Kierkegaard absolute difference and absolute equality?

Question

I'm trying to understand Kierkegaards thoughts on the paradoxical unity of absolute difference and absolute equality

Answer 1

Heh. In theory, if you could understand the paradox it would completely negate Kierkegaard's point. But I suppose we can understand what he's saying about it. Or try. There are quotes from Kierkegaard where he suggests that he specifically made some of his points difficult...

One of the things he seems to be reacting to in some of his writings is the assertion by some of his contemporaries that "all theology is anthropology". So he draws a line to distinguish human thinking from inhuman thinking. And the distinctive feature of inhuman thinking is that humans can't do it (perhaps that goes without saying).

What humans CAN do is to think of things that they know, and compare concepts that they don't know to those things that they do. Thus humans can easily imagine someone with the strength of a hundred men, or a man with a bird's head instead of a human head. These are RELATIVE differences. Our understanding of them flows from other things we understand.

Kierkegaard, however, thought there was a whole class of knowledge that was beyond this. These concepts were not IMPOSSIBLE (like a man that's not a man) but just completely beyond human thinking and comparison (like a man who is a god). No amount of comparison can furnish a human mind with an actual picture of the infinite, or of perfection, and so on. The difference between these kinds of knowledge and the world we are familiar with are not relative, they are ABSOLUTE.

And perhaps that's the best way to understand the difference between the two. If you can compare it to anything accurately, it's a relative difference. If you cannot, then it's an absolute one.

The same extends to equality. When humans talk about equality, they are usually referring to some mundane approximation of equality: equal voting rights, equal chances, equal time. Again, these are relative things. Absolute equality is a kind of equality the likes of which we have never seen... a sort of INFINITE equality.

In religion, this characteristic is often referred to as 'immanence' - the idea that the Divine can be found wherever one looks. Omnipresence on every level.

Kierkegaard seems to think that humans trying to resolve the paradox presented in absolute difference usually do so with an understanding of absolute equality. In other words, one cannot understand directly understand the Divine, but one can directly understand the world; if the world IS the Divine, then thereby can one indirectly understand the Divine.

Which is still kind of confusing... but that's about the best I can do to untangle things. Hope that helps!