Author: Søren Kierkegaard
This book was very challenging to read. About 1/3 of the way through, I realized I was not conceptualizing much of what he was saying. So I started doing some research on the book, which I usually save until the end. It turns out it was a good thing I did the research because it provides a lot of context for what I was reading and not understanding.
Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling under a pseudonym, which apparently he did often. He wrote it from the perspective of someone he ultimately disagreed with and aimed to disprove himself/his pseudonym throughout the book. That was a big revelation for me, because I was confused about how the book was written. He would make statements as if he believed them, but then other arguments seemed contradictory.
I learned that the perspective he was speaking from was from a Hegelian perspective. Which would be someone who shared/believed in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose philosophies were very prevalent at the time.
The aspect of Hegelian philosophy that Kierkegaard addresses in the context of this book is that God is eternal, but changes as humanity changes. And that God is the culmination of all human reasoning/logic/thinking put together. Therefore, if a human can’t reason something, it can’t be possible, even for God.
Knowing this context already helped me a lot in my understanding of the book. It is still a very difficult read though, so my summary below is a result of a) my reading of the book itself, and b) the time I spent listening to and reading summaries about the book.
Fear and Trembling is based around the story of Abraham and his son Isaac from the Bible. Kierkegaard uses the story to make several philosophical claims as well as to explore what Abraham must have been thinking as God called him to sacrifice the son he had been longing for.
A quick summary of the Abraham/Isaac story is that Abraham was promised to be the father of generations by God. But him and his wife were getting very old and still didn’t have kids. They finally had a kid, whom they named Isaac and God promised that through Isaac, Abraham would be the father of generations. But then God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham obeyed, and led Isaac up a mountain to sacrifice him. Just as Abraham was raising the knife to kill Isaac, God stopped him and provided a ram that was trapped in a thorn bush to sacrifice instead.
Kierkegaard starts the book off by having his pseudonym (the Hegelian) try and rationalize the Abraham and Isaac story in four scenarios. He adds to the story some context between the lines to try and come up with a rational justification for why Abraham did what he did.
Going back to the biblical story. Abraham is trapped between two statements from God. One, that he will be the father of generations through Isaac. And two, that he must sacrifice Isaac. Kierkegaards pseudonym is under pressure trying to justify Abrahams actions. Since he believes God is the culmination of human thinking, it would make no sense from a human perspective to kill Isaac and simultaneously expect to be the father of generations through him.
This is ultimately why Kierkegaard chose this story to break apart Hegel’s perspective on God. Because this test of faith has no human logic behind it and doesn’t work in a humans understanding of the finite world. Kierkegaard says you can’t experience true faith without the existence of doubt. This story is the epitome of that definition. Dead people cant have babies. So how could both commands be true? Kierkegaards pseudonym is searching for reasoning or purpose behind God’s command. But there is none. If there was even a sliver of purpose behind it, we could maybe find some human reasoning to justify sacrificing Isaac. But the story offers nothing.
It’s on this basis that Kierkegaard discusses the paradox of faith.
Kierkegaard calls Abrahams faith a faith in the absurd. Abraham had to reason beyond our finite understanding of the world. In the bible, no one had yet been raised from the dead, but Abraham reasoned the absurd, that God could fulfill his promise of giving Abraham descendants through Isaac, even if Abraham killed him.
Ultimately, Kierkegaard is attempting to force the Christians living in his time to do one of two things. Admit that Hegel’s philosophy that God is the culmination of human reasoning is wrong. Or alternatively, maintain their Hegelian philosophy, which would mean that Abraham’s actions in the bible were absurd from a human reasoning perspective. If they maintained that Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard wanted them to stop calling themselves Christians as the beliefs are completely incompatible. Kierkegaard was very critical of what he called the Christian mob in his time. He criticized them for calling themselves Christians, but not ever thinking about or having any good reason for why. It was simply cultural.
At this point, Kierkegaard seems to change the subject a bit and starts talking about three types of characters in the world. These characters are the ethical, the aesthetic/hedonistic, and the religious.
Unfortunately, if you want to learn more about Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this, you will have to read the book yourself, because I can’t seem to work up the motivation to write it all out.