BR: Fear & Trembling (1843) by Soren Kierkegaard

This is going to be a far cry from an academic review - for that sort of thing, check this guy out. And for the actual outlined content of Fear & Trembling, this is a safe place to start. Unfortunately, I've tried writing the serious commentary on the work four times now, and as spot on and awesome as all those renditions were (natch), they weren't exactly riveting stuff for the non-Kierkegaardingly inclined. In short, getting wrapped up in the nuances of Hegelian ethics and why the Abraham and Isaac story definitively overthrows them is heady stuff, so heady in fact that some dude named Kierkegaard wrote a 100 page dense exegesis on it. So, for the real deal, go there; for a quick synopsis followed by a reaction, you've found the place. In short:

The Story of Abraham & Isaac

Abraham, who dutifully waited years and years with his borderline infertile elderly wife Sarah to have a child, is finally (all Ishmaels aside) delivered a son in Isaac, the son whom he loves and who is to in turn to deliver Abraham his promised nation of descendants. But, as Sarah lies dying, making any kind of other son impossible, God (perhaps with an eye to the hilarity of the Bankrupt slot on Wheel of Fortune) commands Abraham to kill Isaac, sacrifice him on an altar. Abraham dutifully does so, says nothing to anyone, grabbing Isaac and a handful of servants and rides for three days to a specific mountain, all the while saying nothing of their purpose. When they finally get to the mount, Abraham grabs Isaac alone and heads up the mountain, big ass knife in hand. When Isaac perceptively asks "what are we going to sacrifice?," Abraham says - pay attention now - "God will provide us with an animal to slaughter." That is the only thing he says the entire while. He then binds Isaac to an altar, and just as he is drawing the knife to his throat, an angel of God catches his wrist, telling him this was all a test and he passed, he's the Father of Faith, and he should unbind Isaac and sacrifice a ram that has just wandered along instead. End scene.

Reaction in a Kierkegaardian Light

A decent first reaction, and one that Kierkegaard says the Hegelian ethical scheme (the idea that the right ethical action is always that which benefits the whole or universe) dictates, is that Abraham is a murderer. Before you balk at this damnation of the "Father of Faith," think quickly what your modern day reaction would be if someone attempted to kill their son and then claimed "but God told me to do it." he would be at best insane, at worst a murderer. Kierkegaard goes through lengths to show that Abraham murdering his son benefits no one in any way, it in fact destroys any possibility of the great nations that Abraham had just been promised, so arguing that Isaac is a "sacrifice" is nonsensical. Killing Isaac in fact harms Isaac, Abraham, the whole host of future Israelites - it is not just that it benefits no one, it harms a mass of people in a very overt way. As such, it is in direct opposition to accomplishing the universal, the greater good that Hegelian ethics maintain is the only right action, the highest calling. Abraham's claim that "God told him to" would be a reference to something higher that the universal, something that doesn't, according to Hegel, exist; therefore Abraham's action can be called nothing but unethical, regardless of its divine command.

We don't tend to think this way, though; we think that Abraham is not an insane murderer, he is rather "great." And if he is great, then our Hegelian system which condemns him is wrong. So Kierkegaard throws Hegel out the window, as that system is incompatible with one that finds Abraham to be great. So the next question is, what makes Abraham great then?

Kierkegaard's answer is "faith," and this is where everything is flipped on its head. There was then, and largely is now, that faith belongs in the realm of the aesthetic, in other words it sits in the realm of the immediate as something that you immediately know and believe, it's the result of an immediate leap and not the sort of thing that requires pondering. This is, in fact, where Hegel (seemingly belittlingly) placed faith, something that sat in the now, practically on the same level of the everyday as the five senses. This is NOT the faith that Kierkegaard talks about.

Kierkegaard speaks of faith as a process. One the first level, he says, is to follow the desires and aims of the individual, to be to some extent a "me" or "us first" or an "Ayn Rand." Just kidding. This is a very natural inclination, and a temptation one aims, in both Kierkegaard and the Hegelian world, to overcome. To fully overcome this would be to give oneself over to the universal, or to act in accordance with the hegelian mandate that personal desires must fall second to things which will benefit the group, humanity, as a whole. This is no small feat; Kierkegaard labels people capable of this "knights of infinite resignation," those who give up on all that they hope for in deference to the higher calling of benefiting all. The KOIR sees all that he could have or all that he wants and resigns himself to never having it, to seeing, admitting and believing that it is an impossibility. he then lives on, knowing that this impossibility that aches him is in service of the greater good. This, in my mind, is an insanely noble concept, and finding it in either K's time or ours is at best a remote possibility.

