Kerkegaard & Wittgenstein-john Cook

Kierkegaard and WittgensteinAuthor(s): John W. CookSource: Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 199-219Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20019209 .

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Rel. Stud. 23, pp. 199-219

JOHN W.COOK Santa Barbara, USA

KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN

In recent years there has been a tendency in some quarters to see an affinity between the views of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on the subject of religious belief. It seems to me that this is a mistake, that Kierkegaard's views were

fundamentally at odds with Wittgenstein's. That this fact is not generally

recognized is, I suspect, owing to the obscurity of Kierkegaard's most

fundamental assumptions. My aim here is to make those assumptions explicit and to show how they differ from Wittgenstein's.

1

Everyone recognizes that Kierkegaard developed his philosophy of religion in opposition to Hegel. What is not so widely recognized is that his positive

account of Christianity depends heavily on Hegelian and Platonic assump?

tions, assumptions which he took to be so widely shared by his readers that

he did not bother to state them clearly. These assumptions run right through most of Kierkegaard's writings, and it would be an enormous undertaking

to lay them bare in all their various roles. I will confine myself therefore to

a single, yet crucial, instance: Kierkegaard's representation of the incar?

nation as the Absolute Paradox. To understand this, we must begin by

reviewing the features of Hegelianism that Kierkegaard was reacting against. What Kierkegaard found most objectionable in Hegel's philosophy will be

evident to anyone familiar with Part in of Hegel's Lectures on the

Philosophy of Religion. Here is a philosopher purporting to have a superior

understanding of what unphilosophical devout Christians believe in regard to their own salvation. Hegel lays out a metaphysical system in which

Christian doctrine is supposedly shown to be an expression of certain

necessary truths which Hegel, merely by taking thought, has discovered on

his own. That God has reconciled himself with man by himself becoming a

man and dying on the cross is treated by Hegel as a metaphysical truth (or

partial truth) which any philosopher with a properly dialectical and

rationalistic metaphysics could figure out for himself. Henceforth, then, the

believer can rise above mere faith, for he will have the certainty which Hegel's

philosophy makes available to him.

While Kierkegaard did not reject Hegel's rationalism altogether (indeed, many of his own writings are exercises in rationalism), he did strenously



200 JOHN W. COOK

object to its application to the central teachings of Christianity. Rationalism, which he often referred to as 'science', has limited application, he thought, because of certain inescapable limitations in human 'understanding'. Thus, we find Kierkegaard writing in his journal:

Until now people have always expressed themselves in the following way: the

knowledge that one cannot understand this or the other thing does not satisfy science, the aim of which is to understand. Here is the mistake; people ought to say the very

opposite : if human science refuses to understand that there is something which it cannot understand... then all is confusion. For it is the duty of the human

understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and

what those things are.1

Kierkegaard goes on to say that, instead of acknowledging its limitations, 'human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but under?

standing'. And the chief instance of this, he thought, was Hegel's claim to

have explained away ('mediated') the 'contradiction' found in the doctrine

of the incarnation. ' In the Church ', writes Hegel,

" Christ has been called the God-Man. This

is the extraordinary combination which directly contradicts the

Understanding_'2 But this 'extraordinary combination' contradicts the

understanding, says Hegel, only so long as we fail to give it a proper

philosophical explanation. Once it is so explained, we see that God's

becoming a man was necessary ; we see that ' the divine must appear in the

form of immediacy'.3 When the doctrine of the incarnation is restated in a

proper philosophical manner, says Hegel, it expresses 'the truth that the

divine and human natures are not implicitly different. God in human form.

The truth is that there is only one reason, one Spirit, [so that] Spirit as finite

has no true existence'.4 The seeming contradition in the God-Man resides

in thinking that God, a timeless being, entered history as a man and thereby became subject, as all men are, to 'time determination'. But there is an error,

says Hegel, in thinking of the matter in this way, for even in the case of Man

the finite and temporal 'has no true existence'. This demonstrable

philosophical truth, he claims, is what we find imperfectly expressed in the

Christian doctrine that God, who is timeless, became a man. By 'appearing in the form of immediacy ', God forced into consciousness the knowledge that

Man, in his essence, is not finite and temporal. Man is no more a temporal

being than is God. Accordingly, in becoming a Man, God did not become

subject to time determinations: it is mere appearance that Jesus was born

1 The Journals of Sor en Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press,

1938), ?633. Notice Kierkegaard's qualification here: it is human science, human understanding, that can

reach only so far. This, as we will see, is an important escape clause for Kierkegaard, for he is prepared to allow that God can understand (can conceive or think) what a mere human cannot.

2 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs (New York: Humanities Press,

1962), vol. m, p. 76. 3 Ibid.

4 Ibid. p. 77.



KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN 201

on a certain date in human history and was crucified some years later. This

being so, the paradox of the God-Man is dissolved, explained away. Because

time is not real, there is no contradiction in the doctrine of the incarnation.1

In this attempt at ' mediation,' Hegel, according to Kierkegaard, has failed

to recognize the limits of human understanding. He chides Hegel by saying

that Christianity ' has proclaimed itself as the Paradox... [and] it would seem

very strange that Christianity should have come into the world merely to

receive an explanation; as if it should have been somewhat bewildered about

itself, and hence entered the world to consult that wise man, the speculative

philosopher, who can come to its assistance by furnishing the explanation'.2 In Kierkegaard's view Hegel's attempt to remove the paradox of the

God-Man is, and must be, a failure. The matter would be otherwise, he says,

if we were dealing here with a 'relative paradox', i.e. with something that

strikes us as paradoxical only because we haven't thought about it

sufficiently, for a relative paradox can, with ingenuity, be explained in such

a way as to remove the appearance of self-contradiction. But the doctrine

of the incarnation, the doctrine that God became a man, is not such a

paradox. It is an ' absolute paradox

' (CUP, p. 195), and its self-contradictory

character cannot be removed by recasting it, as Hegel proposes, in 'diplo? matic phraseology' (CUP, p. 200).3 Christianity, says Kierkegaard, affirms

' that the paradox it talks about cannot be thought, and thus is different from

a relative paradox which at most presents a difficulty for thought' (CUP,

p. 498). Such is Kierkegaard's view of the matter, and we must now try to

understand both what led him to this view and how he attempts to deal with

certain of the difficulties his view presents.

11

The first question to consider is what made Kierkegaard so confident that

the paradox of the God-Man is an absolute paradox. Why, indeed, did he

think it a paradox at all? The answer to this second question is not hard to

find. It is given in the way Kierkegaard states the doctrine of the incarnation.

For instance, he tells us that 'The paradoxical character of Christianity consists in its constant use of time and the historical in relation to the eternal'

(CUP, p. 88) and that 'The paradox consists principally in the fact that

1 I have here summarized, although without all of Hegel's categories, the argument implicit in Hegel's

thought (ibid. pp. 33-100). A critical point is that Hegel held that God is timeless. God, he says, is 'beyond

time'; His 'eternity is contrasted with time' (ibid. p. 3). 2

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans., David F. Swenson (Princeton, 1944), p. 191. Subsequent references to this volume will be placed in the text with the abbreviation CUP followed by the page number.

