One -≫ Two

We assume many things in our lives, and base our feelings, actions, and thoughts on a myriad of brands of reasoning. For we all desire understanding of everything we encounter, from the most base of truths to the most eternally confounding of paradoxes. And there is, as Soren Kierkegaard lays out, "the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought in itself cannot think" (37). Yet this cannot be accomplished, for to attempt to bring comprehension and understanding to that ultimate paradox through historical fact is to not understand the nature by which it exists. In this way, we see that the details of history have no relevance to the determination of faith, and furthermore, that because of this, no need exists for anyone to have a 'proving' experience of the "leap" (43) between understanding and paradox.

Kierkegaard divides understanding and paradox along the lines of ones ability to have a firm grasp on the logical derivation between the two. As Kierkegaard asserts, "when the understanding and the paradox...encounter each other" (59), the passion that the paradox provides is a condition of that interaction, a responsive result. This passion, termed faith, is what grants the bearer the ability to make the leap to what he will understand as truth (in himself).

Kierkegaard is speaking primarily of the necessity of faith as an inherently untrustworthy subject, as far as the realm of scientific proof is concerned. He says that "[i]f the faith of which we speak were a simple historical fact, the historiographer's scrupulous accuracy would be of great importance. This is not the case here" (103). For if faith were dependent on historical evidence, on a logical deduction that made its reasoning as clear, plain and simple as the simplest scientific proof, then the term we have derived would itself be a self-contradicting definition. For to demonstrate ones faith is to exclude faiths existence, "because it is a leap" (43). "But that historical fact has a unique quality in that it is not a direct historical fact but a fact based upon a self-contradiction" (87).

Take for instance, a situation during which one could lay down a direct, simply grasped bridge between understanding and paradox, on the level with how Newton's Third Law is both scientifically proven and makes immediate sense to even the simplest mind. It would become foolish to question this bridging and worldwide intellectual acceptance would be required to follow. Expound upon this to an even more complicated proof, but a proof nonetheless, and the same would result. The impossibility of this Kierkegaard puts this in his own words, saying "in regard to the birth of god" (59) (or the inception of the proof), "if we insist upon absolutely exact historical knowledge, only one human being would be completely informed, namely, the woman by whom he let himself be born" (59). For us to meet the paradox in time and history as a historical fact would be an impossibility because of the inherent properties of that needed knowledge in establishing itself as proof.

Another supporting argument of why