nathan p. carson

PASSIONATE EPISTEMOLOGY:KIERKEGAARD ON SKEPTICISM,

APPROXIMATE KNOWLEDGE, AND HIGHEREXISTENTIAL TRUTH

Abstract

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard’s skepticism andirrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective”and “approximate” knowledge.1 I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certainobjective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approxi-mate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion ofbelief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions,he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate”knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further arguethat we cannot ignore his criticisms of such knowledge because of itsintrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial indeveloping religious selfhood before God.

I. Introduction

To what extent can the human knower arrive at true knowledge aboutreality, and in what ways is this knowledge limited? This epistemo-logical question has been the source of much debate in scholarlywork on Kierkegaard, and answers range widely from claims thatKierkegaard is a complete irrationalist skeptic, to interpretationsof Kierkegaard as a moderate epistemic realist.2 For instance, howshould we interpret the claim, advanced by Kierkegaard’s pseudonymJohannes Climacus, that all knowledge of contingent (historical orempirical) reality is unfinished and uncertain “approximate knowl-edge” (Approximations-Viden)?3 When Climacus adds that it is belief(as a volitional passion) that nullifies this uncertainty, and that faith orbelief is a necessary condition for such approximate knowledge, manyscholars have declared Kierkegaard (partly through Climacus) to bethe irrationalist Christian skeptic, par excellence. Others adamantly

NATHAN P. CARSON, Assistant Professor and Philosophy Program Director, FresnoPacific University. Specialties: nineteenth century philosophy, contemporary virtue ethics,Aristotle’s ethics. E-mail: nathan.carson@fresno.edu

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Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40:1 (March 2013) 29–49© 2013 Journal of Chinese Philosophy

deny this interpretation. These disagreements are exacerbated by thegeneral lack of systematic work on Kierkegaard’s rather unsystematicepistemological commitments.4

In light of these disagreements and this general situation, then, myaim is to offer a defensible interpretation of Kierkegaard’s epistemo-logical views. I will offer this interpretation with regular reference toworks written under Kierkegaard’s most philosophical pseudonym,Johannes Climacus, focusing on this pseudonym’s claims regarding thenature and limits of what he calls “objective knowledge” in general,and of “approximate” human knowledge in particular.5 I first examineKierkegaard’s ontological and modal views that are most directlyrelevant to these parts of his epistemology. Then, after examining hisviews on two different types of objective knowledge, I argue that forKierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is allbut impossible, and that our “approximate” knowledge of the same isfunded by the volitional passion of belief. I then argue that whileKierkegaard places severe restrictions on human knowledge of con-tingent being, he is not a thoroughgoing skeptic and allows for genuineknowledge that may roughly correspond to a mind-independentreality. However, against several scholars who also defendKierkegaard’s realism and the place he affords for genuine approxi-mate knowledge, I will contend that we must keep Kierkegaard’s deepcriticisms of such knowledge firmly in view, and specifically its intrinsicdangers to the development of subjective ethical and religious self-hood. I conclude the article by showing how Kierkegaard’s views onapproximate human knowledge and its limitations play a crucial pre-paratory role in guiding his readers toward his central concern: thedevelopment of ethical and (ultimately) religious selfhood in thepursuit of securing “eternal happiness” in relation to God.

II. Kierkegaard’s Ontological and Modal Commitments

In order to be clear about Kierkegaard’s views on “objective knowl-edge,” its character and limitations, we must first examine a few ofhis ontological and modal commitments and how they constituteKierkegaard’s “great accusation” against Hegel.6 The target is Hegel’scentral doctrine in the Science of Logic, that there is an identitybetween thought and being, and that mediation ultimately overcomesKantian skepticism by dissolving the opposition between subject andobject, phenomenal appearance and reality in itself.7 The truth, repliesJohannes Climacus, will then be a tautological “correspondence ofthought with itself,” a “chimera of abstraction.”8 In PhilosophicalFragments, these non-Hegelian views become clearer. What Hegel’s

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thought-being identification misses, ontologically speaking, is whatClimacus calls the distinction “between factual being [faktisk Væren]and ideal being [ideel Væren],” for these are two different types ofbeing.9

This ontological mistake means that, for Kierkegaard, Hegel’s“solution” to Kantian skepticism, according to which “pure thought”provides absolute knowledge of noumenal reality, is an illusion. ForClimacus no less than for Kierkegaard, thinking always involvesuniversal concepts where such concepts are thought-possibilities forbeing. So, whenever human beings think about a particular and actu-ally existing entity, the concrete being of that entity cannot be anobject of thought.10 So, Climacus states, “Thinking must disregardexistence, because the particular cannot be thought, but only theuniversal.”11 Kierkegaard takes Hegel’s identity of thought and beingto be illusory because, as Evans notes, the moment the “being” of anexisting entity is thought, one abstracts from its concrete actuality andparticularity, grasping it instead as a thought-possibility. The entity isgrasped as ideal being rather than in its factual being or individualexistence.12 Kierkegaard firmly distinguishes these things in a journalentry:

In all the relationships of ideality it holds true that essentia isexistentia, if the use of the concept existentia is otherwise justifiedhere.The Leibnizian statement: If God is possible, he is necessary—isentirely correct. Nothing is added to the concept whether it hasexistence or not; it is a matter of complete indifference; it indeed hasexistence, i.e. concept-existence, ideal existence.

But existence corresponds to the individual; as Aristotle has alreadytaught, the individual lies outside of and is not absorbed in theconcept. For a particular animal, a particular plant, a particularhuman being, existence (to be—or not to be) is very crucial; a par-ticular human being is certainly not concept-existence.13

This quotation illustrates the crux of Kierkegaard’s objectionagainst Hegel, that mediation is valid only in the realm of thought;being as thought is simply the “tautological correspondence ofthought with itself.”14 In this sense, the identity of thought and beingin Hegel’s Logic is a pseudo answer to Kant, for instead of vindicatingrealism and genuine knowledge of reality, it in fact unmoors itselffrom concrete actuality and equates such reality with thought-possibility.15 We will presently see the implications of these views forKierkegaard’s epistemological commitments. First, however, we mustexamine what Kierkegaard takes as a second and closely relatedmodal mistake made by Hegel.

