The central question for this blog series has been the evolving relationship among science, philosophy, and faith. I have previously made the case that technology and modern physics invigorate a strict rationalism. I have also interviewed several professors that have touched on the potential intellectual foundation of faith. In this blog post, I discuss this question in greater detail with Jacob Howland, who wrote a book on the topic, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith. (Jacob also explored this topic in a recent Art of Manliness podcast episode.) In particular, Jacob and I explore the central thesis of his book – that philosophical eros opens up a path to faith.
Jacob, thank you so much for contributing to the Blog Series. I would like to start with framing the intellectual foundation of faith in the context of your book and the Philosophical Fragments, where Climacus explores the apparent inimical relationship between philosophy and faith. On the one hand, philosophy, harking back to Socrates, sees the truth as latently present and revealed in a form of recollection – ascending through reason. Alternatively, faith is made possible with god’s agency in a decisive moment of revelation. The truth for faith is the absolute paradox, unintelligible to reason. To start, then, please discuss the apparent incompatibility that philosophy is learning on one’s own vs. being reborn with faith.
Thank you, Charlie. It’s a pleasure to be interviewed for your blog. Climacus begins Fragments where one must if either philosophy or faith are going to be live options for a human being. One could say that he denies all three theses the sophist Gorgias set forth in his book on nature: (1) There is nothing; (2) Even if there were something, it could not be known; (3) Even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. Climacus begins from the arche, the original principle or springboard, of both philosophy and faith: There is a humanly essential truth, and it can be known—and must be, if one is to live by it. (Kierkegaard relates in Johannes Climacus that the author had tried to begin with universal doubt as the modern philosophers do, and it got him nowhere.)
But how can the truth be known? Can philosophical inquiry reveal it, or does it become available only with divine aid? That is the guiding question of Fragments. The human situation as well as the nature of the essential truth looks vastly different depending on the answer. Philosophy and religious faith seem to be separated by an unbridgeable divide. Faith supposes that human beings have through sin lost the condition for understanding the truth. We are not just in “untruth”; we are untruth because we live it. As the perfection of thought in the condition of untruth, philosophy is furthermore not merely outside the truth but “polemical against” it. According to Climacus, philosophy finds this teaching deeply offensive. And it is scandalized by the “absolute paradox”—the unity of absolute difference and absolute equality in the incarnation of God as man—through which, on the hypothesis of faith, the condition is restored to us. Must the learner be liberated from sin, or from absurdity? Philosophy and faith repel each other like similarly charged magnets.
Expanding on the relationship between knowledge and faith, please highlight the importance of subjectivity in the quest for truth. In the book, you note that Climacus is critical of speculative philosophy as unself-conscious, and therefore an inferior imitation of both Socratic philosophy and Christianity. Please explore the importance of self-knowledge and the Socratic notion that philosophy and faith can only be understood with reference to the individual exploring truth. As you note, without asking “who is the philosopher”, we obscure the passion essential to any existential transformation central to faith.
As your question implies, things are not as clear-cut as my previous reply makes them seem. Climacus’s project in Fragments is archaeological: he digs through centuries of “chatter” in order to recover the original phenomena of philosophy and faith in what he regards as their purest and truest forms—the one exemplified in the speeches and deeds of Socrates, the other solicited by, and manifested in, the incarnation of God in the person of Christ. This produces a certain ambiguity, because much of what comes under the categories of “philosophy” and “faith”—especially including speculative philosophy, and faith as seen from the perspective of speculative philosophy (which reduces Christianity to the objective fact of one’s existence in a Christian nation)—are decayed remnants of the original phenomena.
Like Socrates and St. Paul, Climacus is concerned with the truth we need to live good and happy lives. This ethical or religious truth differs from mathematical or metaphysical truth in that it is true in the relevant sense only if we are true to it—if, that is, we strive to live up to it, as Socrates strove to live up to his best understanding of the Idea of Justice. 2+2=4 is mathematically true regardless of who utters it; “Live not by lies” is ethically false in the mouth of, say, a Soviet commissar. Fidelity to the truth is for Climacus a sine qua non. It is not enough just to think and say it; one must also do it and live it.
