The Trinitarian Self: The Key to the Puzzle of Violence
Charles K. Bellinger
Chapter 2. Askesis: Introduction to Soren[Søren] Kierkegaard
A. Life and Writings
Soren[Søren] Kierkegaard was born in 1813, in Copenhagen, Denmark, as the seventh child of a wealthy businessman. His father was a self-educated man who had a brooding, deeply religious spirit. The father’s pietism and philosophical interests had a great impact on his youngest son, Soren[Søren], who went on to become one of the most important figures in modern Christian thought.
Soren[Søren] Kierkegaard was a bright student, and he received a high quality private school education. By the time he was 17, he could read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and French, as well as his native Danish. He entered the University, where his father hoped that he would study to become a pastor, but Kierkegaard was more interested in studying literature and philosophy, and he adopted the carefree, expensive lifestyle of a prodigal son. He wrestled deeply with religious ideas, however, and at the age of 25 he had a profound conversion experience. He was reconciled with his father shortly before the latter’s death, and he dedicated himself to the cause of Christian faith for the rest of his life.
The Kierkegaard family was deeply touched by tragedy. By the time Soren[Søren] was 25, 5 of his 6 siblings had died, as well as his mother and father. Soren[Søren] himself did not expect to live past the age of thirty. (As it was, he died at the age of 42 in 1855.) He went on to complete the prerequisites for ordination in the Lutheran church, but he never did become ordained. Through his writings, he became a kind of pastor-at-large to the country of Denmark. In 1841 he earned an advanced degree in philosophy, with a dissertation on The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates.
At the age of 27 he became engaged to Regine Olsen. For the next year he agonized within himself as to whether or not he had made a mistake. He broke off the engagement, believing that a marriage between them would not be viable, due to his personal eccentricities and his intense preoccupation with becoming an author. This engagement and its dissolution became one of the main inspirations for his subsequent authorship.
Since he had inherited a large sum of money from his father’s estate, he was able to embark on a career as an independent author. Between the years of 1843 and 1851 he published a stream of books which are remarkable in their number, literary complexity, philosophical perception, and theological profundity. Since he wrote in Danish, he was only noticed at first by a handful of Danish intellectuals. It was not until the 20th century that he became a well-known and widely read figure on the Western intellectual scene, in the wake of his writings being translated into German, French, and English.
His authorship can be divided into two time periods and six writing styles. The first time period is referred to as his “first authorship,” from 1843 to 1846; the second period consists of works written between 1847 and 1855, which are known as his “second authorship.” The first authorship consists primarily of pseudonymous works which were published under pen names such as Victor Eremita, Judge William, Hilarius Bookbinder, and Johannes Climacus. These pen names were attached to imaginary authors whose viewpoints did not necessarily coincide with Kierkegaard’s own viewpoint. A novelist writes a novel by imagining characters and placing them in a setting and a plot. Kierkegaard imagined characters and had these characters write books. An understanding of this point is crucial for the project of interpreting his writings. In his own voice, Kierkegaard said, “if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine” (CUP, 627). After publishing his work Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard intended to end his career as an author. But at that time a satirical newspaper called The Corsair began to lampoon him, at Kierkegaard’s own request. As a result, Kierkegaard became a laughingstock in Danish society, and this incident spurred him on to continue writing. The books he wrote subsequently have become known as his second authorship; they are mainly religious works, published under his own name.
Kierkegaard’s authorship can also be divided into six main writing styles. The six categories are as follows, with a listing of the titles which fit into them:
1) Criticism: Early Polemical Writings [c. 1838], The Concept of Irony [1841], Two Ages [1846], The Book on Adler [c. 1847], The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress [1848].
2) “Fiction”: Either/Or [1843], Repetition [1843], Fear and Trembling [1843], Prefaces [1844], Stages on Life’s Way [1845].
3) “Philosophy of Religion”: The Concept of Anxiety [1844], Philosophical Fragments [1844], Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1846].
4) Pastoral Theology: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses [1843–44], Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions [1845], Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits [1847], Works of Love [1847], Christian Discourses [1848], miscellaneous later discourses [1849–55].
5) Polemical Theology: The Sickness Unto Death [1849], Practice in Christianity [1850], For Self-Examination [1851], Judge for Yourself ! [c. 1851–2], The Moment and miscellaneous later writings [1855].
6) Autobiographical Works: The Point of View for My Work as an Author [c. 1848], Journals and Papers [1829–55].
The first category contains works of literary, philosophical, cultural, and religious criticism. The second category contains works which are “novelistic” in character; they focus on the boundaries between different spheres of existence, such as the aesthetic and the ethical, and the ethical and the religious; they often focus on the subject of marriage; they can be traced back to Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine. The third category consists of pseudonymous works of a highly philosophical character; they address the themes of original sin, the Incarnation, and Christian existence. The fourth category includes Kierkegaard’s religious/upbuilding discourses; these are in effect sermons, but they are meant to be read in published form rather than preached in church; they are addressed to a general audience and they speak in a pastoral and comforting, yet challenging, tone. The fifth category contains late works in which Kierkegaard analyzes and speaks out prophetically against what he sees as the spiritual bankruptcy of Western Christendom. The sixth category is made up of his remarkable autobiographical work, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and of his voluminous journals, in which he carries on a running commentary on his life and times and the inner workings of his writing career.
