Zarathustra and Kierkegaard

“First, for the impatient: if you were making a hilarious Kierkegaard t-shirt of coffee mug, what goes on it?”

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards
— Soren Kierkegaard

I’d say your thumbnail of the Kierkegaard-Nietzsche differential is right. K is ironic, where N is playful. Germanically playful in a sometimes rather clump-footed manner, but playful nonetheless. Playful and ironic are not the same thing.

“the mystery of the Incarnation (Eternity in time) and the miracle of forgiveness (the spiritual non-fatality of being, essentially, spiritually fatally flawed.)”. Huh. Is there such a thing as a gateway drug to Kierkegaard on this stuff, or an entry point for amateurs who lack your impressive reading stamina, John? #askingforafriend …

John Holbo,

“Come to think of it, it’s almost simpler to say that what makes Kierkegaard so distinctive is that he really really takes the Nicene Creed extremely seriously. Seriously. Father = Son plus spirit and salvation. That’s the ticket.”

I don’t think you have the theology right here no offence. I can’t say what Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Nicene Creed is, but how you sum up the Nicene Creed isn’t exactly right.

The Trinity is three things the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that the Father = the Son plus spirit and salvation as you write, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit make up the Trinity and they are different and they are consubstantial. Also you should capitalise the Holy Spirit if you are capitalising the Father and the Son. And salvation is not an element of the Trinity it is more like a goal or a state of being I suppose. Someone can seek salvation, or someone can be saved, that sort of thing.

If you look at the Nicene Creed, first you have to state you believe in the one God, the Father, the Creator of all things, Heaven and Earth. So this is an idea that there is one single creative spirit which is the origin of all being.

This idea of a creator spirit is not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity and Islam, for instance China has versions of this one creator spirit, in Hinduism it is Brahma, and for Indigenous Australians the creator spirit is called the Rainbow Serpent which is a bit like a dragon who lives in water but maybe moves in mist and air I think (when you see a rainbow this is said to show the rainbow serpent is moving to another water hole).

Then the next bit is that you believe in one Lord Jesus Christ who is the only Son of the Father, born before time, God from God, light from light, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.

This is the bit where your theology is not exactly right, since consubstantial does not mean the same which you indicate with the = symbol.

Consubstantial is a Latin translation from the Greek homoousism ; homo is translated as “same” in English, and ousia in translated in plain English as “being” or in Philosophical English as “ontic”.

So it is more like saying they are of the same sort of being, rather than they are one and the same things. The language calls them the Father and the Son implying they are different beings. The language also says the Son is begotten not made, but since it is about spiritual beings it is a bit difficult to understand what that means exactly, apart from I guess it is a different relationship between God the Creator and the Son, as between God the Creator and, say, Earth and its creatures , with the latter being I guess probably classified as “made” in some sort of sense rather than “begotten”.

Wikipedia states in Gnostic use homoousism was used generally to discuss the nature of the relationships between generator and generated, between things generated of the same substance; and between the partners of a syzygy. “It was by Athanasius of Alexandria and the Nicene Council that the Son was taken to have exactly the same nature or essence with the Father, and in the Nicene Creed the Son was declared to be as immutable as his Father. Some theologians preferred the use of the term ὁμοιούσιος (homoioúsios, from ὅμοιος, hómoios, “similar”, rather than ὁμός, homós, “same”) in order to emphasize distinctions among the three persons in the Godhead, but the term ὁμοούσιος became a consistent mark of Nicene orthodoxy in both East and West.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousion

Out of the three beings in the Trinity the Son became man, “He came down from Heaven for us men and our salvation”. So you see people’s salvation is the motive for why the Son would come down from Heaven to become man as Jesus Christ, but salvation is not part of the Trinity since it isn’t a being itself more a state of being that is achievable like a goal.

Then you state you believe in the Holy Spirit too, which is the giver of life. Life here doesn’t mean everyday life I think but spiritual life instead. The Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and the Son, which is taken to mean the source is the creator spirit, but the Holy Spirit proceeds through the Son from the Source. And you should capitalise it since it says the Holy Spirit is adored and glorified with the Father and the Son.

