Introduction
INTRODUCTION
God said to Abraham, go kill me a son.
Abe said, Man, you must be puttin' me on.
BOB DYLAN, Highway 61
The Old Testament story of Abraham's journey to the mountain to sacrifice Isaac has been read in widely different ways. It was used by the early Christian Church to celebrate faith and obedience. The focus then was on Abraham and his unreserved submission to God's will. In Jewish culture the story was later used to invoke God's mercy: instead of the hand raised in sacrifice, it was the staying of the hand that assumed importance, when the angel said, ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him’.* Faith, obedience, and mercy are social virtues. For a modern consciousness the story is likely to be read as an anti-social parable of destruction and raw power. The opening verse of Bob Dylan's song concludes, ‘God said, you can do what you want, Abe, but next time you see me comin', you'd better run. Well, Abe said, where you want this killin' done? God said, do it on Highway 61'. Faith, obedience, and mercy have here given way to disbelief, arbitrariness, and intimidation.
Abraham's journey is the centrepiece of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. But Kierkegaard's focus, as originally, is on Abraham; Isaac is little more than a foil to Abraham's ‘greatness’. Yet this greatness is not, as in the traditional reading, Abraham's willingness to be an instrument of God's omnipotence. Kierkegaard's Abraham is great because of what he suffers in a trial of faith. And far from epitomizing social virtues, this Abraham's suffering and greatness seem to isolate him in a very radical way from his society and its social ways. In impressing us with Abraham's greatness Kierkegaard has a very special purpose. In fact one can safely say that Fear and Trembling is not primarily concerned with the story of Abraham and Isaac at all; it uses the story in order to draw the reader's attention to certain very fundamental questions. The work has a polemical purpose and to carry it out Kierkegaard requires us to focus on the nature of the suffering involved in the story. In this introduction I shall explain these features more fully, indicating in some detail the background to Kierkegaard's writings.
Fear and Trembling first appeared in Copenhagen bookshops on 16 October 1843, along with a companion work, Repetition, and a collection of ‘Edifying Discourses’. The first two works were written under false names, ‘Johannes de silentio’ and ‘Constantin Constantius’, a practice followed by Kierkegaard in all the works he later called his ‘aesthetic production’, from Either/Or (1843) to Practice in Christianity (1850). According to its subtitle, Fear and Trembling is a ‘dialectical lyric’. That doesn't mean that Fear and Trembling is a mainly literary work to be judged by standards of style and presentation, or its topic largely a medium for the artistic development of a literary talent. Since it does call itself a lyric, however, we would certainly expect its author to want his handiwork to be judged at least partly by such standards. Indeed all of Kierkegaard's ‘aesthetic’ works are products of someone obviously delighting in his native literary talent. But to read them as purely literary exercises would be misconceived as well as frustrating. Misconceived because, far from being a mere vehicle for literary expression, their themes are very obviously the author's main concern throughout, and where the style may be called literary, that fact is to be seen rather in the light of the author's chosen way of bringing those themes to light. Frustrating because unless the reader gets a firm hold of the theme and its not always immediately transparent ramifications, much of the work will defy the kind of immediate recognition of meaning on which literary presentation depends.
What Kierkegaard means by ‘aesthetic’ is not altogether removed from the idea of appreciation of beauty. It is, one could say, his characterization of a way of life in which anything at all, and not just what we reserve for labels like ‘art’, ‘beauty’, and ‘good taste’, is treated aesthetically. To treat something aesthetically is to grasp it in terms of the immediate impact it makes, of how it strikes you in the here and now, of its tendency to attract or repel you. In a more general way it is, in Kierkegaard's terms, also to treat life itself as a repository of objects of longing or loathing, as well as degrees of lesser affect in between, in short as a pool of goods (of whatever kind) to be secured and the lack of them avoided. The aesthetic life is a life dedicated to what Kierkegaard calls ‘immediacy’. The word is taken from Hegel, for whom it means unreflective knowledge, in which – and this is vital in what follows – he includes faith. In his major ‘dialectical’ work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard describes a person dedicated to the life of immediacy as being ‘absolutely committed to relative ends’.* The idea of absolute commitment to something relative is intended to smack of contradiction, as it surely does, and finding some suitable expression for the conflict here will give us our first taste of the theme of Fear and Trembling. The simplest but in most ways least suitable expression for it is ‘faith’. The word is not only very imprecise; it would be wrong to think of the work as being concerned with faith as such, in some general or particular sense, and not rather with making some point about faith. The suitable expression we need is one that says what kind of faith Kierkegaard has in mind and what, in the words of his pseudonym, he wants to say about it.
But we have one more packet to open. Can we assume that it is possible to say anything at all about faith? Here we need to call attention to the Hegelian background for Kierkegaard's writings. Hegel certainly thought one could talk about faith. But that was because Hegel considered his own philosophy to provide a general vantage-point from which it was in principle possible to discern the true character of all topics ‘proper’ to forms of consciousness other than the philosophical. Hegel discusses two such alternative forms of consciousness: the experience of art and beauty (‘aesthetics’ in the usual, narrower sense) and religious experience. For Hegel these are not alternatives in the sense that they form equally valid routes to knowledge or understanding. The best that either can afford in this respect is a truncated, and in essential ways distorted, vision of the truth. A complete and undistorted vision, or at any rate an adequate grasp of the possibility of such a vision, Hegel calls the Absolute Mind. The Absolute Mind is a rational mind. Art is one way in which the Absolute Mind manifests itself in human consciousness, but only in an opaque fashion. In the experience of beauty, and more especially in art than in nature, the rational appears in bodily form to our senses. Religion is a better but still opaque medium for Absolute Mind. Here the rational appeals both to the senses and to the intellect in so far as it is given a narrative structure, which in Christianity comes as far to approximating the Absolute Mind's vision as is possible in this form of consciousness. But the content is still only symbolic or pictorial. Philosophy is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Mind, and here all that art manifests and all that religion manifests of the Absolute Mind acquires its adequate, rational expression. Naturally then, the Hegelian regards religious faith as a provisional state of mind. In order to grasp reality in the manner appropriate to the rational reality it is, one must go further, one must proceed to the point of view of philosophy, and there one will be able to convert one's religious faith into what that phenomenon ‘really’ is, and whatever that is it is not what it was for one who had it. Then one will not only have gone further than faith, but also put faith in its proper perspective in the (fundamentally rational) scheme of things. One will have put it, moreover, in the form of concepts, transcribed it into the form of shareable thoughts in the words of a common language.