These various writing styles can be understood as growing out of Kierkegaard’s relationships with the various kinds of people he knew. His “fiction” was addressed to the literary intellectuals of his day, but it also grew out of his engagement to Regine; his “philosophy of religion” was directed at the philosophers and theologians of his time, who were largely under the sway of Hegelianism; his pastoral theology was intended for a general audience; his polemical theology was directed to the leaders of the state church, Bishops Mynster and Martensen. There is also a sense in which everything he wrote was addressed to God. Thus his authorship reveals the intricate nexus of relationships in which he lived. (This nexus of relationships is well illustrated in the volume Encounters with Kierkegaard, edited by Bruce Kirmmse, which contains all of the extant accounts of Kierkegaard by those who knew him.)
During the last months of his life, Kierkegaard carried out a relentless verbal attack on the state church in Denmark, which he judged as having departed from the path of genuine New Testament Christianity. He finally collapsed one day in the street, was carried to a hospital, and died about a month later. His older brother Peter, the only other surviving member of the family, went on later to become a bishop in that same state church.
B. Kierkegaard Graffiti
Kierkegaard was widely read in the twentieth century, but it is far from clear that he was widely understood. In most cases, his interpreters and critics laid over his writings a heavy layer of their own biases, preoccupations, and jargon. When authors attempted to criticize him, their criticisms were often completely contradictory to each other. One person, for example, would say that Kierkegaard was too aesthetic; another would say that he was anti-aesthetic. One person would say that he was too individualistic; another would say that he was authoritarian and fascistic; yet another would say that he was the most anti-fascist thinker in the modern world (a view I endorse). One person would say that he was anti-feminist; another would say that his thought is a great gift to feminism. Most contributions to this jungle of criticism are examples of the phenomenon I refer to as Kierkegaard Graffiti. Just as the vandal who spraypaints a building hastily in the dark and then runs away has no real appreciation for the architecture of the building he is defacing, so also did Kierkegaard’s deep and complex authorship become the victim of misconstrual and slander by people who did not expend the time and effort required for developing a clear understanding of his central concerns. Just one example of this graffiti is the phrase “the leap of faith” which is considered by many authors of encyclopedia articles to be the perfect summary of “Kierkegaard’s philosophy.” It turns out that he never used that phrase anywhere in his writings. The fact that Kierkegaard graffiti can be produced by scholars who have studied his writings extensively and perhaps even written dissertations on him is a sign that his authorship is a very difficult exegetical challenge, but that does not relieve the producers of the graffiti of their responsibility to speak accurately.
C. Central Themes in Kierkegaard’s Thought
In my view, an accurate summary of Kierkegaard would proceed along these lines. Kierkegaard understood the world as the sphere of the creative activity of God. He took very seriously the fundamental biblical theme that God creates the universe through speech. Everything that exists does so because God is speaking it into existence. The human soul is that unique place in all of nature where the voice of God can be heard and responded to consciously. The animals, vegetables, and minerals are simply given from God’s hand without self-consciousness; but human beings are able to be aware of their divine source. We are not only spoken into existence, but we also have the ability to be hearers of that speech. This is our transcendent nobility as human beings, but it is also our peril.
Just as we are superior to the lower animals because we can respond to our Creator consciously, so also can we sink below them into the abyss of sin. The psychology of the animals is set, determined. But our psychology is rooted in freedom. Another way of putting this is to say that we do not simply exist; we are coming into existence. Our character is not set in stone; our character is shaped by our experiences, our fears and anxieties, our relationships with other people, and by our Creator, whose voice is calling us forward into greater maturity as human beings. There are various possibilities open to us if we choose to allow our self to develop in this direction or that direction. The most basic choice which presents itself to us at all times concerns our response to the divine call of creation. We can respond positively to this call and allow ourselves to be drawn forward into the fullness of selfhood that God intends for us, or we can attempt to deafen ourselves to God’s voice and seize control of our selfhood. This is precisely what Adam and Eve did, and what we all do as their children. They sought to “become as God,” to usurp the place of God as the shaper of their future. In the same way, human beings down through the centuries have tried to manage and contain their angst by turning away from God in an attempt to avoid the pain of personal growth. We find it easier to reinforce the status quo of our souls and our societies than to allow the continuing event of creation to make, unmake, and remake us.
When we start down this path of deafening ourselves to the voice of God, we quickly develop a psychological inertia. Our commitment to avoiding the pain of growth is so strong that we organize our character and our societies around that commitment. When we cut ourselves off from the fullness of what the future could hold for us, we inevitably become stunted and misshapen as persons. Instead of living creatively in the tensions of existence before God, such as freedom and necessity, or the eternal and the temporal, we careen in one direction or the other, seeking then to fortify ourselves within one of those poles of existence. What we are seeking to evade above all else is the possibility that we could actually become ourselves before God. Instead of moving in faith into the fullness of life that God calls us to, we choose to follow the pathway that Kierkegaard calls “the sickness unto death.”
