Twp Parables

These two parables from Soren Kierkegaard may be of interest to those in heated discussions about "Truth-as Principle":

1. THE BUTTON

If a man had a little button sewn on the inner pocket of his coat 'on principle' his otherwise unimportant and quite serviceable action would become charged with importance - it is not improbable that it would result in the formation of a society ... 'on principle' a man may interest himself in the founding of a brothel (there are plenty of social studies on the subject written by health authorities), and the same man can 'on principle' assist in the publication of a new Hymn Book because it is supposed to be the great need of the times. But is would be as unjustifiable to conclude from the first fact that he was debauched as it would, perhaps, be to conclude from the second that he read or sang hymns. (From THE PRESENT AGE.)

2 THE NEW SHOES (When the task is becoming oneself, to what shall we compare the individual who does not even recognize that he has, or is, a self?)

It is related of a peasant who came [barefooted] to the capital, and he had made so much money that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk - it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and stockings didn't recognize them, he said to the driver, "Drive on, they are not my legs." (From 'Anti-Climacus' in THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH)

[These and other Kierkegaardian parables are found in Thomas Oden's (ed.) PARABLES OF Kierkegaard, Princeton Univ. Press, 1978]

Principles are good and necessary, but let’s agree to not mistake them for anything more than navigational charts that prepare us for acts that discover goodness nor for our own flesh-and-blood identities that shine so much brighter than the our astronomical maps.