Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T17:15:42.294Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

M. Jamie Ferreira
M. Jamie Ferreira
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Much has been made of the Kierkegaardian flavour of Wittgenstein's thought on religion, both with respect to its explicit allusions to Kierkegaard and its implicit appeals. Even when significant disparities between the two are noted, there remains an important core of de facto methodological agreement between them, addressing the limits of theory and the dispelling of illusion. The categories of ‘nonsense’ and ‘paradox’ are central to Wittgenstein's therapeutic enterprise, while the categories of ‘paradox’ and the ‘absurd’ are central to much of Kierkegaard's attempt (pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous) to dispel religious illusion. Writing of how the ‘urge to thrust against the limits of language’ yields ‘nonsense’, Wittgenstein explicitly appealed to Kierkegaard: ‘Kierkegaard, too, recognized this thrust and even described it in much the same way (as a thrust against paradox)’.1 I want to consider whether Kierkegaard's category of paradox of the absurd is assimilable to Wittgenstein's view of nonsense and paradox. I shall argue that a consideration of Wittgenstein's view of paradox can highlight contrasting strands in Kierkegaard's writings on religious faith, strands which take paradox more or less strictly – in particular, it can clarify several different opinions concerning the status of religious claims. My exploration will bring to the fore some implications of the attempt to make room, in the religious employment of language, for a ‘higher understanding’ of truths which we are said to be able to grasp but cannot express.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 29 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Waismann, Friedrich, ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’, The Philosophical Review (1965), pp. 12–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Diamond, , ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, Philosophy, LXIII (1988), pp. 5–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar [hereafter TAL], and ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus’, in Weiner Reihe: Theman der Philosophie, Bang 5, eds. Richard Heinrich & Helmuth Vetter (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), pp. 55–90Google Scholar [hereafter EIM]; Conant, ‘Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder’, The Yale Review, LXXIX (1990), pp. 328–64Google Scholar [hereafter TATL], ‘Must We Show What We Cannot Say’, in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming & Michael Payne (Lewisburg, 1989)Google Scholar [hereafter MWS], ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense’, forthcoming in Pursuits of Reason, eds. Cohen, Guyer & Putnam [hereafter KWN].

7 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, 1980), p. 26, p. 17.

8 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, sect. VII–43.

9 Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley, CA, 1976), nos. 274, 275.Google Scholar

10 Zettel, no. 260.

11 Journals, Vol. 6, X3 A 635, n.d. 1850, p. 362.

12 Journals, X2 A 19, n.d., 1849, Vol. 1, p. 315; XI2 A 51 n.d., 1854, Vol. 3, p. 414.

13 The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History, tr. Walter Lowrie, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 22, 25, 32, 37, 41Google Scholar; 33, 24.

14 Journals, Vol. 3, X3 A 431, n.d., 1850.

15 Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard's Writings, VII, eds. and trs. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton: 1985), p. 48Google Scholar; Journals, Vol. 1, X2 A 354, n.d. 1850, p. 4.

16 Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, Kierkegaard's Writings, XII, eds. and trs. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong ([Princeton, 1992], pp. 619, 621)Google Scholar; Conant refers to this in KWN, pp. 3–8.

17 Journals, Vol. 6, X4 A 383, n.d. 1851, p. 427.

18 Journals, Vol. 1, X2 A 364, n.d. 1850, pp. 4–5.

19 Journals, Vol. 3, IX A 248, n.d. 1848, pp. 715–16Google Scholar; Vol. 1, X6 B 78, n.d. 1850, p. 6.

20 Journals, Vol. 1, X6 B 79, n.d. 1850, p. 7.Google Scholar

21 ‘Christianity and Nonsense’, The Review of Metaphysics, XX (March 1967), p. 433.Google Scholar

22 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 564, 567, 561–2.

23 Ibid. pp. 564–5.

24 Ibid. p. 568.

25 Ibid. pp. 73–8.

26 Journals, Vol. 1, VIII2 B 81, n.d. 1847, p. 272Google Scholar; VIII2 B 85, n.d. 1847, p. 284.

27 Waismann, ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’, p. 16.

28 The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and tr. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, 1980), p. 142.Google Scholar

29 Point of View, esp. pp. 38–43.

30 Philosophical Investigations, no. 373; Culture and Value, p. 50.

31 Culture and Value, p. 82.

32 Journals, Vol. 2, X2 A 644, n.d. 1850, p. 123.Google Scholar

33 The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard's Writings, XIX, ed. and trs. Howard V. Hong & Edna V. Hong (Princeton, 1980), p. 40.Google Scholar

34 Evans, C. Stephen, ‘Is Kierkegaard An Irrationalist?’, Religious Studies, XV (1989), 353.Google Scholar

35 Journals, Vol. 3, XI2 A 37, n.d. 1854, p. 11.Google Scholar

36 Summa Theologiae, 1a, Qu. 12, a. 8 and a. 13.