In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard remarks that in his earlier Philosophical Fragments he had ignored the difference between Socrates and Plato: By holding Socrates down to the proposition that all knowledge is recollection, he becomes a speculative philosopher instead of an existential thinker, for whom existence is the essential thing. The recollection principle belongs to speculative philosophy, and recollection is immanence, and speculatively and eternally there is no paradox. Plato and Hegel mark the beginning and culmination of a particular project of human thought, metaphysics, which, for Kierkegaard, in its claim to reveal the truth of human existence represents a misunderstanding, and in its character as a human enterprise, expresses a deficient mode of human life.
In erecting that mode,
‘relative’ or ‘conditioned’ willing, to a position of pre-eminence, it
constitutes a confusing of human existence whose proper criticism is ethical or
religious. We can begin to see why he thought this to be so by
examining the character of this project in Plato and Hegel. I Philosophy, Plato
said, begins in wonder, for, as Aristotle later put it, ‘wondering involves a
desire to understand, so that a thing that rouses wonder is a thing in
connection with which we feel desire’. What it is which prompts the
philosophical wonder and desire to understand is shown in Socrates’ account of
his development in the Phaedo. Initially his interest had been aroused
Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy by the investigation of nature
(peri phuseus) directed towards understanding the causal conditions for the
coming to be, maintenance and perishing of the things he found around him. But
the possible results of such an investigation do not seem able to satisfy the
desire to understand which underlies his inquiry. He first gains an insight
into the nature of this desire upon hearing someone reading from a book by
Anaxagoras in which it was said that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and
causes all things. This seemed to Socrates ‘somehow right’, but upon
investigating Anaxagoras, he is disappointed, for ‘the man made no use of
intelligence, and did not assign any real causes for the ordering of things,
but mentioned as causes air and ether, and water and many other absurdities’.
According to Socrates’ account, Anaxagoras appears to have been engaged on a
more general version of his own initial inquiry, attempting to explain natural
phenomena in terms of very general causal principles. What such inquiries
neglect, and what Socrates comes to realize is the object of his own desire to
understand, is ‘the good, which must embrace and hold together all things’ and
it is in relation to this that he leaves the investigating of beings (ta onta)
and turns to that of conceptions (tous logous) in order to understand the truth
of beings. Socrates’ interest lay not in the causal conditions for the
existence of things, which could be formulated in general empirical principles,
but in what it is that makes these things the things they are: something is
‘beautiful for no other reason than because it partakes of absolute beauty; and
this applies to everything’.
It is this sense of cause or reason (aitia) which provokes
his desire to understand, and which is more fundamental than that of the causal
conditions which the investigations of beings concerns itself with. Why this
should be, Socrates indicates when he says ‘not only the abstract idea itself
has a right to the same name through all time, but also something else, which
is not the idea, but which always, whenever it exists, has the form [morphe] of
the idea’. When we say ‘Simmias is greater than Socrates’ this is true by
reason of the greatness he happens to have. But not only can the idea of
greatness not admit of its contrary and so also be small, but ‘the greatness in
us will never admit the small’. If ‘Simmias is greater than Socrates’ is true,
then this truth has the character of changelessness, even if at one time
Simmias is greater and at another smaller than Socrates. If a proposition is
true, then it cannot become false, and the appearance to the contrary is the
result of forgetting that statements about things in the world are always
claims as to what is true of them at a particular time and place, and clearly
what is true of them at one time and place may be different from what is true
at another. The question which prompts Socrates’ wonder and so his desire to
understand is how it is possible for there to be truth about beings, a
possibility which is presupposed by the empirical inquiries into the causes of
things which attempt to tell us particular truths. The issue which concerns
Socrates Wittgenstein called ‘The agreement, the harmony, of thought and
reality.’ ‘A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it, a
proposition, a thought, what makes it true—even when that thing is not there at
all! Whence the determining of what is not yet there?’ This question lay at the
foundation of Wittgenstein’s early work, and in the preparatory studies for the
Tractatus he had written: ‘My whole task consists in explaining the nature of
the proposition. That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose
picture the proposition is. In giving the nature of all being.’ How is it
possible for a proposition, a thought, to be true, to be satisfied by what is?
