Notes
NOTES
1. Quoted from J. G. Hamann, Werke III, p. 190. While engaged in war with Gabii, Tarquinius Superbus (an early king of Rome) had his son flee to Gabii under the pretence that he had been mistreated by his father. The inhabitants made him their military leader, and by striking off the heads of the tallest poppies in his garden before the eyes of his son's messenger, Tarquinius managed to convey to the son that he should put to death or banish the leading men of Gabii. This done, Gabii quickly surrendered to Tarquinius. Kierkegaard quotes the original German.
2. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973, Vol. I, pp. 231 and 252. Kierkegaard quotes in Latin.
3. ibid., Vol. I, p. 83.
4. 2 Timothy 4.7.
5. A reference to an advertisement in Berlingske Tidende, a newspaper run by someone of whom Kierkegaard strongly disapproved and so referred to here slightingly as the ‘Advertiser’. In his journals (Papirer IV, A 88) he adds, in a comment on the advertisement, that ‘the writer should understand that of which he speaks better than the reader, otherwise he shouldn't write’.
6. In J. L. Heiberg's play, The Reviewer and the Beast, Trop says, while tearing the manuscript of [his tragedy The Destruction of the Human Race] in two equal parts: ‘If it doesn't cost more to preserve good taste, why shouldn't we do it?’
7. About three years before the publication of Fear and Trembling Copenhagen got its first buses.
8. In saying that Hegel's ‘System’ would be better described as an omnibus than a tower, Kierkegaard may be alluding to the tower in Luke 14.28–30, referred to in the second of the three problemata below, which was not completed because the builder had not ‘counted the cost’.
9. Genesis 22.1. See note 53 on ‘temptation’. Biblical quotations are from the English Authorized Version, not translations of Kierkegaard's quotations from the Danish.
10. In the journals (Papirer III, A 197) Kierkegaard quotes what he calls a ‘quite perfect example of romanticism in the Old Testament, in the Book of Judith 10.11: “And Judith went out, she and her maid with her; but the men of the place watched her until she came down from the mountain, until she came through the valley, and they could see her no more. And they went straight on into the valley”.’
11. The expression ‘Never a word was spoken of this’ occurs in Kierkegaard's journals (e.g. Papirer VIII, 1 A 17) in connection with something he learned about, and perhaps from, his father in his early youth. What was never spoken about was whatever Kierkegaard's father took to be the cause of his own morbid melancholy.
12. Kierkegaard's allusions here are to Homer (e.g. Iliad vi, 146).
13. Also Homer (e.g. Iliad iii, 381, where a god saves a hero by enveloping him in a cloud and carrying him away).
14. 1 Corinthians 3.18. ‘If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’
15. Hebrews 9.9. ‘By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country’.
16. The reference seems to be to Jeremiah, though the Danish editors of the 1963 edition suggest also Ovid, who was exiled on the Black Sea, where he wrote his Tristia ex Ponto.
17. Galatians 3.8. ‘And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.’
18. Joshua 10.12. ‘Then spake Joshua… and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gideon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’
19. Exodus 17.6. ‘Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shall smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.’
20. Genesis 18.12–13. ‘Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old?’ But note ibid., 17.17, which says, ‘Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?’
21. ‘Seventy’ seems an arbitrary number. According to Genesis 21.5, Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born and seventy-five when God first gave him the promise (ibid., 12.4).
22. Genesis 12.2–3. ‘And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great… and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.’
23. Genesis 18.22 ff. ‘And the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward Sodom; but Abraham stood yet before the Lord. And Abraham drew near and said, Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked?’
24. Freely rendered by Kierkegaard after Genesis 22.1.
25. Luke 23.30. ‘Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.’
26. Genesis 22.3.
27. Freely rendered by Kierkegaard after Genesis 22.3 and 9 f.
28. Genesis 8.4.
29. cf. Plato's Phaedrus, 22 and 37.
30. 2 Thessalonians 3.10 and 12. ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat… Now them that are such we command and exhort, by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.’
31. In Oehlenschläger's play Aladdin, first produced in Copenhagen in 1839, the hero and Noureddin represent light and darkness respectively. cf. Papirer II, A 451.