As I said above, Kierkegaard is sometimes accused of being “individualistic,” and is written off as an unhelpful thinker on that basis. The ineptitude of this criticism is actually very instructive, because it allows for the shape of his thought to be seen more clearly. Consider a passage such as this:
In our age the principle of association (which at best can have validity with respect to material interest) is not affirmative but negative; it is an evasion, a dissipation, an illusion, whose dialectic is as follows: as it strengthens individuals, it vitiates them; it strengthens by numbers, by sticking together, but from the ethical point of view this is weakening. Not until the single individual has established an ethical stance despite the whole world, not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting; otherwise it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak, a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child-marriage. (TA, 106)
Kierkegaard is praising the “single individual” and criticizing sociality; therefore the label “individualistic” must be appropriate, in the eyes of his critics. But they always ignore phrases such as “genuinely uniting” because these phrases ruin the simplistic reading. Kierkegaard does not see the single individual as an end but as a doorway that opens onto a new form of sociality. This can be illustrated with an hourglass turned on its side. On the left side there is the “crowd,” which is human sociality in its corrupted form. The crowd is a product of rebellion against God and resistance to spiritual growth. To become a single individual is to leave this sphere and move into the sphere of positive sociality that is characterized by love of God, self, and neighbor. Visually presented:
Notice how the following passages show the interconnectedness in Kierkegaard’s thinking of love of God, self, and neighbor:
[EXT]It is still the greatest, the roomiest part of the world, although spatially the smallest, this kingdom of love in which we can all be landholders without the need of one person's holding crowding another's—yes, it rather extends another's holdings . . . On the other hand, the kingdom of anger and hate—how small it is in its egotistic isolation and how great the space it demands—the whole world is not spacious enough, because it has no room for others. (JP, 1: 875)
When one denies God, he does God no harm but destroys himself; when one mocks God, he mocks himself. (JP, 2: 1349)
God is not my Father or any man’s Father in a special way (frightful presumptuousness and madness!); no, he is Father only in the sense of being the Father of all. When I hate someone or deny that God is his Father, it is not he who loses but I—then I have no Father. (JP, 2: 1413)
Love to God and love to neighbor are like two doors that open simultaneously, so that it is impossible to open the one without opening the other, and impossible to shut one without also shutting the other. (JP, 3: 2434) [/EXT]
That we are called by God to become mature, loving human beings is the central theme of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. This work is an extended meditation on the creative speech of God, which comes to us very concretely in the words of Christ: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This commandment is both a critique of human culture as it is currently constituted and a call to live as agents of God’s love. The social system we are born into will decree that we should “love,” or have preference for, some people, and hate or ignore others. But when we hear the command and respond to it, we are lifted up by our Creator onto a higher plane on which we are able to love concretely, consistently, and unselfishly. Our response to the divine command gives us our true identity as creatures, which is something that cannot be manufactured by our culture.
To summarize, Kierkegaard paints a picture of the human situation that can be likened to an oscillating fan. The three positions of the oscillation are society, individual selfhood, and relation to God. In our fallen sinfulness, our individuality is underdeveloped and we live on the social level, mimicking others who belong to a “crowd.” But we have the potential to be pried loose, to be disentangled from the crowd. If this happens, we will become individual selves existing before God. (This is Kierkegaard’s main emphasis as a thinker, though he is obviously aware of all three dimensions.) The fan will shift from the horizontal plane, through emerging selfhood, to the vertical axis. But Kierkegaard is not a Gnostic seeking to flee from the world. Our relation to God sends us back into the world to love the neighbor. The fan oscillates down to the horizontal plane once more, but the individual has been transformed. Instead of being motivated by spiritual sloth, the individual is motivated by faith, hope, and love. The process of spiritual transformation that I am pointing to with the image of the fan can be summarized with the Greek word askesis, which originally meant athletic training or practice, as in “training for the Olympics.” It was also used in a military context, as in “basic training.” In the early centuries of Christianity, the word was transposed into a spiritual context, referring to the exercises of the monks and nuns as they sought separation from the world for the purpose of greater openness to God. The English word asceticism is derived from the Greek root in this spiritual usage. Kierkegaard’s thought can be seen as an expression of this central Christian motif. One of his key works, for example, is called Practice in Christianity. The Danish word Indovelse[Indøvelse],translated as practice, or as training in the earlier edition, is the direct equivalent of askesis.
For Kierkegaard, spiritual growth is a Christological event. We become individuals before God by modeling ourselves after Christ, who is the prototype of true selfhood. When this point is not understood, critics interpret Kierkegaard’s comments on “the single individual” out of context and accuse him of “individualism.” In reality, Kierkegaard’s understanding of what it means to be an individual before God, truly loving the neighbor, shows that the ultimate antidote for modern individualism is Christian askesis.
This is a very short list of some of the graffiti erasers, the competent works on Kierkegaard: David Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, Vernard Eller, Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, C. Stephen Evans, Soren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology, Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, Bruce Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society.
Source: http://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/60023/SKchapter.doc
Web site to visit: http://lib.tcu.edu/
Author of the text: indicated on the source document of the above text
S0REN kierkegaard
The only absolute either/or is the choice between good, and evil. . . .