3 Kierkegaard's most directly stated opposition to Hegel is this :

' Christianity is no doctrine concerning

the unity of the divine and the human; nor is it any other of the logical transcriptions of Christianity'

(CUP, p. 290).



202 JOHN W. COOK

God, the Eternal, came into existence in time as a particular man' (CUP,

p. 528). He also puts it this way: 'But that that which in accordance with

its nature is eternal comes into existence in time, is born, grows up, and

dies -

this is a breach with all thinking' (CUP, p. 513). What is evident here

is that Kierkegaard, like Hegel, thought of God as a timeless being, as

'beyond time'.1 Accordingly, he berates those priests who speak of God's

eternity as everlasting duration: ' If the priest would say eternity, let him say

eternity -

yet sometimes he says... "unto all the eternities of eternity, world

without end"' (CUP, p. 528). This conception of eternity-as ever

lastingness, as an endless period of time - is sheer fantasy and confusion, says

Kierkegaard, and one whose conception of God is comprised of such fantasy and confusion 'cannot become aware of the absolute paradox' [ibid.). God

is properly conceived of as a timeless being, and that is why Kierkegaard

speaks of God as ' that which by virtue of its essence cannot become historical

'

(CUP, p. 345). Or as he also puts it, 'it is the perfection of the eternal to

have no history, the eternal being [is] the only existence that has absolutely no history'.2

So far, of course, Kierkegaard is in perfect agreement with Hegel : the

doctrine of the incarnation is (they agree) a paradox of some sort because, on the one hand, God is a timeless being, not subject to time determinations, and yet the doctrine states that some hundreds of years ago God was born,

grew up, and eventually died.

On what grounds, then, does Kierkegaard dismiss Hegel's ' mediation

' of

the paradox and insist that the God-Man is not a merely relative paradox? It is no use his formulating the doctrine of the incarnation, as he does in the

passages just quoted, as the doctrine that the eternal came into existence in

time, was born, grew up, and died. Let us grant that this is a proper formulation of the doctrine. Even so, it would be merely question begging for Kierkegaard to dispute Hegel's position by simply declaring that no other

formulation of the doctrine is possible. In reply a defender of Hegel would

need only say: Look at Hegel's philosophy, for he has shown that the

self-contradictory formulation is not the only possible formulation. Plainly, if Kierkegaard is to dismiss Hegel's position, he must somehow take issue with

Hegel's claim that 'the finite has no true existence', i.e. that men, including

Jesus, are not subject to time determinations. And this, in fact, is what

Kierkegaard does.

It is by no means easy to explain how Kierkegaard goes about this, for

1 On this point Hegel and Kierkegaard are echoing a long tradition in Christian theology, which

includes Anselm, Boethius, Aquinas, and Schleiermacher, all of whom held that God knows all things in a timeless present.' The most direct influence on Kierkegaard was, very likely, Schleiermacher, whom

he studied diligently during his preparation for the ministry. Nelson Pike's God and Timelessness (New York :

Schocken Books, 1970) provides an excellent treatment of this theological tradition. 2

Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, 1946), p. 62.



KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN 20?

here we encounter the most obscure feature of his philosophy, and mis?

understandings of it abound in the literature. To remove one such

misunderstanding, we will do well to begin by considering a passage in which

he takes issue with an implication of Hegel's claim that, because man is

immortal, men (including Jesus) are timeless (not subject to time determi?

nations), namely, the implication that Hegelian philosophers, too, are

timeless beings. In the course of this discussion he makes the following satirical remarks, which might remind one of the style of G. E. Moore's

philosophizing (CUP, pp. 271-2):

One must... be very careful in dealing with a philosopher of the Hegelian school, and, above all, to make certain of the identity of the being with whom one has the honor to discourse. Is he a human being, an existing human being? Is he himself sub specie aeterni, even when he sleeps, eats, blows his nose, or whatever else a human

being does? Is he himself the pure 'I am I'?_Does he in fact exist? And if he

does, is he then not in the process of becoming, does he not face the future? And does he ever face the future by way of action?_Was he born sub specie aeterni, and has he lived sub specie aeterni ever since, so that he cannot even understand what I am asking about, never having had anything to do with the future, and never having experienced any decision? In that case I readily understand that it is not a human

being I have the honor to address.

One way to read this passage would be take Kierkegaard to be insisting that

a philosopher is guilty of an obvious absurdity if he declares that human

beings are not temporal beings. And on that interpretation we might think

that Kierkegaard's position, vis a vis Hegel, is as follows: Hegel imagines that

he can explain away the self-contradictory character of the doctrine of the

incarnation because he has made the mistake of thinking that human beings,

including Jesus, are not temporal beings, i.e. because he mistakenly thinks

that the doctrine does not really mean what it appears to mean when it speaks of Jesus being born, growing up, and eventually being crucified. That is, the

foregoing passage might incline us to think that Kierkegaard is saying : The

doctrine of the incarnation is an absolute paradox, a contradiction, because

its meaning, when fully set out, is that an essentially timeless being became a man and (inasmuch as men are temporal beings) thereby became subject to time determinations, so that it says that God both is and is not timeless.

Let us think about this.

If we are inclined to the foregoing interpretation, this may be owing to

the influence of Moore's essay 'The Conception of Reality',1 where Moore

examines Bradley's claim that Time, although it exists, is not real. According to Moore, Bradley mistakenly thinks that he can

' make a distinction between

44being real" on the one hand, and "existing", "being a fact", and "being" on the other hand - as if he meant to say that a thing may exist, and be,

1 Reprinted in G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London, 1922), pp. 197-219.



204 JOHN W. COOK

and be a fact, and yet not be real'.1 The idea of such a distinction may be

plausible, says Moore, until we carefully examine what it could mean to say that something is unreal. Moore explains:

What, then, ought Mr. Bradley to mean by 'Time is unreal'? What would most

people mean by this proposition? I do not think there is much difficulty in

discovering what sort of thing they would mean by it. Of course, Time, with a big T, seems to be a highly abstract kind of entity, and to define exactly what can be meant by saying of an entity ofthat sort that it is unreal does seem to offer difficulties. But if you try to translate the proposition into the concrete, and to ask what it implies, there is, I think, very little doubt as to the sort of thing it implies. The moment you try to do this, and think what it really comes to, you at once begin thinking of a

number of different kinds of proposition, all of which plainly must be untrue, it Time is unreal. If Time is unreal, then plainly nothing ever happens before or after

anything else; it is never true that anything is past; never true that anything will

happen in the future ; never true that anything is happening now ; and so on_And it is clear, also, that to say that the falsehood of all propositions of these kinds is

implied [by 'Time is unreal'] is equivalent to saying that there are no facts of certain

corresponding kinds - no facts which consist in one event happening before another; none which consist in one event happening before another; none which consist in an event being past or future, and so on_We may, then, I think, say that what

'Time is unreal' means is simply...'There are no

temporal facts.'2

Moore goes on to argue that this, which Bradley ought to mean, is also, in

part at least, what he does mean and that therefore, when he says that Time

is unreal,4 what he means is inconsistent with its being true that Time exists '.3

In short, Moore claims to have shown, by his method of translating into the

concrete, that Bradley cannot make any such distinction as he thinks he has

made, namely, between reality and existence. If Time is unreal, then there

are no temporal facts (e.g. no one has ever been born, grown up, and died), and conversely if Time exists (if there are temporal facts), then Time is real.