Since you didn’t write about the rest of the Nicene Creed, this is enough Sunday theologising for me ;-)

ZM,

K was a Protestant, so he might have been not well versed or interested in those sorts of technicalities. It’s probably safe to say he thought such theological weights, measures, and currency exchanges of the inner life antithetical to the “religious” as he conceives it.

He might see forgiveness of sin less as a “miracle” than a paradox. If sin is forgiven either it isn’t serious enough to require forgiveness, or it is, in which case God is not ethical and so not God. It is then a proper object of faith, which cannot be justified or motivated by reason.

I think of K as a fictionalist: an atheist who believes we’re better off believing, or at least at best trying and at worst pretending to, believe. He euphamisitically calls this “becoming a Christian,” where becoming never reaches being.

@1, Ordet’s a fascinating film. I like to think of it as a preemptive parodist remake of The Exorcist, except the demon that possesses the kid is religious faith itself.

Seems to me K’s ironic method is an elaborate negotiation of the following problem, which has been with Christian writers since Augustine: how does a believer write about God for a non-believing audience?

Hegel didn’t face this problem, for example.

Seconding the Fear and Trembling recommendation. Apart from everything else, it’s got passages of just amazing prose.

Yes, Fear and Trembling. Plus, section two, chapter 2 from Concluding Unscientific Postscript on the idea that “truth is subjectivity.” Philosophical Fragments is a good second choice if you’re still curious after FAT.

“His preoccupation with the mystery of Christ’s incarnation might not immediately square with our picture of K as a proto-existentialist. I’m just saying: he’s, in a sense, more of an orthodox Christian than you might think.”

I take that preoccupation to be more Kantian than Christian–the possibility that reality in itself might be so radically otherwise than the phenomenal world as to defy reason. And Kant’s feeble “room for faith” I don’t take to be Christian at all. If we must lump, I’d lump Kierkegaard, existentialism, and Kant all under Cartesianism, or failed anti skepticism, which is to say, either disallusioned, nostalgic, or bitter ex and failed Christians, the ones sitting under the yew trees hoping the sisters will pray for them. I suspect real orthodox Christians don’t need to syllogism or leap their way into the pretense of faith, nor do they pretend, as the existentialists did, that arbitrary prejudices are invented or created, much less committed values.

There are believers and skeptics, and never do the two meet, though many flip between the two. I think it’s obvious which lump Kierkaagard belongs to.

Sickness Unto Death, K’s most playful, funniest, most compassionate book, never gets enough love.

It was somewhere between “not yet a self” and “bad artist” than I glomped onto K as a relentless humorist. K is attracted to Catholic asceticism, but remains radically Lutheran at heart, if not Calvinist or predestinarian.

“God is Love, and Thou Art Saved. It doesn’t matter what you believe or what you think. Thou art saved. You know it. Everything now becomes entertainment or self-punishment. Lighten up.”

And sin is irony, because we have inadequate words with which to praise and express our joy. Negging on God, cause bashful.

@19

“Sickness Unto Death, K’s most playful, funniest, most compassionate book, never gets enough love.”

I read it when I was being treated for leukaemia. It came across as shallow and silly as everything else I’d read by him.

If I had to spend my last day of life listening to someone reading from a modern philosopher, I would rather have anything by Saul Kripke than anything by the Dane. The former was a serious thinker who took his topics seriously and had original thoughts about them, even if we find all the rigmarole about rigid designation to be question-begging and so on. The latter was just a gentleman amateur who recycled drawing-room opinions in fashionable jargon, and his posthumous reputation is a consequence of the collapse of christian faith and the rising demand for an ersatz version, at least amongst educated westerners.

John Holbo,

This is an interesting paper looking at Kierkegaard’s work on forgiveness in relation to Aurel Kolnai’s work on the logic of forgiveness: “Forgiveness in Kierkegaard‘s Ethic of Neighbour Love” by John B. Howell.

One author cited looks at the difference between a Nietzschean philosophy where forgiveness could be seen as a lack of self-respect, another author looks at how to deal with unrepentant wrongdoers, you have to see them as kind of innately bad and not really a person in the philosophical sense apart from seeing them in terms of their biography where their wrongdoing to you is just a part of a larger picture of them as a person who is like that.

