Two cognitions, x and y, are dissonant if not-x follows from y, for example. Logical inconsistency, conflict with past experience, incompatibility between behaviour and cultural mores and conflicts in specific and general opinion all count as cognitive dissonances. Typically people will act to reduce the psychological discomfort of cognitive dissonance, and John Gager has proposed that it suffices as as an explanation for the success of early Christianity, reducing the dissonance occasioned by disappointed expectations of the coming of the Messiah. Reductions to dissonance are available through either changing the cognition, or adding cognitive elements - where adding can occur by converting other people to be of the same opinion, to diminish the importance of the dissonant cognition, or to reconcile the two cognitions.
The discomfort of cognitive dissonance can be exalted by a psychologically astute ascetic - and Soren Kirkegaard employs a character called Johannes Climacus to explicitly deny the notion that religious life involves physical self torment - rather it is the embracing of voluntary self-denial that is engaged with in a systematic pursuit of self-transformation. Religious existence in this view is essentially continual suffering, where the individual must renounce all finite ends to relate him or herself absolutely to the absolute. This necessitates the existential recognition that the individual is capable of doing nothing himself, but is nothing before God - rather the individual is passively transformed by God, so suffering becomes the pain of self-annihilation and passivity before God's activity.
A Hegelian lens, which would allow the operation of understanding through the Aristotelian principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, is juxtaposed against the exercise of dialectical reason which identifies the possibility that all concepts imply their own contradiction. Kirkegaard recounts that dialectical reason is crucial to understanding precisely because Aristotle's three principles cannot adequately define the natural and social worlds.
Hegel's 'pure being' represents a perfectly abstract and undetermined starting point, without form and without content. For the understanding, for Hegel, the identity of being and nothing is a paradox - but a paradox united in becoming. When something becomes it simultaneously is and is not. Becoming negates the absolute negativity of nothing by bringing the positivity of being and the negativity of nothing into (positive) union.
'Nowhere in heaven of on earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Of course, since we are speaking here of an actual something, those determinations are no longer present in it in the complete untruth in which they are being and nothing, they are a more deoveloped determination, and are grasped as positive and negative'....
Kirkegaard actually objects to Hegel's language here of negativity (and speculation), but employs exactly the notion of negativity as the motive force in individual inward deepening. While Hegel has a final positive landing point in 'becoming', Kirkegaard adopts no such salvific notion, rather the deepest most inward expression of the religious sphere is found in the wound of negativity.
Kirkegaard gives examples of the positive being distinguished by the negative - revelation marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity, the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. We participate in timeless truths and ideals, but exist in a temporal world of becoming, and there is an infinite ethical task to be completed, uniting the contradictory elements into a synthesis.
For Kirkegaard then, faith in the Christian paradox, that an eternal God entered into the finite world in a human form culminates the religious project of self annihilation and effects a 'new birth'. Faith becomes a martyrdom, a crucifixion of the understanding. Faith ensures that the relation to the absolute is not relative. The faithful individual breaks from immanence - from the vain delusion that he is ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the truth. Kirkegaard's antipathy for Hegel arises because Hegel attempts to reconcile the paradox - speculation attempts to align itself with God, and Kirkegaard would prefer to maintain the heightened sense of prodigious contradiction in order to hold Christianity as an existence-communication that must be subjectively appropriated and then actively engaged with, in cognitive asceticism, nulling and voiding the sense of understanding that might be best described by a quote:
'For faith sees best in the dark'.
The discomfort of cognitive dissonance can be exalted by a psychologically astute ascetic - and Soren Kirkegaard employs a character called Johannes Climacus to explicitly deny the notion that religious life involves physical self torment - rather it is the embracing of voluntary self-denial that is engaged with in a systematic pursuit of self-transformation. Religious existence in this view is essentially continual suffering, where the individual must renounce all finite ends to relate him or herself absolutely to the absolute. This necessitates the existential recognition that the individual is capable of doing nothing himself, but is nothing before God - rather the individual is passively transformed by God, so suffering becomes the pain of self-annihilation and passivity before God's activity.
A Hegelian lens, which would allow the operation of understanding through the Aristotelian principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, is juxtaposed against the exercise of dialectical reason which identifies the possibility that all concepts imply their own contradiction. Kirkegaard recounts that dialectical reason is crucial to understanding precisely because Aristotle's three principles cannot adequately define the natural and social worlds.
Hegel's 'pure being' represents a perfectly abstract and undetermined starting point, without form and without content. For the understanding, for Hegel, the identity of being and nothing is a paradox - but a paradox united in becoming. When something becomes it simultaneously is and is not. Becoming negates the absolute negativity of nothing by bringing the positivity of being and the negativity of nothing into (positive) union.
'Nowhere in heaven of on earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Of course, since we are speaking here of an actual something, those determinations are no longer present in it in the complete untruth in which they are being and nothing, they are a more deoveloped determination, and are grasped as positive and negative'....
Kirkegaard actually objects to Hegel's language here of negativity (and speculation), but employs exactly the notion of negativity as the motive force in individual inward deepening. While Hegel has a final positive landing point in 'becoming', Kirkegaard adopts no such salvific notion, rather the deepest most inward expression of the religious sphere is found in the wound of negativity.
Kirkegaard gives examples of the positive being distinguished by the negative - revelation marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity, the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. We participate in timeless truths and ideals, but exist in a temporal world of becoming, and there is an infinite ethical task to be completed, uniting the contradictory elements into a synthesis.
For Kirkegaard then, faith in the Christian paradox, that an eternal God entered into the finite world in a human form culminates the religious project of self annihilation and effects a 'new birth'. Faith becomes a martyrdom, a crucifixion of the understanding. Faith ensures that the relation to the absolute is not relative. The faithful individual breaks from immanence - from the vain delusion that he is ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the truth. Kirkegaard's antipathy for Hegel arises because Hegel attempts to reconcile the paradox - speculation attempts to align itself with God, and Kirkegaard would prefer to maintain the heightened sense of prodigious contradiction in order to hold Christianity as an existence-communication that must be subjectively appropriated and then actively engaged with, in cognitive asceticism, nulling and voiding the sense of understanding that might be best described by a quote:
'For faith sees best in the dark'.
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