Қорқыныш пен діріл

1843 philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard

Fear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (Latin for John of the Silence). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, which says to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." The Philippians verse is sometimes thought to reference Psalm 55:5, which says, "Fear and trembling came upon me." Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham during the Binding of Isaac. Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to refuse to comply with God's orders. He resigned himself to the three and a half day journey and to the loss of his son. "He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eliezer. Who, after all, could understand him, for did not the nature of temptation extract from him a pledge of silence? He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife." Because he kept everything to himself and chose not to reveal his feelings he "isolated himself as higher than the universal." Kierkegaard envisions two types of people in Fear and Trembling and Repetition. One lives in hope, Abraham, the other lives in memory, The Young Man and Constantin Constantius. He discussed them beforehand in Lectures delivered before the Symparanekromenoi and The Unhappiest Man. One hopes for happiness from something "out there" while the other finds happiness from something in themself. This he brought out in his upbuilding discourse, published on the same date. Kierkegaard says, "Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith." He spoke about this kind of consciousness in an earlier book. "There comes a moment in a person's life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit. As immediate spirit, a person is bound up with all the earthly life, and now spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, so to speak, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then depression sets in." Once Abraham became conscious of his eternal validity he arrived at the door of faith and acted according to his faith. In this action he became a knight of faith. In other words, one must give up all his or her earthly possessions in infinite resignation and must also be willing to give up whatever it is that he or she loves more than God. Kierkegaard used the ethical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the aesthetic stories of Agnes and the merman, Iphigenia at Aulis and others to help the reader understand the difference between the inner world of the spirit and the outer world of ethics and aesthetics. Several authorities consider the work autobiographical. It can be explained as Kierkegaard's way of working himself through the loss of his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Abraham becomes Kierkegaard and Isaac becomes Regine in this interpretation.

Kierkegaard says that everyone has a choice in life. Freedom consists in using that choice. We each have the right to speak or not to speak and the right to act or not to act. Kierkegaard's Either/Or is God or the world. He says,

What is the ethical? Kierkegaard steers the reader to Hegel's book Elements of the Philosophy of Right especially the chapter on "The Good and Conscience" where he writes, "It is the right of the subjective will that it should regard as good what it recognizes as authoritative. It is the individual's right, too, that an act, as outer realization of an end, should be counted right or wrong, good or evil, lawful or unlawful, according to his knowledge of the worth it has when objectively realized. ( ) Right of insight into the good is different from right of insight with regard to action as such. The right of objectivity means that the act must be a change in the actual world, be recognized there, and in general be adequate to what has validity there. Whoso will act in this actual world has thereby submitted to its laws, and recognized the right of objectivity. Similarly in the state, which is the objectivity of the conception of reason, legal responsibility does not adapt itself to what any one person holds to be reasonable or unreasonable. It does not adhere to subjective insight into right or wrong, good or evil, or to the claims which an individual makes for the satisfaction of his conviction. In this objective field the right of insight is reckoned as insight into what is legal or illegal, or the actual law. It limits itself to its simplest meaning, namely, knowledge of or acquaintance with what is lawful and binding. Through the publicity of the laws and through general customs the state removes from the right of insight that which is for the subject its formal side. It removes also the element of chance, which at our present standpoint still clings to it." Abraham didn't follow this theory. Kierkegaard says Hegel was wrong because he didn't protest against Abraham as the father of faith and call him a murderer. He had suspended the ethical and failed to follow the universal. Kierkegaard has a different theory about the difference between right and wrong and he stated it in the little discourse at the end of Either/Or. He wrote, "If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act than when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are? Then we have only the choice between being nothing in relation to God or having to begin all over again every moment in eternal torment, yet without being able to begin, for if we can decide definitely with regard to the previous moment, and so further and further back. Doubt is again set in motion, care again aroused; let us try to calm it by deliberating on: The Upbuilding That Lies In The Thought That In Relation To God We Are Always In The Wrong." Kierkegaard says, "Hegelian philosophy culminates in the thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer." Hegel wrote, "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly the means for realizing it, i. e., the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life movement, and activity. We then recognized the state as the moral whole and the reality of freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Abraham had to choose between the ethical requirements of his surroundings and what he regarded as his absolute duty to God. Hegel says, "When I am conscious of my freedom as inner substantive reality, I do not act; yet if I do act and seek principles, I must try to obtain definite characters. The demand is then made that this definite context shall be deduced from the conception of free will. Hence, if it is right to absorb right and duty into subjectivity, it is on the other hand wrong if this abstract basis of action is not again evolved. Only in times when reality is a hollow, unspiritual, and shadowy existence, can a retreat be permitted out of the actual into an inner life."

Johannes de Silentio speaks of the difference between the method Descartes found for himself and the system that Hegel wants to build. He says, "I throw myself down in the deepest submission before every systematic ransacker: This [book] is not the system; it has not the least thing to do with the system. I invoke everything good for the system and for the Danish shareholders in this omnibus, for it will hardly become a tower. I wish them all, each and every one, success and good fortune." Respectfully, Johannes De Silentio Kierkegaard chooses to "work out his own salvation in fear and trembling". Johannes Climacus, another pseudonymous author, wrote in 1846 that Kierkegaard isn't interested in creating yet another system. He says, "The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is in a poetic and refined way a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes." Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the paradox and the leap in Fear and Trembling. He says, "The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all. The act of resignation does not require faith, but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox." He explains himself in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where he writes, "In that book [Fear and Trembling] I had perceived how the leap, according to the author, as the decision par excellence becomes specifically decisive for what is Christian and for every dogmatic category. This can be achieved neither through Schelling's intellectual intuition nor through what Hegel, flouting Schelling's idea, wants to put in its place, the inverse operation of the method. All Christianity is rooted in paradox, according to Fear and Trembling yes, it is rooted in fear and trembling (which are specifically the desperate categories of Christianity and the leap) whether one accepts it (that is, is a believer) or rejects it (for the very reason that it is the paradox)."

