Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: The Absurdity of Abraham

 

                 Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
      And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

I hold this truth to be self-evident, a fact of life. We wake, in terms of conscious memories at least, sometime after the age of three with no clue how we got there. Life comes with no instruction book. There have many attempts to write such a book--the scriptures and a sprawling self-help industry--but the very diversity of these efforts proves that no one is reliable. We choose among contradictories with no ultimate authority but the happenstances of history and our own free will (if any). We may have faith, but never knowledge.

The key word in Robert Fitzgerald's translation from Omar Khayyam is knowing. We can assume, believe, suppose, understand, posit, love, assert, or commit to all manner of whys, but knowing why (knowing what our sudden, mysterious existence means) is above the human pay grade. Life is a game with rules improvised as we go along, either by thinking or electing to stop thinking. Maybe petrifying a prior thought and worshipping it like a stone dog. Maybe riding a musical flow that sings like the Beatles or the theme to Alfie, "Love is all you need." Or maybe (with a nod to Leonard Cohen) zoning out on the "crack in everything . . . where the light gets in." Or, more realistically, the multitude of cracks and kaleidoscopic lights. I'm with Kierkegaard on this, if not elsewhere: that everything, at its deepest foundations, is irreducible subjectivity. 

My preferred term for this implacable unknowing is the void, but the abyss works too. Last year I wrote about the memory of first seeing into the void in childhood (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/existential-angst-in-eternal.html), and it became an inseparable presence my teen years, like Harvey following around Elwood P. Dowd, invisible but seldom absent. The void, in various forms, is all over my juvenilia, crowding out even sexual frustration in the binders of yellow sheets I still keep on a top shelf. Here is a ditty from age 19:

Illumination

One night I climbed

out of my head--

just soul and eyes.

Snug and cloud-limbed,

I saw in bed

what slowly dies.

Saw on the bed

marshmallow flesh

soon to be dead,

in cotton mesh,

but touched myself

and tumbled back

into small self,

and then a black

emotion beat

a piston dance

inside my throat.

Does no retreat

lead from this stance?

I, with no boat,

am sinking free

in dark sea.

Drowning or being in a boat adrift represented life as I saw it then. Looking back over the decades since, I have cobbled together passible ad hoc meanings over the years. Good choices or good luck? The distinction is meaningless. It's been a good river-float, though there is a Niagara ahead, maybe in the next bend, a cataract that was always infinitely near compared to eternity. 

The non-void (anything except the abyss of unknowning) has always been a mere speck falling into that void, the infinite unknown, a scintilla dwindling toward a vanishing point in the abyss of everything we cannot hope to really know. Ultimately, we have only the resources of our own subjectivity. What we have is everything and nothing, unreliability that must be relied on. Soren Kierkegaard confronted this absurd situation, one in which the sole objective truth is subjectivity, the infinite to be found only inside the finite, in Fear and Trembling (1843), an extended meditation on Abraham's near-murder of his son at God's request. At this time, Kierkegaard apparently understood religious faith to be both essential and impossible--at least impossible for the narrator he hides behind. He praises Abraham as a Knight of Faith because the patriarch goes beyond "infinite resignation" to a joy and trust in absurd existence. "He resigned everything infinitely and then grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd" (p. 34).

The ideology of Kierkegaard's bourgeoise 19th-century Copenhagen, where Hegelian philosophy and a state church ruled, clouds his argument (for me) with alien obsessions. Even in English translation, his language is foreign, but I do share his fascination with the story of Abraham, which I travestied in an earlier post (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/01/bad-abraham-prevaricating-patriarch.html ). Kierkegaard admires a hero we both find absurd, admires him on a basis alien to me me--as a protest against the complacent affirmations of the contemporary pastors and neo-Hegelians. He rebounds off a (to me) invisible backboard, agreeing in a rhetoric of radical disagreement. For Kierkegaard, the unreasonableness of Abraham's sacrifice is its reason. We are obliged, in fearful trembling, he insists, to follow our subjective callings even if this means sacrificing all that we love and violates the rules of social order. Abraham is justified because he does this, without ceasing to allow doubt that his God is real or abrogating the law against murder. This is a contradiction, of course, an absurdity.

Kierkegaard's rhetoric, masked by a fictional narrator, is ironic and provocative. His apparent purpose is not to directly express his opinions, certainly not to write philosophical absolutes, but to provoke thought. Fear and Trembling is almost, but not entirely, a work of fiction, a dramatic monologue attributed to a character ironically called Johannes de silentio. Johannes is not silent, so what does this mean? That he remains silent on some essential points--or perhaps its opposite, that he is from silence, breaking silence? Kierkegaard writes to shake those who casually idolize Abraham in conventional terms out of their complacency by showing what the story implies--not presumably that fathers should kill their children on the basis of supernatural dreams--but that membership in the established church and respectable behavior do not make one a Christian. More broadly, social conformity does not make an authentic person. Authenticity can be painful. At the bottom of a life of faith must lie a willingness to transgress conventional morality and affirm subjective experiences of the infinite however radically they transgress social universals.

