Kierkegaard Philosophical Fragments Notes PDF

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Lectures on Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments:

Philosophical Fragments 1-22 Kierkegaard begins, with a difficulty Plato raises in the Meno. The text is as follows

Men. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.

As Kierkegaard notes, Socrates solution is his doctrine of recollection. It is that “all enquiry and all learning is but recollection.” I recognize the truth that I was seeking since I knew it all along. All I needed was to be reminded of it.

Socrates uses this doctrine to prove the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo.

The teacher here is the midwife. She does not impart anything to you. She helps you “give birth,” that is, recollect the truth that you already knew.

Thus, Socrates takes a slave boy and asks him, what how do I construct one square twice the side of the other. The slave boy says, double the side. Socrates asks him to draw this in the sand. He

then counts the square and sees he is wrong. But he also sees that when he draws the diagonal of the square and constructs the new square on it, he gets the right answer.

The point of the dialogue is that the slave boy has the conditions for getting the truth within him. He can count. He can recognize identical triangles as identical, etc.

The teacher merely brings him to employ this condition. He does not give him the condition. As Kierkegaard puts this: “for the ultimate idea in all questioning is that the person asked must himself possess the truth and acquire it by himself.” (p. 13).

In this conception, “The temporal point of departure is a nothing” (ibid.). The other person is merely the occasion.

The question is whether this paradigm of thought is adequate to understand Christianity. Does Christianity consist of a set of truths of which Christ only serves as a reminder?

Is it the case, as Kant asserts, that “Even the holy one of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognized as such” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 76).

Here, Christ does not give us the concept of morality, rather the concept is what first allows us to recognize Christ. Seeing him, we are reminded of the concept. We then recognize him as morally perfect.

Is it the case, as Schliermacher asserts, that Christ is simply an example, an illustration, of someone expressing a consciousness of God in an exemplary degree a consciousness, that we also have, and which allows us to recognize him.

If this is true, then our relation to Christ is like our relation to Socrates. It is accidental and inessential.

Is it the case, as Hegel says, that the essence of God is freedom, that Christ manifests this in the law of love: love and do what you will.

If it is not true, we need another paradigm for understanding Christianity.

In this paradigm, the teacher is essential and so is the moment. How are we to think this?

In the Socratic paradigm, the seeker after truth has the conditions for getting the truth within him. Socrates merely gets him to employ them. He asks the slave boy to count, etc. In the

Christian pardigm, the seeker cannot have the conditions for getting the truth within him. He must receive them. “Now if the moment is to acquire decisive signifi cance, then the seeker up until that moment must not have possessed the truth, not even in the form of ignorance, for in that case the moment becomes merely the moment of occasion … Consequently, he has to be defined as being outside the truth” (13).

For him, in other words, the original objection of Meno applies. He cannot even be a seeker of the truth since he would not know whether or not he has found the truth. He does not have inherently the ability to recognize it.

What about the teacher? He must not just give him the truth, he must give him the ability to recognize it. In Kierkegaard’s words, “ if the learner is to obtain the truth, the teacher must bring it to him, but not only that. Along with it, he must provide him with the condition for understanding it, for if the learner were himself the condition for understanding the truth, then he merely needs to recollect” (14).

This, of course, is to recreate the learner. It is to making into something he was not before. No teacher can to that, only God can.

The teacher must, then, be the God.

As Kierkegaard puts this: “the teacher, before

beginning to teach, must transform, not reform, the learner. But no human being is capable of doing this; if it is to take place, it must be done by the god himself.” (14-15).

As for the learner, before the intervention of the God, he is incapable of the truth. The god does not give him this incapacity. He himself must be responsible for it. He must inherently be at war with the truth. Kierkegaard calls this state of being in “untruth” and at war with the truth the state of “sin.” (15).

This state of sin is also a state of unfreedom. If the learner were free, he could freely choose to be in the truth. But if he could do this in an effective way, he would already have the condition. But he does not. The teacher in setting him free is thus a “deliverator” and “savior” (17).

The teacher here is not someone evaluating the learner’s progress. He does not simply evaluate how far the learning has employed his ability to learn. He rather stands as a judge of the learner himself. He judges that he has not the condition, that he is in unfreedom and in untruth. His relation is to the being of learner himself. He judges this. In Kierkegaard’s words, “A teacher certainly can evaluate the learner with respect to whether or not he is making progress, but he cannot pass judgment on him, for he must be Socratic enough to perceive that he cannot give the learner what is essential. That teacher [who can], then, is actually not a teacher but is a judge” (18)

As for the learner. When he was not in the truth he was departing from it. Receiving the condition for the truth, “he was turned around. Let us call this change conversion” (18). His taking leave of his former state, Kierkegaard calls “repentence.” (19). His receiving the condition is called “rebirth.” Inasmuch as he was in untruth and now along with the condition receives the truth, a change takes place in him like the change from "not to be" to "to be." But this transition

from "not to be" to "to be" is indeed the transition of birth. But the person who already is cannot be born,- and yet he is born. Let us call this transition rebirth (ibid.).

