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Welcome to part two of three of my Ineffability Series. The previous post was on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to the unsayable in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a division of geometric precision in the muddy world that lie beyond the facts. If you want to hear more about this series, read the original post here:
For this post, I will discuss how Søren Kierkegaard tussles with the ineffable, namely through his struggle to communicate the incommunicability of faith. Can the subjective nature of faith ever pass over into objective description without being completely elided? And if it could pass over into comprehensibility, communicability, or even just gestural guidance, what form might that take?
Hints and Clues: Irony and Pseudonymity
How should you deliver a riddle? How should you make a map to treasure?
What you don’t do is give every move required for the riddle’s solution, and you don’t provide the exact longitude and latitude of the treasure—complete with precise descriptions of every landmark one passes by and elaborate clues.
A riddle is meant to be, in large part, hidden, obscure, and purposefully misleading. It is meant to be unraveled. Sometimes, it is made to be frustrating. And you only get the satisfaction from having solved a riddle when you didn’t take any shortcuts: no extra hints, the person who made the riddle didn’t step in, and you didn’t request to use the restroom, while on the toilet, looked up the answer.
And for the treasure map, it should give you something to expect, but it should be sufficiently mysterious that, even in following the map, one doubts whether the symbols and locations are just the right ones. One has to trust the map, however odd and unhelpful it is, and make judgements on the fly. If there were certainty, it wouldn’t be a treasure map.
But, without any clues or hints at all—even, for example, the “hint,” the revelation, that there even is a riddle, that there is treasure—one cannot even begin the quest.
Faith, for Kierkegaard, is something like a riddle and a treasure map. He explores this riddle and treasure map in his pseudonymously published work, Fear and Trembling.1
In this book, Johannes de silentio, our pseudonymous protagonist, traces the poetic, passionate, and dialectical depths of faith through a meditation on the akedah. The akedah is the story in Genesis 22: 1-19 where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. God promised Abraham many descendants, and from Isaac no less. Nonetheless, despite this appearing to contravene the promise on the surface, Abraham rides to Mount Moriah in total obedience. He binds Isaac, but just before he fells the knife, slitting his son’s throat, an angel of the Lord intervenes and tells him to stop. Abraham finds a ram stuck in a nearby thicket and offers it in his son’s stead. Johannes meditates on this story to demonstrate the infinitely important value of faith.
What are we to make of Abraham? The story of his binding of Isaac, his ultimate purpose to please God by sacrificing his son, his unwavering belief in God’s promises: how are we meant to take this behavior? Especially when, viewed exteriorly (for example, from those not in the know), it seems heinous and indefensible?
But let’s take a step back. In writing a riddle, one needs misdirection, equivocation, and all manner of sleight-of-hand with the pen. In making a treasure map, one needs a careful sense of deception and subtly, such that the treasure can be found, but only by the best and the most persistent. But what methods does one have when trying to talk about faith? How does one write that riddle? Make that map?
For Kierkegaard, one requires the methods of indirect communication. Indirect communication employs the tactics of irony and pseudonymity. Kierkegaard employs this to the end of producing a double reflection in the reader, a subjective appropriation, an ineffable understanding. (We’ll get to that soon.)
Irony and its Tricks: “I don’t know if he really means that…“
Irony is a term that is familiar enough. Often, we use it to mean that something went contrary to our expectations. There’s a foreboding and ominous sign warning us to “BEWARE OF DOG” but it turns out to be a Mini Dachshund, a cute lil’ hotdog of a dog. People often say, “Well, isn’t that ironic!” in this sense.
But that’s not Kierkegaard’s irony. (Though, he does like to misdirect and subvert our expectations). There’s another definition that we are familiar with. Irony is saying the opposite of what you mean. So, if I am served a dish—a steaming pile of spam on a moldy cracker—take a bite, hate it, and say, “Oh yes. So delicious! Yum!” then that is ironic in the oppositional sense.
That’s all well and good, but notice that there isn’t anything sneaky or indeterminate about your meaning. If what Kierkegaard is trying to do is initiate a process in us where we seek purpose and meaning for ourselves, and to throw us off balance, this type of irony seems too simple. This is trivial. All one has to do is flip the meaning; find the corresponding antonyms. If Kierkegaard says, “Oh Christ is such a loser!” or “All you gotta do to be a good Christian is go to Church!” We’d obviously know, “Oh. He likes Jesus. And he doesn’t think that you only have to go to Church to be a Christian. ok.” But in that circumstance, we haven’t really appropriated anything, undergone any overhaul of the spirit. We’ve just done the semantic flip and carried on.
