Kierkegaard and Sartre on Faith
Kierkegaard: Faith is truly a marvel and no single human being can ever be excluded from it and its greatness.
Sartre: How could one describe faith as a marvel?
Kierkegaard: Faith is a passion, and passion unites every single one of us.
Sartre: Faith is not a passion, it is not something to be striven for or to take pride in; it is something that is restrictive and confining to human life and progress.
Kierkegaard: Faith is most certainly a passion; it is inherent and natural.
Sartre: Bad faith is something that is natural, but it is also something which we must free ourselves from in order to be happy.
Kierkegaard: Faith is so good a thing as I consider it to be the highest human passion; how could one not? Faith is
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Can reason logically lead us to discard the use of reason, since reason is what led us to this very conclusion in the first place?
Kierkegaard: The leap of faith is the only thing that can bring us to the level which reason cannot. Reason has obvious limits; limits which prevent us from being able to comprehend the vastness and incomprehensibility of the entire universe and everything both inside and outside of it.
Sartre: Are Christians not using reason when they choose to attend church and attempt to find eternal salvation?
Kierkegaard: Christians are, in fact, using reason and that is exactly the problem. As I’ve said, reason cannot bring us past its own limits, and faith is beyond these limits. Furthermore, Christians do not actually practice an authentic faith. The faith that the mainstream Christianity promotes is one that is inherently inauthentic. Listening to a preacher push pointless messages will not bring one an authentic faith. One cannot be taught to accept the impossible; one must accept the impossible as being true on one’s
Then he goes on to conclude by saying that, “The lessons learned from observing people and their beliefs support the position that I have defended: rational people may rationally believe in God without evidence or argument” (Feinberg 142). In schools today, students grow up listening to lectures that are subjective and then later are tested on what the teacher thinks and believes. Whether or not the taught perspective is factual or not, it teaches students from a young age to just take what the teachers, adults, and any authority says as truth, as a way to respecting authority. In the same way that it is reasonable to believe respectable authority, it is rational to have belief in God without specific evidence because we are created with the inclination that a higher being exists and God has shown Himself to be true to every generation. Furthermore, God has placed in every human the inkling to believe what is right or wrong, so when it comes to deciding whether to act a certain way, we can rely on our gut feeling if it is a good action or not. It is a very common and suggested thing to trust one's gut feeling when making a decision, even though it does not require any evidence to see if it is actually the right decision to
In Paul Tillich’s 1957 work Dynamics of Faith, he mentions that there are six major components of faith. These six components of faith describe the Franciscan perspective of “faith”. According to Tillich, the first component of faith is “the state of being ultimately concerned”. The second component of faith is that it is supposed to be at the center of all of our personal lives and everything that we do throughout our own individual lives. The third component of faith is that we should have an awareness for “infinite” things such as God himself. The fourth component of faith is that we need to understand that faith can act as fear, fascination, or both of these qualities at the same time. The fifth component of faith is that doubt is a major product that will always exist with faith. The last component of faith is that we need a community in order to have a “language of faith”.
C. Stephen Evans is stating there is a problem with the philosophy of religion having a neutral stance. Evans rejects both fideism as well as neutralism, and believes that by trying to have a, “neutral, disinterested posture,” a person could, “cut themselves off from the possibility of even understanding what religion is all about,” (Evans, 1985 p. 115). Evans notes that the view of faith and reason, by some religious believers think it is an impossibility to have “rational reflection” on religion. After his arguments that disprove many ideas in both fideism and neutralism, he proposes an alternative solution which he has named, “critical dialog”, that he hopes will, “preserve the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses of the initial theories,” (p. 115). “Correct thinking about religion is rather a genuine faith, a personal commitment,” (p. 116).
Bad faith is pretending that we are not free and responsible for what we are and do, when in fact we know that we are. It is also pretending that we are causally determined as inanimate things are, and that therefore we have no freedom and are not responsible for our lives, as victims of circumstances. To have a truly authentic existence, Sartre dictates that we live according to our own beliefs, that we insert meaning into the acts that we do, not finding meaning from what other people say. We should no live in regard to what other people think or say, because this would also push us into bad faith.
that it "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient
There are many different opinions about the differences between faith and reason. Traditionally viewed differences between reason and faith are that reason is something that requires empirical, factual evidence while faith relies merely on, well, faith. For something to have reason it must have some kind of factual evidence to make it true, or at least very good sound reasoning to believe that whatever it is, is factual. Faith is far from something that attains empirical evidence, faith usually relies on personal accounts which are usually of mystical content. Many philosophers have different opinions about how the two can coexist; some say under no circumstances at all, while others claim they can justify each other, and some claim faith is reason alone. Some philosophers claim that believing in God is an obvious choice by the claim that just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there like Blaise Pascal. Blasé Pascal and Clifford offer two completely different standpoints on the role of reason and faith.
Faith is something a person must have inside them to be able to succeed. Success and failure are two completely different things, but faith is what separates the two. In the short story “A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets” by Kevin Brockmeier, the author illustrates the struggles a man must overcome in society and the obstacles he must overcome when his faith is tested to the limit. In the fable, the author uses symbols of faith, magical elements, and realistic struggles to divulge the morals and struggles of life.
