Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam?

What Would Kierkegaard Do? By CARLIN ROMANO

The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 35 dated May 5, 2006

Northfield, Minn. At 94, Howard Hong knows more about Denmark's most famous philosopher than anyone alive — or at least he has known it longer. Co-founder of the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library here at St. Olaf College, the largest Kierkegaard research library in the world, Hong, over a career of more than 60 years, edited and translated with his wife, Edna, the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), the controversial proto-existentialist who gave us "leap of faith" and other landmarks of individualist Christianity.

Still living with his wife in a wood-and-stone home barely a mile from the campus, the descendant of Norwegian immigrants closely followed how the Danes got themselves in a pickle this year. It happened because they exercised that signature mix of satiric verve, free-spirited laughter, and quizzical skepticism toward organized religion that played such a dynamic role in the life of Kierkegaard himself, a thinker today usually regarded as the father of existentialism. (Kierkegaard would have understood his posthumous elevation to patriarch — he famously observed that while life has to be "lived forward," it "must be understood backward.")

"What comes to my mind," Hong remarks, "is an old definition of a provincial. A provincial is one who can't stand to be laughed at. I mean, the Arabs provided the context for all this. Whoever did these drawings wasn't making up anything. They put some things together." Ask Hong what Kierkegaard would have made of Denmark's flare-up with the Arab world, the attitude of Danes toward Islam, their reaction to seeing Danish consulates and embassies attacked and products boycotted, and he's 30 years old again. Not a know-it-all, but a find-it-out. "Yes, that's good!" he says, intrigued by the idea of Kierkegaard on Islam. "I'm not surehe had a copy of the Koran. Let's see."

Down goes the Phillies cigar he's been puffing, he confides, as a palliative to the downside of life as a nonagenarian survivor in a family bedeviled by ulcers. Up and out of his favorite leather recliner in no time, Hong, still handsome with healthy white pompadour, smartly clad in black shirt and dark tie like some Johnny Cash of philosophical research, is off to another corner of his rambling house. He comes back with the indexes to the 26-volume Princeton edition of Kierkegaard's complete works, and Indiana University Press's seven-volume edition of Kierkegaard's journals and diaries, which he and Edna published from 1967 to 1978.

Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam? Hong predicts there won't be much. Osama, if you're reading this, now's the time to turn the page. Kierkegaard, it so happens, refers directly to Muhammad or Muhammadinism multiple times. Some passages are innocuous, as when he writes, "Like Muhammad's tomb, my soul hovers between two magnets." Others suggest a more judgmental stand.

"Muhammad protests with all his might against being regarded as a poet, and the Koran as a poem," Kierkegaard writes elsewhere in the journals and diaries. "He wants to be a prophet. ... I protest with all my might at being regarded as a prophet, and want only to be a poet." A few passages speak for themselves.

"When one views the historical roles of the religions on their journey through the world," Kierkegaard asserts boldly in 1839, "the relationship is as follows: Christianity is the actual proprietor who sits in the carriage; Judaism is the coach-man; Muhammadanism is a groom, who does not sit with the coachman, but behind."

Hong looks up, stunned at the apparent smoking gun, hermeneutically speaking. He agrees the only way to read the passage is, "Sorry, Islam, but you are tertiary, whether you like it or not." Other passages also show Kierkegaard treating Islam as a weaker rival to Christianity. Writing about the notion that Christianity's survival documents its truth, Kierkegaard observes, "The hypothesis may become more probable by lasting 3,000 years, but it does not on that account ever become an eternal truth that can be decisive for a person's eternal happiness. Has not Muhammadanism survived 1,200 years?"

Hong mulls over the findings, surprised given his earlier uncertainty about direct Kierkegaardian commentary on Islam. But it's not a shock in light of the Danish thinker's intense celebration of an inward-seeking Christianity that put believers in direct contemplation of God. What would Kierkegaard do if it were his attempts at satire that had enflamed Islam? "I don't think he would retract it if he were involved," Hong opines. "I'm not sure he'd even apologize."

And yet. "It wasn't that he had great love of journalists," Hong continues. "Kierkegaard said that if he had a son he'd rather have his son become a trapeze artist in the circus than become a journalist, because he regarded journalism as gossip." And that's where the Kierkegaard-Islam duet gets more intriguing. The Corsair, a wry Copenhagen weekly and the Page Six of its time, famously satirized and caricatured Kierkegaard in 1846 after he picked a fight with it. That drove him to even further depths of his profoundly morose personality, on intimate terms with the "sickness unto death" and "the concept of dread." The Corsair stopped at nothing — it mocked his hunched back, even his pants legs, one shorter than the other. Kierkegaard, in turn, blasted The Corsair as "an office of literary garbage collection."

"In no time at all," writes Joakim Garff in his recent massive biography of the philosopher, "Kierkegaard ... became a walking caricature in the city. Now he was no longer seen as the thinker whose very eccentricity managed to compel the respect of the multitude. ... People who had once looked up to him, perhaps without really understanding what it was they were looking up to, now spent lots of time looking down on him."

