Customer Reviews

Fear and Trembling/Repetition : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 6

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This edition of 'Fear and Trembling' is an excellently produced and translated edition, with the interesting and helpful prefaces and selections of journal quotes typical of the Writings series.

'Fear and Trembling' presents a very penetrating, and ultimately disturbing, investigation into the personal and 'existential' implications of the religious concept of faith, as illustrated by the story of Isaac's sacrifice in Genesis 22.

Reviewers like to analyse the text either in respect to the biography of Kierkegaard, or of his literary output (or in relation to the other book in this collect, 'Repetition'), which are fair enough, but nevertheless, this book stands on its own with the question of whether religious faith can be a 'teleological suspension of the ethical.' This sounds like it could be a tendious philosophical excercise, but his erudition and literary skill constantly defies ones attempt to reduce or domesticate the paradoxes which he throws forward to his reader. The text still today offers each reader a choice of his own.

i will preface this review by saying that what follows is my interpretation of what "fear and trembling" is about. kierkegaard probably would've wanted each individual reader to struggle with the meaning for him-or-herself, as that is what would make the reading of "fear and trembling" of any value to the reader.

there is a difference between the ethical and the religious. confusion over the two has caused great tragedy in human affairs in the past and will continue to do so in the future. kierkegaard's magnum opus "fear and trembling" deals with the relationship between the ethical and the religious spheres, and thus remains relevant even to a modern audience.

kierkegaard wrote "fear and trembling" because he felt the christianity of his time had become too easy, too sugar-coated for the masses to swallow. faith loses its importance when the church becomes more interested in expanding and maintaining its reach than in the underlying message; faith, by its very nature, should be a difficult thing to attain. like many reformers before him, kierkegaard saw christianity as corroding from within. on the other hand, hegelian philosophy had also spread across europe in the early nineteenth century and was encroaching on territories even outside of philosophy, given the ambitious scope of hegel's project. the philosophers were threatening to co-opt the spiritual through logic: hegel's self-realization of "geist," the german word for both "mind" and "spirit." it is in this setting that kierkegaard wrote his most important book, addressing the dangers to christianity from within and without.

"fear and trembling" should be read in the context of the rest of kierkegaard's pseudonymous works for its message to be understood. kierkegaard conceived of life as going through three stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. this framework is also tackled extensively, for example, in "either/or (volumes 1 and 2)" and "stages on life's way." the gist is that before one even attempts to have faith in god, one must first come to appreciate the world for its appeal to one's senses. after that, one matures and realizes there are more important things out there and one gives up his/her individual nature for the universal, living to serve the greater good. this ethical stage can be reached by anybody and is different from being religious. in particular, people of all religions or lack thereof can be ethical people and sacrifice their own selfish needs for others. the ethical stage is where all organized religions and even atheism overlap, and this common ground is all that's needed for a peaceful civilized society.

now, to go from the ethical to the religious stage requires one to abandon the universal, reasserting the individual over the common good, but not regressing to the aesthetic stage in the process either. rather, one undergoes a trial of faith and mysteriously leaps to faith. i say "mysteriously" because faith is a very personal thing between god and the individual. that leap to faith cannot be explained by appealing to logic, nor can what occurs during the trial of faith be effectively communicated or understood by others. on top of all that, the trial of faith will bring the ethical individual into conflict with the ethical itself, hence the "trial" part. it is inconceivably hard and seemingly impossible to attain faith precisely because one must have genuinely gone through the ethical stage first and yet be forced to abandon the ethical.

kierkegaard illustrates all of these ideas in the story of god's command for abraham to sacrifice isaac at mount moriah. faith is something that could take a lifetime to achieve given the earlier stages one must go through; abraham was an old man when he faced his trial so even the patriarch of the judeo-christian tradition is not exempt from the long hard journey through the stages on life's way. god's command to sacrifice isaac very clearly and unequivocally conflicts with the ethical. abraham intended to go through with the sacrifice, but is stopped by god after abraham passes the trial. what exactly occurred in abraham's mind, let alone god's mind, during the trial cannot be known to anyone else. we only see a good person about to do a very bad thing, ready to give everything up and yet receiving it all back by god's will. faith must be absurd, hence ultimately impervious to philosophical/logical investigation. and with this one carefully chosen example, kierkegaard masterfully defended christianity from the dangers on both fronts mentioned earlier.