Although not a systematic philosopher himself—indeed a bitter foe of all philosophical system-building—S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) has had a profound influence on philosophical thought, particularly in the twentieth century. He is generally regarded as the first of the existentialists. In his writings can be found most of the notions that have now come to be regarded as the hallmarks of existentialism—concepts like anxiety, dread, guilt, absurdity, paradox, nothingness, and so on.
Kierkegaard rebelled against the abstract intellcctualism of his times, exemplified most fully in the system of the famous German philosopher G. W, F. Hegel (1770-1831), which purported to reveal the course of world history as following strict logical law. Rather than being logical, countered Kierkegaard, the world and its history are irrational, and, hence, cannot be understood by reason. Truth is not to be found in objectivity, but in subjectivity, or passionate commitment to an idea. A similar rejection of his age can be seen in his views on religion. Trained at the University of Copenhagen to enter the ministry of the state church, he found himself repelled by the outward trappings of orthodox religion as well as by its inner sweet reasonableness. A deeply religious man himself, he was convinced that Christianity' was absurd. And this, for him, was its compelling attraction. One cannot be converted to a belief in Christianity by being convinced of its truth through reason; rather one must, like Abraham, make a "leap of faith."
Kierkegaard, the "melancholy Dane," was born in a rural area in the province of Jutland but moved soon afterward to Copenhagen, where, at least outwardly, he lived the life of a "man about town," spending much of his time in the cafes, associating with the intellectual elite of the city. For a time he was a close friend of Denmark's greatest literary figure, Hans Christian Andersen. But behind his social facade, Kierkegaard lived an inner life of almost indescribable torment, guilt, and despair, feelings ilm are revealed in their starkest forms in his voluminous writings.
Kierkegaard offers no systematic theory of ethics, but his views are clearly of great importance to anyone concerned with the human moral condition. To give some flavor of his ideas, selections have been taken from three of his works. As an aid in understanding the last, which is his interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac, I have inserted as a preface to it the story itself, as it appears in Chapter 22 of Genesis.
The Journals
Gilleleie
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except insofar as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system; what good would it do me to be able to develop a theory of the state and combine all the details into a single whole, and so construct a world in which I did not live, but only held up to the view of others; what good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life; what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion? I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of understanding and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing. That is what my soul longs after, as the African desert thirsts for water. That is what I lack, and that is why I am left standing like a man who has rented a house and gathered all the furniture and household things together, but has not yet found the beloved with whom to share the joys and sorrows of his life.
Either/Or
Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality
My Friend,
What I have so often said to you I say now once again, or rather I shout it: Either/or. . . . There are situations in life where it would be ridiculous or a species of madness to apply an either/or; but also, there are men whose souls are too dissolute (in the etymological sense of the word) to grasp what is implied in such a dilemma, whose personalities lack the energy to say with pathos,
From The Journals ofStren Kierkegaard, translated by Alexander Dru, Reprinted by permission of the Oxford University Press.
S0rcn Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Copyright 1944 © 1972 by Howard A. Johnson. Published by Princeton University Press. Excerpts, pp. 133, 138, and 141-143, reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.
can either do this or that"; but in case he is not a pretty poor navigator, he will be aware at the same time that the ship is all the while making its usual headway, and that therefore it is only an instant when it is indifferent whether he does this or that. So it is with a man. If he forgets to take account of the headway, there comes at least an instant when there no longer is any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self.
The act of choosing is essentially a proper and stringent expression of the ethical. Whenever in a stricter sense there is question of an either/or, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical. The aesthetic choice is either entirely immediate, or it loses itself in the multifarious. Thus, when a young girl follows the choice of her heart, this choice, however beautiful it may be, is in the strictest sense no choice, since it is entirely immediate. When a man deliberates aesthetically upon a multitude of life's problems, as you did in the foregoing, he does not easily get one either/or, but a whole multiplicity, because the determining factor in the choice is not accentuated, and because when one does not choose absolutely, one chooses only for the moment, and therefore can choose something different the next moment. The ethical choice is therefore in a certain sense much easier, much simpler, but in another sense it is infinitely harder. He who would define his life task ethically has ordinarily not so considerable a selection to choose from; on the other hand, the act of choice has far more importance for him. If you will understand me aright, I should like to say that in making a choice it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated. Therefore, even if a man were to choose the wrong, he will nevertheless discover, precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose, that he had chosen the wrong. For the choice being made with the whole inwardness of his personality, his nature is purified and he himself brought into immediate relation to the eternal Power whose omnipresence interpenetrates the whole of existence. This transfiguration, this higher consecration, is never attained by that man who chooses merely aesthetically. The rhythm in that man's soul, in spite of all its passion, is a spiritus levis [light breathing].
So, like a Cato I shout at you my either/or, and yet not like a Cato, for my soul has not yet acquired the resigned coldness which he possessed. But I know that only this incantation, if I have the strength for it, will be capable of rousing you, not to an activity of thought, for of that you have no lack, but to earnestness of spirit. Perhaps you will succeed without that in accomplishing much, perhaps even in astonishing the world (for I am not niggardly), and yet you will miss the highest thing, the only thing which truly has significance, perhaps you will gain the whole world and lose your own self.
