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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
In some unpublished lectures on communication written in 1847, Kierkegaard contends that Christian communication requires some direct discourse. This did not mean that he had abandoned his long-standing insistence that Christianity is a project for existence. The information conveyed in that discourse is not intended to assuage intellectual curiosity and to supplement our general desire for knowledge. Rather, it intends a change in people's lives. Thus, he further asserts that this direct discourse is preliminary and must be followed by indirect discourse. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard is saying that some truth claims about matters of fact are indispensable; some propositions that convey information, which might from a logical standpoint be either objectively true or false, are necessary in genuine Christian communication.
page 121 note 1 See the section entitled ‘Communication’ in Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, trs. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967, vol. I, pp. 252–319 and esp. p. 289.Google Scholar
page 122 note 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein. New York: The Viking Press, 1969, p. 185.Google Scholar
page 122 note 2 ibid., p. 187.
page 122 note 3 ‘Faith, Scepticism, and Religious Understanding.’ Faith and Philosophical Inquiry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 17f.Google Scholar
page 123 note 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trs. Pears, D. F. & McGuinness, B. F.. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 6.41. (Citation by reference to the numbered remarks of the text.)Google Scholar
page 123 note 2 Quoted by Toulmin, Stephen in ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’. Encounter, vol. XXXII (Jan. 1969), p. 69.Google Scholar
page 123 note 3 ibid., p. 64.
page 124 note 1 ‘The Blue Book.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Man and his Philosophy, ed. Fann, K. T.. New York: Dell Publishing, 1967, p. 170.Google Scholar
page 124 note 2 Quoted by Rhees, Rush in ‘The Philosophy of Wittgenstein’. Discussions of Wittgenstein. New York: Schocken Books, 1970, pp. 42f.Google Scholar
page 125 note 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe, G. E. M.. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958, 109.Google Scholar
page 126 note 1 Among that cluster of religious phenomena that is covered by the word ‘Gnosticism’, there are several examples of beliefs that are not treated as assertions of matters of fact. Syncretism was characteristic of Gnosticism; the Gnostics readily incorporated the beliefs of other religions with which they came in contact into their own vast theogonic or cosmogonic speculations. Irenaeus and other Church fathers focused on this aspect, emphasising the absurdity of anyone's believing all that was packed into the Gnostic pleromas. But, as more original Gnostic sources have come to light, it has become increasingly evident that there was a more sophisticated side of Gnostic thought than the fathers recognised or admitted. ‘The detailed theogonies of the Gnostic teachers’, Jaroslav Pelikan notes, ‘were finally aimed at dealing with the human predicament, not simply at accounting for the origin of the cosmos. As one Gnostic teacher counseled, “Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point.”’ (The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 86.)Google Scholar In his essay, ‘Introduction to the Gita’, Elliot Deutsch argues that the Bhagavad Gita accords a similar treatment to the beliefs of the earlier Upanishads; i.e. it makes of the beliefs an indirect description of a personal experience of redemption. (The Bhagavad Gita. New York, 1968, pp. 3–25Google Scholar.)
With respect to Christianity it is significant that modern demythologising biblical theologians have not regarded the New Testament authors as simply manipulators of the myths of their day but as victims of them. This is their reason for insisting on a demythologising translation into an idiom accessible to modern men. Of course this hermeneutical technique, depending as it does on an extraconceptual grasp of the subject-matter and on the possibility of translating concepts in a manner analogous to the way we translate words from one language to another, is not available to the Wittgensteinians of the complete-indirectness school. Being more sophisticated about the logical relationships between concepts and understanding and less sophisticated about exegesis of the biblical text, they have a tendency to imply or argue in a relatively unexamined way that, the New Testament authors did not intend the beliefs to be truth claims.
page 127 note 1 It has, after all, never been a temptation in traditional Christian thought to suppose that God is a physical being with eyebrows, etc.
page 127 note 2 Philosophical Investigations, 66.
page 128 note 1 See Winch, , ‘Introduction: the Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy’. Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Winch, Peter. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 16ff.Google Scholar Winch's claim that this interpretation is tempting is supported by the case of Pears, who gives in to the temptation. Speaking of Wittgenstein's philosophy, Pears writes: ‘It does not assimilate one kind of discourse to another: on the contrary, it is always the differences between them that are emphasised, and particularly the difference between factual discourse and the other kinds… Wittgenstein was always preoccupied with the pseudo-scientific treatment of religion, morality and philosophy… He rejects the pseudo-scientific treatment of nonfactual modes of thought.… A religious tenet is not a factual hypothesis, but something which affects our thoughts and actions in a different kind of way’ (op. cit., pp. 185ff).
page 129 note 1 ‘Verifiability.’ How I See Philosophy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968, P.59.Google Scholar
page 130 note 1 On Certainty, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. & von Wright, G. H.. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1969, 204.Google Scholar
page 131 note 1 We do not express judgments of absolute value on any occasion but only in circumstances where it makes sense to do so. For the person capable of making such judgments, those factual circumstances are not neutral but value-laden. One might, for example, in reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov come to see that the elderly and saintly monk, Father Zosima, was in fact a father to Alyosha Karamazov in a way that the young man's biological father never was. For a person having only the biological conception of fatherhood, this could not be a fact at all.
page 132 note 1 Quoted by Malantschuk, Gregor in Kierkegaard's Thought, trs. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 364f.Google Scholar