Reading Kierkegaard as movement: Seeing Paradox as relational pull; feeling the Paradox as erotic gravity

In “Offense at the Paradox: An acoustical illusion” (Appendix to Ch. III in Philosophical Fragments – “The Absolute Paradox – A Metaphysical Caprice”), Kierkegaard quotes Goethe to illustrate “the understanding surrendered itself and the Paradox gave itself” – “Halb zog sie, ihn, halb sank er hin” (“She half dragged him, he half sank down”). It describes Faust being drawn toward Gretchen – a movement that is neither purely active nor purely passive. He is both pulled and yielding. Kierkegaard uses it to characterise the relation between the understanding and the Paradox: The understanding surrenders – and yet the Paradox gives itself. Half it draws him, half it sinks. It becomes a model of epistemic eros (the philosophical concept of love/longing as a driving force for inquiry).

What could be more beautifully analogous than this passage from “The Gypsies” (by Jan Yoors, a Belgian man who left Antwerp as a boy to live with a Lovara Romany group).

“Old Bid-Shika once told us the legend about the full moon being dragged down to earth by the sheer intensity, weight and witchery of the Romany tongue.”

He writes about the Romany language being dense, wild, archaic, incantatory; unfit for small talk, and recounts the legend of the moon dragged down by its intensity.

The moon does not simply fall; language does not simply seize. Half she pulled him, half he sank. The encounter between the understanding and the Paradox is not domination or absorption, but one of participation. The soul enters the object. (We complete the object of knowledge ourselves?)

Ch. III in Philosophical Fragments is also about a certain personal and intellectual temperament; a certain kind of epistemic humility (“the happy collision” versus “offense” at the Paradox). The relation of mutual participation between the understanding the paradox is not available to every temperament. There are two dominant modern temperaments: (1) The conquering intellect (“I will master the object”) (2) The defensive skeptic (“the object cannot be known”). Participation belongs to neither: it requires a third temperament; the one willing to be altered (“the difference is necessary in order to be altered in some third”) – Philosophical Fragments, Appendix II (IV 221). This is comparable to Wittgenstein’s “thinking both sides of the limit.” This is also what we could mean if we said we could “conceive of an Absolute limit as relational.”

 Manifestation is revealed by a mutual tension. The understanding does not conquer the Paradox; nor does the Paradox crush the understanding; they move towards one another; they complete the fall together.