So what type of irony is Kierkegaard using?
Irony as a way of life, and with three distinct features: the contradiction between the internal and external, exclusion, and freedom.2
Contradiction
This is the feature of irony that we touched on where the ironist’s inner state is not aligned with their outer state. And as we saw, this incongruency cannot not simply be oppositional, for then it would be determinate. The inner state of the ironist can’t be cracked so simply. Remember, irony is supposed to teach us about faith, and faith is a riddle; it is not so easily solved, if it can be solved at all.
Irony is an indeterminate contradiction between the exterior manifestation (what the ironist is saying, doing, etc.) and the inner truth (what they really mean). We don’t know what they believe, what their true intentions are, or what they are fighting for. There is an unsettling air of ambivalence, ambiguity, and uncertainty: a cheekiness and free-floating detachment. You know that they aren’t taking anything seriously, or if they are taking something seriously, it is hard to tell what. In any case, there’s a growing sense of superiority in the ironist over their situation. They are separating off from the external world, making it a plaything. They are not taking its demands, or their engagement with it (or other people’s engagement with it) seriously.
Exclusion
In acting ironically, the ironist sets up two groups: those in the know and those outside. Think about when someone is sarcastic and it flies over a third party’s head, but then they shoot you a wink because they know you caught on. The ironist is like that.
When one acts ironically, one divides people into the privileged few who get it, and the ignorant outsiders, not privy to one’s game. There are the naïve who take the statement at face value, and the people who see your game (though not necessarily what you are exactly thinking, just that you aren’t thinking what you say you are).
Side note: The word for holy in ancient Hebrew, qadosh, can mean sacred, but it also can be set apart. Holiness is a separating off, a dedication, a choice. I invite you to think about the connections between irony, humor, and holiness: what it feels like to share a laugh with those who “get it” and those who don’t.
This gives the ironist a sense of superiority, a holiness self-made, a kingdom self-taught, separated off with the moat of their own cleverness. And no one else but the ironist himself needs to be in the know. She can relish her own cunning, swimming in the secrecy of herself.
Freedom
And here’s the upshot of the previous two features, the real point of Kierkegaard’s irony. The ironist is free. How? Because when one acts unironically one is bound to the truth of one’s assertions and actions. We are responsible, since our commitments (our deeds and sayings) are determinate and definitive. But the ironist is equally uncommitted to any of the ways something could be taken. The ironist is not concerned with communication: he wants to luxuriate “in the freedom that comes from playing at conversation.”3
The ironist is largely without intention, unconcerned with how the listener takes their actions and speech. Their indeterminacy of meaning unleashes them from responsibility. Connected to superiority, this discovered inner freedom is an insincerity that denies that the typical activities of social life have a point. It is all beneath him.
The Problem
But, there is a significant problem for the ironist. What is this freedom they’ve found? One, it is an incredibly lonesome freedom. They are unconstrained by their immediate situation, but they are not free to commit themselves to anything.
To put it stronger: Does the thoroughgoing ironist take his own ironic outlook seriously?
If he does take it seriously, he has something toward which he is not ironic: he has committed himself to something.
If he does not take the irony seriously, he loses his sense of superiority and exclusion: irony is just as worthless as any other activity.
Stuck.4 What’s the way out?
The Purpose
Kierkegaard’s purpose using irony, then, is that he is free from any of the particular meanings found in his pseudonymous texts (and perhaps in his larger authorship). Kierkegaard’s end-goal is not to encourage irony as a way of life, as such. Rather, this greater reflectivity urges one closer to Christian faith, because one realizes that irony inevitably leads one to essentially playing with the finite world, never fully engaging in it. And the other worldviews we are presented with (the aesthetic, the ethical), as embodied in the different pseudonyms, are dead-ends.
I do not know how controversial this point is, but I have developed a way of reading Kierkegaard’s authorship as an existential reductio ad absurdum. As in, he sets up a near-exhaustive set of ways of life and demonstrates that they all are extremely limited, or dissatisfying, leading to ignorance and despair. But there is one worldview that is never talked about directly. The point of view of faith. And he leaves it to the reader to learn that subjectively, not just as a bare fact. He leaves it to the reader to realize irony, hedonism, simple virtuous living, and the like, are dead-ends.
