Pithy quotes from our current reading which give us pause to reflect

From Fear and Trembling.

I will consider yet another case: that an individual wants to save the universal by his concealment and silence. For this I can make use of the legend #[196]# of Faust. 93 Faust is a doubter, †† an apostate of the spirit who goes the way of the flesh. This is the poet’s view, and even though it is repeated over and over again that every age has its Faust, nonetheless one poet after another doggedly goes down the same beaten path. Let us make a slight alteration. Faust is the doubter ϰατ’ εξοχην [in the eminent sense; par exellence]; but he has a sympathetic nature. Even in Goethe’s version of Faust I feel the absence of a deeper psychological insight into the secret conversations that doubt carries on with itself. In our time, when of course everyone has experienced doubt, no poet has yet taken any steps in this direction. So indeed, I think I would like to offer them royal bonds on which they could write of all the many experiences they have had in that connection—they would scarcely be able to write more than what would fit in the upper margin.
Only when one turns Faust in upon himself like this, only then can the doubt appear in such poetic fashion, only then does he himself really discover all of its sufferings in actuality. Then he knows that it is spirit that sustains existence, but he also knows that the security and happiness in which people live are not grounded in the power of the spirit, but can easily be explained as an unreflective bliss. As a doubter, as the doubter, #[197]# he is higher than all this, and if anyone wants to deceive him by getting him to imagine that he has gone beyond doubt, he easily sees through it, for the person who has made a movement in the world of spirit—thus, an infinite movement—can immediately detect in the response whether the one who is speaking is a man who has been sorely tested or is a Münchhausen. 94 Faust knows that he can accomplish with his doubt what a Tamerlane 95 accomplished with his Huns: alarm and terrify people, cause existence to buckle under their feet, sow disunity among people, cause the scream of anxiety to resound everywhere. And if he does this, he is nonetheless no Tamerlane—in a certain sense he has the authorization of thought and is authorized to do this. But Faust is a sympathetic temperament, he loves existence, his soul knows no envy, he realizes that he cannot stop the fury that he is certainly capable of awakening, he desires no Herostratic honor 96 —he remains silent; he conceals the doubt more carefully in his soul than the girl who conceals beneath her heart the fruit of a sinful love; he tries as best he can to walk in step with other people, but what takes place within him is something he consumes within himself, and in this way he presents himself to the universal as a sacrifice.
Sometimes, when an eccentric thinker #[198]# raises the whirlwind of doubt, one can hear people complain, saying: “Would that he had remained silent.” Faust realizes this idea. Anyone who has an idea of what it means that a person lives by spirit also knows what the hunger of doubt means and that the doubter hungers just as much for the daily bread of life as for nourishment of the spirit. So even though all the pain Faust suffers can constitute a quite good argument that it is not pride that has possessed him,…But he is a doubter. His doubt has annihilated actuality for him, for so ideal is my Faust that he is not one of these scholarly doubters who doubt for one hour per semester while occupying a professorial chair but otherwise are able to do everything else—as well as this—without the assistance of spirit or by virtue of spirit. He is a doubter, and the doubter is just as hungry for the daily bread of happiness as for spiritual sustenance. Nonetheless, he remains true to his decision and remains silent; he speaks to no one of his doubt, nor to Margaret of his love.
It’s obvious that Faust is too ideal a figure to permit himself to be satisfied with the nonsense that if he were to speak, he would bring about a general discussion, or that the whole matter would pass off without consequences, or perhaps, or perhaps. (Here, as every poet can easily see, there is a comic element dormant in the plot: by bringing Faust into an ironic relation to these low-comic fools who in our times go chasing after doubt; who present an external argument, e.g., a doctoral diploma, as proof of their having truly doubted; or they swear that they have doubted everything; or they prove it from the fact that in the course of their travels they met a doubter: these special couriers and sprinters in the world of spirit who in the greatest haste get a bit of news about doubt from one person and about faith from another, and now wirtschafte [do business] in the best manner, all according to whether the congregation prefers fine sand or coarse sand. 98 ) Faust is too ideal a figure to go about in slippers. A person who does not have an infinite passion #[199]# is not ideal, and the person who does have an infinite passion has long since saved his soul from such rubbish. He remains silent in order to sacrifice himself—or he speaks, conscious that he will confuse everything.
If he remains silent, then he will be condemned by ethics, for it says: “You must acknowledge the universal, and you acknowledge it precisely by speaking, and you dare not take pity on the universal.” One should not forget this observation when one sometimes passes harsh judgment on a doubter because he speaks. I am not inclined to judge such conduct leniently; but here, as everywhere, it is important that the movements take place in proper, normal fashion. If worse comes to worst, a doubter, even if his words caused the world every possible misfortune, is much to be preferred over these wretched sweet tooths who taste a bit of everything and want to cure doubt without knowing what it is and who therefore are usually the immediate cause when doubt bursts forth in wild and uncontrollable fashion. — If he speaks, then he confuses everything, for even if that does not happen, he only gets to know that afterward, and a person cannot be helped by the outcome, either at the moment at which a person acts or with respect to his responsibility.
If he remains silent on his own responsibility, he may well be acting magnanimously, but to his other pains he will add a little spiritual trial, for the universal constantly torments him, saying: “You should have spoken—how can you be certain that your decision was not in fact the result of covert pride.”
Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling, Problema III, paragraphs 32-36.