From Kierkegaard’s point of view, the mistake is that Hegel fails tomake a distinction between necessary being and contingent being,

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and thereby also to distinguish how we know necessary versus con-tingent truths. In his argument against Hegel’s introduction of logicand necessity into history, Climacus argues that history (and contin-gent being generally) is the sphere of flux and change (kinesis), ofnon-necessary coming into existence and going out of existence.16

Hegel’s own view is radically different as he states, in a passagecited by Climacus, that “real possibility, because it contains the othermoment, actuality, is already itself necessary. . . . Real possibility andnecessity are therefore only seemingly different.”17

In opposition to this view, Kierkegaard, through Climacus in the“Interlude” of Fragments, claims the following:

the possible turns out to be nothing the moment it becomes actual,for possibility is annihilated by actuality. Precisely by coming intoexistence, everything that comes into existence demonstrates that itis not necessary, for the only thing that cannot come into existence isthe necessary, because the necessary is.18

Therefore the distinction Hegel fails to make, for Climacus, isbetween necessity (which possesses eternality, timelessness, andcannot fail to exist) and natural/historical contingency (marked byfreely caused coming-into-existence). In contrast, Climacus holds thatall changes of coming into existence are ontologically contingent; theyinvolve a possibility being annulled by actuality and are ultimatelybrought about by a freely effecting cause of some sort (whether divineor human).19

As Perkins notes, this perspective brings together two concepts ofnecessity: (1) a Parmenidean concept of necessity as that which alwaysis, and (2) the Leibnizean and Humean epistemic requirement fornecessary propositions (that they be impossible to deny).20 With thismore modest (than Hegel) treatment of necessity, Climacus keeps thespheres of necessity and possibility/actuality separate, leaving historyand empirical reality as the sphere of freely caused coming-into-existence, where everything is in a contingent process of becomingand could have been otherwise.

Now, several important epistemic distinctions have emerged. Partlydue to Leibniz’s influence on his non-Hegelian notions of truth andnecessity, Kierkegaard also makes a strong distinction between ourepistemic relation to the necessary (and necessary “truths of reason-ing”), on the one hand, and to contingency (and contingent, historicalor empirical truths) on the other.21 If “objective truth” is (as it isfor Kierkegaard) a function of correspondence between thought andbeing, then when the object of knowledge has ideal being (e.g., math-ematical entities), such agreement is unproblematic. Here, as we willsee, objective formal certainty seems quite possible for Kierkegaard.

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However, when the object of thought is historical or empirical andhas (or had) factual being, the agreement is non-necessary and veryproblematic indeed. In this sphere knowledge is at best merely an“approximation” that perennially remains objectively uncertain, pre-cisely because thinking fails fully to capture factual being that isontologically independent from thought.

III. Objective Knowledge of Ideal Being

With this partial discussion of Kierkegaard’s ontological and modalcommitments in hand, we are in a better position to understand hisviews on knowledge in general, and on “objective knowledge” inparticular. What should be evident is that, while Kierkegaard has aspecial place for the related notions of “subjective knowledge” andtruth as subjectivity, he does indeed countenance genuine “objectiveknowledge” and even certain kinds of formal certainty. What he pri-marily wants to reject, however, are the pretensions of such knowl-edge to absoluteness and completeness.22 However in light of theabove discussion and especially Kierkegaard’s view that humanthought fails to grasp the “actuality” of particular contingent beingsin themselves, he is indeed partially a friend of skepticism. Conse-quently, the relationship between the place Kierkegaard gives toobjective knowledge, on the one hand, and his skeptical emphasis onthe relativity and uncertainty of human knowledge, on the other,needs further explication.

As Piety notes in her recent monograph on his epistemology, thereare several different notions of knowledge Kierkegaard uses through-out his corpus.23 There is objective knowledge that is not relatedessentially to the existence of the knower, and there is subjectiveknowledge that is so related. I will focus here on objective knowledge.Such knowledge, according to Piety, can be divided up into two kindsthat map onto our previous interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ontologi-cal and modal commitments. One kind of objective knowledge isassociated with formal certainty, and the other is Kierkegaard’s morelax notion of “approximate” knowledge, associated not with certainty,but with probability.24

The objective knowledge associated with formal certainty takes asits objects necessary truths or “philosophical truths,” as Climacus callsthem.25 Here, as I noted above, the correspondence between the idealbeing of the object of knowledge and the knowledge itself is complete.Kierkegaard names the disciplines that study such “philosophicaltruths” the sciences of “ontology” and “mathematics,” where by“ontology” he seems to mean the study of ideal truths of reasoning or

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logic (rather than the study of everything that is, more broadly).26

Therefore Kierkegaard contends that “the objects of science [thatis, ontology and mathematics] are things that can be in only oneway. What is scientifically knowable is therefore the necessary,the eternal.”27 Kierkegaard also continues that the “certainty” thatattends such sciences is “absolute,” because “here thought and beingare one.”28 What such sciences cannot show, however, is that the truthsthey study exist (er til), or have anything other than ideal being. ForKierkegaard, as Piety notes, the idea of God may entail the idea ofperfection, but that does not mean that either God or perfection canthereby be proven to exist, or to have factual being.29 The epistemiccertainty with respect to such objective knowledge, then, is only andalways ideal certainty.

Kierkegaard’s views on objective knowledge of truths of reasonmean that interpreting him as a general skeptic is a mistake. Wheregeneral skepticism is the view that certain knowledge of anything atall (whether ideal or actual) is impossible, Kierkegaard simply doesnot fit the bill. With respect to subjective knowledge, moreover, heaffirms immediate and certain self-knowledge of one’s own ethicalactuality, which only strengthens this reading of his epistemology.30

However, even if one accepts such a reading, one might still objectthat Kierkegaard is nonetheless thoroughly skeptical when it comesto the world external to the knower, to historical truths, and generallyto knowledge of factual being or existence (er til). If there is no certainknowledge apart from knowing ideal mathematical or logical truths,on the one hand, or subjective knowledge of our own ethical actuality,on the other, it would seem that according to Kierkegaard’s episte-mology we remain (much like Descartes) cut off from the world andtrapped in our own minds or subjectivity. Such, however, is not thecase. To see why, we must also examine Kierkegaard’s second notionof “objective knowledge,” where he appears to countenance genuine“approximate” knowledge of historical and contingent being(s).

