The Paradox of World Knowledge
Kierkegaard’s dilemma facing Christians, discussed in Fear and Trembling (1843), turns on the tension between theological and cosmological rules of the game of individual salvation arising from an immortal and personal God and God-Man sent to Earth, always already present, on the right, and the sensual, material, self-indulgent nature of humanity in the wild, leaves of grass, on the unright. Which (W)hom wilt thou wanteth to know and chooseth to believe? The God promising eternal salvation, or the women and men of your cohort offering human comfort and happiness?
As he encountered the episteme into which he was born, he perceived all too much of a human world in ascendancy. State-sponsored Christian institutions had watered down the orthodoxy, cheapened it, tacitly approving a robust life of the flesh so long as the churches were filled on Sunday.
In the preface to The Sickness Unto Death (1843) Kierkegaard’s heroic sentiment is made plain: “…[I]t is not Christian heroism to be humbugged by the pure idea of humanity or to play the game of marveling at world-history” (pp. 5-6). History sings a Siren song luring the weak away from the Word to oblivion. He did not have great regard for human scientists, either. In Works of Love (1847) he wrote that “Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject” (p. 283).
Kierkegaard’s Europe was in a period of cognitive unrest, though Kierkegaard, alive and well in human garb in the state of Denmark where something was was rotten, would not have known the word ‘cognitive’ as we know it. The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw the movement of the Western goal posts from God’s playing field to the field of Science, but cognitive science would have to wait for the 20th century.
Factor in the Industrial Revolution and you have a crisis of faith for the Church and an identity crisis for the Individual. Henry Ford had another century to wait, but Copenhagen nonetheless saw the emergence of machines that transformed agriculture as well as manufactories. Everyone worked for a living, men, women, children, living in emerging centers where there simply wasn’t enough time nor energy to devote to God. The Western world was beginning its descent into Christian darkness.
With little regard for organized religion, Kierkegaard understood that Christianity in industrialized societies strengthened by empirical scientists would never again have the wattage to deceive masses of people into believing that attending service on Sunday would put them on their path to Heaven. He is quoted as having written the following words in his journal in 1835:
"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."
Johannes Silencio, the pseudonym who speaks throughout Fear and Trembling, focuses on the Biblical story of Abraham, an old man completely devoted to God, and Isaac, Abraham’s son. After a lifetime of waiting for a child, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are blessed by God and become proud parents of a baby boy. They grow together happily for some years when suddenly Abraham is given a command by a divine voice, directing him to offer his son as a sacrifice to God.
With a heavy secret in his heart and in profound silence, Abraham walked with Isaac toward Mount Moriah. The journey was difficult physically and spiritually, but Abraham’s resolve gave him strength to put one foot in front of the other. He had neither unburdened himself nor discussed his mission with anyone, including his wife. At the peak he built the sacrificial altar, and there stood his beautiful son, exquisite in his humanity, totally unaware of the sharp knife his father carried.
Of course, as Abraham bound his child, arranged him on the altar, and prepared to draw blood, to kill the child who was the light of his life, another missive from God arrived and directed him to call it all off. An angel announced God’s intervention, Abraham sacrificed a nearby ram, and Christianity now had a Constitutional test of faith. Ye who claim to believe must be prepared to do God’s bidding even if it goes against humanity and its laws. Living in such a state day in and day out is bound to produce fear and trembling.
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I make my way through Kierkegaard to lay the groundwork for making an argument that SoR ©️ is not science at all, but religion. Kierkegaard noted in his journal the watermark of a religion when he raised the doing of sacred acts above the gaining of knowledge of human history, the sanctimony of self-sacrifice regardless of personal desires or feelings. Listening to way too many YouTubes uploaded by the Reading League or by state chapters, I can testify to the profound importance of just doing it the right way, keeping the faith, proselytizing converts, teaching reading according to the dictates of sacred texts handed down from the true Scientists, a shape-shifting word that now means the Anointed Ones, regardless of who you are, what you think, or what your concerns are.
Note well: This discussion has nothing to do with the historical field of reading research and the scholars who work within it. This discussion has to do with the High Priestess Emily Hanford, the true believers who reference the “last thirty years of research,” who disenfranchise any studies carried out before the dawn of the Simple View in 1980. The Church—oops, League—has one sanctioned journal: The Reading League Journal. It is, make no mistake, the journal.
And those who resist? Those who succumb to the Three-Headed Monster who responds to three names—Visual, Semantic, and Syntactic, the Brothers Grimm—those teachers are ignorant of the knowledge that counts when the Certifier of Days asks for proof of devotion, they are untrained in the sacred LTRS, their teacher prep professors were wily demons, the commercial publishers are charlatans who will sell whatever teachers want. The worst reprobate is the online sorceress “Teachers Pay Teachers” where pedagogical porn is peddled, the blind leading the blind.
I’ve got roughly four hours invested in watching videos of keynotes at the March, 2022, League and have a plan to do some comparative discourse analysis looking at religious gatherings and SoR ©️ conferences, complete with sermons. I can’t take too much of it at one time. What’s most interesting is this: Natalie Wexler gave the first keynote. You could hear a pin drop. It was eerie. Stay tuned.
