Philosophers explain the meaning of the Kierkegaard quote that comforts Joe Biden
In an emotional interview with TV host Stephen Colbert, US vice president Joe Biden mentioned that he’d found solace in the writing of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He said that his wife, Jill Biden, had taped a Kierkegaard quote to the mirror, which read “Faith sees best in the dark.”The line comes from the philosopher’s Gospel of Sufferings and is an apt choice of quote for Biden, whose son Beau died in May of cancer.
It’s beautiful writing but far from straightforward. “Kierkegaard has this way of being quite aphoristic and coming up with a wonderful phrase that you could put on the mirror, and yet it’s not clear what he means because he’s always a dialectical thinker,” Joel Rasmussen, professor of theology at Oxford University.
In times of great suffering, there can be no rational source of hope or comfort. Yet Kierkegaard writes that faith cannot be fully understood in times of happiness. One can only experience true faith when life is bleak.
“One sees a kind of goodness coming out of this darkness but, as one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms often says, it’s by virtue of a leap. It’s a leap in rationality. One can’t argue one’s way, in a straightforward fashion, to a position of faith,” says Rasmussen.
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