But to return to the castaway and the message in the bottle. The castaway has, we have seen, classified the messages differently from the scientist and logician. Their classifications would divide the sentences accordingly as they were analytic or synthetic, necessary or contingent, repeatable or historic, etc. But the castaway’s classification divides them accordingly as some express a knowledge which can be arrived at anywhere and at any time, given the talent, time, and inclination of the student — and as others tell pieces of news which cannot be so arrived at by any effort of observation or reflection however strenuous and yet which are of immense importance to the hearer. Has the castaway’s classification exhausted the significant communications which the bottles contain? If this is the case, then we seem to be saying that the news which the islander finds significant is nothing more than signs of various need-satisfactions which the organism must take account of to flourish. These needs and their satisfactions are readily acknowledged by the objective-minded man. Indeed, the main concern of the biological, medical, and psychological sciences is the discovery of these various needs and the satisfying of them. If a man is thirsty, then he had better pay attention to news of water. If a culture is to survive, it had better heed the news of the approach of the British or a war party from a neighboring island. Also, if a man is to live a rich, full, “rewarding” life, he should have his quota of myths and archetypes.
Are we saying in short that the predicament which the islander finds himself in and the means he takes to get out of it are those very needs and drives and those very satisfactions and goals which the objective-minded man recognizes and seeks to provide for every island everywhere? It is not quite so simple. For we have forgotten who it is we are talking about. As we noted earlier, the significance of news depends not only on the news but on the hearer, who he is and what his predicament is.
Our subject is not only an organism and a culture member; he is also a castaway. That is to say, he is not in the world as a swallow is in the world, as an organism which is what it is, never more or less. Our islander may choose his mode of being. Thus, he may choose to exist as a scientist, outside and over against the world as its knower, or he may choose to exist as a culture member, that is, an organism whose biological and psychological needs are more or less satisfied by his culture. But however he chooses to exist, he is in the last analysis a castaway, a stranger who is in the world but who is not at home in the world.
A castaway, everyone would agree, would do well to pay attention to knowledge and news, knowledge of the nature of the world and news of events that are relevant to his life on the island. Such news, the news relevant to his survival as an organism, his life as a father and husband, as a member of a culture, as an economic man, and so on — we can well call island news. Such news is relevant to the everyday life of any islander on any island at any time.
Yet even so all is not well with him. Something is wrong. For with all the knowledge he achieves, all his art and philosophy, all the island news he pays attention to, something is missing. What is it? He does not know. He might say that he was homesick except that the island is his home and he has spent his life making himself at home there. He knows only that his sickness cannot be cured by island knowledge or by island news.
But how does he know he is sick, let alone homesick? He may not know. He may live and die as an islander at home on his island. But if he does know, he knows for the simple reason that in his heart of hearts he can never forget who he is: that he is a stranger, a castaway, who despite a lifetime of striving to be at home on the island is as homeless now as he was the first day he found himself cast up on the beach.
But then do you mean that his homesickness is one final need to be satisfied, that the island news has taken care of 95 per cent of his needs and that there remains one last little need to be taken care of — these occasional twinges of nostalgia? Or, as the church advertisements would say, one must have a “church home” besides one’s regular home? No, it is much worse than that. I mean that in his heart of hearts there is not a moment of his life when the castaway does not know that life on the island, being “at home” on the island, is something of a charade. At that very moment when he should feel most at home on the island, when needs are satisfied, knowledge arrived at, family raised, business attended to, at that very moment when by every criterion of island at-homeness he should feel most at home, he feels most homeless. Not one moment of his life passes but that he is aware, however faintly, of his own predicament: that he is a castaway.
Nor would it avail to say to him simply that he is homesick and that all he needs is to know who he is and where he came from. He would only shake his head and turn away. For he knows nothing of any native land except the island and such talk anyhow reminds him of Sunday school. But if we say to him only that something is very wrong and that after fifty years on the island he is still a stranger and a castaway, he must listen, for he knows this better than anyone else.
Then what should he do? It is not for me to say here that he do this or that or should believe such and such. But one thing is certain. He should be what he is and not pretend to be somebody else. He should be a castaway and not pretend to be at home on the island. To be a castaway is to be in a grave predicament and this is not a happy state of affairs. But it is very much happier than being a castaway and pretending one is not. This is despair. The worst of all despairs is to imagine one is at home when one is really homeless.
But what is it to be a castaway? To be a castaway is to search for news from across the seas. Does this mean that one throws over science, throws over art, pays no attention to island news, forgets to eat and sleep and love — does nothing in fact but comb the beach in search of the bottle with the news from across the seas? No, but it means that one searches nevertheless and that one lives in hope that such a message will come, and that one knows that the message will not be a piece of knowledge or a piece of island news but news from across the seas.
It is news, however, this news from across the seas, and it is as a piece of news that it must be evaluated. Faith is the organ of the historical, said Kierkegaard. Faith of a sort is the organ for dealing with island news, and faith of a sort is the organ for dealing with news from across the seas.
But what does it mean to say that faith is the organ of the historical? For Kierkegaard it means two things. For an ordinary historical truth — what we here call “island news”—faith is the organ of the historical because the organ of the historical must have a structure analogous to the historical. The nature of the historical is becoming. The nature of belief is a “negated uncertainty which corresponds to the uncertainty of becoming.” By historical Kierkegaard means the existing thing or event, not only that which existed in the past, but that which exists here and now before our very eyes. One sees that star rightly enough, but one must also confirm by another act that the star has come into existence. Faith is the organ which confirms that an existing thing has come into existence.* The Christian faith, however — the news from across the seas — is an embrace of the Absolute Paradox as such, a setting aside of reason, a credo quia absurdum est. It is well known that Kierkegaard, unlike Saint Thomas, denies a cognitive content to faith — faith is not a form of knowledge. His extreme position is at least in part attributable to his anxiety to rescue Christianity from the embrace of the Hegelians.
Yet we must ask whether Kierkegaard’s antinomy of faith versus reason is any more appropriate to the situation of the castaway than the logician’s classification of synthetic and analytic. For the castaway, or anyone who finds himself in a predicament in the world, there are two kinds of knowledge, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and news bearing on his own predicament. The classification of the castaway would correspond roughly to the two knowledges of Saint Thomas: (1) scientific knowledge, in which assent is achieved by reason, (2) knowledge of faith, in which scientific knowledge and assent are undertaken simultaneously. The fact is that Kierkegaard, despite his passionate dialectic, laid himself open to his enemies. For his categories of faith, inwardness, subjectivity, and Absolute Paradox seem to the objective-minded man to confirm the worst of what he had thought all along of the Christian news.