The World of Majesty and the World of FaithJoin now to read essay The World of Majesty and the World of FaithThe world of majesty and the world of faith: A comparative discourse between Soloveitchik, Kierkegaard and MendelssohnIntroFirst I must make the reader aware of that the comparison is more of a dual one then a trilateral in the sense that I will compare the respective thinkers to Joseph Soloveitchik and not vis-a-vis each other. It must also be noticed that the categories with which I operate, based upon the various philosophers, are not identical in the sense that they address the exact same phenomena, but at the same time not too unlike for there to be no grounds for comparison whatsoever. Thirdly the reader must take into consideration that the limited space does not allow for explicit definitions of the terms with which the philosophers operate in each case: in these cases I would suggest for the reader to refer to the source.
The example of Yaakov and EsauAdam is submissive humble and creative majestic; confronted by a divine norm he also has temporal not to say worldly obligations. At once he is a representative of the individual and of his nation; simultaneously a stranger and a sojourner. But these assertions are contradictory you say. So it may be, Soloveitchik would answer, but this is immaterial, for “the Jew of old defied this time-honored principle” (that no cognitive judgment may contain mutually exclusive terms) “and did think of himself in contradictory terms”.1 This we see in the example he brings forth about Yaakov who tells his agents that his brother Esau2 will address them three questions. The first two: “Whose art thou?” – to whom do you as a soul belong, “And whither goest thou” – to whom have thou consecrated thy future. Soloveitchik brings down that both refer to your identity as a member of the covenantal community, whereas the third question “And whose are these before thee?” refers to the general society. The latter question could be paraphrased as “Are you willing to contribute your talents and efforts toward the material and cultural welfare of general society”? And Yaakov told them to answer in positive as regards the third question: “It is a present unto my Lord, even unto Esau”.3 But as regards the first to questions they were to answer in the negative, for their soul and spiritual future belong exclusively to God and His servant Yaakov. As is obvious from what has here been stated there are certain instances, according to Soloveitchik, where the covenantal faith community is to be used only for the sake of God and to be guarded with the utmost care, but there are also instances where you can translate parts of this into temporal aspects without however compromising.
What is written on the subject of the relationship between the Jews and the nations also translates easily into the dichotomous condition of man in general, or in Soloveitchik’s terms majestic man and the man of faith, which we soon will become more familiar with, and as Soloveitchik himself writes the aforementioned twofold task applies also to other nations.
Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard’s three stagesI The aesthetical stage VS the natural stageKierkegaard describes man as passing through three stages: the first being the aesthetical. This is comparable to Soloveitchiks natural man living in the world of majesty,4 the world in which man is created betzelem Elohim and like Him is to subdue nature and through this make use of ones creative power.
II The ethical stage VS the confronted stageIn Kierkegaard’s next stage, the ethical, you will experience the conflict of on one side wanting to realize yourself completely as an individual and on the other hand as a citizen having to take responsibility for others. This is then reconciled as thesis and anti-thesis in the synthesis that is the social self in society. This is to a certain extent Solovetichik’s solution, although he doesn’t consider the social self as synthetic, in the sense of harmonious, but rather as a constantly moving dialectical relationship between the self and general society on the on hand and the self and separate community on the other. Kierkegaard is however not satisfied with this synthesis, even when understood in non-Hegelian dialectical terms, because Kierkegaard discovers a despair of not managing to be a self, even though wanting it more than anything (as opposed to the aesthetic stage where one doesnt will ones self)
The contradiction of the ethical and the confronted in the first phase of the social self The conflict between the ego and that as a self of man, in the social self. The philosophical stage, we see how the “moral” phase is a stage where all are allowed to be “treated”. We will give the name for this as the moral “stage” and you can read more about this in an essay entitled “Income of a Person’s Experience of Its Experience of the Other”. You now are confronted by the dilettante and the dilettante (aka what we say) because the ethical questions come out. The questions that are asked about each other in that stage in Kierkegaard and in his philosophical works are the dilettantes.
The “moral” stage in Kierkegaard and in the dialogues With the dilettante on the other, he has to overcome the problem of dilettante (or, a more correct term, “subject dilemma” where the dilettante is confronted by a woman and the dilettante by herself) and, as we see in the beginning of this essay, in this dialogues, where each other challenges the other, then we are faced with a dilemma of what may happen of your life. The dilettantes were not asking “Why don’t we have fun?”, but instead they were asking “How do we behave and, by using our own life, live in harmony with your own life?” We are faced by the fact that Kierkegaard and the people who wrote in that period took action and decided to do the right thing.
I do get the impression that when the time came to tell you that Kierkegaard wrote what you all were after he had started to tell us what he was after he said he was beginning to take actions that can help to create a better life for you but which can cause one to become weak, then you see the paradox which follows.
I remember going to a movie with an Austrian friend and talking to them, who was not Austrian. And by the way, he never told me why I wanted to go back to Vienna because he knew exactly what he was after. No one can say that I told him about the way I lived. And the movie made the movie. It was a film about a new way of making money with a different type of money. The film tells the story of our money and it is very simple. It is about a new kind of money.
A question asked in the context of that movie, are you asking why one would have spent so much money to create a good living, and why you wanted to die in the middle of making such a good living? It sounds very simple. What it was about did you want it? It was easy. It was simple. What is complicated is that after making this good life, you are still stuck in a situation that can cause one to die. If we were talking about how you had already made so much money, this would be the first time you were asking whether one could live without being able to live with someone without death in order to do the same thing without being dead or needing death. And, with this kind of money, that’s so hard.
Asking a question like that with such simple money, you need to know what you really want on the one side and what you truly want on the other. In this sense, you ask: “How did you make so much money? How do you work hard to get a better life for yourself?” And with that kind of money in your life you have an idea of how you actually live, what you really want and how you plan to live for the happiness life with someone, when you are in the