“Ralph inflicts some wrong upon Fred, which results in Fred having feelings of indignation and adopting a “retributive” attitude. Forgiveness will consist of Fred coming to “nullify” this feeling of indignation and this retributive attitude in some way — but it is essential for the process to be a process of forgiveness that these feelings and attitudes be present at some point. Otherwise Fred may degenerate into condoning Ralph‘s wrongdoing instead of forgiving it.

For Kolnai, ―condonation means that Fred is clearly aware of Ralph‘s wrongdoing, insult, offence or viciousness and per se disapproves of it but deliberately refrains from any retributive response to it.

Condonation is closely related to forgiveness, but ―it does not presuppose and nullify the original retributive position but quasi-automatically loves or cleaves to the wrongdoer rather than hating the sin and placing the emphasis on ideally separating it from the sinner. Condonation is a serious danger to forgiveness, and forms the first part of the logical paradox Kolnai is constructing. It is worth quoting Kolnai at length here:

“Condonation is thus virtually ‘conniving’ and immoralistic; in its graver forms, it is not only undignified and self-soiling but also unfair in so far as it may reveal that Fred is ready to put up with a starkly offending Ralph while being perhaps mercilessly hard on a far more lightly offending and possibly even repentant Robert. To condemn all condonation might, however, amount to overseverity; for it seems plausible that without condoning some faults we could not possibly live together with others, nor, for the matter of that, with ourself. But, just as it is highly undesirable to live at peace with our own misdeeds and vices, it is, generally speaking, also undesirable to condone those of others, seeing that it similarly means silencing and neutralizing the retributive attitude to moral disvalue even where it particularly concerns us. It is well known that those who practice submissive meekness before evil, and danegeld-paying to aggressors and blackmailers often resort to gross and refined techniques of exculpation and also parade the ‘sublime’ tinge of forgiveness; the point need not be labored. Thus condonation very easily takes on the semblance of forgiveness and may therefore be seen as constituting the first term of the logical dilemma: Forgiveness is objectionable and ungenuine inasmuch as there is no reason to forgive, the offender having undergone no metanoia (Change of Heart) but persisting in his plain identity qua offender. The contrast lies between genuine forgiveness with its backbone of a crystal-clear pro response to value and con response to disvalue on the one hand and condonation with its innuendo of spineless accompliceship, or ‘compounding with’ disvalue, on the other.”
….
Thus condonation represents the first horn of Kolnai‘s logical dilemma for forgiveness. Unless one requires repentance, a change of heart, one cannot forgive. To ―forgive‖ without a change of heart is not to forgive at all, but to condone.

Kolnai has already hinted at the other horn of the dilemma. “At the other end of its spectrum, forgiveness seems to collapse in mere redundancy, or the mere registering of moral value in the place of a previous disvalue.”

If Ralph has truly repented, has had a change of heart, and has mended his ways, one might argue that Fred now has a moral obligation to change his attitude toward Ralph. If Fred fails to do this, he is open to the charge of vindictiveness, a morally inappropriate attitude and distinct from the attitude of retribution.

Normally this change in attitude and feeling would be what one calls forgiveness; but ― “the objection arises that forgiveness has now lost its ground and raison d‟etre: that there is no room for it, seeing that there is nothing to be forgiven.” By repenting of his wrongdoing, Ralph has in effect canceled out the wrongdoing itself, and thus forgiveness is unnecessary.

And so the dilemma is complete. “Either the wrong is still flourishing, the offence still subsisting: then by forgiving you accept it and thus confirm it and make it worse; or the wrongdoer has suitably annulled and eliminated his offence, and then by harping on it further you would set up a new evil and by forgiving you would only acknowledge the fact that you are no longer its victim. Briefly, forgiveness is either unjustified or pointless.”

I do not pretend to be convinced by Kolnai‘s paradox, nor do I propose to argue against it extensively here.

Many would argue that the second horn seriously misunderstands the nature of certain injuries or offenses.

Wrongs are not like monetary transactions; they cannot always be catalogued quantitatively. There may be offenses against one‘s person that can never be “balanced”, no matter how much repentance, apology, or money is thrown one‘s way. And so forgiveness may still have something to do in the face of extreme repentance and even reparation.