We notice that Kierkegaard has given his author the name ‘Johannes de silentio’, which is allegedly borrowed from one of the Grimms' fairy-tales, ‘The Faithful Servant’.* Kierkegaard's John of Silence is not, however, at all a silent person. If he was he wouldn't be an author. Nor was the faithful servant in the fairy-tale. He told his master, the young king, of three dangers threatening him, though realizing that in doing so he would be turned to stone. (To anticipate a further connection with Fear and Trembling, when the royal couple later got two sons they gave the lives of these in sacrifice in order to bring Johannes back to life, whereupon Johannes brought the children back to life.) Johannes, the author, is no slouch with words; and yet he finds it difficult to say anything about faith except that it is something which, if you have it, you will not be able to explain to anyone else. Instead of seeing faith from some elevated point of view like that of Hegel's ‘System’ (Hegel's own word for the complete account of the ascent to the Absolute Mind's transparency), Kierkegaard's author conveys to us the hard fact that faith, if it is anything, simply has no place in a system of thought, that ‘faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off’. Faith, for Johannes de silentio, is an expression rather of the limit of what can be thought. A person who has it cannot say what it is he has; or at least he cannot say what faith is from any ‘systematic’ or scientific point of view. (We should note that Hegel also thought of his system as a science, the science of spirit.) But having read Fear and Trembling we might even suppose that Kierkegaard has wanted his pseudonym to tell us that if someone genuinely has faith, as Abraham the father of Isaac is said to have proved by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, then that person has in that respect exiled himself from the realm of human discourse. His faith is an affront to humanity as we generally understand this, that is as a more or less well-defined set of dispositions that we expect or recognize in each other and value.
There may be doubts (there is certainly controversy) as to the precise extent of the unintelligibility that Kierkegaard would have his author attribute to the having of faith. But the general drift of Fear and Trembling's treatment of faith is clear enough: if we are to talk of faith at all it is of something we cannot explain in any language that suffices for people to describe and justify their actions and attitudes to one another. Fear and Trembling has a Preface which says that faith in Kierkegaard's time is thought to be where one begins in life, not where one aims to end. A parallel is drawn with doubt. The Greek sceptics strove all their lives to retain their suspension of judgement, and thus as they saw it their peace of mind, against every pressure that threatened to extort a decision from them in some matter of controversy. Doubt was what they sought to preserve, not a state of immaturity they felt bound to overcome. So too with the prevalent Hegelian notion of faith. It is not grasped as something hard to come by. To be able to believe, as Johannes says in his Preface that his contemporaries do, that faith is the beginning and not the end one must have a cheapened conception of faith. One must think of faith as a state of a certain kind which it is right and proper for mature human beings to overcome. Faith is then not the highest one can aspire to, as it was for former generations; nor therefore are the goals contemporaries set themselves the same as those set by generations for whom faith was a ‘task for a whole life-time’. Take Abraham, the ‘father of faith’. His faith is said to have been put to the test by God. A grim test by any standards. Abraham has to be prepared, to the point of actually performing the deed, to kill his only and much-loved son Isaac. Abraham withstood the test, but was allowed at the last moment to sacrifice a ram instead, and has ever after been celebrated as the worthy father of the nations and families descended from his son. But the celebration is performed merely in words. We not only do not understand what Abraham went through, we are led by Hegelian philosophy to suppose that we have the measure of Abraham's greatness and that the faith Abraham bore witness to is to be treated as though it were ‘a children's disease which one must hope to get over as soon as possible’. In an Epilogue Johannes de silentio asks whether the only way to raise the value of what we consider to be human ideals is to be less complacent, more critical, about having already attained them – if for no other reason than ‘to have something to fill the time with’, i.e. by taking up the slack. He offers an alternative, to see what life's problems and tasks really are, to keep them fresh in mind, and to bear in mind that they are not to be solved and performed by acquiring new forms of consciousness in which the problems and tasks virtually disappear as they do for Hegelians, so that succeeding generations inherit the solutions without having to face the problems.
The most embracing general message of Fear and Trembling seems to be, then, that the notion of faith is in current discussion of it so far cheapened that what is talked about is not properly called faith at all; and that if we are to praise venerable figures like Abraham, or Abraham in particular since he is revered as the father of faith, we should be made to appreciate what it was like to be Abraham undergoing the trial of faith. If Abraham is to be said to be great, then we should be given a clear picture of what it was that he achieved. This Johannes de silentio sets out to do in the first of Fear and Trembling's two fairly neat divisions. This first part is lyrical rather than dialectical. We are ‘tuned’ to the right frame of mind in a short section which presents four different versions of the Abraham and Isaac story, all of which would make Abraham intelligible to us but none of which would make him the father of faith. Our author presents the four versions as imagined by someone who was first gripped by the story as a child but later, without losing his sense of the grandeur of Abraham, has grown increasingly perplexed about what Abraham actually did, and tries to put himself in the position of an observer of the events – not, we are told, to add the detail of immediate experience to his earlier fascination, but to try to grasp in thought what happened, an attempt which Johannes de silentio as it were takes over and whose nature earns for his ‘lyric’ the qualification ‘dialectical’. There follows a ‘speech in praise of Abraham’. The notion of speech is central to Johannes de silentio's ‘lyrical’ effort at conveying to us what Abraham actually went through. (Which is why I have not translated the Danish ‘Lovtale’ as is customary with ‘eulogy’ or ‘panegyric’.) Fear and Trembling has as its central (as opposed to enveloping) concern the question of whether what faith is, if it is anything, can be spoken about. The conclusion appears to be that it cannot. But we can certainly speak about Abraham. We can speak about him in many ways. Unthinkingly as the child hearing the story for the first time, and who has not yet learned the distinctions we employ when adult; or – as our author goes on in a more ironic vein to point out in the following section – in the way of the cleric who knows the distinctions but fails to apply them as he goes through the verbal motions of praising Abraham in his Sunday sermon; or, as we are told in the ‘speech’, in the way of the poet who sees in his hero a better nature that he might himself have aspired to but as a poet prefers merely to commemorate by giving expression to. Johannes de silentio takes us further than all of these. He tries to convey what it must have meant to Abraham to be told by God that he was to sacrifice Isaac, to want to bear witness to his faith but to be able to do so only by putting his own son to death. Abraham could have been great in a number of ways. He might have sacrificed himself instead. Or sacrificed Isaac but in resignation rather than faith (see below). But his special greatness was that, in doing what he did, he did not doubt that he would get Isaac back. Abraham believed he would, if not keep Isaac, at least have him restored, whatever he did, even to the point of killing him. His greatness was to be able to keep that faith in that circumstance and in the context of all that Isaac meant to him, and thus in full view of the extent of his loss if his belief should be unfounded. The result of Johannes de silentio's speech in praise of Abraham is to establish his greatness on three counts: in respect of what he loved (God), of what he confidently expected (the impossible), and of what he strove with (not the world, or himself, but again God). The sum of what Johannes de silentio can say here is that Abraham was willing, and in the most extreme test imaginable proved himself able, to accept that human life, Isaac's, Abraham's, everyone's, acquires its meaning and value from the source of creation itself, not from ‘the raging elements and forces of creation’ that confront a person and bear him along in the world, both outside and in the ‘dark passions’ inside his own soul.