Now because Kierkegaard ridicules Hegelians by making them seem to

be saying that they are not 4in the process of becoming' - that they have

never faced the future, never made a decision and so on, we may be led to

suppose that Kierkegaard, like Moore, meant to reject any distinction

between reality and existence. And because he repeatedly insists that

whatever exists is cin time',4 it might seem that he is prepared to say, quite

flatly, that Jesus was a temporal being, that his birth and death and so on

1 Ibid. p. 199. Bradley, having argued that time is unreal (is mere appearance), entertains an objection to this, namely, that time cannot be unreal because change

' is a matter of direct experience ; it is a fact

and hence it cannot be explained away'. He replies: This 'is indubitable. Change is a fact_And, if

we could not in any way perceive how the fact [that this or that changes] can be unreal, we should be

placed, I admit, in a hopeless dilemma.' But this dilemma doesn't arise, he continues, because it is wrong to think

' that an appeal to experience can prove reality. That I find something in existence in the world

or in myself, shows that this something exists, and it cannot show more. Any deliverance of consciousness... is

but a deliverance of consciousness_ It is a fact, like other facts, to be dealt with, and there is no

presumption anywhere that any fact is better than appearance.' (Quoted by Moore, ibid. pp. 201-2, from

Bradley's Appearance and Reality.) 2 Ibid. pp. 209-11.

3 Ibid. p. 214. 4 The phrase 'whatever exists' does not include God, for according to Kierkegaard, 'God does not

exist, he is eternal' (CUP, p. 296).




were temporal facts, and that this cannot be explained away or qualified by any sort

of philosophical analysis. Yet the truth of the matter, as we will see, is just the

opposite of this: Kierkegaard's position depends entirely on his thinking he

can make a distinction that is similar to, although more complex than,

Bradley's.1 In fact it is quite easy to see that Kierkegaard must have had some such

distinction in mind. For had his position been similar to Moore's, his claim

that the God-Man is an absolute paradox would have been tantamount to

his saying that Christianity is sheer nonsense and that no one could possibly be a believer. On Moore's view the proposition 'Jesus was born many centuries ago, grew to manhood, and was eventually crucified' cannot be

reduced to (or transformed into) a proposition (or propositional fragment) that states no temporal facts. It is, as we might put it, an irreducibly temporal

proposition. Accordingly, on Moore's view the proposition 'God, a timeless

being, came into being at a definite time as an individual man, grew up, and

was crucified '

can be nothing but a plain contradiction, a piece of sheer

nonsense. If God is timeless, then it is logically impossible that he became

a man, and conversely if God did become a man, then it is logically impossible that he is a timeless being. Consequently, Kierkegaard, because he holds that

God is timeless, must choose between concluding that (a) the doctrine of the

incarnation is plain nonsense, so that no one in his right mind could believe

it, and concluding that (b) it is possible (while yet disagreeing with Hegel) to draw a distinction like Bradley's, according to which temporal facts,

although they unquestionably exist, are not real.

The first of these alternatives could be embraced only by someone who

was flatly opposed to Christianity. It is not, therefore, surprising that

Kierkegaard explicitly rejected it. Thus, in the Postscript (p. 504) we find it

said that

...the believing Christian not only possesses but uses his understanding... ; but in

relation to Christianity he believes against the understanding and in this case also

uses understanding... to make sure that he believes against the understanding. Nonsense therefore he cannot believe against the understanding, for precisely the

understanding will discern that it is nonsense and will prevent him from believing it, but he makes so much use of the understanding that he becomes aware of the

incomprehensible, and then he holds fast to this, believing against the understanding.

Plainly, Kierkegaard is saying here that the Christian will recognize nonsense

when he sees it and that therefore when he believes something he can make 1 If one wonders how, in keeping with the above-quoted passage ridiculing Hegelians, Kierkegaard

could possibly agree with Bradley that time is unreal, it need only be recalled that Bradley, while insisting that Time is mere appearance, also insisted that it would be absurd to deny that appearances exist.

' For

the present ', he says, * we may keep a fast hold upon this, that appearances exist. That is absolutely certain,

and to deny it is nonsense_Our appearances, no doubt, may be a beggarly show, and their nature to an unknown extent may be something which, as it is, is not true of reality. That is one thing, and it is quite another to speak as if these facts had no actual existence_And I must repeat that such an

idea would be sheer nonsense. What appears, for that sole reason, most indubitably is; and there is no

possibility of conjuring its being away.' (Quoted by Moore, op. cit. pp. 198-9.)



206 JOHN W. COOK

no sense of, he will insist that it is not nonsense. Although this is plainly a

bad piece of reasoning (since all sorts of people fail to detect nonsense), it

is nonetheless clear that Kierkegaard rejects the first of the aforementioned

alternatives. We may conclude, therefore, that he adopts the remaining

alternative, namely, that a distinction of some sort can be drawn between

reality and existence, so that one can hold that temporal facts (e.g. that Jesus was born, grew to manhood, and was crucified), although they exist, may not be real.

Our question was this : How, in his attempt to show the doctrine of the

incarnation to be an absolute paradox, did Kierkegaard take issue with

Hegel's claim that man, like God, is 'beyond time', not subject to time

determinations? We have found reason to think that he did not take a

Moorean stand and hold that any temporal statement about a man

(including any such statement about Jesus) is irreducibly temporal. For in

order to avoid the consequence that the absolute paradox is nothing but sheer

nonsense, he needs to be able to say that in some sense (or in some way)

temporal statements about Jesus may not be irreducibly temporal, that the

temporal language of these statements may in some sense (or in some way) be less than final. At the same time, he is most anxious not to let this become

a form of Hegelianism, wherein the paradox of the God-Man turns out to

be no more than a relative paradox, a paradox we can explain away, leaving us with a doctrine we can understand. Plainly, Kierkegaard has considerable

work, some nice maneuvering, to do here. Just how he goes about this can

be shown most clearly, I think, by eschewing, for the moment, some of his

own terminology. Accordingly, in the section that follows I will formulate

Kierkegaard's position in the plainest way that I can, recognizing that I have

not stated certain matters in exactly his manner. It will be, if you like, a

twentieth century version of Kierkegaard.

in

As a preliminary to stating Kierkegaard's position, I will simply say that he

held, contrary to Aquinas and others, that there can be no proof that God

exists and accordingly held that no one can know that God exists. And now,

having said this much in my own voice, I will affect the voice of Kierkegaard

himself, so that the remainder of this section is to be taken as what he might

say were he explaining himself to philosophers of our century. Because we cannot know that God exists, we cannot take it to be a

philosophical truth that there is a timeless being that beholds and compre? hends our temporal lives timelessly, i.e. as fixed and unchanging. On the

contrary, philosophers, so long as they are engaged in purely philosophical

thinking, must concede thatybr all we know there may be no reality save that

world of change and succession that Kant called the phenomenal world.




Even so, one datum that exists for philosophers is a book commonly referred

to as Holy Scripture, wherein a Creator of all things, God, is spoken of and

wherein it is said that God became a man and that we humans are promised eternal happiness if only we shall believe. Moreover, this Holy Scripture, as

the name itself suggests, represents itself, not as some story invented by mere

mortals, but as the word of God, as his communication to us. Now while there

are some among us who will receive this communication in the spirit of simple faith and gratitude, there are also some among us -

Hegel, for instance - who

will think about various passages in this book and become puzzled by them.

