Becoming a Self

Chapter Twelve. The Subjective Issue - the Dialectical: (Pages 561-86)

CHAPTERI T W E L V E The Subjective IssueThe Dialectical (Pages 561--86) Climacus finds human existence to be paradoxical and contradictory . Its dipolar structure makes it an incongruous inseparability of elements that do not easily unite. He might have done this with the classical definition of humans as rational animals, saying that rationality and animality contradict each other. Instead he does so in terms of the ways in which we belong both to finitude and to infinity, both to time and to eternity. But in Fragments he had found the Christian affirmation that Jesus ofNazareth was God incarnate to be the absolute paradox , and as he now returns to this theme of"the absolute paradox, the absurd, the incomprehensible" (561), he has more than human dipolarity in mind. He sees Christianity as a move beyond Socrates to a new and intensified level of dialectical difficulty, which he has just called "the dialectical in the second place" (556, 559). Christianity is doubly dialectical because it superimposes on the universal dialectic ofexistence as such the particular dialectic ofan eternal God who "comes into existence in time, is born, grows up, and dies" (579). As if directly to challenge the Scholastic adage that the mysteries of Christian faith go beyond reason but not against it, Climacus repeatedly insists that Christian faith must be "against the understanding" (565-66,568, 579n, 585). Twice he even describes faith as "the crucifixion of the understanding" (564). Christianity rests on a "dialectical contradiction" (570-81) of an unusually intense sort. This means that Religiousness B, even more than Religiousness A, will be a challenge to the rationalist project of rendering the whole of reality intelligible to human understanding. In view ofthe widespread tendency to interpret any critique ofreason (or I 180 181 I The Dialectical of logocentrism) as an anything-goes irrationalism, it is important to be as clear as possible about what he is saying. We found him dealing briefly with the dialectical contradiction of Christianity in chapter 8 above. Against the notion that the contradiction involved was the formal logical contradiction of asserting a proposition and its denial at the same time, a threefold argument was offered. First, Climacus uses the language of contradiction in a Hegelian sense, which signifies tension, incongruity , and opposition rather than formal, propositional contradiction . Second, the contradictions to whIch he points are often existential rather than epistemological-for example, the contradiction sometimes involved in wanting one's students to do well and feeling an obligation to give honest grades. Third, where contradiction does have a clearly epistemic focus , it lies in the incongruity between the content of a particular beliefand a larger frame ofreference that excludes that beliefbut whose normative credentials are open to question. The issue becomes whether the belief in question signifies an anomaly that calls for a paradigm shift, or whether it should be rejected on the basis of the prevailing paradigm. In light of these factors, it would be a dramatic semantic shift if Climacus were suddenly to start using "contradiction" as formal logicians use the term. In the present context the "contradiction" of the incarnation is closely related to the claim that it can only be believed "against the understanding." Does the contradiction lie within the belief itself or between it and the understanding? If the latter, whose understanding? Here, as in the earlier discussion, the contradiction turns out to be relational, and the paradigm that stands in contradiction to incarnation is human understanding. The passages that make this clear evoke memories of the earlier claim that existence "is a system- for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit" (118). The contradiction is the incongruity of the divine and human standpoints. Thus, for example, Christianity is paradoxical "as long as there is existing and only eternity has the explanation" (562). In other words, it is paradoxical for those who exist and whose understanding is temporal. Ifwe could see things sub specie aeterni, the paradox would vanish. But to try to replace the paradox with an explanation is "to fancy that one is in eternity" and to flirt with that flight from concretion to abstraction that can make such a fancy seem fact (563). We know that Climacus thinks it impossible to back out of time into eternity, but here his critique is moral. This fancy is "impatience" (563). "The interpretation ofthe 182 I C HAP T E...