From an Epistemology of Faith to Everyday Understanding

Crises of Trust and Doubt in Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig

In the final chapter of Philosophical Fragments, “The Follower at Second Hand,” Søren Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) pseudonymous author maintains that those who must believe in the veracity of an event that they did not personally witness, and those that were contemporary to and physically present to witness that same event are, epistemologically speaking, equidistant from the event in question. In this way Kierkegaard collapses the temporal and empirical distance between the contemporary witness and the latter-day believer (or “follower at second hand”), who treats the original witness’s account as the basis of his faith in revealed religion. This doctrine, which I summarize with the aphoristic “believing-is-seeing,” has immense significance for the present-day practitioner of psychotherapy. As the psychotherapist is inevitably in the position of the witness- or follower-at-second-hand—required, as she is, to initially take what she is told by a client on sheer faith—Kierkegaard’s inversion of the familiar “seeing-is-believing” provides a useful framework for epistemologically resituating the therapist vis-à-vis her client.

Yet even a moment’s consideration of the epistemology that Kierkegaard proposes—one that is admittedly restricted in its original context to matters of Christian faith—will compel one to object that clinical disbelief (to reformulate Coleridge’s locution) can only be willfully suspended so long. Particularly with patients that exhibit a pattern of (self-)deception, an automatic faith in their accounts of their experience has the potential to preclude the development of therapeutic clinical knowledge. In hopes of providing the groundwork for a form of clinically applied “charitable skepticism” (D. Burston, personal communication, October 14, 2011), I turn in what follows from Kierkegaard’s original doctrine of “believing-is-seeing” to the religious epistemology developed in Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (1954/1999b).

Rosenzweig, who was familiar enough with Kierkegaard’s work to reference it in his own, structures this allegorical Büchlein as a clinical intervention in the life of an individual suffering from a religio-existential paralysis (Rosenzweig, 1922/2005). This “clinical” treatment of a religious paralysis begins with the cogito in precisely the same bind that Kierkegaard describes: Because, as Kierkegaard (1844/1985) explains, the “presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching, and the god himself must provide the condition” (pp. 55-56), there is no outside point of reference, no all-encompassing philosophical system by which the believer may externally verify the content of his belief.

Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) believer in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy soon begins to doubt everything, not least of which is the reality of his and others’ existence. This process of Cartesian “depersonalization” arises from the same recognition that Kierkegaard champions in Philosophical Fragments: When one is concerned with events, say, on the order of the incarnation, the mere experience of consciousness is such that the reality of existence cannot be verified by reference to a point outside it.

While Kierkegaard intends this treatment of religious epistemology to illuminate the paradoxical “leap of faith” absent from both Hegelian Idealism and 19th-century Danish Lutheranism (Burston & Frie, 2006), his argument can be usefully extended to situations routinely faced by clinicians. In particular, the problem and the necessity of believing what one is told by a client in the first session must be approached with the same “hermeneutics of affirmation” with which Ricoeur (as cited in Kearney, 2004) understood the Christian believer (inter alios) as conceptualizing the incarnation. That said, this initial leap must be tempered with a subsequent skepticism, one whose empathy is never in question but whose reservations remain.

Thus in what follows, I first briefly discuss the religious epistemology of Philosophical Fragments in light of its clinical implications (Kierkegaard, 1844/1985). Next, I provide a careful, clinically driven reading of Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. This exegesis I employ to build on and move past Kierkegaard’s necessarily limited epistemology of faith. With the clinical resonance of these two texts in mind, I argue that Rosenzweig’s antiphilosophical “turning-toward-life” provides the best means of building successfully on Kierkegaard’s initial “leap of faith.”

By suffusing the early clinical relationship with a foundation of “charitable skepticism” and deferring questions of epistemological certainty, a disturbed client may, as Rosenzweig (1954/1999b) anticipated, be put “back to work” (p. 101). Indeed, in the empirically unverifiable question of the veracity of objects of religious belief, Rosenzweig locates a (non-Christian) stumbling block that is remarkably similar to the one on which Kierkegaard bases his deliberately anti-systematic epistemology of faith. As we will see, Rosenzweig’s “clinical” argument in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy creates the conditions by which psychotherapeutic considerations of matters of narratable truth may be best addressed. By moving past questions of absolute veracity and advancing toward a dynamic engagement of religious and existential thought as it is experienced, the philosophical paralysis that afflicts Rosenzweig’s protagonist can be transformed into self-conscious living.

