Natural Sciences

by Soren Kierkegaard

If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates' day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: "Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks' (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: "that is how men who do not think behave'). An excellent subject for an Aristophanes, particularly if he let Socrates look through a microscope.

There is no use at all in going in for natural science. One stands there defenseless and without any control. The scientist begins at once to distract one with all his details, at one moment one is in Australia, at another in the moon, in the bowels of the earth, and the devil knows where -- chasing a tape worm; at one moment one has to use a telescope and at the next a microscope, and who the devil can stand that kind of thing.

But joking apart; the confusion lies in the fact that it is never dialectically clear what is what, how philosophy is to make use of natural science. Is the whole thing a brilliant metaphor (so that one might just as well be ignorant of it) ? is it an example and analogy? or is it of such importance that theory should be formed accordingly?

There is no more terrible torture for a thinker than to have to continue living under the strain of having details constantly uncovered, so that it always looks as though the thought is about to appear, the conclusion. If the natural scientist does not feel that torture he cannot be a thinker. Intellectually that is the most terrible tantalization! A thinker is, as it were, in hell until he has found spiritual certainty: hic Rhodus, hic salta, the sphere of faith where, even if the world broke to pieces and the elements melted, thou shalt nevertheless believe. There one cannot wait for the latest news, or till one's ship comes home. That spiritual certainty, the most humbling of all, the most painful to a vain spirit (for it is so superior to look through a microscope), is the only certainty.

The main objection, the whole objection to natural science may simply and formally be expressed thus, absolutely: it is incredible that a man who has thought infinitely about himself as a spirit could think of choosing natural science (with empirical material) as his life's work and aim. An observant scientist must either be a man of talent and instinct, for the characteristic of talent and instinct is not to be fundamentally dialectical, but only to dig up things and be brilliant -- not to understand himself (and to be able to live on happily in that way, without feeling that anything is wrong because the deceptive variety of observations and discoveries continuously conceals the confusion of everything) ; or he must be a man who, from his earliest youth, half consciously, has become a scientist and continues out of habit to live in that way -- the most frightful way of living: to fascinate and astonish the world by one's discoveries and brilliance, and not to understand oneself. It is self-evident that such a scientist is conscious, he is conscious within the limits of his talents, perhaps an astonishingly penetrating mind, the gift of combining things and an almost magical power of associating ideas, etc. But at the very most the relationship will be this: an eminent mind, unique in its gifts, explains the whole of nature -- but does not understand itself. Spiritually he does not become transparent to himself in the moral appropriation of his gifts. But that relationship is scepticism, as may easily be seen (for scepticism means that an unknown, an X, explains everything. When everything is explained by an X which is not explained, then in the end nothing is explained at all). If that is not scepticism then it is superstition.

Excerpted from The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard. A Selection Edited and Translated by Alexander Dru.