In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard addresses the problem that any attempt to ascribe meaning to existence is absurd (or at least can seem so). It is the fear of that problem that causes anxiety — the fear and trembling mentioned in the title.
Kierkegaard has been called the first existentialist. Fear and Trembling is existentialist in that it is about about the relationship between the individual and the absolute. It confronts the difficulty or absurdity of trying to impose a framework of understanding on reality.
Yet Kierkegaard, in encountering the absurd, draws a conclusion that is the opposite of those reached by the other philosophers known as existentialists, such as Nietsche, Sartre, and Camus. Where they took the problem of the absurd as a reason to endorse the concept of defining one’s own meaning or to embrace nihilism, Kierkegaard went in the other direction, toward faith.
Why examine Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac? Kirkegaard’s existentialism
Fear and Trembling is formatted as a kind of deep exegesis of the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac.
Abraham is credited as the father of faith, yet he is commanded directly by God to do something unethical — killing his son, who was the apparent fulfillment of another promise from God.
Thus Abraham was forced to confront the absurd.
Unlike other figures prominent in history, myth, and scripture — Agamemnon, Jephtha, Brutus — Abraham did not kill his child. To obey God, Abraham was willing to carry out the sacrifice of Isaac, bringing him up Mount Moriah and binding him. At the same time, he had faith that he would not have to kill Isaac. For Kierkegaard, Abraham demonstrated faith in this “double movement,” in simultaneously planning to kill his son and believing that his son would not be killed. In other words, his faith was demonstrated in the absurd.
Before examining the argument in detail, though, it is worth noting Kierkegaard’s arguments for approaching this set of questions to begin with, laid out in the Preliminary Expectoration.
Here is where Kierkegaard is perhaps the most existentialist. He argues that everyone must examine this question for himself. Every person, individually, must do the work of reckoning with the most fundamental questions about his place in the world. It is a job that cannot be outsourced and cannot be tag-teamed.
It is different in the world of spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails, here it does not rain both upon the just and upon the unjust, here the sun does not shine both upon the good and upon the evil, here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife gets Isaac. He who will not work does not get the bread but remains deluded, as the gods deluded Orpheus with an airy figure in place of the loved one, deluded him because he was effeminate, not courageous, because he was a cithara-player, not a man. Here it is of no use to have Abraham for one’s father, nor to have seventeen ancestors-he who will not work must take note of what is written about the maidens of Israel,! for he gives birth to wind, but he who is willing to work gives birth to his own father.
This is an exhortation to wrestle with the meaning of life and the question of existence. It’s also a warning that you must go through this struggle as an individual. Even the best set of circumstances and the healthiest traditions and institutions can only take you so far. Eventually, you must answer for yourself why you exist. This insight makes me think of the folk song covered by Johnny Cash: “You can run on for a long time, but sooner or later, God’s gonna cut you down.”
A few paragraphs later, Kierkegaard connects this mission to the concept of anxiety.
In case that rich young man whom Christ encountered on the road had sold all his goods and given to the poor, we should extol him, as we do all that is great, though without labor we would not understand him-and yet he would not have become an Abraham, in spite of the fact that he offered his best. What they leave out of Abraham’s history is dread; for to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and most sacred obligation. Dread, however, is a perilous thing for effeminate natures, hence they forget it, and in spite of that they want to talk about Abraham.
Another word for dread in this context is anxiety. A key point from this short but difficult-to-interpret paragraph is that it is one thing to contemplate the example of the rich young man, who was asked to do something extremely difficult. It’s another entirely to consider the example of Abraham, who was asked to betray his most sacred obligation by God — calling into question the fundamental meaning of reality.
Here it’s worth skipping ahead to the epilogue, where Kierkegaard discusses how faith cannot be transmitted through tradition:
Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter didn’t shirk its task and deceive itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which the one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor’s, and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk.
But the highest passion in a human being is faith, and here no generation begins other than where its predecessor did, every generation begins from the beginning, the succeeding generation comes no further than the previous one, provided the latter was true to its task and didn’t betray yet.
In a way, this passage is a note of skepticism about progress. While humans can see progress in technology, civilization, the arts, etc., from generation to generation, each person is confronted with the question of faith anew regardless.
So Kierkegaard is saying that existential dread is both merited and useful. He is also saying that, at some point, it is necessary for each individual to directly confront that dread.
On the one hand, these are existentialist points, and could be interpreted as diminishing the value of the concepts of religion, tradition, family, and every other human institution, as he argues they can only take you so far.
On the other hand, what Kierkegaard is saying is the opposite of what is commonly thought of as existentialist since the action being described is faith: faith in God, specifically, for Kierkegaard, who was a devout Lutheran, but also faith in the broader sense that existence does have meaning and that the pursuit of understanding is worthwhile.
Note well that, by faith, Kierkegaard does not mean something separate from inquiry and logic. Just the opposite: Faith is the willingness to look directly at the most fundamental and anxiety-inducing questions possible.
What is faith?
This passage, which is probably impossible to interpret without knowing the basic points of Kierkegaard’s analytical framework, is where he most explicitly lays out his understanding of faith:
Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that it is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes that individual who, as the particular, stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation occurs precisely by virtue of the universal; it is and remains in all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox.