But Kierkegaard takes it a step further. The man he seeks, the Ultimate (again, going beyond the Hegelian universal) is the Knight of Faith. The KOF undertakes the same process as the KOIR - surveys all he desires, hopes, and admits that it is impossible, gives up all hope and resigns to the fact that it is never to be, putting him in those same shoes as the KOIR. But KOF takes it the next step - despite having given it all up, knowing for 100% sure that it is all impossible, he nevertheless 100% believes, solely on the strength of the absurd, the impossible, coming to be, that his individual desire will be served regardless. Again, do not confuse this with hope or strong belief in an unproved postulate - he rather believes IN SPITE of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Abraham is, then, the KOF - he resigns himself to completely losing Isaac, to killing his son that he loves, losing the nations promised him - only he has Faith only on the strength of the absurd that he will get him back, will get all of it back. Kierkegaard, or at least the pseudonym he uses to write this book, says over and over again that he cannot comprehend this, and I would also urge you to consider the fact that 1000000 Buddhist monks with 1000000 typewriters could meditate for 1000000 years and never understand this, so don't pretend to. Ha - again, that's an exaggeration, but the point is that this is the highest possibility, an epitome of internal struggle, and that is what makes Abraham great. Faith is not of the aesthetics, not of the ethical (since in this case it so blatantly violates the ethical), but it is in its own third category, and Abraham is its example par excellence. Also, because God's commandment of Abraham to sacrifice his son represents a teleological suspension of the ethical, in other words a cessation of the authority of the ethical universal in deference to a higher calling, Faith, that Faith itself exists above the ethical - and it is faith that is the highest possible achievement, not the universal.

Hegel's ethics, at least with regard to God, revolve around the idea that in serving the universal, you serve the Absolute (i.e., God) - all contact is really indirect, since any attempt at the Absolute could only be achieved via the universal. It should also be heavily noted that this invariably intertwines the universal with the Absolute, making God, so to speak, a slave to the universal, a claim that makes unmovable stones light by comparison. Another argument of Kierkegaard's is that Hegel's concept of the Absolute and the Universal wraps up God in only that which is accessible to human life, something that is in everything in the world but also not capable of being separate from those things in the world. Abraham, though, through a direct, individual relationship with the Absolute, transcends the universal and comes back to the individual. In this sense, Abraham's relation to the Absolute supercedes the universal, stands higher than it. One's duty to God, to the Absolute, then does trump one's duty to the ethically sound. Notice also that this puts a real rift between the universal and God, making God a surefire stand alone entity - because if God can do something diametrically opposed to the universal, than surely he is not wrapped up in it.

The final section of Kierkegaard's work deals largely with the ineffability of Faith contrasted with the effability of infinite resignation - he exemplifies this by contrasting the duties of the aesthetic and the ethical in traditional tragic heroes, then going on to explain why Abraham is not bound, nor should he try to, explain himself, or speak to Isaac or his wife or the servants about his intentions. One part of the argument is this would significantly weaken his greatness as Father of Faith, because part of his greatness lies exactly in this entire ordeal being his and his alone. But more importantly, the reason Abraham cannot speak to Isaac or anyone else about this is because it is on the strength of the absurd, it is a paradox, and really, where would you start? Abraham could speak indefinitely and never explain with language, rationally, what he was doing. There is no philosophy that wraps its head around this or even gets close to explaining this - faith is ineffable, irrational, paradoxical, and wholly above being discussed. Said Kierkegaard. Ahem. "Faith cannot be discussed," said Kierkegaard. In his book about Faith. Cough cough.

Kidding aside, that is really the heart of this matter - that Faith is personal, irrational, and has no place in the Aesthetic of Ethical systems as noted by Hegel. It is *by definition* impossible to talk about and only exists on the strength of the absurd, that which, to put it bluntly, does not make human sense. These are themes that dominate almost everything Kierkegaard works on - his emphasis on the subjective experience over the objective, his critiques of the church and their approach to religion as a process, and all of his work on his idea of what it means to be a Christian, the struggle involved, the very personal nature in which one's Faith must be developed - developed, not sprung forth as in a vision or a leap or anything of that sort. Fear & Trembling is his work all about Faith, and it uses the story of Abraham and Isaac as its centerpiece to expose just what it is that we find so great about Faith.

In the end, of course, Abraham's test turned out to be a trial, and one which he passed. It needs to be pointed out very explicitly that this was not a "test of faith" in the normal sense - usually a test of faith is an easy, very beneficial and decidedly unethical way out weighed against a painful and ultimately personally sacrificing action. For example, do I have faith that everything is going to turn out fine if I just do the right thing, or do I go ahead and steal the wallet that is poking out of that guy's pocket over there and buy myself that coveted ice cream bar? Abraham's test, then, is backwards - the easy way out, um, NOT killing his son, is also the ethical thing to do. The temptation is to do the good thing, and the Faith-based goal is to do the evil thing, to kill another human being for no possible benefit to the universe. Kierkegaard finds this to be "The" test of Faith, that it was not a test to resist temptation but rather one in which Abraham prove his faith to God. You could in fact equate this notion with another - that the proof of Abraham's faith, i.e. the outcome of the trial, is what was held in such high esteem all this time, the thing that trumped the universal. Which, natch, doesn't make any sense.

