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Do We Choose to Believe Things According to Kierkegaard?

This post concerns two types of belief, or faith according to Kierkegaard: ordinary, everyday beliefs and specifically Christian faith. There is only one word in Danish for both types of belief: Tro. 

A journal entry from 1852 exhibits the concept that most scholars have in mind when talking about Kierkegaard’s views on Christian faith.

πιστισ—επιστημμη

So here we have it πιστισ as it is used in good Greek (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) is regarded as signifying something somewhat lower than επιστημμη. πιστισ relates to what is probable. Therefore πιστισ, to produce faith, according the the classics, is the orator’s task.

Christianity now comes and brings up the concept of faith in an entirely different sense, precisely in relation to the paradox (that is, improbability), but then again as signifying the highest certainty [Vished] (see the definitions in Hebrews), consciousness of the eternal, the most passionate certainty that causes a per[son] to sacrifice everything, life itself, for this faith.” (KJN 9, 81.)

The Danish for this passage is:

See der har vi det. πιστις saaledes som det bruges i godt Græsk (Plato, Aristoteles o: s: v:) ansees for at betegne noget langt lavere end επιστημη. πιστις forholder sig nemlig til det Sandsynlige. Derfor er  πιστις at frembring Tro, ogsaa efter Clasikkernes Mening, Talernes Opgave.

Nu kommer Christendommen og bringer Begrebet Tro op, i en ganske anden Forstand, Tro just som forholdende sig til det Paradoxe (altsaa det Usandsynlige) men saa igjen betegnende den høieste Vished (cfr. Definitionen i Hebræerbrevet) Evigheds-Bevidstheden, den meest lidenskabelige Vished, der lader et Msk. offre Alt, Livet med for denne Tro.

It’s important to appreciate Kierkegaard’s observation that the task of the orator, according to classical philosophers, was to “produce” [frembringe, which literally means “to bring forth] faith. That is, faith, or belief in the ordinary sense, is for Kierkegaard, as for classical philosophers, a passion, or an essentially passive thing. It appears to be something that happens to a person, rather than something that person does. Orators “produce” faith. They do not incite their listeners to make decisions that what they are saying is correct, they persuade, or produce belief by making what they are saying appear more probable than alternative views. No rational person, when presented with a multiplicity of views will adopt one that appears less probable to them over one that appears more probable. 

Kierkegaard appears to believe that convictions evolve naturally in people as apparent probability increases. Some people are less credulous than other people, and hence require more persuading, but credulity is arguably the default state of human beings. Kierkegaard was well aware of this. That, I believe, is where the “leap” comes in. People form beliefs based on their perceptions of probability and are generally unaware of the fact that probability is very different from formal certainty. To form beliefs is to go just a little bit beyond the evidence on which they are based, because that evidence (outside mathematics anyway) is always only probabilisitic and probabilities are not proofs in the strict sense. That is, beliefs are underdetermined by the evidence on which they are based.

I described this dynamic in “Kierkegaard on Rationality” where I explain that we appear “compelled” to make judgments based on their perceptions of probability, or improbability “simply by virtue of the kind of creatures we are.” I did speak there about “choosing between” different interpretations of existence, but I believe now that I was wrong. I was less familiar with Kierkegaard’s thought then than I am now (that was actually a paper I wrote in graduate school) and I was making an argument against Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim in After Virtue that “Kierkegaard considered moral commitment to be ‘the expression of a criterionless choice,” or “a choice for which no rational justification can be given” (After Virtue, 38). That is, I was more concerned to refute the idea that there was no rational justification for the movement from one interpretation of existence to another, than I was with the issue of whether that movement was the expression of a choice. 

In fact, Kierkegaard does not describe the movement from an aesthetic interpretation of existence to an ethical one as a choice. What he says there is that the aesthetic view of existence sees suffering as a result of misfortune. The more misfortune, the more suffering. Hence the aesthete who experiences persistent suffering, starts to view the aesthetic interpretation of existence as less plausible than the ethical interpretation because the latter sees suffering as essential to human existence. If an aesthete experiences persistent suffering, asserts Kierkegaard, “he despairs, whereby immediacy ends, and the transition to another understanding of misfortune is made possible, that is, to comprehending suffering, an understanding that does not merely comprehend this or that misfortune, but essentially comprehends suffering” (CUP, 434 emphasis added).