Here is the key background, which I am going to try to express in my own words in a significantly simplified way, at the risk of introducing errors.
First, to understand the word “mediation” here — from my edition of Fear and Trembling, with notes by Alastair Hannay: “‘Mediation’ is the Hegelian term for a process of resolving conceptual oppositions into higher conceptual unities. For instance, the belief that public service conflicts with personal freedom can be ‘mediated’ …in the realization that, properly understood, the latter depends on the former.”
Next, to understand the other terms in this passage, it is necessary to know that Kierkegaard divides life — thought and action — into three stages.
The first is the aesthetic or the particular. The aesthetic stage of life is one governed by pleasures, interests, pursuits, and the like.
Another way of thinking about this stage is that it is what today would be called sources of identity. Identity can be a source of meaning, at least for a time. Identifying oneself with an occupation, an ethnic group, a movement, or an art clique can confer meaning. It’s a form of life and meaning created by, and limited by, one’s own background, tastes, and proclivities.
The second is the ethical or the universal. The ethical stage of life is one controlled by one’s desire to live in accordance with a universal ethic. Such an ethic could be Aristotelian virtue ethics, or the Kantian moral imperative. But the key consideration is that the ethical is created by and limited by universal truths that are knowable and invariable. So, for example, the ethical principle that murder is wrong always obtains at every place and time.
The third is that of faith or the religious. This is in a sense the highest stage of life, and one that most people will not obtain — Kierkegaard suggests repeatedly that he personally cannot fathom it. Faith is a direct encounter with the absolute that goes beyond desire and beyond reason. “Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off,” he writes.
To build up to this point a different way, Kierkegaard introduces two characters (both of which I would argue are somewhat unfortunately labeled). One is the Knight of Infinite Resignation. This is the individual who is willing to pay any price to fulfill the rules of ethics, to resign himself to the demands of the universal rules even to the point of self-sacrifice.
The Knight of Faith, in contrast, is the individual who can not only resign himself to the demands of universal ethics, but can also go further by virtue of his direct relationship with the absolute.
To compound the metaphor, Kierkegaard compares the knights to dancers. Most people in life live in the aesthetic, and are not engaged in dance at all. Knights of Infinite Resignation can leap into dancing positions momentarily, but cannot hold them, and fall down. Knights of Faith fall down, but in such a way that they look like they are standing or walking, and thus “transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the pedestrian.”
This is not quite Kierkegaard’s famous “leap of faith,” a phrase which is generally attributed to his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but it is a closely related idea. The idea is that the Knight of Faith can take the exact same task that would doom the Knight of Infinite Resignation — for instance, following an order directly from God to kill one’s own son, thus violating the ethical proscription of murder — and turn it into a source of redemption, through faith. So, paradoxically, the Knight of Faith at once leaps, as the Knight of Infinite Resignation sought to do, and at the same time appears to be simply walking, as those living in the aesthetic realm are doing. He is simultaneously fulfilling the obligations of universal ethics and his own particular desires.
“He resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd,” Kierkegaard writes.
“Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence,” he later writes. A key point to note in this sentence is that “resignation” refers to resigning oneself to living according to universal ethical principles at any cost.
While it would be easy to read Kierkegaard as endorsing some form of subjective morality, in fact he means the opposite. He insists that faith entails living first as subject to the demands of universal and objective ethics, and only at a higher state of life or consciousness as directly in relation to the absolute.
A paradox of faith: Profoundly personal, but also universal
One point of emphasis throughout the book is Abraham’s silence throughout the ordeal.
In traveling to Mount Moriah to kill Isaac, Abraham is engaging in an action that would appear to everyone else as an ethical violation, but which is nevertheless required by faith (what Kierkegaard refers to as the “teleological suspension of the ethical”). To speak of it at all would be to cause scandal or to be seen as a madman. There is no way Abraham could have justified his actions to others.
The pen name Kirkegaard chose for this book, “Johannes de Silentio,” is another reference to this dynamic. Namely, that each person must confront the paradox of existence for himself as an individual in relation to the absolute, higher (in a sense) than the universal.
In doing so, it is impossible to speak to others about the experience. It’s also impossible to be spoken to: Every person must do it for himself. This idea is closely related to the one mentioned above, regarding the responsibility of each individual to confront the meaning of existence himself.
“A tragic hero can become a human being by his own strength, but not the knight of faith. When a person sets out on the tragic hero’s admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand,” Kierkegaard writes.
Yet there is a further paradox here, which is that by this act of faith, presupposed by a resignation to the demands of universal ethics, the individual gains back his own initial heart’s desire and his relationship with the universal — that is, including with universal humanity.
Kirkegaard does not make this point in Fear and Trembling, but the story of the Binding of Isaac ends with a restatement of God’s promise to Abraham, in which God promises that, because Abraham was faithful, his descendants will be as numerous as the stars.
So, by entering into the most extreme form of isolation — having to directly confront the paradox of meaning and existence alone and in silence — Abraham gained the most extreme form of community.
Joseph Lawler 