Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard says that everyone has a choice in life. Freedom consists in using that choice. We each have the right to speak or not to speak and the right to act or not to act. Kierkegaard's Either/Or is God or the world. He says,

Temporality, finitude—this is what it is all about. I can resign everything by my own strength and find peace and rest in the pain; I can put up with everything—even if that dreadful demon, more horrifying than the skeletal one who terrifies me, even if madness held its fools costume before my eyes and I understood from its face that it was I who should put it on—I can still save my soul as long as my concern that my love of God conquer within me is greater than my concern that I achieve earthly happiness. Fear and Trembling p. 49

Teleological suspension of the ethical

What is the ethical? Kierkegaard steers the reader to Hegel's book Elements of the Philosophy of Right especially the chapter on "The Good and Conscience" where he writes, "It is the right of the subjective will that it should regard as good what it recognizes as authoritative. It is the individual's right, too, that an act, as outer realization of an end, should be counted right or wrong, good or evil, lawful or unlawful, according to his knowledge of the worth it has when objectively realized. (...) Right of insight into the good is different from right of insight with regard to action as such. The right of objectivity means that the act must be a change in the actual world, be recognized there, and in general be adequate to what has validity there. Whoso will act in this actual world has thereby submitted to its laws, and recognized the right of objectivity. Similarly in the state, which is the objectivity of the conception of reason, legal responsibility does not adapt itself to what any one person holds to be reasonable or unreasonable. It does not adhere to subjective insight into right or wrong, good or evil, or to the claims which an individual makes for the satisfaction of his conviction. In this objective field the right of insight is reckoned as insight into what is legal or illegal, or the actual law. It limits itself to its simplest meaning, namely, knowledge of or acquaintance with what is lawful and binding. Through the publicity of the laws and through general customs the state removes from the right of insight that which is for the subject its formal side. It removes also the element of chance, which at our present standpoint still clings to it."[17][18]

Abraham didn't follow this theory. Kierkegaard says Hegel was wrong because he didn't protest against Abraham as the father of faith and call him a murderer.[19] He had suspended the ethical and failed to follow the universal.[20][21][22]

Kierkegaard has a different theory about the difference between right and wrong and he stated it in the little discourse at the end of Either/Or. He wrote, "If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act than when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are? Then we have only the choice between being nothing in relation to God or having to begin all over again every moment in eternal torment, yet without being able to begin, for if we can decide definitely with regard to the previous moment, and so further and further back. Doubt is again set in motion, care again aroused; let us try to calm it by deliberating on: The Upbuilding That Lies In The Thought That In Relation To God We Are Always In The Wrong."[23]

Kierkegaard says, "Hegelian philosophy culminates in the thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer." Hegel wrote, "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly the means for realizing it, i.e., the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life movement, and activity. We then recognized the state as the moral whole and the reality of freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements."[24] Abraham had to choose between the ethical requirements of his surroundings and what he regarded as his absolute duty to God.[25]

Hegel says, "When I am conscious of my freedom as inner substantive reality, I do not act; yet if I do act and seek principles, I must try to obtain definite characters. The demand is then made that this definite context shall be deduced from the conception of free will. Hence, if it is right to absorb right and duty into subjectivity, it is on the other hand wrong if this abstract basis of action is not again evolved. Only in times when reality is a hollow, unspiritual, and shadowy existence, can a retreat be permitted out of the actual into an inner life."[26][27]

Absolute duty to God

Johannes de Silentio speaks of the difference between the method Descartes[28] found for himself and the system that Hegel wants to build.[29] He says, "I throw myself down in the deepest submission before every systematic ransacker: This [book] is not the system; it has not the least thing to do with the system. I invoke everything good for the system and for the Danish shareholders in this omnibus, for it will hardly become a tower. I wish them all, each and every one, success and good fortune." Respectfully, Johannes De Silentio[30] Kierkegaard chooses to "work out his own salvation in fear and trembling".[31] Johannes Climacus, another pseudonymous author, wrote in 1846 that Kierkegaard isn't interested in creating yet another system. He says, "The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is in a poetic and refined way a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes."[32]

