Rasmus Nielsen

During his lifetime, Rasmus Nielsen (1809-1884) was the most famous philosopher in Denmark and Norway. Unfortunately for Nielsen’s philosophical legacy, he was an overtly Theistic philosopher at precisely the moment that Denmark and Norway were growing out of the conservative Christian mould. In short, Nielsen was the last philosopher in Scandinavia who put God in the center of his philosophical system. The next generation wanted a philosophy without God, or at least without God playing such a central role, and so they essentially stopped interacting with Nielsen’s philosophy.¹

But Nielsen did influence many people — despite an apparent lack of self-awareness of the existence of this influence. At least that is our hypothesis. Nielsen influenced Harald Høffding in a direct way; and there is good reason to think that Nielsen influenced Christian Bohr (who was a student in his Filosofikum course). In fact, Nielsen was in many ways responsible for the intellectual climate in Denmark in the second half of the 1800s, and as such, Nielsen is a key figure for understanding Niels Bohr’s relationship to the preceding philosophical tradition. (Nielsen was also more of a transitional figure to secularization than was recognized by those who took him to be its enemy.)

It is well-established that Bohr read some Kierkegaard. Nonetheless, we agree with other scholars that Bohr wouldn’t have nodded his head and said, “yes, I agree with Kierkegaard.” The problem is that Kierkegaard’s worldview was too different from Bohr’s — too focused on the God-human relationship, sin, redemption, etc. And Kierkegaard doesn’t seem to say anything of relevant to the practice of science. So, it would seem misguided to look for a direct influence of Kierkegaard on Bohr.

That leaves open the question of whether there might have been an indirect influence of Kierkegaard on Bohr. Could Kierkegaard have influenced a mindset that Bohr himself inherited? Recall that Bohr was a student at the University of Copenhagen fifty years after Kierkegaard died. What were the philosophical trends in Copenhagen when Bohr was a student? It certainly wasn’t trendy to be a Hegelian, as it was at Cambridge, as Hegel’s philosophy had never really found a receptive audience in Denmark. There might have been some hints of neo-Kantianism, which was popular at that time in neighboring Germany. But there was no neo-Kantian professor at the University of Copenhagen.

In short, none of the “major” philosophical traditions (i.e. traditions that one reads about at American universities) was ascendant in Denmark when Niels Bohr was a student. Not British empiricism, nor continental rationalism, nor their Kantian synthesis, nor the Hegelian resolution of Kantian subjectivity. As of 1905, philosophy in Denmark was Harald Høffding, and Høffding was eclectic.

Despite his eclecticism, there is no doubt that Høffding was profoundly influenced by his reading of Kierkegaard.

Nielsen and Kierkegaard

In the 1830s, Hegelianism was in the air at the University of Copenhagen. The newly appointed professor of theology, Hans Lassen Martensen, was a right-wing Hegelian. It’s not surprising then, that a young student like Rasmus Nielsen would follow suit, and his earliest work was explicitly Hegelian.

Nielsen was a student at the same time as Søren Kierkegaard. We know from Kierkegaard’s journal entries that they were acquaintances. But Kierkegaard dawdled, and then used his rather large inheritance to support his writing career. In contrast, Nielsen was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.

One big mystery about Rasmus Nielsen is why his interaction with Kierkegaard’s philosophy led him to undertake a study of the natural sciences and their methods. One might have expected the complete opposite, i.e. that becoming convinced of Kierkegaard’s point of view would push one further away from “science”. To the contrary, Nielsen decided that philosophers needed to study ‘naturvidenskaberne’, i.e.
the natural sciences.

(Nielsen’s later works include detailed discussion of recent advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Nielsen introduced Darwin’s theory of evolution to Denmark, and he argued that it is perfectly compatible with traditional Christian doctrines.) Nielsen was, in an important sense, the first philosopher of science in European history.

Introducing Darwin

Mechanism versus teleology

In Aristotelian natural philosophy, it’s perfectly reasonable to give teleological explanations, i.e. in terms of final causes. The invocation of final causes was challenged by Galileo, Descartes, and other early modern scientists. They proposed, instead, to explain in terms of efficient causes, and more specifically, in terms of mechanisms.

There were, of course, several philosophers who weren’t convinced that mechanical explanation suffices. For example, Leibniz had his monads with entelechies, and Berkeley thought that change always traced back to an agent’s action.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argued that thinking in terms of final causes does play a positive role in scientific reasoning. As a result, the debate between mechanism and teleology was back on the table in the 19th century.

No god’s eye view for humans

The faith-reason controversy

Many people associate Kierkegaard’s name with the phrase “leap of faith”, and they naturally assume that Kierkegaard advocated blind faith, both in God and in Christian doctrine. Even in university classrooms, Kierkegaard is frequently used as an example of a “fideist”, i.e. a person who holds that religious truth is beyond the reach of human reason.

The true story about Kierkegaard is, of course, much more complicated. To a zeroeth approximation, Kierkegaard was a critic of “Reason”. But Kierkegaard was in a context, and in that context, “Reason” was G.F.W. Hegel’s “Wissen” and “Wissenschaft”. If you know anything about Hegel, you know that his notion of “Wissen” is a far cry from the pedestrian notion of believing things on the basis of sufficient evidence. The point is that we need to be cautious about putting Kierkegaard in a box that simply doesn’t make sense for his context.

As mentioned before, Nielsen — unlike Kierkegaard — was inspired by the natural sciences. He believed that science (Videnskab) is an essential part of the task of human life, and that it delivers great goods to human kind.

Nielsen had been working up to it for many years, and in his book Grundideernes Logik (1864), he states it directly:

Faith and reason are different kinds of things.²

As we can see from his lecture notes, Nielsen had long been preaching this lesson to his students. However, the publication of the overt statement was the occasion for a backlash, and most notably by Georg Brandes who wrote the pamphlet Dualisme i vores nyeste Philosophie (1866). (Brandes, born in 1842, had just completed his degree at the University of Copenhagen.) In this pamphlet, Brandes attacks Nielsen’s conception of the relation between faith and reason, arguing that it is as psychological impossibility to have a faith that is uninformed by considerations of a rational nature.

Open questions

1. It is not clear how much medieval philosophy Rasmus Nielsen knew. Nonetheless, there are incredibly strong parallels between Rasmus Nielsen’s views on faith and reason and the medieval doctrine of two truths (Averroes, Boetius of Dacia, Siger of Brabant). The doctrine of two truths says essentially that a proposition might be true from the point of view of science but false from the point of view of faith.

2. It would be too much of a stretch to think that Rasmus Nielsen’s views on faith and reason had any direct influence on Niels Bohr — certainly not on the question of faith and reason, and not even on Bohr’s idea of “complementary” viewpoints. (Bohr is very tolerant about religion, and sees value in it, but he definitely rejects its claims upon him.) Nonetheless, it is perhaps culturally telling that both of these Danes thought of reality as “fragmented”, or more accurately, as requiring fragmented points of view.

3. There is much work still to be done in figuring out what Rasmus Nielsen’s views and arguments were — and teasing out the good ideas, if there are any. (It’s another task, of course, to try to tease out the ways in which Nielsen influenced subsequent Danish thinkers, and perhaps indirectly, other thinkers outside of Denmark.) Besides his many published works (all in Danish), Nielsen left handwritten notes that have been preserved by the Royal Library of Denmark. The library also maintains notes written by his students, e.g. Harald Høffding.

References

(Asmussen 1911) (Rosenberg 1903) (Koch 2016) (Høffding 1909)