Om Grundtvigs tænkning og den nyere tids filosofi. Introduktion til Danne-Virke II

Resumé

On Grundtvig’s Thought and Post-Lutheran Philosophy
An introduction to Danevirke II

By William Michelsen

Grundtvig’s considerations on the life of man in his periodical Danevirke (1816- 19) are the result of his critical reading of the major works in modern philosophy and in protestant theology since 1517. His criticism of the works can be found in Prospect o f World Chronicle Especially in the Age o f Luther from 1817; his own comments are presented in Danevirke. Inevitably the criticism has affected the comments, making them difficult to read today in our altered circumstances. Yet all philosophy and theology since Luther has seen itself in relation to the same works, though in most cases reaching a different conclusion from Grundtvig’s. It is three hundred years of thought he is concerned with.

Grundtvig denotes the fundamental concepts in his thought with the words: Sense, Knowledge, and Made in G od’s Image. By “sense” he means the faculties through which we apprehend existence, both the outer existence and the inner: sight, hearing, and feeling. With their aid man already in childhood builds up not only his environment but also his self-awareness. Here Grundtvig ascribes the fundamental sense to feeling. Sight, he says, is both the faculty through which we receive images of the outer world, but also as the inner sense the faculty through which we create imaginative pictures of what we cannot see directly with the outer eye. Such pictures may be true or false, that is, illusions. When Grundtvig had his visions, he regarded the true visions as brought about by God, and the false as produced by “the Father of Lies”, the Devil. Hearing, the sense through which we perceive words and thus learn to speak, is for Grundtvig the basis of human reason, which he considers a faculty developed later and which could therefore under no circumstances be the basis of the human psyche.

The creation of man in God’s image, as both the Old and the New Testament relate it, means that man is made to resemble his Maker, though from the outset he is in no way a complete image of God. Rather, he finds himself in a slow development towards this goal; a development that is still marked by the Fall. Grundtvig has given his first exposition of his thinking on the subject in the unfinished second edition of Brief Prospect of World Chronicle, the first edition of which appeared in 1812. These pages from 1814 are reprinted at the front of this edition of Grundtvig Studies.

Grundtvig’s understanding of the old Danish word, vidskab, (knowledge) is as the intellectual superstructure of the sciences through which we form our world-view. He demanded of himself that his ideas should be understandable to every thinking person, and that they should be expressed in pure Danish without the loan-words constructed by philosophers. Naturally they should also be in agreement with common sense as well as classical logic. He paid no heed to Kant’s Critique o f Pure Reason, which is a major reason why he has been attacked for being unable to understand what he read and unable to think sensibly himself. Søren Kierkegaard chose a different tactic in his criticism of contemporary thought, but Kierkegaard’s tactic in no way changed Grundtvig’s views. Understanding Grundtvig therefore requires that one begins from the same starting-point that he offered his readers, even though posterity has called it naive realism.

Part of fundamental experience, says Grundtvig, is that every person is both body and spirit, and that the bodily and the spiritual cannot be separated in the living person. He calls this permanent link between body and spirit man’s Self or Soul.

Since man’s life is limited in time and moves in only a limited space, Grundtvig believes that time and space are also limited, are not endless. Man is not master of time and space; but he can imagine beings living an endless existence which is called everlasting. From this comes the idea of an everlasting life.

Such ideas come into being through the Word, by which Grundtvig does not mean constructed sound symbols but something that the child learns from the other people it trusts. In this way man comes to trust the super-human word too: God’s Word. It is from this Word of God that the world man lives in and man himself are created. This idea is not the experience of the individual, however, but something which belongs to mankind’s, i.e. all men’s common experience, which Grundtvig calls History. No man has experienced the creation of the world, but ideas of it have been transmitted from man to man through history. Grundtvig calls his view of man and the life of man a historical view of man. However, he does not regard this view as science (videnskab) but only knowledge (vidskab). He also avoids the word “philosophy” in his thought because his view goes against the conttemporary misuse of the word.

Grundtvig’s thought rejects every philosophy which claims to explain man and his existence solely through human reason and without regard to man’s limitation in time and space. Instead he maintains that we can only know human life through the experience of individual peoples and the whole human race, i.e. through History. This is the criticism he makes in the first of his “reflections”, which has the title On the Philosophical Century, a term that comprises the philosophy of the 18th century from Christian Wolf to Schelling.

According to Grundtvig the task of philosophy and the sciences is to understand mankind. But when he contemplates man as an image of his Creator, he maintains that man knows what he is an image of, even though he cannot conceive it. He can only conceive himself. His task is to attain a true picture of himself - “to conceive oneself in Truth”. Grundtvig believes this means conceiving man as the inconceivable God has created him.

