If the ... is Silent

We have lost self, the singular self, in Hegel. When reason took precedence in consciousness, it lost what is most true--its undeniable (immediate) singularity. In Kierkegaard, we discover several consequences of this lost of the singular self.

The one is the devaluing of faith. We have already discussed this plenty in class. In short, as faith is regulated to the ethical sphere, the immediate paradoxical oneness between Self and Absolute is lost.

The another is philosophical suicide. Suicide is the most dramatic expression of self-consciousness for the act is for Self and what is lost is Self. When suicide is regulated to the field of philosophy, the philosopher will appeal to reason to give the Self a law against suicide. This translates the act of suicide into universal terms and what is lost is the radical singleness of the act. In other words, the philosopher has killed the self through reason much like Hegel does in his philosophical system where reason dominates.

In both Faith and suicide, the incommunicability of the act reflects this immediate self which has been lost in this era of universal reason. In Faith, one cannot speak of why they acted in faith because to do so would put a private act in terms of the universal, which would eliminate the radical singlularity essential to the act. God called Abraham, no one else. No one else can participate in Abraham's relationship with God, and yet the universal is dependent on God for its sanction.

For Suicide, the person commits an act which immediately bypasses all universal claims on him or her. If one chooses to annihilate his own life, he is acting directly with self as self and as such there is no mediation with the universal which is a relationship between self and reason. Suicide can have no reason and cannot be communicated.

So we have this radically singular self whose two basic modes, acts of faith and acts of affirming or denying life are incommunicable. Two questions for me going forward are: 1) If at base each person has an existence which is incommunicable, then how could the universal have any power in our lives? 2) How did the universal  (mediated) emerge from the singular (unmediated) if one is essentially not the other?

Kierkegaard and Hegel

            The beginning of class on Tuesday kind of blew my mind in a way that nothing else in college really has. It had never really occurred to me before that maybe what is the truest is what cannot be expressed in words. At the same time, however, I think some variation of this idea is really what I’ve believed all my life or at least the last few years. When I’m frustrated about some feeling I have about the present in regards to the past, I commonly say something along the lines of “No one understands.” It seems that no matter how much I try to explain something about myself and my life and no matter what details I include, I can never fully get my point across to people; I can’t express it fully in words in a way that is comprehendible. Nevertheless, I still throughout these situations continue to feel like what I feel is valid. Even though I can’t communicate it, I still believe it. For this reason, our discussion at the beginning of class was amazing to me. It gave words (ironically) to something I think I’ve thought for a long time.

            As I said in class, this all makes sense with regards to sense-certainty. An exact moment may not be able to be captured with just words alone. The experience of being there really is different from hearing about something. For example, if one heard about the nature of a sunset at a particular time and place, no matter what words were used, the words can’t fully reproduce the sunset. Hearing about it is necessarily different from experiencing it in that hearing about it can’t fully give one understanding of it. Furthermore, as Dr. J pointed out, even if one experiences something at the same time as another, his or her experience of it might be different than that of the other person by virtue of them being different people. Because different people are different, they may experience the same thing in different ways.

            This was all pretty interesting to me because I actually saw an interesting parallel with Hegel’s notion that the truth is the whole. To refresh, in Hegel’s preface, he writes, “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development” (11). At this point and a few other points throughout the preface, Hegel makes the point that the truth of anything is not just its ending or a summary of the ending; it is the whole thing or the whole process. This idea fits in with what I’ve just discussed. A moment is possible inexpressible in words because that moment is related to everything around it and moments that came before it; words can’t gather the full development leading up to the moment. The parallel, however, is notably clearer when thinking about the ways in which different people perceive things. As I said before, two different people may see the same thing differently. This is because of their different personalities or their different previous experiences. The individual people have developed through their lives in a way that makes a certain moment take a certain form of truth. For this reason, a description of the moment in general terms may not yield truth; the truth of the moment might really flow continuously from everything in a person’s life before that moment. The truth of that moment is determined by the development of the person’s life that came before it. In other words, the truth is not purely a description of the moment but everything within a person leading up to that moment. It follows that this would be difficult or impossible to express in words. With this in mind, I think that even though Kierkegaard and Hegel diverge from the point of sense-certainty, this general idea of Hegel’s actually fits in well with Kierkegaard’s idea of what is the truest.

