Customer Reviews

Fear and Trembling

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It pleases me that so many readers have reviewed "Fear and Trembling" at amazon.com, yet infuriates me that so few have written anything of substance for those who wish to know whether Everyman's edition (translated by George Steiner) is the one to buy. Yes, "Fear and Trembling" is a response to Hegel. Yes, the story of Abraham is central to it. Truly, my hat is off to those who have thought carefully and insightfully about this work; however, most of amazon.com's reader reviews of "F&T" merely restate what one finds in Steiner's introduction--which (surprise, surprise!) is availible to every passerby, thanks to Amazon.com's "look inside" option.

Ignore the critical interpretations availible here, and skip directly to Steiner's introduction. What you will find there should convince you that his is the translation worth your money. Quite simply, Steiner writes beautifully, with an almost hypnotizing lyrical precision; I have yet to find another translation of "F&T" that I believe compares to his.

F & T is a "bundle of complexes." At bottom, it deals with the Abraham story. Look closer, and it deals with Regina Olsen. Look again, it deals with Hegel's ethics. And finally, it looks at faith in general.

SK argues that faith is a threefold movement which can barely be talked about. Before him, Hegel had narrowed in on faith in his System. Kierkegaard naturally took offence: how can faith be so easily dealt with? How can faith be so compartmentalized? Because for Kierkegaard, faith is large and mysterious: not the stuff of analytic summary. Specifically, Hegel did not describe faith well enough, to say how it comes or goes in a man. And he left it behind to move onto other categories. But K says that faith cannot be casually treated or left behind. A closer look at faith is more important than anything because "faith is the highest passion in a man." Faith is generally downplayed by K's world and our own. Religious faith, mostly, though K will applaud 'leaps of faith' in general, even without religious belief. After all, human consciousness involves faith, he argues.

K develops his idea of faith in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to the philosophical fragments." In that volume, Christian faith is the best faith there is. A Christian believes that Christ was God, but has no way of knowing for sure. The less objective certainty, the more subjectivity. The believer is forced to pull into himself. He knows, by way of reason, that God being Man is ridiculous, offensive, and baffling. But he believes it anyway, "by virtue of the absurd." His belief becomes a passion. His inwardness becomes a relation to God. In the words of Oaklander, he contends with "self-activity" and "self-scrutiny." No other religion, besides Christianity, has this "intensification of subjectivity." No other religion expects its members to believe that the Creator became a human person. No other religion offers that extremity of a personal nature.

According to SK, faith ultimately is done by "virture of the absurd." The Absurd is that God became Man: Lord Jesus Christ. The absurd, moreover, is that things may work out in spite of themselves. That 'all is well.' A Knight of Faith (i.e. the ideal Christian, who almost is impossible to find) may sacrifice something in the 'leap of faith' that somehow, some way, he'll get it back again - since with God all things are possible. Just below him is the Knight of Infinite Resignation, who gives something up but nevertheless retains his secret love for it.

Onto Abraham. K, in his own words, is the first to consider the "anxiety" of Abraham, who by faith went to kill his son Isaac, by order of God. But why? Because, by 'virtue of the Absurd' Abraham believed that somehow Isaac would return to him unscathed. By this reasoning, Abraham is not a murderer and neither is he a mentally ill individual. In fact, the Bible clearly states that Abraham loved his son completely, perhaps more than most fathers love their sons. And yet his story is so baffling that K lost sleep over it, for years on end. And we, too, should lose sleep he urges.

I'll leave the finer details to K himself, suffice to say that Abraham is K's Knight of Faith and is a hero to history like Socrates.

FEAR AND TREMBLING stands as one of Soren Kierkegaard's most widely read works. It's brevity is appealing to those with only a marginal interest in philosophy and theology. It's subject matter is what attracts those persons who want to find a nexus between ethics and theology.

In the work, Kierkegaard engages the famous passage in the Old Testament of the bible where Abraham is ordered by God (Yahweh) to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It stands today as the most salient episode in the bible where Plato's EUTHYPHRO dillema is confronted.

Now, what is the EUTHYPHRO dillema, you may ask? The dillema is set out by Socrates in Plato's dialouge of the same name. Basically, it comes down to this: are good and evil intrinsic to the universe itself? Or are the qualities of good and evil decided upon by God (or gods)? If the former is true, then God (or the head of a pantheon of gods) cannot be truly omnipotent, for there is at least one power that even he / she / it must follow. If, on the other hand, good and evil are decided by God(s), then might makes right.

Enter Kierkegaard, who spends the pages of this work acting more-or-less as a defense attorney for Abraham for his even contemplating the murder of his son. For Kierkegaard, the divine-command-theorist, the latter horn of the conundrum (i.e.: might makes right) is the only plausible alternative open for the religious believer. The first horn denies God's sovereign omnipotence over the universe and all of its affairs, which is utterly unacceptable.

So, the Dane offers to us the defense of what he calls the "teleological suspension of ethics." That is to say, while Abraham was acting out of direction from God, he was not subject to the ethical laws of the "everyday" universe that the rest of us live in every day.

That, in brief, is the topic that this book considers. For the complete explanation and polemics of his views, this book is highly recommended. That the subject matter of FEAR AND TREMBLING greatly disturbed Kierkegaard becomes readily obvious in the first pages. If the arguments presented are examined carefully, it is a topic whose implications may very well shock the modern-day theologian as well.

I'm in accord with the reviewer who marvelled at this book's staying power-- I first read Kierkegaard twenty years ago, and his ideas continue to resonate in my mind today. I'm a far different person now then I was then, but the passion for knowledge never diminishes, and Kierkegaard's philosophy (literally) echoes on. A life-altering book, one of the very few I have read.