In his criticism of the philosophy of the 18th century Grundtvig does not mention Leibniz. But in his World Chronicle from 1817 he does mention his Théodicée (1710). He admits that the defence of Christianity which Leibniz presents was built on the same logical foundation as his own view, namely the basic principle of contradiction. But he nevertheless claims that this foundation was an illusion. For Christianity exceeds all human reason, though it is not in conflict with it. And if one wishes to support Christianity with philosophical proof, one risks leading it to destruction: “Supports are ready to fall, and what rests on them wobbles when it is pushed. ” This was almost what happened when Leibniz’s pupil, Christian Wolf, built his system on Leibniz’s philosophy. And this is why Grundtvig’s criticism of 18th century philosophy begins with Christian Wolf.

What is the core of Grundtvig’s criticism? What is the main purpose of this lengthy presentation, which appeared just as obscure to contemporary readers as it does to present-day readers, however willing they may be to follow him?

Grundtvig’s criticism of “the philosophical century” is to the effect that man is attempting the impossible: to conceive who or what has created the world and man himself, God. This is impossible, if only because man is incapable of conceiving anything greater than himself and his existence, limited by time and space. He can imagine something greater but he cannot conceive it. He can believe in God and an everlasting life, but neither God nor everlasting life can he conceive philosophically.

Man’s philosophical and scientific task is limited to understanding himself and his existence in time and space. And since he only knows his development up to the point at which he lives, he cannot achieve any systematic description or explanation of human life in its entirety, as that would require a development he does not know of.

This is the core of Grundtvig’s thought and of his criticism of the philosophy of his time and of previous centuries. But it may well be difficult to perceive or deduce this from his first philosophical consideration in Danevirke, partly due to the polemical tone and the words and thoughts that are foreign to us, and partly because his way of thinking is disfigured by a terrible misprint in his criticism of this philosophy which was the basis of all contemporary thought. It is not especially Kant that Grundtvig singles out; he is attacking every philosophy which maintains that human reason can conceive a being which is created by itself, absolutely independent of anything else. He then continues: “... and what it cannot conceive it cannot itself be either, since reason is in no way outside (udenfor) as far as it conceives... - as if Grundtvig would argue against the idea that reason was “outside”. That is not his aim. The sentence only makes sense when the word udenfor is separated into its component parts: It then reads: “... since reason is not, unless it conceives; it is a concept, and in us a temporal concept which cannot possibly conceive anything eternal and unchangeable; and the self-dependent is eternal, the self-dependent living truth is unchangeable.”

This was Grundtvig’s main assertion in the dispute over Schelling’s philosophy. It is extended here to cover the whole of “the philosophical century” and thus Kant’s philosophy too. God is and will remain inconceivable. One can believe in Him, but one cannot conceive Him. Religion can just as little be replaced as supported by philosophy. Grundtvig refuses to accept the philosophical artifice of turning time and space into categories of human thought (and thus in principle everlasting).

Man cannot conceive eternal truth. But he can conceive that nothing can be true if it excludes man as he really is. For eternal truth has created man as he is.

This is the use to which Grundtvig puts the basic principle of contradiction in his view of the relationship between reason and faith. He does not attempt to prove that God exists, or what faculties He has, or that He created the world and man. But he does maintain that whoever denies that God can create and has created the world contradicts himself. For man does exist, and has created neither himself nor the world - nor his own reason.

Grundtvig goes no further in his application of the basic principle of contradiction in the essay. But he claims that he has the right to use it in his evaluation of men’s deeds throughout history; see also Henning H.irup's doctorate: Grundtvig’s View o f Faith and Knowledge (Copenhagen 1949).

The purpose of this first consideration is not only to contradict contemporary philosophy but to make room for historical knowledge. Grundtvig elaborates his concepts in two other essays: On Historical Knowledge and On Developing the Chronicle in the same volume. His aim with all three articles - and with the periodical in general - was to marshal an alternative to the contemporary view that it was possible to adduce another ground for an understanding of human life than historical knowledge, that is, in a speculative natural philosophy. According to Grundtvig History shows that man is “a being in the process of developing himself’. He asserts that what is developing itself must already be present in man as “woven into” him. He himself cannot generate it, he must conceive it. God’s revelation as man does not mean that man has produced God, but that he is made in God’s image. So when Grundtvig speaks here of God’s “revelation in time”, he is not thinking of religious experiences but incontrovertible historical events.