As the reference to the proposition as a ‘picture’ suggests, Wittgenstein
thought at this time that it must be because reality and thought share a common
form. Propositions could only be true or false, correspond or fail to
correspond with what is, if reality had intelligible form. A proposition, a
thought, represents a situation, and is true if the situation exists. It can
only agree or disagree with reality if this representing is possible, and that
requires that there be an isomorphism of thought and reality: reality must
essentially have the character of thought. The wonder that provokes Socrates’
desire to understand is that what is, ‘all being’, is thinkable, that truth is
possible. What must the nature of all being be that this should be so? When
Socrates is explaining this in the Republic he begins by saying: We predicate
‘to be’ of many beautiful things and many good things saying of them severally
that they are, and so define them in our speech…And again, we speak of a
self-beautiful and of a good that is only and merely good, and so, in the
Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy case of all the things that we
then posited as many, we turn about and posit each as a single idea, assuming
it to be a unity and call it that which really is.
Man is the being possessing logos, a word which means word,
account, reason amongst others. He speaks and because he speaks he can be asked
for and give reason, justification, for what he says. The most fundamental form
of saying, for it appears any other kind must be built upon it, is
identification, saying ‘This is that’: this is a cow, this colour is red, and
so on. Even an utterance like ‘This is sweet’ is not merely a squeal of delight
or disgust. It appears to involve a claim: that this taste satisfies what is
meant by ‘sweet’. And that meaning appears to be something quite different from
the taste itself. The taste comes to be and passes away, it is mine and not
yours, it occurs here and at this time. But the meaning is not somewhere or at
some time, is not mine or yours. It ‘is’ in a different way. Whereas the ‘is’
of the taste or of this table, this room, means ‘is here and now, at such and
such a place and time’, the ‘is’ of the meaning does not. It is apparently a timeless
‘is’. And whereas the taste is tasted, the table seen and felt, the sound
heard, the meaning can neither be tasted, seen, felt nor heard: ‘And the one
class of things, we say can be seen but not thought, while the ideas can be
thought but not seen.’ The ideas are objects of the intellect, nous, the taste,
the table, the colour are objects of sense, aisthesis. And yet this is not a
matter of different capacities being directed at quite unconnected objects. For
we say the objects of sense are: the table, the colour, the taste. But that
object is a table only in so far as it satisfies the idea of the table: its
very being as a table depends on the idea. But should we say: very well, we
experience by sense not the table but a brown physical object, then the same
can be said. It is only a brown physical object in virtue of the ideas of
brownness and of physical object. And if it is said, nevertheless we at least
experience ‘this’, then that too, as something said, standing as it does for an
object, is only possible in so far as there is a congruence with the idea of an
object. Without the ideas we could not even say ‘This’. To say, or think, there
is something is already to use language, and so presuppose meaning. Without
meaning, without the ideas, there is—not even nothing, since for there to be
‘nothing’ there must be meaning. Nevertheless, we are forced at the limit to
recognize what cannot be conceptualized. In order for there to be temporal
beings through their relation to the ideas, there must be presupposed that
which is first formed in accordance with ideas, ‘the Mother and Receptacle of
this generated world’, which as it ‘is to receive all kinds’ is ‘devoid of all
forms’ and so only ‘in some most perplexing and most baffling way partaking of
the intelligible’. When we speak of ‘the class of things that can be seen’ we
are already in the realm which presupposes the objects that can only be
thought. Those objects are the meanings which, as timeless, cannot be subject
to change, which can only occur in time. Hence, Plato says, they are ‘always
the same’.
But their sameness is, at the same time, difference from
other ideas, so that if we can state a meaning we do so by a definition, a
distinguishing, and if we cannot state it, but merely intellectually apprehend
it in its indefinability, we nevertheless do so in its distinction from all
else. A definition, say ‘A triangle is a three sided plane figure’, is a truth
which is neither spatially nor temporally delimited, as are all truths about
objects ‘that can be seen’ which are in the realm of ‘becoming’. And we can see
that the definition is a distinguishing of the triangle within a more general
idea, that of plane figure, which also encompasses squares, rectangles, and so
on. The idea of the plane figure is itself distinguished within a more general
idea, that of figure, within which we have both two-dimensional plane and three
dimensional figures. A definition, or the apprehension of an indefinable
distinction, is always a distinguishing within the context of a more general
idea, of a part from the other parts of this whole. This more general idea
itself, that of figure, can only be distinguished as part within the realm of a
yet more general idea. We rise from the idea of a triangle to plane figure to
that of figure itself, the idea of geometrical ideas. But the idea of figure is
itself a part of the more general category, the ideas which make possible
things within time, within which it may be distinguished. That more general
category is itself a part of the general category of idea itself, the other
part being composed of those ideas which relate both to ideas themselves and to
the application of such ideas to the realm of the temporal: sameness,
difference, unity.
