Kierkegaard and Issues in Contemporary Ethics

Mélissa Fox-Muraton

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110705744
• eBook ISBN: 9783110707199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

While Kierkegaard's philosophy focuses on concrete human existence, his thought has rarely been challenged regarding concrete and contemporary moral issues. This volume offers an overview of contemporary ethical issues from a Kierkegaardian perspective, deliberately taking him out of the sphere of Theology and Christian Ethics, and examining the ways in which his works can provide fruitful insight into questions which Kierkegaard certainly never himself envisaged, such as accepting refugees into our communities, understanding how we relate to social media, issues of identity with regard to bioengineering or transgender identity, or problems of interreligious dialogue.

The contributions in this volume, by international scholars, seek to address both the challenges and insights of Kierkegaard's existential ethics for our contemporary societies, and its relation to topics of current interest in the field of moral philosophy. The volume is organized into three major sections: the first focusing on the relation between ethics and religion, a topic of primary importance with regard to the development of religious foundationalism and the challenges of dealing with diverse belief systems within our communities; the second on our understandings of ourselves and our relations to others with regard to issues of media and community; and the third targeting more specifically questions of identity, and the ways in which the developments of modern science impact identity construction. This work offers new paths for critically engaging with the moral issues of our times from an existential perspective.

Part I: Ethics And Religion

1 Either Religion or Ethics

Shai Frogel

“‘No,’ said the priest, ‘one doesn’t have to take everything as the truth, one just has to accept it as necessary.’ ‘A depressing opinion,’ said K. ‘It means that the world is founded on untruth.’” (Kafka, The Trial)

Kierkegaard considers religious existence to be more elevated than ethical existence, that is, a source of a more authentic and meaningful life. This elevation is achieved, argues Kierkegaard, by dialectically negating and overcoming reason and ethics for accepting the paradox of faith. Nowadays, we are facing many conflicts which express the tension between religious faith and ethical demands. Two genuine examples are gender and political criticism. Should one tolerate discrimination against women in the name of religious faith? Should one avoid caricatures of religious figures in the name of religious sensitivity? This paper claims that Kierkegaard’s philosophy confronts us with this conflict instead of ignoring it or rejecting it. It uses Kierkegaard’s recognition of this conflict to explain the threat for ethics posed by religion, but also in order to reject the superiority that Kierkegaard attributes to religious existence.¹

1.1 Suspending Ethics?

Fear and Trembling is probably Kierkegaard’s most well-known book, published under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio. In this book, he confronts us with his most troubling existential insight concerning the conflict between religion and ethics. Abraham, the father of faith in the monotheistic tradition, was commanded by God to bind his son, Isaac. He obeyed God’s command without saying a word (one possible interpretation of the pseudonym: de silentio). This terrible act perpetrated by a father towards his son became the paradigm of faith in the monotheistic tradition. Is Abraham a murderer or a believer? Kierkegaard asks this question again and again in the book without giving a clear answer to himself or to his readers. Thus, he rhetorically echoes his terrible recognition of the conflict between ethics and religion.

Kierkegaard suggests that we should not read this story from the end, as we usually do, since this approach prevents us from understanding the unique existential state in which Abraham finds himself, which Kierkegaard defines as fear and trembling. Jacques Derrida interprets this trembling in terms of Mysterium tremendum:

We fear and tremble because we are already in the hands of God, although free to work, but in the hands and under the gaze of God, whom we don’t see and whose will we cannot know, no more than the decisions he will hand down, nor his reasons for wanting this or that …We fear and tremble before the inaccessible secret of God who decides for us although we remain responsible, that is, free to decide, to work, to assume our life and our death.²

The story apparently has a happy end, since Isaac is saved by the sacrificial lamb, or rather, by God. Therefore, by reading the story from the end we miss out on Abraham’s anxiety, which characterized the existential state of faith.³ It is the anxiety of the individual who suspends his ethical commitment, which is human and rational, in order to obey God’s inhuman and irrational command. This story explores the idea that religious faith is rooted in the irrational aspect of human existence, where one is moved by metaphysical fear and desire. Abraham’s religious anxiety overcomes his rationality and therefore, he has nothing to ask and nothing to say. He puts himself in the hands of God and goes off to murder his son, not because he knows something, but because he was moved by his fear and trembling.⁴

