Fear and Trembling, the biblical story of Abraham is retold with four different viewpoints, to narrow on the religious and the ethical. The Religious is that stage of life when the individual is found to be in “an absolute relation with the absolute”, and the ethical being the “expression of the universal, where all actions are done publicly and for the common good. “ Kierkegaard writes that Abraham killing Isaac is ethically wrong, but religiously right. But the point that Kierkegaard is driving home is the distinction between faith and resignation.
Faith is what it takes to “leap into the absurd, something that cannot be rationally explained, transcending the intelligible. ” Resignation is the sacrifice of something dear and the following reconciliation with that loss. Kierkegaard cites the example of Agamemnon who must reconcile himself to the loss of his beloved daughter, Iphigenia. Back to the Abraham story, it would have been resignation if Abraham merely had tried to kill Isaac on the basis of the infallibility of God’s wish.
But Abraham made the leap of faith to believe that God would not commit something unethical, and hence, spare Isaac. But doesn’t this teleological suspension of the ethical by Abraham reflect an intrinsic incongruity? By teleological suspension of the ethical, one means the suspension of the moral law for the sake of a higher law. According to Kierkegaard, had Abraham been willing to kill Isaac just because God had told him to do so would have been resignation or obedience. But Abraham is willing because he believes in the virtue of God to not kill Isaac.
The Essay on Origin Of Judaism God Abraham Isaac
The origins of Judaism are written in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch. Genesis is divided into several major parts. The creation of the world (first part) and the story of Abraham (second part) are respectively the parts that are dedicated mostly to the origins of Judaism. God created heaven and Earth. Then he created man. Man disobeyed God, building a partition between them, ...
That is faith. And this ostensible incongruity is Kierkegaard’s distinction between Faith and Resignation. Another thing I would like to talk about is the compartmentalization of human life into three stages: Aesthetics, Ethical and Religious. Each reflects inherent contradictions with each other and is, hence, incongruent to each other. The Aesthetic, “the realm of sensory experiences and pleasures”, The Ethical and The Religious are how a human life evolves into a true being.
Because these are conflicting ideas of life, they stand independent of each other. This idea is rather at odds with, say, Aristotelian virtue of Moderation, who spoke of the Golden Mean. “Virtue consists in the observance of the mean relative to us, this being determined by principle, that is, as the prudent man would determine it. “ Kierkegaard maintains that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace god by making the leap of faith. Religion is absurd and cannot be understood, it cannot be approached rationally.
Unlike this, Aristotle does not recommend a one-size-fits- all system, and the mean that we strive could be relative. For example, Kierkegaard says, “That it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation (p. 115).
” The Ethical, or the Common Good, he reckons with it’s static rationality might be the impediment to passion for the Absolute, that is necessary to embrace the absurd. His main criticism of the society is that it is too passionless. Hence, the stages of life are different, often at odds with each other.