The Danish for this passage is “fortvivler han, hvorved Umiddelbarheden hører op og Overgangen er gjort muligt til en anden Forstaaelse a Ulykken: til at fatte Lidelsen, en Forstaaelse der ikke blot fatter denne eller hiin Ulykke, men væsentligen fatter Lidelse.” (SKS 7, 394.) 

The expression that is translated as “comprehend” is fatte, and this translation is indeed correct. To fatte something means literally “to catch it,” and figuratively to “apprehend,” or “comprehend” (see Ferrall-Repp). Persistent suffering facilitates a more accurate understanding of the true nature of suffering. The sufferer doesn’t chose a better understanding of suffering. That is, they don’t chose an ethical interpretation of existence over an aesthetic one. Their persistent suffering helps them to get a better grasp of suffering, of its place in human existence, and hence of the nature of human existence. It is more like an act of perception than like a choice. 

That said, there is some element of volition here. Kierkegaard says that persistent suffering makes the transition to another understanding of existence possible, not that it forces this understanding on the sufferer.  The suffer can chose to persist in despair, can chose to continue to doubt what now seems increasingly plausible to him. That is, one can refuse to assent to the truth of a perception. That’s a negative expression of volition, though, rather than the positive expression we would generally associate with a choice.

This highlights how unlike the secular existentialists Kierkegaard is. We cannot make meaning out of nothing. There are objective truths about reality.  We cannot chose to believe whatever we want about reality. Reality impresses itself upon us and our choices are limited to either accepting or rejecting these impressions, or to inquiring further into whether they are correct. That is, our impressions concerning the true nature of some particular aspect of reality, do not appear to be free choices, according to Kierkegaard, but something produced in us independently of our will. 

The will does have a role, however, in belief formation, even with respect to objective reality, to the extent that we can decide the extent to which we want to inquire into the truth of a particular proposition. We sometimes have conflicting impressions relative to the probability of the truth of a particular proposition. If the majority of the scientific community subscribes to a particular theory, that will likely give rise to the impression that that theory is correct. On the other hand, if we are personally acquainted with a scientist whom we respect, who argues persuasively (in the loose sense of persuasive) that that theory is incorrect, then we may well be torn concerning whether to accept the theory as true. In instances such as these, which are likely many, we don’t generally decide what to believe, we simply keep looking into the issue until it seems to us that we have identified the view that is most likely correct, and we determine this, when, after some period of investigation, we find ourselves believing one or the other of the two views about which were were originally torn. 

This goes against what I said in Ways of Knowing, where I asserted that Kierkegaard was 

aware that the impression created in the scholar, or scientist, by the direction in which a particular set of data is tending can be so great that we would seem to have little choice but to accept the data as conclusive and he is not, for the most part, concerned to preclude such acceptance. Indeed, he recognizes full well, unlike the Pyrrhonist to whom he is so indebted, that a life without beliefs is impossible. His concern is rather to expose the nature of such acceptance, that it is a choice, no matter how well-founded or reasonable is may appear relative to alternative choices. (Ways of Knowing, 93.)

But again, I believe I was wrong in that I don’t think Kierkegaard was concerned to expose that the acceptance of one view of empirical reality, or one scholarly theory, over another was a choice, but rather that such acceptance was undetermined by the evidence that led to the acceptance. That is, I think he was concerned to point out that we cannot have certainty in any discipline outside of mathematics. Such an appreciation is important, because it highlights that the will does have some role in the search for scholarly and scientific knowledge. But that role, I believe now, is restricted to the decision of whether to continue collecting evidence rather than to accepting or rejecting a particular theory. 

I realize that this is an extremely fine distinction in that that decision is going to be related to how strong has become the impression that one theory is more probably correct than another. But I think it is none-the-less an important distinction because not only does it make sense of the actual language he uses when describing the transition from an aesthetic interpretation of existence to an ethical one, it coheres with the fact that Kierkegaard clearly believed that there was an objective reality that would impinge upon the perceptions, both literal and figurative of the observer, or subject. 

There are passages in Kierkegaard’s works that might appear to go against the view I’m presenting here, such as in the second volume of Either-Or where Judge Wilhelm refers to the subject’s choice of himself (cf., e.g., EO II, 215), but choosing oneself is a very different sort of choice than choosing to believe something.

Kierkegaard does refer to Troens Valg, i.e., “the choice of faith” (KJN 8, 146) when he observes “Holy Scripture demands ‘faith,’” and for precisely this reason there must be inconsistencies, so that there can be a choice of faith, or so that faith becomes a choice.”