What is it, then, that I distinguish in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I would only bring you up to the point where the choice between the evil and the good acquires significance for you. Everything hinges upon this. As soon as one
can either do this or that"; but in case he is not a pretty poor navigator, he will be aware at the same time that the ship is all the while making its usual headway, and that therefore it is only an instant when it is indifferent whether he does this or that. So it is with a man. If he forgets to take account of the headway, there comes at least an instant when there no longer is any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self.
The act of choosing is essentially a proper and stringent expression of the ethical. Whenever in a stricter sense there is question of an either/or, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical. The aesthetic choice is either entirely immediate, or it loses itself in the multifarious. Thus, when a young girl follows the choice of her heart, this choice, however beautiful it may be, is in the strictest sense no choice, since it is entirely immediate. When a man deliberates aesthetically upon a multitude of life's problems, as you did in the foregoing, he does not easily get one either/or, but a whole multiplicity, because the determining factor in the choice is not accentuated, and because when one does not choose absolutely, one chooses only for the moment, and therefore can choose something different the next moment. The ethical choice is therefore in a certain sense much easier, much simpler, but in another sense it is infinitely harder. He who would define his life task ethically has ordinarily not so considerable a selection to choose from; on the other hand, the act of choice has far more importance for him. If you will understand me aright, I should like to say that in making a choice it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated. Therefore, even if a man were to choose the wrong, he will nevertheless discover, precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose, that he had chosen the wrong. For the choice being made with the whole inwardness of his personality, his nature is purified and he himself brought into immediate relation to the eternal Power whose omnipresence interpenetrates the whole of existence. This transfiguration, this higher consecration, is never attained by that man who chooses merely aesthetically. The rhythm in that man's soul, in spite of all its passion, is a spiritus levis [light breathing].
So, like a Cato I shout at you my either/or, and yet not like a Cato, for my soul has not yet acquired the resigned coldness which he possessed. But I know that only this incantation, if I have the strength for it, will be capable of rousing you, not to an activity of thought, for of that you have no lack, but to earnestness of spirit. Perhaps you will succeed without that in accomplishing much, perhaps even in astonishing the world (for I am not niggardly), and yet you will miss the highest thing, the only thing which truly has significance, perhaps you will gain the whole world and lose your own self.
What is it, then, that I distinguish in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I would only bring you up to the point where the choice between the evil and the good acquires significance for you. Everything hinges upon this. As soon as one
can get a man to stand at the crossways in such a position that there is no recourse but to choose, he will choose the right. Hence, if it should chance that, while you are in the course of reading this somewhat lengthy dissertation, which again I send you in the form of a letter, you were to feel that the instant for choice had come, then throw the rest of this away, never concern yourself about it; you have lost nothing—but choose, and you shall see what validity there is in this act, yea, no young girl can be so happy in the choice of her heart as is a man who knows how to choose. So then, one either has to live aesthetically or one has to live ethically. In this alternative, as I have said, there is not yet in the strictest sense any question of a choice; for he who lives aesthetically does not choose, and he who after the ethical has manifested itself to him chooses the aesthetical is not living aesthetically, for he is sinning and is subject to ethical determinants even though his life may be described as unethical. Lo, this is, as it were, a character indelebilis impressed upon the ethical, that though it modestly places itself on a level with the aesthetical, it is nevertheless that which makes the choice a choice. And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves; they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die. They do not live aesthetically, but neither has the ethical manifested itself in its entirety, so they have not exactly rejected it either; they therefore are not sinning, except insofar as it is sin not to be either one thing or the other; neither are they ever in doubt about their immortality, for he who deeply and sincerely is in doubt of it on his own behalf will surely find the right, and surely it is high time to utter a warning against the greathearted, heroic objectivity with which many thinkers think on behalf of others and not on their own behalf. If one would call this which I here require selfishness, I would reply that this comes from the fact that people have no conception of what this "self is, and that it would be of very little use to a man if he were to gain the whole world and lose himself, and that it must necessarily be a poor proof which does not first of all convince the man who presents it.
My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil/or excludes them. Here the question is under what determinants one would contemplate the whole of existence and would himself live. That the man who chooses good and evil chooses the good is indeed true, but this becomes evident only afterwards; for the aesthetical is not the evil but neutrality, and that is the reason why I affirmed that it is the ethical which constitutes the choice. It is, therefore, not so much a question of choosing between willing the good or the evil, as of choosing to will, but by this in turn the good and the evil are posited. He who chooses the ethical chooses the good, but here the good is entirely abstract, only its being is posited, and hence it does not follow by any means that the chooser cannot in turn choose the evil, in spite of the fact that he chose the good. Here you see again how important it is that a choice be made, and that the crucial thing is not deliberation but the baptism of the will which lifts up the choice into the ethical.
Fear and Trembling 241
Abraham and Isaac*
And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, "Abraham." And he said, "Behold, here I am." And He said, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thce of."
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took rwo of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clove the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his young men, "Abide ye here with the ass and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you."
And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son, and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father and said, "My father." And he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" And Abraham said, "My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering." So they went, both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of, and Abraham built an altar there, and laid wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
And the Angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham." And he said, "Here am I." And He said, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything to him, for now I know that thou fearest God seeing thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me." And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up rbr a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
Fear and Trembling
Can There Be a Teleological Suspension of Ethics?