Kierkegaard rejects the dominant philosophies of his day, the systems of Kant and Hegel. Kant saw subjectivity as governed by universal categories, including moral laws centered on his categorical imperative, a secular Golden Rule. He reduced religion to morality. Hegel interpreted religion in terms of evolving ideas, originally primitive and mythological, but ultimately defined in universal, objective terms. In contrast, Kierkegaard championed ultimate subjectivity--private faith over public systems. In Fear and Trembling, he attacks Hegel's concept of universal morality, norms of family, society, and the state that were supposed to overrule the individual. Morality, of course, would prohibit Abraham from killing his son. Kierkegaard insisted, however, that a private conviction in a "knight of faith," however absurd, might mandate objectively "immoral" behavior: "It does not follow from this that the ethic should be abolished, but it receives an entirely different expression, a paradoxical expression, in such a way, for example, that love of neighbor can cause the knight of faith to give his love of neighbor the opposite expression of what duty is ethically speaking" (p. 61).

Kierkegaard acknowledges the danger in Abraham's story. He imagines a pastor preaching a sermon on the text, praising the willingness to sacrifice what is most precious. But what if one of his parishioners, taking him seriously and feeling a calling, went home from church and sacrificed his own son? What would the pastor say? "You pariah of society, what devil has possessed you that you want to murder your son?" (p. 23) Nothing the parishioner could say would reasonably justify him. No possible explanation could transform the child-killer, like Abraham, into a "knight of faith." And the risk is not merely academic. As I was preparing to write this, two stories appeared on the CNN news feed, one about a father killing his two children because Qanon material had convinced him that they would become monsters, another about a man slaughtering a house full of strangers, including a small child, because he imagined they were child traffickers. And religiously motivated terrorism goes without saying.

Even as Kierkegaard acknowledges that a contemporary transgressor may be delusional, he defends his Knight of Faith. If God is God and we receive his mandate, this overrules all of rational ethics. As Martin Luther King wrote, man-made codes should be in harmony with God's law. For Kierkegaard, in absurd but inexorable fact, absolute morality, the ground of all we can know about what to do, is subjective and individual, not objective and universal. Life comes with discordant instruction books, none of them authoritative absent the consent of conscience.

MLK suggests another context for the loneliness of absolute subjective morality. Suppose that white child in a 1925 Jim Crow Alabama community understood that God's justice demanded that the two races in her town intermingle in perfect equality until all racial distinctions were blurred beyond recognition. This would seem--to every churchgoing white in the community, perhaps even to the inspired child--to be a temptation, an assault on the prevailing racist morality. But once the child has received this insight--once she has eaten of this knowledge of good and evil, a fruit denied her neighbors--she can only be good by transgressing "universal" morality.

Kierkegaard's own transgression, for which Fear and Trembling is a veiled apologetic, was his jilting of Regine Olsen--material for a romance novel, if not a comedy, but momentous in his life. If your crisis of testing by God is a broken engagement in your twenties, your greatest adventure philosophy study in Berlin, yours is a sheltered and privileged life, but Kierkegaard's tumultuous interiority, obsessively documented in books and journals, infused it with drama. Olsen took the breakup with equal seriousness and they were both highly visible fish in the small pond of Copenhagen, the center of the Danish world. She was the daughter of councilor of state, he the eccentric son of a wealthy manufacturer. Their breakup was a scandal. Regine accepted the grand analogy between Soren's rejection of marriage and Abraham's trial and understood her forgiveness of him, in her words, as "a duty not only towards him, but towards God, to whom he sacrificed me, whether he did he did it from an innate tendency to self-torment (a misgiving he himself had), or whether, as I think time and the results of his work will show, from a higher call to God" (Hohlenberg, pp. 230-231).

Kierkegaard devoted a lengthy section of Fear and Trembling to Abraham's inability to explain his motives to his wife, son, and servant--not just his refusing to give an explanation, but the impossibility of one. Indirectly but transparently, Kierkegaard struggles to explain his inability to explain his abandonment of Olsen. I wonder that so many words, in that book and later publications, journals, and letters, have been given to explanations that remained so unclear. The broken engagement had something to do with leisure to write on an inheritance that might not comfortably support a family, but that is easily said. Something was left unsaid, something repeatedly said to be unsayable. William McDonald, a Kierkegaard specialist, remains puzzled: "Kierkegaard harbored an undisclosed secret, something dark and personal, which he thought it his duty to confide to a wife, but which he dared not. Whether it was some sexual indiscretion, an inherited sexual disease, his innate melancholy, an egotistical mania to become a writer, or something else, we can only speculate." 

I can best understand this by assuming some sort of sexual blockage. Karl Marx wrote voluminously on an uncomfortably small income with a family, and the easy analogies with Beatrice and Dante, Heloise and Abelard, break down quickly. Dante probably would have married Beatrice had it been possible. Heloise and Abelard were chaste only when denied opportunity. They did not buck public morals to achieve frustration as Kierkegaard apparently did. Perhaps the man was impotent or gay. God knows. We are left with very private public writer who prized and buried his subjectivity.

References

Hohlenberg, Johannes. Søren Kierkegaard, a Biography. Pantheon, 1954.

Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling. Translated by Sylvia Walsh. Edited by C.  Stephen Evans. Cambridge UP,  2006.

McDonald, William. "Soren Kierkegaard." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/kierkega/#SH1b