Kierkegaard’s ’Fear and Trembling’: A Reader’s Guide

225 Pages·2010·0.949 MB·English

by  Clare Carlisle

KIERKEGAARD’S
FEAR AND TREMBLING
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KIERKEGAARD’S
FEAR AND TREMBLING
A Reader’s Guide
CLARE CARLISLE
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© Clare Carlisle, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6460-8
PB: 978-1-8470-6461-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carlisle, Clare, 1977-
Kierkegaard’s Fear and trembling : a reader’s guide / Clare Carlisle.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-460-8 (HB)
ISBN-10: 1-84706-460-4 (HB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-461-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-84706-461-2 (pbk.)
1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. Frygt og bæven.
2. Christianity–Philosophy. I. Title.
B4373.F793C37 2010
198'.9–dc22
2009052529
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd,
Chippenham, Wiltshire
For Mark
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CONTENTS
Foreword viii
A Note on the Text xi
1. Overview of Themes and Context 1
2. Reading the Text 29
Preface 29
Tuning Up 40
A Tribute to Abraham 56
A Preliminary Outpouring from the Heart 70
Problem I: Is there a teleological suspension
of the ethical? 99
Problem II: Is there an absolute duty to God? 120
Problem III: Was it ethically defensible for Abraham
to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from
Eliezer, from Isaac? 130
Epilogue 171
3. Reception and Influence 174
4. Further Reading 200
Notes 202
Index 208
vii
FOREWORD
At several moments during the course of writing this book,
I have been visited by the question of why I am writing it. These
visits have not always been especially welcome, and the question
has been surprisingly difficult to answer. There are, I think, good
reasons for producing a clear guide to Kierkegaard’s Fear and
Trembling: this is a challenging and enigmatic text, and even
though some readers find it more captivating than many other
works of philosophy, there is always a danger of becoming bored
by a book one doesn’t understand. Thus one reason for writing
an accessible commentary on Fear and Trembling is to encourage
readers to persist with it and to plumb its depths, in order not
only to do its author justice, but also to be rewarded by a fasci-
nating, profound and influential book that it would be a shame
to miss out on.
However, when I was first asked to write this Reader’s Guide,
I was aware that excellent introductions to Fear and Trembling
were already available. John Lippitt’s Routledge Philosophy
Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (2003) and
Edward Mooney’s Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1991), for example, are both
highly recommended, and the editorial introductions to various
English translations of the text – such as those by C. Stephen
Evans and Sylvia Walsh, Alastair Hannay, and Howard and
Edna Hong – are all authoritative and illuminating.
So the question, it became clear, was about why I am writing
a guide to Fear and Trembling. One plausible general answer to
this question is: in order to discover that the text is more difficult
than I thought it was, and that I understand it less well than
I’d assumed. A more particular answer is: in order to think about
courage. Before I was invited to write this Reader’s Guide I had
(I assure you) already read Fear and Trembling. In fact, I’d read
it many times, and on each occasion it raised new questions
viii
FOREWORD
and yielded fresh insights. I think I have always been intrigued
and moved, without quite knowing why, by its author’s sugges-
tion that the person of faith is distinguished by ‘a paradoxical
and humble courage’ – but re-reading it this summer, my atten-
tion was drawn far more than before to references to courage
throughout the text. This compelled me to reflect on courage: on
why Kierkegaard, in 1843, thought it was important; and on why
we should think it is important now. In his 1784 essay ‘What Is
Enlightenment?’, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant urges
his readers to have the courage to understand things for them-
selves (‘Sapere aude!’), but for Kierkegaard a further and perhaps
more radical kind of courage is required when we reach the lim-
its of our understanding; when knowledge, calculation and
planning fail us; when we step out into the unknown. This
domain of the unknown may include the existence and nature of
God; the inner lives of other people, and even of ourselves; and
also, of course, the future.
I offer these personal remarks not in order to tell you
something about myself, but in order to say something about
Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling – and not just to point out
the significance of courage for this thinker, and in this text. One
of the starting-points of Kierkegaard’s philosophical reflection
on such themes as truth, freedom, selfhood, suffering, love,
responsibility and spiritual growth – which are all, along with
courage, integral to Fear and Trembling – is his recognition that
to exist is to be in a continual process of becoming. Fear and
Trembling ends with a reference to Heraclitus’ remark that one
can never step twice into the same river, and we learn most from
this ancient piece of philosophy when we focus less on the river
than on the person stepping into it.
On the first page of his book Repetition, Kierkegaard raises
‘the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what
importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being
repeated’, and this question is as pertinent to the act of reading
a text as it is to other activities and experiences. I often advise my
students to read a text at least twice before they even attempt to
make a preliminary judgement about its meaning and value. But
can a reader read the same book twice? Each time we read we are
different, because we are continually formed, however slightly,
by our actions and experiences. At the very least, the person who
ix