32. This is Plato's version of the Orpheus legend. See Symposium 179d.
33. Matthew 3.9. ‘And think not to say within yourselves. We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.’
34. Isaiah 26.18. ‘We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth…’
35. Themistocles, as related by Plutarch, Themistocles, 3, 3.
36. Matthew 11.28. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’
37. Matthew 19.16 ff.
38. It is generally assumed that the reference is indirectly to Regine.
39. From Horace's Letters, I, 18, 84: ‘It's your affair when the neighbour's house is on fire.’
40. Kierkegaard refers frequently to what he regarded as his physical deformity.
41. Matthew 18.21–2: ‘Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.’
42. John 2.1–10.
44. Ephesians 5.16. The passage in the Danish Bible would be rendered in English by ‘buying the seasonable time’.
45. It is assumed that Kierkegaard wrote this after hearing of Regine's engagement, an event that had caused him to rewrite the conclusion of Repetition in a way that would signal to her his approval. The fact that this passage puts Kierkegaard's response to the engagement in a rather different light would indicate that Fear and Trembling was written after Repetition, in spite of the order in which they appear in the Samlede Vœrker.
46. From a Danish folk-song.
47. See Magyarische Sagen, Mährchen und Erzählungen, by Johann Grafen Mailáth, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1837, 2nd ed., p. 18. The tale is called ‘Erzsi die Spinnerin’. See Papirer II, A 449.
48. Horace's Odes III, 24, 6: ‘cruel necessity of fate’.
49. Matthew 17.20. ‘… If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’
50. Kierkegaard writes in his journals (Papirer IV, A 107): ‘If I had had faith I would have stayed with Regine.’ The entry is dated 17 May 1843.
51. Karl Daub was a contemporary theological writer whose work Kierkegaard comments on in his journals and elsewhere. See Papirer IV, A 92.
52. The notion of incommensurability is basically that of the absence of a unit of measure (e.g. length) in terms of which two entities can both be measured exactly. This does not imply incomparability. But in a stronger sense, which Kierkegaard seems to adopt, when two entities are incommensurable (e.g. the individual with reality) they are not strictly comparable at all. In some contexts Kierkegaard treats ‘incommensurable’ as interchangeable with ‘unmeasurable’.
53. ‘Temptation’ expresses three distinct notions in Fear and Trembling, all of them distinguished in the Danish. When God ‘tempts’ Abraham, God is putting Abraham to a test. The test, however, is Abraham's ability to withstand temptation (Fristelse) in another, the usual sense, namely the power of something to attract someone away from a course he or she believes to be the right one. In the present context temptation (Anfœgtelse) is a state in which someone's being tempted in this usual sense is connected with the idea of passing or failing a test of spiritual adequacy. Fear and Trembling contrasts two diametrically opposed applications of this latter: one (as here) in which the individual's pursuit of subjective goals as moral ones is to be failing the test from the viewpoint of the Hegelian conviction that public morality is the final court of moral appeal, the other where any appeal to public moral opinion involves a weakening of the ‘true’ but ‘absurd’ conviction that the individual can have direct subjective access to an absolute court of moral appeal, in terms of which public morality is reduced to a merely relative status. The context makes clear which of these notions the word ‘temptation’ expresses, though all three can be seen to be involved in Abraham's case. The test is whether he can resist the temptation to waver in his absolute loyalty to God by seeking public understanding for the act God has commanded, or worse, by invoking the ‘universal’, e.g. in the form of an appeal to his duty as a father, as an argument against the very idea of an absolute loyalty to God. If Abraham had not loved Isaac as he did, all thought of sacrificing him would have been Anfœgtelse (see p. 61), because the price paid would be being weighed against some personal advantage. As it was, however, the only such advantages conceivable by Abraham would require him to avoid the sacrifice. Thoughts in those directions are Anfœgtelser for Abraham.
54. ‘The Ethical Life’ is the title of Part III of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and Kierkegaard's term ‘det Sædelige’ is a direct translation of ‘das Sittliche’. ‘Good and Conscience’ is the title of a sub-section of Part II. See Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford University Press, London, 1980, and the present translator's Introduction, above.
55. See, e.g., Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979, VI, B, Ib, pp. 321 ff.
56. In some of Hegel's earlier writings (see Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. by H. Nohl, Tübingen, 1906, p. 247), published late and unavailable to Kierkegaard, Abraham is indeed described in this way.
57. Boileau, L'art poétique I, 232.
58. ‘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’ (according to Hegel and also Judge William in the second volume of Either/Or) in the realization that, properly understood, the latter depends on the former. Because it is a conceptual operation it follows that it occurs ‘precisely by virtue of the universal’.
59. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, v. 448, in C. Wilster's trans. Agamemnon says, ‘How lucky to be born in lowly station where one may be allowed to weep.’
60. Menelaus, Calchas, and Ulysses, cf. ibid., v. 107.
61. ibid., v. 687.
62. Judges 11.30–40. ‘And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering… And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances…’
63. While first consul in Rome, L. Junius Brutus put two of his sons to death for trying to restore the Tarquins. Brutus got his name by feigning idiocy in order to escape being murdered by Tarquinius.
