| They need his dialectic to be consolidated, if faith is what they want, but 'the most intelligent person is hindered from believing by his great understanding'. On the other hand: 'he also has the advantage of knowing from experience what it is to believe against the understanding' (SV3 10, p. 234/502). As to what that advantage is, a comment in the journals may help. It says that 'to be properly clear that the object of faith is the absurd abbreviates tremendously'. That might just mean that once you see the point you don't have to go on and on, not about the elaborate dialectic, but about faith. That remark, too, seems aimed at the 'intelligent', but in the same entry Kierkegaard surmises that God may have made the object of faith absurd out of concern for people - ordinary people, that is to say, people of ordinary intelligence and not versed in dialectics. Pap ire r X 2 A 624 (p. 490) (1850). God has even 'let it be said in advance that it was, is, and must be absurd'. | | | | |
| The Sickness unto Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 60. | | | | |
| Stephen Mulhall, Faith and Reason (London: Duckworth, 1994), p. 50. | | | | |
| See, e.g., n. 2 above on the Wittgenstein connection, and more recently in responses to Conant by, e.g., John Lippitt, 'A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to Salvation: Climacus as Humorist in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript', Religious Studies, 33 (1997), pp. 181-202, and John Lippitt and Daniel Hutto, 'Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCVIII (1998), pp. 263-86. | | | | |
| Samlede Værker (3rd edn) (SV3), (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962), p. 163 SV3 10, 163. Swenson/Lowrie, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941) translate this as to realize the truth' (p. 175). Page references to the translation accompany those to the original. | | | | |