Transitional Figures

In this fourth installment of our “Postmodern Epistemology” series, we now turn from the Modern Precursors (René Descartes and Immanuel Kant) to three “Transitional Figures:” Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

These transitional figures are thinkers who are most often viewed as neither modern (in any true sense) nor postmodern.¹ The most important of this group for our purposes are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

If it is true that the so-called “gang of six”² (which is comprised of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty) is a representative selection of what constituted (and constitutes) postmodernist thought, then we must treat Nietzsche and Heidegger under the rubric of transitional figures.

John Caputo, recounting the influences and predecessors to Derrida’s thought, says,

“The genealogical lines and links of deconstruction run back, not only to Nietzsche, but also […] to Kierkegaard and Levinas, who are arguably the most important religious philosophers […] in the last two centuries.”³

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Kierkegaard believes that the objectivizing tendency in epistemology (or science in general for that matter) is quite wrong-headed because the quest for objectivity always renders the subject accidental. In other words, once we arrive at objective truth, everything (allegedly) becomes indifferent “for all interest, like all decisiveness, is rooted in subjectivity.”⁴

What counts then for Kierkegaard is not so much what is objectively true but “to find the truth which is truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live and die.”⁵

Kierkegaard’s claim that “Truth is subjectivity”⁶ provides an excellent Anknüpfungspunkt for postmodernism.

Kierkegaard opts for a kind of fallibilist epistemology in which the subjective is prior to the objective, and ethical norms regulate our beliefs.⁷

Thus, Kierkegaard basically introduces the notion of subjective truth. For him, objective truth is the goal of scientific endeavor. However, even in this, he claims that it functions more as a limiting concept that one may only strive for since objective truth can never actually be achieved. We can attempt to approximate it to be sure, but we are never able to go beyond a high probability of its actual objective truth value.

So Kierkegaard concludes that objective truth is not enough to live by because matters of life (such as faith, ethics, etc.) require a decision. “Because the objective approach can never reach complete certainty, it can never make a decision.”⁸ Decisions, therefore, lie in the realm of subjectivity. To try to prove the existence of God objectively, for example, would achieve nothing because “God is a subject, and thus only exists for subjectivity in inwardness.”⁸

According to Kierkegaard, an attempt to objectively verify Christianity would, in fact, establish the antithesis of the Christian faith: “An objective acceptance of Christianity (sit venia verbo) is paganism or thoughtlessness.”⁹

The Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” into truth can be defined in the following manner: “An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.”¹⁰ We must take note in this definition of the mixed elements of objective appropriation of truth and subjective engagement/decision, which (when taken together) constitute truth for Kierkegaard.

The “turn to the subject” in Kierkegaard is particularly striking because of what he chiefly opposes. The “system” which Kierkegaard repeatedly positions himself against and in contrast to is the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, who espouses an essentially foundationalist philosophy.¹¹

The way to overcome Hegel’s system, for Kierkegaard, is through existentialism (i.e., a turn to the subject). Consequently, Kierkegaard (and especially his existentialist stance) has had a very direct influence on some important postmodern representatives (such as Derrida, who pays tribute to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in his The Gift of Death).

1. Since postmodernism is often considered to have begun sometime after WW II (some say perhaps in the 1970s) it would be anachronistic to consider these figures postmodern, even though they might have done more to ultimately shape postmodernism than anyone else.↩
2. Merold Westphal, Westphal, Merold. “Postmodernism and the Gospel: Ontotheology, Metanarratives, and Perspectivism.” No pages. Cited April 10, 2005. Online: http://www.dal.ca/~swmartin/resources/westphal%20on%20pomo/pomoxst.htm.↩
3. Erickson, Truth, 76.↩
4. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 173.↩
5. Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 82.↩
6. Cf. the corresponding section in the Postscript.↩
7. Cf. especially his well known assertion that “The story of Abraham contains a teleological suspension of the ethical.” Emphasis added. Bretall, Robert. A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton; Princeton University press, 1973), p. 134.↩
8. Erickson, Truth, 82.↩
9. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 116.↩
10. Ibid., 135.↩
11. Hegel’s system has a “beginning.” It is a logical system starting from the immediate. It has an epistemologically certain starting point and can thus be termed foundationalist (Cf. Erickson, Truth, 77).↩