That is the only place, however, in the entire Kierkegaard corpus (at least according to the online edition of SKS) where he uses that expression. He uses similar expressions in other places, but always, according to my cursory research, with respect to Christian faith, never (at least according to the online edition of SKS) with respect to any other sort of belief. That is, I did a search on vælge at tro (chose to believe) and on beslutte at tro (or decide to believe) and there were no hits whatever for either phrase in the entirety of the Kierkegaard corpus. 

Before I proceed with my argument, I want to caution against starting with word searches of that sort. I’ve been reading Kierkegaard for more than forty years. I feel that I know how he thinks. That’s a dangerous assumption, of course, but I have so far, anyway, generally been proved right in what I’ve assumed was his position on a particular issue. I don’t do word searches on SKS to learn what Kierkegaard’s views on a particular subject are. I go looking for passages to cite to support what I believe to be his views, and also occasionally, as in this instance, to see if I might be wrong, if there are perhaps passages that suggest Kierkegaard held some view other than the one I’m inclined to attribute to him, or that might appear to suggest this and hence be used by scholars less familiar with Kierkegaard’s thought to support erroneous interpretations of it. 

Word searches on SKS are a dangerous place to start in trying to understand Kierkegaard’s views because the hits will take the searcher to passages in works where the context of the occurrence of the term in question will be crucial to understanding what Kierkegaard is talking about. Kierkegaard uses the term Tro, for example, like he uses so many other terms, in a variety of ways. Sometimes it refers to the faith that is a momentary phenomenon (pun intended), and other times to Christian doctrine, and still other times diachronically to the life of a Christian who strives to continually renew the faith that is experienced in “the moment.” One needs to know the context in which the word, or expression, occurs to understand the meaning it has in that context, to say nothing of in the authorship as a whole.

But back to the issue of this post. One has to chose the believe the truth of Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, precisely because belief in that truth cannot form naturally, as do other beliefs. It is important to appreciate, however, that while this choice is necessary to Christian faith, it is not sufficient. Faith is what Kierkegaard in Philosophical Crumbs, calls “the condition for understanding the truth,” and that is given to the believer by Christ in the believer’s encounter with Christ, or, as he expresses it in Crumbs, with “the god in time.”

Kierkegaard asserts in Crumbs that “the conclusion of belief [Slutning] is not an inference but a decision [Beslutning]” (Crumbs, 150/SKS 4, 283) where he is not obviously talking about Christian faith or belief. The context of this reference, however, is a grasp of becoming as such and this is not an ordinary epistemological activity. Historians are generally concerned with what historical facts were rather than with how they came about. That is, historians are concerned with determining what happened in the past, not whether it happened freely or was the product of deterministic forces.  And becoming is never an issue in the natural sciences because the only “becoming,” in Kierkegaard’s technical sense, that can be attributed to nature is restricted to the moment of its creation. The changes that subsequently characterize nature do not represent becoming in the genuine sense.

“Becoming” appears to be a specifically Christian concept, according to Kierkegaard. What he refers to in Crumbs as the “Socratic” perspective, which he appears, at least there, to consider the only possible alternative to the Christian, makes time unreal. The changes that characterize temporal phenomenal existence from the “Socratic” perspective are like the changes Kierkegaard says characterize nature. They do not involve genuine becoming. So when Kierkegaard is talking about the “conclusion of belief [Tro]” being a decision, he is likely talking specifically, if indirectly, about Christian faith and not about belief in a more generic sense. 

So ordinary beliefs are formed in us more or less independently of our wills. The will can have a role, according to Kierkegaard, but it appears that role is restricted to deciding whether to keep investigating the truth of some candidate for belief or to give in to the impression that the object of the belief is true. What distinguishes Christian faith, or belief, from ordinary faith, or belief, for Kierkegaard, is that it is not the natural product of an impression of the increasing probability that Christianity is true, but an antidote to the anguish of the consciousness of sin, the importance of which increases in proportion to the increase in that anguish. The more desperate the need of the sinner for forgiveness, the greater the attraction of Christianity. But the attraction is not the product of an impression of the increasing probability of the truth of forgiveness. Quite the contrary. The greater the sinner’s anguish, the less credible to him will be the claim that his sins are forgiven. 