sometimes kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement to regine olsen is mentioned as a potential source of meaning for "fear and trembling." in particular, some folks posit that kierkegaard was hoping to receive regine olsen back after the breaking of the engagement, much as the knight of faith in "fear and trembling" receives the world back, by virtue of the absurd. it is certainly true that kierkegaard was deeply affected by this episode in his life, but one of the reasons he broke off the engagement was because he wanted to focus on the deeper theological and religious issues he felt he should devote his life to. i have too much respect for kierkegaard's grand project to give this very personal interpretation much weight.

there are two main english translations of "fear and trembling" available: the one done by walter lowrie, and the one done by edna and howard hong. the hongs' translation for the princeton "kierkegaard's writings" series is the superior translation, in my opinion. lowrie's older translation is outdated and some of his choice of words will distract you. for example, the lowrie translation includes the phrase "a panegyric upon abraham" while the hongs translated the same as "eulogy on abraham." take your pick!

the princeton "kierkegaard's writings" series is excellent in general, offering excerpts from kierkegaard's journals as well as historical/philosophical context for kierkegaard's work. "fear and trembling" is packaged with "repetition" in volume 6 of the series, but you should really think of the vastly overshadowed "repetition" as just a nice bonus.

on a personal note, i read and kept re-reading "fear and trembling" on the side in the spring semester of my sophomore year in college. i majored in electrical engineering, but much of my focus was on this book instead. compared to the subject matter kierkegaard was dealing with, everything else just seemed so incredibly trivial. even after the four years of classes to complete my degree, i find that "fear and trembling" is still what i think about more. i hope kierkegaard has as much of an influence on your life as he has had on mine.

These two books are twins: published on the same day, with the same purpose: the failed explications of an essential Kierkegaardian concept: Repetiton. Why, when an author clearly knows the meaning of a concept in his own terminology, would he fail to be able to explain it? Why would an author make failure part of the purpose of a book? There is a reasons. The authors of both books are pseudonyms. Kierkegaard does not use nom de plumes. He creates characters and then writes the book from that perspective. Johannes de Silento (the author of "Fear and Trembling")is a poet. Constantine Constantinus (the author of "Repetition") is an experimental psychologist. These characters attempt to define repetition, but their methods will not allow them. Repetition is not reducible to poetry (romanticism) or science (reason). Now why is that? It is necessary to Kierkegaard's project (the book "Repetition" shows that it is necessary) because his project is essentially Christian and Revelation cannot be derived philosophically (Hence Constantine Constantinus' failure). But how do you get to discuss Christian ideas, then? By an elaborate method of importation and laundering. For instance, Constantine Constantinus introduces Repetition by comparing it to Platonic recollection. But the real source for importation is the Old Testament. Fear and Trembling is an elaborate interpretation of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Repetition ends with the Young Man (the guinea pig for Constantine Constantius' psychological experiments) writting on the Book of Job. In each case, something is sacrificed and yet the one who sacrifices finds the sacrifice restored to him. Much ink has been spilt showing how this copncept relates to Kierkegaard's abortive engagement or his relations to his father (and I am sure SK appreciates this muddying of the waters; he never liked an audit trail), but the primary image is that of God the Father sacrificing his Son, and, through the Ressurrection (as Johannes de Silento would say, by virtue of the absurd) receiving him back again.

When I first read Fear and Trembling way back in the Dark Ages of the late 'seventies, I was blown away. Righteousness in early Hebrew thought has little to do with rules and doctrine, but is rooted in the needs generated by the relationships we have with one another, and Fear and Trembling underscores this. It is easy to understand why the essay was given the title it was. For, as with Abraham, each of us is in absolute relationship with the Absolute, and Kierkegarrd sees Abraham as a knight of faith who clearly understands his priorities. What looks like insanity from a human makes complete sense from the perspective of the One called Elohim, and understanding this is both liberating and deeply troubling.

