Sárospataki Füzetek 15. (2011)

2011 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kónya Péter: Szlovák reformátusok a 17-18. században

Sawyer. Frank

tion of nothing; on the contrary, by faith I acquire everything....”.31 He also speaks of “seeing the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious as three great allies”.32 So while he rejects a logical synthesis, he accepts a new wholeness through the leap of faith, which gives a new integrated meaning to life. “Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal...[and] stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. ...Faith is a miracle, and yet no person is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is passion.”33 (‘Passion’, because it is more than logical unification.) The three stages of life are not necessarily evident (only) in an outward way. What counts is the inner attitude of the heart. The highest ‘religious’ level of love for God does not cancel the aesthetic joy or the ethical duties of life, but arrives at the new synthesis of the self. Until we reach this stage, we are merely ‘on stage’, acting a part which is not our true identity.

SYSTEM — “System and finality are pretty much one and the same, so much so that if the system is not finished, there is no system....A system which is not quite finished is an hypothesis; while on the other hand to speak of a half-finished system is nonsense.”34 “The systematic Idea is the identity of subject and object, the unity of thought and being. Existence, on the other hand, is their separation.”35 (This is a good Kierkegaardian definition of Idealism and Existentialism. Idealism is harmonized logic; existentialism is painful reality.)

SUBJECTIVITY — we do not live by ‘objective’ facts (even though these are important); we live by subjectivity, or the composing of a ‘self. (Concluding Unsäentific Postscript)

TRUTH — objective truth deals with the content of the facts; subjective truth deals with acts: our personal response to the facts. ‘Truth’ for the existing individual (who is not merely part of the crowd, nor merely enumerating truths from a distance) is an “objective uncertainty” held fast with “passionate inwardness”. It is ‘my truth’ (S. Kierkegaard is here very postmodern). We only discover truth by means of living through crises: finiteness, failure, suffering, difficult choices, and facing death. Early in his Journals in\835 he wrote: “What matters is to find a purpose...the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to five and die.”

UNIVERSAL/PARTICULAR — universalizing concepts say everything about being but nothing about my individual existence — myself and my choices.

UNDERSTANDING — we may know many things through objective reason and factuality, but we only understand things intuitively and in the subjective relationship of commitment & trust. Life is understood ‘backwards’, even though it must

31 From S. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, reproduced in A Kierkegaard Anthology, 127.

12 Anthology, 96.

33 S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Anthology 130 &134.

34From S. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unsäentific Postscript, reproduced in Anthology, 195-6.

35 Postscript, ibid. 205.

64 SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 2011/4