Soren Kierkegaard

learned and half-learned, who have looked through a microscope .Then
things will no longer be as they were in the past, when a person could dare
to speak of the simplest but highest of all things, addressing himself outspo-
kenly and frankly to everyone, to all people, regardless of whether they are
black or green or have large heads or small .He would first have to see
whether they have brains enough—to believe in God .If Christ had known
about the microscope, He would have first have examined the apostles.”
Here Kierkegaard ruminates critically on the issues that are central to his
understanding of the natural sciences: The gulf between the expert and the
nonexpert, the end of the principle of equality, the decline in plainspoken-
ness, and not least, a situation in which a person’s relation to Christianity
would come to depend on technical qualifications and professional compe-
tence—and here again, Kierkegaard mentions the brain, which can only be
judged by those few who have an understanding of such matters .The natu-
ral sciences were thus beginning to deprive a person of his fate, whether
that fate was simply chosen or merely accidental, and with the clear-sight-
edness of the pessimistic prophet, Kierkegaard saw that there would be a
“new cultural consciousness” that would “make natural science its reli-
gion.” For the same reasons, Kierkegaard placed himself in emphatic oppo-
sition to a banal future in which people would brush things aside by insisting
that everything is the fault of something or someone else, the fault of society
or of the circumstance that their brains are too small: “Let us imagine the
greatest criminal who has ever lived and also imagine that by that time
physiology will have upon its nose an even more splendid pair of spectacles
than ever before, so that it could explain the criminal, explain that the whole
thing was a matter of natural necessity, that his brain had been too small,
et cetera .How dreadful is that immunity from all future prosecution in
comparison to the judgment Christianity passes on him: that he will go to
Hell if he does not repent.”
It might seem strange that Kierkegaard here heaps such scorn on the
ability of a more and more splendidly bespectacled “physiology” to see
what had previously been hidden, because Kierkegaard had himself supplied
Vigilius Haufniensis with a similar pair of spectacles that enabled him to
inspect a number of the psychosomatic conflicts that Kierkegaard had quite
literally felt in his own body.
To some extent, this sharp antithesis between “physiology” and “Chris-
tianity” must be attributed to Kierkegaard’s very clear sense that modern
natural science wanted to make explanation identical with exculpation, di-
agnosis with judgment: “In the end, physiology will expand so much that
it will annex ethics .Indeed, there are already signs of a new attempt to treat
ethics as physics, so that the whole of ethics becomes an illusion, and the