Pseudonymity and its Agility: Who’s even talking?
Kierkegaard published many works under his own name, and never tried to hide the fact that he was the author of the pseudonymous works. Since the pseudonyms aren’t an attempt at authorial secrecy, they serve a philosophical purpose. Kierkegaard creates these characters to represent various subjectivities and worldviews. He never makes it obvious when he agrees, disagrees, or is in ambiguous ironic removal from the positions and attitudes taken up by the characters.
Faith is essentially subjective and cannot be externally represented. Since this is the case, the nature of faith, and what it is like to have faith, can never be directly stated or shown to the reader, only gestured toward. I read much of his pseudonymous work as setting up the existential question of faith, both poetically and rationally. He then leaves it to us to decide. This is the purpose of indirect communication.
These points of view (these modes/spheres of existence, as they are sometimes called), in his ironic distance from them, are shown to be dead ends. Subjective truths must be achieved through double reflection.5 Objective truths can be simply communicated, however hard it was to acquire them. For example: The earth orbits the sun. Or, a more plain example: It is raining outside. One can take an astronomy lesson to learn about the first one, and simply check out the window for the second.
Subjective truths are tougher to get across. For example, truths about how one ought to live, or about the conditions underlying one’s psychological and ethical life, and the self. The transferring process is muddier. How is one supposed to communicate that everyone is a sinner and Christ is the only route to eternal salvation, or that we are before God every second (and that should be terrifying), or that only faith like Abraham’s is real faith? But the point is deeper than that. Even if one successfully communicates the concept, it may still remain abstract. It takes a personal movement to agree to a subjective truth and then to have it pressure your life, to motivate you to make changes.
That is double reflection: one must reflectively understand the concept, then apply the concept to one’s own life. By putting the ideas in the mouth of another character, Kierkegaard remains aloof from the precise determinations and leaves it to us to evaluate and feel the force of the worldviews and opinions.
Kierkegaard employs other techniques but these are two of the main ones. These are the literary equivalents of a wink, an attitude of alacrity and cheekiness, molded over with a nod, a joke, and a dishcloth with nothing underneath it. We remove the cloth hoping for a meal, there’s nothing, and we look up to see Kierkegaard straddling a rope on the side of the building, finger to his lips in a shush, before rappelling down to the ground below. Tricky bastard!
Fear and Trembling: John the (not so) Silent
For being called John the silent, our narrator sure talks a lot. Talking about mermen and myths and this “God” guy. People really like to talk my hear off about this guy.
How do we understand Abraham, a knight of faith, as Johannes calls him? Johannes approaches the issue by tackling three problems in the form of three questions:
Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?
Is there an absolute duty to God?
Was it ethically defensible of Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, from Isaac?
Johannes’ answers (and, for all intents and purposes, Kierkegaard’s answers as well):
Yes.
Yes.
No.*
*But it’s complicated.
The What What the What?
The teleological suspension of the ethical…6 Of all the philosophy jargon, this one always seemed unnecessarily intimidating and off-putting to me. After having gotten through Hegel, I thought it couldn’t get worse. Oh boy. It just gets worse.
Luckily, what this means is straightforward. A telos is the end, the purpose, the aim, or the goal. A knife’s telos is to cut, for example. Suspension means something like “putting on hold,” or “bypassing,” or “temporarily relieving of force.” And the ethical is mostly7 what it sounds like: the ethical pertains to the conduct of agents, and to what is good and bad, and the like.
Putting it all together, all the question is asking is this. Can there be some higher end that someone can aim at that frees them from the claims of the ethical?
Indeed. And that higher end is God.
Conceived under the aspect of the ethical, if you intend to kill your son, motherfucker you are messed up! But if God tells ya to do it, well gosh darn, that is a holy sacrifice! The ethical meaning of an action becomes suspended when it is enacted by a person of genuine faith, connected to God directly.
An Absolute Duty
Absolute here means that the command to obey God trumps all other duties. There is a preemptive quality to faith. Faith is pocket aces when it comes to action. Whether it be a duty to strangers, family, the state, nature, yourself, or whatever, faith wins out.