Ethics is as such the universal, and as the universal it is valid for all, which may be expressed in another way by saying that it is valid at every moment. It rests immanent in itself, having nothing outside itself which is its TeXos [end], being itself
'Genesis 22: 1-13.
From Fear and Trembling by S0rcn Kierkegaard, trans. by Robert Payne. Reprinted by permission of
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242 S0REN kierkegaard
the te\os; of everything outside itself, and once this has been integrated in ethics, it goes no further. Defined as a being, immediate, physical, and spiritual, the Individual is the Individual who has his ie\o<; in the universal and his ethical task is to express himself continually in the universal, to strip himself of his individuality in order to become universal. As soon as the Individual desires to assert his individuality over against the universal, he sins and he can only become reconciled with the universal again by recognizing it. Each time the Individual, after entering the universal, feels compelled to assert himself as Individual, he is in a tribulation from which he cannot escape except by repentance and by renouncing himself as Individual in the universal. If this is the highest that can be said of man and his existence, then morality is of the same nature as man's eternal blessedness, which is his Te\os; in all eternity and at every moment, for it would be a contradiction to let it be abandoned (i.e., ideologically suspended), since, as soon as it is suspended, it is lost, while that which is suspended is not lost, but remains preserved in the higher sphere which is its Te\os;.
If this is so, then Hegel is right in his chapter on "Conscience and the Good,"* where he defines man solely as the Individual, and he is right in considering this definition as a 'moral form of evil' which must be suppressed in the teleology of morals, so that the Individual who remains at this stage either sins or endures tribulation. On the other hand, Hegel is wrong in speaking about faith and wrong in not protesting loudly and clearly against the respect and admiration enjoyed by Abraham as the father of faith, when he should have been brought to trial and banished as a murderer.
For faith is this paradox, that the Individual is superior to the universal, but in such a way, however, that the movement repeats itself, and therefore in such a way that the Individual, after he has once been in the universal, then as Individual isolates himself as superior to the universal. If this is not faith, then Abraham is lost, then faith has never existed in the world, precisely because it always has existed. For if ethics (i.e., morality) is the highest, and nothing incommensurable remains in man except it be evil (i.e., the particular which ought to be expressed in the universal), then there is no need for any other categories besides those of Greek philosophy and those which can be logically deduced from them.
Now the story of Abraham presents a teleological suspension of ethics of this kind. There has been no lack of sharp-witted heads and thorough investigators to find analogies to it. Their wisdom is founded upon the beautiful principle that fundamentally everything is the same. If one looks a little more closely, I doubt very much whether one will find in the whole world a single analogy except a later one, which proves nothing, if it is certain that Abraham represents faith and that it is normally expressed in him whose life is not only the most paradoxical that one can think of, but so paradoxical that it cannot be thought at all. He acts by virtue of the absurd; for the absurd lies precisely in the fact that he as Individual is superior to the universal. This paradox does not lay itself open to medi-
*In his Philosophy of Right—Ed.
Fear and Trembling 243
ation; for as soon as he begins with it, he must confess that he was in tribulation, and if that is the case he would never be able to sacrifice Isaac, or if he has sacrificed Isaac, he must return repentant to the universal. By virtue of the absurd, he once again receives Isaac. At no moment, therefore, is Abraham a tragic hero; he is something quite different, either a murderer or a believer. He does not possess the intermediary condition which saves the tragic hero. That is why I can understand the tragic hero, but cannot understand Abraham, although, in an insane sort of way, I admire him more than any other man.
In terms of ethics, Abraham's relationship to Isaac can be expressed simply: the father ought to love his son more than himself. There are, however, different degrees within the sphere of ethics; and we shall see whether a higher expression of ethics is to be found in the story capable of explaining Abraham's behaviour ethically and of giving him the ethical justification for the suspension of his ethical duty towards his son, without, however, going beyond the teleology of ethics.
When an undertaking affecting a whole nation is thwarted, when it is brought to an end by the displeasure of Heaven, when the angry deity sends among them a calm which laughs at all their efforts, when the oracle fulfills her heavy task and proclaims that the God demands the sacrifice of a young girl—then the father has to carry out the sacrifice heroically. In spite of his desire to be "a poor man who dares to weep", and not the king who must behave in kingly fashion, he must conceal his grief nobly. And if, when he is alone, he is overcome by his grief, and if throughout the whole kingdom there are only three men who know why he is sorrowing, soon all his subjects will be companions in his sorrow, but also in his deed, knowing that he has consented to sacrifice his beautiful young daughter for the common good. "O face, dear face, O breast, O golden hair" (Iphigenia in Aulis, 687). And the daughter will move him with her tears and the father will turn away his face; but the hero will raise his knife. When the tidings are borne to the land of his fathers, the maidens of Greece will blush with enthusiasm, and if his daughter is betrothed, instead of showing his anger, her lover will be proud to share in the deed of the father, for she belonged to him more tenderly than she belonged to the father.
