Truth is the Way

Kierkegaard's Theologia Viatorum

Christopher Ben Simpson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610971492
  9781498213493
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621895121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In The Truth Is the Way, Christopher Ben Simpson presents Kierkegaard's work as a theologia viatorum, a theology to guide one on life's way. This truth that is the way is at once existential, metaphysical, and theological - the highest truth is a living in accord with reality that is revealed to us and enabled in us by Jesus Christ. This picture of Kierkegaard's thought, drawing on the whole of his published corpus, presents his perspectives (by way of prolegomena) on the nature of truth, of communication and of faith and (more substantially) his guiding vision of the world, God, humanity, and Christ, culminating in Kierkegaard's understanding of the manner of life lived in light of this vision - of a journey walked in the virtues of patience, faith, hope, and love toward a life of joy in the midst of suffering, of communion with oneself, with God, with others.

PART 1

Prolegomena: On Truth

1

Communication

On Communication

Communication – as a topic for reflection and as cunningly enacted – has a central place in Kierkegaard’s thought. He was a communicator concerned with how one is to communicate. At the beginning of Part Two of Either/Or, Judge Vilhelm (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) deliberates on how to address ‘A’ – the pseudonymous author of Part One (EO 384). Vigilius Haufniensis (another pseudonym) writes of preaching, and about communication more generally, that it ‘is really the most difficult of all arts and is essentially the art that Socrates praised, the art of being able to converse’ (CA 16). Very broadly, Kierkegaard recognizes in communication a dialectic of proximity and distance – that one needs to draw near to what one takes to be the reader’s or listener’s perspective, to the actual lives of the real persons one would address, so that what one says is meaningful, accessible, plausible to them, despite communicating a perspective that is not their own, or at least a perspective that the reader does not initially recognize as their own. For the distance, the ideality in communication, can allow a reader to reflect on what is often too close to see – their own (or something like their own) perspective on life as a ‘theoretically educe[d] life-view’ (BoA 16). Kierkegaard writes: ‘The art in all communication is to come as close as possible to actuality, to contemporaries in the role of readers, and yet at the same time to have the distance of a point of view, the reassuring, infinite distance of ideality from them’ (BoA 15). The end goal here is no cool comprehension of ideas. Kierkegaard is interested foremost in a form of communication that ‘seeks and looks for that favourably disposed person who takes an interest in the seeker, gives an opportunity to what is said, brings the cold thoughts into flame again, transforms the discourse into a conversation’. It is thus that ‘the recipient accomplishes the great work of letting the perishability of the discourse arise in imperishability’ – in the actuality of existence, in the truth as that lived (EUD 231).

Indirect communication

This method of starting where a person is and leading onward is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s process of indirect communication. ‘The secret in the entire art of helping’, he writes in The Point of View, is to be ‘a willing and attentive listener’ – to ‘be the astonished listener who sits and listens to what delights that other person’ (PoV 45–6). For when ‘a teacher is truly to be the learner’ (PoV 46), such a teacher is enabled to deal with readers on their own terms. Hence the title of the section in that book: ‘If One Is Truly to Succeed in Leading a Person to a Specific Place, One Must First and Foremost Take Care to Find Him Where He Is and Begin There’ (PoV 45).

In order to communicate the truth to another where they are, it is assumed that the truth, in whole or in part, is what the other is lacking.10 But to presume to communicate the truth directly to one who is in untruth, who believes falsehood, will likely be met with resistance, rejection, dismissal – for, from the perspective of the other, one is presuming to give them something they already have, something they do not lack, namely the truth. ‘By a direct attack’, Kierkegaard writes, one that would communicate ‘only strengthens [the other] person in the illusion and also infuriates him’ such that this other person then ‘love[s] in [his] secret heart that bewitchery even more fanatically with clandestine passion’ (PoV 43, 46). Such an antagonistic posture ‘also contains the presumptuousness of demanding that another person confess to one or face-to-face with one make the confession that actually is most beneficial when the person concerned makes it to himself secretly’ (PoV 43).11 Communication, especially communication of that which is most important and so most intimate, is inhibited by the frame of winning and losing.

Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication has to do with communicating to one in the midst of an illusion. As such, it has a certain negative function. The truth has a ‘salutary terror’ (CD 220). The upbuilding, the healing, to the one who is sick but does not know it, does not recognize it, is not unequivocally welcome – ‘for the presumably healthy and strong it is bound to appear at first as the terrifying’ (CD 96). Common (fallen human) understanding is dominated by the ‘lies and baseness and injustice [that rule] the world’ (PoV 63). ‘Truly’, he writes, ‘it is not truth that rules the world but illusions’ (PoV 59). While Kierkegaard’s dissident, ‘polemical’ stance as a ‘religious author’ vis-à-vis the dominant discourse of the world is nothing terribly new (PoV 67), he proposes ‘a totally new science of arms’ – a ‘strategy . . . constituted on the basis of having to contend with a delusion, an illusion’ (PoV 52–3).12