That, I would argue, is the true paradox of Christianity. The believer believes against probability, or the impression of probability, in contrast to every other belief, he or she might have, but out of need. That is, the Christian must decide to believe the truth of Christianity in a sense in which they do not actually decide to believe anything else, precisely because the belief will not form naturally in them. That is why, I believe, Kierkegaard argues that “Christianity now comes and brings up the concept of faith in an entirely different sense, precisely in relation to the paradox (that is, improbability).”

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Yet Another Error in the New Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks

I’ve found yet another significant error in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I don’t go looking for errors, as I believe I’ve explained in earlier posts, I discover them by accident, usually when I’m updating references from the old Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Due to the generosity of my friend Sylvia Walsh Perkins, I have a complete set of both KJN and the earlier JP. Most of the journal references in my earlier writing, as well as the notes I’ve made over the years, are to the JP, so when I need to update those references to the new KJN, I go first to the relevant JP entry because that entry always includes a reference to the passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, the only complete edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers in Danish. When I find the passage in the Pap. I type the Danish into the searchable edition of the new Danish Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. That then gives me the location of the passage in SKS. The new KJN is keyed to SKS, so once I have the SKS info I can find the passage in the new KJN.

Unfortunately, I keep discovering problems with the new KJN. The problem I am going to talk about in this post concern the following passage from KJN

For a thinker there can be no worse anguish than having to live in suspense while people pile up detail upon detail; it always looks as if the idea, the conclusion, will arrive very soon. If a researcher in the natural sciences does not feel this anguish he must not be a thinker. This is the terrible tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is, as it were, in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit. (KJN 4, 72.)

The Danish for this passage is:

For en Tænker kan der ikke gives nogen rædsommere Qval end at skulde leve hen i den Spænding at medens man opdynger Detail, det bestandig seer ud som kom nu Tanken næste Gang, Conclusionen. Føler Naturforskeren ikke denne Qval saa maa han ikke være Tænker. Dette det Intellectuelles rædsomme Tantalisme! En Tænker er som i Helvede saa længe han ikke har fundet Aandens Vished.

The Hongs render the Danish as:

For a thinker there is no more horrible anguish than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it continually seems as if the thought, the conclusion, is just about to appear. If the natural scientist does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is literally in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit.

Here is how I would translate the passage: 

There is no torment more dreadful to a thinker than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it constantly seems as if the conclusion will come with the next thought. If the natural scientist [Naturforsker] does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is in hell as long as he has not found certainty [Aandens Vished].

The Hongs’ translation of this passage is generally superior to the new KJN translation. There are numerous problems with the translation in KJN. First, the term translated in KJN merely as “worse” (rædsommere) is the same term that is translated later as “terrible” (rædsomme). The latter translation is more accurate in that rædssom has connotations of fear given that it is derived from ræd which Ferrall-Repp translates as “fearful, timid, afraid, frightened, timorous.” One can’t actually call the translation of rædsommere  as “worse” a error, though. It just isn’t ideal. The Hongs’ “more horrible” is actually preferable.

The same thing could be said of KJN’s tortured attempt to keep Kierkegaard’s simile “som i Helvede” a simile by translating in as “is, as it were, in hell.” The phrase sounds intolerably pedantic in English, whereas the original Danish, som i Helvede would not sound pedantic to a native Danish speaker. The tone of the original is far better preserved by rendering the simile as a metaphor. That is, som i Helvede is better translated as “is in hell,” without the Hongs’ “literally,” since if some translation of som were necessary, “figuratively” would be more appropriate, but would, again, render a passage that sounds more pedantic in English than it does in Danish.

The last annoying departure from the Hongs’ translation of the passage in question that I’m going to list in this post is the rendering of opdynger Detail  as “pile up detail upon detail.” Opdynge, according to Ferrall-Repp means  “to heap up, amass, accumulate,” so the Hongs’ “heaping up,” is arguably preferable to KJN’s “pile up,” but again, the new translation does not actually alter the sense of the passage. Even the fact that KJN renders Detail (which has no plural in Danish but which is clearly used in the plural sense in this passage) as “detail upon detail” doesn’t doesn’t actually alter the sense of the passage. 