Religion, which is meant to enhance the faith of it followers, has done the opposite. The practices of religion have become overwhelmingly factual that the faith component of religion has vanished. In order to be a genuine beliver one must comprise an authentic faith. Both religious leaders and followers must realize that their religion is not factual, but sustained through faith. The key to the gates of heaven is faith, not facts.
In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, the concept of the Knight of Faith is an exalted one, a unique title awarded to those whose devotion to God goes far beyond what is even comprehensible or expected for the average man, who has an aesthetic or ethical life. We are told by Kierkegaard that this Knight of Faith, when in a situation where resignation appears to be the only solution to a problem, puts his faith in what appears to be the absurd, and believes that the solution that he desires lies in God. This fuels his faith, and makes him better than the aesthetic man, who simply abandons or ignores the problem, or the ethical man, the Knight of Infinite Resignation, who accepts the problem and resigns himself to a life of despair. The Knight of Faith exists as a shining beacon of devotion to the will of God, and, according to Kierkegaard, there exist only two known examples of the Knight of Faith: Abraham, and Mary. These exemplary figures in history put their faith in God, and believed that God would provide a solution to their problems. This unconditional faith in their creator is supposed to be inspirational, and in a sense, make the reader feel incredibly pitiful and resentful of their own wavering faith. In the following paragraphs, I aim to argue that a moment of absolute faithlessness can prove to be just as powerful as a moment of pure faith, and that Mary and Abraham serve as God-given examples of an absolute faith that is inaccessible to all but a few humans who serve very specific purposes in this world. Finally, I will propose a different mode of existence, one in which a man’s free will allows him to find joy in whatever God provides for him.
Through my study of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Saint Augustine’s “The Confessions”, I discovered that both text involve a journey of finding real truths before acquiring a faith. This suggests that faith and reason are compatible because one must embark on journey in which they are educated about real truths before they are able to acquire a faith.
Kierkegaard argued against Kant that rationalism was lacking where religion was concerned. Kierkegaard fought that religion had nothing to do with rationalism, but everything to do with an individual relationship with God. The individual is free to maintain an intimate relationship with God which comes with faith as the absurd. Unlike Kant, Kierkegaard sees moral rationalism in society, but religion has nothing to do with it. It is a completely different subject that cannot be mixed with moral reason. He states that religion belongs only to the person seeking religion and overpowers all things rational. Kierkegaard places religious philosophy beyond the context of rationalism completely.
He basically calls the people of Argos fools for following Zeus and repenting their sins. Here he is removing the people of free will, making them blindly follow this religion. I do think free will is often restricted, but by the person themselves, because they feel like they need to conform and follow this power. Sartre, through Orestes, makes it seem like you can only be free when you are free from power over you, therefore free from religion. I think this is a skewed view of life. Sartre generalizes followers of religion, specifically Catholicism, so much that they all seem like mindless clones. I am not religious, but I think people who follow religion don’t give it all the power. Rather than letting it have a hold over them, they work with it to make their decisions. Here is where I think Sartre fails. He is hypocritical. Sartre makes it seem like searching for answers or validation through religion is foolish, so instead, he gives us the answers he thinks are correct, he gives himself the power over the reader. He essentially makes himself into a god and existentialism into a religion, completely counteracting his previous points. Sartre is telling the reader that they are stupid, and existentialism is the right way, but since according to existentialism there is no right way, it all just becomes a never-ending, pointless
Sartre is one of the constructors of the philosophy of existence that is existentialism. Humans must first be born and exist before they are able to define their essence. He states that there is no universal statement about what humans are. But, there is one overall statement about the circumstances that make us human, which is that we are free. He believes that when we have to make decisions nothing is forcing us to do what we are doing. Which leads to the idea that humans have to take full responsibility for our actions, beliefs and emotions. By being aware that we are free, the responsibility of this can cause “anguish” according to Sartre. One of the most painful thoughts can be that we alone are totally responsible for what happens to us. To avoid the pain of some of the bad decisions we make people can act as if they had no choice and may pretend that they are not free which would make them not responsible. When you act like you were not free and are not responsible is known as having bad faith. That is humans try to convince themselves that outside forces, forces that are beyond control or our conscious mental state helped determine the decisions we made.
In today’s modern western society, it has become increasingly popular to not identify with any religion, namely Christianity. The outlook that people have today on the existence of God and the role that He plays in our world has changed drastically since the Enlightenment Period. Many look solely to the concept of reason, or the phenomenon that allows human beings to use their senses to draw conclusions about the world around them, to try and understand the environment that they live in. However, there are some that look to faith, or the concept of believing in a higher power as the reason for our existence. Being that this is a fundamental issue for humanity, there have been many attempts to explain what role each concept plays. It is my belief that faith and reason are both needed to gain knowledge for three reasons: first, both concepts coexist with one another; second, each deals with separate realms of reality, and third, one without the other can lead to cases of extremism.
Today, faith is the cornerstone of all major religious knowledge claims because there is no definitive way of...