To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world looks rationally back. --G.W.F. Hegel
Friday, March 28, 2014
Faith and War
So, I was feeling pretty good about Kirkigaurd, before class the other day, but now I don't know what to think. The idea of faith being not a dicision, not something whcih can be taken off and put on like a jacket on a spring day, but instead, an action, a struggle, a war which one wages inside of oneself, resonates with me. I can understnad and sympthethize with his project, of makign faith expensive. But I am struggeling with understanding the paradox, it still seems like any test of faith, any deep and abiding struggle to affirm faith in spite of (and a little bit because of) a malestrome of obsticles should count. As I was writing this, a metaphor occurred to me, and I wonder whether this makes sense to anybody else. If we are too see faith as a struggle, as a war which one wages witinthin oneself, would it be fair to say that. like a war. whcih might rip apart the status quo, causing the suspension of what would otherwise be "ethical," faith, as an experience with such great power, could also rip apart out status quo, could also shatter and suspend the"ethical"? Wars are experiences whcih hold so much power: physical, social, emotional, psycological that they can become the defining characteriztic of people's lives, and the defining characteriztic of a time period, setting the cultural tone for generations to come. Now if we imagine all of the sheer power of a war, collapsed into one singular momemnt of faith, it almost defies logic. If we can see how during a war, normal bonds of ethical and just, right and wrong, fair and unfair are suspended, compressed and transformed under the emence weight of war, how much more so would these things be suspended where that terrible and awsome poer to be multipliex 100 fold and experinced as a moment of singularity within an individual. I feel like this is the sort of power abraham expeirnced, and with that sort of power, your expeirnce would be utterly ripped from reality, beyond ethics, beyond universals, beyond comprehension, and translation, both absolutely real, and utterly uncommunicable.
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I think your comparison is an interesting one, and it expresses the same idea that Kierkegaard advocates. I think you are moving along the right lines in multiplying the experience by a factor, but that this "multiplying" and the "factor" themselves still do not represent the difference in the experience. However, you still make the point directly following the "multiplication" that the experience is totally incomprehensible. I think this accurately represents Kierkegaard. But... I think Kierkegaard wrong to call this an experience. If is "utterly ripped from reality, beyond ethics, beyond universals, beyond comprehension, and translation, both absolutely real, and utterly uncommunicable" as you say (and as I think Kierkegaard indicates), then is not something of this sort totally inaccessible to humans and totally worthless to them? I think its worthless to them as a whole (i.e. as humanity) since the "experience" is purely individual if it is to have the worth Silentio claims, but I am also wondering if this kind of "experience" actually does anything for the individual that the individual as a human being can have access to.
ReplyDeleteKierkagaard's project does not seem to be 'end-directed,' in the strictest sense. His treatise is not 'for' anything or anyone, certainly not humanity. The description of events appears to be a sort-of check on particular christian doctrines. Clearly, in his articulation Abraham and Isaac's ascent of Mount Moriah, there is no model, no prescription, nothing. The christian dogma simply projects a universal prescription onto a particular decision that would, under any other circumstance, appear to the rational observer to be absolutely absurd. If his project is for anyone, it is for the individual subject, attempting to orient themselves in a world, where decisions like these sometimes need to be made. More importantly, however, he wants to make sure that his readers understand faith as this thing that defies description and eludes evidence.
ReplyDeletePeirce, I think you are absolutely right. War is not like faith, in that it is an experience, but more than that, War is a social experience, closer to Hegel's Geist, it is something that a whole society, a whole generation, goes through together, that profoundly reshapes the ethical, and the socially accepted universal. Faith, on the other hand, for Kierkegaard, unlike war, could not be farther from the social. Faith is an entirely, utterly, and totally individual and singular unmediated relation to the absolute. That being said, I guess what I was really attempting to do was to provide a an interesting metaphor for another instance in which the ethical and the universal are temporarily suspended, and after which for the person (in he case of faith) or for the society ( in the case of war) is permanently changed in a way that is intangible and incommunicable. Then again, I think Kierkegaard would argue, that when the ethical is suspended in faith, it does not ultimately change, even if the individual does. Whereas, in war, the ethical is suspended in a much more dialectic way, as a response to a situation, and after the episode, that ethical suspension, and all that it entailed, lingers, ever present, in the social consciousness, and the dialectic development of new forms of ethical and social norms.
ReplyDeleteYour impressions provide a powerful idea of the concept of faith. I believe it is fair to characterize Abraham's struggle as a sort of war within one's self. That is in many respects what faith is - an internal battle; but it is also a war between one's self and the world. For example, freshmen at Rhodes who have grown up in the Church and proscribe to its core doctrines often find themselves posing many questions to themselves about why they believe as they say that they do, and whether they even believe these long-accepted doctrines at all. I know that this was my struggle when I first came to Rhodes. Faith for me was a war against the world's culture that sparked a war within. Such, I believe, is the case for those who subscribe to faith. Abraham's specific struggle is obviously a special case, as we have noted in class, but the general concept of his internal struggle to accept belief is universal.
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