IV. Approximate Knowledge of Contingent Being

As we have seen, Kierkegaard sometimes associates knowledgewith the classical epistemological demand for objective certainty.However, for all of our objective knowledge of contingent and actualexistent being, past or present, Kierkegaard uses “knowledge” in amuch looser sense. Here the notion of “objective knowledge” is, asJohannes Climacus calls it, Approximations-Viden; it is “approxima-tive” knowledge that is more at home in probabilistic and defeasiblenotions of knowledge and justification.31 Early on in Postscript, for

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instance, he states that “with regard to the historical the greatestcertainty is only an approximation,” even under the best efforts of allthe angels united together.32 To grasp this sort of knowledge, it ishelpful to start with Johannes Climacus’s comments on our immedi-ate sense perceptual experience.

In an obscure passage in Fragments, Climacus tells us “immediatesensation and immediate cognition cannot deceive,” for it is unmedi-ated by concepts.33 In speaking of non-deceptive “immediate cogni-tion,” Climacus appears to refer simply to phenomenal appearances,or the way things in sense experience show up for us pre-reflectively.34

Here, Climacus clearly reflects Kierkegaard’s own endorsement ofthe ancient skeptics’ acceptance of “appearances” and suspicionof inferential judgments based on those appearances.35 For SextusEmpiricus, who Kierkegaard frequently cites, immediate appearancescan be taken as a given, while doubt preserves ataraxia through thewithholding of judgment or inferences based on those appearances.Likewise, Climacus holds that beyond immediate phenomenalappearances nothing about contingent actual being is objectivelycertain.

Climacus offers perception of a star as an example. “When a per-ceiver sees a star,” he says, “the star becomes dubious for him themoment he seeks to become aware that it has come into existence. Itis just as if reflection removed the star from his senses.”36 One can seethat there is a star, but one cannot see that it has come into existence.Moreover, one can immediately perceive the star, but (as shownabove) one cannot conceptualize that particular existing star withoutsubsuming it under the general category of stars, thereby failing toknow its particular actuality in its freely caused and contingentcoming into existence. In either case, our knowledge of that starremains “objectively uncertain” because all thought translates actualor factual being into ideal being, thereby missing the star’s particularcontingent being. Hence Climacus’s objection against Hegel—theobjection that mediation is valid only in the realm of thought and notin the realm of freedom—refers not merely to the free future-directedchoices of individual persons, but to the entire realm of freely causedcontingent being. Knowledge of such things remains objectivelyuncertain because, when it comes to contingent being, we can neverfully eliminate the possibility of error.

Such uncertainty is doubled when we add to this Kierkegaard’sview of the human knower. As knowers, of course, we ourselves arecontingent beings who have come into existence. In Kierkegaard’sview, however, we are marked by a double contingency. In additionto the contingency of nature, there is the contingent coming-into-existence of agential human activity; we ourselves are always

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actualizing possibilities.37 So, epistemically, Climacus recognizes thatany objective human knowledge of contingent and existing beingmust arise from within this flux of becoming, where both the knowerand the object known have come into existence, while the knowerhimself moves within a flux of becoming.

In light of this treatment, Climacus, no less than Kierkegaard,holds that all genuine “approximate” knowledge of contingent beingrequires the passion of faith or belief [Tro], a view that has causedmany to name Kierkegaard an “epistemologist of belief.”38 Tro is thepassional human capacity that is appropriate to the “historical,” for ithas “within itself the corresponding something by which in its certi-tude it continually annuls the incertitude that corresponds to theuncertainty of coming into existence.” For, Climacus continues, “faith[Tro] believes what it does not see; it does not believe that the starexists, for that it sees, but it believes that the star has come intoexistence.”39 Whereas the passion of doubt preserves objective uncer-tainty by also nullifying the knower’s interest in actuality, belief (Tro)preserves objective uncertainty while intensifying the knower’s inter-est in and commitment to actuality.40 Moreover, it is crucial to notethat the “faith” Climacus discusses here is not religious faith, butan ordinary passion of belief that is a necessary condition for approxi-mate knowledge of things that have contingent (and actual) being,such as stars, trees and electrons.

For this reason Climacus states that when it comes to approximateknowledge, we relate to the historical (contingent being) by nullifyingthe uncertainty that attaches to any coming into existence, notthrough knowledge, but through belief which is “an act of freedom,an expression of the will.”41 The natural scientist, for instance, mustbelieve (and presuppose) the coming into existence of whatever heobserves, and at some point must cease his data collection and experi-mentation to draw approximate, probabilistic conclusions, eventhough such activities can never really be finished or secure objectivecertainty. Throughout the whole process, of course, the knowerhimself is actualizing possibilities, thereby remaining within the sameflux of contingent becoming that he examines. For Kierkegaard, then,belief is the conscious nullification of uncertainty that keeps “thewound of negativity open,” precisely by acknowledging that certainknowledge apart from this movement of the will is a chimera, whetherthe movement is presupposed prior to inquiry, at work within it, orinvoked in its closure.42

When natural scientists or scholars in the humanities pretend thatthis “wound of negativity” is in fact objectively closed, Kierkegaardcharges them with sophistry. Referring in his journals to both sorts ofscholarship, he asks the Socratic question: “‘Does natural science

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know something or does it not?’ It can answer neither Yes nor No, forthe whole secret of it is that it is almost and as good as and not very farfrom and almost, just as if it knew something.”43 This is to say that it isan approximating knowledge; it is always on the way, uncertain, andperennially unfinished.

However, the uncertainty and unfinished character of empiricalknowledge does not mean that Kierkegaard is an anti-realist oran idealist. For instance, his position on approximation knowledgeinvolves the claim that both the subject and object of historical (orempirical) knowledge are in the process of becoming. However,Kierkegaard does not (like Hegel) identify the “truth” of what is thecase about any given contingent actuality, with the historical develop-ment of the relation between subject and object.44 This is so because,as stated above, our approximate knowledge of past historical eventsis in a flux of becoming, while the actuality of the events themselvesremains fixed and unchangeable (though not necessary). So, what is inthe process of becoming, at least in the case of past historical approxi-mate knowledge, is not the historical object of knowledge itself, butthe object as it appears to and for thought [erkjenende Betragtning].Therefore, while the object of historical knowledge remainsunchangeably fixed and independent of thought in its concreteactuality (i.e., its having come into existence—Tilblivelse), it is stillinvolved in a process of “coming to be” [Vorden] for thought, wherethe correspondence between the latter sort of becoming to the actu-ality of the object can never fully be established or finished, except forGod himself.45 This also means, as Climacus notes, that faith [Tro]remains perennially the indispensable “organ for the historical.”46

