Posted by Pat on November 22, 1999 at 23:40:06:
In Reply to: Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling posted by aysha on November 18, 1999 at 18:05:54:
...and you're not just looking for help on a paper, I'd be glad to discuss the place of silence in Kierkegaard with you.
My reading of SK's treatment of silence (at least in Fear and Trembling is that language is always a social thing- it attempts to encapsulate experience in 'general' terms which are socially accessible. If we point at a leaf and say 'leaf' we are trying to fit a particular thing into a general term that we understand.
As Concluding Unscientific Postscript is at pains to show, this attempt to encapsulate concrete actuality in abstract structures of thought and language can never really work. You can't 'get' existence through language. This is particularly the case with respect to the 'subjective truth' of the concerned individual; the example of one's attitude to death throws this into particular focus. To say 'I will die' does not capture some deeper meaning which this has for the self which comes to appropriate this fact "with inwardness". Thus language cannot capture the particularity of individual human experience.
This has huge implications for Abraham, for whom there is nothing but subjective truth in his engagement with divine command. He stands, we are told, in an absolute, unmediated relation God, one which therefore lies outside of "human calculation". His direct relationship to God, one which all existing individuals may have according to SK, cannot be put into words.
Moreover, faith involves the inward apprehension of paradox, and therefore not only can it not be put into words without distortion, it cannot be thought by a person who does not have faith. Abraham believes two contradictory things at once-that God will take Isaac and that he will not. We cannot understand this without faith- that is, without a direct relationship to God. Language, the medium of human communication, will not help us here. It falls outside of human logic, and therefore human inter-expressability. See Philosophical Fragments for more on this area.
Anyway, that's a fairly simplistic outline of how I understood the role of language in SK. Any thoughts?
Regards,
Pat
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