The world of ethics demands disclosure and punishes hiddenness but aesthetics rewards hiddenness according to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard says, "Greek tragedy is blind. A son murders his father, but not until later does he learn that it was his father. A sister is going to sacrifice her brother but realizes it at the crucial moment." Abraham hid everything he did. He kept everything from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. But Abraham's 'inability to become open is terror" to him. He keeps absolute silence about the whole affair. A single individual like Abraham might be "able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, but, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him." Abraham was experiencing what Kierkegaard called "reflective grief" but not just grief but joy also because he was beginning a new association with an unknown power. Grief and joy can both keep an individual quiet in inward reflection, perhaps it is a mixture of both that Abraham felt. Kierkegaard says, "If Agamemnon himself, not Calchas, should have drawn the knife to kill Iphigenia, he would only have demeaned himself if in the very last moment he had said a few words, for the meaning of his deed was, after all, obvious to everybody, the process of reverence, sympathy, emotion, and tears was completed, and then, too, his life had no relation to spirit that is, he was not a teacher or a witness of the spirit." He says of Abraham, "If the task had been different, if the Lord had commanded Abraham to bring Isaac up to Mount Moriah so that he could have his lightning strike Isaac and take him as a sacrifice in that way, then Abraham plainly would have been justified in speaking as enigmatically as he did, for then he himself could not have known what was going to happen. But given the task as assigned to Abraham, he himself has to act; consequently, he has to know in the crucial moment what he himself will do, and consequently, he has to know that Isaac is going to be sacrificed." Kierkegaard puts it this way in another book, "We shall not say with the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 4:10), 'Woe to him who is alone; if he falls, there is no one else to raise him up,' for God is indeed still the one who both raises up and casts down, for the one who lives in association with people and the solitary one; we shall not cry, 'Woe to him,' but surely an 'Ah, that he might not go astray,' because he is indeed alone in testing himself to see whether it is God's call he is following or a voice of temptation, whether defiance and anger are not mixed embitteringly in his endeavor." The task God gave to Abraham was so horrifying that he could tell no one about it because no one would understand him. Ethics forbade it as well as aesthetics. Abraham became a knight of faith because he was willing to do what God asked of him. "He didn't trouble anyone with his suffering." Abraham was wrong as far as ethics is concerned but right as far the Absolute is concerned. Kierkegaard says, "wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence, it is upbuilding always to be in the wrong because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!" What could Abraham do most in his relationship with God? Remain faithful to his commitment to God. He accomplished that by actually lifting the knife to carry out his mission. In short, he acted. Here the intention was more important than the result. He had faith and had to go no further to please God.

Kierkegaard says, "By my own strength I cannot get the least little thing that belongs to finitude, for I continually use my strength to resign everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain, but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd. But this movement I cannot make. As soon as I want to begin, everything reverses itself, and I take refuge in the pain of resignation. I am able to swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical hovering." The story of the princess and of Agnes and the merman can be interpreted autobiographically. Here Kierkegaard is using the story of Abraham to help himself understand his relationship with Regine Olsen. She was his only love as far as "finitude" is concerned and he gave her up. Kierkegaard says the young man who was in love with the princess learned 'the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself. He is no longer finitely concerned about what the princess does, and precisely this proves that he has made the movement [of faith] infinitely." In his Journals, Kierkegaard also mentioned Agnes and the Merman: "I have thought of adapting [the legend of] Agnes and the Merman from an angle that has not occurred to any poet. The Merman is a seducer, but when he has won Agnes' love he is so moved by it that he wants to belong to her entirely. — But this, you see, he cannot do, since he must initiate her into his whole tragic existence, that he is a monster at certain times, etc., that the Church cannot give its blessing to them. He despairs and in his despair plunges to the bottom of the sea and remains there, but Agnes imagines that he only wanted to deceive her. But this is poetry, not that wretched, miserable trash in which everything revolves around ridiculousness and nonsense. Such a complication can be resolved only by the religious (which has its name because it resolves all witchcraft); if the Merman could believe, his faith perhaps could transform him into a human being." Kierkegaard tasted his first love in Regine and he said it was "beautiful and healthy, but not perfect." Regine, his first love was his second love; it was an infinite love. But he resigned it in order to serve God. He couldn't explain to Regine how it happened that he changed anymore than Cordelia could explain what happened between her and the seducer in The Seducer's Diary. "She could not confide in anyone, for she had nothing definite to confide. When one has a dream he can tell it, it was real, and yet when she wished to speak of it and relieve her troubled mind, there was nothing to tell. She felt it very keenly. No one could know about it except herself, and yet it rested upon her with an alarming weight." Abraham couldn't confide in Sarah or Eliezer either.