A hero, for example, Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to allow the Greek army to return home safely from Troy, is tragic but comprehensible. They are tragic, because we feel for them, we understand their plight, and we wish it could've been different. We see how hard it is to sacrifice a lower duty (duty to the family) to a higher duty (duty to the state). They sacrifice for the greater good. The higher duty trumps the lower duty. But a duty to God is absolute. No matter what the situation is, the commitment to God wins out over every other contender.
An Ethical Defense
Taking it all together, the person of faith cannot talk about their duty to God or their teleological suspension of the ethical. It is private. They cannot defend themselves. The moment they begin to explain themselves, to justify themselves, they re-enter the realm of the ethical. And if Abraham does that, his action becomes murder again, not a sacrifice. He has no recourse to explanation. He must be absurdly and terrifyingly suspended. As Stephen C. Evans puts it
Language and reasoning are social activities. A person’s ability to explain and justify an action requires socially accepted standards of what counts as right and what counts as rational. Insofar as Abraham’s actions are rooted in a word from God that is not mediated through society, Abraham cannot possibly explain or justify his actions.8
Justification in the realm of the ethical requires the medium of language. Otherwise, one cannot get the message out to one’s community. The standpoint of the human community, with its worldly wisdom, when they hear Abraham say, “Yeah, I’m going out to slit our son’s throat, but God will provide us with descendants nonetheless,” will actually hear, “Yeah, so, I’m crazy.” Viewed exteriorly, Abraham’s faith commits him to something absurd and preposterous. Faith, and the actions of faith, cannot be understood through human calculative reasoning.
The tragic heroes can substitute one duty (an ethical telos) for a higher duty, all the while remaining within the language community and the structures of justification. Abraham “lacks the middle term” where his action are mediated by reference to some higher ethical duty in the hierarchy of ethical life.
Johannes admires Abraham but does not understand him. Kierkegaard shows how faith is essentially incomprehensible to those who do not have faith by showing us Johannes’ failure. Kierkegaard’s texts are built to fail to communicate the full reality of faith. Faith is a movement made in the privacy of the heart, in relation to God. If just anyone could understand faith, then it is the cat on the mat, the objective fact. It is Agamemnon. The ironist’s in-group and out-group becoming one group, the pseudonym become the author. Without the duality, the holiness fades.
Faith is interior. The moment it passes into the exterior, it vanishes. Abraham’s struggle must be silent. Otherwise, the struggle disappears.
What is faith, then?
What are we left with?
It’s not a type of propositional knowledge: Max the cat is on the damn mat! We know much about where (Kierkegaard thinks) faith occurs. It is individual, subjective, and internal. Faith is a movement, connected intimately with passion, made in the chambers of the heart and the spirit. We know faith is more about action, fealty, and total psychological and spiritual transformation than about bare-bones, dusty existential quantifications and scientific procedures. Faith is a commitment to God, for whom all is possible, who can complete one’s selfhood, and has the mercy and love to act on that ability. Faith is trust in God’s promises.
But what can’t we say about it? Well, a whole damn lot.
First, knowing all of this doesn’t make faith easier. Indeed, it makes the movement a lot harder. Looking up at the riddle, down at the treasure map, you now know how rare the movement is, how subtle and torrential, and how lonesome the journey is. You don’t know how exactly to make the journey, just which conditions obtain if you are going the right way or not.
Second, the feeling of genuine faith remains ineffable. We know a lot about what is true about the person who has faith. But there always remains an important sense in which the person of faith is imperceptibly subtle, quotidian, and largely indistinguishable from those without faith.9 We are left with a gesture.
We ask for directions from Kierkegaard, and instead of elaborating in detail how to get there, he says, “You go somewhere that way. And watch out for the sky-lions.” To which we say, “Wait, which way? What the fuck are sky-lions?” Turning to get his reply, we see him speeding off down a Copenhagen street, whipped up on sugar and caffeine, pursuing a path to Sortedam Lake, stopping passersbys to rant about Christendom like a palpably more unsettled and squirrel-ish Socrates.
I will save most of my critiques for another time. And, I’d like to say that Kierkegaard has much to him that I don’t have time to praise. He advances past Martin Luther in his conception of Christ. He has a respectable taste for psychology. And he is just a much better writer than Luther. But here is a short critique, as a taster.
