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Kierkegaard on Theistic Proof
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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It has been customary among analytic philosophers not to think highly of, and even to denigrate Kierkegaard. Their view is exemplified by the late Henry Aiken who writes that that Kierkegaard ‘usually does not argue for his position: he merely presents it’. Or that, as according to Aiken, one ‘distinguished Oxford philosopher’ is reported to have remarked, ‘Kierkegaard is not one of those philosophers on whom you can sharpen your wits’. It seems to me on the contrary, that Kierkegaard does indeed present arguments for his views. What follows is an example of this.
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References
1 Aiken, Henry D. (ed.). The Age of Ideology (Mentor Books, 1956), p. 226.Google Scholar
2 Kierkegaard, Soren. Philosophical Fragments (ed. and trans. by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna), pp. 37–44.Google Scholar Princeton University Press. All references except for those noted will be from these pages.
3 The Meno, 97A–98D (many editions).Google Scholar
4 Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Scientific Postscript (Princeton Paperback, 1968), p. 82.Google Scholar
5 In his Grammar of Assent John Henry Cardinal Newman raises a similar issue and deals with it by distinguishing between notional and real assent. My view is more radical, and is, I think, the view taken by Kierkegaard. See chapter 4 et passim of Grammar of Assent (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1955).Google Scholar
6 Evans, J. D. G.. Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 74.Google Scholar
7 The Critique of Pure Reason, A606–B632 (many editions).Google Scholar
8 Summa Theologica, Third Article (many editions).
9 One way of interpreting Aquinas here is that he believes that Anselm's argument begs the question in that no one would accept the crucial premise who did not already accept the conclusion.
10 Partly responsible for this, I believe, is a misunderstanding of the famous Fregean programme of ‘depsychologizing’ logic. Whatever Frege may have meant by this, it was not that it is possible to understand logic without any recourse to some intentional concepts.
11 Perelman, Ch. and Obrects-Tytece, L.. The New Rhetoric (The University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 31–5 et passim.Google Scholar
12 Op. cit. A643–B671.Google Scholar
13 Barth, Karl, ‘A Presupposition of the Proof: The Name of God’. from Anselm: Fides quarens intellectum, reprinted in The Many-faced Argument, ed. Hick, John and McGill, Artur C. (New York: Macmillan Company), p. 128.Google Scholar Barth distinguishes between noetic and ontic content. In terms of this distinction, ‘God’ has only noetic content.
14 Kierkegaard's argument here will perhaps startle those who are familiar with the recent work on the logic of names by such philosophers as K. Donnellan, S. Kripke, and H. Putnam.
15 Professor Berel Lang has commented on this point: ‘The implication for Kierkegaard is that religious belief is foundationless in terms of argument. One can, e.g. be ethical by following (and applying) certain general principles; one cannot be religious by doing this. It seems to me that the “justification” for the religious commitment for Kierkegaard is at most negative – by what is still lacking when one proves everything that can be proved (the sense of this is “despair”)’. I want to thank Professor Lang for his help in revising and reformulating this paper. All the errors are mine.
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