In Climacus’s philosophical (Socratic) or religious (Christian) anthropology, the human soul stands in an essential relationship to ultimate reality, be it God or the eternal beings. The soul needs and longs for this reality and truth; it is its proper nourishment, and the source of such order and harmony as may see it safely and happily across the heaving seas of life. According to Climacus, Socrates lacks self-knowledge just to the extent that the ultimate reality he needs and longs for is and remains for him a paradox. The speculative thinker, however, lacks self-knowledge in a deeper sense. Philosophical or religious anthropology is of no interest to him. He aspires to the condition of pure contemplation, pure objectivity; he is exclusively concerned with thinking the truth from the absolute standpoint—with metaphysical truth, in other words. He seems to have forgotten that he is a human being, “a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal,” as Climacus writes in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, whose openness to universal, eternal, infinite truth is not meant to eclipse his particular, time-bound, finite existence, but to inform and illuminate it.
Before moving to a way that philosophy and faith can be complimentary, to fully appreciate the contrast, please discuss the role of time or history in the path to faith. You have noted that, for philosophy, time is not significant in the sense that ascending to the truth is a historical point of departure, but it merely has historical interest, when someone is conscious of the eternal truth. Knowledge in this case is a form of recollection, where I rest in the truth that emerges from me. As already possessed, the moment of awakening is itself insignificant. In contrast, as you discuss the Philosophical Fragments, with faith, there must be a decisive moment for an individual in history. You note how “faith grasps…the paradoxical unity of the historical and the eternal, the human and the divine and the finite and infinite…in the teacher himself”. One awakens in a moment of such significance that it is distinct – a coming into existence. Please discuss the fundamental distinction and grapple with the ahistorical nature of revelation.
Philosophy and faith conceive of the truth and the teacher in radically different ways. On the philosophical hypothesis, the truth is eternal, and the teacher is merely the occasion for learning on one’s own. On the religious hypothesis, the truth is not simply eternal, and the teacher, who restores the condition for understanding the truth that the learner has lost through sin (something only a god could do), is not merely a historical occasion. Rather, the teacher—the concrete incarnation of the universal, eternal, infinite God as a particular existing human being—is the teaching. In Christian terms, Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life.” Philosophical inquiry could never discover this teaching because it is not knowledge but absolute paradox (and so is accessible only to belief), and because only action on the part of a loving God could disclose His existence to human beings. For the learner who embraces it in faith, the act of revelation is sui generis. It is the decisive event of human history and, as “the beginning of eternity” for him, of his own life. God’s revelation and the learner’s “decision” of faith are two inseparable dimensions of what Climacus calls “the moment,” the saving entrance of eternity into time.
Having framed the apparent incompatibility, can you explore the central concept in your book, that philosophical eros can open up a path to faith. As you note, “might it be possible that, under certain conditions, both philosophy and faith could in their own ways lead to the truth”. Can you then please speak to how philosophy is rooted in eros, the passion for wisdom. Also, how faith is similarly grounded in passion, which is the origin, and answer to, the paradox – and therefore central to both philosophy and faith. In your book, you describe how Socrates follows his passion for wisdom to the point where he is forced to acknowledge the intractable mystery of the divinity to which Eros opens him up. Please also expand on how, for Socrates, understanding the love of wisdom is appreciating that an individual is not a subject, in the sense of modern philosophy, but a soul, that is receptive “to something outside of and beyond itself, to something that transcends it.”
In the Platonic dialogues, the philosopher is characterized by an erotic passion for wisdom. Socrates regards wonder, the soul’s openness to what is alluringly and perplexingly other and strange, as the beginning of philosophy. Climacus similarly links philosophical eros with paradox. “The paradox is the passion of thought,” he writes, “and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.” Climacus argues in Fragments that Socratic inquiry finally bumps into a paradox that is absolute because reason cannot resolve it. Philosophical eros thus leads to a “collision” with the unknown, a “frontier” where Gorgias seems to be vindicated, because what is glimpsed can neither be known nor expressed. But that is not the end of the story. Having completed a “thought-project” that “indisputably goes beyond the Socratic,” and wondering whether it is “more true than the Socratic,” Climacus presents himself to Socrates “for inspection” at the end of Fragments. Were philosophy untruth, this would make no sense. But Socrates is not polemical against the truth; his eros is untinged by intellectual pride, and he is entirely free of the “offense against the [absolute] paradox” that supposedly characterizes philosophy.