Kierkegaard is more personality, more energy of being, more outward agony, than nearly anyone who has ever lived, and to read Kierkegaard for treatise more than his infectious spirit is to miss the cornerstone of his treatise: Life's enduring ecstasy is synonymous with personal involvement, even when that involvement is partially or inaccurately informed. In other words, Abraham may have been willing to kill his son (so, stop, apologetic churches, reading this story as Abraham's faith that Isaac would mysteriously be salvaged!) and definitely didn't give a damn about your religious/philosophical platitudes in such a case. In a post-9/11 universe, this story, or its darker interpretations, is particularly unpopular, but policy without a pinch of Kierkegaardian humility devolves the lot of us into people of spiteful assumption rather than devotion.

Fear and Trembling is probably Kierkegaard's clearest and most vivid interpretation of faith, seen through the story of Abraham and Isaac. God has asked Abraham, who with his wife Sarah has waited and prayed for a son for 70 years, to sacrifice that son. Abraham obeys, but it is the tension within Abraham, the tension between ethical duty and the requirements of faith, that Kierkegaard focuses on. Faith emerges as what allows the individual to transcend the life of just anyone, the "universal", through an absolutely individual relationship with God.

Abraham's anguish is the anguish of a loving father, for whom the ethical duty of a father is inviolable. But his God demands it. Abraham doesn't simply obey -- in his actions, he must reconcile the irreconcilable. The victory of Abraham's faith is his resolution to carry out God's command, fully and intentionally preparing to give up Isaac, while at the same believing, by "virtue of the absurd", that Isaac will be returned to him, that he will lose Isaac and also regain him.

For Kierkegaard, this faith is the elevation of the individual, in the individual's own relationship to God, above the universal, the demands of secular, ethical life. In another essay, The Present Age, Kierkegaard complains that faith has become secularized in the church, in which faith is the duty of everyone, to be fulfilled by all in the same way. To him, this is a lowering of faith to something within the universal, what is demanded of everyone and explicable as the duty of man per se.

In faith, by contrast, the "individual is higher than the universal" in a way that is incomprehensible philosophically, precisely because the duty of the individual cannot be universalized and explained in the common terms of reason. Faith is a relationship between a particular individual and God. What God requires of Abraham, He requires of no one else -- it arises out of Abraham's individual, particular relationship to God, and only Abraham can understand it. In that relationship, Abraham is elevated above the universal, above the life of everyone and anyone, beyond the ethical and into the properly religious.

Kierkegaard's opponents here are both the common religious institutions of his own time and the dominant philosophy of Hegel. Hegel's system includes religion and faith, but religion is subsumed under the more complete and adequate philosophical knowledge and realization of "the absolute". For Hegel the universal is higher than the individual, and the individual's duty is to find his place in the universal -- to act in accordance with universal duty, what is required of everyone -- and to make that universal real in the political and civil life of a modern state. Much of the 19th century birth of existentialism, both religious and non-religious, comes in response to that requirement of the universal.

Kierkegaard's treatment of the individual in Fear and Trembling expands his much more abstract account of despair in The Sickness Unto Death, where religious faith per se, or faith specifically in the Christian God, seems at times separable from the abstract requirements of faith. Could we interpret him in a more secular way, as talking not just about religious faith but about meaningfulness in life altogether? There are passages in others of his writings, e.g., The Present Age, that suggest that what is missing in modern life is the condition of meaningfulness in life altogether -- the leveling of everyone's life into a kind of anyone's life (what goes as "das Man" in Heidegger or "the herd" in Nietzsche). And the abstract formulations from The Sickness Unto Death may seem only to require the self to relate itself to itself through an "other", not through God.

But I don't think that's what Kierkegaard means here -- the "other" seems necessarily to be God, in that only God can do what a god can do -- realize the absurd, the apparently impossible. This is why he is talking about "faith" and not "meaningfulness" (or why if he is in fact also talking about "meaningfulness" he must believe that meaningfulness is really only possible through faith).

This newer edition and translation of Fear and Trembling is published with Repetition, a work completed and published at about the same time. (An earlier edition had published Fear and Trembling together with The Sickness Unto Death, tying the two accounts of despair and faith together).