V. Kierkegaard’s Skeptical Realism

We are now in a position to summarize Kierkegaard’s argument indefense of approximate knowledge, as given by Climacus: If humanthought always translates actuality into possibility, if both empiricalbeing for thought and human knowers themselves are in flux, and ifempirical knowledge is perspectivally shaped by the data choice andwill of the knower, then all human knowledge of empirical reality is atbest an approximation that remains always unfinished and uncertain.When we add to this that it is the passion of belief that nullifiesobjective uncertainty while yet preserving it, then we arrive at a viewof Kierkegaard (via Climacus) as the irrationalist Christian skepticpar excellence.47 Popkin, for example, holds that the inability to“attain true knowledge” of anything certain leads Kierkegaard to a“purely fideistic Christianity, devoid of all reasons for belief.”48 He

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then claims that Kierkegaard therefore surpasses even the most“extreme-anti-rationalism” of Christian skeptics like Pierre Jurieuand Pierre Bayle.49

While Kierkegaard’s position (through Climacus) certainly placesserious restrictions on human knowledge, Popkin’s view is overstated.First, Kierkegaard does seem to hold that we can know, with certainty,ideal objects of knowledge as found in logic and mathematics. Sec-ondly, the possibility of some adequate knowledge of this world seemspossible for Kierkegaard. As Anderson points out, if empirical realityis unable to be truly known, then the term “approximative” becomesmeaningless, since we would have no way of knowing which explana-tions are closer to or further away from the truth.50 In support of this,Climacus does claim that the existing subject, though abstracting fromhis own existence, “comes to know much about the world” throughapproximative historical knowledge, even as it is funded by thepassion of belief.51 Finally, in light of Kierkegaard’s pervasive truth-claims about contingent reality and the situation of the humanknower, he clearly does not think that every interpretation of realityhas an equal claim to truth.52 It would seem that for Kierkegaard (noless than Climacus), human beings such as Kierkegaard himself mustbe able to have some knowledge about contingent beings that isapproximatively more adequate than others.

One reason why the mistake of reading Kierkegaard as a totalskeptic is so prevalent is that the metaphysical realism implicit inKierkegaard’s notion of approximate knowledge depends on the verydivision that makes him a friend of soft skepticism; that is, he supportsthe quasi-Kantian division between ideal being (or being for thought)and contingent factual being in itself. For Kierkegaard, however, it isthe denial of such a division that creates genuine (and total) perni-cious skepticism. As noted above, the Hegelian union of thought andbeing, rather than vindicating realism, makes the ontological mistakeof equating ideal and factual being. Hegel thereby abandons oneproper epistemic task of thinking: the pursuit of increasing connect-edness with mind-independent actuality. Kierkegaard’s skepticism,unlike Hegelian abandonment of the real, supports metaphysicalrealism. For, it is precisely the concrete actuality and mind-independence of the objects of knowledge in contingent being, thatmakes our knowledge of such things perennially uncertain and unfin-ished. Such knowledge is an approximation to something. As Evansnotes, “in claiming that historical knowledge can never be more thanapproximative, Kierkegaard is not denying the independence of theobject of knowledge. On the contrary, he is presupposing it.”53

Now, one might object that Kierkegaard rejects Hegel’s solution toKantian skepticism by simply reinstating Kant’s position.After all, on

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the picture we have so far, all thinking fails to grasp the actuality ofcontingent beings “in-themselves.” If thinking never truly capturescontingent being in itself, have we not returned to Kantian noumenalskepticism? While Kierkegaard does indeed hold to something likeKant’s view, the objection overlooks his crucial distinctiveness fromKant. First, as previously noted, Kierkegaard does indeed affirm thatone can have subjective self-knowledge of one’s own existential andethical actuality as actuality. This is what Climacus describes as “theonly actuality that does not become a possibility by being known andis not something that can be known only by being thought.”54 Thisknown actuality is no mere Cartesian immediate awareness of con-sciousness or Kantian postulate of practical reason; it is rather thegenuine reality of self-agency which, for Kierkegaard, translates pos-sibility into actuality. Moreover we are not bound by this view intoexistential solipsism, for our acquaintance knowledge of our ownactualizing existence gives us a first-personal sense for (not an infer-ence to) the actual existence of things beyond the self.55 While thisremains for Kierkegaard “objectively uncertain” and we can reachbeyond our own actuality only through the passion of faith or belief(Tro), such approximate knowledge of mind-independent contingentbeing is indeed possible.

VI. The Dangers of Approximation

Having reviewed a number of reasons why Kierkegaard, throughClimacus, ought not to be interpreted as a thoroughgoing skeptic (orirrationalist), I think there are reasons to think that Kierkegaard isseverely critical of correspondence approximative knowledge asan ideal. This will place my current view in tension with those whosee the approximative pursuit of knowledge as benign or neutral(Perkins), as something Kierkegaard overtly promotes (Anderson,Piety), or as the only ideal that makes sense to him (Evans).56 In theirattempts to correct the false perception that Kierkegaard is thor-oughly ironical or skeptical, such views run the risk of overlooking thehigher ethical and religious vocation to which Kierkegaard calls exist-ing human beings, in the name of making him safe for anti-skeptics,metaphysical realists and natural scientists.

I have already noted above Kierkegaard’s critiques of the pre-tended objective certainty that can occur in the natural sciences andhumanities. What is forgotten, says Kierkegaard in his journals, is that“empirical knowledge is a perpetually self-repeating false sorites,”and pretended objectivity turns “modern science and scholarship”into “dishonest” sophistical enterprises.57 However, Kierkegaard’s

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criticism of objective approximate knowledge extends well beyondthe reminder that it is indeed approximate, objectively uncertain,and funded by the passion of belief, or that it is simply “a distractionfrom ethical concerns.”58 Kierkegaard’s criticisms are in fact far moretrenchant.