In Postscript, Climacus presents Socratic philosophizing as a close analogue of faith. Both have the same basic structure and participate in similarly paradoxical attempts to link finitude with the infinite, time with eternity, particularity with universality in one’s own life. Socratic philosophizing, which shuttles up and down in trying to weave the Ideas into the fabric of existence, to unite understanding with being, involves fundamental deficiencies and uncertainties. It is, in a basic sense, Sisyphean: the ascent is never complete, and the descent is inevitably haphazard. We do not, and cannot, know that we know; unanswered questions haunt every inquiry, and there are no signs that say You Are Now Leaving the Cave. An adequate noetic intuition and complete discursive account of the Idea would not suffice in any case. It is not enough to know what Justice is: one must be just. That involves a continuous application of one’s best understanding, a series of judgments—hopefully just ones!—about how best to manifest the Idea in the unique and fluctuating circumstances of one’s existence.
Climacus writes that Socrates exemplifies the “highest truth” for an existing person: “an objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness” (emphasis in original). Yet faith involves a still more paradoxical passion of inwardness. Whereas Socrates sought to bring into relation to his existence a truth that, considered in itself, is unparadoxical, Christianity seeks to bring into relation to one’s existence the absolutely paradoxical unity of absolute difference and absolute equality in the incarnate god. Instead of objective uncertainty and the corresponding Socratic ignorance, Christianity involves objective absurdity.
I would like to now focus more on the specific question of whether this compatibility can be construed as an intellectual foundation – viewing this issue through the lens of several other philosophers who, ostensibly, explicitly address the issue. First, to explore another Christian thinker, and the potential intellectual ground for faith, can you discuss how, for Aquinas, faith is not a negation, but the perfection of reason. Can we think of this as a traditional intellectual foundation? How would you contrast this view of reason with Kierkegaard, where the leap of faith is the abdication of reason, when the understanding steps aside – where faith is risk? For instance, you write: “knowledge cannot replace faith or come to its aid, because the object of faith is a paradox that unites contradictories and thereby surpasses understanding”. Is, then, Aquinas irreconcilable with Kierkegaard, where the truth for faith is the absolute paradox, unintelligible to reason?
Aquinas’s understanding of faith as the perfection of reason is the culmination of a tradition comprising ancient and medieval attempts to connect Greek philosophy with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran. I’m thinking especially of Philo, who claimed that Moses was the teacher of Plato; Alfarabi, who regarded Islam as a popular image of philosophical truth; Averroes, who argued that Islam makes philosophizing obligatory; and Maimonides, who tried to harmonize Aristotle and the Torah. Aquinas’s thought stands alone in its systematic rigor and clarity, and its refusal to reduce philosophy (Aristotle) to faith (Christianity) or faith to philosophy.
Aquinas argues that philosophy does provide a kind of foundation for faith. In the Summa Theologiae, for example, he offers various a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. In Fragments, however, Climacus argues that philosophical arguments can “only develop the ideality I have presupposed,” that is, they suffice merely to establish relationships between concepts. An a posteriori demonstration couldn’t show, for example, that Napoleon exists; it could only “demonstrate (purely ideally) that such works are the works of a great general etc.” Aquinas himself acknowledges that only divine revelation could establish the existence of a God that can achieve salvation for human beings—one moved by love to undergo incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. And if Socrates speaks both of “the god” and “the gods” in the Platonic dialogues, it is because, absent divine revelation, he does not even know if the deity is one or many!
I’m not sure I know the answer to your last question. Sin, by which we lose the condition for understanding the truth, intensifies the difference between man and God. Repentance and rebirth in faith presumably annuls this absolute difference. Does the truth remain wholly unintelligible to reason for one is no longer untruth?