This is my first reading of Repetition, and I can't really trust what I think about it -- Kierkegaard is very hard to understand in a first reading. But what I see is a kind of tightly focused evolution of the "exception" that appears also in Either/Or and provides the first glimpse of the individuality that flourishes in faith. The "young man" in Repetition becomes, through his relationship with "the girl", a "poet" -- not a "knight of faith" at all, but someone who was been tested by the ethical -- by the prospect of marriage -- and emerged as the "exception". The exception is an exception to the universal, the possibility of the individual who is higher than the universal, what the "knight of faith" realizes.

What's also interesting in Repetition is the cast of characters -- the pseudonymous author (Constantin Constantius, who sounds like the voice of Kierkegaard and places the story in the perspective of Kierkegaard's thought), the "young man" (who parallels Kierkegaard himself in his relationship with Regine Olsen), and "the girl" (parallel to Regine). Kierkegaard often splits himself into characters in order to find both the reflective and active aspects of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious lives he depicts, and Regine is an almost constant muse.

I am not able to comment on the accuracy or flow of the translation--the only Danish I know is the one that the kid from the mailroom used to bring by every morning--and so I am only able to engage the main ideas: faith. sacrifice. ethics. Each one negating the other, or at least any pair negating the third. Kierkegaard emphasizes that for faith we must sacrifice ethics because--as Job learned the hard way--God transcends morals. But it is also true that faith in ethics leads us to abandon sacrifice, as does an ethical interpretation of faith, and--perhaps most importantly--ethics can require that we sacrifice our faith.

I interpret this as meaning that on the one hand, we may find ourselves breaking our own laws to follow what we believe. For if you are pursuing something worth pursuing, and it happens to run beyond the law, are you going to abandon the chase?

But it is easy to break laws, and hard to break hearts (at least, that is, you must be hard to do so). And so doing the right thing in regards to your ethical understanding of action can lead you to sacrifice the mutual faith that you have with other people. In some ways, this is what Isaac confronts. The man on the way home sure of a steak dinner isn't a knight of faith--he is at best a pawn. Abraham too is not impressive here. What Isaac gave up was, so I have come to think after years of thought on the matter, much more weighty. He went up the mountain with faith in his father and in God; he was forced to sacrifice one to maintain the other. We will never know which. And that is the nature of love in a world in which doing the right thing is sure to involve breaking SOMEONE's law. [17]

In addition to the parallels between this story and SK's relation with his father mentioned by previous reviewers, another important parallel is his failed engagement with Regine Olsen. She is his Isaac, who he must sacrifice. Perhaps he thinks his own calling, means that he too can "teleologically suspend" the ethical (duties to Regine). Its remarkable, that we now should be so concerned about the private live of a pseudonymous author. Is Johannes de Silentio a poetic side of Kierkegaard? Poetic yes, but paradoxically he also says he is purely dialectic.

The different takes of the Abraham story, remind me of Rabbinical midrash. The four different accounts did not happen, but they might have. It is a way of stretching the story, and a way to introduce his "faith by virtue of the absurd". The tragic hero remains in the ethical, but Abraham is different that this, and is related to the Absolute. Very thought provoking!

SK once claimed had he written no other book, Fear and Trembling would have sufficed to make his reputation as one of the greats of literature. A fair assessment, but he did indeed write other books and Fear and Trembling needs to fit within that context. This is especially the case in relation to its twin: Repetition. This is even more urgent when you recognize Fear and Trembling's subject matter, which is: Repetition. SK introduces the concept with typical irony: neither Constantine Constantinus nor the Young Man, nor Johannes de Silento actually achieve repetition. Repetition is negatively defined: we are told not what it is, but what it is not. We are told that repetiton occurs "by virtue of the absurd." Sartre took this construction directly into his philosophy and made himself a laughing stock. This goes to show that either you keep you sense of humor fully operational in reading SK's books or he will make you look like a jerk. People who do not laugh long and loud at these books will not be able to interpret them without claiming for themselves absolute idiocy. And people who do not understand Repetition may as well stop wasting their time on Kierkegaard. Perhaps the can do Nietzsche and perspectivism instead?

be my father!" those hongs really know how to edit a book, wow. still i think most of the credit has to be given to johannes de silentio for writing it. i haven't read repetition yet. it'll probably a really brain teaser.