What about the moment. In the Socratic paradigm. It is inessential. When Socrates reminds the learner of some truth, i.e., causes him to employ his capacity for the truth, has nothing to do with the truth he learns or his capacity.

For the Christian paradigm, however. It is essential. It is the moment of his receiving the condition, the moment of rebirth: In the moment, a person becomes aware that he was born, for his previous state, to which he is not to appeal, was in deed one of "not to be." In the moment, he becomes aware of the rebirth, for his previous state was indeed one of "not to be." (21)

What is going on here? Kierkegaard seems to have several points in mind.

The first is that the basic Christian notions, sin, repentance, conversion, rebirth, etc., do not fit into the Socratic paradigm. This is the paradigm of Greek thought. The claim, then, is that Christianity is outside, otherwise, than Greek thought.

Levinas

makes the same claim with regard to Judaism (ethics).

Thus, faith in Christianity is expressed by pistis in Greek. This does not signify belief in doctrines, but rather confidence, trust, in a person. The person, not some truth is the object. When Christ says, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14.06), he is not identifying himself with some

doctrine, some “truth” of the faith. The relation to him is not epistemological. It is not, in the first instance, a question of knowledge.

The relation is, rather, that of the conditioned (the person) to the condition (Christ). The second causes the first to be. The relation concerns the believer’s existence.

The second point is that this relation of the conditioned to the conditioned is that of grace. Grace is God’s free gift. I do not deserve it. It is simply given to me. With it, I can recognize God as God and Christ as his son. Without it, it is impossible.

This whole notion of grace presupposes a radical incapacity on the part of man. He cannot by himself actually recognize the truth that is God. He is subject to Meno’s paradox.

Socrates, in resolving the paradox, does not just put forward the doctrine of recollection. He also asserts that all nature is akin. It is interrelated. Thus, the part points to the greater whole. It fits in with other things, together they form an ordered whole. We can infer from what we know to what we don’t know. We already have a general idea of what it must be.

The difficulty with this move for Christianity is that its object is not part of the whole. It is outside of it. It is before the world and, hence, not capturable by its categories. One sees this with the apostles’ relation to Christ. They constantly misunderstand him, interpreting him in worldly terms.

Go over the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The inability of miracles to convince people of what is truly non-worldly.

Our not having the condition to recognize the truth is, in this regard, our being part of the world, our having all our categories taken from it.

Point put in terms of existence. The categories tell us what something is. God (Christ), as giving us existence, is not a what. He is existence itself. This is something that the world needs to receive from outside of itself.

In other words, the claim of Christianity (and Judaism) is that of a transcendent God. The epistemology of Socrates and Greek philosophy is that of world as a self-sufficient whole. The latter, by definition, cannot encompass the claim of Christianity.

Philosophical Fragments, pp. 23-36 In this reading, Kierkegaard continues to draw the contrast between the human teacher and the transcendent god.

The human teacher is part of the world. He has an inclination (“a call and a prompting”) to be a teacher. Others had an inclination to learn. He thus has a mutual relation to the learner, who is also part of the world. In Kierkegaard’s words: Himself influenced by circumstances, he in turn exerted an influence upon them. In accomplishing, his task, he satisfied the claims within himself just as much as he satisfied the claims other people might have on him. Understood in this way—and this was indeed the Socratic understanding— the teacher stands in a reciprocal relation, inasmuch as life

and its situations are the occasion for him to become a teacher and he in turn the occasion for others to learn something. (23)

The point is that both are part of the world and involved in its nexus of mutual relations. As Kierkegaard also puts this on the next page the pupil is the occasion for the teacher to understand himself; the teacher is the occasion for the pupil to understand himself (24)

Cf. Aristotle’s assertion: The actuality of the teacher qua teacher is in the learner (this is where the teacher is at work, making the learner actually learn) The actuality of the learner qua learner is in the teacher (this is where the learner is at work, making the teacher actually teach). Each provides the material (the means) for the other’s actualization

Point: both are through the other. Both exist as part of the world.

For Plato, each is the occasion for the other to understand himself, i.e., grasp himself as a teacher or a learner. Their relation, however, is accidental. The teacher could have taught someone else, the learner could have learned from someone else. Neither has a claim, as an individual, on the other.

Thus, Kierkegaard continues: “in death the teacher leaves no claim upon the pupil's soul, no more than the pupil can claim that the teacher owes him something” (24).

Neither has given the other the capacity to teach or to learn. All they have done is actualize this.

The God’s relation to the learner is, however, different. He “ needs no pupil in order to understand himself.” The other does not actualize his potentiality. He does not give him the material for his activity. The pupil does not have the condition requisite for learning and thus can provide the teacher with no material by which he can actualize himself as a teacher. The teacher must himself create the material

Given this, how can the learner motivate the teacher to come into contact with him? What can move the God to teach the learner? The God must move himself. But what is his motive? We do not have here the mutuality of the teacher and the pupil being in the world and influencing each other accordingly.