In this ontology, the individual is totally isolated, a sort of lone hero in his own heart. Is faith (or indeed, the subject, plain and simple) this divorced (or divorceable) from the communal? Some will correctly state that faith for Kierkegaard is a relationship with three moving parts: you, other people, and God.10 And faith is the unsettled lubricant that allows real connection at all: you can’t reach out in love to others without passing through God.
I know that. But my worry is that all of this language is theoretically consigning striving, and striving as a community, to the backend. You tear up enough of the idea that faith subsists in culture, in places and people, shred it, and toss it in the waste basket, and then you have the audacity to paste it back together with the glue of the subject coram Deo, the person before God? Who has that person become but a husk, and what glue could she be but water?
It is true that Kierkegaard (and Luther) never totally left behind other people, community, and the love in all of this. They indeed have some moving notions about it. But it has always struck me as terribly naïve to place logically indomitable, theoretical strictures on letting the soul out of its cage without the assistance of grace, and removed from the assistance of anyone else, and then turn around and claim they’ve shown us something good. You are the force that fights to verify our alienation.
A pale, sickly, and paltry instability from the famished state of modernity—the dearth of beauty, faith, purpose, and community—reaches out of the throat of his books. He asks you to choke, then throws you an impossible lifeline. But one wonders if he’s right. If he is, only God can help us.
Thanks for reading,
Nicholas
R.O.P.S. (Regular-Old Post-Script)
I only got to writing this Friday. I had been on a lovely, week-long vacation with Audrey’s family, that was genuinely rejuvenating, and taught me a lot about beauty, intimacy and how to feel those things. I also only got back on Thursday at 4:30 in the morning by train. Needless to say, that day was needed for recovery. But! I am back to my things now. I’ve just decided to cut Luther, just for simplicity’s sake and to be kind to myself as I have less time to write this. How’s that feel ya lil’ Deutsch peasant!? Go back to misreading Augustine, loser.
If there are some mistakes, I’ll get to polishing them soon: I wanted to get this out despite the circumstances!
Also, this is a slapdash exegesis of Fear and Trembling. For concision, I couldn’t talk about the nature of and the interaction between the knights of infinite resignation and faith, divine command theory, the realm of the ethical, and much, much more. Likely will write a more in-depth post at some point, if folks are interested. For example, here’s a (slightly altered) quote from my thesis that gestures toward the heavy complications I’ve passed over: “How is Abraham’s motivation different from the impulsive, aesthetic-Romantic who acts against the greater good for some private impulse? The main distinguishing factors are that he still loves his son, so the ethical and finite are still being respected in his motivational structure, but just in a contradictory and absurd manner, and in a way that is impossible to understand from the outside.”
Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling. Translated by Sylvia Walsh. Edited by C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Cross, Andrew. “Neither either nor or: The perils of reflexive irony” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, 125-153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
I use this article for most of this section. And I essentially condensed and altered the section on irony from my thesis. This paper is awesome. It is a bit long and can get complicated, but it is genuinely the paper for this topic. If you are interested in irony, or in Kierkegaard’s particular type of irony, this paper is indispensable.
Cross, Andrew. “Neither either nor or: The perils of reflexive irony,” 132.
The solution proffered by Cross and Kierkegaard is that the ironist eternally suspends themselves from taking the leap into the ethical way of life. The ethical way of life is the one wherein you take responsibility for your life and posit an ideal that structures one’s sense of self toward future duties. He always keeps this possibility in mind, but never chooses it. Thus, he just enjoys the play of being an ironist: its not just “meaningless striving” with no alterative: therefore, since the ethical is possible he retains his power over it. I’ll leave it to you to ponder that solution (Cross 150).
Evans, Stephen C. Kierkegaard: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 30.
https://cl.gy/VhyKl ← Kierkegaard rap! Chidi’s Kierkegaard rap from The Good Place. Also, what the fuck! I had no idea there was a longer version, I was just searching for the one in the show. In the longer rap, he takes about double reflection. He even talks about how irony takes up a limbo state in-between the aesthetic and the ethical, which is a very deep-in-the-scholarly-dialectic fact. Well played.
Kierkegaard usually means ethical to refer to a weird glob-mix of Kant-Hegel soup (rather uncharitably conceived: potentially ironically and on purpose…It’s a whole thing.). Basically, universal. The more the particular/individual is blotted out, the more perfectly ethical.
