The Unknowable

           

            On Sunday I spent the whole day working on my Kierkegaard essay. In the morning I’d gotten a response to the thesis I’d sent to my TA, Sean. He told me that my thesis sounded too much like exegesis. He advised me to focus on one sub-question of the topic, to be more specific than critical analysis. He suggested that I ask myself what exactly I thought was important about the topic and to write about whether I disagree or disagreed Kierkegaard’s analysis of these points. The last two things Sean suggested set me free and so I was able to revise my thesis in much more satisfying way:

            Søren Kierkegaard says through Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of 

Philosophical Fragments, that the existence of god cannot be proved or disproved, and that this is because god is unknowable. He asserts that this unknowable god  in being the embodiment of the whole of the universe  is the absolute unknown. I agree with Climacus that if god exists, such an all-encompassing entity would indeed be beyond the capacity of our reason to conceptualize. I argue that this fact should serve as a warning sign against the attempt, as it is not a natural place for logic to be applied. Climacus anticipates this argument and agrees that it is absurd to try to grasp the possibility of god with reason, but offers the concept of a leap to faith away from reason as a way to enter into the experience of knowing god. I argue that Climacus has misread the warning sign, which tells us that the unknowable is not important and is even dangerous to try to know, especially if one thinks that the abandonment of reason is the way to do so. I will argue here that if Climacus truly were to see god as unknowable, the leap to faith would not be a consideration. In this essay I will show through an analysis of Climacus’s arguments and the Christian dogma that he uses to support it, that the very attractiveness of coming into a relationship with an unknowable god in the way that Climacus proposes, while being paradoxical, as he admits, is not paradoxical in a good way, but rather paradoxical in a way that proposes to destroy reason, and is thereby really a form of attempted mental suicide. 

            I sent this to Sean in the mid afternoon and kept writing as if that was my thesis. He got back to in the early evening, telling me I’d made it to first base and that I could go ahead and write my paper with that thesis.

            I worked for another four hours until I was exhausted and went to bed an hour and a half earlier than usual.