Forord

Everything can be had at such a bargain price that it becomes a question whether in the end there is anyone who will make a bid.

Every speculative score-keeper who conscientiously tallies the momentous march of recent philosophy, every junior lecturer, tutor, and student, every smallholder and lodger in philosophy, does not stop at doubting everything, but goes further.

Perhaps it would be inopportune and untimely to ask them where they actually end up; but it is surely polite and modest to take it as settled that they have doubted everything, since otherwise it would be a strange way of talking to say that they went further.

This preliminary movement they have all made, then, and presumably so easily that they do not find it necessary to let fall a single word about how; for not even the one who, anxious and troubled, sought a little instruction found any such thing — a guiding hint, a little dietary prescription about how one is to conduct oneself under this enormous task.

"But surely Descartes did it?"

Descartes, a venerable, humble, honest thinker whose writings surely no one can read without the deepest emotion, did what he said and said what he did.

Alas!

Alas!

Alas!

that is a great rarity in our age!

Descartes did not — as he himself often enough repeats — doubt in relation to faith.

("Remembering, however, as has already been said, that this natural light is to be trusted only so long as nothing contrary is revealed by God himself ..... Besides everything else, moreover, it must be fixed in our memory as a supreme rule that the things which have been revealed to us by God are to be believed as the most certain of all; and although perhaps the light of reason, however clear and evident, might seem to suggest something else, faith is nevertheless to be given to divine authority alone rather than to our own judgment. Cf. Principles of Philosophy, Part One, §§ 28 and 76).

He did not cry fire and make it everyone's duty to doubt, for Descartes was a quiet, solitary thinker, not a bellowing night-watchman; he modestly confessed that his method had significance only for himself and had its ground partly in his own earlier muddled learning.

("Let no one therefore suppose that I intend here to hand down some method that everyone ought to follow in order to govern reason rightly; for I have resolved to set out only the one that I myself have followed... But as soon as I had completed that course of studies (namely of youth), upon whose finishing it is customary to be admitted into the ranks of the learned, I began to think quite otherwise. For I found myself so entangled in so many doubts and errors that I judged all my efforts at learning had profited me nothing other than that I had discovered my ignorance more and more. Cf. Discourse on Method, pp. 2 and 3).

— What those old Greeks, who after all understood a little something of philosophy too, took to be a task for a whole life, because the skill of doubting is not acquired in days and weeks — what the old, seasoned warrior attained, who had kept doubt's equilibrium through all entanglements, undauntedly denied the certainty of the senses and the certainty of thought, incorruptibly defied the anxiety of self-love and the insinuations of fellow-feeling — with that, in our age, everyone begins.

In our age no one stops at faith, but goes further.

A question about where they end up would perhaps be a piece of foolhardiness; on the contrary, it is surely a sign of urbanity and good breeding that I assume everyone has faith — since otherwise it becomes a strange way of talking: to go further.

In those old days it was otherwise; then faith was a task for a whole life, because it was assumed that the skill of believing is acquired neither in days nor in weeks.

When the tested old man then drew near to his end, had fought the good fight and kept the faith, then his heart was young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed mastered, but which no human being ever quite outgrows — except insofar as he might manage, as early as possible, to go further.

Where, then, those venerable figures arrived — there, in our age, everyone begins, in order to go further.

The present author is by no means a philosopher; he has not understood the System — whether it exists, whether it is finished — he already has quite enough for his weak head in the thought of what an enormous head everyone in our age must have, since everyone has such an enormous thought.

Even if one were able to translate the whole content of faith into the form of the concept, it does not follow from this that one has grasped faith — grasped how one entered into it, or how it entered into one.

The present author is by no means a philosopher; he is, poetically and elegantly speaking, a supernumerary scribe who neither writes the System nor promises about the System, who neither pledges himself upon the System nor to the System.

He writes because it is a luxury for him — one that grows in agreeableness and evidence the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.

He easily foresees his fate in an age that has struck a line through passion in order to serve science — an age in which an author who wants readers must take care to write in such a way that it can comfortably be leafed through during the afternoon nap, and take care to model his outward bearing on that polite gardener's lad in the classifieds, who, hat in hand and with good references from the place where he last served, recommends himself to a most honored public.

He foresees his fate, to be wholly ignored; he senses the dreadful thing, that zealous criticism will several times make him stand in the corner like a schoolboy; he dreads the still more dreadful thing, that some enterprising registrar or other — a paragraph-swallower (who, in order to rescue science, is always willing to do to other people's writings what Trop, 'to save taste,' magnanimously did to 'The Destruction of the Human Race') — will carve him up into sections, and do it with the same inflexibility as the man who, in order to serve the science of punctuation, divided up his speech by counting the words, so that fifty words went to a full stop and thirty-five to a semicolon.

— I fall down in deepest submission before every systematic bag-peerer: "This is not the System; it has not the slightest thing to do with the System.

I call down all good upon the System and upon the Danish shareholders in this omnibus; for a tower it will hardly become.

I wish them all, one and all and each in particular, luck and blessing."

Most respectfully, Johannes de silentio.