ed. by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31: “So I am not the one who is the lord of my life; I am one of the threads to be spun into the calico of life!” Similarly, A fails to integrate the eternal aspects of his self-relation with its temporal entanglements. He proudly acknowledges in Either/Or, Part One, 39, that his esthetic efforts are an attempt to live “aeterno modo [in the mode of eternity],” but then in Either/Or, Part One, 26, A complains that in his timeless esthetic abstractions he cannot reconcile himself with time and master it: “Time passes, life is a stream, etc., so people say. That is not what I find: time stands still, and so do I. All the plans I project fly straight back at me; when I want to spit, I spit in my own face.” In Penner, Subjectivity and Knowledge, I have called this an instance of existential aporia, which provides the practical reasons for sphere-shifts in the Kierkegaardian texts.

[50] See Caleb Miller, “Faith and Reason,” 139-142. Miller is basing both his reading of Kierkegaard and his response to him on an argument made by Robert M. Adams, “Kierkegaard's Arguments Against Objective Reasoning in Religion,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25-41. I am addressing Miller's version because his is less nuanced than Adams' and Adams' version is not really even a challenge to Kierkegaard, as C. Stephen Evans has already argued in Faith and Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 107.

[51] Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1.23. Miller, following Adams, who wrote before the advent of the new Hong translation, uses the old Swenson Lowrie translation. I am citing from the Hong translation, but follow the passages Miller uses to support his thesis.

[52] Thus, Evans, in Faith and Reason, 11, 107, justly renames this argument of Climacus' the “incommensurability argument,” as the basic idea is that there is an incommensurability between the sort of beliefs required by an infinite passion for eternal blessedness and the sort of certainty granted by historical evidence.

[53] Miller, “Faith and Reason,” 140.

[54] Miller, “Faith and Reason,” 141.

[55] Miller, “Faith and Reason,” 141.

[56] He seems to follow Adams' definition of Climacus' concept of objectivity, “Kierkegaard's Arguments,” 25-26 (his italics): “Let us say that a piece of reasoning, R, is objective reasoning just in case every (or almost every) intelligent, fair minded, and sufficiently informed person would regard R as showing or intending to show (in the circumstances in which R is used, and to the extent claimed in R) that R's conclusion is true or probably true.”

[57] Cf. Evans, Faith Beyond Reason, 107.

[58] Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), trans. and eds. by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, 40n. See Penner, Subjectivity and Knowledge, Chapter Two for more on this argument.

[59] Steve Evans makes this same argument in reply to Adams in Faith Beyond Reason, 107.

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A Lecture by Myron Penner