But ideas, temporal beings, and that which must be
presupposed for the application of ideas within the temporal at all, are all
themselves parts of being: they can all be said to Kierkegaard and modern
continental philosophy ‘be’. But we cannot say what ‘being’ means by
distinguishing it as part within a larger whole, for there can be no such
whole. Rather, to say what being is, is to give its own parts, the temporal
‘is’ and the timeless ‘is’, in their relation. Thus Plato tells us that
‘becoming’ is for the sake of ‘being’ in the timeless sense, and ‘that for the
sake of which anything comes to be is in the class of the good’. The Good is
not an idea but the relation between temporal beings and the ideas which makes
the latter the condition of possibility of the former. Hence ‘the good itself
is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power’,
granting existence and essence, their role as essence, to ideas, and so making
possible our knowledge of them as essences, as what makes possible the objects
we unreflectively take as real. Of course, Plato speaks of the Idea of the
Good. But this is not something which can be apprehended by thought, since it
is presupposed in the possibility of thought itself. If we do speak of the idea
of the Good, it is in the sense of the Idea of idea itself, that which makes
ideas essences either of what is not an idea or of subordinate ideas
themselves, and that is the relation between the temporal and the timeless
‘is’. The realm of Being is not simply divided into two unconnected realms, of
Becoming and timeless Being. They are a whole which we understand when we see
that the latter makes the former possible. And when we recognize the idea of
the Good, of this very dependency of the world we take unphilosophically to be
the real one upon the realm of what is only available to the intellect, then we
‘arrive at the limit of the intelligible’. Here we see the Platonic resolution
of our question: how is truth possible? Plato’s answer is that what we speak of
nonphilosophically and so produce ‘truths’, the realm of becoming, is ‘for the
sake of timeless being’: that what is in time is made possible by the timeless
being of the ideas, the proper objects of thought, and so ‘participates’ in the
intelligible. ‘The table is brown’ can be true only because there are tables
and brownness in the world as temporal and spatial instantiations of the ideas
of table and brownness, because the realm of becoming is a ‘copy’ or image of
that which is available to thought alone. This ‘harmony between thought and
reality’ we address in directing ourselves towards the idea of the Good: ‘Wise
men tell us that heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by
communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance and justice, and that is
the reason why they call the whole the Kosmos [order].’
Philosophy as love of wisdom thinks ‘the whole’ (to holon)
and it does so in terms of order, without which the wholeness of the whole
cannot be thought. This thinking takes place as ‘dialectics’: ‘For he who can
view things in their connection is a dialectician, he who cannot, is not.’ The
dialectician is one who systematically determines what each thing really is,
the great difficulty lying in doing this correctly. The key to this is not ‘to
separate everything from everything else’ which is ‘the mark of a man who has
no link whatever with the Muse of Philosophy’ but to be governed by the aim of
truth, the unity of the whole: ‘Whom do you mean, then, by the true
philosophers? Those for whom the truth is the spectacle of which they are enamoured.’
The philosopher is enamoured of the spectacle of truth for he is directed not
towards the production of truths but towards resolving the question of the
possibility of truth, towards the truth of truth. Our everyday truths are
possible because the reality we there address is intelligible, formed in
accordance with what is truly intelligible, the ideas. But what, then, of
ourselves? We speak not only of other things around us but of ourselves, and we
can do so only if there is, timelessly, the idea of the human, of what in
relation to the whole distinguishes man from other beings. Man is within the
‘visible and tangible’ and so has a body. Beings within space and time are
either inanimate or living, the latter having the power of self-directed change,
psuche, through which they approximate their ideas. If the Good is the relation
of purposiveness which relates the temporal realm to the unchanging, then this
process of imitation is the way in which temporal living beings reveal it.
Their ‘good’ is their satisfaction, to the extent this is possible within the
changeable, of the requirements of their idea. Psuche as the power of
self-direction towards their good may be present unconsciously, as in plants,
or with a degree of awareness of their end, as with animals which seek what is
beneficial and flee from what is harmful. The animal has both sensation, which
plants have too, and an unreflective consciousness of their good. But man,
whilst sharing these forms of psuche, has too nous, intelligence, and logismos:
that Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy is, the ability to know ends
by intelligence and to calculate means towards them. This gives him both the
power of knowledge of other beings and of self-mastery of himself. Intelligence
distinguishes man amongst living beings, and manifests itself in the very
capacity for speech which requires some form of apprehension of meanings,
ideas, but takes its proper form in knowing these intelligible objects
explicitly and in knowing their relation to temporal beings.
