There were definitely some leftover ideas from last Thursday’s class that dominated today’s discussion. Among these was a questioning of Abraham’s story as a true test of the paradox that is faith, which I found to be an interesting notion.
Abraham is just a man. In essence, he is no different than any other man. However, it is his faith that sets him apart from his peers. What is faith? Faith is, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, an absolute relation to the absolute. That is to say, it is a direct relationship between a particular individual and God. The nature of this relationship is paradoxical, insofar as a single member of the universal sphere can somehow supersede that universe and be justified over the universal through his absolute relation to the absolute (God). Just how is it that Abraham’s faith is tested and he rises to become the template of true Christian faith?
Abraham and his wife Sarah, after being barren for decades and well past the age of childbirth, are finally given a son by God. One day, God casually tells Abraham to take his son up on Mt. Moriah, and sacrifice him as proof of his obedience to Him. Abraham does as he is commanded by the Lord, and he and Isaac go to Mt. Moriah together. Dutifully Abraham ties Isaac up on the altar, preparing him to be sacrificed, and once all is ready he unsheathes his dagger and prepares to sacrifice his son, his only son, the very same son that God promised so much would come from. It is in this moment that Abraham’s paradoxical situation comes to a climax. On the one hand, Abraham believes that Isaac will live to become the father of the Tribes of Israel (as God promised). He also is willing to sacrifice Isaac to God in order to show his obedience and do God’s will.
Abraham is in this moment, through his willingness to kill his son for a justification which he cannot explain to anyone else, superseding the sphere of the universal through faith. It is through this leap of faith that Abraham rises to become a knight of faith, who attains an absolute relation to the absolute. What sets him so far apart from other great people who have sacrificed for a higher power is that Abraham never resigns himself to the task of carrying out his duty, taking solace in the fact that it’s for God. Nor is he caught up in the absurdity of the paradox that he is faced with. Instead, Abraham steadfastly carries out God’s will, as if it were his own. To unflinchingly carry out the will of God, even if it costs you everything you’ve prayed for, and even if it may bring scorn and disdain to your name, that is what faith may require of you. For Kierkegaard, Faith is not something one proclaims, but something that a person must endure, in order to attain a direct, immediate relationship with God.
9 comments:
I wonder a bit how Kierkegaard really feels about this leap of faith. I know that he holds the status of being the first major Christian existentialist, but this idea of so readily embracing paradox is completely terrifying and rather unattractive to me. I suppose that's the point Kierkegaard is making, but even still, it seems to me that maintaining the universal sphere is more important on the whole than embracing the individualistic, religious sphere, if we are to have a working society--though the importance of that is arguable, particularly from an Existential standpoint.
So I guess I'm mostly saying that this paradox is really, really difficult to accept, and that's why those who can make that leap of faith are few and far between. Kinda makes you wonder what the "moral majority" would do if God asked them to kill their kids.
I can't help wondering why it is that any Christian is supposed to find the idea of a man's embracing of a paradox praiseworthy. And not only praiseworthy, but the very standard by which all other acts of faith are measured in praiseworthiness.
The question for me is this: if a faith in God is rooted in accepting a paradox, which is completely illogical, by what criteria do we assess other illogical acts/beliefs in terms of their being praiseworthy demonstrations of faith or dismissed entirely as crazy/irrational behavior? After all, if the ability to reason rationally is what separates humankind from animals, why then are we supposed to throw rationality aside in order to embrace an illogical idea of God that could be just as easily substituted with the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot? Are we compromising what it means to be human when we make these illogical leaps of faith, or:
Is there a teleological suspension of the rational during the teleological suspension of the ethical?
I don't think a paradox necessarily has to be irrational. Dr. J mentioned this in class. There is a difference between irrationality and something that transcend reason, i.e., something that is unable to be grasped by human understanding. Considering also that our "reason" and "rationality" is deeply rooted in a Western set of cultural norms and traditions (I'm thinking specifically here of Plato, Aristotle, and the whole canon of Western philosophy). Take an Eastern philosophical idea like the complete and total annihilation of the ego for example, and it seems, in our Western minds, completely illogical. This goes back to Kierkegaard's point about truth being subjective. It all depends through which lens you're viewing it.