One occasion for such puzzlement (although there are other occasions as

well1) is that certain passages speak of a man - a man born centuries ago in Bethlehem

- as having been God himself. A thinker will find this puzzling

because, on the one hand, he understands God to be a timeless being, a being who cannot rightly be spoken of in temporal terms, while on the other hand

this man, Jesus, who is said to be God himself is spoken of in Scripture in

ordinary temporal language, i.e. in the language in which you and I speak of the events of our own lives. Accordingly, a thinker cannot but wonder

whether there is not here a perfectly plain contradiction: a timeless being who is spoken of in temporal terms. Moreover, (and this is a most critical

point, to which we will return) one may think that a contradiction here, in

this book called Holy Scripture, is like a contradiction anywhere else, i.e. that

a contradiction in Scripture is fatal in the same way a contradiction is fatal

in something a man might write or say. And if one does think that a

contradiction here is no less disastrous than a contradiction elsewhere, then

one may, like Hegel and all those Hegelian theologians, want to try to rid

Scripture of this evident contradiction - may want, that is, to invoke some

philosophical theory which makes it out to be no more than a relative

paradox. Yet herein lies a great mistake, which I will endeavour to explain. First of all, it must be realized that there is but one avenue open for

explaining away the contradiction, namely, by maintaining that the life of

Jesus was not really an historical, temporal, episode, so that the temporal

language of Scripture can be replaced by non-temporal language.2 This, of

course, is what Hegel maintained. In place of the proposition that God was

born at a certain moment of history and that he grew up and was eventually crucified - a proposition, be it noted, that contains temporal language (past tense verbs, etc.), Hegel gives us the proposition that there is a unity of God

and Man, a proposition that he takes to be as free of temporal language as

1 Kierkegaard states another of the Christian paradoxes as follows: 'That "original sin" is guilt

- that

is the real paradox. How paradoxical that is may best be seen thus. It is formed by compounding qualitatively different categories. To "inherit" [in Danish 'original sin' is 'inherited sin'] is a natural

category [a category of nature] ; guilt is an ethical and spiritual category. Now who would ever think, says reason, of putting them together, of saying that something is inherited which by definition cannot be inherited.' The Journals of Sor en Kierkegaard, op. cit. ? 1061.

2 Kierkegaard remarks that 'the language of [Hegel's] abstract thought... ignores the concrete and

the temporal' (CUP, p. 267).



208 JOHN W. COOK

is 'Twice two is four'. Here, however, is the catch. In keeping with

orthodoxy, Hegel allows that Jesus was fully a man, that he was a man just like any other man. Accordingly, he cannot hold that the life of Jesus is not

in time without holding also that the lives of all men, including his own, are

not in time. And this he is quite prepared to do, which is why he explicitly

says that there is only one Spirit and that 'Spirit as finite has no true

existence'. In other worlds, one consequence of Hegel's theory is that, in

doing away with the temporal language that Scripture uses in speaking of

Jesus, it also does away with the temporal language (or conceptions) we

employ in speaking and thinking about ourselves. But this is absurd! I can

no more think about my life -

about what I did yesterday and plan on doing this afternoon

- in some non-temporal idiom than I can think about numbers

in a temporal idiom.1 Hegel, in short, forgot that no one, not even a great

logician, can escape his temporal thinking processes when thinking or talking about human beings, whether about himself or his neighbour or Jesus. Even

the greatest logician does not behold everything timelessly, in an unchanging consciousness in which there is no before and after. Consequently, we are

stuck with conceiving of Jesus in the temporal language in which Scripture relates his life. And this, in turn, means that we are also stuck with the

contradiction in the doctrine of the God-Man.

At the same time, it must be remarked that the entire Hegelian project rests on a questionable assumption, namely, that a contradiction in Scripture is like a contradiction in something a man has said. If we notice a

contradiction in something a man has said, then we have to dismiss the

contradiction as something

we can make no sense of, as something that

cannot be true or be acted on. We don't think that, despite its being a

contradiction, it may be true anyway. And if I someone told you, 'Close the

door and also do not close it', and if he insisted that this was no riddle but

exactly what he meant, you could only dismiss what he has said and pay it

no attention. Here contradiction is fatal. But why should we think that a

contradiction is similarly fatal in Scripture? For after all, Scripture represents

itself, not as some story told by a man, but as the word of God. This being

so, it is open to us to think that what we, who are in time, can only see as

a contradiction is not a contradiction for the author (supposing there is such

an author) of this communication, this author being a timeless being.

Admittedly, an atheist could not allow this, since for him this book, the Bible,

is just another of the books composed by men, so that for him a contradiction

1 Kierkegaard writes that the existing individual

' thinks before and after' (CUP, p. 293) and also that

'an existing individual... translates all his thinking into terms of process' (CUP, p. 79). Here, however,

he has stated the matter carelessly, for he surely does not mean to suggest that we must invariably, no

matter what the subject matter, think in temporal terms. He would no doubt allow that I can think of

the square root of, say, 625 without thinking of the square root in temporal terms - without thinking

that at present (or for the time being) 25 is the square root of 625. Also, Kierkegaard is prepared to allow

that -

indeed, he insists that - the plain man's concept of God is the concept of a timeless being, of a

being that is not 'in time'. It is when we think of ourselves and the phenomenal world that we cannot

but think in temporal terms. Possibly, he thought of himself as simply following Kant here.




here is no different from, no less fatal than, a contradiction in any other book.

Matters are otherwise, however, for a Christian believer.1 Believing as he does

that Scripture is the word of God, he can also believe that something in

Scripture can be true (true, that is, for God) although for a man it is and

must remain a contradiction.2 In the case of the God-Man, for instance, a

believer can think of the matter as follows. God beholds and conceives of all

things timelessly, i.e. without change, without past and future.3 Yet in

communicating with his creatures He must speak in the temporal language that goes with the human condition, the only language in which a man can

grasp what is said of himself or another.4 For instance, when we are promised 1

Kierkegaard explicitly says that the non-believer will see nonsense where the believer will not : ' The

absurd, the paradox, is composed in such a way that reason has no power at all to dissolve it in nonsense

and prove that it is nonsense; no, it is...a riddle, a compounded riddle about which reason must say: I cannot solve it, it cannot be understood, but it does not follow thereby that it is nonsense. But, of course, if faith is completely abolished, the whole sphere is dropped, and then reason becomes conceited and

perhaps concludes that, ergo the paradox is nonsense.... Faith [on the other hand] believes the paradox.'

(Soren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, ed. and trans, by Howard K. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1967-70), vol. 1, ?7.) I take Kierkegaard to be making three

claims here : ( 1 ) Since it cannot be proved that there is no God, it cannot be proved that the paradox is nonsense; nevertheless (2) if someone does not believe that God exists, he will als6\believe that the

paradox is nonsense, whereas (3) the believer will not take the paradox to be nonsense - on the contrary, he will believe it is true despite the fact that he cannot see in it anything other than a contradiction.

