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Fear and Trembling

Søren Kierkegaard/1843 / 19th century

AnxietyEthics And ReligionFaithSacrifice

AnxietyEthics And ReligionFaithSacrifice

Ethics in the Existentialism tradition, oriented around anxiety and ethics and religion.

Published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling meditates on the story of Abraham and Isaac to test the limits of ethics and religious commitment. The book became a classic of existential and Christian thought for its account of inwardness, paradox, and the teleological suspension of the ethical.

175 excerpts/5 sections

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Chapters

The structural skeleton of the work

Section 1

Preface

72 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith37 excerpts The Absurd13 excerpts Infinite Resignation10 excerpts Paradox9 excerpts Abraham8 excerpts

Life Without Eternity

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all– what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw–how empty then and comfortless life would be!

Section 2

Problem I

22 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith9 excerpts The Absurd4 excerpts Abraham3 excerpts Ethics3 excerpts Heroism3 excerpts

The Particular Over Universal

For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal– yet in such a way, be it observed, that the movement repeats itself, and that consequently the individual, after having been in the universal, now as the particular isolates himself as higher than the universal. If this be not faith, then Abraham is lost, then faith has never existed in the world … because it has always existed. For if the ethical (i.e. the moral) is the highest thing, and if nothing incommensurable remains in man in any other way but as the evil (i.e. the particular which has to be expressed in the universal), then one needs no other categories besides those which the Greeks possessed or which by consistent thinking can be derived from them.

Section 3

Problem II

23 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith8 excerpts Ethics6 excerpts Individualism4 excerpts The Tragic Hero4 excerpts The Universal4 excerpts

Love's Paradoxical Duty

The absolute duty may cause one to do what ethics would forbid, but by no means can it cause the knight of faith to cease to love. This is shown by Abraham. The instant he is ready to sacrifice Isaac the ethical expression for what he does is this: he hates Isaac. But if he really hates Isaac, he can be sure that God does not require this, for Cain and Abraham are not identical. Isaac he must love with his whole soul; when God requires Isaac he must love him if possible even more dearly, and only on this condition can he sacrifice him; for in fact it is this love for Isaac which, by its paradoxical opposition to his love for God, makes his act a sacrifice.

Section 4

Problem III

52 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Ethics12 excerpts Suffering11 excerpts Faith9 excerpts The Universal7 excerpts Aesthetics6 excerpts

Innocence's Dead Calm

The merman was a seducer. He had called to Agnes, had by his smooth speech enticed from her the hidden sentiments, she has found in the merman what she sought, what she was gazing after down at the bottom of the sea. Agnes would like to follow him. The merman has lifted her up in his arms, Agnes twines about his neck, with her whole soul she trustingly abandons herself to the stronger one; he already stands upon the brink, he leans over the sea, about to plunge into it with his prey–then Agnes looks at him once more, not timidly, not doubtingly, not proud of her good fortune, not intoxicated by pleasure, but with absolute faith in him, with absolute humility, like the lowly flower she conceived herself to be; by this look she entrusts to him with absolute confidence her whole fate. And, behold, the sea roars no more, its voice is mute, nature's passion which is the merman's strength leaves him in the lurch, a dead calm ensues–and still Agnes continues to look at him thus. Then the merman collapses, he is not able to resist the power of innocence, his native element is unfaithful to him, he cannot seduce Agnes.

Section 5

Epilogue

6 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith3 excerpts Existentialism2 excerpts Love2 excerpts Cultural Critique1 excerpt Dialectics1 excerpt

Each Generation's Primitive Start

Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further, except in so far as the preceding generation shirked its task and deluded itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which also the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the preceding generation, and if here one is not willing like the previous generations to stop with love but would go further, this is but idle and foolish talk.