Kierkegaard not only recognizes Abraham’s anxiety by reading the story from the beginning, but also directs us to Abraham’s depression at the end of the story. He does this through the small fragments at the beginning of the book, under the title of “Exordium.” These small fragments lyrically compare Abraham’s existential state to different ways through which a mother may wean her baby. In the shortest of these fragments, he writes:

It was early in the morning when Abraham arose: he embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age, and Sarah kissed Isaac, who took away her disgrace, Isaac her pride, her hope for all the generations to come. They rode along the road in silence, and Abraham stared continuously and fixedly at the ground until the fourth day, when he looked up and saw Mount Moriah far away, but once again he turned his eyes toward the ground. Silently he arranged the firewood and bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife—then he saw the ram that God had selected. This he sacrificed and went home.—From that day henceforth, Abraham was old; he could not forget that God had ordered him to do this. Isaac flourished as before, but Abraham’s eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more. When the child has grown big and is to be weaned, the mother virginally conceals her breast, and then the child no longer has a mother. How fortune the child who has not lost his mother in some other way.⁵

“Abraham’s eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more.” The price that Abraham had to pay was very high, argues Kierkegaard, even though the son was saved. One can surely wonder also about Isaac’s trauma: Did he really “flourish…as before”? But Kierkegaard asks us to concentrate on the father. It is the anxiety before the act of faith and the deep depression he experiences afterwards that Kierkegaard attempts to capture, both lyrically and philosophically.⁶ The fact that Isaac would be saved was unknown to Abraham before the event. So, if one wants to understand the anxiety involved in faith, one needs to imagine the feelings of a father who is about to bind his son just because he heard a voice which commanded him to do it.⁷ And if one wants to understand the depression involved in faith, one has to imagine the sense of guilt of a father who intends to murder his son. Kierkegaard imagines that “Abraham’s eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more.” God tested Abraham’s faith, and Abraham surely passed the test and by this became “the knight of faith.” Yet focusing on this fact can cause us to miss out on the troubling aspects of the story: the heavy ethical and psychological price of faith. Abraham suspended his ethical commitment to his son in order to obey God’s command. Through this, Kierkegaard argues, he explores a new and more elevated stage of human existence, which is characterized by ethical sin and existential suffering.

Herein, according to Kierkegaard, lies the conflict between the Greek model of existence and the monotheistic one. The Greeks saw the ethical sphere as the superior existence of human beings, and therefore dedicated their thinking and life to achieve this ethical existence. It is Socrates’ ideal of a “good life” (eudemonia, εὐδαιμονία), which Plato formulates by the expression “the form of the good” and Aristotle defines as ethics. The Greek view depends on the assumption that human beings are rational beings, and therefore their superior form of existence is the one which is guided by reason. Since reason is our faculty of universalizing, it directs us to prefer the universal over the particular, and thus defines the meaning of ethical life: the more universal your attitude towards human life, the more ethical your existence.⁸ The logic is simple and clear: the more you live according to this superior faculty, the more perfect your existence will be. Philosophers, throughout the history of Western thought, provide us with ethical theories that show that the superior human existence is the ethical one, which is guided by reason and is characterized by harmony between the individual’s morality and happiness. Kant even argues that if the connection between morality and happiness cannot be proved, morality is in vain: “If, therefore, the highest good [a necessary connection between virtue and happiness] is impossible, according to practical rules, then the moral law which commands us to further this good must also be fantastic and aimed at empty imaginary purposes, and hence itself false.”⁹

From the ethical perspective, Abraham is a murderer. Kierkegaard agrees with this claim, but nevertheless holds that the religious is the highest existential stage of human existence. Abraham’s story explores, according to Kierkegaard, the dialectical relationship between ethics and faith: one needs to overcome ethics to arrive at the existential stage of faith. He names it the “leap” or the paradox of faith, since such a movement requires negating rationality. Kierkegaard agrees with traditional philosophy’s claim that ethics is the superior product of our reason. It is by reason that we overcome our mere sensual existence, which he names the aesthetic sphere, to constitute a common ethical life. Reason enables us to universalize our existence in order to share our life with other individuals. From the univ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics for the 21st Century
• Part I: Ethics And Religion
• Part II: Media And Community
• Part III: Challenges To Identity
• Abbreviatons
• Index