To extend the case of construing faith as a form of knowledge, I would like to move to Spinoza, where it would appear that his unusual fusion of philosophy and faith explicitly calls for an intellectual foundation. The highest form of knowledge is the intellectual love of God, where the highest ideal of human life is “being-in-God” – a participatory conception where human immortality is appreciating the mind’s eternity. As Clare Carlise notes in Spinoza’s Religion, it is a virtue cultivated in rest under a species of eternity, with a joyful awareness of being-in-God. Is it fair to say that Spinoza’s ethical and ontological transformation is – literally – a form of knowledge? Or is it somehow more of a semantic question – as both Spinoza and Kierkegaard are essentially framing a collapse of a human being’s finite life and the eternal life of God?
Perhaps this is a good place to try to clarify Kierkegaard’s—not just Climacus’s—relationship to philosophical science as developed by Spinoza and perfected by Hegel. A very rough and compressed summary of the origin and development of that science might go like this. Aristotle’s metaphysical account of God as actualized intellect was incorporated, via Alfarabi, into Maimonides’ teaching of the intellectual love of God, a noetic achievement at the fertile intersection of philosophy and prophecy. Spinoza stripped that Maimonidean teaching of scriptural prooftexts and endowed it with the Cartesian methodical rigor of “geometrical” deduction. Hegel bought Spinoza down to earth, so to speak, by offering a philosophical version of Christian eschatology. In Hegel’s account, Spirit (Geist) or divine Mind enters into human history and drives its necessary teleological development.
Kierkegaard rejects this tradition’s exaltation of pure intellect because it collapses the structure of human existence. He focuses most of his critical energy on Hegel, who in his day had captured the intellectual imagination of the leading Danish philosophers, theologians, and ministers. As Anti-Climacus teaches in The Sickness Unto Death, the individual human being is spirit. Spirit—the self—is a relation of finitude and infinity, time and eternity, and freedom and necessity, a relation that consciously relates itself to itself and to the one that established it (God). The essential human task is to bring these elements into right relationship, not to absorb finitude into infinity, etc. It is “to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God.” Kierkegaard calls this “Christian heroism.” The self that succeeds in this venture “rests transparently in the power that established it.” This is a kind of “being-in-God,” but not in the Spinozist or Hegelian sense of the mind’s appreciation of its eternity.
Kierkegaard’s basic criticism of Hegel’s systematic and speculative philosophy is wittily expressed in this passage from Climacus’s Postscript:
“If a dancer could leap very high, we would admire him, but if he wanted to give the impression that he could fly—even though he could leap higher than any dancer had ever leapt before—let laughter overtake him. Leaping means to belong essentially to the earth and to respect the law of gravity so that the leap is merely the momentary, but flying means to be set free from telluric conditions, something that is reserved exclusively for winged creatures, perhaps also for inhabitants of the moon, perhaps—and perhaps that is also where the system will at long last find its true readers.”
Consistent with the charter of the series, exploring the evolving nature of science, philosophy and faith, I would like to now turn to the implications of scientific achievements, starting with Nietzsche and his case for the limits of reason. Of course, he grappled with the impact of Darwinism and effectively chronicled the death of God. However, I would like to emphasize his perspective, shared with Kierkegaard, on the limits of objectivity. That is, whether an intellectual foundation is even a legitimate question. With Nietzsche, the notion of a God is “grotesque”, allied with the unlimited ambition of modern science in a “unshakeable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable of not only knowing being but even of correcting it” (Birth of Tragedy). Fast forwarding to Wittgenstein, should we see philosophy as reaching its limits – where “it just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything? Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain” (PI 126). In sum, considering the critics of the discipline and limitations of objectivity, is it fair to wonder if the question of the intellectual foundation of faith is moot?
Kierkegaard’s critique of objectivity can be sharply distinguished from Nietzsche’s. While Nietzsche assimilates the will to truth to the will to power (Beyond Good and Evil, section 211), God remains for Kierkegaard an independent standard of humanly essential truth. Thus it is possible for him to ask a question like the following (which Climacus does in Postscript): “If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth?”
