Faith, forgiveness & love by Kierkegaard
Something to ponder about:
“You can never know whether a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees…….”
“Faith is the most important fact in religious questions. Kierkegaard wrote: ‘If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith, I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.’ “
-Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
I completely disagree with Kierkegaard, for the simple reason that faith is no standard for believe. One need not believe merely because one cannot objectively deduce.
Faith is only a leap, and I must say, not entirely unwarranted. In a world that is bizzare and beyond comprehension, it is too tempting not to believe in god or some form or even a formless almighty - a designer. But the point is how does that faith or its absence make a difference to us? As Albert Camus says - life has certain givens. Its up to us to keep appealing to a potentially non-existing almighty for favours or to adapt and make the most out of the givens.
Eternity, my friend, is not of human concern. This life is. Read “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. He also discusses Kierkargaad before dismissing his leap.
Many thanks to KSR for your interesting insight on the above post. Really appreciate your view on this.
Well, I realized that something we can identify and agree is that Kierkegaard was not completely correct. As you have said “One need not believe merely because one cannot objectively deduce.” I never believed in blind faith, nor endorse any religion that promotes blind faith; it becomes a sort of unconditional trust. I believe trust must be earned…. Hence your description of faith as a leap is most apt. It is not a blind leap; we need to take into account other considerations. Such as the bizarre world you’ve mentioned, the answered prayers and the accounts of the supernatural. If there is a god, he must first reveal Himself to us and earn our trust; which the Christian God claimed to do.
However, I would have to put a different weight on your valuation of eternity and the current life. This life is important not as an end to itself, but this life is important as this life can be viewed to be the preparation for the next phrase - namely eternity. Our decisions here would have consequences of eternal repercussions. We only have this one life to figure out if eternity exists. And if eternity is does exist, we had better make sure we do all we can do get on the enjoyable side of it.
I am pasting here an article i had written for my college magazine. It is about the book by Camus I adviced you to read. I would like you to read this as it is a basic introduction to his theory of absurdity. I agree eternity and faith are what make life bearable for many. But if you read Camus, you get to see a different aspect, which appeals more than the leap of faith, that we most often end up taking.
Living with the Absurd
Albert Camus wrote a great book, The Myth of Sisyphus , long ago, which I read recently with great pains despite the fact that I liked what I read. Call it absurd or believe in my confession that it’s a difficult book to read, if you wish to follow it. If you go by genre, it would fall in the non-fiction / philosophy category; but if you don’t, I would prefer to call it an exploration. It is like a travelogue, only that the places he visits have not been visited before and that they are not ‘places’. They are conclusions, arrived through inquiry into thoughts.
He neither ridicules nor worships, either the dialectic or faith. A rare non-extremist - a clan that philosophers do not generally belong to. No doubt, his theory of the absurd, which he expounds in the book, is based on the presumption that there is no god. Yet, he uses faith of some other kind - the faith in the human intellect to desire order and logic (not precisely in the platonic or dialectic sense), which he terms as the never ceasing ‘longing for happiness and for reason’. It forms one half of the absurd, the other being the unreasonable silence of the irrational world. The absurd is born of the divorce between these two aspects, or in his own words “ it is born of their confrontation”. He wrote somewhere that one of the most absurd possible ends to a human life would be to die in a road accident. He was killed in a road accident in 1960, at the age of 47.
Sisyphus, as I understand from Camus’s last chapter in the book, is a character from Greek mythology. He was supposedly condemned, for some act of his, to the underworld (again, a concept from the Greek mythology) to roll a very heavy stone up a mountain and leave it at the top of the slope, so that it would roll back to the ground. After which, he was to walk down and roll it up again - forever. The punishment was - futile and hopeless labour. There is an analogical correlation between Sisyphus and every man in this ‘absurd’ world. Therefore, Camus starts his book with an eternal question - Is life worth living? For if we go back to the analogy with Sisyphus, is it not more logical for man to end life and defy the punishment? Camus answers in the negative and does well for that. He brings a sense of heroism to the very act of living, to every minute of life that has defied the obvious choice of suicide. In lack of better words, I quote to expound:
“ [A]t the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments towards that lower world whence he will have to push it up again towards the summit. He goes back down to the plain…[I]t is during the return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me…I see a man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end…At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the liars of gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock…[I]f the myth is tragic, it is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?…There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
There are many theories on life - the mystical, the dialectic, the existential, et al. But, once understood, nothing is more liberating and simplistic than ‘the absurd’. In a lot of things, Camus’s theory of the absurd borrows from the earlier existentialists. In a lot more, it differs, it disagrees - and those are the parts that distinguishes it from any previous metaphysical text.
The strange thing is that ‘the absurd’ offers no answers, and that precisely is its appeal. What it actually does is that it eliminates questions that essentially do not have answers. Let’s take an example. Imagine the most virtuous (according to your set of values, for virtue definitely is subjective), hard-working, intelligent and talented law student that can be. Let’s say that he builds a resume unparalleled by any of his contemporaries, his oral skills are solid - all in all, assume a perfect would-be lawyer. This imaginary hero of ours applies for a position in a lot of law firms, counsels etc. Despite everything falling in place by the “reasonable-man” test, he is rejected everywhere - for six months. Now, let us ask “Why?”.
The mystics would say, “It’s god’s will. Fate.”. No matter how ‘sacred’ it may sound, the answer is, to many, unsatisfactory. Even those who accept it, most often hear voices appealing against this verdict of the mystics - probably the voice of reason. Ask the dialectics, and they would demand details - minute details that are impossible to get. If they have that, they would apply the principles of logic and arrive at an answer that would beg the question. Logic, no doubt, is a boon. But unfortunately, life is not logical. Evidence? Experience.
What would ‘the absurd’ say? It would tell you that you are asking the wrong question. In a world that is illogical and random, where events do not follow reason, there are certain “Why’s” you must live with. With experience and practice, these “why’s” will vanish - because then you would be as conscious of the absurd as light of the day.
The tragedy of human life is that it is mostly spent planning for the future. Man desires being something, achieving something, accomplishing something - all in the future. And the comedy of errors is that he has no choice in the matter. For, let alone the kind, man cannot even ensure that he shall have a future at all. Death is a certainty - and it’s timing is unknown, unknowable.
Man has eternally been looking for a ‘meaning of life’, the purpose for which he is born. The absurd takes away all meaning, denies any such purpose. Even the mystics have offered no meaning for this life, their argument is a life after death, which is not only of no consequence to man’s eternal quest but also unfair to him. To the conscious man, only the given is of concern, i.e only the life on earth in the true form that it exists. Given that, can man adapt himself to it? And how? Indifference to the future, desire to use up everything that man has, to live without appeal to supernatural forces, to use his reasoning - these, according to Camus, are the essentials for living with the absurd. Life for him is a rebel against the irrational world. In any other form, he believes, the choice of suicide pops-up.
Find a man who has not wondered over his misfortunes, “Why me?”. Find a man who has not witnessed a sequence of events that made no sense. Find a man who knows where he will be five years from now. If you find no one, do not appeal - rebel. Except eternity, man has freedom over every other choice. And everything beyond choice is beyond man’s field of concern. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
[...] Albert Camus, KSR and the Myth of Sisyphus 5 04 2007 First and foremost, I would like to express my thanks to the prompt and enthusiastic reply of KSR. (A commenter on the post of Faith, forgiveness & love by Kierkegaard) [...]
well, forgiveness is not so much on the other as an activity that happens to one self… kierkegaard would point out that forgiveness is a matter of change in the personal level.
[...] Living with the Absurd [...]