There are lots of these unnecessary deviations from the Hongs’ translations in the new KJN translations. Rendering “Spænding” as “suspense” rather than “tension” is less desirable than the Hongs’ “tension” given that Ferrall-Repp does not list “suspense” as one of the possible English translations of Spænding. Those translations are: “1. tension; 2. estrangement; 3. excitement.” That said, “suspense” isn’t actually misleading. It’s just an unnecessary deviation from the earlier translation. One gets the sense, going through the new KJN, that many of the deviations from the Hongs’ earlier translations were made not because there was any problem with the original, but because the more changes the new translation team could come up with, the greater would be the impression that a new translation was necessary.  

No such justification for a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was necessary, however, because the Hongs’ translation was not complete. That is, there was definitely a need for a complete English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. Sadly, KJN is not a complete translation of all of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers because is it based on SKS and SKS is not complete. That is, there’s lots of important material missing from SKS (see earlier posts on the problems with SKS).

The error in the new KJN translation of the above passage is the translation of the Danish man as “people.” Not only is this incorrect, it is seriously misleading. Man, in Danish, just like man in German, is properly translated as “one” (as indeed the Hongs did render it in their translation of this passage). That is, it isn’t other people who Kierkegaard describes as piling up “detail upon detail” (opdynger Detail), but the researcher who is the subject of the passage. 

The error in KJN actually gives the passage a different meaning. That is, it makes it look as if the thinker in question experiences rising anxiety, or whatever, as he or she watches other people’s research amass more and more material that would be relevant to some issue to which the thinker is seeking a resolution, or some question to which he or she is seeking an answer. In fact, such a view could be attributed to Kierkegaard, as I in fact did attribute it in the paper I gave at Princeton in July. That is, I pointed out in that paper that science and scholarship, according to Kierkegaard, are collective endeavors, that no individual scholar or scientist can be the sole arbiter of truth in his or her discipline. 

The new KJN translation of the passage in question from Kierkegaard’s journals would appear to support such a view and could easily be appropriated by scholars as a reference that would support such a view. The thing is, it doesn’t. It isn’t inconsistent with such a view. It just doesn’t speak to the issue of how the establishment of truth in science and scholarship is a collective endeavor. The issue of this passage is how intellectuals, or scholars and scientists, are actually unwittingly searching for a kind of certitude, or mental calm, that cannot be found in the realm of science and scholarship, or of ideas more generally, but only in the realm of spirit. 

So scholars beware. If you are not actually fluent in Danish and have your own edition of Soren Kierkegaards Papirer (or easy access to a library that has it). Then you are going to want to get ahold of a copy of the Hongs’ Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. As hard as I sometimes am on the Hongs, I think they actually did a very nice job with the journals and papers. Sadly, as I mentioned about, their translation is only a selection, so serious Kierkegaard scholars are going to need to supplement it with references to the Papirer, and that, of course, means they are going to have to learn Danish!

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Kierkegaard at Princeton

From left to right: Lara Buchak, Hans Halvorson, Austen McDougal, and Z Quanbeck

I attended a Kierkegaard workshop at Princeton University last month and it was such a delightful experience I thought I should post about it. The papers were uniformly good and thought provoking. Many of the presenters, including Alexander (a.k.a Z) Quanbeck, who organized the conference, were young and that certainly bodes well for the future of Kierkegaard scholarship. I was also encouraged to learn that Princeton has two tenured members of the philosophy department, Lara Buchak and Hans Halvorson, who are Kierkegaard enthusiasts, and that bodes even better for Kierkegaard scholarship. 

Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that neither Buchak nor Halvorson has a background in continental philosophy. Buchak focuses on “decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy or religion,” and Halvorson “focuses on applications of category theory in mathematical logic,” as well as the philosophy of physics. That is, both have the kind of highly technical math, logic, and science-based backgrounds that used to dominate Anglo-American philosophy and for which there is still a strong favorable bias on the part of most philosophy hiring committees. 

That two such traditionally-trained analytic philosophers would have an interest in Kierkegaard may seem strange to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. Kierkegaard, contrary to popular belief, was highly analytical and generally averse to speculation. That’s actually a conspicuous difference between Kierkegaard and George MacDonald, while both have very similar theologies at the most fundamental level, MacDonald’s prodigious imagination was drawn to speculating on issues such as the spiritual status of animals and the fate of souls whose moral progress is, on his view, merely interrupted by death, while Kierkegaard was far most skeptically inclined. 

Buchak presented a fascinating paper called “Why Should We Defer to Authority?” that reminded me very much of my paper, “The Social Implications of Epistemic Obligation in Kierkegaard’s Epistemology” (presented at a conference entitled “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism, and Conspiracy Theory,” at the University of Southampton, in September of 2024). There were lots of differences, of course, but I anticipate that Buchak’s paper will soon be published and that I will then be able to make a comparison of the two the subject of a future blog post.