But although our author can admire Abraham for this, there is still the question of whether he can understand him. This question is raised in the second, more properly ‘dialectical’ part of Fear and Trembling. This part opens with a ‘Preamble from the Heart’ (Foreløbig Expectoration, lit. ‘preliminary unbosoming’, usually rendered, misleadingly for English ears, as ‘preliminary expectoration’) that sets the stage by giving graphic accounts of the distinctions we need to understand what ‘faith’ means in this context. By ‘dialectic’ Kierkegaard means something not far removed from what modern philosophers would call ‘conceptual analysis’, or the clarification of distinctions, though here distinctions hard to face rather than hard to make. The most manifest aim of the section, called ‘Problemata’, to which the unbosoming is a ‘preliminary’ is to show that if Abraham is indeed to be praised for the specific greatness attributed to him in the ‘speech’, then certain central principles of Hegelian philosophy are untenable. Conversely, if they are tenable, then Hegelians should not be paying lip service to Abraham's greatness. The principles are taken up in the three problemata which form the dialectical part proper of Fear and Trembling.
According to Hegel's concept of what he calls ‘the ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) behaviour is moral when it contributes to the maintenance of the ethical unit formed by any society. Actions undertaken by the individual on his own behalf lack a moral aspect unless they can be linked, in intention and/or fact, to the well-being of society as a whole; and an individual who feels unbound by ties of association and duty (at least to his associates), or does not see the necessity in respect of his own well-being of personal participation in the social whole, lacks insight into the true, ‘rational’ relationship between an individual and society, or, in the terminology both Hegel and Kierkegaard use, between ‘particular’ and ‘universal’. (I have translated ‘den Enkelte’ as ‘the single individual’, though occasionally also as ‘particular’, and not just as ‘the individual’, since Kierkegaard sometimes refers to the individual, or Individet, in contexts where the distinction between an individual-as-particular's being and not being constituted in the universal is not the issue. And I have translated ‘det Almene’ as ‘the universal’ even though this is misleading if it suggests absolute generality in a logical universe; in Hegel and in Kierkegaard ‘universal’ is related to the notion of ‘whole’ as opposed to ‘part’ or at most to what applies generally within a concrete domain, e.g. a society or nation.) In Fear and Trembling the requirement of ethics is stated – though perhaps only postulated (see below) – as being that the individual should be ‘doing something for the universal’. According to this view, to do what would normally count as contrary to your duties can only be justified if there is some wider benefit to the universal at stake. Thus you may be called upon in the service of the State to act contrary to your obligations as a father or mother. If what you are called upon to do is, say, sign a death-warrant for the execution of your son, you will be exonerated for that aspect of your action which would otherwise be labelled a moral outrage against your child (and the society of which the child is of course also a member). Indeed not only will you be exonerated but acclaimed as a kind of moral hero. But if you were to carry out that same aspect of the action outside such a context, and if there were nothing in the action that counted as doing something for the universal, then ethically speaking you would be damned.
But that is just Abraham's situation. He is prepared to kill his own son even though in doing so he does nothing for the universal. Indeed, as our author points out, there is an added irony in the case of Abraham, since it had been God's promise to him that through Isaac he was to be the progenitor of the nations that are the very repository of any (future) ‘universal’. In so far as the universal enters into Abraham's act, it does so only as it lies ‘concealed in [Isaac's] loins’. If Abraham's act is not to be simple, or even compound, murder, then there must be some higher court of appeal than that of the ethical life; there must be some authority that can be called absolute in relation to the ethical life, and in relation to which the ethical life is itself merely relative. The situation where that condition is satisfied Johannes de silentio calls the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, since in that case the ethical life no longer has its goal within itself, but is subservient as a whole to some other end, or telos.
Kierkegaard's use of the Abraham and Isaac story in Fear and Trembling has caused much controversy. It has led some to reject Kierkegaard's thought out of hand, as committing him to the view that barbaric acts can be sanctioned by appeal to ‘faith’. Others, more inclined to be sympathetic to Kierkegaard from the start, have sought for saving interpretations, for instance in the fact that Fear and Trembling is after all the work of a pseudonym and the views expressed (as Kierkegaard expressly says) are not to be identified as Kierkegaard's own, or Kierkegaard was half-poet and so inclined to select his examples for their immediate impact rather than analogical accuracy, or else his concerns are polemical and so the Abraham and Isaac example can be catalogued as strategic exaggeration, and so on. I would not disparage such attempts to save Kierkegaard, or even the decision to reject his thought out of hand: and I certainly would not do so without sufficient space to spread out the various views and assess them. However, it seems to me that such reactions are often based on a failure to look closely enough at the actual text and to follow the argument. The first place to look is at this notion of faith. What is it that Abraham is supposed to exemplify?
In his ‘Preamble from the Heart’ Johannes de silentio presents us with a graphically drawn distinction between resignation and faith, represented in the figures of their respective ‘knights’. There is no faith, in Kierkegaard's sense, without prior resignation. More than that, there is no faith unless the believer takes with him something essential to the knight of resignation. And there is no resignation unless there is something in the world that a person wants in the strong sense in which one says he or she has set his or her heart on it. Resignation is, as it were, renouncing one's most cherished hopes when whatever is hoped for proves unattainable. Resignation is not giving up thinking about one's heart's desire: on the contrary, being resigned requires retaining the original interest but accepting that nothing on earth will permit it to be satisfied. If you were to accept that it could indeed be satisfied, it could only be ‘on the strength of the absurd’. The word ‘absurd’ here means not ‘logically impossible’ but ‘humanly impossible’, or ‘in any intelligible way impossible’. When a friend dies one may want more than anything that the friend be restored to life, and of course that is not possible: one could only think it was possible on the strength of the absurd. And if one did think it possible on the strength of the absurd, one would no doubt be convicted of absurdity oneself if one let one's hopes, even expectations, be known. There is no logical absurdity in the hope or expectation; one doesn't wish that one's friend were both dead and alive, only alive; but it is nevertheless an absurd hope or expectation and anyone entertaining such could only do so in the full consciousness that the absurd must actually take place for fulfilment to occur. If, for instance, one entertained the hope or expectation without fully facing up to the fact, or conviction, that its fulfilment is a human impossibility, one would be too confused to be a knight of resignation. If the case of resurrection sounds too far-fetched, take our author's own example. A young man falls in love with a princess but then realizes he has no prospects there and resigns himself to the impossibility. The idea of there being any prospects is therefore now absurd. Clearly it is not a contradiction. Who knows? Perhaps one day he will find himself in the situation where the princess is no longer out of bounds. But so long as he is resigned he does not contemplate that possibility. Faith is then the young man's ability, not even just to contemplate the possibility, but to accept that what is (absurdly) possible is in fact in store for him. As Johannes de silentio points out, what people often mean by ‘faith’ is something much less, something one needs ‘in order to renounce everything’, not something that itself presupposes that one has renounced everything.