The Necessary Paradox of Faith in Philosophical Fragments

While an extended treatment of the psychological dimensions of Philosophical Fragments is beyond the scope of this essay, an understanding of its clinical relevance merits a brief summary of the general epistemological argument there advanced. ¹ The text as a whole consists of a cautious and self-consciously ironic thought project, one that aims specifically to consider the philosophical conditions for what is left unspecified as—but is still beyond doubt as being—the incarnation. As mentioned above, the difference that Kierkegaard (1844/1985) identifies between normal, Socratic (or “maieutic”) methods of knowing on the one hand, and the knowledge involved in the incarnation on the other, is that in the case of the latter the content of the knowledge and the means of its communication are identical. Recall here again Kierkegaard’s claim that the “presence of the god in human form . . . is precisely the teaching, and the god himself must provide the condition” (pp. 55-56). As we will see, in abstract this argument bears a striking resemblance to the clinical encounter, as the material narrated by a patient and her but-partially comprehended experience thereof are initially difficult to distinguish.

This union of revealed content and prophetic medium is, of course, far from novel within Christian thought. Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) innovation in this regard consists rather in his insistence that the normal rules of empirical evidence be suspended. Because the incarnation is both the message and the means of its communication, he concludes that the contemporary witness to such an event has no empirical advantage over a latter-day believer. One must first believe that what one is seeing is in fact both the “god in human form” and the “suffering servant” visible to the naked eye; thus, “the person who does not believe does not see” (Kierkegaard, 1844/1985, p. 93). Believing, in other words, is seeing—or as Kierkegaard himself puts it in an equally succinct voice, “belief believes what it does not see” (p. 81).

Kierkegaard (1844/1985) is at pains to emphasize this point in Philosophical Fragments. Indeed, his argument divides the experience of knowing into two distinct forms: The first, “contemporary” (or witness) form of knowledge is one that bases its assumptions on direct, sensory observation; the second, “follower at second hand” way of knowing refers to those that would believe by virtue of the contemporary’s (ostensibly “evidence-based”) account. Yet Kierkegaard (1844/1985) insists that the latter believes by virtue of sensory observation no less than the former: The “one who comes later does indeed believe by virtue of the contemporary’s declaration, but only in the same sense as the contemporary believes by virtue of immediate sensation and cognition” (p. 85)—which is to say, hardly at all, for the contemporary must first believe before he may see.

In fact, the union of form and content that characterizes the incarnation is such that merely seeing it is of no use in really seeing it. In such a case, wonders Kierkegaard (1844/1985),

What good would it be to be a contemporary? . . . [W]hat else does this mean except that one simply cannot be immediately contemporary with a teacher and event of that sort, so that the real contemporary is not that by virtue of immediate contemporaneity but by virtue of something else (pp. 66-67).

Contemporaneity and historical distance are thus collapsed. The case is not that every ostensible witness sees with fresh eyes by virtue of the “magnificence” of the event but rather that every believer can see only by virtue of faith (which is to say, the “something else” quoted above). This indeed is what Kierkegaard (1844/1985) means in his etymologically literal use of the Greek word “autopsy” (i.e., the personal and immediate act of seeing): Whether by contemporary witness or latter-day documentation, the person with faith in the narrative he encounters “continually has the autopsy of faith; he does not see with the eyes of others and sees only with the same as every believer sees—with the eyes of faith” (p. 102).

In the interest of linking this idiosyncratic and undeniably counterintuitive treatment of religious belief with questions of clinical credulity, it is worth considering C. Stephen Evans’s (1998) characterization of Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) epistemology as a “a kind of metaphysical realism” (Evans, 1998, p. 166). In Philosophical Fragments, Evans observes, one encounters a Kierkegaard that transforms faith into the only honest vehicle for the construction of knowledge: “Kierkegaard’s view is not that human knowers can never make contact with an external world”—cannot, that is to say, ever confirm their assumptions or answer their questions by reference to lived experience—”but that all such contact involves faith or belief” (Evans, 1998, p. 165). ² For the Kierkegaard of Philosophical Fragments, faith is at the heart of knowledge.