64. The ethical life is here, again, Hegel's ‘das Sittliche’.
65. In an ironic sense Abraham's act does, then, stand in a relation to the universal. It is directed against the ‘families’ and ‘nations’ of which he was to be the father.
66. There is some reason to suppose that the category Kierkegaard has in mind here is faith (see A. Hannay, Kierkegaard, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982, p. 89), in the sense defined in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and specifically a relationship ‘unknown to paganism’ (cf. Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1941, p. 496). The trouble with this, however, is that faith in that sense presupposes the concept of sin, which Johannes de silentio says he has deliberately excluded from his discussion of Abraham, who ‘did not become the single individual through sin’ (p. 124 below). So it is unclear how faith will contribute to an understanding of specifically Abraham.
67. See the dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets.
68. Mark 3.22. ‘And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.’
69. A reference to Hegel's view of the function of the State. See the Introduction, above. For Kierkegaard's most sustained attack on ‘levelling’, see Two Ages, trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1978.
70. Kierkegaard uses the Greek ‘skandalon’, which in this context means ‘stumbling block’ or ‘offence’. But ‘scandal’ is apt enough.
71. Genesis 18.11. ‘Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.’
72. Luke 1.38.
73. G. E. Lessing, Auszüge aus den Literatur-Briefen, 81st letter, in Maltzahn's ed., Vol. VI, pp. 205 ff.
74. See Hegel's Logic, trans. W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, §138, pp. 196–200. The child is ‘at first a mere inward’ and ‘determined’ by the ‘will of his parents, the attainments of his teachers, and the whole world of reason that environs him’ (p. 198). The mature man is determined by the inner in the sense that ‘[as] a man is outwardly… so is he inwardly’ (p. 197).
75. See Papirer I, A 237, where Kierkegaard refers to Schleiermacher and the ‘Hegelian dogmatists’ who treat faith as a kind of ‘vital fluid’ or ‘atmosphere’ to be ‘inhaled in spiritual understanding’.
76. C. G. Bretschneider's Lexicon manuale graeco-latinum in libros N.T. (1829), Vol. II, p. 87.
77. In Hebrew the feeble consonants (‘j’ and ‘V’) are said to ‘quiesce’, or become silent, when their sound is absorbed in that of a preceding vowel. See Papirer II, A 406. Here, however, Kierkegaard has got it the wrong way around.
78. Q. Fabius Maximus, known as Cunctator for his caution in war, was appointed dictator of Rome during the war with Hannibal (217 B.C.) and was five times consul (233–209 B.C.).
79. A chief character in a puppet show. Cf. Kasper and Punch.
80. Stokkemœndene i Gulddaasen, a play by Olufsen. Stokkemœnd are people appointed to attend legal proceedings as witnesses.
81. Kierkegaard refers to a ‘Dyrehaugsselskab’, which, assuming ‘Dyrehaug’ is the modern ‘Dyrehavsbakken’, means something like ‘zoo company’, which might indicate either the visitors to the zoo or its inmates.
82. Corresponding passages are Deuteronomy 13.6 f. and 33.9; Matthew 10.37, 19.29. As a ‘similar’ passage Kierkegaard inserted in his MS. a reference to 1 Corinthians 7.11, which, however, seems not appropriate.
83. Hegel's Enzyklopädie, §384.
84. In his Logic (op. cit., §63, p. 99) Hegel equates faith with immediate knowledge, but also with ‘inspiration, the heart's revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or common sense’. Of all these he says they ‘agree in adopting as their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented to consciousness’.
85. Elsewhere Kierkegaard places irony on the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical, as humour on that between the ethical and the religious. Irony for Kierkegaard is the mode of consciousness in which the finite world as such becomes an object of thought, and thus acquires a certain distance; the ‘interesting’ can perhaps be related to this in the way that single finite things or persons can, for a consciousness of this kind, assume importance as representatives of the whole in some aspect and degree or other.
86. The Danish here says ‘med aesthetisk Inderlighed og Concupiscents’, i.e. ‘with aesthetic inwardness and concupiscence’, but since ‘inwardness’ can be misleading and ‘concupiscence’ is oldfashioned I have chosen a more simple rendering.
87. An example of double recognition is where Orestes, who in his attempt to take the statue of Artemis as the price of his recovery from madness has been seized and is to be sacrificed to Artemis, is recognized by, and at the same time recognizes, his sister Iphigenia, whom he believed dead since being sacrificed by Agamemnon but by a devious route had become priestess of Artemis. They escape with Orestes's friend Pylades.
