The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

John Lippitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415707183
• eBook ISBN: 9781317376910
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the key figures of nineteenth century thought, whose influence on subsequent philosophy, theology and literature is both extensive and profound. Fear and Trembling, which investigates the nature of faith through an exploration of the story of Abraham and Isaac, is one of Kierkegaard's most compelling and widely read works. It combines an arresting narrative, an unorthodox literary structure and a fascinating account of faith and its relation to 'the ethical'.

The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling introduces and assesses:

• Kierkegaard's life and the background to Fear and Trembling, including aspects of its philosophical and theological context
• The text and key ideas of Fear and Trembling, including the details of its account of faith and its connection to trust and hope
• The book's reception history, the diversity of interpretations it has been given and its continuing interest and importance

This Guidebook assumes no previous knowledge of Kierkegaard's work and will be essential reading for anyone studying the most famous text of this important thinker.

1

Introduction

Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Bæven] is probably Kierkegaard’s best known and most commonly read work, and Kierkegaard himself seems to have seen this coming. In an entry in the journal that he kept for most of his adult life, he claimed that ‘once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book’ (JP 6: 6491).¹ Yet the book’s fame has been a mixed blessing. Robert L. Perkins is probably still right in his claim that Fear and Trembling is ‘the most studied of Kierkegaard’s works in the undergraduate curriculum’, but this comes at a price.² Sometimes, it is the only text in a course in which Kierkegaard appears as one amongst several thinkers, a situation that brings with it twin dangers. First, the apparent argument of Fear and Trembling is often attributed to ‘Kierkegaard’. Yet, like many of Kierkegaard’s works, Fear and Trembling was not written under his own name but under that of a pseudonym, in this case the mysterious Johannes de silentio, signalling the importance of ‘silence’ to the text. This fact should not be forgotten, and we shall consider its significance shortly. Second, Fear and Trembling is sometimes mistakenly taken to be ‘Kierkegaard’s’ definitive view of the nature of faith and the relation between ethics and religion. It is not, as an acquaintance with such later texts as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Sickness unto Death and Works of Love, to name but three, will show any curious reader. But this second issue is not merely a function of the first. That is, as well as the fact that the text is the work of a pseudonym, there is a rather more obvious problem in attributing Fear and Trembling’s message to Kierkegaard. This is that it is far from obvious what actually is ‘Fear and Trembling’s message’. While it may be true that Fear and Trembling has immortalised Kierkegaard’s name, it is a text which is at least as likely to be greeted by puzzlement or downright exasperation as admiration. Often the book has been read as a strident demand for obedience to God even when divine commands override ethical requirements. But we shall see in due course that the story it has to tell is rather more complex and nuanced than that. Moreover, if the sheer range of interpretations of a text is in any way testimony to its richness, Fear and Trembling is a rich text indeed.

Kierkegaard’s life and works

Before considering what the book is about, we should turn to consider its author – or, more precisely, since its author is a pseudonym, its author’s inventor. It is quite common in books in this series to start with a brief biography of the thinker concerned. But there is a peculiar problem with doing so in the case of Kierkegaard. With considerable plausibility, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong claim: ‘No thinker and writer ever tried as Kierkegaard did to leave the reader alone with the work.’³ That is, Kierkegaard was concerned to an extraordinary degree with attempting to drive a wedge between his life and his thought so that the latter would not be interpreted solely in the light of the former. (As we shall see, this was part of the purpose behind writing pseudonymously.) This was a far from unalloyed success: there have been no shortage of attempts to ‘explain’ the work in terms of the life. For instance, Kierkegaard’s broken engagement to a young girl, Regine Olsen, has been thought by some to be the key needed to ‘explain’ the ‘secret message’ of Fear and Trembling, and we shall need to discuss this matter later (though without accepting this conclusion). So it is with a warning about the dangers of a merely ‘biographical’ reading in mind that the following brief account of Kierkegaard’s life should be read.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a city in which he lived for virtually his whole life. Søren was the youngest of seven children. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a successful, self-made businessman, who exerted a great influence on the young Søren. An important part of this influence consisted of bringing up his children in an atmosphere of intense religiosity. But this was a religiosity steeped in Michael’s personal melancholy. Søren seems to have been convinced that he would die at an early age, but this ostensibly strange fixation was not without foundation. By the end of 1834 his mother and no fewer than five of his siblings had died. Moreover, no sibling had lived to be older than thirty-four, and Kierkegaard’s father seems to have passed on to the surviving sons, Peter and Søren, his belief that his tragedy would be that he would outlive all his children. However, this turned out to be incorrect, and when the old man died in 1838, Søren, as one of only two surviving children, inherited a considerable amount of money. Though nominally a student of theology at the University of Copenhagen since 1830, he had been living a fairly bohemian life, reading more in the way of literature and philosophy than studying hard for his theology exams.⁴ His father’s death seems to have galvanised Søren into re-dedicating his efforts to formal study as a mark of respect to his father. (As an intelligent but entirely self-educated man, the formal education of his sons had been a matter of great importance to Michael.) Søren finally took his theology exams in 1840, shortly after having become engaged to Regine (more of which later). Having passed with the respectable but not outstanding grade of laudibilis [commendable], he stayed on at the university, submitting a lengthy dissertation, now known as The Concept of Irony, in 1841. Following the break with Regine that same year, Kierkegaard travelled to Berlin, ostensibly to hear Schelling’s lectures, and from this point on began a quite phenomenal output of work, in stark contrast to the – apparent – indolence of most of his student years.