2 There are two points to be noticed here. First, the phrases 'for God' and 'for man' are essential to

any proper statement of Kierkegaard's position. That is, when he speaks of the God-Man as a paradox or a contradiction or an absurdity, he does not do so without qualification. On the contrary, he says that 'it involves the contradiction that something that can become historical only in direct opposition to all human reason, has become historical' (CUP, p. 189), that it is 'an absurdity to the understanding' (CUP, p. 191), that it is 'contradictory to all thinking' (CUP, p. 513), and so on. Accordingly, we find

Climacus saying in the Postscript: ' If speculative philosophy wishes to say... that there is no paradox when

the matter [of the God-Man] is viewed eternally, divinely, theocentrically -

then I admit that I am not in a position to determine whether the speculative philosopher is right, for I am only a poor existing human

being, not competent to contemplate the eternal either eternally or divinely or theocentrically' (CUP, p. 190). Making the same point, Climacus says that 'only eternity possesses the explanation' (CUP, p. 499). It is important to bear in mind here that Climacus says that he is not a Christian, and that is why he, unlike a believer, can say no more than that it is possible that if the matter were viewed eternally (in a timeless consciousness) there would be no paradox, no contradiction. By contrast, Kierkegaard, the

believer, writes in his Journal : ' The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is

truth as it exists for God. The standard measure [of truth]... is superhuman; and [for a man] there is

only one relationship possible: faith' (The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, op. cit. ?1061). 3 This is implied in Kierkegaard's remark: 'It is impossible to conceive existence without movement

[i.e. change and succession], and movement cannot be conceived sub specie aeterni' (CUP, p. 273). Inasmuch as Kierkegaard assumes that God does conceive whatever it is he does conceive sub specie aeterni, it follows from the foregoing that he holds that that which God conceives is timeless. (Many passages suggest that he assumed that the objects of God's thought are Platonic ideas.) In another context he writes: 'For God it may be so; because he has in his eternal [i.e. timeless] consciousness the medium which alone

provides the needed commensurability between outer and inner. But the human spirit cannot see the world-historical in this manner...' (CUP, p. 126).

4 We find Kierkegaard remarking: 'Language is an ideality which every man has gratis. What an

ideality - that God can use language to express his thoughts and thus man by means of language has

fellowship with God' (Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, op. cit. vol. m, ?2336). Although Kierkegaard does not here say so, it may be that he found it remarkable that God can express his thoughts, which are thoughts of matters beheld timelessly, in the temporal language men understand. Of course, if I am

correct, Kierkegaard also thought that it would be a mistake to regard the language of Scripture as being merely human language, so that where we find a contradiction we can judge it to be sheer nonsense. And in fact we find him saying :

' The Christian language uses the same words we men use, and in that

respect desires no change. But its use of them is qualitatively different from our use of them...' (Ibid. ?2333). Although the example Kierkegaard goes on to give is an example of a moral teaching, I take it that what he says here about Scriptural language was meant to cover also the use of temporal language in Scripture to express God's thought of what is not (ultimately) temporal.



210 JOHN W. COOK

life everlasting, this is represented to us as something extending into the

future. Such language will not represent the matter in the way God himself

beholds it, sub specie aeterni, and so what is said in this language will not, in

case God exists, constitute the last word, so to speak, on the matter, since

what, in human language, is called 'life everlasting5 will not be everlasting but

eternal, timeless.1 In short, the believer can allow that the temporal language used in Scripture when God or Jesus is spoken of is not really (not irreducibly)

temporal language.2 (Or to put the matter in another way, the man of faith

can allow that where the language of Scripture is concerned, we are like the

prisoners in Plato's Allegory of the Cave: because humans know only

appearances not Reality (the Forms), the language of Scripture, although it states eternal (timeless) truths, is adjusted (by means of tensed verbs, etc.) to what mere humans can comprehend.) Nevertheless, one needn't think that

because God must resort to temporal language in order to communicate with

His creatures, and because this generates certain contradictions in Scripture, God cannot communicate all that needs communicating. That the temporal

language of Scripture, with its consequent paradoxes, serves God's purposes

quite adequately can be seen if we take proper notice of what God wants

of men.

God's aim is not that of a professor of history, say, who would have his

students come to believe various propositions.3 Rather, God communicates

with men in order to change their lives -

or, more exactly, in order to offer

them the opportunity to change. And the change wanted of us is a change from hubris to humility. The message, roughly, is this : if you will become

properly humble, become a servant of the Lord, you shall have eternal

happiness. Moreover, as a test of one's humility, God makes a demand of

us, namely, that we believe that he appeared on earth as a man. But what

we are here asked to believe can only strike us as a contradiction, so that

1 In the Postscript Kierkegaard writes : ' Is it not the case that eternity is for an existing individual not

eternity, but the future, and that eternity is eternity only for the Eternal, who is not in process of

becoming?_It is undoubtedly for this reason that Christianity has announced eternity as the future

life, namely, because it addresses itself to existing [i.e. temporal] individuals' (CUP, p. 273). In his

Journal, however, he writes that 'in eternity a person is not in the succession of time', meaning that in

surviving death a person ceases to be in time (Soren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, op. cit., vol. 1, ?842). Elsewhere he uses the phrases 'as long as I live in time' (Ibid. ?705) and 'so long as one is in time' (CUP,

P- 499) 2 In The Concept of Dread Kierkegaard remarks that a

' perfect spirit

' has no history, and adds : '... hence

no angel has history. Even though the Archangel Michael had recorded all the missions on which he

was sent and which he performed, this [record] nevertheless is not his history' (Princeton, 1957), p. 44. ? 'The object of faith is not a doctrine, for then the relationship would be intellectual, and it would

be of importance not to botch it, but to realize the maximum intellectual relationship_If Christianity were a doctrine, the relationship to it would not be one of faith, for only an intellectual type of relationship can correspond to a doctrine. Christianity is therefore not a doctrine...' (CUP, pp. 290-1). Kierkegaard's

assumption here seems to be that if religious belief were belief in the ordinary sense, i.e. belief that such

and such is the case, then Hegelian philosophers could undertake to establish, by philosophical means,

the truth of these religious propositions. Accordingly, he thought that the only thing that could prevent

philosophy from replacing faith with knowledge, and thus making faith obsolete, is that the object of

faith should be something that, for human beings, is a contradiction, something we can make no sense

of (see CUP, p. 195).




our salvation is conditioned on believing (not a contradiction but) what is

for us, even if not for God, a contradiction.1 But this means that belief here

is something unique, something other than a propositional attitude. Belief

here is a passion.2 Moreover, we must put away all hope of understanding,

making sense of, what we are asked to believe, which means, of course, that

no philosopher can undertake to make it the conclusion of some piece of

reasoning. Yet, while we can make no sense of it, one who does believe will

allow that God's communication that He became a man is not, finally and

irrevocably, nonsensical and incapable of truth, for he will allow that what

becomes self-contradictory when cast into human (temporal) language may

very well be a truth for God, a truth when beheld sub specie aeterni.

IV

Two questions remain. First, are these view of Kierkegaard's compatible with

Wittgenstein's views about language and religion. Second, has Kierkegaard

given a plausible account of Christianity? I will take these in order.

