Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 1999

This paper argues that Kierkegaard's defence of Abraham is in the first instance a polemic against the notion that the demands of faith are coterminous with the best insights of practical reason. It is further argued that while no justification of Abraham's action at Mount Moriah may be offered, he is nevertheless to be admired for trusting in God beyond the limits of his understanding. Such trust is admirable, however, only in the context of a long life of obedience and love. A conflict of faith and ethics In 1988 in the United States, a man was convicted in the high court for injecting his son with the Aids virus. In his summing up of the case, the presiding judge looked at the father and said, 'You are going to burn in hell for this crime you have committed.' If, perhaps, the judge's theology is not shared by all, there will be, I imagine, little dissent from his expression of moral outrage. Whatever the father's prospects might be, before the American court or before God, the ethics of the matter seem clear. A father who inflicts such damage upon his own son has clearly done wrong. At another time, and in another place, another father took his son to a mountain called Moriah. The father ascended the mountain with his son, he built an altar and laid his son upon it, and then he lifted his knife to kill the boy. Within the Jewish and Christian religious heritage that man is celebrated as the archetype of faith, for he enacted this story, we are told, in obedience to God. The problem involved in setting these two stories side by side is the problem addressed by Søren Kierkegaard in his book Fear and Trembling, pseudonymously penned by a character called Johannes de Silentio, Johannes the Silent One. How can what is ostensibly the same act, the murder of a son by his father, give rise in the one case to moral outrage and in the other to praise of the father's faith? Never mind that Abraham did not in the end go through with the act of killing his son. Abraham is approved of in the Bible because he was prepared to do so. But is it

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2008

Though there are significant points of overlap between Michelle Kosch’s reading of Fear and Trembling and my own, this paper focuses primarily on a significant difference: the legitimacy or otherwise of looking to paradigmatic exemplars of faith in order to understand faith. I argue that Kosch’s reading threatens to underplay the importance of exemplarity in Kierkegaard’s thought, and that there is good reason to resist her use of Philosophical Fragments as the key to interpreting the ‘hidden message’ of Fear and Trembling. Key to both claims is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I also briefly sketch an alternative reading of the ‘hidden message’, one in which Kierkegaard’s Christian commitments play a notably different role.

2001

The purpose of this paper is to show that the various layers of meaning in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling are embedded in a hidden, new Christian communication. I trace the traditional Christian understanding of the "sacrifice of Isaac," in which Isaac is the prefiguration of Jesus, and then argue that Kierkegaard departed from this traditional teaching to make Abraham the Christ-figure of the story. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is the true sacrifice of the story. Soren Kierkegaard went to some trouble to alert the reader of Fear and Trembling to a hidden message within its covers. There is the Pseudonyn1, "Johanness de Silentio," suggesting that the author is remaining silent about something, although he writes much. Then there is the addition on the title page that reads: "What Tarquinius Superbus spoke in his garden with the poppies was understood by his son, but not by the messenger." This refers to when the son of Tarquinius Superbus sent a messenger to ask his father what he, the son, should do with the people of Gabii. The father walked with the messenger in the garden, and as they spoke removed the heads of the tallest poppies with his cane. The son understood from this how to proceed. He was to put to death the leaders of Gabii. The author of Fear and Trembling, too, is suggesting that we must pay attention to what he is doing as he speaks to us, if we hope to get the message. What is Kierkegaard's hidden message? The usual wisdom says that Fear and Trembling contains a hidden message to or about Regina, Kierkegaard's former fiancee. Kierkegaard broke with Regina on Gctober 11, 1841, and published Fear and Trembling just two years later. During the period of 1841-1843 his diaries are full of references to Regina, and Kierkegaard's renunciation of her. Thus, Fear and Trembling is really about Kierkegaard's Abrahamic giving up of his Isaac, Regina. Ronald Green has moved out of the conventional wisdom about the hidden message, advancing an original understanding of Kierkegaard's work. Green argues for a hidden message in Kierkegaard's work, one which Kierkegaard 11imself may not have been aware of and only unconsciously intended. That secret message had to do with the relationship between Soren Kierkegaard, the son, and the father, Michael Pederson Kierkegaard. For Green, the father-son setting of the Fear and Trembling pertains to the very essence of the message for Kierkegaard. This message

This chapter is intended to provide a philosophical analysis of Fear and Trembling in the light of the debate around the Ethics of Belief. In addition, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s purpose in writing this work was not to defend what appears to be its manifest argument, that true Christian faith involves accepting Abraham as an exemplar, but rather that the argument can be read as an explicit attempt to show why we should reject him. To this end, we will discuss how the work relates to the debate between William Kingdom Clifford and William James making reference as well to developments in the debate since then, especially the work of the contemporary philosopher Susan Haack. Moreover, we will also consider some surrounding factors that affect the reading of the text today.

Randwick International of Social Science Journal

The author of the article "Abraham's faith in Kierkegaard's conception: an analysis of the books 'Fear and Trembling,'" analyzes the theme of faith from the perspective of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The philosopher was impressed by the adventure of the faith of Abraham who was challenged to sacrifice his son at the command of Yahweh (Gen. 22). The paper tries to find the explanations of philosophy, with reference to the acceptance of the divine challenge, by Abraham, who seems inhuman and irrational. We will analyze the expression used by Kierkagaard, who calls Abraham the "Knight of the Faith," in what sense, paradoxically, by faith did Abraham win Isaac? What is the significance of the knight of resignation, with reference to the one who refuses the act of faith, and wants to keep the temporality. We will see that from his point of view, the believer cannot accept advice, he will travel alone on this path. The logic of faith, the ...