Another thing. Faith is almost exclusively linked to the idea of belief in God's existence. But that is not at all what is meant here. Johannes de silentio envisages the situation had Abraham only resigned. Resignation for Abraham would not be his denying himself the belief that God exists. According to Johannes, resignation on Abraham's part would be giving up Isaac to God. The resigned Abraham would not expect to get Isaac back. But that would not be because there was no God to manipulate the suprahuman possibilities needed to restore Isaac; rather it would be because God was not the kind of deity one could count on to be disposed to give back to Abraham his opportunity to exercise paternal love. The resigned Abraham believes God wants him to sacrifice Isaac and that the sacrifice will be the end of Isaac as far as he is concerned. If Abraham did not already believe in God's existence there would clearly be difficulties. If the test was a proof of Abraham's belief in the existence of God, who could Abraham suppose set the test? The story says he accepted that God had set it. But then he already believed in God's existence – and that would be just as true even if he failed the test. What the test requires of Abraham is not that he believe that God exists, but that he believe that God both wants and will be able to give him back his opportunity to exercise paternal love. Faith in God's existence is something Abraham already has; the faith he is to prove is his believing that he will not in the end be deprived of Isaac even if he carries out God's command to kill him. ‘In the end’ does not include ‘in the hereafter’. It is, as Johannes de silentio says, for this life that he believes in the possibility of getting Isaac back on the strength of the absurd. Abraham's trial is to show that he believes that he and Isaac will be living together again even after he has sacrificed Isaac.
We can get nearer to the core of the story in Kierkegaard's version by varying its scenario. Suppose Kierkegaard had indeed intended that the test should be of Abraham's faith in God's existence. That would have meant that Abraham had the option of not believing in the existence of God; and given the nature of the test Abraham would surely find it hard to associate it with belief in any kind of deity that he would want to believe existed, so for theoretical reasons as well as to protect Isaac he would no doubt choose not to believe. Suppose, secondly, that Abraham sacrifices Isaac and does not get him back ‘in the end’. That might mean that the test was not at all as Abraham supposed. The test could have been to withstand the temptation to suspend the ethical teleologically, for God could be a Hegelian who wanted to have proof of Abraham's faith in the rightness of ‘accomplishing the universal’. Or suppose, thirdly, that we exclude the possibility of a Hegelian God but still Abraham does not get Isaac back. Could a God such as Abraham believed in demand such an action, intending Abraham to believe he will get Isaac back, and yet not give Isaac back? Or would that (shades of Descartes!*) be some kind of proof that God did not exist?
Regarding the first supposition, as I have said, it is perfectly clear that Abraham is not to be understood as someone who could decide not to believe that God existed; his choice concerns rather what one is to hope for or expect given that God does exist. Second, it is equally clear that Kierkegaard's God is not Hegel's, but a source of values the realization of which does indeed call for the teleological suspension of the ethical. As for the third and more problematic supposition, it strikes me as desirable, in tackling the question of Kierkegaard's intentions here, to focus on what is actually recounted. Abraham believes he will get Isaac back and he does. The possibility that he might not is one that Abraham chooses to ignore, correctly as it turns out. The point of the story is best sought in these two features.
The ‘Preamble from the Heart’ gives us a portrait of a knight of faith very different from that of Abraham. There the knight is outwardly indistinguishable from the proverbial man in the street; he seems in fact to be petit bourgeois from top to toe, a shopman in the street. He is visibly at home in the world, and attends with all possible enthusiasm to any of life's details. No sign of the faraway look, the resigned detachment, of someone who has given up his hopes for this world; but neither anything to compare with the silent resolution of Abraham. And yet, we are told, this person is at every moment making the ‘movement of faith’ against the settled conviction that ‘humanly speaking’ it is absurd that the things he enthuses over should have the value he obviously ascribes to them. The intended analogy with Abraham could be this. Isaac is, in not just the metaphorical sense, the whole world for Abraham (as the promise of future generations he is the whole world also in a wider sense), and the latter's willingness to part with Isaac represents the necessary feature of resignation which is the renunciation of the human possibility of possessing ‘the whole world’. This feature must be an element in Abraham's faith. But only this feature, not the whole of resignation. Johannes de silentio's knight of resignation, the young man in love with the princess, once he realizes the futility of his love, cancels it as a worldly project and turns his idea of the princess into a kind of attribute of God, directing his love at God instead. Our author says that his love takes on ‘the expression of eternal love’. If Abraham were to resign himself to losing Isaac he would abandon Isaac to God and direct his love at God, away from the world which now conspicuously lacks all that as a father he loves. But although as a knight of faith he must emulate the knight of resignation in accepting the human impossibility of a continued earthly love of Isaac, precisely as a knight of faith he restores his love to its former target, the worldly state, still a human impossibility, but now, on the strength of the absurd, regained in faith as a divine possibility, which he even anticipates as a certainty. Obviously we can raise the question, what if his certainty is misplaced?, and speculate about the implications in that event. Would it be proof that God did not exist? Or that Abraham was wrong to assume that the best for Isaac and him was that they should stay together, or to assume that it was not better for Isaac to be with God? Would it show that resignation was the appropriate stopping place and faith too far? But these questions I believe distract attention from the features of the story that are meant to be salient. According to these we should see Abraham primarily as in a most definitive way accepting that the good things in life, represented for him in Isaac, derive their value not from the mere fact that they exist and can be valued, enjoyed, delighted in, but from the source of existence itself. Abraham is, as it were, handing Isaac back so as to receive him again on the proper basis.
