Notes for 12/2/2025

 

12/2/2025

[Philosophy Club every Tuesday at 5:00pm in CAS 436 ("The Cave")]

[Challenge for today: Try to think of (and possibly ask) at least one question.]

 

Would you want to be perfectly rational?

 

Soren Kierkegaard (SK)

 

Philosophy linked to biography & to pseudonyms (facades? Personae?)

SK’s different perspectives manifest the complexities of thought and experience (unclear how much was autobiographical).

 

 

Vociferous critic of “Christendom”

(Christianity as banal, safe, perfunctory, self-congratulatory)

 

 

Sought “Existential completeness”

 

“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility.”

(Being free isn’t for the faint of heart.)

Only spiritual beings experience anxiety (because of freedom). But also, only they can feel liberated.

 

Anxiety is unavoidable. All significant choices are subject to regret.

 

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” (Either/Or)

 

 

Abraham felt tremendous anxiety (“fear and trembling”) at obeying God’s command to kill Isaac: to use his freedom to do something ethically absurd.

 

We need to confront the magnitude of our choices, even though this causes dread and anxiety.

Socrates: “How should I live?”

 

Kierkegaard: “How should I live in light of the fact that I must die?” (life is a task)

How do I exist? (How do I become my authentic self?)

 

The authentic self is created and chosen on the basis of the complex interplay of thoughts & feelings.

 

“Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.”

This suggests that, like James, risk is unavoidable. We can’t always wait for rational validation of our choices.

We have to be willing to make mistakes.

 

 

 

At the deepest level we must choose between 3 different approaches/orientations (stadia)(“stages” (not progressive) or “spheres”):

(1) Aesthetic

(2) Ethical

(3) Religious (Christianity*)

For K, there are no objective or rational criteria for preferring any of these. There is no rational argument that can show any one of these is more correct than the others.

 

 

We cannot avoid our subjectivity

“Subjectivity is truth.”

Here “subjectivity” refers to the inward, lived, embracing of passionate commitments.

 

 

The aesthetic stage treats life as an artistic project.

The aesthete is broadly a rational egoist.

Criteria of fulfillment = happiness (represented by Don Juan & the Seducer) Happiness is opposed to boredom and is achieved through challenge, e.g., the Seducer’s wooing of Cordelia, becoming engaged, and then getting her to break off the engagement. (He does this by psychological manipulation (mind games) to get her to doubt herself and to see marriage as “constrictive”.)

Cordelia comes to think that the only way to save the authenticity of her love is to break the engagement. This leaves him free from the ethical constraints of marriage, and he can sleep with her without the promise of marriage. He then discards her.

 

Attempting to “refute” the aesthetic by reason is futile. (SK includes letters attempting this.)(Bernard Gendron’s “gangster” thought-experiment)

 

 

Ethical : Criteria of fulfillment = good/right (represented by Judge William)

 

Ethical stage goes beyond the individual and includes the social domain as well as recognizing others as persons (rather than as resources/objects).

 

The ethical approach accepts that happiness is better achieved through moral duty than through self-gratification.

Religious: Criteria of fulfillment = God/eternal life (Represented by Socrates, Abraham, SK?)

 

Synthesis of the individual (aesthetic) and universal (ethical). But the individual is “higher” than the universal. This is where the “teleological suspension of the ethical” operates. (Ethically, Abraham is wrong to sacrifice Isaac, but religiously he stands primarily and individually in relation to God.)

 

SK distinguishes the religious attitude into:

 

Religion A: The religion of immanence. The divine is found within oneself (through experiences such as moral guilt, awareness of one’s finitude & powerlessness to achieve total fulfillment).

Religion A uses reason to point toward the transcendent. (Socrates is an example.)

 

Religion B: Christianity (religion of paradox). Rationally absurd (the infinite became finite).

Faith is a (desperate but happy) leap made with “the passion of/for the infinite.”

For SK, it is impossible to reason oneself into Christianity. (Not merely because of lack of evidence or conflict with empirical knowledge, but because it defies reason.)

Religion B subsumes the Ethical but goes beyond it in relating to God. (Is the ethics of Religion B DCT?)

F&T seemingly implies that faith = obedient trust despite reason.

 

 

Was SK an irrationalist?

 

Christianity is fundamentally irrational (both logically and evidentially).

 

It requires one to accept that the infinite became finite (the incarnation is absurd), and that death is not the end.

 

Abraham’s relation to God is ethically irrational. (Consider actual cases where people killed in the belief that God told them to kill.)

 

Naturalism, though, would leave one with no solution to the dismal finality of death. This is why the leap of faith, though irrational, is also happy.

 

SK’s concept of faith appears to be non-doxastic, though it includes accepting some beliefs. Faith is an attitude of the whole person in which one commits to a worldview centered on God & Christ.

But it does involve beliefs that are counter-rational, and this makes it difficult (rationally impossible).

 

Faith isn’t just taking the first step without seeing the whole staircase, but is more like taking the first step when you believe there aren’t (or can’t be) any stairs.

 

 

Some possible defenses of SK against the charge of irrationality:

 

-      Perhaps SK only rejects particular accounts of reason (especially the view suggested by Hegel, or by the smug preachers of his day selling “lemonade twaddle”)?

-      Perhaps SK’s apparent endorsements of irrationality are tied only to some of his literary personae? (Will the real SK please stand up?)

-      Perhaps irrationality is a pretense: a strategic device intended to draw attention to the question of what true rationality really amounts to?

-      Perhaps SK only intends to embrace limits on Reason, where faith can take us farther? (My inability to SEE a rational solution doesn’t mean there can’t be one.)

-      Perhaps SK’s concept of reason was limited by the science & philosophy of his day? (“[Reason] has crossed out passion in order to serve science.”)

 

There is no doubt that SK opposes the dispassionate ideal of reason. In contrast, his work is saturated with references to “passion” (this is largely what “truth is subjectivity” points to).

 

He complains that “[The] insipid rationality [of the current age] has pumped all passion out of life.”

 

He sees both Socrates and Christ as peers in their passionate commitment to truth (philosophical & religious, respectively). Both gave their lives for their commitments.

 

For SK, Christianity’s demand to take up your own cross means to shake up the social order (to be a gadfly, or to embrace the poor, sick, weak, ….)

 

Near his death, SK rejected “Christianity” but embraced Christ. (He refused Communion but said he loved Christ and looked forward to walking hand-in-hand with him.) He gave nearly all his money away to the poor.

There was a riot at his funeral.

 

 

One thing SK’s philosophy seems ill-equipped to address is how to resolve disagreements: religious, theological, ethical, scientific/factual, etc.

 

Should one believe on faith that Biblical literalism is true? (That Noah’s flood really happened or that the Garden of Eden was a real place?)