Halvorson presented an equally compelling paper entitled “Climacus on the Objective Way.” My notes are too sketchy, sadly, to facilitate a responsible reconstruction of either Buchak’s or Halvorson’s that paper. I can summarize here very briefly, however, a paper Halvorson published earlier that I think every Kierkegaard scholars should read because of the massive implications it has for future Kierkegaard research. That paper is “The Philosophy of Science in Either-Or.” It originally appeared in Cambridge’s Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Critical Guide,and is available for download from PhilArchive. 

Halvorson argues in this paper that Either-Or “contains Kierkegaard’s argument against the predominant Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of scientific objectivity” and that this rejection “is a forerunner of Niels Bohr’s ‘epistemological lesson of quantum theory.’” That is, Halvorson argues very persuasively that “Either-Or is a central text for the transition from and enlightenment picture of scientific objectivity to the new picture that began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (pp. 1-2). 

The argument, very roughly, goes something like this. A, the protagonist of the first volume of Either-Or is paralyzed by indecision precisely because his perspective on his existence, or on existence more generally, is too objective. Objectively, everything simply is, and there is no reason to chose one thing, or one course of action, over another. Halvorson then traces this view of the existential effect of an extremely objective stance relative to one’s existence back to Kierkegaard’s teacher, Poul Martin Møller and, in particular, to Møller’s novel En Danske Students Eventyr (A Danish student’s adventure) which presents a character who, like Kierkegaard’s A, is paralyzed by indecision brought on by what Halvorson describes as “a hypertrophied capacity for reflection.” 

I’m ashamed to admit that while I own a copy of Møller’s collected works, I’m not much of a novel reader, so I had never read En Danske Students Eventyr (which is probably the best-known work of Møller’s, at least to contemporary Danes). One doesn’t have to have read it, though, to follow Halvorson’s argument. The only problem I have with the argument is that I think putting Hegel in the same class as Descartes, and the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity with which he is associated, is problematic. Everything Halvorson says about Kierkegaard’s attitude toward this ideal is, I believe, unassailable. I’m just not entirely confident that Kierkegaard would ascribe such an ideal to Hegel.

Hegel certainly thought he was objective, but he was no victim of the paralysis that characterizes both A and the protagonist of Møller’s novel. Kierkegaard appears to believe that, rather than exemplifying the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity, Hegel suffered from a kind of intellectual megalomania that was pathological. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Kierkegaard, who is generally averse to speculation, is so often lumped together with Hegel as one of those “weak-minded continental thinkers” to which analytic philosophers have such an aversion. The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity arguably does lead to indecision, as Halvorson argues, and in that way, precludes the kind of wild speculations in which Hegel engaged. That is, it would preclude the conclusion that one had achieved absolute knowledge of the sort Hegel claimed (hence the practice of the Pyrrhonists, the paradigmatic objective inquirers [Σκεπτικό], of allowing assent only to appearances, or impressions concerning the nature of reality, rather than to beliefs about it).   

In support of this view is the fact that most contemporary Anglo-American philosophers trace their own philosophical stance back to the Enlightenment, but few see Hegel as an embodiment of that ideal, and more than a few have strongly negative reactions to him. Of course it’s conceivable that Kierkegaard thinks hewing too closely to the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity could eventually drive a person mad and that this was what had happened to Hegel. So from that perspective, I suppose, Hegel could be considered at least an anomalous exemplar of this ideal.

Whether Hegel is properly classed with Descartes is a minor point, however, in the context of Halvorson’s argument and hence in no way weakens it. Halvorson’s argument is that the role of subjectivity in knowledge formation was passed from Møller, to Kierkegaard, from Kierkegaard to Rasmus Nielsen (a friend of Kierkegaard’s and a professor at the University of Copenhagen), from Nielsen to his student Harald Høffding, and from Høffding to his student (drumroll…) Niels Bohr! 

Fascinating, eh? It’s no wonder that Halvorson, who has a background in in physics, has developed an interest in Kierkegaard. There is so much work to be done in the area of Kierkegaard’s relevance to, and influence upon, contemporary empirical science, and physics in particular. My hope is that Halvorson will lead that scholarly charge and that there will soon be a growing body of work in this area of Kierkegaard scholarship.