88. Oedipus, in Sophocles's Oedipus the King.
89. Iphigenia, in Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris. Agamemnon did not in fact succeed in sacrificing Iphigenia. Artemis put a hart in her place and took her to Tauris where she became priestess. It was there that she later saved her brother from sacrifice.
90. Aristotle, Natural History, V, 4, 7. cf. Papirer IV, A 36.
91. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, op. cit., vv. 861 ff.
92. An argument that takes advantage of the particular features of a situation or person.
93. In Greece an olive branch was the symbol of entreaty.
94. G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie 1. Bd., first and second pieces (Maltzahn's ed., VII, p. 10).
95. Aristotle, Politics, 8 (5), 3, 3. Augurs really belong to the Roman priesthood.
96. Kierkegaard believed there was a divine veto against his marriage. The example is obviously one he could view with a great deal of ‘aesthetic inwardness and concupiscence’ (see note 86). His journals contain reflections that parallel the possibilities listed here.
97. Axel and Valborg were forbidden by the Church to marry owing to their close consanguinity.
98. See Lessing, op. cit., 1. Bd., twenty-second piece (Maltzahn's ed., VII, p. 96).
99. The legend occurs in a folk-song and has been used by Jens Baggesen in his Agnete from Holmegaard, as well as by Hans Christian Andersen in his dramatic poem Agnete and the Merman, first produced (disastrously) at the Royal Danish Theatre in 1843.
100. In fact it doesn't, while the fairy-tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (Molbech, No. 7) does.
101. Kierkegaard remarks repeatedly (especially Postscript, op. cit., pp. 359 ff. etc.) that the monastic movement of the Middle Ages was a mistaken, ‘abstract’ way of relating oneself to the ‘absolute telos’.
102. Lacking the necessary condition for the attainment of the highest good is the situation Kierkegaard equates with ‘hereditary’ sin. In it the primary problem is to establish a relationship to the ‘absolute telos’, which is a matter for the individual as such and not as an instance of the universal.
103. The Book of Tobit is among the apocrypha of the Old Testament.
104. See Schiller's Resignation, 3rd strophe.
105. Longus was a Greek sophist in the 4th or 5th century A.D., and author of Daphnis and Chloë, an erotic piece that is extant.
106. Book of Tobit, 7.18–20.
107. Shakespeare, King Richard III, Act I, Scene 1. Kierkegaard in fact quotes the German translation, since he could not read English.
108. Stepmothers were traditionally attributed evil influences over their stepchildren.
109. The poet Cumberland's play The Jew was performed frequently at the Royal Danish Theatre between 1795 and 1834. Scheva the Jew was thought by everyone to be a miser and usurer, but in secret he was a great benefactor.
110. In Jens Baggesen's Kirkegaarden in Sobradise (Danske Vœrker, I, p. 282).
111. Aristotle according to Seneca, De tranquillitate animi. Dial. IX, 17, 10. cf. Papirer I, A 148.
112. Tamerlane, king of the Mongolians 1370–1405, a conqueror famed for his cruelty.
113. The honour of destruction. Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus the same night that Alexander the Great was born (356 B.C.), in order to make himself immortal.
114. Gregorius Rimini, an Augustinian monk who was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Paris and died in 1358, was given this name because he subscribed to the view that unbaptized children went to hell, not limbo as usually held among Catholics.
115. Ludvig Holberg's Erasmus Montanus, Act I, Scene 3. A character, the deacon, says, in connection with bargaining for the price of the earth to be cast on a grave, ‘I can say to a peasant, “Will you have fine sand or just earth?”’
116. Matthew 6.17–18.
117. Commentators link this notion, the ‘idea of the congregation’, to the populist religious movement led by Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872). According to Grundtvig, Christianity was based on the ‘living word from the Lord's own mouth’ in the ceremonies of confession, and not on the Bible, which was open to attack.
118. Kierkegaard's word is ‘desultorisk’, or ‘desultorily’ in the sense of ‘skippingly’ or ‘disconnectedly’. Perhaps ‘from different points of view’.
119. King Richard III, Act II, Scene I. Again Kierkegaard quotes the German translation.
120. 1 Corinthians 14.23.
121. Genesis 22.8.
122. Plato's Apology, 36 A. Some texts read ‘thirty votes’.
123. Diogenes Laertius, of Laërte, in Cilicia, most likely lived in the 2nd century A.D. Author of the Lives of the Philosophers, in ten books.
124. ‘The Tailor in Heaven’, Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Vol. I, 2nd ed. (1819), p. 177. According to the Grimms, however, the tailor was really dead.
125. The disciple was Cratylus, an Athenian contemporary of Socrates.