Similarly, simply because one forgives in the absence of repentance does not mean that one is morally spineless or condones the wrong done; that person may have other compelling reasons for forgiving.
….
While I think any logical threat to forgiveness attributed to Kolnai‘s dilemma is greatly overstated, I do think it helps to bring into focus some of the main issues with which those interested in forgiveness should be concerned. Simply, an understanding of forgiveness should take very seriously the moral wrong involved (that is, avoid condoning the wrong) and should at the same time leave something significant for forgiveness to do, that is, it should make room in the act of forgiveness for real moral meaning.
….
[Jeffrie] Murphy‘s 1982 “Forgiveness and Resentment” opens with a passage from Fay Weldon‘s novel, Female Friends, in order “to set a certain tone.” The passage “conveys the rather Nietzschean thought that forgiveness might actually be harmful and wrong—a weakness or vice, in short, instead of the virtue which conventional Christian wisdom takes it to be.”

Murphy chooses to set this tone because, while he thinks there is much to be said in favor of forgiveness, he also thinks there is much to be said against it, and since he takes the prevailing winds of thought to be decidedly in favor of forgiveness, he elects to emphasize the other side of the issue.

He further notes that “forgiveness, like love, is a topic that tends to elicit respectful piety rather than serious thought from those who consider it: I want none of this.” Forgiveness has been neglected by moral philosophers along with other interesting and important elements of the moral life that focus upon the role of feelings in the moral life. Forgiveness is ultimately concerned primarily with how one feels and not how one acts.
….
In addition, feelings often have consequences in action or public policy. For example, “resentment or hatred toward criminals may have something to do with our willingness to let prisons remain the inhuman pestholes they now tend to be.” The level of one‘s resentment is often unjustified, and resentment itself represents a barrier to the restoration of moral equality. So the good side of forgiveness is easy to see. “Forgiveness heals and restores; and without it, resentment would remain as an obstacle to many human relationships we value.”

But forgiveness has a bad side as well. “A too ready tendency to forgive may be a sign that one lacks self-respect.” If one does not react with a resentful attitude when one is wronged, it may indicate that one either does not think one has rights or that one does not take them very seriously. “Forgiveness may restore relationships, but to seek restoration al all costs—even at the cost of one‘s self-respect—can hardly be a virtue.”

Murphy is even more concerned with what a lack of self-respect might mean for morality in general. If one tends to overlook offenses committed against oneself, one may tend to overlook offenses in general. Murphy reasons thus:

“If it is proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel indignation when I see third parties morally wronged, must it not be equally proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel resentment when I experience moral wrong done to myself?

Just as the psychopath who feels no guilt, shame, or remorse for the wrong he does can be said to lack a true appreciation of morality, so too can the person who feels no indignation or resentment be said to lack a true appreciation of morality.

Morality, in short, is not simply something to be believed; it is something to be cared about. This caring includes concern about those persons (including oneself) who are the proper objects of moral judgment.”

Finally, if forgiveness is to be acceptable to Murphy, it must be “consistent with self- respect, respect for others as moral agents, and allegiance to the rules of morality i.e., forgiveness must not involve any complicity or acquiescence in wrongdoing.”
…
“Why should I forgive him?” [Cheshire] Calhoun says this question is usually answered by giving a reason one deserves forgiveness, or by noting that the resentment one is holding onto is causing too much harm. The problem, however, is that forgiveness offered for these reasons is ―disappointing.
….
Calhoun addresses the common condonation objection to views of forgiveness which do not require some sort of repentance or atonement. Calhoun thinks this objection rests on two assumptions that, as empirical statements, are false:

1) In every unrepentant case, failure to protest sends a condoning message; and
2) Sending this message will always have some significant and morally objectionable consequence.

However, Calhoun does think that one can condone in forgiveness by “minimizing, rationalizing, or ignoring injuries,” and “by telling a story that unrealistically portrays the wrongdoer as more deserving of benevolent attitudes than in fact he is.”

This condonation will result in only a minimalist forgiveness. In order to forgive without condoning, one would have to tell a story of aspirational forgiveness. The problem, however, is that there seem to be only stories of desert.

And so Calhoun seeks to give the basic components of a story of aspirational forgiveness.