For instance, in the much-debated section of Postscript on truth assubjectivity, Climacus takes up the correspondence view of truth as“agreement between thinking and being.”59 Here Climacus not onlyallows for the real possibility of the correspondence project, throughwhich we come to know much about the world; he also treats this“objective reflection” as deeply dangerous since it is only accidentallyrelated to the knower’s existence. Such reflection “leads to abstractthought, to mathematics, to historical knowledge” in such a way thatthe subjective knowledge essentially related to the existence of theindividual becomes a matter of indifference.60

The question is whether, in Kierkegaard’s view, this is necessarilythe case. Can a scholar in the humanities or sciences consciously keepthe negative “wound” of objective uncertainty open, and escape theseproblems? After all, says Piety, pretensions to absolute knowledge orobjective certainty are not themselves essential to these disciplines,even though some scholars may mistakenly entertain them.61 Theproblem with this view is that Kierkegaard often suggests that thedangers to existential subjectivity are internal to the approximationknowledge project in light of its endlessness, inessential relationto subjectivity, and the inherent risk it holds for supplanting the“highest” tasks for human beings that are found in ethical and reli-gious formation.62 In his journals, for instance, Kierkegaard asks,

Why should I need to know about the afferent and efferent nerveimpulses, about the circulation of blood, about the human being’smicroscopic condition in the womb? The ethical has task enough forme. . . . I wonder if I am not weakening my whole ethical impulse bybecoming a natural scientist?. . . I wonder if my gaze is not turnedaway from the most important thing by letting myself begin withphysiology instead of assuming the whole of physiology and saying:Begin.63

Comments such as these open the possibility that, in Kierkegaard’sview, pursuit of approximate knowledge could indeed be carried outunder what are (in his view) optimum conditions of epistemic humil-ity and still, as a matter of course, make the more important task ofbecoming a unified ethical (and religious) person vanish.

The moments in which Climacus (and Kierkegaard) recommends“forgetting” objective reflection in order that “subjectivity . . .becomes the final factor and objectivity the vanishing,” only serve tounderscore the severity of Kierkegaard’s criticisms of the approxima-

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tion project.64 In this latter posture, it seems, Kierkegaard not onlystresses that “objective uncertainty” is an epistemic reality for allfinite knowers, but also that such uncertainty must be intentionallyaccented and held fast in order that passionate inwardness maydeepen toward infinite consciousness of God and ultimately toward adirect relation to Jesus Christ. It is here that we find, in the passionateupholding of objective uncertainty, the “highest truth there is for anexisting person.”65 While rightly rescuing Kierkegaard from chargesof complete skepticism and irrationalism, then, one must also lethis trenchant internal critiques of objective approximate knowledgestand, with the full force of his deepest concerns transparently in view.

VII. Epistemic Humility and the Path toReligious Existence

Kierkegaard’s deepest concerns are, of course, linked to the ethicaland religious life, and in particular to what he takes to be the religioustruth of Christianity. It is here that direct knowledge of a subjectivesort takes center stage, as well as the possibility of existing personspossessing and appropriating the highest truths, up to and including“eternal happiness.” When it comes to knowing these higher truths—where knowing involves personal appropriation rather than merepropositional knowledge—the stakes are very high indeed. HereKierkegaard’s epistemological views on the nature and limits ofobjective knowledge play an essential role in moving human beingstoward these ethical and religious tasks. A full demonstration of thisessential role requires far more explanation than I present here.Nonetheless, I will at least offer some preliminary comments on whyKierkegaard’s epistemic commitments form a necessary precursor tothe ethical and religious tasks he seeks to place before his readers.

To begin with, it should now be clear from my exposition abovethat Kierkegaard’s overall perspective implies a rejection of classicalfoundationalism in modern epistemology. He opposes those who seekto ground the whole of human knowledge in certain foundations,rejecting too the ideal epistemic position of the knower as a “viewfrom nowhere” (a position of complete objectivity). As we have seen,Kierkegaard severely restricts what finite human beings can knowwith any degree of certainty, and denies, even in the case of math-ematics and logic, that human knowers can occupy a purely objectivestandpoint. Moreover, the ontological distinction between idealand factual being prevents the establishment of a “basing relation”between certain knowledge of ideal entities and knowledge ofactuality.

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For Kierkegaard, uncertainty is an inescapable part of our condi-tion as knowers, and this means that all of our knowledge of actualityinvokes, at some level, our practical concerns and passions.We cannot,like Descartes, objectively settle every bit of knowledge beforesubjectivity is involved in the practical sphere of living. Rather, inaffirming the persistence of objective uncertainty and the role ofsubjectively passionate faith or belief (Tro) in all knowledge of actu-ality, Kierkegaard appears to repeat the ancient view that pursuit oftruth cannot be neatly separated from our subjective commitmentsto live life one way rather than another. That is, the ethical task ofchoosing how to live is an essential part of our epistemic task ofknowledge acquisition, whether we are aware of this or not. As notedabove, subjectivity (and its role in knowledge acquisition) may beforgotten, and objective reflection can push subjectivity to the van-ishing point. Nonetheless, there remains in Kierkegaard’s epistemiceconomy something like an inescapable interpenetration of objectiveand subjective knowledge, reason and passion, even when he stressestheir potentially antagonistic relationship.

Once human beings become aware of the uncertainty and limits oftheir knowledge, as well as the role that practical, passional commit-ment plays in its presupposition, acquisition and closure, there isaccording to Kierkegaard a more realistic prospect that such personsmay acquire heightened awareness of the ethical task set before themby God. For instance, when an existing individual (say, a medicalstudent) attends not merely to the approximate knowledge of physi-ology, but also to the ethical task of becoming a self as a primary andhigher concern beyond her investment in physiology, she may in timearrive at the full-fledged ethical perspective summarized by JohannesClimacus: “The true is not higher than the good and the beautiful, butthe true and the good and the beautiful belong essentially to everyhuman existence and are united for an existing person not by thinkingbut by existing.”66

The life-perspective of the ethical, however, is only the beginning.For, in Kierkegaard’s economy the ethical is a gateway to still highertruths that are found in the religious life. The gateway is presentbecause, for Kierkegaard, God is the ultimate source of the ethical. Ifthis is so, then, as Evans rightly notes, “anyone who is aware of themoral task has an implicit awareness of God’s reality, even if theindividual does not recognize that it is God who is addressing him.”67

What is more, Kierkegaard notes in his Upbuilding Discourses thatanyone truly committed to the good in a single-minded and unifiedway is also thereby achieving their unique God-given task of becom-ing themselves.68 Generally, then, in Kierkegaard’s thought there isnot only a connection between the modest epistemic position of the

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human knower and the ethical life; there is also an intrinsic linkbetween the ethical life and the religious life. Indeed, in Postscript,Climacus equates the classical and medieval ethical notions of thesummum bonum with the religious notion of “eternal happiness”whereby the search for and movement toward the highest good is alsoa quest for eternal blessedness.69

However, it is only when a human being sees the limits of thevolitional dimension of the ethical—that is, the limits of self-sufficientlife-integration and self-formation through committed choice—thatsuch a person fully enters the “religious.” “Religiousness A,” asJohannes Climacus calls it, is the “Socratic” religious life and experi-ence that is immanently possible for and common to human beingsgenerally. For Climacus, Religiousness A is in some sense a necessaryprecursor to Christianity (Religiousness B). Both require, amongother things, the (non-Sartrean) recognition that ethical agency, inte-grated selfhood and the “eternal happiness” of proper relatedness toGod (or the “infinite”) cannot be wholly achieved through humanaction or freedom of will alone.70 Religious consciousness is therebymanifestly marked by a deep sense of dependence upon and need fordivine aid.