It can certainly seem that important elements in the Abraham story drop out if we take the analogy between Abraham and the shopman to extend no further than this. In the first place, there is nothing in Johannes de silentio's portrayal of the knight of faith as shopman to suggest sacrifice, and Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is supposed to be the test of his faith. Second, there is nothing in the portrayal of the shopman knight to suggest the breach of ethical responsibility that Abraham's sacrifice involves.
Let us briefly consider these two disanalogies. First the element of sacrifice. To make a sacrifice is to give away something or someone of value in an interest that stands higher on the valuescale than the (admittedly already high) interest served by refraining from giving it or the person away. The problem with understanding Abraham is to grasp what that higher interest can be. Sacrifice in a higher cause is a familiar enough occurrence, in history and in myth; usually it is in the interests of the nation or the State, and the sacrifice is made to the (tearfilled) applause of those who identify their own interests with that of the nation or the State. But in sacrificing Isaac Abraham is serving no higher interest of that openly shared kind. No one will applaud him. Now in ordinary life we abandon things and persons for quite selfish reasons. But we would often like to parade these ‘losses’ as sacrifices on behalf of projects of a not purely selfish nature. A young man might abandon his plans to marry and excuse himself by telling his jilted fiancée that marriage would interfere with his own longer-term interests in being a ‘fulfilled’ human being, or, still more pompously, with society's interests in the fruits of his further education. He might even try to convince her it was in her better interests. For any outsider, including the fiancée, it would be very hard to tell how honest these claims to unselfishness were, or whether the real reason was that the young man was tired of the girl, thinks marriage will bind him, or wants more ‘experiences’ before ‘settling down’.
The Abraham story is not like an everyday one. As Johannes de silentio tells it there can be no deception or self-deception of that kind. Abraham could not be wrong in believing that he has no selfish interest to serve in abandoning Isaac. He has only one selfish interest, and that is invested in Isaac. There is nothing Abraham could envisage for his own benefit that was not identical with his hopes for Isaac. There is therefore no basis in Abraham for the general doubt one may entertain about a sacrificer's honesty, that people often do have motives to conceal purely selfish reasons for disregarding the wishes and interests of those whose interests they would be expected to protect. That being so, when we are told that Abraham abandons Isaac in order to prove his faith, we cannot suspect, as in ordinary life we often can, that this is just a cover that serves to conceal some more mundane interest. In intending to kill Isaac Abraham has no other interest than to testify to his faith – which we recall is belief that he is going to keep Isaac in spite of the human impossibility of his doing so if he puts Isaac to death. Note that by being himself the cause of Isaac's death Abraham also eliminates the kind of doubt one can have about a person's faith when it is adopted in order to alleviate the pain, say, of bereavement caused naturally. Here Abraham, by bereaving himself of Isaac, is the occasion of the torment that calls for alleviation. His faith cannot be a means of alleviating pain when it is the cause of the pain it is supposed to alleviate. The main point, however, is precisely that the story of Abraham as Fear and Trembling presents it is artificially removed from the kinds of context in which sacrifices are normally called for, and from the situations that normally call for them. This allows Abraham to act in a way that unambiguously conveys his belief about the things he values, without his personal interest in these infecting the belief in a way that can normally make professions of faith suspect. Of course you might say that the intention to prove his faith is itself a personal interest of Abraham's. That would be the case if, for instance, Abraham acted as he did in order to show God that he was able to obey any command of God's, because, as one might say, he fancied himself as a totally obedient servant of God. But in fact there is nothing of this kind to be elicited from the story as we are told it. All we are told is that Abraham wanted to show his faith, and, as we have seen, that faith consists in the belief that he will keep Isaac, or that Isaac will be restored. Normally a sacrificer does not entertain the prospect of receiving again what he parts with. But that is because in the normal case a sacrifice is an act of resignation, not of (Abraham's kind of) faith.
The story of Abraham and Isaac need not be taken, therefore, as a literal description of what a person must be prepared to do if he is to be said to have faith. It can be read as an allegory in which Abraham's actions symbolize some general feature of a religious consciousness rather than illustrate the sort of deeds expected of someone who has that consciousness. What that general feature is might be specified in a variety of ways. In the above I have suggested that it has to do with the assumption a religious believer must make about the things and persons he values in the world, and that this assumption can be brought to light in the case where something or someone a person totally sets his heart on proves to be humanly speaking unattainable. This might suggest that faith, the belief that it is nevertheless to be attained ‘on the strength of the absurd’, is only for losers, the young men whose princesses are unavailable, the young maidens who are doomed never to find husbands (another of our author's examples). That would be a very narrow concept of faith (though there is a tendency in Kierkegaard to talk as if faith was only possible for sufferers). But Johannes de silentio's ‘lyrical’ account of resignation, too, might be allegorical. It could be read as symbolizing the way a person must look upon everything that he values, whether or not it is unattainable. It could symbolize the attitude that says that nothing in the world has value simply because one values it. This would be resignation about values generally, as in Max Weber's ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung). Faith would be, correspondingly, the attitudinal appendix to this, that things have their value nonetheless, but they have them on their own account and from God. It would be plausible to attribute this compound attitude to the shopman knight of faith, but also of course to attribute it to Abraham and his belief that what he is giving to God will be returned, as it was but with its status clarified.
There remains the second disanalogy between the shopman knight and Abraham, namely that there is nothing in Johannes de silentio's portrayal of the former to suggest a breach with the ethical. This brings us to the infamous ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, the subject, as remarked before, of much academic controversy. The problem has been to reconcile the idea that Abraham's sacrifice can be a ‘good’ action, because in fulfilment of God's command, with its being an action in total defiance of any conceivable ethical standard. It is not a sacrifice that can be defended on the grounds that it recognizably or even imaginably contributes to the good of some person or persons whose good might be conceived to stand higher on some scale of values. Indeed there is no person or persons whom it benefits at all.
Once more it pays to take heed of what Kierkegaard has his author say. The words are, as always with Kierkegaard, chosen with expert care and used with great consistency. We should first recall what has already been said. The faith that Kierkegaard is concerned with here is not plain belief in the existence of God; it is belief that the projects on which one sets one's heart are possible even when they prove humanly impossible to carry through. It is the belief that they can be carried through, but on a new basis, as once Isaac is restored the project of loving him as befits a father continues but now reconstituted ‘on the strength of the absurd’. In the third of the problemata, on the question of whether Abraham should have told the affected parties (including of course the sacrificial victim) of his intention to sacrifice Isaac, we are told another story – or rather several versions of another story, that of Agnete and the merman, which unlike the Abraham one is clearly intended to mirror a situation in real life. In drawing his conclusions from this story our author tells us that the greatest person he can conceive of is one who ‘becomes revealed’. In Kierkegaard's terminology that means someone who has the strength of mind to face (normal) moral responsibilities (of frankness as well as concern) in spite of certain fundamental obstacles. It is also called ‘accomplishing the universal’ or ‘realizing the universal’. In a version of the legend outlined by Johannes de silentio the merman realizes the universal by marrying Agnete, but can only do so ‘on the strength of the absurd’, by ‘making the movement of faith’.