As I hopefully have alluded sufficiently to, this entire line of argument comes from a set of circumstances that existed in K's world. One, Kierkegaard thought that Hegel's system had brutally misappropriated Faith, so this is an effort to put Faith back in the esteemed place in which it belongs. Two, he wished to demonstrate that Faith was a hard-won value, not something grasped on a whim. This also stemmed from his disagreement with Faith's placement in the Hegelian system, but also with a severe disagreement with herd mentality and the low place that Faith had in the Enlightened world. Faith, it seemed, had become something to go beyond, a stepping stone from which to leap. Kierkegaard wished to place Faith back at the apex, at the pinnacle of what humanity could achieve - not something to be started from and jumped off, and not a human process that, like some kind of theoretical chemistry, could be built upon from one generation to the next. Finally, I think Faith for Kierkegaard lies so firmly in the realm of the personal and the subjective that he wanted to defeat all arguments that attempt to place faith within a philosophical system. He really makes an effort, by identifying it a something so thoroughly paradoxical and ineffable, to take Faith out of philosophy's jurisdiction and give its own (and not coincidentally, higher than everything else) state.

Reaction, Nyetian-style

My initial reaction is plainly that the story of Abraham and Isaac is terrifying. God is terrifying enough in Bob Dylan's version, where he's giving arbitrary commands that you can't understand and throwing out threats and pretending you have free will but then saying "but it would really be in your best interest to do this" with a sly, Mafia-derived wink. That, of course, is a modern day take on God as arbitrary bully, which is a whole 'nother set of snakes on a plane. But God in the Old Testament (HA!) is scary enough - he is forcing Abraham to do something heinously terrible to the son he loves, to the child to whom he has devoted a lifetime just to see his birth, and there is no explanation, no "do this and you will be rewarded for your obedience," just a stern "do this," with all the terror that sits behind it. God here tears through Abraham's psyche for the sake of a test, puts him through dire agony for three days on a typical whim. He is just nasty, just... wait, what's that word for arbitrarily causing pain and suffering... evil? This is to say nothing of God's lack of respect for Sarah, who is now dying and also stands to lose a beloved son, or, for criminy's sake, Isaac himself, who is about to be killed for no apparent reason!!!!!!

(For another quick take on the Old Testament God's tendency to kill people for no readily apparent reason other than narrative advancement, check out Genesis 38:7. And, no, I have never found what Er did to deserve that either, nor can I figure out why Er gets the Do-Not-Pass-Go treatment while our friends Stalin and Hitler get to do whatever. Weird, eh?)

All of the terror in this lies in a concept of God as temporal actor in the Old Testament, as though he were just the same as anyone else, sitting and witnessing events, not knowing what the future may bring, wondering if because his brother masturbated that he too would be smote... smited. But your average concept of God gives you something of an omniscient, outside of time vantage point. Meaning that God would already know what was going to happen - or even if you want to cling to free will, he would at least have a solid grasp as to the inner workings of one of his creations... so he probably should have been able to predict Abraham's actions, if not know them outright. Which makes me wonder, why a test at all? Is this all for show? Human torment, for what, kicks? Isaac? Isaac?!?! Psychotherapy bills much? Is a pre-determined test of Faith worth all of this, really?

It is, por supuesto, audacious to question such things. But I think Kierkegaard may agree with me when I postulate that it's equally insane not to question them - to take a story as absolutely twisted and paradoxical as the Abraham-Isaac story and turn it into "Abraham proved his faith." The same problems with the church and the church-going masses that Kierkegaard saw in his land in his day - cheaply assumed Faith, mindless following of church structure that said nothing to the mystical, personal nature of the religious experience - they're not gone. I do not see people ponder. This is not to say we should all be Kierkegaard's, consumed by our Faith to the near point of sickness, but it is to say that mindless lip-service, to my ears, has grown painfully tired.

These are the things, in the end, that I got out of the book:

First, and above all else, that texts, media, films, etc., all provide a wealth of depth to be examined. The story of Abraham & Isaac, so thoroughly central to our doctrines, sits largely unexamined by Joe Average Christian, and I can't help but find that sad.

Faith is not just belief in something with a lack of evidence, at its height it is paradoxical, irrational, ineffable belief in the certainty of something after having completely resigned to the fact that the something is not rationally true. It is a surrender to the absurd.

Faith begs an almost mystical account of itself, and as such would seem to suffer from supporting proof (miracles, mystical experience, etc.) rather than benefit from it. I mean to say that looking for a sign to affirm your Faith pretty much insures that you do not have it, really.

That Religion as a subjective, thoroughly examined and lived-in experience is an ineffable, while its counterpart, mindless adherence to doctrine, is merely effable. (HA!)

The herd is, however, overwhelming. Meaning that George Bush, despite his status as Religious Leader of America, will not likely be quoting Kierkegaard in a press conference anytime soon.