Immanuel Can
That's only an "is." It's not an "ought," in itself.
I detect suffering is an "is." The suffering is unjust is an "ought." You don't get both together for free, logically. The second has to be shown as derivable from the first -- a thing which, as David Hume argued, simply cannot be rationally done.
Ok, Immanuel Can, the following does not want to be dismissed out of hand.
Hume and Wittgenstein were simply wrong, and reasonable talk about ethics is not limited to what is "empirically" verifiable or falsifiable. This division between is's and ought's has produced the most confusing philosophy since Plato's forms.
Suffering is certainly an IS, an objectless IS, conceived in itself. So what IS it? Does it cross our paths as a meaningful presence? Of course. Is it "empirical," like the sun and the clouds? Well, it is hard to pin it is sensory data, because the external senses do not have to be engaged, and it would therefore be the internal senses that, e.g., allow me to detect this migraine. But really, internal and external is not the point.
It is the datum itself. This IS of the migraine's pain. We have to be fair in this, for our object, I am proposing, is to give an exhaustive account of the pain, and Occam's razor is not to be used as a blunt instrument of ad hoc theoretical surgery: what is "there" must be accounted for if it is IN the pain, and not dismissed because Hume told us it's not really there. After all, is a color "there"? Unmistakably, when we see it (call it qualia, if you like; it's just another superfluous term). Take the matter of a color.
This arrives at the center of what I am trying to say:
How do we "know" the color is there? I do not want to provoke a discussion about hermeneutics.
Let's just say that which we call yellow is GIVEN, just there, period, the concept that synthesizes the color AS a color ends there. You could ask more questions, but that leads to hermeneutical complications I am not discussing (
unless you want to!! It is a very, very interesting topic). So. I am interested in this giveness of the sensation we call color, and there is nothing to say to enlighten us about it's giveness. You stare at it, and it's "thereness" simply stares back. The point: it has NO justificatory foundation beyond it. It is not discursively determined, simply intuitive. IT's not an epistemological construct (as the pragmatist's might say); we didn't make it up.
On to pain: what is "given" in a pain event? Here, we have to very careful NOT be disingenuous: Pain is not like yellow, and if we treat it like yellow, then Hume and Wittgenstein win the day. Wittgenstein is wrong, unless you can tell argue otherwise: IN the FACT of pain, there is something else, embedded and part and parcel of the pain, and this is the moral/valuative bad. What is the justification for this proposition? Observe the pain as a scientist would observe. Give analysis to the event, the phenomenon. It is qualitatively different from other empirical concepts, any such concept. The ethical dimension of it is not only there, it is by far the most salient feature of the event. If one still disagrees, by all means, apply the match to your finger and report what you are witnessing, It is NOT "well, there is a certain excitation at a spatial locality of the first digit of the right hand...." and so on. This kind of thing is for explanatory contexts OUTSIDE of the phenomenological analysis of the pain. This is why analytic philosophers are maddeningly obtuse about ethics. They want to move into things they CAN discuss, knowing there is no way to elaborate on the simple givens of the world (and again, hermeneutics is off the table here unless you want to go into them), and the ethical bad of pain is a simple given.
They certainly do not want to yield to moral realism, and that is what this amounts to: accepting that the world is by design, if you will, a moral place. We invented rules and our attitudes are variable, but nobody invented the moral badness of pain. It is there, intuitively accessible, clear as a bell.
This argument is likely the best expression of the idea I can manage and it addressed most of the questions you present. It is an engaging piece of reasoning. If you don't find it so, then there is little I can do.
Decidedly not.
Resignation is the farthest thing from being a knight of faith. Being "of faith," he continually ventures forth with both confidence and uncertainty -- with commitment, but with circumstantial uncertainty looming, too. He knows WHOM he serves, and why he serves; he does not know at all what will happen in his serving. Nothing there is "fated" at all. And he's courageous, not resigned. That's how Kierkegaard sees it.
The knight of faith knows he is not in charge of how things will go. This is the implication of "resignation," in the quotation you provided. But the reason he can "drain the deep sadness of life" with a "resignation" that is "infinite" is that "he knows the blessedness of infinity." He drinks the cup of the sadness of life to the bitter end -- admits all the harness and apparent tragedy of life -- but does so because he's not afraid to face the facts...for he "knows the blessedness of infinity," i.e. of God, eternity and heaven. For him, life does not end with that.
How do you say resignation is the farthest thing from being a knight of faith when Kierkegaard himself describes him as such? And you say he is courageous, not resigned. That's twice you contradict K. The faith described by K is the denouement of his account. Take anther look:
this man has made and at every
moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the
deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the
blessedness of infinity
In order to understand this, one has to read elsewhere in K's more technical works. In his Concept of Anxiety, he presents the structure of the self, and here he gives us his concept of the eternal present where the soul and God abide. Faith is through positing spirit, and redemption is achieved by an existential break with the mundane in the realization of the eternal present where actions finally are free of the restraints of recollection. Thus, the knight of faith is not simply believing or knowing; rather s/he is living within the divine "space" of the present and all things are resolved there. Of course, one continues to use language, assume customs, culture, habits (what Heidegger will call dasein), and this is why in Fear and Trembling the knight of faith is objectively depicted as so unassuming. S/he is still one of us, by every means, but one: actions and thoughts issue from the soul/God (K talks like this in Anxiety) where freedom lies.
So this resignation is an self realization which is inherently redemptive. K is not just theorizing, he presents a method for realizing God grace in actuality. The true knight of faith is both very remote, and there before our waking eyes as an everyday person.
Camus (to return to the OP) is different from that. His business of making "the rock" into "his rock" is very, very close to resignation. Whereas Kierkegaard's knight is a man of action who ventures out, Sisyphus is a defeated figure who converts the inevitable into something he embraces...Camus himself uses such language. That's a form of Fatalism...or something so close to it that it's very hard to separate the two.
Right, Camus and resignation. But venturing out for K? What does this mean? Action? No; faith! But you're right on the mark with Camus. But his Meursault in the Stranger is no enviable fellow at the end walking toward the gallows (or is it the guillotine?).
This is not what is said. We must regard it as an interpretation presented as a fact. We do not, in fact, know what Abraham thought. Genesis does not tell us what went on his mind, simply what he said to his son. But it does not matter, for Kierkegaard's purposes; for doubts are not sins when faith conquers them. Then, they become trophies of battles won.
for Kierkegaard, Abraham is a heuristic brought out to examine the concept of faith, just as he did with Adam and the concept of original sin. It's not about a person that lived many years ago. K argues against this kind of history based faith often. Don't quite get the art about battles and trophies.