Page - 33 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

32 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 One should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feel- ing: a paltry mediocrity. But the highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own downfall; and so it is also the supreme passion of the Reason to seek a collision, though this collision must in one way or another prove its undoing. The supreme par- adox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.22 Hall develops this idea by identifying a dialectic of paradox in Kierkegaard’s thought, a dialectic he summarizes as follows: For the first time, a new unity between opposites is possible; but in this new unity, the oppositions are accentuated, not resolved. … This dialectic of paradox in which something may be said to be necessarily present in some phenomenon, but present as absent, occurs over and over in Kierkegaard’s thinking.23 Hall gives the example of the dialectical relations in Kierkegaard’s writings between resignation (or despair) and faith.24 Furthermore, Kierkegaard ques- tioned another paradoxical pattern in the matrimonial process. In his Stages in Life’s Way, he stresses a fundamental difficulty in marriage: love or nascent love (or, one might say, desire) is immediate but marriage is a decision. He does not consider love alone, for it implies a blind and thoughtless adoration Kierkegaard fears and warns against.25 Emotion is reaffirmed and reevaluated by a rational process, suggesting the construction of reciprocity by experience and an affir- mation of reason – even if the process seems to hardly accommodate the imme- diacy of love. The experience of reciprocity allows the individuals involved to be fully aware of the contradictions of the process on which they have embarked, but it also allows them to be conscious that those contradictions are part of the potential success of the experience and the achievement of conversation between lovers – in that sense, the question of faith comes into the equation. For this reason, Love must be welcomed into marriage or into the resolution; willing to marry means that the most immediate of all things must be, at the same time, the freest of resolu- tions. … Marriage is a resolution that does not ensue directly from the immediacy of love.26 22 Kierkegaard 1962, 46. 23 Hall 1994, 146–147. 24 “For Kierkegaard’s, faith excludes and at the same time includes both resignation and despair; faith would not be faith apart from both elements, yet faith constantly annuls both”, Hall 1994, 147. 25 He asserts that “there is a form of modesty against which the most intense adorations is an offense, a form of infidelity against the loved one; even if this adoration, in the mind of the lover, connects him indissolubly to her, it is a form of infidelity because in this admiration there is a criticism in play”, Kierkegaard 1988, 132, my translation. 26 Kierkegaard 1978, 95–96, my translation.