caution: words!

Words are our main means of communicating, yet so easily misunderstood. Whether that is a failure of the words or the failure of our own underlying understanding is not always so easy to determine.

I had to laugh today upon reading Kierkegaard saying

I for my part have applied considerable time to understanding Hegelian philosophy and believe that I have understood it fairly well; I am sufficiently brash to think that when I cannot understand particular passages despite all my pains, [Hegel] himself may not have been entirely clear.

This is the same man who wrote:

Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought.

Right.

Of this man, we so easily affirm that he held faith to be non-rational. Some people even say that he found faith to be IRrational. But is that really what he said? I don't think so. It's much more simple - and yet much more complex - than that.

Take care with what you define - and how you define it - as well as what you think goes without need of definition. Those words are sometimes the hardest words of all to define.

______________________

Both quotes are from his Fear and Trembling - the Princeton University Press Edition, p. 33 (the first quote) and pp. 55-56 (the second).