This much is true: both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein recognized that, for philosophers at least, there is something problematical about the language

(or phraseology) of Christian teachings. Beyond that I can find no agreement between them. For Kierkegaard the problem is that certain Christian

teachings have the appearance of being self-contradictory and hence non?

sensical, and he was anxious to address this problem very differently from

Hegel. He did so by maintaining that the language in which human beings are addressed by Scripture, while it is perfectly suitable inasmuch as we, who

are in time, could understand no other, has the peculiarity that we cannot

discern whether or not what appear to be contradictions (pieces of sheer

nonsense) really are contradictions. The believer, he tells us, is a person who

1 Kierkegaard writes : '... God also handles everything in such a way that he can only become the object

of faith, always making the relationship one that contends against reason.Take all the difficulties in

Christianity which free-thinkers seize hold of and apologists want to defend... [These] difficulties are

simply introduced by God in order to make sure that he can become only the object of faith (although it is also necessarily implicit in his essence and in the disproportion between the two qualities : God and

Man). This is why Christianity is a paradox; this explains the contradictions in Holy Scripture, etc' (Soren

Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, op. cit., vol. i, ? 1144). 2

Kierkegaard makes this explicit when he writes: 'Faith has in fact two tasks: to take care in every moment to discover... the paradox; and then to hold it fast with the passion of inwardness

' (CUP, p.

209). Further on he writes: 'The thing of being a Christian is not determined by the what of Christianity

[i.e. by the content of any doctrine] but by the how of the Christian. This how can only correspond with one thing, the absolute paradox. There is therefore no vague talk to the effect that being a Christian is to accept, and to accept, and to accept quite differently, to appropriate, to believe, to appropriate by faith quite differently (all of them purely rhetorical and fictitious definitions) ; but to believe is specifically different from all other appropriation and inwardness. Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the

repulsion of the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness, which in this instance is intensified to the utmost degree' (CUP, p. 540). In his Journal, where he is speaking with his own voice, Kierkegaard seems to be endorsing this when he writes:

' It is clear that in my writings I have given a further definition

of the concept of faith, which did not exist until now' (The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, op. cit., vol. 1,

?1147; see also ?843).



212 JOHN W. COOK

will allow that Scripture is the word of God and that, because God is a

timeless being, the apparent contradictions in Scripture are not really contradictions because the temporal terms used in Scripture are not, so to

speak, the final word on the matters spoken of there, i.e. that what must be

self-contradictory for humans may be the truth for God. Is there anything in this that Wittgenstein could accept?

Surely not! Wittgenstein emphatically rejects the idea that we cannot

know whether a given form of words is or is not nonsense. If we can see that

it has a use in human life, then we know that it is not nonsense. On

Wittgenstein's view, it cannot be that language (or more narrowly : religious

language) has a 'logic' that is somehow hidden from us. For, as he puts it, 'a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by power independent

of us_A word has the meaning someone has given it.'1 Yet it is essential

to Kierkegaard's view that the real meaning of Scriptural language -

if,

indeed, it has any meaning at all - has been given to it by a power

independent of us. As we have seen (p. 209, fn. 1), he thought that a

philosopher with Wittgenstein's ideas about language could only conclude

that Christianity is sheer nonsense.

That was not, of course, Wittgenstein's conclusion, but his reason for not

drawing that conclusion would have been anathema to Kierkegaard. The

latter took it for granted that Christianity is concerned with - and essentially

concerned with - transcendental matters, with matters that are not a part of the world we are all familiar with in our daily lives. He was entirely

confident, for example, that the promise of eternal happiness was a promise

regarding man's immortal soul. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, maintained

that 'Christianity is not...a theory about what has happened and will

happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes

place in human life.'2 In the same spirit he writes: 'It strikes me that a

religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a

system of reference. Hence, although a belief, it's really a way of living, or

of assessing life.'3 In short, Wittgenstein adopts a reductionist account of

religion. He even goes so far as to say that 'the historical accounts in the

Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief

would lose nothing by this'.4 The Christian believer would lose nothing by

this, he thinks, because the Christian does not, in the first place, hold any such

beliefs. Rather, in Wittgenstein's view, the believer takes from the Gospels the same sort ofthing he might take from, say, a reading of Tolstoy's didactic

stories, namely, the ideal for a way of living one's life. Because he was, in

a general way, philosophically opposed to the very idea of transcendent

entities and events,5 he could make nothing more of religious belief. 1 The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958), p. 28. 2 Culture and Value (Chicago, 1984), p. 28. 3 Ibid. p. 64.

4 Ibid. p. 32. 5

See, for example, ?ettel (Oxford, 1967), ?256-60.




Kierkegaard, of course, could only have regarded Wittgenstein's view as

leaving out the heart and soul of Christianity. He would have thought of

Wittgenstein as reintroducing in a disguised form the idea that man is the

measure of all things, an idea which Kierkegaard took to be the antithesis

of religiosity. In answer to our first question, then, I think it would be fair to say that

no two philosophers could be further apart on fundamental issues than

Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. In saying this, I am not overlooking the

well-known fact that Wittgenstein held Kierkegaard in high esteem.1 Indeed, it is fairly obvious that Wittgenstein thought of himself as endorsing certain

of Kierkegaard's views. For instance, in Culture and Value we find him saying:

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to right than you can forge iron when it is cold.

The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you ; you can follow it as

you would a doctor's prescription. -

But here you need something to move you and

turn you in a new direction_

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.2

In lectures Wittgenstein undertook to expound this Kierkegaardian idea that

religious belief (faith) is not actually belief "(in the ordinary sense) by saying: 'In a religious discourse we use such expressions as: "I believe that so and

so [e.g. a Judgement Day] will happen", and use them differently to the way in which we use them in science.' The difference, he says, is that 'here [in

religion] believing obviously plays much more this role : suppose we said that

a certain picture might play the role of constantly admonishing me, or I

always think of it. Here, an enormous gulf would be between those people for whom the picture is constantly in the foreground, and the others who just didn't use it at all.'3 Now while it is plain that in passages such as these

Wittgenstein took himself to be endorsing Kierkegaard's position, I also think

that he cannot have understood the essentials of that position. As we have

seen, Kierkegaard does indeed hold that, in the case of Christianity, religious belief (faith) is not a propositional attitude since that which might pass for

the content of faith is (for humans) self-contradictory. He sums this up by

saying that 'the object of faith is not a doctrine' (see p. 210, fn. 3 above) and that

' the thing of being a Christian is not determined by the what of

Christianity but by the how of the Christian' (see p. 211, fn. 2 above). So

far there is at least a superficial resemblance between Kierkegaard's view and 1 M. O'C. Drury reports Wittgenstein as having said that 'Kierkegaard was by far the most profound

thinker of the last century ' and that Kierkegaard

' is too long-winded ; he keeps on saying the same thing

over and over again. When I read him I always wanted to say, "Oh all right, I agree, I agree, but please get on with it."

' ' Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein', in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush

Rhees (Oxford, 1984), pp. 87 and 88. 2

Op. cit. p. 53. 3 Lectures and Conversations (Oxford, 1966), p. 57 f.