Most of what I read 30 years ago for college classes remains a blur, but this text, along with "Sickness Unto Death," stands out as a notable exception. It appealed to my romantic nature and ironic temperament, and confirmed my suspicions of all organized religions while leaving room for faith--an insane leap into a relationship that by relating itself to itself is grounded transparently in the power that posited it. Somehow it made sense then, and still does. No one describes romantic fixation and unrequieted love as carefully yet passionately as Kierkegaard, then transforms it from mere narcissistic stasis into life-affirming energy.

Of all his religious, psychological and philosophical tracts, FEAR and TREMBLING is Kierkegaard's most original and disturbing. Initially SK proposes what seems to be a clever essay mocking the "comfortable Christianity" subtended by the prevalent Hegelism of his day. In the twinkling of an eye, however, the reader finds himself confronted by a probing of the Biblical tale (Genesis 22)of Abraham's summons by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. With four brief, fable-like re tellings of the ordeal, Kierkegaard challenges simple "Sunday school" faith with terror. "WHAT might have gone on in Abraham's mind as he made the THREE DAY JOURNEY to the mountain to slaughter his child?...WHAT would his wife Sarah have thought? WHAT did Isaac think of his father; and his Father of HIS GOD for the rest of their days?" Kierkegaard barely deigns to allow "Abraham was faithful...and they all lived happily ever after..." No,the seminal existentialist forces the reader to recognize that...ethically, and "legally"...what Abraham "almost" did was criminally monstrous or insane. How then is Father Abraham saluted by the ages for heroic obedience,belief and love? SK here presents his intellectually dizzying formulation of THE TELEOLOGICAL SUSPENSION of THE ETHICAL. Here the individual...acting beyond any concept of GOOD & Evil...places himself before God alone without any recourse to meta-law, "equity", or Conscience. He is acting absolutely Alone...in FEAR and TREMBLING...in category-less dread and Freedom. In a series of elaborations (The PROBLEMATA) SK attempts to obliquely guide the reader through the irrational to the brink where "the leap of Faith" may be NECESSITATED...though never explained or "mediated". For the student of the history of ideas or philosophy this is the fundamental work by, perhaps, the premier expositor of modern Existentialism. Frederich Nietzsche's radical "poetry" aside, one has to travel back to the writings of St. Augustine to meet such discernment of the human condition. FEAR and TREMBLING is a masterpiece of profound, ironic, Truth-testing philosophy. It challenges the reader to examine the ethical foundations of his life and compare...but never compare...the finite grounds of his "radical" choices with the Groundless Infinity that unique Ultimate Actions rarely but ominously confront Individuals with as Tasks that afford no excuse, and NO ESCAPE......

Kierkegaard first takes issue with the prevailing (i.e., Hegelian) notion that faith is something to be "transcended" by means of systematic philosophy, and almost baits the reader to consider what it means to go "beyond" faith anyway. Next, he postulates 4 thought experiments that (poetically) reconstruct the Abraham and Isaac ordeal, each of which is intended to show how the story might be harmonized with the prevailing Hegelian mode of understanding the "univeral" in ethical terms. Finally, the section on "Problemata" argues against three (at the time well-known) postulates of Hegelian ethical thought by showing that these are all inconsistent with some remarkable feature of the faith that Abraham evidences.

The section on the Knight of Infinite Resignation and the Knight of Faith provide, albeit obliquely, support for the view that the movement of faith is absolute, and cannot be transcended.

Hannay's introduction is excellent (however, I would suggest first skimming it, then reading Kierkegaard's book, then reading it in earnest at the end).

Kierkegaard first takes issue with the prevailing (i.e., Hegelian) notion that faith is something to be "transcended" by means of systematic philosophy, and almost baits the reader to consider what it means to go "beyond" faith anyway. Next, he postulates 4 thought experiments that (poetically) reconstruct the Abraham and Isaac ordeal, each of which is intended to show how the story might be harmonized with the prevailing Hegelian mode of understanding the "univeral" in ethical terms. Finally, the section on "Problemata" argues against three (at the time well-known) postulates of Hegelian ethical thought by showing that these are all inconsistent with some remarkable feature of the faith that Abraham evidences.

The section on the Knight of Infinite Resignation and the Knight of Faith provide, albeit obliquely, support for the view that the movement of faith is absolute, and cannot be transcended.

This book is simply outstanding. Kierkegaard wrote that book in prose, but with such a spirit that you read it as a one big poem, hymne to faith.

If you want to get an unforgettable experience read this book. And you'll not be alone in your admiration. Kirkegaard works were so influential, that they led to the birth of "XX century's phylosophy" - existencialism.

There is much I do not understand here. If I can make a weak attempt to grasp the obvious, it is that while Abraham is to be admired for his faith, it is a faith which cannot possibly be understood by anyone other than himself in an ultimate sense. Kierkegaard is writing in an age of Hegelian hegemony, and he must constantly describe his thoughts in relation to the dialectic, where the universal or ethical holds complete intellectual rule over the absolute or individual standards of right and wrong. His many historical and legendary analogies - which might have helped his contemporary readers understand the concepts of faith as going beyond total resignation to stand on the strength of the absurd - are to some degree lost on the less literate like myself in the late 20th century. Much is made of the tragic hero and the sharp distinction between his simple appeal to the duty of the universal ethic and Abraham's case in which no amount of ethical conjuring could make God's demand justified or righteous to anyone other than Abraham as an individual. Furthermore, the faith which uniquely makes Abraham's actions righteous is precisely the point he could not have conveyed in words, and any attempt would have minimized or nullified the action of faith. Paradox and the dialectic are very key to his discussion and a solid understanding of both is recommended. Even without those, however, this book will deepen your awe of God's demand and Abraham's faith as it challenges your understanding of your own faith.