Moreover, when it comes to the acquisition of “eternal happiness,”the ethically charged awareness that we cannot acquire it ourselvesis one thing, but the addition of Kierkegaard’s views on the objectiveuncertainty of our knowledge of contingent being makes the issueeven more urgent, particularly in the case of Christianity. When itcomes to items of mere relative interest (such as knowing what I atefor breakfast this morning), the stakes of my ultimate uncertainty arerather low. However, when my eternal happiness is at issue (an itemof “infinite interest” for Kierkegaard), then the stakes are so highthat I cannot countenance any objective uncertainty. This indicatesfor Kierkegaard just how pressing is the question that forms theepigraph of Fragments: “Can an eternal happiness be built on a bit ofhistorical knowledge?” After all, no bit of historical knowledge isfully certain in Kierkegaard’s epistemology. The question is relatedto Kierkegaard’s central concern to show that the historical truth ofChristianity cannot be known purely objectively and is not fullyaccessible to rational thought. It is here that the importance of hisviews on modality and approximate knowledge emerges into fullview.

As we have seen, all of our approximate knowledge of contingentbeing (which includes historical events) is for Kierkegaard uncertain,and involves the passion of belief or faith. Now, as Johannes Climacusnotes in the “Interlude” of Fragments, the central claim of Christianityis that “the god has come into existence.” As an event of contingent

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being the historical reality of this event involves non-necessarycoming into existence.As a purely historical fact, then, our knowledgeof it is objectively uncertain and involves faith. Climacus notes thatthis is ‘faith’ “in its direct and ordinary meaning [belief] as the relationto the historical.”71 Yet for Kierkegaard, as is well known, thishistorical actuality is no mere historical fact; it is the incarnate Christhimself, the “Absolute Paradox” as Climacus calls it. For, this actualityinvolves the paradox that God, a necessary being who always is andtherefore by definition cannot come into existence, has taken oncontingent being and has come into existence.

We can now see why Kierkegaard’s modal and related epistemiccommitments are so crucial. Necessity, as previously noted, has forKierkegaard nothing to do with historical coming-into-existenceor freedom, while history (and contingent being generally) is thesphere of non-necessary, freely caused coming-into-existence. IfKierkegaard (through Climacus) surrenders to Hegel’s modality andcorrelative epistemological relation to historical facts under theaspect of the necessary, then Christ the Paradox himself, his histori-cal coming-into-existence, becomes a matter of necessity. Moreover,if we relate to him epistemically under the aspect of necessity, hebecomes fully analyzable and knowable through unaided humanreason. In that case, he ceases to be an Absolute Paradox and theultimate downfall of fallen reason. For Kierkegaard, preciselybecause the god has come into existence, it is crucial that the his-torical in general, and our epistemic and passional relation to thehistorical, be one of passion and uncertain contingency rather thannecessity.

However, as Climacus notes in the “Interlude,” approximateknowledge of this historical actuality requires not merely faith in the“ordinary” sense, but also faith in the “eminent” sense, since theobject of belief is absolutely paradoxical and thereby lies beyondfallen and finite human understanding. So, while there is a typicalsense in which faith is the “ordinary” organ of the historical, and soproperly belongs here, the Absolute Paradox shatters the thoughtcategories of both probabilistic and a priori reasoning. Unlike typicalcases of approximation knowledge, the Paradox does not whollyconform to the finite contours of human knowing.

Therefore, if consciousness of our inability to self-sufficientlyachieve the summum bonum of the ethical leads aright, then Reli-giousness A ultimately reveals our need for divine aid. Moreover, ifthe stakes involve nothing less than an eternal happiness towardwhich we ultimately strive, then, for Kierkegaard, human progresstoward “higher” existential truths ideally leads to a confrontation withthe Paradox. Here, human beings can respond with either offense

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(doubt) or faith. For Kierkegaard, moreover, the condition for acquir-ing the truth—that is, “faith” (Tro) in the eminent sense—can only begiven as a divine gift.72 This is not merely the result of our havingrun up against the natural limits of objective knowledge and humanunderstanding. For, as Climacus notes, paradoxical faith must be givenas a gift in light of our active existential rebellion against this truth, foras learners we occupy the position of being in “untruth.”73 Yet, itremains true that paradoxical faith, though a gift, is a passion appro-priate to the Paradox considered in its historical dimensions, andso appropriate to the natural existential limits of our approximateknowledge. Though the Paradox may be the “downfall” of the under-standing, as Climacus says, it remains possible for the understandingand the Paradox to come to a “mutual understanding” when theunderstanding wills its own downfall, steps aside, and “the paradoxgives itself” as well as the appropriate gift of faith.74 In Kierkegaard’sepistemic economy, then, there is a sense in which human understand-ing that properly limits itself also finds itself.

VIII. Conclusion

While these latter applications of Kierkegaard’s epistemic viewscould be more deeply developed, I hope at least to have shown howthey can play an essential and progressive role in moving humanknowers from ordinary approximation knowledge to an appropriate(yet unprecedented) encounter with the Absolute Paradox. Withrespect to the central aim of this article, however, I hope to haveoffered a needed clarification of Kierkegaard’s views on both objec-tive knowledge in general, and on approximate knowledge of con-tingent being in particular. In light of his ontological and modalcommitments, and his characterization of faith-infused approximateknowledge, I have argued that while Kierkegaard severely restrictshuman knowledge, his views do not entail a thorough irrationalismor skepticism. Nevertheless, while his views countenance genuineknowledge that may roughly correspond to reality, those who wouldseek the “higher” existential truths toward which he points mustresolve to let his criticisms of the endless nature and pretendedself-sufficiency of approximate knowledge stand fast. If we do letthem stand, we may then begin to grasp the profoundly humane,rather than merely skeptical, contours of Kierkegaard’s passionateepistemology.