Because ‘an illusion can never be removed directly’ (PoV 43), one must use an indirect method – a method ‘permeated by reflection’ (PoV 52). The reflected form is existentially disengaged. Reflection takes a step back from one’s immediate involvement – the reader’s view is presented to them as an ideal possibility that they can imaginatively ‘try on’ as something other than ‘their own’ view – to see its failings as one would in another person who is too involved in their folly to see it as such – but only then to recognize the ideal, reflected possibility so evaluated and judged (by oneself) as being one’s own.13 Alternatively, the writer’s/speaker’s view can be considered and appropriated by the reader/hearer, as their own – not as one cowed into submission – but as one given the freedom to consider the reflected idea as possible, to consider it as an alternative to their own view – to their illusions (PoV 7). This method of helping another to recognize and leave behind their illusions through reflection is presented as loving (PoV 44). One can see one’s failings for oneself freely – and not be coerced by or humiliated before the communicator. ‘The secret of communication specifically hinges on setting the other free’ for the discourse ‘wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart’ (CUP 74; UDVS 5).

Paradoxically, this loving and ‘Christian’ manner of communicating the truth entails a certain deception – for to address one in the midst of illusion one must speak the language of illusions (PoV 44).14 The deception, to be precise, is not directly naming the other’s view as it is, as a delusion, but starting ‘from another angle’ (EO 480). In indirect communication, one ‘deceives people into the truth’15 – for

direct communication presupposes that the recipient’s ability to receive is entirely in order, but here that is simply not the case – indeed, here a delusion is an obstacle. That means a corrosive must first be used, but this corrosive is the negative, but the negative in connection with communicating is precisely to deceive.

And this ‘begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value’ (PoV 54).

This is a first negative moment in relation to faith’s stepping forward, stepping up, stepping into a life-view as a lived actuality. Kierkegaard writes:

One does not become a Christian through reflection, but in reflection to become a Christian means that there is something else to discard. A person does not reflect himself into being a Christian but out of something else in order to become a Christian. (PoV 93)

The second moment of the double-movement of indirect communication is that of positive appropriation (or faith) (PoV 6). The truth that Kierkegaard is interested in communicating, the deep truths about human life, are ‘concerned truths’, truth that is to be edifying, that is ‘not indifferent to how the individual receives it, whether he wholeheartedly appropriates it or it becomes mere words to him . . . not indifferent to whether the truth becomes a blessing or a ruination to him’ (EUD 233–4). What Kierkegaard wishes to communicate is not an abstract truth but something that cannot be communicated directly – cannot be simply ‘given’ to another (EUD 13–14). The appropriation, the decision must be his own.16

This indirect communication is an ‘artistic communication’ in which one is ‘required to think of the receiver and to pay attention to the form of communication in relation to the receiver’s misunderstanding’ (CUP 76). It is a poetic endeavour that uses the ‘being-in-between’ of an imaginary construction – versus direct confrontation and communication – in order to influence ‘by means of the ideals’ (CUP 264; FSE 21). By means of indirection and ‘deception’, it ‘drives out devils only by the power of the devil’ (FT 61).

The end, the goal of the communication intended in Kierkegaard’s work is that of helping the reader to change their viewpoint, their ‘life-view’ and so the way they live. Its end, it could be said, is the attaining of wisdom (as opposed to mere knowledge) – true living, truth in existence. In this process of communication, Kierkegaard often likens himself to a Socratic midwife, a teacher who does not give the desired result to the learner but helps, enables, provides the space, the possibility for one to bring forth the end on one’s own (though not simply on one’s own), to appropriate, to change one’s mind, one’s view, one’s life. This is ‘the highest relation a human being can have to another’ for ‘ethically-religiously one cannot essentially benefit another’ (PF 10; SLW 344). In relating to one with a false perspective, ‘one owes it to a person who has gone astray in this way to shout: “Think of the end!”’ – to say to them: ‘ask yourself’ (EO 585, 608). The truth – what is actual and is to be lived in as actual – is presented in terms of possibility, of an alternative way to be:

If actuality is to be understood by a third party, it must be understood as possibility, and a communicator who is conscious of this will therefore see to it, precisely in order to be oriented to existence, that his existence-communication is in the form of possibility. (CUP 358)

Rhetoric of engagement, out-narration, the higher and the lower

Kierkegaard’s rhetoric of engagement is neither a defensive posture nor one seeking (simply) to accommodate Christianity, the truth to be communicated, to the perspective of the reader – to justify it to the reader on her own terms, within her own perspective. This is precisely backwards (CD 162; SUD 87). For Kierkegaard, it is Christianity that provides the broadest and truest perspective in the midst of which all lesser perspectives are located, relativized, their relative truth and falsehood made evident (teleologically suspended, aufgehoben). It is the reader’s terms, their perspective, which is lacking. This is a strategy of ‘out-narration’.17 In this vein, the higher, the truer view is the one that presen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Centre of Theology and Philosophy
• Series Introduction
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Prolegomena: On Truth
• Part 2: Theologia Viatorum