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221 Notes 1. A Pretense of Irrationalism 1. Several scholars argue that Kierkegaard does not reject reason. Merold Westphal is one of the first interpreters to present persuasive arguments that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist. See his Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, and Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscien tific Postscript, esp. 124–125, 181–183. C. Stephen Evans takes on the most serious arguments that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist, and I think, compellingly refutes them. He also argues cogently that Kierkegaard assigns reason a positive role in the search for truth, and gives an ac count of Kierkegaard’s conception and use of reason. In Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” he claims that “our subjectivity . . . may be or become a medium that . . . opens us up to an encounter with truth” (3); that Kierkegaard “thinks that a reason that recognizes its passional character is a friend to humans struggling to find their place” (x); and that “Climacus in his own way . . . suggest[s] that a faith rooted in a revelation that reason cannot fully understand may indeed be rational” (95). See also his claims in Kierkegaard, on Faith and the Self that Kierkegaard thinks that “faith has [perhaps] ebbed” “be cause [people] have become impoverished in their grasp of . . . human life”; and that Kierkegaard thinks that faith “stems from a courageous attempt to face the truth about who we are and who we should be” (5, 7; cf. 329–330). Evans has probably argued more extensively for the rationality of Kierkegaard, and explained more thoroughly the character of that rationality, than any other interpreter of Kierkegaard. Besides Passionate Reason and Kierkegaard, on Faith and the Self, his books Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus and Faith above Reason: A Kierkegaardian Ac count are crucial sources for understanding Kierkegaard’s conception and use of reason. Robert C. Roberts, in “The Grammar of Sin and the Conceptual Unity of The Sickness Unto Death,” argues that “being a Christian is a fulfillment of religious ness A” (136). And since Religiousness A is independent of revelation, Roberts is in 222 · Notes to Page 2 effect saying that Kierkegaard sees natural humanity, including natural rationality, as fulfilled in Christianity. In “The Socratic Knowledge of God,” Roberts also sets out to “explore and defend Kierkegaard’s conception of the natural knowledge of God” (134). Roberts is especially helpful on the role of the emotions in Kierkegaard ian rationality—see “Existence, Emotion, and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kierke gaard” and “Dialectical Emotions and the Virtue of Faith.” Jack Mulder Jr., in Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dia logue, has also argued convincingly that Kierkegaard’s understanding of the hu man being is a “hybrid of the Lutheran and Catholic anthropologies” (179). An im portant aspect of this hybrid is a combination of Lutheran suspicion of reason and Socratic respect for the same. 2. In Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Merold Westphal argues very persuasively that a large part of the cause that Kierkegaard appears to reject reason is that he makes it his business to critique something that “masquerades” as reason, namely, a “historically specific form of human deviousness,” or “the fun damental assumptions of the established order,” or “ideology” (21, 89). This line of argument provides very good evidence that Kierkegaard does not reject reason as such, but only (what he regards as) perverse forms of rationality. C. Stephen Evans, in Faith above Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account, similarly distinguishes two aspects of the concept of reason: “The concept is partly norma tive; it connotes those patterns of thinking that ought to be emulated because they are most likely to lead to truth. A purely normative concept is, however, abstract and empty. In reality every human society holds up particular concrete patterns and modes of thinking as constitutive of reason because they are thought to realize these normative ideals” (93). Evans argues that when Kierkegaard critiques reason, or claims that faith is “against reason,” he typically has in mind, not reason as such, but “particular concrete patterns and modes of thinking” of a particular “human society” that form “a barrier to achieving the goals of reason in an ideal normative sense” (93–94). Therefore, in short, Evans thinks that much or most of Kierkegaard’s opposition to reason is directed at (what Kierkegaard regards as) a particular, per verted version of reason. 3. Some scholars have come close...