Now Johannes says he understands the merman, because the merman is in the humanly intelligible situation, even the familiar situation, of being prevented by his own guilt from realizing the universal. What is intelligible about this is that the merman has recourse to the absurd (also called the ‘paradox’) in order to come back to the universal from which guilt has exiled him. But Abraham is not intelligible in this way. For Abraham is already quite capable of accomplishing the universal as far as his obligations to Isaac are concerned. He is and wants always to be a good father to Isaac. What is unintelligible about Abraham is that he is using the paradox to make himself incapable of realizing the universal.
But that is not altogether correct. What Abraham himself would say he was doing, so long as what he says is an expression of his faith, is that he is retaining or reaffirming his capacity to realize the universal – for after all, his belief, insane though it must seem, is that he is going to get Isaac back even if he sacrifices him. In his faith Abraham does not think he is putting himself outside the universal where the relevant universal is his being able and willing to exercise his fatherly concern for Isaac: what he thinks is that in order to show God his faith he must put the possibility of his continuing to exercise this concern into God's hands. And yet to someone who does not share Abraham's belief in the need to reconstitute the ability to serve the universal on the strength of the absurd, Abraham's action must seem irrational in the extreme. When he already has the capacity to realize the universal, why does he expose himself to what by any rational calculation is the virtual certainty of losing it? That is one aspect of Abraham's irrationality. Another is that Abraham believes he will get Isaac back – but that, according to the text, does have its parallel in the case of the merman, for he too makes the movement of faith ‘on the strength of the absurd’. However, there is a third aspect of irrationality that is not shared by the merman. Whereas the merman, so to speak, falls back on this latter irrationality as a (or the only) way of getting back his capacity to accomplish the universal, Abraham can give no better reason for resorting to it than that he must prove his faith to God. So the contrast of intelligibilities as between the merman and Abraham looks something like this (the reader is begged to excuse the complexity of the next few lines, which is due as much to the subject-matter as to my poor ability to express the point more clearly). The fact that the merman resorts to absurdity to regain the capacity to accomplish the universal is partially intelligible, it is intelligible on the surface, to someone who equates morality with accomplishment of the universal. But only on the surface, because such a person would not understand the element of absurdity and faith that the merman needs in order to reestablish this capacity which a person who makes this equation will unreflectively praise. However, since such a person fails to grasp the means (which in fact imply a subversion of the basis on which he unreflectively finds the merman's goal praiseworthy), he also fails in any genuine way to grasp what it is he is praising the merman for doing. What the merman is genuinely doing is coming back to the universal via a position which no longer equates morality with accomplishment of the universal. As for Abraham, he despite appearances actually has the same kind of aim as the merman. He wants to regain the capacity to accomplish the universal. But for him, since his specific intention is not to accomplish the universal in some particular way but to prove his faith, i.e. show that he believes that intentions of the kind the merman genuinely has are the properly moral kind of action, this requires as a means an act of self-incapacitation which no one who equates morality with accomplishment of the universal could ever think of praising, and which such a person could therefore never find intelligible as a moral action. A question that arises here is whether Johannes de silentio is intended by Kierkegaard to be such a person, that is someone who superficially understands the merman but because he doesn't understand Abraham doesn't genuinely understand the merman either, or whether we should look further for something that Johannes genuinely understands about the merman but not about Abraham. I leave this question open, though some remarks below indicate the kind of answer that I myself find plausible. The most important conclusion to draw from the above remarks is that the merman and Abraham are engaged in two very different projects. What we are, I think, entitled to conclude from the disanalogy between them is that where the merman is doing one thing, calling on faith to get himself back into the universal (but on another basis than that on which he once belonged to it), Abraham in sacrificing Isaac is doing two: at one level the sacrifice is the act of general resignation that he has to perform before he can show that he believes the goals praised by the ‘universalist’ can be reestablished as praiseworthy on a principle that is the diametrical opposite of that on which the universalist praises them, and at another his ability to carry it through is his showing this. Abraham wants to show that the goals can be re-established on the principle that the particular individual is ‘higher’ than the universal. We should no more take the story of Abraham and Isaac to show us what sort of actions are required for the renunciation that precedes faith in general (let alone, as some claim, that Abraham's action is the kind of thing Kierkegaard means us to expect of moral agents once the individual has got the upper hand and is in direct contact with God), than we should expect the merman's marrying Agnete to be a way of proving his faith to God.
The opening pages of each of the three problemata all follow a uniform pattern. First the ethical is defined as the universal, then a consequence drawn from this, followed by the observation that to accept this consequence is to concede that Hegel's account of the ethical is right. Thereupon our author claims that if Hegel's account is indeed right, then Hegelians have no right to talk of faith or to give credit to Abraham as its father, for according to each of the consequences in question Abraham must stand morally (even criminally) condemned. The three consequences of defining the ethical as ‘the universal’ are: (i) that the individual's moral performance must be judged by its underlying social intention; (ii) that there are no duties to God other than duties that are in the first instance to the universal; and (iii) that it is a moral requirement that one not conceal one's moral projects or the reasons one has for failing to carry them through. In each of the problemata Abraham is shown to infringe the principle of the ethical as the universal by failing to conform to the consequence, or implicated requirement, in question. Abraham acts as though there were a superior measure of moral performance that made social intentions irrelevant; he supposes himself to have an absolute duty to God that overrides the ethical defined as the universal; and he cannot reveal his intention to the parties concerned.