FRESNO PACIFIC UNIVERSITYFresno, California

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Endnotes

In various drafts of this article I benefitted a great deal from the contributions of severalpeople. Accordingly, I wish to thank C. Stephen Evans for offering knowledgeable andinsightful comments on two drafts, George Willis Williams III for his helpful feedback andfor clarifying Kierkegaard’s view of our inevitably interested existence. I also wish tothank Christopher Latiolais for his thorough review, written feedback, and critical engage-ment with this piece when I presented it at the 2012 Pacific Division of the AmericanPhilosophical Association. Finally, I am grateful to this issue’s special editor, LaurenPfister, for encouraging me to link Kierkegaard’s epistemic views to his larger concerns ofacquiring religious selfhood before God. The final section of the paper was written as adirect result of Lauren’s ideas on this score.

1. Throughout the article, honoring Kierkegaard’s own wishes (Postscript, 627), I willlargely cite the views presented as Climacus’s, rather than Kierkegaard’s. Cf. SørenAabye Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,Vol. I, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992), 627. Subsequent citations will be entered as JohannesClimacus, Postscript, followed by page number(s). However, I also assume throughout(and sometimes show by citing Kierkegaard’s journals) that the two largely overlapon the issues I examine, even though they differ on others. This overlapping assump-tion is defensible in light of two things: First, Kierkegaard changed his name fromauthor to editor of Philosophical Fragments (also under the pseudonym JohannesClimacus) at the last minute, so he clearly sees a strong continuity between his ownviews and those of Johannes Climacus. Secondly, the issues I deal with in this articleare shared in common by both Philosophical Fragments and Postscript, and indeedare prevalent throughout Kierkegaard’s wider corpus and journals. Søren AabyeKierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Subsequent citations will beentered as Johannes Climacus, Fragments, followed by page number(s). For a briefsummary of Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms generally, see note 5 below.

2. Mackey, Popkin, Nordentoft, Gill and Hannay, are a good representative samplingof the interpretive range. For an excellent review of their positions, see ThomasC. Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” in InternationalKierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Robert L. Perkins(Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997), 187.

3. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 81. Also, while Approximations-Viden is better trans-lated from the Danish as “approximative knowledge” or “approximating knowledge,”I will typically refer to this with the more simple and straightforward English phrase“approximate knowledge.” While this rendering is more natural in English, there is arisk of losing the sense that such knowledge is perpetually unfinished and incremen-tally advancing by degrees, as this is better captured with the gerund “approximating.”However, I will depend on my general exposition to make that sense of the phraseclear.

4. Piety notes that while many scholars discuss the nature of knowledge in Kierkegaard,most remain ignorant of the substance of his epistemology. See Marilyn Gaye Piety,“Kierkegaard on Religious Knowledge,” History of European Ideas 22, no. 2 (1996):105. Piety’s recent monograph is now the only systematic treatment of Kierkegaard’sepistemology in English. See Marilyn Gaye Piety, Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’sPluralist Epistemology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010). There is, however,another older monograph devoted to Kierkegaard’s epistemology which has not yetbeen translated into English: Anton Hügli, Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität und dieObjektivität des Erkennens bei Søren Kierkegaard (Knowledge of Subjectivity and theObjectivity of Knowing in Søren Kierkegaard) (Basel: Editio Academia, 1973).

5. For readers who are unfamiliar with Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms, a brief note isin order here. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms was limited (largely) to the first phaseof his overall authorship, from 1843–1846. The second phase of his authorship (1847–1855) included far more non-pseudonymous works (notably, Works of Love), but also

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two crucial works by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, who embodies an ideal religiouslife view which Kierkegaard himself thought he had yet to attain (see The Sicknessunto Death and Practice in Christianity). While the use of pseudonyms was a commonpractice in Copenhagen during the first half of the 19th century, Kierkegaard hadseveral distinct goals in mind in using them, especially during the first phase of hisauthorship (1843–1846). This first phase included numerous pseudonymous authorsor editors in works entitled Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, PhilosophicalFragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life’s Way, and Concluding UnscientificPostscript. Each of these pseudonymous works was closely accompanied by publica-tion of explicitly Christian and devotional Upbuilding Discourses in Kierkegaard’sown name, and this corroborates Kierkegaard’s later claim, in his Point of View for MyWork as an Author, that the whole of his pseudonymous authorship possessed aunified religious aim. Specifically, Kierkegaard used his pseudonyms instrumentally inhis overall vocational effort to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom,” sinceDenmark was at the time a Lutheran, Christianized state. In all of his writing, whetherdirectly or indirectly, he sought to address the single individual and awaken such aperson to the prospect of becoming a self before God through a direct, inwardrelation of faith, rather than merely through externalized institutional structures ofthe culturally assimilated Christianity of nineteenth century Denmark. InKierkegaard’s early view (owing in part to his great admiration for Socrates’ use ofirony and maieutic method), this could best be accomplished by way of indirectcommunication. So, Kierkegaard sought to place the possibility of existing as anindividual human being before God as close to his readers as possible, and the lifeviews of his pseudonyms (however much Kierkegaard himself agreed or disagreedwith them) are thus offered up as thought possibilities embodied by these pseudony-mous characters. Therefore, an important issue when reading any given pseudonym isthe extent of their continuity with Kierkegaard’s own views. For instance, he is clearly(if indirectly) critical of the life view embodied by the aesthete (named “A”) inEither/Or I, however other cases are more problematic. Judge William of Either/Or IIembodies an ethical life view that stresses the crucial role of volitional commitment inpersonal formation, a view that Kierkegaard would endorse. However, the Judge alsouncritically imbibes a morality of social convention (much like Hegel’s Sittlichkeit),and it is precisely this view of ethics (specifically its lack of answerability to God) thatKierkegaard later critiques. While there are a number of ways to interpretKierkegaard’s own views in relation to various pseudonyms, one very defensible wayis to use his private journals and works written in his own name as interpretivecontrols for one’s reading of a given pseudonym.

6. J. Heywood Thomas, “Logic and Existence in Kierkegaard,” Journal of the BritishSociety for Phenomenology 2, no. 3 (1971): 10.

7. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen andUnwin, 1969), 46.

8. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 123 and 196.9. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 41 (note). See also Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and

Papers, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by GregorMalantschuk, 7 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978), 1:1057 and1:1059. Hereafter cited as Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, followed by volume andentry number. For a similar interpretation, see Hügli, Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität,99, and Piety, Ways of Knowing, 7.