Most systems and viewpoints also date from yesterday, and the conclusion is arrived at as easily as falling in love is accomplished in a novel where it says: To see her and to love her were synonymous — and it is through curious circumstances that philosophy has acquired such a long historical tail from Descartes to Hegel, a tail, however, which is very meager in comparison with that one used from the creation of the world and perhaps is more comparable to the tail that man has, according to the natural scientists. Journals I A 329 1837

Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the paradox and the leap in Fear and Trembling. He says,

"The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all. The act of resignation does not require faith, but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox."[33]

He explains himself in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where he writes, "In that book [Fear and Trembling] I had perceived how the leap, according to the author, as the decision par excellence becomes specifically decisive for what is Christian and for every dogmatic category. This can be achieved neither through Schelling's intellectual intuition nor through what Hegel, flouting Schelling's idea, wants to put in its place, the inverse operation of the method.[34] All Christianity is rooted in paradox, according to Fear and Trembling-yes, it is rooted in fear and trembling (which are specifically the desperate categories of Christianity and the leap)-whether one accepts it (that is, is a believer) or rejects it (for the very reason that it is the paradox)."[35]

Abraham concealing his undertaking

The world of ethics demands disclosure and punishes hiddenness but aesthetics rewards hiddenness according to Kierkegaard.[36] Kierkegaard says, "Greek tragedy is blind. A son murders his father, but not until later does he learn that it was his father. A sister is going to sacrifice her brother but realizes it at the crucial moment."[37]

Abraham hid everything he did. He kept everything from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. But Abraham's 'inability to become open is terror" to him. He keeps absolute silence about the whole affair.[38][39] A single individual like Abraham might be "able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, but, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him."[40] Abraham was experiencing what Kierkegaard called "reflective grief" but not just grief but joy also because he was beginning a new association with an unknown power. Grief and joy can both keep an individual quiet in inward reflection, perhaps it is a mixture of both that Abraham felt.

What prevents reflective grief from being artistically portrayed is that it lacks repose, that it never comes into harmony with itself, or rests in any single definitive expression. As a sick man throws himself about in his pain, now on one side and then on the other, so is reflective grief tossed about in the effort to find its object and its expression. Whenever grief finds repose, then will its inner essence gradually work its way out, becoming visible externally, and thus also subject to artistic representation. As soon as it finds rest and peace within itself, this movement from within outward invariably sets in; the reflective grief moves in the opposite direction, like blood retreating from the surface of the body, leaving only a hint of its presence in the sudden paleness. Any characteristic outward change does not accompany reflective grief; even at its very inception it hastens inward, and only a watchful observer suspects its vanishing; afterwards it keeps careful guard over its outward appearance, so as to make it as unobtrusive as possible. Retiring thus within, it finds at last an enclosure, an innermost recess, where it hopes it can remain; and now begins its monotonous movement. Back and forth it swings like a pendulum, and cannot come to rest. Ever it begins afresh from the beginning and considers everything, it rehearses the witnesses, it collates and verifies their testimony, as it has done a hundred times before, but the task is never finished. Monotony exercises in the course of time a benumbing influence upon the mind. Like the monotonous sound of water dripping from the roof, like the monotonous whir of a spinning wheel, like the monotonous sound of a man walking with measured tread back and forth on the floor above, so this movement of reflective grief finally gives to it a certain sense of numb relief, becoming a necessity as affording it an illusion of progress. Finally an equilibrium is established, and the need of obtaining for itself an outward expression, in so far as this need may have once or twice asserted itself, now ceases; outwardly everything is quiet and calm, and far within, in its little secret recess, grief dwells like a prisoner strictly guarded in a subterranean dungeon, who spends year after year in monotonously moving back and forth within its little enclosure, never weary of traversing sorrow's longer or shorter path. Either/Or Part I, Swenson p. 168

When Christianity entered into the world, there were no professors or assistant professors whatever-then it was a paradox for all. It can be assumed that in the present generation every tenth person is an assistant professor; consequently it is a paradox for only nine out of ten. And when the fullness of time finally comes, that matchless future, when a generation of assistant professors, male and female, will live on the earth-then Christianity will have ceased to be a paradox. On the other hand, the person who takes it upon himself to explain the paradox, on the assumption that he knows what he wants, will focus directly upon showing that it must be a paradox. To explain the unutterable joy[41]-what does that mean? Does it mean to explain that it is this and that? ... The explaining jack-of-all-trades has everything in readiness before the beginning of the performance, and now it begins. He dupes the listener; he calls the joy unutterable, and then a new surprise, a truly surprising surprise-he utters it. Suppose that the unutterable joy is based upon the contradiction that an existing human being is composed of the infinite and the finite, is situated in time, so that the joy of the eternal in him becomes unutterable because he is existing; it becomes a supreme drawing of breath that cannot take shape, because the existing person is existing. In that case the explanation would be that it is unutterable; it cannot be anything else-no nonsense. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript Vol I, 1846, Hong translation p. 220-221