The pattern of argument in the problemata is thus of the kind logicians call modus tollens. The form of such argument is ‘If A then B; not-B, therefore not-A'. ‘A’ may state a general principle or a definition, and B the specified implication of the former. In the case of each of the three specified implications Johannes de silentio says quite explicitly that it is also an implication of Hegel's account of ethics. There is good reason to suppose, then, that the principle (or definition) A is intended as a statement of the Hegelian conception of ethics prevailing in Kierkegaard's time. Hegel defined ethical life (Kierkegaard uses a Danish expression, ‘det Sædelige’, which is a direct translation of Hegel's ‘das Sittliche’, as the identification of the individual with the totality of his social life.* The basic idea behind an ethics of Sittlichkeit is that public morality, or the principles of social and political cohesion underlying any actual society, are expressions of universal human goals. If there is a human telos (goal) at all, that is where it finds expression. Thus in order to become moral the individual should conform to, and begin to want to act in accordance with, the principles of public morality that any State must be based on. ‘The State’, says Hegel, ‘in and by itself is the ethical whole.’† This is precisely the idea of the ethical as the universal which the problemata present as a hoop that Abraham must jump through in order to prove the morality of his action. Abraham consistently fails. What he himself would say in explanation of his action, that his faith is being put to the test, is quite incomprehensible according to the principle. For on the principle God could only test him by tempting him out of his familial and social obligations; there could be no duty to God that was not to be found among those obligations. And worse, Abraham cannot even explain his case, because there is no other way of intelligibly excusing your sacrifice of another as a moral action than by being able to show the one to be sacrificed how the sacrifice in some way contributes to the fulfilment of a social intention higher than that of keeping the person to be sacrificed unharmed. This makes any attempt on Abraham's part to communicate his intention to others a ‘temptation’: if he can find anything intelligible to say by way of explanation, then he has failed the test, been tempted by the ethical (as universal), instead of proving himself to be, as a particular individual, higher than it.
That in brief is the sum of the argument of the problemata. It is clear that if Hegel is right then Abraham does teleologically suspend the ethical, he does conceive of an absolute duty to God, and he remains concealed – he cannot justify his action to those concerned.
But what is Johannes de silentio's own view? Does he side with Abraham? Or should we rather interpret the problemata in a minimal fashion? That is, should we say that all Johannes is doing is to show that if you are a Hegelian, then you cannot talk glibly of faith as something you have fathomed and can proceed beyond, because according to your principle Abraham is morally evil and a criminal?
This minimal answer leaves open, however, the question of whether Johannes (or Kierkegaard) envisages some alternative principle for morality. I myself believe he (and Kierkegaard) does. But it is one thing to envisage an alternative in the sense simply of not excluding the possibility that there is one, another to envisage it so to speak as present to mind. I would suggest that where Kierkegaard might say that he himself envisaged it in the second sense, Johannes de silentio is made to write as if he envisaged it only in the first. The story of Abraham and Isaac indicates only in outline, and by symbolizing its formal features, the view that it is possible for someone to qualify as essentially human independently of any specification one may give of what, in the context of intention and action, is properly human in general. This would be unthinkable to Hegelians. They would assume as a matter of principle that there is an inseparable link between acquiring the status of a developed human being and conforming ever more successfully to, and convergently upon, some accepted general specification of ‘human’. What they would never be able to understand in Abraham is that for him it is not any revealed balance of human gain in respect of the total social life of a community that counts for the humanity of an action. Abraham acts as though someone could be properly human prior to the expression of his or her humanity in the universal, so that the universal becomes an expression in turn of a humanity pre-established, as it were, at the level of the particular and no longer the category in which humanity is established. *
Where Hegelians believe individuals realize themselves by being taken up, consciously and willingly, in the universal, Abraham represents a diametrically opposite view in which the universal – or the presence of a social intention – has first to be established prior to entering (or re-entering) the universal. Its being formed in the individual is, so Kierkegaard believed his own experience to have taught him, no easy matter; in the end it requires faith, in the sense that Johannes de silentio is made to clarify. However, Johannes's platform is still that of his (contemporary) readers. The postulate that the ethical is the universal is one he accepts, at least as the only going ethical principle available to him. And he uses it to test the distance between his sense of the greatness of Abraham and his ability to understand him. Really what he uncovers is the extent of the inability of those who accept the Hegelian principle to understand Abraham. But that is because the readers Kierkegaard has designed him for are wedded to that principle. Kierkegaard's overriding aim is to divorce them from it, but he believes that has to be done with their own consent and therefore with due regard to their own conceptual and attitudinal presuppositions. In a work published after his death Kierkegaard gives some guidelines as to how to interpret his ‘aesthetic’ and ‘dialectical’ works. He says the former are to lead the reader to Christian concepts ‘back’ from the ‘aesthetic’ way of interpreting them, back from the point of view of the life of immediacy, and the latter ‘back’ from the System and speculative philosophy. In the case of the aesthetic works his method, he says, is to deceive. In answer to his own question about what the deception amounts to in this case, he says:
It means that one doesn't begin directly with what one wants to communicate, but… going along with the other's delusion. Thus (to keep to the present work's topic) one begins by saying, not ‘I'm a Christian, you are not’, but ‘You are a Christian, I am not’. Not by saying ‘It is Christianity I preach, and the life you lead is purely aesthetic [the life of immediacy]’, but by saying ‘Let's talk about the aesthetic’. The deception is that one does this precisely in order to come to the religious. But according to the assumption, the other is also under the delusion that the aesthetic is the Christian, since he thinks he is a Christian and yet lives the life [of immediacy].*
At one point in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de silentio says he doesn't understand Abraham, he also says that to understand him we need a new category. This is almost certainly the Christian concept of faith (not Abraham's) defined and elaborated at great length in Philosophical Fragments and particularly Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Actually the concept of faith developed there helps us in no way to understand Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a ‘trial’. What it does is provide the basis for the alternative ethical paradigm which Johannes de silentio is only able to chart by banging his head up against the limits of the Hegelian paradigm. That is what it is his job as a pseudonymous author to do. Johannes de silentio operates ‘dialectically’ (as he himself says), but only from the perspective of people who live the life of immediacy. They don't have the Christian concept of faith and nor does he. The new paradigm is reserved for later pseudonyms who take on Hegel's System more directly and whose readers are people who need to be brought back from that. They too are deluded. They are ‘absent-minded’ because they have allowed themselves to be so much swallowed up in the system that they have lost sight of what it means to exist, of the sense of being a particular, and in the process have given intellectual support to a prevailing ‘pantheistically dissolute contempt for individual people’.† They have to be humoured out of their delusion. But that is another (though not entirely different) story.
Introductions to works of Kierkegaard's usually begin with a summary of his life. I have chosen to put my summary at the end. The reason is that if one puts too much emphasis on the points of biographical relevance that keep on cropping up, particularly in the so-called aesthetic works, one loses sight of the compositional integrity of the best of Kierkegaard's writings. This is undoubtedly true of Fear and Trembling, in which almost every page, certainly every illustration, from myth, folk-tale, history, or Kierkegaard's own imagination, bears witness to its actual author's real-life preoccupations at the time.