Hong thinks that even though Kierkegaard himself spun out little drawings, and might have volunteered himself to be one of the 12 cartoonists of Muhammad, he'd be divided in his reactions to the current controversy. "I suspect Kierkegaard would have a good word for the Muslims," Hong muses. "If for nothing else, in admiration of their discipline. ... I don't think he would have thought well of Muhammad taking an army into the city and all of that. ... But the flabbiness of the West, he'd go after that and have a kind of respect for the discipline generally of Muhammadinism, even though it easily becomes a formalism, and then a fanaticism."

Nor would the apostle of Christian individualism be likely to condemn Muslims en masse. "I don't think he would approach them as a group," Hong remarks. "He says most people are really pretty good if you can get them apart, tear them apart from the crowd, the demos." Gordon Marino, professor of philosophy at St. Olaf and current director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library, agrees that Kierkegaard's take on the cartoon controversy would be balanced between his allegiance to Christianity and free expression on the one hand, and his reverence for the seriousness of religious experience.

"His emphasis is on the sacred," notes Marino, who lived in Copenhagen for three years while completing his book, Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Marquette University Press, 2001). "There's nothing sacred anymore in Danish society. It's very secularized, the churches are empty, at least in the city." For that reason, Marino surmises, the Danes remain "kind of perplexed" that others would get so angry about representations of God. Like Hong, he thinks Kierkegaard would not respect Muslims who robotically follow instructions from imams, but he would admire Muslim seriousness, any devotion that arises out of personal relationships with God. And he would remain quite critical of media that "enflame public opinion," like those that attacked him.

"After those cartoons came out," Marino recalls, referring to the caricatures of the philosopher, "Kierkegaard's whole life changed. He was much more isolated. ... He would have thought useful satire has to involve a certain amount of wisdom, that one has to be adept at it. Just to mock someone, just to provoke someone, he would think of that as childish." You might sum up his advice with a twist on an old admonition, consistent with both his general approach to revelation and eye for every empirical detail. Look outward, as well as inward, before you leap. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania. http://chronicle.comSection : The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 35, Page B14

Betraying Spinoza

In a broader context, Spinoza's deconstructionism of identity has interesting parallels with Amartya Sen's recent anti-Huntingtonian thesis, elaborated in his recent books "Identity and Violence" and (to an extent) "The Argumentative Indian." To quote from the former work,

"The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician," etc.

And unlike Ms. Goldstein, Sen argues that such a world-view - of self as well as of others - is eminently possible and desirable. Posted by Anustup Datta on 05.19.06

The most significant observation of Goldstein is that Spinoza expressed the insight that in order to progress in one's appreciation of the non-physical aspects of the world, one needs to get beyond the constraints imposed by one's personal identity. Although axiomatic in the East it is extremely rare in the West. Another more recent example is Wittgenstein. This insight seems only to come to people in the aftermath of a traumatic experience - in Spinoza's case surely the experience of the excommunication. Because most of our own identity is unconscious it is very difficult to dismantle it without outside help, but it does seem to be the case that a Jewish identity, perhaps because it is so specifically defined in its external aspects, is easier to get beyond than many others.

The other important achievement of Spinoza was to write to Descartes pointing out that Descartes' position did not logically imply dualism. I hope Goldstein brings this out in his book because all the eminent people who write about Descartes/Dualism nowadays seem to be quite unaware of Spinoza's correction. Posted by Euan Hill on 05.19.06

Evolution's Bottom Line

By HOLDEN THORP NYTimes.com Homepage Published: May 12, 2006

THE usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity and evolution, is to make predictions. When theories make practicable foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the new things that we enjoy — like global positioning systems, which rely on the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible, which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of gravity.
Creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way. The creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from a judge in Pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to evolution amounted to the teaching of religion. They prevailed, however, in Kansas, where the school board changed the definition of science to accommodate the teaching of intelligent design.

Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does.
Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution. Recent, exciting examples are humanized antibodies like Remicade for inflammation and Herceptin for breast cancer, both initially made in mice. Without our knowledge of the evolution of mice and humans and their immune systems, we wouldn't have such life-saving and life-improving technologies.
Another specific example is resistant bacterial infections, one of the scariest threats to public health. The ones that are resistant to antibiotics are more reproductively successful than their non-resistant relatives and pass the new resistance genes on to more offspring. Just as Darwin said 150 years ago.
The creationists have devised a tortuous work-around for this phenomenon, which endorses natural selection and survival of the fittest, but says that evolution doesn't explain the original development of species. The problem is, there are hundreds of genes that occur in both bacteria and humans. It's hard to see why a designer would do it that way, since having the same genes in bacteria and humans makes infections harder to treat: drugs that act on bacterial gene products act on the human versions as well, so those drugs could kill both the bacterium and the human host. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So evolution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?
One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than 600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts. Kansas has 11.
In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush mentioned our problems in science education and promised to focus on "keeping America competitive" by increasing the budget for research and spending money to get more science teachers. I hope he delivers, but we can't keep America competitive if some states teach science that has no commercial utility. Those smart youngsters in India and China whom you keep hearing about are learning secular science, not biblical literalism.

The battle is about more than which truth is truthier, it's about who will be allowed to innovate and where they will do it. Sequestering our scientists in California and Massachusetts makes no sense. We need to allow everyone to participate and increase the chance of finding the innovations to improve society and compete globally.
Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school. Holden Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.