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Is there a way to access this article without paying $40. It caught my attention, as Betz will argue Hamann provided Kierkegaard with the initial inspiration for FT:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106385120701600304?journalCode=prea

Mike, I will dig around for you. It will be later this afternoon. Ok?

No rush. Thank you!

This seems to be an apt description of the anxiety associated with serious doubt and the power it can have, if the thorough and thoughtful doubter were to speak. It’s not a light thing, any of it.

I see Kierkegaard’s view of the doubter as being in contradiction to the dispassionate knower that was so prevalent in the Church of his day

If I understand you right, then absolutely “yes.”* I glanced up at the computer and saw what was your notification, while I was laboring over this bit in Problema III, ¶26; I think it goes well with what you said:

When a person does not have passion enough to make either the one movement or the other, when one saunters through life in careless and slovenly fashion, repents a little, and thinks that the rest of it will surely take care of itself, then, once and for all, one has renounced living in the idea, then one can very easily achieve—and help others to achieve—what is highest, i.e., to fool oneself and others into imagining that in the world of the spirit things go as they do in a game of cards, where everything takes place by chance. One can then amuse oneself by considering how odd it is, indeed, that precisely in an age in which everyone can of course achieve the highest, there can be such widespread doubt concerning the immortality of the soul — for the person who has actually made merely the movement of infinity, he scarcely has any doubts about that. Conclusions reached by passion are the only reliable ones, i.e., the only ones that are convincing. Fortunately, in this case existence is more loving, more faithful than what wise men claim, for it excludes no person, not even the humblest; it deceives no one, for in the world of the spirit the only person who is deceived is the one who deceives himself. It is everyone’s view (and to the extent that I allow myself to judge about it, it is also my view) that entering a monastery is not the highest thing, but in no way is it my view that, in our times, when no one enters a monastery, everyone is therefore greater than the profound and earnest souls who found repose in a monastery. How many people in our times have passion enough to consider this and then to judge themselves honestly? Merely the thought of taking time upon one’s conscience like this, of giving one’s conscience, in its insomniac tirelessness, the time to search through every secret thought, so that a person—if he does not at every instant make the movement by virtue of what is noblest and holiest in a person—can through dread and anxiety discover and, if by no other means, then through anxiety, lure forth the dark undercurrent that in fact conceals itself in every human life—whereas when one lives in society with others, one so easily forgets, so easily slips away from this, is supported in so many ways, is granted the opportunity to begin anew: I have thought that merely by itself, this thought, understood with proper respect, could serve to chasten many an individual in our times, times which believe they have already arrived at what is highest.

I feel heartily rebuked by SK.

*Careful, though, reading SK casually. Like most philosophers, his words have specific meanings in the context of his own work. SK is brutal toward the “dispassionate.” This quote is mild compared to most places.

I am still rereading the previous passage and doubting whether I got the sense of what Soren’s doubter is ideally :rofl:

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If anyone “gets” SK’s writing on first blush, it isn’t me. Everything I have from this book has been the result of great effort and many readings.

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The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know. Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

—Mark Twain

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I think he would prefer a gutsy judgement over right understanding. Not that they have to be in opposition thankfully. Passionate knowers. I finally got around to listening to Jamie Smith’s You Are What You Love. I tried listening to it years ago after discovering him in Letters to a Young Calvinist but it didn’t connect then. It’s fantastic now and not surprisingly relevant to Kierkegaard. Whereas SK would describe the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical and to the religious, I see Smith making a similar move here in this passage:

Laws, rules, and commands specify and articulate the good; they inform me about what I ought to do. But virtue is different: virtue isn’t acquired intellectually but affectively. Education in virtue is not like learning the Ten Commandments or memorizing Colossians 3:12–14. Education in virtue is a kind of formation, a retraining of our dispositions.