When the brave judge who saved Israel in the hour of her distress bound God and himself in one and the same vow, he had to turn the rejoicing of the young girl, the joy of his beloved daughter, into sorrow, while the whole of Israel sorrowed with her over her maidenly youth; but every freeman will understand and every resolute woman will admire Jephthah,* and all the maidens of Israel will desire to behave like his daughter, for of what use would be a victory obtained by the vow, if Jephthah did not keep the vow? Would not the victory be taken away from the people?
When a son forgets his duty, when the state entrusts the sword of justice to the father, when the laws decree that the punishment shall be inflicted by the hand of the father, then must the father heroically forget that the guilty one is his son, and nobly conceal his sorrow; but there will be no one among the people, not even the son, who will not admire the father; and every time the laws of Rome are expounded, it will be remembered that many have commented upon them more learnedly, but none so nobly as Brutus.
*Sce Judges, Chap. 11, verses 29-40—Ed.
244 soren kierkegaard
If, on the other hand, while a favourable wind was bearing the fleet under full sail toward the harbour, Agamemnon had sent the messenger to call Iphigenia to the sacrifice; if Jephthah, without being bound by an oath upon which depended the fate of his people, had said to his daughter: "Go alone two months and bewail thy short youth and then I shall sacrifice thee on the altar"; if Brutus had had an upright son and yet called the lictors to put him to death—who would have understood them? If they were asked why they had done this, and if all three had replied: it is a trial in which we are tempted, would anyone have understood them better?
At the decisive moment when Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus heroically overcome their suffering, when they have heroically lost what is dear to them and they have only to accomplish the exterior sacrifice, then surely every noble soul will shed tears of compassion for their suffering and of admiration for their deed. If, on the contrary, at the decisive moment of the heroic courage with which they bear their suffering, they were to say, simply: it will not happen all the same, who would understand them? And if they added, as explanation: we believe this by virtue of the absurd, would anyone understand them better? For if it is easy to understand how absurd the statement is, it is more difficult to understand how they can believe in it.
There is a striking difference between Abraham and the tragic hero. The tragic hero remains within the domain of morality. He gives to an expression of ethics a TlXos in a still higher expression of ethics; he reduces the ethical relationship between father and son or daughter and father to a sentiment the dialectic of which is related to the idea of morality. In this case then, there can be no question of a ideological suspension of ethics itself.
But the case of Abraham is quite different. By his action he went beyond the ethical stage and possessed a higher reXog outside it, in favour of which he suspended ethics. For I would like to know how it is possible to relate Abraham's action to the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any point of contact between what Abraham did and the universal, other than that he overstepped it. There was no question of saving a nation, or of defending the idea of the state, or of appeasing the anger of the gods. If there were any question of the divinity being angry, then it could only have been with Abraham, and his entire action stands in no relation to the universal and remained a purely private undertaking. While, therefore, the tragic hero is great through his moral virtue, Abraham is great through his purely personal virtue. In the life of Abraham there is no higher expression of ethics than that the father should love his son. Here there can be no question of ethics in the sense of morality. Insofar as the universal was present, it was concealed in Isaac, hidden, as one might say, in his loins and was compelled to cry out through Isaac's mouth: Do not do this, you annihilate everything.
Then why did Abraham do this? For God's sake, and so, what is absolutely identical, for his own sake. For God's sake, because God demands this proof of his faith; for his own sake, because he wanted to furnish this proof. The identification of these two experiences is perfectly expressed in the word which is always used to describe this condition: it is a trial, a temptation. But what is a tempta-
Fear and Trembling 245
tion? Ordinarily speaking, a temptation is something which tries to stop a man from doing his duty, but in this case it is ethics itself which tries to prevent him from doing God's will. But what then is duty? Duty is quite simply the expression of the will of God.
It here becomes clear that in order to understand Abraham, we require a new category. Such a relationship to the divinity is unknown to paganism. The tragic hero never enters into a private relationship with the divinity; but ethics is to him the divine, and therefore the paradox therein can be mediated in the universal.
Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and when I remain silent, no one can understand me. As soon then as Abraham desires to express himself in the universal, he is obliged to say that his situation is a tribulation; for he has no higher expression for the universal which exists above the universal he has transgressed.
While therefore Abraham excites my admiration, he also terrifies me. He who denies himself and sacrifices himself for his duty surrenders the finite to grasp the infinite; he has no lack of security. The tragic hero abandons certainty for a greater certainty and one can watch him with confidence. But what of the man who abandons the universal in order to grasp something still higher, which is not the universal? Can this be anything but a tribulation? And if it were possible, but the Individual was mistaken, what salvation is there for him? He bears all the suffering of the tragic hero, he annihilates his own joy in the world, he renounces everything, and in that same moment, perhaps, he shuts himself off from the one supreme joy which is so dear to him that he would purchase it at any price. Seeing him, it is impossible to understand him, impossible to watch him confidently. Perhaps what the believer desires cannot be done at all, since it is inconceivable. Or if it could be done, and the Individual had misunderstood the divinity, what salvation would there be for him? The tragic hero has need of tears and he demands tears, and who, watching Agamemnon with envious eyes, would be so barren as not to weep with him? But where is the man with a soul so perplexed as to presume to shed tears over Abraham? The tragic hero fulfils his task in a given moment of time, but in the course of time he accomplishes something of no less value: he visits those who are weighed down by sorrow, those whose lungs cannot breathe enough for their stifled sighs, those whose thoughts hang heavily about them and who are pregnant with tears; he shows himself to them, waves away the magic spells of sorrow, unbinds their bonds, dries their tears, and in the sorrows of the tragic hero they forget their own. No one can shed tears over Abraham. You approach him with a horror religious, as Israel approached Mount Sinai.
