The Unspeakable Time of Fear and Trembling

The Unspeakable Time of Fear and Trembling

Thank God. I’m glad that I took a second read of this book. Reading Fear and Trembling is more than an intellectual activity. Kierkegaard requires the readers to empathise with him as he did with Abraham to embody his bewilderment and anxiety - the counter-intellectual drive that nevertheless propels his writing. Abraham sacrificing Issac is the central image in Kierkegaard’s mind, yet it is a poetic vision that is sufficient in itself and self-contained that prohibits further elaboration. Of course, it also dismisses valid book reviews, and for that reason, I will only write loosely and hope that time will lead us towards the depth of Kierkegaard’s unspeakable vision.

Fear and Trembling is ‘dialectical lyric’ in that it is not deductive, argumentative, or problem-solving. It is a trial-and-error of consistently interpreting Abraham. For that purpose, the book has no systematic structure. It reads like an intellectual map that outlines the starting point, the exploring journey via beaten paths, and the destination - if there is any. The ‘Attunement’ introduces Kierkegaard’s core problematic, which is one of the finest existentialist manifestos. This follows with four literary variations of Abraham’s story. The next is the ‘Speech in Praise of Abraham’ that affirms Abraham’s divine faith. Then there are four ‘Problematas’ exploring Abraham’s sacrificial motivation on the basis of the four variations. They experimented with some literary examples, but none could help interpret Abraham. ‘So either is there a paradox, that the single individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is done for.’ (144) The book ends with the ‘Epilogue’ that is a sublime reaffirmation of faith, of Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, and of the incommensurable divinity cried out by both Abraham and Kierkegaard. No answer is given in words. To hear the cry, one must decipher the paradox.

What may qualify Abraham’s sacrifice other than the paradoxical ‘faith’? Kierkegaard discussed various possibilities. For instance, the knight of faith, who abandons all his ethical duty for faith, is an appropriate analogy of Abraham. Yet there is no category to reconcile the knight’s particular faith with the universal ethical demand. In contrast, the tragic hero also commits to an ethical crime, but he does it for a higher ethical purpose that absorbs and legitimises the ‘crime’. Abraham was not sacrificing Isaac for ethical purpose inasmuch as Abraham was the only recipient of the divine message. No others hear the message; they could not understand Abraham. The incommensurability determines that Abraham’s act must be private and particular to him only.

Abraham sacrificing Isaac is the purest image of faith because it dismisses the possibility of justifying faith. At that doomed moment, Abraham had no reason, ethical code, or any secular norms whatsoever to follow, but only his absurd and unethical faith. Only when faith clashes with everything else can it ultimately prevail. That alters the Hegelian dichotomy of particularity and universality. For Hegel, God is compatible with the universal. For Kierkegaard, however, God’s trial of Abraham breaks away from the universal. What Moriah witnessed was exactly Abraham’s triumphant particularity over all others’universality.

Thus we can infer that, if universality is the greatest expressible in the human world, faith must transcend universality. Because Abraham is not egoistic or individualistic, his particularity must belong to a higher category. In that regard, I suggest replacing ‘particularity’with ‘the unspeakable’. The unspeakable is not the opposition of universality. In the book, Kierkegaard may be circumstanced in the Hegelian dichotomy. It is right to interpret Abraham’s faith with ‘paradox’ if one holds firm to the Hegelian language. However, Hegel’s philosophy does not welcome sheer paradox. For him, paradoxical parties should find their unity in a higher synthetic level. Thus, saying ‘something is sheer paradoxical’ is, to some extent, acknowledging that the Hegelian philosophy fails to capture it. It is thereby plausible to suspend the usage of ‘particularity’ and employ the empty category ‘the unspeakable’. It helps us look into the very direction Kierkegaard points us to. In that light, we can also understand why Fear and Trembling is written in that structure - to enable the readers not to read passively but to look towards actively, not to mention that the emotion effectuated by the narrative also functions in the body of the readers.

Faith is ultimately the unspeakable. That is why Kierkegaard speaks several times of incommensurability. Abraham is capable of hearing the voice from the above, but he cannot speak to the people around. As long as he speaks, his words have only divine connotations and make sense to no others. That turns Abraham’s speech from the means of communication to the act of reaching to the divine. It is destined to fail; nevertheless, he is committed to it. This is poetic than philosophical: the act of speaking towards, as casting stones into the valley to try to hear its depth. To speak is to dedicate to the divine. His language is totally private; its narrative does not represent or clarify but leads and guides him towards. That is the speech of Abraham, and we readers may have realised that that is also the speech of Kierkegaard. The profound incommensurability prevents both Abraham and Kierkegaard from uttering sensible speech [logos]. Fear and Trembling is in that way an imitation of Abraham’s act - to write as a dedication to faith.

It is curious to the readers: how could Kierkegaard realise the existence of the unspeakable category, though not being able to tease it out? Whilst the answer remains obscure, it is obvious that Kierkegaard has been puzzled and troubled by Abraham for years. Traditional theological accounts failed to convince him. As a genuine Christian, Kierkegaard dares not forfeit his faith to God, and God is absolutely merciful. That is not different from the theologians’starting point. The problem is that God indeed gave a verbally merciless order. Traditional theology defends the story by its result: God’s true intention was not to harm Isaac but only to test Abraham. It is a safe and sound conclusion to the readers since they can well see the result of the story. That consolidates the readers with the viewpoint of God. However, that is not satisfactory to Kierkegaard. He ‘wanted to be there at that moment when Abraham raised his eyes and saw in distance the mountain in Moriah....’ (44) To feel the story, he puts him at the place of Abraham.

This is the methodological twist of Kierkegaard: his empathy abandons the perspective of God and replaces it with a humanist one. In the Bible’s narrative, ‘Abraham raised his knife’ and ‘God replaced Isaac with a goat’ are both in the past tense. They are both facts, but they happened with a sequence. Whilst Abraham raised his knife, he did not know what would happen in the future. Here, Abraham cannot utter ‘God replaced Isaac with a goat’ in the past tense - he could have not known that fact. It is also here that Kierkegaard empathises with Abraham and questions God’s perspective. To be human is to embody all the existential confinements: time, flesh, mobility, emotion, etc. Abraham’s crisis was precisely that of time. He must face the present, i.e. the exact moment before his blade reached Isaac, alone.

Time humanises Abraham and time affirms his faith. Time. Fear and Trembling does not discuss time specifically, but it lies at the centre of the book. Since faith is unspeakable, its truth must not be commensurate with Abraham. To conceal the truth, God knew that Abraham is a man who exists in time. If Abraham knew the result of his sacrifice as the readers do, he would not face any paradoxical situation or make any difficult decision. Only for Abraham’s ignorance can God’s merciless image be applicable. Because he has no full view, he knew God’s decision in a fragmented version that distorts the truth. That forced Abraham to make his blind choice, and even with such blindness, Abraham remains loyal to God. This is the moment when nothing other than faith explains Abraham’s decision. This is the moment of Abraham’s absolute loneliness and greatness. This is the moment that one fears and trembles. This is the moment when time existentialises mankind.

Ultimately, time is the heavy existential burden with which we humans must bear. We readers also lived in time, but in the time two centuries after Kierkegaard. Whilst he reads Abraham from the human perspective, we may read him from God’s. That perspective would not transcend us but should urge us to reflect and redeem our existence. His empathy is a great humanist step of fear and trembling that walks into the age of ours, the age that exists no God. That is the victory of neither God nor man; rather, it is the affirmation that faith is the ultimacy of existence. As he said, ‘[f]aith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it, for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.’ (95)