Over the next few years some of the works for which Kierkegaard is most famous appeared: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and Repetition in 1843 (the latter two on the same day, 16 October); Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces in 1844; Stages on Life’s Way in 1845 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846. All of these works are pseudonymous, but alongside them appeared various more explicitly religious ‘upbuilding discourses’, published under his own name, and various other short pieces. Some of the discourses were also published on the same day as the pseudonymous works: in the case of Fear and Trembling, there were three such discourses: two entitled ‘Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins’ and one entitled ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’ (all contained in EUD). One sense in which the Postscript was supposed to be ‘concluding’ is that Kierkegaard seems to have planned to cease his output there and perhaps take a post as a country pastor. However, the direction of his life was changed in part by the first of two conflicts, with a scandalous but influential Copenhagen paper, The Corsair. A challenge to The Corsair from one of the pseudonyms, Frater Taciturnus, led to Kierkegaard being ruthlessly ridiculed in print, The Corsair focusing on such matters as his slightly hunchbacked appearance and the uneven length of his trouser legs. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this spat was that it led to Kierkegaard’s determination to keep writing. So began what has become known as his ‘second authorship’, including such important works as Works of Love in 1847, The Sickness unto Death (published in 1849) and Practice in Christianity (published in 1850). Being the victim of public ridicule must also have contributed to the hardening of Kierkegaard’s view, evident from A Literary Review (1846), of the dangers of ‘the crowd’ or ‘the public’.⁵

The second great conflict came with the established Lutheran state church. Kierkegaard had long been concerned with the incongruity he saw between ‘genuine’ Christianity and what he heard preached from pulpits, which he saw as an evasion of the radical teaching of the New Testament. This came to a head in the 1850s. In Practice in Christianity, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, Kierkegaard contrasts his view of New Testament Christianity with the establishment religiosity he labels ‘Christendom’, famously proclaiming the need to ‘re-introduce Christianity into Christendom’.⁶ In the last two years of his life, this ‘attack upon Christendom’ became venomous. In a series of articles, he accused the Church of rank hypocrisy in betraying the message of the gospel, a particular target being Jakob Peter Mynster, Bishop of Zealand and Primate of the Danish State (later Danish People’s) Church. In the midst of this furore, Kierkegaard collapsed in the street, dying in hospital some weeks later, on 11 November 1855, at the age of forty-two. At his funeral, there was a disturbance led by his nephew Henrik Lund, a student, who protested that it was hypocritical to bury his uncle as if he was a member of a church the hypocrisy of which he had spent his last years trying to expose. One suspects that Kierkegaard would have approved of this. According to the recollections of his friend Emil Boesen (the only priest Kierkegaard would allow to visit him in hospital), when Kierkegaard was asked whether he wanted to receive the last rites, he said yes, but from a layman rather than a priest, as ‘the priests are royal functionaries [who] have nothing to do with Christianity’.⁷ Though most of his money had run out by the time of his death, Kierkegaard’s will, believed to have been written in 1849, left everything to Regine. However, possibly owing to the intervention of Fritz Schlegel, the man whom she had by then married, she declined, asking only that her letters to Søren and a few personal items be returned.⁸

Søren and Regine

In the above, I have skated over one of the most famous elements of Kierkegaard’s biography, and which some have thought to be crucial to Fear and Trembling: the story of his broken engagement to Regine. Here, then, are the basic details. Søren and Regine were engaged for thirteen months before the former broke off the engagement in 1841. Why? According to Kierkegaard’s journal, he had wrestled with the possibility of marriage and a conventional bourgeois life and reached the conclusion that his ‘melancholy and sadness’ would make married life impossible. Writing retrospectively, Kierkegaard says:

In the course of half a year or less she would have gone to pieces. There is – and this is both the good and bad in me – something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship to me. Yes, in the light-weight cloak in which I usually appear, it is another matter. But at home it will be evident that basically I live in a spirit world, I had been engaged to her for one year and yet she really did not know me.⁹

Kierkegaard claims that Regine failed to see that his melancholy was no mere personality quirk: beneath it was a ‘religious collision’. Alastair Hannay suggests that this term, used by Hegel to descri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Reference key to Kierkegaard’s texts
• Key to commonly used editions of Fear and Trembling
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Tuning up: ‘Preface’, ‘Attunement’ and ‘Speech in Praise of Abraham’
• 3. Infinite resignation and faith: the ‘Preamble from the Heart’
• 4. Suspending the ethical: Problemata I and II
• 5. The sound of silence: Problema III
• 6. What is Fear and Trembling really about?
• 7. How reliable is Johannes de silentio?
• Bibliography
• Index