It is a time to make distinctions, fine distinctions, says W. of our collaborative paper on Kierkegaard. We should write in a series of numbered points! We should incorporate equations, if we could! And diagrams! It is a time for graphs, W. says. For geometry.
Our inclination has always been towards the vague, the amorphous, W. grants. We lose ourselves in grand vistas, in the account of the huge disasters to come, for example. In our would-be prophetism. In our wholly spurious sense of the infinite.
Wasn't it Kierkegaard above all who warned of the despair of the infinite, of leaving the finite behind? Wasn't it Kierkegaard who warned of the dangers of the imagination unlimited by anything concrete? The fantastic, the unlimited: that's what Kierkegaard warned against. And we have to heed his warning!
But then, too, Kierkegaard warns us of the opposite kind of despair: of finitude's despair, which never dreams, never roves far from what it takes to be the self. But the self of finitude is a paltry, secular thing. For it is only from the infinite that the religious comes, Kierkegaard says.
Religion needs imagination! It needs the abstract even as it needs the real; it needs the concrete. Our task- the great task of the self in willing to be itself - must be to hold them in tension. It is to affirm the infinite and the finite, not one at the expense of the other.
It is the same, for Kierkegaard, with dipolar relationship between possibility and necessity. Possibility's despair is, he says, a lack of necessity – a sighing after mirages that take no account of the limits of individual existence. Necessity's despair is the loss of possibility, and with it, the meaning of faith, of freedom.
For necessity is only a kind of fatalism, a determinism, and hence a denial of God as the ground the self. There remains only the calculus of probability – of the chance of this happening, or that. Possibility, thereby, is withered, etiolated.
The self of necessity, then, is secular, bourgeois, the philistine who knows that this world is all there is. What sense does he have that 'with God everything is possible'? How can he pray, when prayer depends on that same 'with God, everything is possible'?
With God …: a beautiful sentiment, W. and I agree. Prayer: a beautiful idea. And to think we know something of it in our vagueness and grand vistas … To think that's what we've been doing all along, trying to pray …
And now W. is dreaming of prayer-graphs and Godly equations. He's dreaming of a celestial rigour, of the sharpness of fine distinctions aquiver with the divine.
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