Our society is often called an ``information-oriented society.'' What occupies moderns most is that which is to be communicated. They rarely ask what the communication itself is.
It is Kierkegaard that put the meaning of communication itself in question. In other words, he asked what it means to communicate.
Regine, his fiancée, taught him the meaning of communication. He had to break off his engagement with her though he loved her deeply. Why? He existed in a religious world, besides a secular (aesthetic ) world. The former was far more important than the latter to him. His love for God couldn't be reconciled with his love for her. He chose faith in God after long suffering.
He tried one way or another to inform her of the true reason, the religious reason for his breaking the engagement. But he realized that he couldn't tell the truth to her directly, because she lived only in the secular (aesthetic) world. He knew he had to communicate indirectly with those who live in a different stage. It was thus Regine who taught him indirect communication.
This idea also gave him an important basis concerning his understanding of Christianity. Christ, believed by Christians to be the son of God, was born as a human being. Kierkegaard defined him God-man, the sign of contradiction. Christ cannot show his real form at all, because he is also in the state of absolute unrecognizability (incognito). Direct communication is impossible for him, because it does indeed directly state what one essentially is.
If God-man's communication is indirect, what does he want to communicate? Kierkegaard's answer is: he wants human beings to make a decision whetehr they believe in God or not.
Thus incognito and indirect communication form the essential basis of Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity.
The purpose of this paper is to examine Kierkegaard's concept of ``det Ubekjendte'' (the unknown) in light of contemporary philosophy of religion, specifically to compare Kierkegaardian thought with the religious foundationalism of reformed epistemology.
We can define the ``religious foundationalism'' as a thought which, in order to justify and make acceptable our religious beliefs rationally, seeks firm grounds on which we can found such beliefs. Obviously this is not only a contemporary issue, but has been discussed since the time of patristic philosophy when philosophical ways of thinking became adopted by the Christians for their apologetics. Philosophical efforts such as offering sufficient explanations and evidences to those who do not share the same religious beliefs, or justifying the beliefs one owns, have always been seen anywhere in the history of philosophy and religion.
In this paper, first, in order to make clear what religious foundationalists insist, we examine the so-called ``reformed epistemologist'' foundationalism, taking Alvin Plantinga's for a typical example. Secondly, referring to Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, we analyze how the arguments for the existence of God in Christianity become invalid. Additionally we consider what D. Z. Phillips, one of Wittgensteinian fideists, insists when he criticizes the religious foundationalism from his standpoint of thinking of a set of religious beliefs as constituting a ``language game''.
Regarding the traditional foundationalism as self-referentially inconsistent, Plantinga takes a sort of religious experience as an undoubtable ``properly basic'' ground for religious beliefs. According to his opinion, Plantinga still seems to need a new religious foundation5 while criticizing the traditional foundationalism, but Kierkegaard apparently does not. For the ineffability of God is attributed the paradox in Christianity, and in essence the paradox cannot be apprehended rationally. Thus, for Kierkegaard, the belief in God does not need to be made intelligible.
Emmanuel Levinas reads Fear and Trembling as a text that describes a serious conflict between ethics and faith. He criticizes Kierkegaard's faith for its self-God centric nature, essentially an egoism that ignores the otherness of the neighbor and exposes the neighbor to violence.
This paper defends Kierkegaard against Levinas. Levinas' criticism is significant because of his stringent ethics standard in terms of the relationship between the self and the other. This standard provides us with a strict criterion for examining Kierkegaard's ``neighborly love.'' In the neighborly love described in Works of Love, the neighbor reveals his/her otherness, which rejects the cognitional and practical power of the believer.
To make this point, I investigate the concepts of the ``paradoxical love to neighbor'' and ``battle with God,'' which are found both in Fear and Trembling and Works of Love. ``Paradoxical love to neighbor'' shows a severity of faith, the unconditional self-denial in front of God. In contrast to the ``paradoxical love to neighbor,'' ``battle with God'' shows a leniency of faith in which the believer is receptive to the other's individuality, which cannot be reduced to the believer's cognitional and practical power.
Dans cette article, nous nous proposons de retrouver la problématique du langage comme un rapport à autrui dans la pensée de Kierkeggard et celle de Lévinas.
Le parler philosophiquement de l'existence annulerait l'existence qu'est à la fois particulière et singulière, puisque l'énoncé philosophique est général et universel par essence. Pour remédier à cette aporie, Kierkegaard adopte ``la communication indirecte". Ce que Kierkegaard veut faire par là est d'amener son lecteur à réflechir sur son existence et ainsi devenir ``le singulier''.
De même, Lévinas considère l'essence du langage comme un rapport à autrui. Selon lui, autrui est non pas un objet qu'il me faut comprendre mais un interloculeur que je interroge. Si l'altérité d'autrui surgit dans seulement la réponse de moi á autrui, c'est une responsabilité de répondre à autrui m'impose. Ainsi Lévinas retrouve l'éthique dans un rapport à autrui comme l'essence du langage.
Nous sommes sûr que ces deux philosophes possèdent un problème commun, c'est-à-dire ils considèrent le langage non seulement comme un rapport à autrui mais aussi comme le fait dynamique où le singulier et autrui se produient en même temps.
An esthetic human being tends to increase his pleasure by choosing the partners arbitrarily, the so-called self-love. On the other side, an ethical human being takes the existence of other people into consideration, suspending his particular desire. However, he cannot become free from affirming himself as a judgment standard. A Christian religious human being, who embraces the Christian world view of disavowing the secularity, transfers the sovereignty of judgment to some not of himself. By which, he deals with self-love in a way qualitatively different form that of an esthetic or an ethical human being. The method presented by Kierkegaard about self-love transfers the judgement standard to God, thus avoids the dissolution of the standard itself, leaving the possibility of sharing a standard. However, who is the one that judges whether the act of one person is self-love or not? No matter how a man ruins himself in the domain of interiority, it is indispensable for him to consider how to relate himself with other people, who live in different situation and in different standard of value. It is important for us to harmonize the absolute relation with a demand, that is, relativizing of the standard of value while maintaining the absolute relation with God when it is compulsorily required in the actual relations with other people.