The patient, too, we may say, is in a sense at once the “prophetic” medium of her knowledge and its content. What she presents to the clinician is at once herself and a narrative of a self she wishes to understand. In no sense, of course, is it the case that the clinician must accept in toto everything related to her by the patient. Still, it is worth considering the degree to which a therapist must initially approach the client with an attitude of acceptance—one that is epistemological as well as affective.

Because outside verification of the lion’s share of material presented by clients in initial consultations is beyond the ken of the clinical profession, a tentative and provisional leap is required on the part of the therapist. An epistemology of faith as manifested in the initial sessions, we may say, collapses an historical distance roughly analogous to that between Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) contemporary and follower at second hand. Indeed, in this context it is important for the clinician to consider Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) conclusion in Philosophical Fragments that there “is no follower at second hand. The first and the latest generation are essentially alike” (pp. 104-105). As a witness to material that is reexperienced as it is told, the therapist must first encounter that material through the same historical conflation as Kierkegaard’s believer.

From Automatic Credulity to Clinical Convalescence: Rosenzweig

It must be noted that the two texts discussed in this essay exhibit more differences than similarities. Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) Philosophical Fragments consists of an exploration of the epistemological conditions and implications for faith in the Christian paradox of the incarnation; Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) Understanding the Sick and the Healthy presents a barely disguised Judaism as the best cure for a psychic, existential paralysis, and contains as well a thinly concealed critique of the incarnational Christology that Kierkegaard champions. ³ Yet both texts are structured in the rhetoric of the thought project and the allegory, and written in the voice of narrators without an explicit fixed commitment to a certain outcome.

Again, my interest in comparing these two texts consists largely in gauging their potential relevance to clinical concerns—especially those that arise with choosing to take on a kind of a priori faith in a client’s narrative over the first few sessions. Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) epistemology of faith has provided us with a framework for reconceptualizing questions of veracity in the initial clinical encounter. Since the patient presents herself as both the medium and content of that which she wishes to understand, a certain leap of faith is required in attending to her as an empathic listener, in believing that she is what she herself tells. This “leap” collapses the historical distance between the clinical listener and the original witnesses (including most centrally the client) to the events described.

Without forgetting that Kierkegaard (1844/1985) originally understood this relation as one that exists exclusively between the individual person and the divine, it must be admitted that a clinical application of his argument—involving, as it does, a relation that is both interpersonal and nontheological—presents the therapist with a bit of a stumbling block, indeed an aporia. The necessary question might be framed as follows: If the therapy begins with a leap of faith in the veracity of the client’s narrative, how then can critical listening and charitable skepticism ever hope to begin?

While Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) clinical allegory will provide us with the most salient response to this question, an appreciation for the aversion to epistemological certainty in all of Kierkegaard’s thought goes some length toward quelling concerns with automatic credulity. As Marcus Pound (2007) has recently noted,

Because for Kierkegaard the divine is absolutely transcendent . . . the act of religious commitment entails that one relate all of one’s life to something that remains utterly unknown and without common measure between the two. And so religion does not invite certainty; rather, it asks people to let go of the very last and reasonable thing they are holding onto. (p. 16)

The therapeutic resonance of this passage, while not quite self-evident, should nonetheless be clear: Entering into the relation that constitutes faith involves a “letting go” of fixed and preestablished boundaries of selfhood. What is more, the “letting go” allows for a tentative suspension of these same boundaries, requiring, as it does, that the clinician replace a desire for epistemological certainty with an openness to lived experience—an openness constituted first and foremost by a kind of secularized faith.

Rosenzweig (1925/1999a, 1954/1999b, 1922/2005) maintained that his “system of philosophy” provided something in the way of an antidote to the same philosophical systematicity that Kierkegaard (1844/1985) so vociferously critiqued (Rosenzweig, 1925/1999a). In an essay published 3 years after he completed the post-Hegelian Star of Redemption, he explained that the book was to have a therapeutic effect for the its philosopher-reader, leading him away from epistemological paralysis and helping him “to enter into the middle of everyday life” (Rosenzweig, 1925/1999a, p. 100). The problem with philosophy, Rosenzweig maintained, was that it put the cart before the horse: By questioning the empirical reality of fundamental philosophical concepts in isolation—those here being God, Man, and World—the philosopher loses sight of everyday life, and enters instead a quagmire of Cartesian depersonalization.

Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) clinical intervention, one might say, takes place by according philosophy a heuristic rather than primary status in human knowledge and experience. “Everyone should philosophize some of the time,” he concludes in “The New Thinking,”

Everyone should some time look round about from his own standpoint and his point in life. But this look is not an end in itself. The [Star of Redemption] is not a goal that has been reached, not even a preliminary one. It itself must be answered for, instead of it carrying itself or being carried by others of its kind. This responsibility happens in everyday life. Only in order to recognize and to live the day as every-day, the day of the life of the All had to be traversed. (Rosenzweig, 1925/1999a, p. 100). ⁴

By traversing the day of the life of the All, Rosenzweig means giving equal consideration to (a) the sort of rigorous philosophical reflection that calls basic concepts into question and (b) an attention to the philosophically unremarkable aspects of everyday life. This indeed is his concern in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, where three orienting ideas (or experiences, depending on how willing one is to read Rosenzweig [1954/1999b] as a pragmatist) are described in their functions as fixed, pre-established relations.

As Eric Santner (2001) argues in a comparative study of Rosenzweig and Freud, the fact that Rosenzweig (1954/1999b) intended Understanding the Sick and the Healthy as “an explicitly ‘therapeutic’ companion volume to the Star . . . suggests that he himself understood his work as a kind of intervention in the domain of psychopathology” (Santner, 2001, p. 55). The particular brand of psychopathology Rosenzweig had in mind, however, was one that arises largely from a kind of philosophical paralysis.

In Understanding the Sick and Healthy the reader is presented with a philosopher-paralytic, one whose pathology originates in his having separated “his experience of wonder from the continuous stream of life, isolating it” (Rosenzweig, 1954/1999b, p. 40). In making his wonder—his awe-struck consciousness of his and the world’s existence—an experience separate from life as he lives it, the lay-philosopher finds himself obsessed with the “essences” of things, be they God or “a pound of butter” (p. 42). He has given up on “common sense” in both the colloquial and Kantian (i.e., sensus communis) connotations: His thinking is divorced from his experience, and he doubts that there could be such a thing as “sense common to all.” Thus his “common sense is crippled by a stroke,” and quickly he begins to doubt his own existence in classic Cartesian fashion. “No one,” Rosenzweig observes of the philosopher-paralytic, “has less faith in himself than he” (p. 42).

Yet where Descartes may have seen his uncertainty regarding his own existence as proof thereof, Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) paralytic finds that his doubt only continues to snowball: “In short, all that he had taken for granted became uncertain; he had required proof and assurance of everything” (p. 46). The patient in this allegory appears to suffer from an illness that, for our purposes, is just as likely to afflict the therapist. Having wondered obsessively about the veracity of what he encounters and what he thinks, he finds himself uncertain to the point of paralysis, cut off from others and alienated from his own intuition. It seems that as soon as he begins to exercise his monomaniacal skepticism—so necessary in the practice of systematic theology and philosophy, so inhibitory in everyday life—he finds that not even his own cogito provides a sure enough point of reference.

Beset by an attack of infinite regress, Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) allegorical paralytic is rushed to a remote mountain clinic. There, he is given a “revolutionary” treatment: Taken to a location from which he can view three distinct, interconnected mountain peaks, the patient documents his recovery from psychic paralysis in a journal. These peaks, it should be noted, function in the allegory for the three components of Rosenzweig’s philosophical system: God, Man, and the World. Consideration of the details of this system (which is, after all, only discussed at length in The Star of Redemption) are perhaps less relevant than the nature of the allegorical “treatment” contained therein, as it is this intervention that so compellingly lends itself to clinical analogy.

In the imaginary letters exchanged by the referring and inpatient physicians, one of the clinicians emphasizes that his intervention is indeed subtle. “[S]uch a cure,” he explains, “cannot be applied at will. To be effective, it must be part of living experience” (Rosenzweig, 1954/1999b, p. 56). Indeed, in a statement that recalls the last words of The Star of Redemption (“INTO LIFE” [Rosenzweig, 1922/2005, p. 447]), the physician explains that the “sickness of reason is such an unusual condition, that it may be cured, at last, by the power of life itself” (Rosenzweig, 1954/1999b, p. 56). What Rosenzweig means by the admittedly vague reference to “life,” is, it becomes clear, an approach to basic questions of epistemology that is more relational than essential.