If something is beyond reason, or "unable to be grasped by human understanding," at what point can we actually talk intelligibly about it and take ourselves seriously? Plato's "Meno" documents a conversation between Socrates and Meno in which the latter inquires whether or not virtue can be taught. One of Socrates' main moves in the dialogue is questioning how we can talk about a thing (in this case, virtue) if we do not know what it is.
For our purposes, why is it that we are able to talk about things that transcend our human understanding (i.e. leaps of Faith, suspensions of the ethical, God) using only our human understanding? And what role do subjective truths play here?
In total agreement MJG. I don't understand the human fascination with the divine or for that matter, absolute truth or any other sort of abstraction. If hypothetically, God is infinite, and we as humans are finite, then how can we attempt to understand what/who God is? Our attempts succeed only in anthropomorphizing, putting God in our little human boxes.
At the same time, we talk about things we don't understand all the time. We don't truly understand why or how many scientific "facts" work, but we have faith that they do. We don't know anything for certain, because we cannot always trust our senses (an example from last class: we believe the sun will rise tomorrow, only because we have seen it rise every day). There is no way of knowing if individual sensory experience is universal, that is, do we all actually experience the same things? Again, going back to subjective truth here.
Slightly off topic, but I was reminded of this morning's successful test of the particle collider. What do you guys think? Science's claim to be the only "objective truth" is interesting to me. I wonder what Kierkegaard would say...
Sorry, the link was broken. See if this works.
In reaction the the last post by Kelie on September 10...
So, I was just going over my Kierkegaard today as preparation for the exam and I decided to look at the blogs when I saw all of these posts. This last post really made me think. Indirectly, through his discussion of faith and objective/subjective truth, Kierkegaard does bring up the all too common question of whether there is any real basis at all for faith in a divine source. Kelie's comment about the particle collider really rekindled a topic that I have struggled with for a while. The idea of there being such a relationship between the divine and a particular individual, faith, seems to go against all odds. It makes much more sense to say that science, not faith, is the most absolute/objective truth we will ever encounter. Science at least offers us solid evidence that we can obsere where faith asks us to put our trust in something with no signs of existence. This is a problem for me and something that can really depress you if you think about it too hard. Faith, as kierkegaard said, is passion. If faith doesn't exist, then we seem to lose that passion and without passion, life seems a lot less meaningful to me.
In response to Micheal-
For me, Kierkegaard explains faith best when he says,
“one certainly should not be anxious about mankind, about finite things, but that only he who has undergone possibility’s anxiety is educated not to be anxious, not because he avoids the dreadful things of life, but because these always become weak by comparison with those of possibility…If the individual cheats the possibility by which he is to be educated, he never reaches faith, his faith remains the cleverness of finitude, as his school was finitude’s school” (31).
In my interpretation of this quote, I find that Kierkegaard is positing his own definition of “bad faith”. The “bad faith” he addresses is a faith that is only anxious about “finite things”, while correct faith is a faith that is exercised out of, and “educated” by, possibility. The “weaker” of the two, being that of anxiety caused by “mankind” and “finite things” is what I think he means by things that are empirical (e.g. if I push this ball, it will roll off the table). This is why I like Kierkegaard’s definition of faith so much. In stating that possibility causes anxiety, Kierkegaard implies that faith, as true to one’s anxiety, can be a belief in the absurd.
The same concept of absurdity can also be applied to Dostoyevsky “underground man”. Why would anyone do something so absurd as to base one’s entire existence – and for that mater fate – upon a puzzling and seemingly “irrational” notion that is faith in God. Again, we see here that man, in adhering to faith, is indeed exercising his free will to choose even at odds with the “scientifically” and “mathematically” accepted norm: God does not exist.
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