Kierkegaard says, "If Agamemnon himself, not Calchas, should have drawn the knife to kill Iphigenia, he would only have demeaned himself if in the very last moment he had said a few words, for the meaning of his deed was, after all, obvious to everybody, the process of reverence, sympathy, emotion, and tears was completed, and then, too, his life had no relation to spirit-that is, he was not a teacher or a witness of the spirit."[42]

He says of Abraham, "If the task had been different, if the Lord had commanded Abraham to bring Isaac up to Mount Moriah so that he could have his lightning strike Isaac and take him as a sacrifice in that way, then Abraham plainly would have been justified in speaking as enigmatically as he did, for then he himself could not have known what was going to happen. But given the task as assigned to Abraham, he himself has to act; consequently, he has to know in the crucial moment what he himself will do, and consequently, he has to know that Isaac is going to be sacrificed."[43] Kierkegaard puts it this way in another book, "We shall not say with the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 4:10), 'Woe to him who is alone; if he falls, there is no one else to raise him up,' for God is indeed still the one who both raises up and casts down, for the one who lives in association with people and the solitary one; we shall not cry, 'Woe to him,' but surely an 'Ah, that he might not go astray,' because he is indeed alone in testing himself to see whether it is God's call he is following or a voice of temptation, whether defiance and anger are not mixed embitteringly in his endeavor."[44]

The task God gave to Abraham was so horrifying that he could tell no one about it because no one would understand him. Ethics forbade it as well as aesthetics.[45] Abraham became a knight of faith because he was willing to do what God asked of him. "He didn't trouble anyone with his suffering."[46] Abraham was wrong as far as ethics is concerned but right as far the Absolute is concerned. Kierkegaard says, "wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence, it is upbuilding always to be in the wrong-because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!"[47] What could Abraham do most in his relationship with God? Remain faithful to his commitment to God. He accomplished that by actually lifting the knife to carry out his mission. In short, he acted. Here the intention was more important than the result. He had faith and had to go no further to please God.[48]

Faith is the highest passion in a person. There perhaps are many in every generation who do not come to faith, but no one goes further. Whether many in our day do not find it, I do not decide. I dare to refer only to myself, without concealing that he has a long way to go, without therefore wishing to deceive himself of what is great by making a trifle of it, a childhood disease one may wish to get over as soon as possible. But life has tasks enough also for the person who does not come to faith, and if he loves these honestly, his life will not be wasted, even if it is never comparable to the lives of those who perceived and grasped the highest. But the person who has come to faith (whether he is extraordinarily gifted or plain and simple does not matter) does not come to a standstill in faith. Indeed, he would be indignant if anyone said to him, just as the lover resents it if someone said that he came to a standstill in love; for, he would answer, I am by no means standing still. I have my whole life in it. Yet he does not go further or go on to something else, for when he finds this, he has another explanation. Fear and Trembling p. 122-123

Although I ordinarily do not desire any comment from the critics, I almost desire it in this case if, far from flattering me, it consisted of the blunt truth "that what I say everyone knows, every child, and the educated infinitely so much more." That is, if it only remains fixed that everyone knows it, then my position is in order and I shall surely come to terms with the unity of the comic and the tragic. If there were anyone who did not know it, I would be thrown off balance by the thought that I could possibly teach him the requisite preparatory knowledge. What occupies me so much is precisely what the educated and cultured say in our time-that everyone knows what the highest is. This was not the case in paganism, Judaism, or during the seventeen centuries of Christianity. Fortunate nineteenth century! Everyone knows it. What a progress since those ages when only a few knew it. Would a balance possibly require that in return we assume that there is no one at all who would do it?

• Stages on Life's Way, Søren Kierkegaard,1845, Hong Note p. 471-472

Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers VI B 66 1845