A Dog in a Bowling Alley: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

So much of learning is finding out how little you know. Famously, Socrates was said to have understood this better than anyone. And so for someone who tries to read the dialogues--Apology is a good one on this topic--it becomes difficult to tell what people really mean nowadays when they go around calling this or that style of teaching "Socratic." I have a hard time seeing it when most of what school seems to be about is along the lines of grades, tests, bells--appearances, in a word, rather than truth, or love of wisdom. I don't hesitate to say that what I try to do is Socratic teaching, of course, if I think it will help get people to listen to me, but I do wish we could investigate what that would actually look like, rather than treating it like any other school-reform buzzword. Particularly when we use it as nothing more than a token meant for translation into political terms, one that signals "high-brow, liberal arts, hence conservative," rather than "STEM, social justice-y, hence liberal," then "Socratic teaching" or "Socratic method" become essentially worthless for our purposes.

A similar concern, only more centered on such quaint-yet-revolutionary terms as "Christianity" and "faith," drives Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. The same pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, authors the Fragments and its long Postscript, both of which set forth the difficulty of calling someone or something Christian as if we all knew what we mean by that. While these books position themselves against the dominant philosophical current of Kierkegaard's day, which proclaimed it had superseded faith within Hegelian system-building, their message is totally relevant to our own, in which scientific triumphalism remains as easy a temptation to fall into as ever. Speaking approvingly of one who "stays out of jostling crowds," JC goes on:

Likewise, it is not suitable for a pamphlet writer to come lickety-split with his respectful supplication on behalf of  a few dialectical deliberations. He would be just like a dog in a bowling alley. Likewise, it is not suitable for a stark-naked dialectician to enter into a scholarly dispute in which, despite all the talent and learning pro et contra, it is nevertheless, in the last resort, not dialectically decided what the dispute is about. If it is a purely philological controversy, then let learning and talent be honored with admiration, as they deserve to be, but then it has no bearing on faith. (27)

I hope none of us here may be such lickety-split pamphlet writers; the image of a dog in a bowling alley is almost too pathetic to bear. If I rush in to praise Kierkegaard without knowing very well what to say about dialectics or faith, his two great themes, I hope I nevertheless do so decently attired. And we are far from taking a merely philological interest, I think, though I started this piece with a consideration of words. (I suspect that Signum University, a great proponent of reviving interest in philology in our time, itself acts at least partly from a concern with faith, if its founder's admiration of Boethius is any guide).

Lately I've tried to read some popular apologists/political writers/philosophical/self-help gurus (Keller, Spitzer, Alinsky, Nafisi, Peterson, Beauvoir, Gilbert) besides my staple lately of non-specialist science, just to see what's out there, what's popular. I haven't read much of all there is, for sure, but I think it's safe to say that there's no one quite like Kierkegaard--and that he'll never be popular:

To explain the paradox would then be to comprehend ever more deeply what a paradox is and that the paradox is the paradox.

Thus God is a supreme conception that cannot be explained by anything else but is explainable only by immersing oneself in the conception itself. The highest principles for all thinking can be demonstrated only indirectly (negatively). Suppose that the paradox is the boundary for an existing person's relation to an eternal, essential truth--in that case the paradox will not be explainable by anything else if the explanation is supposed to be for existing persons. (220)

In a footnote discussing the review of Fragments in a German journal, Kierkegaard/JC expresses his pleasant surprise at anyone reading it at all, but then takes issue with the "didactic" delivery:

As I see it, this is the most mistaken impression one can have of it. The contrast of form, the teasing resistance of the imaginary construction to the content, the inventive audacity (which even invents Christianity), the only attempt made to go further (that is, further than the so-called speculative constructing), the indefatigable activity of irony, the parody of speculative though in the entire plan, the satire in making efforts as if something [altogether extraordinary, that is, new] were to come of them, whereas what always emerges is old-fashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity--of all this the reader finds no hint in the report. And yet the book is so far from being written for nonknowers, to give them something to know, that the person I engage in conversation in this book is always knowledgeable, which seems to indicate that the book is written for people in the know, whose trouble is that they know too much. Because everyone knows the Christian truth, it has gradually become such a triviality that a primitive impression of it is acquired only with difficulty. When this is the case, the art of being able to communicate eventually becomes the art of being able to take away or to trick something away from someone. This seems strange and very ironic, and yet I believe I have succeeded in expressing exactly what I mean. When a man has his filled his mouth so full of food that for this reason he cannot eat and it must end with his dying of hunger, does giving food to him consist in stuffing his mouth even more or, instead, in taking a little away so that he can eat? Similarly, when a man is very knowledgeable but his knowledge is meaningless  or virtually meaningless to him, does sensible communication consist in giving him more to know, even if he loudly proclaims that this is what he needs, or does it consist, instead, in taking something away from him? When a communicator takes a portion of the copious knowledge that the very knowledgeable man knows and communicates it to him in a form that makes it strange to him, the communicator is, as it were, taking away his knowledge, at least until the knower manages to assimilate the knowledge by overcoming the resistance of the form.  (275)

There is no small irony that in the next few pages he ventures to criticize Socrates' tendency to give long speeches at times, when the master of ironic questioning worried there might be some misunderstanding. For the pages-long footnote, nay, the whole long book, is just such an urbane voice of one crying in the wilderness. And at the very end, Kierkegaard does finally let the ironic distance collapse into unmistakably direct communication, confessing that all of the authors of his books have been authored by him. I'm still missing a couple of them, Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces, as well as his student thesis on Socratic irony, but apparently all these works were supposed to be in fact concluded by Postscript. Instead, though, he went on writing more. So we'll read on!

Tentatively, now, I would posit that no one before him, or perhaps since, has thought through the questions of eternal and existing, lived truth as deeply as SK. No one has ironically, in jest, and and in terrible earnest, spoken of crucifying reason on the cross of the paradox (564), unless I have been too careless to grasp it. No one has evoked more convincingly the forging of inward subjectivity in the struggle with the absolute dogma--not even Augustine or Shakespeare, though maybe I just need to read more of the former, starting with another pass at his Confessions, and revisit the latter's Lear, his Fool and Cordelia. And no one is as futile a popularizer as me, but I'll keep on trying to introduce SK to fellow readers, even if no one has the time to read him.