Two Puzzling Things about the Knight of Faith

Kierkegaard's two Knights are individuals whose life is organized around a single concern/wish/purpose, the realization of which appears to them as thinking beings as possible, but which they nevertheless retain. The Knight of Infinite Resignation simply retains the wish while believing it's impossible (though she acts as if it's possible). The Knight of Faith goes further, and believes both that it is possible and that it isn't. There are two puzzling things to me about the Knight of Faith:

1. How the Knight arrives at her positive belief (i.e. 'Isaac will live,' or 'I shall have the princess,' e.g.) in the first place.

2. How the Knight is able to believe the contradiction made by conjoining her negative and positive beliefs (e.g. 'I will kill Isaac,' and 'Isaac will live' or 'I cannot have the princess,' and 'I shall have the princess').

2. How is the Knight of Faith able to believe a contradiction?

I will start with the second. It is, after all, because the Knight believes a paradox ("the absurd") that she is able to maintain her 'positive' belief. The most obvious response would be that the Knight does not believe both of these things in the same respect: that is, it's not a contradiction because the way in which the Knight's goal is "possible" to her and "impossible" to her are different. But I have trouble believing Kierkegaard didn't think of this and mean to exclude it. My intuition is that the key to the Knight's coherence, to the extent that she has any, has to lie in the juxtaposition not of beliefs that say what is not really contradictory, but in the two different modes in which the Knight exists--the 'finite world [which I assume to be 'the world of the understanding']' and the 'infinite [which I assume means 'spiritual'] world.'

The detachment from the world which "understanding rules" is accomplished before the knight-in-potentia becomes a Knight of Faith. This detachment is a crucial step: "for only in infinite resignation does my eternal validity become transparent to me, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence on the strength of faith" (75). Let's read "eternal validity" as the infinitude of the wish the Knight cannot rid himself of. In other words, as Kierkegaard says several times about the Knight(princess), that even love is something one can do entirely on one's own (72). So this paves the way for the simultaneous adoption of two perspectives--which Kierkegaard would describe as one of the finite world/understanding, and the infinite world/faith. The Knight of Faith can exist because her belief that she will attain her wish is somehow attuned to the world of faith, where impossibility doesn't mean impossibility. But the possibility the Knight is able to believe in is fulfillment in the finite world--not the Knight of Infinite Resignation's self-sufficient, resigned wishing.

Kierkegaard seems to agree with my previous claim that the Knight of Faith is not self-deceived: "Accordingly he [the Knight of Faith] admits the impossibility and at the same time believes the absurd; for were he to suppose that he had faith without recognizing the impossibility, with all the passion of his soul and with his heart, he would be deceiving himself, and his testimony would carry weight nowhere, since he would not even have come as far as infinite resignation" (76). A first stab at this argument might be that we cannot have what Kierkegaard calls "faith" without knowing that it's founded on something that in the finite world is not possible; and if we are deceiving ourselves by telling ourselves that it simply is possible, we're skipping the crucial steps of recognizing impossibility and believing anyway.

My students wanted to know how this kind of faith could be distinguished from ordinary cases of dogmatic false belief. The answer seems to be psychological: if the belief has the role in those individuals' psychology (i.e. foundational) that it has in the two Knights,' and if she is without illusions as to what is possible in the finite world, then she is well-placed for one of the two kinds of Knighthood.

1. How does the Knight of Faith arrive at her positive belief?

The basis for the Knight of Faith's positive belief is given by Kierkegaard, variously, as "the absurd," and "the fact that in God all things are possible." But perhaps "the absurd" (which for Kierkegaard means a paradox) could be the pair of contradictory beliefs itself--allowing for the existence of secular Knights, Knights who have faith, but neither in any tenets of Christianity, or on the basis of them. We're still left with the problem of where the positive belief comes from. I'd like to suggest that it comes from the discovery made in infinite resignation that one can have, if not the princess, then one's love; which is sufficient unto itself. That is, the love on its own is just as good; and one lives as if it were fulfilled, but does not quite take the next step towards believing it will be fulfilled. I'm not sure what makes the transition possible. Kierkegaard emphasizes the readiness with which Knights of Faith would welcome the fulfillment of their wishes, should it come; this seems to me like saying they wouldn't, in those circumstances, be resentful, or anxious, or unable to experience joy. They're ready to hit the ground running.

Could the positive belief of the Knight of Faith be based on an illusion--the illusion that their completed wish is just over the horizon, something they will be able to have on their own, made plausible by the self-sufficiency of their wish in the stage of infinite resignation? If one wishes hard enough, perhaps (thinks the Knight), the wish will become the completed wish, in the finite world but perhaps not through it. The illusion of the ability to affect the world through the use of one's spiritual prowess. That's an illusion I can understand.

But Abraham....who knows?