C. Stephen Evans, “Introduction,” in Fear and Trembling, trans. by Sylvia Walsh, 2006, and so on.
Some effort is exerted in Fear and Trembling toward answering the question of how to distinguish the person of counterfeit faith from the person of genuine faith. He offers some answers: the person of counterfeit faith will be a sectarian, for example (think cult leaders who demand assent to an us vs. them structure of reality; certain gnostic elements will be present; they will actively drive violent wedges between people, etc.). But why would this necessarily be the case? The counterfeiter could be cleverer than that. Someone like Kierkegaard would be a good example of a clever counterfeiter, if he did not have the faith he preached about. And the truth of the matter is that Kierkegaard has set up too many theoretical insulations. The subjective nature of faith is inaccessible from an exterior standpoint. It simply is uncrossable. The person who accepts this idea is forced to admit that nothing external is an absolutely reliable guide to the internal question of whether they have faith.
I have something scary to say…The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation! Did I scare you? Discussion on The Sickness Unto Death coming at some point or other…
Great job involving normal and genious thinkers. Its never a solo walk. The scavenger hunt or joke or faith are all better tacked as a community. Would faith or scavenger hunts be worth it if they were obvious. Heck no! . Thanks for sharing your thoughts with everyone. I am also glad you found the spider Cara. Sometimes the spider needs to be found, the scavenger hunt needs to be figured out and a small part of the mystery of faith needs to be revealed to keep us going. Yay spider🙂
Once again, a 10/10 post, and one that will likely be helpful to me this fall when I have to read this guy proper. I have thoughts on these ideas that I feel are only tangentially related to what you've said here. Hopefully they will be meaningful regardless? Here you go:
I am, in fact, thinking about the similarities and intersections between irony, humor, and holiness, especially the first and last concept there. This past week, I took the train to a park in Wilmette where, in 2022, someone had reported seeing Phiddipus audax, the bold jumping spider. I did this with the express purpose of getting a glimpse of one. I've been looking for these bugs EVERYWHERE for MONTHS; it's been my summer telos, for lack of a better term, to see one in the wild. I have had absolutely no success. Anyway, I got to the park, made my way to the exact location the 2022 specimen had been reported, and anticipated rifling through bushes and cracks in walls for hours. But as soon as I reached the spot, there she was, Phiddipus audax, casually climbing down a drain pipe like the itsy bitsy spider herself. I don't believe in God in the typical sense, but I thought about it for a minute there.
There is, I think-- and I could be wrong because it's been a long day and reading is hard-- irony in this: namely in the fact that I stood there slack-jawed looking at this spider and repeated aloud to no one, "It isn't this easy. It can't be this easy." But it was. I woke up, thought "I am going to look for a bold jumper today," took the train to where one was once seen, and saw one. By definition, I'd say that was easy. Maybe in the larger context of my search, it wasn't-- it did take me a few months total-- but in terms of the short term telos here (is that a thing?), I achieved my goal with ease, and then insisted audibly that no, I hadn't. Kierkegaardian irony? You tell me.
And there was a lot there that felt divine. For almost any other person, say the yoga instructor I saw teaching a class in the middle of the park when I arrived, seeing the bold jumper on the drainpipe would not have been earth-shattering. It would not have been ironic, or divine, or anything. It maybe would've been scary, depending on the person. The yoga instructor is the out-group. But I'm in the in-group-- me and the great spider God in the sky both understand that I have a quest to see a bold jumping spider, so for me, there is significance to my finding one. There's irony in my response, and holiness in its presence. I think this is not quite what Kierkegaard was saying, but it's what I'm saying, and that's all I've got right now. I wonder what Kierkegaard has to say about luck? I think that can easily be conflated with irony and faith, too.
And I like the idea that knowing this makes faith more difficult, because it does. I saw that bold jumping spider, and it was amazing, and I have not seen another since. What now? What can I take from this? My hope and faith in the powers that be to show me this spider was confirmed, but it took months to do it overall. How do I move forward from this?
Very interesting stuff, even if I don't quite grasp all of it. You put this very well. "Who has that person become but a husk, and what glue could she be but water?" goes HARD. I really liked this post and I apologize if talking about Phiddipus audax in the comment section is off-putting. It's all I know how to do. I'm really glad you had a great vacation. Thanks Nicholas. :o)