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Written Reality: Essays: Learning to Fall Without Hitting the Ground

Learning to Fall Without Hitting the Ground

by Andrea M. Newton

With his offbeat English humor, Douglas Adams is one of the most popular modern novelists -- which makes it even more surprising that Adams would employ some of the major philosophical ideas of the existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. However, in his description of a Somebody Else's Problem Drive and the art of flying in Life, the Universe, and Everything, Adams uses the main principles behind Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

Flying, according to Adams, is simply the knack of “learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss” (58). As one would expect, this is easier said than done. As Adams informs the reader:

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it (59).

Just as Kierkegaard’s knight of faith cannot make the leap of faith by thinking about making the leap of faith, neither can Adams’ student flyer succeed in learning to fly by saying, “Okay, I’m going to throw myself at the ground and then forget about hitting it.” As soon as the flyer says that, he thinks about hitting the ground and, not surprisingly, plummets to earth like a large, heavy stone.

Instead, the flyer’s attention must be distracted by something completely out of his control. Arthur Dent, the hapless main character of Adams’ novel, presents a perfect example of this. When running from the exploding lair of a being named Agrajag who was trying to murder him, Arthur tripped. However, in the split second before he hit the ground, Arthur was amazed to see lying in front of him a “small navy blue tote bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his personal time scale” (Adams 110). Consequently, Arthur forgot all about hitting the ground, and, therefore, did not.

The same principle lies behind Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. Although the individual who tries to make the leap of faith by thinking about it may not find himself staring helplessly at a rapidly approaching chunk of rock, he is instantly stuck in the universal, unable to make the leap. Kierkegaard, like Adams, warns the reader against trying to think himself into a leap of faith:

If someone deludes himself into thinking he may be moved to have faith by pondering the outcome of [Abraham’s] story, he cheats himself and cheats God out of the first movement of faith – he wants to suck worldly wisdom out of the paradox (37).

The first part of Kierkegaard’s warning seems clear enough – one cannot make the leap of faith simply by thinking about it. In this particular case, Kierkegaard cautions that one cannot make the leap of faith by thinking about the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Though some would argue that Abraham does not, in fact, sacrifice Isaac, to Abraham, he does. In Abraham’s mind, he has given up Isaac since he knows he must sacrifice his son, even though he believes he will get Isaac back by way of the absurd. Abraham’s mental sacrifice is sacrifice enough. Without that, Abraham’s torment would not have been real, he would not truly have thought he would lose Isaac, and therefore could not have made the leap of faith.

The second part of the quote from Kierkegaard creates some confusion. First, the philosopher warns that the leap of faith cannot be made by thinking about it. But, immediately after that, Kierkegaard tells the reader that the leap of faith is impossible without reason, without “worldly wisdom.” This claim seems contradictory to everything Kierkegaard has said before and everything he proposes later, especially “Problema II,” in which Kierkegaard states:

As soon as this single individual wants to express his absolute duty in the universal, becomes conscious of it in the universal, he recognizes that he is involved in a spiritual trial, and then, if he really does resist it, he will not fulfill the so-called duty, and if he does not resist it, then he sins, even though his act realiter [as a matter of fact] turns out to be his absolute duty (70).

This passage, which states that becoming conscious of one’s absolute duty prevents the individual from making the leap of faith, appears to be in direct conflict with the previous passage which claimed that without reason the leap of faith was impossible. The apparent conflict stems from the way the reader perceives the word “reason.” Most readers automatically expect reason to mean understanding or comprehending. However, if one understands his absolute duty, it brings that duty into the person’s internal world and he cannot make the leap of faith. Instead, Kierkegaard uses reason to mean contemplation. By contemplating the “shudder of an idea” on the fringe between the internal and external worlds, the knight can make the leap of faith which takes him momentarily into the external, then back to the internal. Cornelio Fabro attempts to explain this difference in his essay, “Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard’s Dialectic.”

Meanwhile, the work of reason is not excluded from the object of faith as such, although it operates certainly not in order to explain it but in order to prepare and invite man in some way to accept it. Moreover, reason is able to establish that the object of faith transcends reason and cannot depend on it (Johnson 177).

Reason which seeks to understand the external only succeeds in bringing the external into the knight’s internal world. Since that shudder of an idea is no longer in the external world, the knight cannot use it to make the leap of faith. Even if he does leap to that idea, he does not enter the external world since his reason has brought this external idea into the internal world.

Reason as contemplation is more difficult to understand. A fine line separates the internal world from the external. To make the leap of faith, one must find an idea which lies on this fringe – what Kierkegaard calls the “shudder of an idea” – and concentrate on it more or less out of the corner of one’s eye. If a person focuses on it directly, he will understand it by reason and bring it into the internal world. If the person ignores the idea, he cannot enter the external world, and therefore cannot make the leap of faith. Instead, one must consider this idea with just enough intensity to use it to make the leap of faith.

This same principle lies behind Douglas Adams’ Somebody Else’s Problem drive. In the addled universe of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, Adams explains, many people have found it enormously beneficial to make certain things invisible – not the least of which are spaceships. The simplest way to achieve this is to construct an inexpensive Somebody Else’s Problem (S.E.P.) drive, which “relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain (31).” Such as a spaceship in the middle of Lord’s Cricket Grounds in England, which is where Arthur Dent, the hero of Adams’ book, first encountered an S.E.P. Unfortunately, he could not quite grasp the concept, even though his friend Ford Prefect explained it in the simplest terms possible:

An S.E.P… is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye (24).

Just as one can only see an S.E.P. by catching it out of the corner of one’s eye, so can the knight of faith only succeed in the leap of faith by absently contemplating the shudder of an idea on the fringe between the internal and external world.

In a sense, making the leap of faith, seeing an S.E.P., and flying are all accidental. The knight of faith cannot purposely make the leap. If he tries, he brings the external world into the internal and fails. If the hitchhiker tries to see an S.E.P. by looking directly at it, his brain will consider it something too dangerous to the hitchhiker’s sanity and block it out. By reminding himself to forget about hitting the ground, the student flyer thinks about the ground and subsequently hits it. Instead, like Arthur Dent, the knight, the hitchhiker, and the student flyer must have his attention wrenched from his goal at the last possible second by that blue travel bag he knew had been lost at the Athens airport ten years earlier.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Douglas. Life, the Universe, and Everything. New York: Harmony Books, 1982.

Fabro, Cornelio, CPS. “Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard’s Dialectic.” A Kierkegaard Critique. eds. Howard A. Johnson and Niel Thulstrup. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.