Who was so great in the world as that blessed woman, the mother of God, the Virgin Mary? And yet, how do we speak of her? That she was blessed among women does not make her great, and if it were not that by a strange coincidence the congregation could think just as inhumanly as the preacher, then surely every voung woman might still be asking, Why was I not also blessed? and if I had nothing else to say, I would not refuse to answer the question on the plea that it was stupid; for in the abstract, in the presence of a favour, all men have equal
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rights. We forget the distress and the dread and the paradox. My thought is as pure as any man's, and the thought of any man who considers such matters will be purified; and if this is not so, then terror lies in wait for him; for once these images have been evoked in the mind, it is impossible to forget them, and if you sin against them, they revenge themselves terribly upon you with a quiet anger which is more terrible than the braying of ten ravenous critics. No doubt Mary bore her child miraculously, but she was like other women in this, and it was the time of distress and dread and the paradox. The angel was indeed a ministering spirit, but he was not an obliging spirit who went to the other young girls of Israel and said, "Do not despise Mary, the extraordinary is happening to her." The angel came only to Mary and no one could understand her. What woman has been so insulted as Mary? And is it not also true here that those whom God blesses he curses in the same breath? This is the spiritual interpretation of Mary, and she is not—it is revolting to have to say this, and still more revolting to think of the thoughtless affectation of those who think in this way—she is not a lady sitting in state and playing with a divine child. But in spite of this, when she said: "Behold the hand-maid of the Lord," then she is great, and I imagine that it ought not be difficult to explain why she became the mother of God. She needs the admiration of the world as little as Abraham needs tears; for she was not a heroine, and he was not a hero, and neither of them became greater than a hero by being exempt from distress and dread and the paradox: only through these tribulations did they become great.
It is a great thing when the poet presents the tragic hero to the admiration of men and says: "Shed tears over him, for he deserves your tears"; for it is a great thing to deserve the tears of those who are worthy to shed them: it is a great thing that the poet should dare to awe the crowd and chastise men and cause everyone to examine himself to see whether he is worthy to shed tears over the hero; for the waste water of blubberers profanes the holy. But it is a still greater thing that the knight of faith should dare to say even to those who have the nobility to shed tears over him: do not shed tears over me, but rather shed tears over yourself.
Overcome with emotion you return to those happier times, a sweet and mournful longing leads you to the height of your desires, the desire to see Christ walking in the promised land. You forget the dread and distress and the paradox. Was it easy to avoid making a mistake? Was it not terrible that this man who walked among other men was God? Was it not a dreadful thing to sit at table with him? Was it an easy matter to become an apostle? But the result, eighteen centuries of Christianity, that is a help, that has helped on the vile deception by which men deceive themselves and others. I do not feel the courage to desire to be contemporary with such events, and therefore I do not judge severely those who were mistaken, nor do I judge lightly those who saw aright.
But I return to Abraham. During the interval which preceded the result, either Abraham was at every moment a murderer, or we stand in the presence of a paradox which is superior to all mediation.
The story of Abraham then involves a teleological suspension of ethics. As the Individual he has become superior to the universal. This is the paradox which
Fear and Trembling 247
cannot be mediated. It is just as impossible to explain how he enters it as to explain how he remains within it. If this is not the case, then Abraham is not a hero, but a murderer.
Study Questions
1. Why does Kierkegaard believe that the ethical choices we make are important? What is most important about them?
2. What difference does Kierkegaard find between living aesthetically and living ethically? Do you accept his conclusion?
3. What is the point of the Abraham and Isaac story as it appears in Genesis? Would you have obeyed God's command, as Abraham did? What relevance does the story have to life today?
4. How does Kierkegaard interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac? Why does he distinguish Abraham from the tragic hero? Is his interpretation convincing? Important? Do you find Abraham an admirable figure?
5. Kierkegaard is sometimes called "the first existentialist." Why?
Selected Bibliography
The selections listed are all expositions of and commentaries on Kierkegaard's ethical and
religious thought.
Beabout, G. FL Freedom and its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1996).
Gardner, P. Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Gill, J. H. (ed.) Essays on Kierkegaard (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1969). Hannay, A. Kierkegaard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Perkins, R. L. Seren Kierkegaard (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1969). Pojman, L. P. The Logic of Subjectivity (Lanham: University of Alabama Press, 1984), csp.
Chap. 6.
Price, G. The Narrow Pass (London: Hutchinson, 1963), Part 3. Rudd, A. Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Stack, G. J. Kierkegaard's Existential Ethics (University: University of Alabama Press,
1977). Valonc, J. J. The Ethics and Existentialism of Kierkegaard (Lanham: University Press of
America, 1983), Chaps. 3 and 4. Warnock, M. Existentialist Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1967), Chap. 2.
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