Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment

A Phenomenological Proof? The Challenge of Arguing for God in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship

101 A Phenomenological Proof? The Challenge of Arguing for God in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship Heiko Schulz Despite the extraordinary variety and richness of its pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous views, standpoints, and perspectives, Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole seems absolutely unanimous when it comes to assessing the meaning and viability of the so-called proofs for the existence of God. There can be no doubt that in Kierkegaard’s opinion all pertinent attempts are and must be not only deeply flawed, but also highly dubious in terms of their ethico-religious implications—a foolish (PF, 39) enterprise at best, a “shameless assault” (CUP, 545) on God’s presence and majesty at worst. This notwithstanding, I will try in the following to show and to explain in some detail that a phenomenological reading of the pseudonymous authorship (in particular, The Sickness unto Death) may also— though arguably not at first sight—provide us with a fresh, original, and philosophically fruitful perspective on the problem of God in Kierkegaard . Thus, I will argue on the one hand that on a surface level there is indeed an argument for God’s existence to be found in Anti-Climacus’s book; however, it is neither conclusive in itself nor intended to be read as and/or believed to be conclusive by the author himself, since it turns out simply to be correct or formally valid, leaving the question of its being actually true undecided and up to the reader. On the other hand—and as a supplement to this overt and explicit, yet only formally valid argument —we do in fact find another, although indirect and genuinely phenomenological argument in Sickness. As such the argument is based on the assumption that it can possibly be established and justified only from the internal or “experiential” perspective of the self, more exactly: the self in despair. There has already been a number of successful attempts 102 H E I K O S C H U L Z to reconstruct basic Kierkegaardian ideas (e.g., his notion of freedom) in a phenomenological vein,1 and in the present paper I simply want to supplement these attempts by shedding light on the problem of God’s existence. In what follows, I will initially outline Kierkegaard’s main counterarguments against the so-called proofs for the existence of God. Secondly , I will present a reconstruction of the phenomenological argument and its relation to the formal one. In this context I will also try to reconcile Kierkegaard’s (more exactly: Climacus’s) strictly critical, in fact at times polemical attitude toward the proof issue and my own case for an, albeit hidden, phenomenological type of proof—a proof, which as such and at first sight seems diametrically to run counter to Kierkegaard ’s own explicit views and intentions. In conclusion I will abandon the limits of the purely pseudonymous perspective by incorporating two pertinent journal entries. Here Kierkegaard, speaking in his own voice, does not only repeat and confirm the pseudonymous views already explained , but he also argues—persuasively, in my opinion—that for better or worse we can never have it both ways: we cannot on the one hand give a truthful account of (the ideality of) the Christian faith and at the same time prove the existence of God, much less of the Christian God of love. Either of these goals is and must necessarily be realized at the expense of the other, since both are strictly speaking incompatible. Climacus’s Five Ways of Arguing Against Any Attempt to Prove God’s Existence Kierkegaard’s attempt to refute the purported proofs for the existence of God builds upon two main lines of argument. The first line is supposed to show, in a rather straightforward way, that existence as such and in general cannot be proved—and thus also and a fortiori the existence of God. The second line aims at showing that even if the first one would not obtain (namely in the sense that at least God’s existence could be proved) such proof, or more exactly, the mere attempt of such a proof, would be a meaningless, in fact even a foolish enterprise and as such highly problematic on ethico-religious terms also. Let us take a closer look at each line of argument in turn. The (following) subarguments supporting the first line turn on certain premises about the nature, scope, and limits of proofs as such and in general.2 The meaning and function of...