Rather than tarrying over the exact essences of the conceptual referents of everyday life, the paralytic is encouraged to see the philosophical foundations of lived experience as they emerge in vivo. The argument is as anti-idealistic as they come. Indeed, one of Rosenzweig’s physicians provides an etiology that locates the origin of the paralysis in just the kind of reasoning that German Idealism would be inclined to champion: Thus, the “real cause of the illness is not that reason assumes that ‘spirit’ is the essence of reality; it is its assumption that it is possible for something to exist beyond reality” (Rosenzweig, 1954/1999b, p. 57). It would appear that the patient’s “Environmental treatment” involves an immersion in lived experience, one that is not so anti-intellectual as it might at first appear (p. 60).

In fact, Rosenzweig (1954/1999b) is quite far from denouncing philosophy. Asking basic epistemological questions—which is, after all, the sole sense in which “philosophy” is used in this text—is for him an unquestionably worthwhile enterprise. What is not is prioritizing those questions over everyday conscious experience. This seems to be the cure that the “orientation therapy” has in mind. Each of the patient’s glimpses of the “summits” emerges alongside the “roads” that connect them; the philosophically distinct concepts of God, Man, and the World are seen to emerge only through their links in everyday life. As his physician declares in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, “[E]veryday life, it is clear, cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the sublime realm of theory, no matter how ‘essential’ it may seem when compared to dull, tedious reality” (Rosenzweig, 1954/1999b, p. 56). That reality has become “dull” and “tedious” owes to the experience of epistemological paralysis; seeing philosophical grandeur as constituent of the everyday returns to it its centrality.

Most important for our purposes in this allegorical account of epistemological convalescence is the manner by which philosophical essentialism is traded for a relational approach to everyday experience. In the diary entries recounting his treatment, Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) patient finds himself able to engage the quagmire of epistemology with the same “charitable skepticism” with which the clinician endeavors to approach her client. Now, when he asks himself whether he may say that “the world is—something,” he may reply in the first-person plural that

our answer is . . . characterized by a lack of presumption, quite unlike those answers which insisted on plumbing the “deeper regions” in order to demonstrate “essence.” The latter pretended to ultimate profundity, while ours does not desire to be profound, but prefers to keep to the surface. . . . It does not claim to be truth—it does, however, aspire to become true. Thus it is merely a diving board. (p. 70)

As a “diving board,” the patient’s style of philosophical interrogation is necessarily provisional and tentative, and this in the service of arriving at an undetermined conceptual destination. Rosenzweig (1954/1999b) finds that even the name of “God cannot be spoken unless, at the very same moment, a bridge is constructed to man and the world” (p. 90). Limits are thus put on the debilitating effects of infinitely regressive speculation. No longer must reason depersonalize the patient’s fellow man and alienate him from himself.

Clinical Conclusions

To return to the clinical resonance of this allegory, one may observe that Rosenzweig’s (1954/1999b) argument steers well clear of advising against posing critical epistemological questions. Instead, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy advocates an approach to the constituent elements of knowledge and consciousness that locates their origin in the empirical (rather than ideal) realm. Truth, we may say, is understood as a process of “becoming”—albeit in a pre-Heideggerian sense.

The initial Kierkegaardian leap of faith that is required of the clinician must be tempered by just this kind of epistemology. For our purposes, Kierkegaard (1844/1985) can be understood as having highlighted a moment in which normal, everyday empirical reasoning is of little use. And while it is true that in Philosophical Fragments this moment is one that specifically addresses questions of religious belief, it also bears a striking resemblance to the strange, nonlegalistic epistemology encountered routinely by practitioners of psychotherapy. Since the clinician is at worst uninterested in and at best unable to verify much information provided by therapy clients through reference to some extraclinical evidence, the initial exploration of material provided by the client must proceed from a tentative “willful suspension of disbelief.” Of course, uncritically believing all of what one is told by a client—swallowing their narrative hook, line, and sinker, as it were—is of as little use for the clinician as verifying their words by reference to outside material.

For this reason, Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) epistemology of faith must be tempered with the particular concept of everyday philosophy proposed by Rosenzweig (1954/1999b) in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. The truth of what the client relates cannot initially be judged by reference to outside material, nor can concern with the veracity of a client’s narrative be abandoned. The charitable skepticism, the skeptical empathy with which the therapist desires to approach the client is one that, like the interconnected peaks viewed from Rosenzweig’s allegorical clinic, must emerge in harmony with the different elements of her narrative.