Kierkegaard’s claim: What moves the teacher is love. (ibid.). How are we to understand this: One way to understand this is through the procreative love that begets. The radical sense of this love is reserved for God (31), but there are a number of analogies here.

Desire, in a certain sense, is procreative. What I desire, I will to be. If the desire is active, I act to bring about the desired object or condition. This also holds when a couple has sex with the desire for children. It also holds for someone writing a novel, a painter painting a picture, etc.

In such cases, the action is not caused by its object, which does not yet exist. It is rather creative of the object. This in a radical sense is true of God. God’s love precedes the world [as prior to the world, he needs nothing in it to act]. His love also creates the world.

In Kierkegaard’s words, “But if [the God] moves himself and is not moved by need, what moves him then but love, for love does not have the satisfaction of need outside itself but within.” (ibid.).

In other words, it has no external motivation, but only an

internal one—the conception of what it will bring about.

Now, for the God, who was eternally before the world (and, hence, outside of time, which is a worldly concept), this internal motivation is eternal—it is outside of the world and hence cannot be determined by anything temporal in it. This holds even though, it realizes its action at some definite moment in the world it brings about. As Kierkegaard puts this, His resolution, which does not have an equal reciprocal relation to the occasion, must be from eternity, even though, fulfilled in time, it expressly becomes the moment (25).

Kierkegaard now moves to another sense of love: that of mutuality. He writes: Out of love, therefore, the god must be eternally resolved in this way, but just as his love is the basis, so also must love be the goal … The love, then, must be for the learner, and the goal must be to win him, for only in love is the different made equal, and only in equality or in unity is there understanding (ibid.).

Note: the two senses of love at work here. The first is a creative love that creates its object. The second is a love that aims at equality.

The two are in conflict. I am not equal to what which my love brings about. I am superior. I am the condition, the object is the conditioned.

On the other hand, suppose I love another person—a woman. My love, here, strives for equality. I want her to love me as I love her. I want to win her love for me and establish an understanding in which we are equal partners.

The two attitudes are in conflict. One sees this in the parent’s relation to the child. The child is the result of the parent’s creative love (assuming that the child is a wanted child). As such, however, their relation is not mutual. Some parents attempt to resolve this by being “friends” with their children. But this often does not work. The child thinks that the parent is abdicating his responsibility as a parent—he does not want a friend, but a parent.

What we have in Kierkegaard is an extreme example of this.

How can the creator

establish a relation of equality with the creature? Without equality, how can there be a relation of love? Yet this love is basically unhappy, for they are very unequal, and what seems so easy—namely, that the god must be able to make himself understood—is not so easy if he is not to destroy that which is different.… The unhappiness is the result not of the lovers' being unable to have each other but of their being unable to understand each other (ibid.).

The notion of destruction points to the fact, as Kierkegaard adds, that “ no human situation can provide a valid analogy” (26)

Its reference is to the killing splendor of God. As Kierkegaard notes, the Israelites believed that no one can see God face to face and live (Exodus 33:20).

The Greeks, too, had a sense of the killing splendor of God. When Zeus fulfills his promise to Semele to show himself as he is, he does so in a bolt of lightening, reducing her to ashes.

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Behind such examples stands the notion of the otherness of the god, of its not fitting into the contexts in and through which things are normally given. Such contexts are those of the “earthly economy”—that system of exchange through which things come to us.

Our bodily metabolism with its organic needs is an example of this economy; so are our normal, everyday commercial transactions. They point to our dependence on the world, i.e., to the fact that we live only through a constant process of exchange with it. The otherness of the sacred manifests itself in its not being part of this economy and, hence, in its disrupting this economy (when we contact it directly) and with this, disrupting the conditions for our earthly existence.

Admitting this limitation, Kierkegaard still suggest an analogy for the divine love: that of a king “who loved a maiden of lowly station in life” (ibid.).

The king is concerned “whether she

would acquire the bold confidence never to remember what the king only wished to forget—that he was the king and she had been a lowly maiden.” (27). If she does remember, then the equality of love is ruined, but this is his goal.

It is in this regard that Kierkegaard writes:

The god wants to be his teacher, and the god's concern is to bring about equality. If this cannot be brought about, the love becomes unhappy and the in struction meaningless, for they are unable to understand each other. (28).

True love involves the mutuality of understanding. The lover wants the beloved to understand her, to sympathize with her, to know where she is coming from. The same holds in the opposite direction. The question is: is this possible with God?

Job has a long complaint about this. How dare God judge or even say anything about him, given that God is immortal, not subject to afflictions, never suffers need or want, and Job does. His point is that God lacks the condition to understand him and therefore is incapable of judging what he cannot understand. (Christians take the i...