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Sometime soonish, I look forward to reading some Smith.
Everything In this quote from Smith, including virtue, fits in SK’s category of the ethical (analogous to Hegel’s “universal”). The ethical is an incredibly demanding state. But in Kierkegaard’s categorization, it is all humanly achievable, that is, does not require faith. The religious state involves “the single individual as the single individual in absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place precisely by virtue of the universal: it is and remains for all times a paradox. It is inaccessible to thought.” (Pg. 67)
Virtues and ethics are high things but they are mediated by the culture, the universal, which holds them to be virtuous and ethical. In the religious, that is in matters of faith, one has a command from God which has nothing to do with and may be in direct conflict with the ethics and virtues of the universal. To act in faith, the single individual must separate herself from community, no longer acting as a member of the group, must now act alone as a particular individual in direct, immediate, relation to God (the absolute).
Writing that out for the first time from memory, I feel like I have mostly grasped what he was saying, and am now starting to understand some of his comments about the aloneness of this state.
In F&T, the pseudonymous author’s stated purpose is to heighten the challenge of understanding Abraham in the context of faith. He makes a bull’s eye.

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From last night’s reading in The Matter With Things in chapter 18:

a tradition is never static: if it were to become so, it would die. It is there not just to oppose change but to inform it and guide it. It is a living thing, a process of change in response to new circumstances. It is reverberative and responsive, not linear and fixed: forever in flow. Nonetheless, there is a difference between organic change and forced or abrupt change, as there is a difference between training a climbing plant and cutting it off, or uprooting it. A tradition changes by being born anew in each member of the community that shares in it. It is, above all, lived:

To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own.14

In this respect, it is obvious that we are each only what we are, only think what we think, only believe what we believe, and love what we love, against a background of shared meanings within a culture and a landscape from which, though individual, we stem, in which we are never wholly separate one from another, and in terms of which ‘meaning’ has meaning. The rightful rejection of the Cartesian fantasy of an isolated, decontextualised, rational mind, hopping around the universe accessing uncontaminated truths, is at the heart of the last hundred years of philosophy in Europe, and is what Heidegger, Scheler , Merleau-Ponty and others were striving to achieve and to communicate. Not to have affections, not to have affiliations and loyalties, not to love, but only reason to act for us in understanding what we do and who we are, is literally madness.

From this I take it there are two ways for a tradition to die. One is for people to fall victim to the delusion that they can or should step away from all traditions. The other is that they should cease to doubt and challenge that tradition in the face of new experience. The life of a living tradition can feel like the death of an idealized one but the thought that one might hold any opinion at all about a tradition without being in and building on from it is also folly.

I wonder who else sees this tension between belief held so tightly that it is strangled and so lightly that one drifts from the fold of cultural common ground?

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Those lines will probably start to blur when you get into Smith :sunglasses:

Mark, it’s tempting to go through both McGilchrist’s quote and your points about it and and more words. That is unnecessary and would only detract from this outstanding post. I have rather gone through and highlighted a few sections that really hit me.

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From following the discussion on your Fear & Trembling thread it seems to me that SK is focused rightly on the folly of viewing traditional belief as something fixed for all time like the head of an elk over the fireplace rather than as something actively lived through. Given my circumstance I am more focused on the other direction folly may take, imagining traditional belief to be mired in the past and as such of no real use. Much better to find the balance point.

      Joy & Strength

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“D-branes with negative tension… These exotic beasts warped the structure of reality around them, creating multiple dimensions of time and violating the fundamental principle that probabilities must always add up to 100%.”

I’m not sure that doesn’t want its own thread, but it would be a short one with all I know about it! @pevaquark and @glipsnort might be interested.

The article was surprisingly readable. And the whole premise of a solution possibly being found in obscure textbooks from the 1980s makes for a page scrolling thriller. Needless to say I couldn’t explain any of the math or physics, but if glipsnort or pevaquark read this, I had a good discussion recently on a math subreddit and find it super interesting the continuum hypothesis may depend on whether these 2 sets have the same cardinality: [a,b] and (a,b). I keep being told there is bijection between the 2, but I’ve yet to see the proof for myself. I’ll probably bring the subject back up there again.

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