214 JOHN W. COOK

Wittgenstein's. But the resemblance is no more than superficial. For according to Kierkegaard the 'how' of the Christian is the passion with which he 'holds

fast' to the absolute paradox, and he holds fast to it because, although it can

only strike him as self-contradictory, he believes (apparently in the ordinary sense of the word) that the self-contradictory form of words conceals a

truth - an 'eternal truth', as Kierkegaard puts it, i.e. something that only a

being outside of time can see to be the truth. For Kierkegaard it is this eternal

truth that makes all the difference. If he had come to think that there is

no supernatural agency that can forgive men's sins, he would also have

concluded that Christianity does not merit our attention. And had he

encountered a philosopher stoutly maintaining that there is no possibility of

eternal happiness beyond the grave, he would have declared that this

philosopher could not reconcile his views with Christianity. For according to Kierkegaard, Christianity is only for those who have an

' infinite passionate

interest in an eternal happiness' (CUP, p. 51). Wittgenstein, however, was

firmly opposed to this idea of a Christian promise of happiness beyond 'this

earthly life'. On. the one hand, we find him opposing Kierkegaard's own

conception of the promised state as an ' eternal [timeless] consciousness

' when

he alludes sardonically to

Philosphers who say:'after death a timeless state will begin', or: 'at death a timeless state begins', and do not notice that they have used the words 'after' and 'at' and

'begins' in a temporal sense, and that temporality is embedded in their grammar.1

There are, of course, Christians who can agree with this criticism because

they take Christianity to promise us, not ' timeless

' existence, but everlasting

life. But Wittgenstein, as we have seen, goes further and declares that

Christianity does not promise even this : it does not tell us ' what will happen

to the human soul, but is a description of something that actually takes place in human life'. Plainly, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are at odds on the

most fundamental matters.

Our second question was whether Kierkegaard's account of Christianity, so far as we have surveyed it here, is plausible. In order to answer this

question, it is necessary to be reminded of a general feature of his account

that I have not mentioned. This is that Kierkegaard did not mean to be

devising an account of Christianity that satisfied preconceived philosophical

requirements but instead meant to be describing something familiar to even

the simplest of believers. Indeed, he was repelled by the Hegelian version of

Christianity partly because it seemed to give intellectuals an advantage.

Thus, we find him saying :

... I cannot abandon the thought that every man, absolutely every man, however

simple he is,... can nevertheless grasp the highest, namely, religion. I cannot forget

that. If that is not so, then Christianity is really nonsense ?

1 Culture and Value, op. cit. p. 22.




Think of the highest of all things, think of Christ - only imagine that he came into

the world in order to save a few really clever people, for the others could not

understand him. Horrible, disgusting. No human suffering repelled him, nor any limitations - but the society of clever people, that would certainly have repelled

him.1

One implication of this is that, since Kierkegaard held that one requisite for

becoming a Christian is that one recognizes the doctrine of the God-Man

as being an absolute paradox, he must also have thought that every

Christian, however simple, conceives of God as a timeless being, so that for

even the simplest the God-Man is an absolute paradox. And this, in fact, is

what Kierkegaard says : '

When Christianity came into the world there were

no professors and Privatdocents at all ; then it was the paradox for everyone '

(CUP, p. 198). And again: 'Christianity as understood by the speculative

philosopher is something different from Christianity as expounded for the

simple. For them it is a paradox; but speculative philosophy knows how to

abrogate the paradox' (CUP, p. 200). Plainly, Kierkegaard believed that

everyone conceives of God as timeless. But is he right about that?

We have already noticed that Kierkegaard takes occasion to chide the

clergy for speaking of God as everlasting rather than as eternal (timeless). He himself knew full well, then, that his own notion of God as timeless was

not universally received. He should also have known that his own notion is

not that found in the Bible. For as John Marsh observes, ' For the philosopher

God is eternal, dwelling in an eternal "now" entirely apart from succession.

But the Bible speaks with unashamed anthropomorphism about a God who

acts in history and meets with men.'2 And Nelson Pike, in God and Timelessness, sums up his examination of the issues, as well as his survey of the relevant

doctrinal literature, as follows :

... there appears to be little reason to think that this doctrine [that God is timeless] is implied by the basic Christian concept of God..., nor have I been able to find

any basis for it in biblical literature or in the confessional literature of either Catholic or Protestant Churches. Again, on this last point, the evidence I have

uncovered... seems to point rather clearly in the other direction.3

Kierkegaard can hardly have been right, then, in thinking that his philo?

sophical conception of God is also the common conception. But in that case

his insistence that, to be a Christian, one must recognize the God-Man as

an absolute paradox has the consequence of making Christianity unavailable

to the vast majority. His timeless God is the God of only a handful of

philosophers and theologians. And in that case his definition of'faith' is, at

best, highly idiosyncratic. While it may be that Kierkegaard himself, qua

Christian, did not, in the ordinary sense of the word, believe anything

1 The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, op. cit. ? 1031. 2 'Time and Eternity', in A Handbook of Christian Theology (Cleveland, 1964), p. 107. 3

Op. cit. p. 190. Pike marshals his evidence regarding confessional literature on pp. 180-7.



2l6 JOHN W. COOK

regarding the doctrine of the incarnation and related matters (that, instead, he had only a 'passion' of some sort), this is not how it is with the typical

Christian, who, when reciting the Apostle's Creed or the Athanasian Creed, for example, certainly means to be reaffirming various beliefs.

In his journals Kierkegaard expressed the hope that in his writings he had

managed at least to provide an 'exact description of Christianity', so that

others might have the guidance that he had lacked.1 I think we must

conclude that that hope went unfulfilled. Kierkegaard was a nineteenth

century philosopher, and his ' description

' of Christianity was given in the

philosophical categories in which he felt at home. It seems never to have

occurred to him to describe Christianity without the use of philosophical terms, in the way that an anthropologist, for example, might describe it.

Perhaps it would have seemed to him - and not unreasonably so - that such

a description would leave Christianity vulnerable to some plain-spoken and

unanswerable criticisms.

v

I have argued that while Wittgenstein thought of himself as agreeing with

certain of Kierkegaard's central claims, in fact he did not understand those

claims. This misunderstanding has led others to misunderstand Wittgenstein himself. Taking him to be in substantial agreement with Kierkegaard, some

of his followers have assumed that his philosophical views are compatible with Christianity. The fact of the matter, however, is that Wittgenstein remained an empiricist to the end, with the consequence that he could find

no sense in the idea of supernatural beings and supra-empirical events. Yet

for various reasons he refused to think that Christianity is worthless nonsense, and so he undertook to make sense of it within his empiricism, which is to

say that he sought to give a reductionist account of Christianity. The

realization of this should put an end to religious philosophers calling

Wittgenstein's views to their assistance in disputes over what sense, if any, can be found in Christian teachings.

Drury reports: 'When he [sc. Wittgenstein] was hard at work on the

manuscript of the Philosophical Investigations he said to me: "I am not a

religious man, but I can't help seeing everything from a religious point of

view."'2 I think we cannot dispute that Wittgenstein was not a religious

man, but I should think that a Christian -

whether a Kierkegaardian or

not - would have to dispute Wittgenstein's assertion that he saw things from

a religious point of view. How could he have when he dismissed the very idea

that men are creatures, owing their existence and their devotion to a

1 The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, op. cit. ?849. 2 O. M'C. Drury, The Danger of Words (New York, 1973), p. xiv.



KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN 21 7

supernatural being? Another of his remarks, also quoted by Drury, puts this

matter in proper perspective :

It is a dogma of the Roman Church [said Wittgenstein] that the existence of God

can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me

to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside

myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.1

I take it that the sense of this passage is this : if God is conceived of as being

the possible subject of an existence proof, so that by means of a proof one

might come to know of his existence, then he is being conceived of as a being

outside oneself, i.e. as a being with whom one must reckon because he holds

one's fate in his hands. Wittgenstein found the idea of proofs to be

unacceptable because he found abhorrent the conception of God that goes

with such proofs. But in rejecting the conception of God as a being outside

oneself, Wittgenstein was as much at odds with Protestantism as with

Catholicism and as much at odds with Islam as with Christianity. For all

these, God is not God unless he holds dominion over all.

The fact that Wittgenstein nonetheless imagined that he saw everything from a religious point of view tells us something important about his

philosophical views. On the one hand, he held that people make the mistake

of resorting to the idea of'spirit' or 'the immaterial' or 'the aetherial' when

they fail to see how one sort of word (or phrase) in the language differs from

another,2 and it seems likely that he would have said that the idea of God

as a being outside of oneself is the product of just such a confusion, i.e. that

because 'God' is grammatically a proper name philosophers make the

mistake of thinking that there is some sort of being (although plainly not a

material being) named 'God'. On the other hand, his propensity to invoke

reductionist accounts as a means of'saving the language'3 led him to think

that in religion, as elsewhere, a reductionist account brings out the actual

meaning of religious terms and thus saves them from the attacks of

philosophical sceptics.

Finally, it is necessary to address a question that inevitably arises out of

certain things Wittgenstein said when he was not engaged in philosophizing. For instance, Drury reports him saying :

' I seem to be surrounded now by

Roman Catholic converts! I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope

they do,'4 and on another occasion saying: '...of this I am certain, that we

1 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', in Recollections of Wittgenstein, op. cit. pp. 107-8. 2 The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 4 and 47 and Philosophical Investigations, ? 36. 3 In my essay 'The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein's On Certainty' (Philosophical Investigations, April 1985,

pp. 81-119) I have argued that Wittgenstein never did abandon the phenomenalism that was so

prominent in his writings and lectures of the 1930s. I am also prepared to argue that, despite his

protestations to the contrary, he was a behaviourist -

albeit, not a behaviourist of the sort represented

by either J. B. Watson or the logical positivists. 4 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', op. cit. p. 148.



2l8 JOHN W. COOK

are not here in order to have a good time'.1 In these remarks, as in many

others, Wittgenstein seems to be talking as though he accepted certain

orthodox views, e.g. that there is a God who hears and may respond to men's

prayers and who has created us for a purpose. But how can that be? Is there

not an inconsistency between his remarks of the sort just quoted and his

declaration : ' I am not a religious man

' ? How, after all, could an atheist hope

that his friends are praying for him?

The answer to this question is that Wittgenstein did not think of himself

as an atheist. On the contrary, his philosophy - his empiricism

- eliminates

the possibility, not only that there is a supernatural being who hears men's

prayers, but also that there is no such being. (The negation of a piece of

nonsense remains a piece of nonsense.) Because atheists hold that there is no

such being, Wittgenstein could only think that atheism is muddleheaded. On

Wittgenstein's view, the difference between believers and non-believers lies

in their attitudes towards life and in whether they participate sincerely in

the observance of certain rituals. Now I think it is fair to say that Wittgenstein did share at least some of (what he took to be) the Christian attitudes towards

life.2 And because he did, he also found it appropriate, on occasion, to use

certain religious expressions. For example, I should think that when he said

that we are not here to have a good time, he did not mean to imply that

there is a creator whose purposes we are to serve but meant only to express his agreement with Christian attitudes about life, about how one ought to

live. And I suspect that his hope that his Catholic friends prayed for him

was only the hope that they were concerned for him, such concern being what

he took that sort of prayer to express. And the same sort of explanation holds,

I should think, when we find Wittgenstein occasionally calling on God, as

he did when he wrote : ' God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in

front of everyone's eyes.'3 One may wonder how Wittgenstein, who holds that

God is not a supernatural being outside of himself, could make such a

supplication. The explanation is that Wittgenstein thought that such

supplications, even when made by the most orthodox Christians, do not

presuppose belief in a supernatural being. Thus, in his remarks on Frazer, we find him saying:

Was Augustine mistaken, then, when called on God on every page of the

Confession? Well

- one

might say -

if he was not mistaken, then the Buddist holy-man, or some

other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them

was making

a mistake except where he was putting forward a

theory.4

1 'Some Notes on Conservations with Wittgenstein', op. cit. p. 88. 2 On one occasion he remarked to Drury: 'There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians'.

'Conversations with Wittgenstein', op. cit. p. 114. 3 Culture and Value, op. cit. p. 63. 4 'Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough"', The Human World, in (May, 1971), pp. 28-9.



KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN 2ig

Wittgenstein is alleging that whatever is said in a truly religious spirit does

not express or presuppose any theory (any belief about the universe, about

what exists or doesn't exist, and that therefore different religions do not

contradict one another so that only one can be true. So when Augustine 4 called on God on every page of the Confession ', he was not, as we might think,

making supplication to a supernatural being. Accordingly Wittgenstein, too, can 'call upon God

' (so he thought) without running afoul of his empiricism,

for he will only be doing whatever it was that Augustine was doing. When reading Wittgenstein, it is important to remember that reduc?

tionists, when they think they have reduced #'s tojy's, also think they have

saved the language in which x's are spoken of, as Hume did with the words

'cause', 'power', and 'necessity'.1 Wittgenstein and some of his followers

have attempted to reduce religious belief to ethical attitudes solemnized and

memorialized in ritual, and they think that this entitles them to use religious terms and phraseology despite their denial of the transcendent. But just as an

unbiased look at the use of the word 'cause' (and related words) shows that

Hume had no right to continue (as he did) speaking of the causes of things, so an unbiased look at the actual use of religious terms shows that

Wittgenstein and his followers have no right to continue (as they do) using such terms.2 It is time for atheists to talk like atheists, for when they do

otherwise, they only mislead.

1 In the Treatise Hume writes : ' Thus upon the whole we may infer that when we talk of any being... as

endow'd with a power or force, proportion'd to any effect; when we speak of a necessary connexion betwixt

objects, and suppose that this connexion depends upon an efficacy or energy, with which these objects are endow'd ; in all these expressions, so applied, we really have no distinct meaning, and make use only of common words, without any clear and determinate ideas. But as 'tis more probable that these

expressions do here lose their true meaning by being wrongly apply'd, than that they never have any

meaning; 'twill be proper to bestow another consideration on this subject, to see if possibly we can discover

the nature and origin of those ideas we annex to them' (Bk. i, Part in, ?xiv). What Hume goes on to

do in his further consideration of this topic is, of course, to invent a reductionist meaning of the word

'cause,' so as to accommodate that word to his empiricist metaphysics. 2 See Kai Nielson,

' Wisdom and Dilman on the Scope of Reason in Religion ', Philosophical Investigations,

Autumn, 1980, pp. 1-14; and his 'Philosophy and Religious Commitment: A Response to Dilman',

Philosophical Investigations, Spring, 1981, pp. 58-60.



Documents

Kerkegaard & Wittgenstein-john Cook