Piety, M. G.: Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard's Pluralist Epistemology.

Mehl, Peter J.

PIETY, M. G. Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard's Pluralist Epistemology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. xvi + 196pp. Cloth, $49.95--Piety's book is a tightly reasoned and sharply focused study. Her task is to explicate Kierkegaard's epistemological thought, which she admits is not systematically developed nor even a central focus of his writings, but it is, in her judgment, of critical importance to "his views on religious faith and its role in human experience." Piety claims that Kierkegaard is an epistemological pluralist, although she admits that many of the epistemological "views attributed to him here were held more intuitively than as the result of conscious analysis." Nevertheless, she claims that the epistemological views she presents "may be inferred and extracted from various parts of Kierkegaard's corpus and that if the views are sometimes confusing in their complexity, they nevertheless form a largely coherent whole."

Piety organizes her study by the kinds of knowledge she finds in Kierkegaard's writing. The first division is between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge. Objective knowledge is descriptive; it is not essentially related to the existence of the individual knower. Subjective knowledge however is so related and includes ethical and religious knowledge, both of which are prescriptive. Both these forms of knowledge are further subdivided. Objective knowledge, for Kierkegaard, includes knowledge in the strict sense, as in the formal certainty of mathematics, and knowledge in a looser sense, associated with probability as in the natural sciences. Subjective knowledge is divided into what Piety calls "subjective knowledge proper" associated with psychological certitude, and pseudo-knowledge which "refers to a subject's intellectual grasp of propositions that are essentially prescriptive but whose substance is not reflected in the existence of the 'knower.'" The varieties of knowledge types found in Kierkegaard's writing are designed to "show that there is no sense in which knowledge of the truth of Christianity may legitimately be said to be superior to faith in this truth." Yet, Piety mentions slightly further on that "Knowledge, for Kierkegaard, is always based on some presuppositions the truth of which cannot be proved and is thus relative to those presuppositions." This point would seem to challenge Kierkegaard's claims to eternally valid ethical norms, but this is not discussed.

While the majority of this book is a careful examination of these four types of knowledge in Kierkegaard's authorship, the first chapter provides an overall look at Kierkegaard's philosophical anthropology. In this chapter on "the knowing subject," Piety does an admirable job of articulating Kierkegaard's views on consciousness, self-consciousness, and the self. Chapters three through six constitute the heart of the work with considerable detail and depth. Piety rightly points out that Kierkegaard does not reject objective knowing, but respects it in its place. When it tries to encompass subjectivity (ethics and religion), it has gone beyond its proper bounds. Piety also rightly argues that Kierkegaard is a realist, and that knowledge in the objective sense is contact with reality. Yet, he is aware that whenever we grasp reality, we do it as thought-reality, as language stands between our consciousness and reality. This makes reality a possibility for us. However, the one place that reality is not possibility is when ideality is instantiated in our own actuality, our ethical actuality; this is subjective truth. As she puts it, "The truth that is a property of actuality rather than of thought, or language, is the truth belonging to ethics and religion." Empirical truths for Kierkegaard are always simply thought-approximations and probabilities, relative to time and place. "Theories in science and scholarship are always the product of the cooperative efforts of various individuals throughout the history of these disciplines and need ... to be continually reverified within the evolving standards of verification agreed on by practitioners in these disciplines." This strikingly contemporary pragmatist understanding of empirical knowledge would seem to have some relevance for our understandings in the psychological as well as the normative realm. In this area, according to Kierkegaard, we have introspective access or contact with eternally valid ethical norms. How does a person know this about these eternally valid norms? It appears "through attention to his subjective experience as such, rather than through becoming objective." On the subjective side, Kierkegaard thinks that we have immediate relationship to what happens in our own minds, and thereby psychological certainty can be achieved.

The chapter on subjective knowledge takes us to the heart of Kierkegaard's project, and the focus is on what Piety calls "subjective immanent metaphysical knowledge." This sort of knowledge has to do with God, immortality of soul, and other interior matters. In the case of God, it seems that the self knows of God because he has a moral obligation relative to this God, what Piety calls a subjective necessity. One cannot "rid oneself of the impression that one has a duty to God." Knowledge of the constituting factors of the human self is part of immanent metaphysical knowledge; Descartes's cogito is one example of such knowledge. But of primary concern here is Christian ethics, which is a matter of inner motivations and obstacles rather than any deliberation about values and their application. Christian ethics involves considerations of guilt and sin, our relationship to God and Christ, and how the eternal enters into the temporal for the believer. A key point here is that, while there is Christian knowledge, possession of this knowledge is not sufficient to make one an authentic Christian self, as this is a matter of seeking to live as a Christian, to instantiate the will of God in Christ. To do this, the infinite passion of faith is needed, and thereby a surrender of worldly understanding in matters of subjectivity.

Finally, the conclusion of this work will be of considerable interest to those scholars concerned with Kierkegaard's views on faith and knowledge, as Piety enters into a debate between Steven Emmanuel and Louis Pojman regarding the possibility of propositional knowledge that God became human in the person of Christ. Piety's book, however, will be of interest almost exclusively to Kierkegaard scholars, as it does not relate Kierkegaard's thought to contemporary epistemological thought or to any particular philosophical or religious traditions. For me, this was the frustration of the study; I was always looking for a more critical angle, or a conversation with current philosophical voices. Still, for those with a passion for in depth knowledge of Kierkegaard's epistemological views, Piety's book is full of careful analysis.--Peter J. Mehl, University of Central Arkansas.