First, the story “would begin by connecting misdeeds to the agent‘s true self” instead of separating them, as in desert stories. The problem with telling such a story, however, is that connecting a wrongdoer to his wrongs shows that such an individual “is not an appropriate object of reactive attitudes, that he is not a person.”

The unrepentant and unexcused wrongdoer calls into question his very status as a moral agent, his very status as a person. And so instead of telling aspirational stories, we tell stories that in some way deny that the wrongdoer is fully a person.

We tell stories in order to indicate that we should not have expected goodwill from the wrongdoer in the first place; and we only expect goodwill from a person. But these stories are told only when stories of desert have failed.

The idea that only exceptionally flawed individuals could intend harm and refuse to reform even when they understand they are wrong is a product of the normal person‘s need to make moral sense of her choices and actions. “To be a normal person is to identify the most sensible (or, if you like, rational) thing to do with the morally justified thing to do. It is, thus, to be continually open to demands for better behaviour.”

Calhoun also thinks that our insistence on the importance of forgiveness rests on the same assumption. To treat someone as a person is just to hold him to a certain moral standard, and restrictions on who is deserving of forgiveness are also based on this standard.
…
Such stories do not wipe away wrongdoing or sins; instead they emphasize the rationale behind their commission or omission.

Aspirational stories do not tell us that, given the chance, the wrongdoer would act differently; instead, they tell us the exact opposite.

And so, for Calhoun, aspirational forgiveness ultimately means that “one stops demanding that the person be different from what she is.”

Such forgiveness cannot be obligatory, for the sort of sympathetic entrance into another‘s life necessary is unduly burdensome, and human beings cannot be obligated “to refrain from demanding that persons make moral sense of their actions,” for this is part of what it means to treat someone as a person. But viewing someone biographically is also part of what it means to treat one as a person.”

https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/baylor-ir/bitstream/handle/2104/5414/john_howell_phd.pdf?sequence=1

Yan,

“Maybe C (maybe ZM too?) didn’t notice the humor that bob highlights and summed up so perfectly: “It doesn’t matter what you believe or what you think. Thou art saved. You know it. Everything now becomes entertainment or self-punishment. Lighten up.””

Um, this is not at all proper Lutheran theology. Is that supposed to be the irony?

Lutherans don’t think good works make people more or less likely to go to Heaven, what they think is that faith alone and God’s grace determines whether someone goes to Heaven.

So you can see what matters is precisely “what you believe” and “what you think”.

If you have genuine faith in God and Christ then by God’s grace you will, according to Lutheran theology, go to Heaven.

If you “believe” and “think” something else, then you are damned eternally to Hell in Lutheran theology technically.

ZM,

I think K is a bad Lutheran (more controversially, I think he playfully and/or perversely redefines Christianity to the point of not being a Christian at all. I sincerely think he’s a reluctant closet atheist.)

But your points about doctrine get to the heart of a serious dilemma in his work. He says very explicitly that faith is not about what but how, giving as an example a baptized Christian praying in church who might not have true faith in contrast to a “pagan” praying to an idol who might in fact demonstrate true faith–paradoxically, in his playful and perverse definition, be closer to a true “Christian”.

Whenever I teach K, a student raises the question, “if ‘truth is subjectivity’ and only the how matters, why then choose Christianity over another religion, or over no religion at all, or Lutheranism over Catholicism, etc?”

I’m not sure what his answer is. My best guess is: “why not? By all means choose something else if you like, but practice it with real faith.”

I suspect he also thinks that of the religious traditions that dominate his world (and thus the ones he can most effectively use to reach his audience) the Protestant trad it ion is more amenable to the twisting he wants to give, and that atheism is off the table either because it narrows his audience too much and also because he may think, against the existentialists, that it’s hard to uncouple atheism from despair…

Well if the baptised Christian doesn’t have true faith, then according to Lutheranism they would go to Hell, since having faith is the reason in Lutheranism you receive God’s grace and go to Heaven. So Kierkegaard’s Lutheran theology is correct in that bit. Anyhow, I have never read any books by Kierkegaard, I was just interested in the theology aspects.

Ha! Just looked it up and realised I’d read a novel by Amelie Nothombe, Stupeurs + Tremblements, some years ago. Had no idea it was about that.