10. Cf. C. Stephen Evans, “Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unsci-entific Postscript,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco:Baylor University Press, 2006), 37–38.

11. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 326. See Kierkegaard’s identical point made, withreference to Johannes Climacus’s views, in Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 1:1059.

12. Evans, “Realism and Antirealism,” 38.13. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 1:1067.14. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 123.15. Cf. ibid., 331. For a full discussion on Hegel’s “answer” to Kantian skepticism, see

chapter 3 in Postscript.

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16. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 75. A little bit later on in the text, Climacus alsocarefully distinguishes between the past as necessary, and the past as unchangeable(79–80).

17. Hegel, Science of Logic, 549; cited in Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 299 (note 12).18. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 74.19. Perkins, for instance, notes that the chief presupposition of Climacus’s entire argu-

ment is that “every historical cause finally terminates in a freely effecting cause.”Robert L. Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s Epistemological Preferences,” InternationalJournal for Philosophy of Religion, 4, no. 4 (1973), 208. Cf. also Johannes Climacus,Fragments, 90–95.

20. Cf. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 73–75, and Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s Epistemologi-cal Preferences,” 208.

21. Piety, Ways of Knowing, 49.22. Cf. Piety, Ways of Knowing, 8; Hügli, Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität, 33; Evans,

“Realism and Antirealism,” 59–60; and Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s EpistemologicalPreferences,” the entire article. See also Martin Slotty, “Die Erkenntnislehre S. A.Kierkegaards” (The Epistemology of S. A. Kierkegaard), Ph.D. diss., Friedrich-Alexanders-Universität, 1915, 18–20.

23. Piety, Ways of Knowing, 12.24. Ibid.25. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 21.26. For a more extended discussion of Kierkegaard’s use of “ontology,” see Piety, Ways of

Knowing, 66ff.27. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 2:2281.28. Ibid., 1:197.29. Cf. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 280, for Climacus’s dilation of this point. Cf. also

Piety, Ways of Knowing, 66–67 and Hügli, Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität, 11 and 89.30. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 320. Cf. also 32, 81, and 317.31. Ibid., 81. For example, see Evans, “Realism and Antirealism,” 39, and Piety, Ways of

Knowing, 3. See also Fragments, 81, where Johannes Climacus assumes that historicalknowledge is real, and simply asks how it is that we acquire such knowledge.

32. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 23, 30.33. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 81.34. Cf. also ibid., 149.35. Ibid., 81. Cf. 82, where Johannes Climacus credits the ancient skeptics with this insight.

For more discussion of these views in Kierkegaard, see José Raimundo Maia Neto,The Christianization of Pyrrhonism: Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard, andShestov (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 65–73.

36. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 81.37. Ibid.38. Slotty, “Die Erkenntnislehre S. A. Kierkegaards,” 12. For similar interpretations, see

Piety, Ways of Knowing, 12, and Evans, “Realism and Antirealism,” 39.39. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 81.40. Cf. Neto, The Christianization of Pyrrhonism, 77–78. Neto rightly notes that “For

Climacus, objective uncertainty is a given fact in relation to which a subject deter-mines either a relation of doubt (as sceptics [sic.] do) or of belief. Both require acontinuous engagement of the self because the transformation of the subject is neverdone once and for all” (Neto, 76). Because skeptical doubt simultaneously preservesobjective uncertainty (which belief also preserves) and attempts to eliminate interestin actuality (unlike belief), Climacus says that “All skepticism is idealism” (JohannesClimacus, Postscript, 352), and that the ancient skeptics’ pursuit of ataraxia was “anexistential attempt to abstract from existence” (Postscript, 282). However, such inter-est cannot be eliminated. Even Zeno, when confronted by a mad dog, ceased hisskepticism and admitted to the fact that he was an interested human being.

41. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 83.42. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 78.43. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 3:2815. Emphasis mine.44. Cf. Hügli, Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität, 280.

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45. Kierkegaard uses two expressions for “becoming.” Tilblivelse refers to a change inbeing, as when some possibility becomes actualized. Vorden, however, indicates a“coming to be” that is tied to the nature of a given thing, as when an acorn naturallycomes to be an oak tree. To the extent that historical events are objects of knowledge(and hence not the actualities they once were), they are naturally in a process ofcoming to be (Vorden) for thought, as our understanding of such objects changes overtime.

46. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 81.47. For a sampling of scholars who hold this view as well as of those who endorse a softer

reading, see note 2 above.48. Richard H. Popkin, “Kierkegaard and Skepticism,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical

Assessments of Leading Philosophers Vol. II, ed. Daniel W. Conway (London:Routledge, 2002), 249, 252.

49. Ibid., 244.50. Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” 191.51. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 81, with my emphasis.52. Johannes Climacus argues, for instance, that the negative posture of the person who

(against the deceived “positive” Hegelians) knows that human knowledge is alwaysuncertain, is in fact in an advantageous position, for he knows the truth of things in thisrespect (ibid., 78).

53. Evans, “Realism and Antirealism,” 40.54. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 320. Cf. also 32, 81, and 317.55. Evans, “Realism and Antirealism,” 41.56. Ibid., 42 (citing Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 81–82); Perkins, “Kierkegaard’s Epis-

temological Preferences,” 216; Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowl-edge,” 194.

57. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 2:2254 and Journals and Papers 1L:649.58. Piety, Ways of Knowing, 43, 81.59. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 189–190.60. Ibid., 193, 197.61. Piety, Ways of Knowing, 82.62. Cf., for instance, Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 1:197 and 2:2821.63. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 3:2807. I am grateful to Piety (Ways of Knowing, 81)

for directing me to this passage.64. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 196.65. Ibid., 203.66. Ibid., 348.67. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009), 115.68. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V.

Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 93. I amgrateful to Evans (Kierkegaard: An Introduction, 115) for leading me to this keypassage.

69. Cf. Johannes Climacus, Postscript, 201, 393, and 427.70. In The Sickness unto Death, for example, Kierkegaard’s treats self-sufficiently willing

to be oneself as a form of sin and despair. Also, in his journals, Kierkegaard wondersat how it has come to pass that the contentless “liberum arbitrium” (free will; libertyof decision or judgment) has become equated with “positive freedom.” Such a fic-tional will “has nothing to do with the content but as infinitely abstract elasticitymaintains itself victorious and indifferent for all eternity” (Kierkegaard, Journals andPapers 2:1240).

71. Johannes Climacus, Fragments, 87.72. Ibid., 58.73. Ibid., 15–18.74. Ibid., 59.

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