The work appeared when Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was thirty. It came eight months after the publication of his first main, and much larger, work, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, and thus marks the beginning of a period of intense activity that saw more than a dozen major publications by the year 1850. The background can be briefly sketched. Kierkegaard (an earlier spelling of the Danish for ‘churchyard’, but carrying as in English the primary connotation of ‘graveyard’) was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813. His father's family had worked the land of their local priest in Jutland, in a feudal arrangement that gave them their name. The father himself had been released from his virtual vassalage by the priest at the age of twenty-one, at a time when he had already moved to Copenhagen to work in an uncle's hosiery business. Kierkegaard senior later became a wealthy wholesaler of imported goods and Søren inherited a fair fortune when his father died. Søren was the youngest of seven children whose mother was their father's second wife and had formerly been maid to the first. A brother and sister died before he was nine. His two surviving sisters, a brother, and his mother all died not long before he was twenty-one, and Søren became convinced that he himself would not live to be more than thirty-three. He was educated at a strictly run School of Civic Virtue, gained there a reputation for a quick tongue and a sharp wit, and then at the University, where he enrolled in 1830. His chosen subject was theology, but he studied liberal arts and science as well, spending in all seven years as a student, his father footing the not inconsiderable bills.
In 1837 he met Regine Olsen, daughter of a Copenhagen dignitary. Regine was then fourteen years old. The following year Kierkegaard's father died. The father had exercised a great and largely oppressive influence on the son from early childhood, and Kierkegaard eventually found it necessary to try to recapture his spontaneity by breaking himself free. In 1835 he had begun describing Christianity, associated with his father, as a debilitating influence. He looked about him for some other idea ‘to live or die for’,* forsook his studies, and led outwardly the life of a rich young man about town, aesthete, and wit. Entries in his journal, however, tell a different story. Kierkegaard was really undergoing a period of deep depression, which nevertheless culminated in a reconciliation with his father shortly before the latter's death at the age of eighty-one (Kierkegaard being then twenty-five). Then came the affair with Regine. They became engaged on 10 September 1840 and all seemed set for a life of civic virtue.
But that was not to be. Although in the year following the betrothal he had undergone the necessary practical training for a career in the State Church, and, possibly with an academic career in mind, had begun work on his doctoral thesis, and had even preached his first sermon, in August 1841 he returned Regine's engagement ring. By November of that year, not long after his successful defence of the thesis (The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates), the break with Regine was final and he was on his way to Berlin, attending Schelling's lectures there (at about the same time, it is thought, as Karl Marx did the same, though there is no record of their meeting). The reasons for this turn of events are not easy to pinpoint, but the crux seems to have been Kierkegaard's sense of his inability to fulfil the personal conditions of a civic life, in particular those involved in being husband and father. Whatever the reasons, there followed the flood of pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous works, beginning in February 1843 with Either/Or (in two volumes, each of over 400 pages), followed by Repetition and Fear and Trembling, and eight months subsequently to these by Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety (June 1844). These were relatively slim volumes, but then came the substantial Stages on Life's Way followed by the ‘dialectical’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, directed at philosophers of the Hegelian tradition. Alongside this already impressive production Kierkegaard also published twenty-one ‘edifying’ and ‘Christian’ discourses under his own name.
Fear and Trembling belongs to the series of works (Either/Or, Repetition, Stages on Life's Way) concerned with ‘realizing the universal’, a theme close to Kierkegaard's heart in view of his decision not to proceed with his marriage. But in Fear and Trembling this theme is set in sharp juxtaposition with two others, faith and sacrifice. The relevance of the latter, and thus also the appeal to Kierkegaard of the story of Abraham and Isaac, is obvious enough. In one respect Kierkegaard was sacrificing Regine, who obviously wanted the marriage; in another he was sacrificing himself, since he obviously wanted Regine; and in yet another he perhaps felt that his whole life had been sacrificed through his father (Abraham?), at least ruined as far as being healthily adapted in mind as well as body to accepting the responsibilities and pleasures of family life and a solid job is concerned, and therefore a preparation for some higher mission. As an expert psychologist Kierkegaard was well able to sort out these possible constructions of his situations for himself, and to question the corresponding motives, as well as his own motives for adopting any of them. Thus, to think of the pain he caused Regine as a sacrifice to a higher mission the pain his father had caused him had somehow prepared him, and maybe even specially him, to carry out, could well be a stratagem to conceal some less worthy motive. The ways in which he thought of handling the break with Regine are repeated (from his journals) in the final version he constructs of the legend of Agnete and the merman. So too with faith. In his journals he wrote that if he had had faith – faith for this life – he would have stayed with Regine.* But that too would have required sacrifice, at least of his career as a writer and all that his life had seemed to be a preparation for.
It was in any case the career of a writer that he pursued until his death at the age of forty-two. By that time (11 November 1855) he had managed to make himself an object of public ridicule by provoking a feud with a satiric weekly, which mercilessly caricatured him, his posture, clothes, and unusual, jerky gait, but also a public nuisance, by launching a sustained and bitter attack on the Danish State Church and its more eminent functionaries. There were further publications, notably The Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850), a number of ‘Christian Discourses’, and a broadsheet which Kierkegaard himself published, called The Instant (Øieblikket). This ran through nine issues before Kierkegaard fell ill, collapsed in the street, and died in hospital some six weeks later, probably of a lung infection. On his sickbed he confided to his friend from boyhood, one Emil Boesen, now a pastor and the only member of the Church he would see, even though his own brother was a clergyman, that his life had been a ‘great and to others unknown and incomprehensible suffering’ which looked like ‘pride and vanity’ but ‘wasn't’. He regretted that he hadn't married or taken on an official position. Kierkegaard's funeral was the occasion of a minor disturbance led by his student nephew, who protested at the Church's insistence on officiating at the committal proceedings, contrary to the deceased's wishes.
In the Preface to Fear and Trembling the author sports with the notion of ‘going further’, an expression I also used at the beginning of this introduction. It was used by H. L. Martensen, Kierkegaard's former tutor at Copenhagen University and later Bishop Primate, in a review where he claimed that one should move forward from the methodological doubt of Descartes to Hegel and even beyond. Kierkegaard uses doubt as a parallel to faith, as something hard enough to get to, let alone to go further than. This is typical of the ‘situational’ character of most of Kierkegaard's writings. They were written for contemporary readers who, unlike us, would be quick to catch the allusions and identify the references. He wrote in Danish, of course, and could have entertained no expectation that his works would become ‘classics’. However, concerning Fear and Trembling, he did predict that with its ‘frightful pathos’ this early work ‘alone’ would suffice ‘to immortalize my name as an author’. Moreover, once he was dead and his reputation for flippancy and wit no longer prevented readers from taking the book seriously, it would ‘be read’ but also ‘translated into other languages’ (Papers and Journals: A Selection, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1996, p. 425).