That said, reason is for Kierkegaard only negatively a basis for faith. In clarifying its own limits, it affirms the necessity for a decision, a “leap” of faith. In particular, the incarnation of God as man is neither a necessary truth nor a historical fact, and so cannot be an object of knowledge. Kierkegaard therefore completely disassociates certainty from faith, as we saw in the previously quoted passage from Postscript to the effect that the highest truth for an existing person is an objective uncertainty held fast with the most passionate inwardness.
The wonder of faith, as Johannes de Silentio writes in Fear and Trembling, is that it “preserves an eternal youth” in the face of life’s challenges. In other words, the joyful and resilient way of living that faith makes possible is not absurd, and I think Nietzsche and Wittgenstein would agree. Recall that Zarathustra does not disabuse the old man who sings and praises God. He does not tell him that God is dead—for God is not dead for him. And Wittgenstein, who remarked that Kierkegaard was “by far the most profound thinker” of the nineteenth century, and learned Danish in order to read him, was deeply concerned with ethical and religious perspectives that transcend speech but nevertheless manifest themselves in meaningful forms of life.
Finally, raising the opposite possibility, I would like to now turn to the present and ask whether modern physics is shedding new light on philosophical questions. In prior posts, I have made the case that quantum artificial intelligence invigorates Spinoza. I have also suggested that the theory on non-locality reflects a strict monist view – as physicists sound very much like Rationalists in addressing the implications of particle engagement. Further, as Ross Douthat noted in a recent piece, “the god hypothesis is constantly vindicated by the comprehensibility of the universe, and the capacity of our reason to unlock its many secrets. Indeed, there’s a quietly theistic assumption to the whole scientific project”. Is it possible, then, that science, although fundamentally descriptive, can provide empirical information that informs a kind of intellectual foundation for theism? In sum, can modern science open up a path to faith?
I don’t see any conflict between modern science and religious faith. Quite the contrary. In the first place, modern science is an intellectual game. The object of that game is to see how much we can explain by appealing to only two of Aristotle’s four causes, the efficient and material. But human life is possible only because we cognize and respond to final and formal causes. The scientist qua human has to acknowledge explanatory factors that he or she discounts qua scientist.
What is more, modern physics is as humbling as it is wonderful. The fact that we know what we do is remarkable. Douthat is right to observe the theistic assumption of science. Kepler, for example, was inspired to work out his law of planetary motion by the Timaeus’s account of how the demiurge constructed the cosmos according to mathematical ratios. Yet weird phenomena like quantum entanglement remind us of how little we actually know. And we are fundamentally limited by event horizons, including the biggest one of all, beyond which stands the origin of the universe. Cosmological paradoxes abound. To peer out into the universe, for example, is to look back in time; the Hubble image of a quasar ten billion light years away registers its massive jets of superheated particles as they appeared ten billion years in our past. In theory, an astronomer with a sufficiently powerful telescope anywhere in the universe would be able, looking in any direction, to see all the way back to the Big Bang. The inconceivably dense point from which the universe is thought to have exploded would thus seem to be present at every point on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius of roughly 13.8 billion light years (corresponding to the estimated age of the universe) centered on the observer, wherever he may happen to be!
I don’t see how modern science could ever answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And yet there is something rather than nothing, something that science itself has revealed to be both impenetrably mysterious at its core and inconceivably greater than us in extent and power. If this is not an intellectual foundation for theism, it is at least an intellectual invitation to the same.
Jacob Howland
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism. His latest book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic (Paul Dry Books, 2018). His other books are Plato and the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2006); The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates’ Philosophic Trial (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); and The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (Twayne Publishers, 1993 and Paul Dry Books, 2004). His articles have appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, the New Criterion, Commentary, the Claremont Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, City Journal, The Nation, UnHerd, Quillette, and Mosaic, among other venues.
Charlie Taben
Charlie Taben graduated from Middlebury College in 1983 with a BA in philosophy and has been a financial services executive for nearly 40 years. He studied at Harvard University during his junior year and says one of the highlights of his life was taking John Rawls’ class. Today, Charlie remains engaged with the discipline, focusing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. He also performs volunteer work for the Philosophical Society of England and is currently seeking to incorporate practical philosophical digital content into US corporate wellness programs. You can find Charlie on Twitter @gbglax.
