Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard's Pluralist Epistemology

5. Redefining Knowledge

95 CHAPTER FIVE Redefining Knowledge Subjective Knowledge I argued in chapter 4 that Kierkegaard’s main quarrel with his contemporaries concerned the possibility of absolute knowledge. Kierkegaard “was content,” observes Slotty, “to have convinced himself that there was no such thing as presuppositionless knowledge [in philosophy] and proceeded hurriedly to demonstrate the impossibility of such knowledge in other spheres” (Slotty, 22). Kierkegaard was not particularly interested in objective knowledge. Subjective knowledge or, more specifically, ethical knowledge and religious knowledge, were his main concerns.1 “Ethical-religious realities,” observes Slotty, “presuppose themselves and knowledge of these realities is attained, according to Kierkegaard, by means which conform to laws unique to these realities” (Slotty, 40).2 We have already seen that all knowledge is interested according to Kierkegaard and that all knowledge thus has a subjective element . We also saw, however, that there are two fundamentally different 1 See Slotty, 40; and Harald Høffding, Kierkegaard som Filosof [Kierkegaard as philosopher ] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1919), 59. 2 Compare this to Deuser’s claim that “the inner perspective has its own being and demands, therefore, an epistemology of its own” (Deuser, 105–6). 96 WAYS OF KNOWING types of interest: the first where the object of interest is some third thing such as beauty or truth and the second where the object of interest is the knower himself.3 These two types of interest are associated with two different types of knowledge. We examined objective knowledge in chapters 3 and 4. The remainder of the book will look at what Kierkegaard calls subjective knowledge. I have not so far drawn much attention to the various Danish expressions Kierkegaard uses to refer to knowledge. This is because the distinctions he makes between the two Danish expressions normally translated into English as knowledge of the propositional sort—that is, Erkjendelse and Viden4 —appear to be relative to the context in which they occur.5 That is, Kierkegaard does not appear to make any general, or systematic, distinction between these expressions. Much of the confusion, however, surrounding the efforts of various philosophers to determine the substance of Kierkegaard’s epistemology is a direct result of the fact that Kierkegaard’s discussion of subjective, or essential, knowledge often involves reference to acquaintance knowledge (Kendskab) rather than to propositional knowledge . To avoid confusion, from now on I will indicate the Danish term in question when quoting Kierkegaard if the term in question would not normally be translated as knowledge in the propositional sense. It is important to appreciate that subjective knowledge is not distinguished from objective knowledge in the way one might think. Some sorts of subjective knowledge will have a relation to the knower such that if the knower were different, so the content of the knowledge would be different . This does not mean, however, that subjective knowledge is subjectivist. There is, for Kierkegaard, a single ethical and religious reality in the sense that there is one set of eternally valid ethical norms for human behavior and one God who requires of every human being that he actualize these norms in his existence. Kierkegaard, as Slotty observes, “was personally convinced of the truth of Christianity” (Slotty, 63).6 There is, for Kierkegaard, a single ethical-religious reality—that is, Christianity—it is just that the way 3 See chapter 3, “Objective versus Subjective Knowledge.” 4 See Poul Lübcke, Politikens Filosofi Leksikon [Politiken’s philosophical lexicon] (Copenhagen : Politikens Forlag, 1983), 16 . 5 See chapter 1, “Kierkegaard’s Terminology.” 6 Compare this to the observation of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling: “If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, . . . what would life then be but despair? . . . But for precisely that reason it is not so” (FT, 15). REDEFINING KNOWLEDGE 97 to knowledge of this reality is through the individual, through attention to his subjective experience as such, rather than through becoming objective.7 Subjective knowledge proper, we will see, is like objective knowledge in the strict sense in that it is characterized by an immediate relation between the knower and the object of knowledge. That is, subjective knowledge proper involves contact with, or participation with, the reality in question . Just as was the case, however, with objective knowledge in both the strict and looser senses, subjective knowledge is...