Leap of Faith - Kierkegaard, Marx, and Tolstoy

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy said he found out "there was no God" in 1838 when he was 12 years old. He had to work through this idea for the next 38 years until he could come away with a method by which he could believe, not only in God but in Christ. Kierkegaard heard the same from Hegelian philosophers and worked through his doubt to belief but he opposed that method. His thought was to start with faith and proceed forward making positive steps rather than always falling back to start over after doubt had prevailed. He said, "False doubt doubts everything except itself; with the help of faith, the doubt that saves doubts only itself."

Kierkegaard didn't want to argue about his faith anymore than he wanted to argue about why he might or might not get married or become a professor. He just wants to make the movement from "possibility to actuality" and knows he'll just waste time if he tries to explain himself.

I think that, just as a Christian always ought to be able to explain his faith, so also a married man ought to be able to explain his marriage, not simply to anyone who deigns to ask, but to anyone he thinks worthy of it, or even if, as in this case, unworthy, he finds it propitious to do so. Either/Or Part II, p. 88-89, Hong

Tolstoy tried to explain the method he used to come to grips with the Christian religion. He acted on his beliefs by freeing his serfs, writing books to help them learn to read, and giving them land to farm and live on. He didn't argue and reason with his neighbors he just did what he set out to do.

Karl Marx complained about Hegelian philosophers in The German Ideology in this way, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it." Walter Kaufman changed the quote to reflect the Kierkegaardian difference in his book, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959),

His relation to philosophy is best expressed by changing one small word in Marx's famous dictum: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change"-not "it," as Marx said, but ourselves." p. 202

Only in changing oneself is one equal with another according to Kierkegaard because in Christianity all are equal before God. The world is too abstract to change but the single individual, you yourself, that is something concrete. Kierkegaard put it this way in his Upbuilding Discourses of 1843-1844 and in his Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 1847:

The idea so frequently stressed in Holy Scripture for the purpose of elevating the lowly and humbling the mighty, the idea that God does not respect the status of persons, this idea the apostle wants to bring to life in the single individual for application in his life. .... In the hallowed places, in every upbuilding view of life, the thought arises in a person’s soul that help him to fight the good fight with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, and in the fight to free himself for equality before God, whether this battle is more a war of aggression against the differences that want to encumber him with worldly favoritism or a defensive war against the differences that want to make him anxious in worldly perdition. Only in this way is equality the divine law, only in this way is the struggle the truth, only in this way does the victory have validity- only when the single individual fights for himself with himself within himself and does not unseasonably presume to help the whole world to obtain external equality, which is of very little benefit, all the less so because it never existed, if for no other reason than that everyone would come to thank him and become unequal before him, only in this way is equality the divine law.

  • Soren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 141-143

Are you now living in such a way that you are aware as a single individual, that in every relationship in which you relate yourself outwardly you are aware that you are also relating yourself to yourself as a single individual, that even in the relationship we human beings so beautifully call the most intimate (marriage) you recollect that you have an even more intimate relationship, the relationship in which you as a single individual relate yourself to yourself before God?

  • Soren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, March 13, 1847, copyright 1993 by Howard Hong, Princeton University Press p. 129

The idea behind world history and constant quantification dehumanizes the quality known as the single individual and can produce "soul rot due to the monotony of self-concern and self-preoccupation" with anxiety about where you fit within the system. Language comes to the aid with quantities and quantities of words to explain everything. But Kierkegaard says "the pathos of the ethical is to act."

The observer stares numbly into the immense forest of the generations, and like someone who cannot see the forest for the trees, he sees only the forest, not a single tree. He hangs up curtains systematically and uses people and nations for that purpose-individual human beings are nothing to him; even eternity itself is draped with systematic surveys and ethical meaninglessness. Poetry squanders poetically, but, far from fasting itself, it does not dare to presuppose the divine frugality of the infinite that ethically-psychologically does not need many human beings but needs the idea all the more. No wonder, then, that one even admires the observer when he is noble, heroic, or perhaps more correctly, absentminded enough to forget that he, too, is a human being, an existing individual human being! By steadily staring into that world-historical drama, he dies and departs; nothing of him remains, or he himself remains like a ticket the usher holds in his hands as a sign that now the spectator has gone. If, however, becoming subjective is the highest task assigned to a human being, then everything turns out beautifully. From this it first follows that he no longer has anything to do with world history but in that respect leaves everything to the royal poet. Second, there is not squandering, for even though individuals are as innumerable as the sands of the sea, the task of becoming subjective is indeed assigned to every person. Finally, this does not deny the reality of the world-historical development, which, reserved for God and eternity, has both its time and its place. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, (1846) p. 159

As a rule repentance is identified by one thing, that it acts. In our day, it perhaps is less subject to being misunderstood in this way. I believe that neither Young nor Talleyrand nor a more recent author was right in what they said about language, why it exists, for I believe that it exists to strengthen and assist people in abstaining from action. What to me is nonsense will perhaps have a great effect and perhaps most of my acquaintances, if they were to read these letters, would say: “Well, now we have understood him.” Soren Kierkegaard, Stages On Life's Way, 1845 p.339, 601 Hong

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    The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
    —Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)