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.

Kierkegaard, paradox, and individuality

      When reading the problema, Kierkegaard’s influence on existentialism is clear. You can also see why his name Silentio for this text, as his dicussion on speech and silence becomes an essential focal point for his work. I was especially taken by the third problema and the return to the discussion of Abraham. Kierkegaard has made the point that the ethical requires disclosure. However, Abraham cannot disclose. If he speaks then he lowers himself to the ethical, creating a gulf between him and God. God’s command has been unique to Abraham. Just as if someone came up to me claiming God had spoken to him, telling him to kill his son, I would think him a murderer and would not understand. Abraham’s paradoxical situation cannot be universalized.  His decisions and unique interactions with God make him unique, his decisions make his character. As he has demonstrated in his other stories, the individual sometimes has to act against the universal. 

       Johannes’ subsequent reference to Heraclitus surprised me but fit perfectly. As Heraclitus says that one cannot step in the same river twice, so too is Johannes saying that the individual encounters unique problems along her own path. Every situation cannot fit into a categorical imperative. But Zeno does not understand Heraclitus’s point and tries to take it further, rendering it absurd. In this way Johannes may be saying that people have distorted Hegel, rendering it too universal and absurd. 

        Another fascinating point is Silentio’s refusal to intellectualize faith. Unlike science, faith cannot be built upon or passed down like Hegelian conscious. Faith has to be experienced and by definition cannot be shared appropriately. Some things, like faith, cannot be communicated aptly. Communication in fact ruins and changes the very thing you would try to communicate. This idea comes way before it’s time, and you can see the influence on later existentialism to Sartre and even Derrida. The idea that some experiences may not be able to be quantified runs counter to the burgeoning industrialization that Kierkegaard was surrounded with. We too live in a world where we now map brain waves and attempt to identify scientific explanations for every conceivable thing. Kierkegaard here tries to say what almost cannot be said, in a way only Silentio, or silence can really say it. Some things cannot be communicated or studied without changing the experience and each experience is unique. While Kierkegaard may not have started this movement, he certainly brings up the issue in an extremely sophisticated manner, placing himself at the forefront of the new century of philosophy

Frustration: Justification and Amazement via the Absurd

                In understanding Kierkegaard’s position, I think we must take it as true that god exists, that the events of Abraham did occur, and that justification is possible through the absurd. To simply take these as baseline facts of Kierkegaard’s analysis should be something that raises red flags in anyone’s mind.

 The most troubling and the most readily disputable, to me, is the justification of Abraham’s position via a paradox, via the absurd. Kierkegaard is very careful to use the word justification, a word that does not necessarily imply any sort of rationalizing endeavor like the “explanation” or other suitable words would suggest. Though we have come to associate justification with rational explanation, to justify is simply to uphold or defend something as well-grounded (i.e. as justified). It does not by necessity require typical reasoning nor is it necessarily a true/false claim. But I think we can say that there are degrees of justification and that some things are more effectively justified than others.  Again, it is the tendency to associate the degree of the justification with the most rational argument. This is because we can make connections and see most clearly through reason. Asking a human being, who only understands itself as a human and as being via reason, to suspend the ethical—to suspend the universal—on the basis of and with the justificiation of paradox is to ask the human being to suspend the basis of meaning in our lives. There is no meaning without understanding or comprehension.