At its highest development, this is the capacity for
philosophy, knowing the nature of the All: We should rectify the revolutions in
our head by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the All, and thereby
making the part that thinks like unto the object of its thought, in accordance
with its original nature, and having achieved this likeness attain finally to
that goal of life which is set before men by the gods as the best life both for
the present and the time to come. Man’s end, through which he best participates
in his idea, that of an intelligent living being, lies in philosophical knowing
within which all other beings, both temporal and unchanging, appear as they
are. In this way, he reveals in its appropriate form the relation of purposiveness,
the Good, which holds beings together in harmony. Hence ‘the greatest study’ is
‘to learn the idea of the Good’, through which it is possible for the good of
man, apprehension of the truth of the whole, to be achieved. Those ‘who are
uneducated and inexperienced in truth have no single aim and purpose in life to
which all their actions, public and private, must be directed’. Human life
finds its end in philosophical knowing of the truth of the All, and this is
wisdom: The soul alone by itself departs to what is pure and always existent
and immortal and unvarying, and in virtue of its kinship with it enters always
into its company. Then it has ceased from its wandering and when it is about
these objects it is always constant and unvarying because of its contact with
things of a similar kind: and this is called wisdom. Truth is possible about
the world since it is formed as an image of the purely intelligible, the ideas.
But it is available to us because we have a ‘divine element’, intelligence, which
enables us to apprehend what is changeless and so inhabit a world of becoming
at all, for that depends for its being on changeless being. Unless there were
this harmony between ourselves and the ideas, thought would be impossible for
us. The soul must, therefore, be ‘unchangeable or something close to it’, for
its judgements, and those upon it, if true, are changelessly so.
Our possession of nous makes possible not only our capacity
for the apprehension of what is true about the world surrounding us, but also
about ourselves, whose being is itself made possible by the idea of the human.
Taking this as our pattern, we can attain ‘self-mastery and beautiful order’
making of ourselves ‘a unity, one man instead of many’. The idea of the human,
that which distinguishes man from all else within the whole, is that of an
intelligent embodied being, for whom, therefore, ‘it belongs to the rational
part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought on behalf of the entire
soul’. But that rational part engages in its own proper activity in
understanding: so the capacity for ruling is identical with that of learning
and knowledge. But understanding, as the progress of Socrates towards
selfknowledge in the Phaedo shows, culminates in philosophy, which aims at
comprehending the principle which holds together all being, man himself
included. Philosophical contemplation, theoria, the fulfilment of this inquiry,
thus constitutes the highest activity for humanity, the end of human life: it
lies in making the cause of the harmony between thought and reality, the Good,
manifest. Yet man can only play this role in the scheme of things, revealing
the intellectual order of the whole, the truth, if there is such truth. The
idea of the Good is the central principle of this order, that Becoming is for
the sake of Being, that what is in time depends for its being upon non-temporal
forms. That this is so is recollected through reflection upon the realm of
becoming: we already say temporal beings are, and this is only possible in so far
as forms are non-temporally. Without the forms we could not say anything, and
so there would be no realm of Becoming. Nevertheless, this appears to rest on
an assumption which it must, at the same time, be beyond intelligence to
justify, since intelligence can at the most apprehend the forms and their
relation to temporal being. Thus, Socrates, being asked to speak about the
Good, asks: ‘do you think it right to speak as having knowledge about things
one Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy does not know?’ Given that we
do say temporal beings are, then perhaps we must assume the existence of the
forms and of their relation to such beings. But mightn’t it be that such
initial saying were itself illusory, so that reflection upon it merely
compounded the illusion? Of course, we could never know whether this is so or
not. But if our reflection is to reveal the truth of the whole, we must begin
with something which is itself, albeit imperfectly, true. Given that our aim is
truth, how can we justify this initial starting place? Doesn’t the pursuit of
truth involve us in an assumption which that very pursuit requires us to
justify whilst at the same time prevents us from doing just that? How can we
know we have any contact with truth at all? Only if the pursuit of truth could
reveal itself as presuppositionless could its instability be rectified, and that,
of course, is Hegel’s aim.
 - Michael Weston&via=stc_network)
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