                There is no wonder and amazement without understanding. In this respect, I think that things which are truly paradoxical—what I mean to bring up here are things that by definition do make sense, cannot be understood, are literally absurd or equivalently miraculous—are self-undermining with respect to the human grasping them. Nothing can be truly contradictory and at the same time be appreciated as a wonder. No one wonder’s at the square-circle because it cannot exist. Try to conceive of it. The wonder and appreciation that Johannes de Silentio suggests we should possess for the faith he speaks of seems to me to be impossible. For by holding wonder for something, we necessarily associate it with meaning and we only possess meaning in understanding. To suggest that we can hold meaning through paradox is simply not the case for paradox possesses no meaning. It is simply impossible to understand, and therefore—if it is truly absurd—should lie out of the realm of human vision.

All of this does take for granted that reason is what is necessary for human understanding.
                

Abraham's defining characteristic within the exordium: silence. Who, after all, could understand him? Why speak of his task at all? As a figure of Faith, he must look inward, toward the tension between his task and its context--God's request must be incommensurable with the context in which the request is made. By asking of Abraham something other-worldly--outside the world's norms, God places Abraham in a position of absolute isolation. God strips Abraham the crutch of communication, of community. Abraham cannot dilute his question with the input of others. To kill one's son does not even warrant consideration. To pose such a question would imply insanity, on the asker's part. How can one describe his interaction with God, when the request made contains within it an absurd, inhuman request: And God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.'"So, like a knight of Faith, he collects his things in silence, then guides his horse and son, for three days, on foot the the top of Mount Moriah--all that time, battling the distance between his reality and the request. Isaac, being Abraham's only son, came after a long bout of infertility. Finally, God, his savior, grants him the son he desired for so long, only to immediately--like a capricious ass--take him away again, not by natural causes or an accident, but through a proclamation to the father. Without any other evidence, he accepts this request, alone. What kind of huberis or deference must someone possess to follow through, so resolutely, with such a request. How can someone so confidently--at least ostensibly confidently--proceed, suspending everything known before hand? If such a law were universalized, in the Kantian manner, what kind of world would come into existence? At this juncture, Abraham's decision seems absolutely in-line with protocol. Of course, this is only retrospectively the case. The observers, proclaiming such idiocy, with confidence, forget the process through which such a decision must be made. The same progression must be true of the man who hears voices for un-Gods. The structure remains the same, but one decision is worshipped while the other disclaimed. 

Johannes de Silentio

In perhaps my favorite passage from the Phenomenology, Hegel says that “what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed]” (§110). What can't be expressed by universal concepts and communicated to another cannot constitute a truth, and Hegel seems to have little interest in things that aren't true. Kierkegaard, like Hegel, also associates language with universal concepts, saying that "As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me" (110). But unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard seems to find these incommunicable truths even more fascinating than communicable ones. Which is perhaps why, on the whole, Kierkegaard takes more interest in Abraham than he does in Hegel: Hegel (though I'm not sure I would call him a great communicator) is a very meticulous communicator, while the story of Abraham leaves a lot unsaid. In fact, Abraham's defining characteristic, his faith, is incommunicable: he "cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak" (110). This seems to presuppose (and, in fact, Kierkegaard explicitly insists on this) that there is "something" in the individual apart from the universal--"an interiority that is incommensurable with exteriority" (118). 

This is a long way of introducing what really fascinates me about Kierkegaard’s text: the fact that it was originally published under a pseudonym. Perhaps Kierkegaard had more practical reasons for using a pseudonym, but I would like to imagine that this decision has something to do with the concept of the incommunicable and the unmediated. Maybe his anonymity has something to do with his idea that some part of the individual is always separate from the universal and impossible to communicate—that there are some things about the individual that can’t be spoken. Kierkegaard’s chosen pseudonym for this text is, after all, Johannes de Silentio. If this is the case—that Kierkegaard uses a pseudonym because he, like every other individual, can only say so much—it actually seems to make this text incredibly personal. These are just some preliminary musings, but I think a sustained reading of anonymity and pseudonymity could shed some light on incommunicability and the individual.