1 Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard’s Supposed Irrationalism: A Reading of Fear and Trembling By Daniel M. Johnson Abstract: There is a long history of interpreting Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as setting forth an irrationalist position on the relationship of faith to ethics–a position that declares faith actually opposed to the demands of ethics. One question has emerged at the forefront of the debate over this interpretation: is the ethics to which Johannes de Silentio opposes faith Kantian or Hegelian? I argue that the Kant/Hegel debate is irrelevant for determining whether Kierkegaard is an ethical irrationalist. To make the case for my thesis, I will take a step back and give a general reading of Fear and Trembling. There is a long history of interpreting Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as setting forth an irrationalist position on the relationship of faith to ethics–a position that declares faith actually opposed to the demands of ethics.1 In recent discussion, one question has emerged at the forefront of the debate over this interpretation: is the ethics to which Johannes de Silentio (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) opposes faith Kantian ethics or Hegelian ethics? C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal have both developed an argument against the irrationalist reading of Fear and Trembling that depends on interpreting de Silentio’s ethics as Hegelian. Since Hegelian ethical demands are just the roles and norms imposed on the individual by society, “not timeless Kantian moral laws,” they argue, it is reasonable to think that “the claims de Silentio makes about the relation of the ethical to the religious life must be understood as relative to a particular conception of the ethical,” and so there may be no conflict at all between a proper conception of the ethical and faith.2 Others, like William Wainwright, who aren’t so sure that Kierkegaard isn’t an irrationalist, have followed Evans and Westphal in seeing the Kant/Hegel issue as central to

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Brand Blanshard, for instance, has said that “what Kierkegaard is praising here is…the doing of something that from every human point of view is productive of nothing but evil,” and concludes that Kierkegaard is a moral nihilist. Brand Blanshard, “Kierkegaard on Faith,” in Essays on Kierkegaard, ed. by Jerry H. Gill, Minneapolis, MN: Burgess Publishing Company 1969, p. 116. 2 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004, 70. The same argument can be found in Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard and Hegel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alistair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 108-109.

2 the debate over Kierkegaard’s purported irrationalism.3 Wainwright, though, thinks that Johannes could very well have Kant in mind in his characterization of the ethical, and this means that Kierkegaard may well be making a much stronger irrationalistic claim.4 Because Kant sees the ethical as much less contingent than Hegel–Kantian ethical demands are the product of a universal reason that applies at all times and in all places, without exception, to human beings qua rational beings–it is harder to see how Kantian ethical demands could be “suspended” without thereby suspending reason itself (and thus taking a strong irrationalist position about faith). I intend to argue that the Kant/Hegel debate is in fact irrelevant for determining whether Kierkegaard is an irrationalist with respect to ethical decision-making. Even if Kant is the operative figure in Fear and Trembling, it does not follow that Kierkegaard is an ethical irrationalist. Now, I myself do not think that Johannes’ conception of the ethical is primarily Kantian. I agree that Hegel is the main operative figure.5 I simply do not think that this is relevant for seeing that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist, and I want to try to convince even those who take the Kantian line. To make the case for my (relatively narrow) thesis, I’ll have to take a step back and give a more general reading of what Kierkegaard is up to in Fear and Trembling. In section I, I will lay out what I believe to be the two interpretive keys to absolving Kierkegaard of the charge of irrationalism–neither of which involve resolving the Kant/Hegel debate. In section II, I will utilize these two keys to argue for a non-irrationalist reading of Fear and Trembling. I will 3

See William J. Wainwright, Religion and Morality, Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2005. Wainwright cites Seung-Goo Lee, “The Antithesis between the Religious View of Ethics and the Rationalistic View of Ethics in Fear and Trembling,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1993 (The International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), pp. 101-126, as one who thinks the operative conception of the ethical is at least partly Kantian. 5 For my reasons for thinking so, see Westphal, “Kierkegaard and Hegel,” pp.109-110, and Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, pp. 66-70. The decisive consideration here is the issue of the tragic hero, which is only compatible with a Hegelian conception of ethics. 4

3 analyze three major elements of the book, all apparently “irrationalist” elements, and argue that in light of the interpretive keys none should actually be understood as irrationalist claims. In section III, I will argue that my reading holds whether Kant or Hegel is understood to be the operative figure, and that it follows that the Kant/Hegel debate is irrelevant for resolving the question of Kierkegaard’s irrationalism.

I The first interpretive key to absolving Kierkegaard of the irrationalist charge lies in understanding Kierkegaard’s overall project of contrasting competing forms of reason. This can be seen most clearly through a parallel between Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments. In the Appendix to the third chapter of Philosophical Fragments, Reason (worldly understanding) and the Paradox (the content of Christian faith) get into what Merold Westphal has called a “name-calling” contest.6 Reason accuses the paradox of being absurd and therefore false; the paradox responds by agreeing that certainly it is absurd from the point of view of Reason, but insists that this is not a discovery of Reason–the paradox had already noticed that it was absurd from Reason’s point of view but thereby concluded that it is Reason that is absurd. Reason is merely echoing what the paradox has already said: “The expression of offense [offended Reason] is that the moment is foolishness, the paradox is foolishness–which is the paradox’s claim that the understanding [Reason] is the absurd but which now resounds as an echo from the offense.”7 The fact that the Paradox is the one that started the name-calling shows that there is a certain sort of symmetry to the situation; it is not as if Reason is the only way to think and the 6

SKS 4, 253-257 / PF, 49-54; Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1987, p. 88. 7 SKS 4, 255 / PF, 52.

4 Paradox rejects thinking altogether. Instead, the Paradox represents an alternative way to think, a system of thought with its own standards of reasonableness and criteria for finding truth. Indeed, it is an alternative form of reason altogether, a form that stands opposed to worldly Reason. These forms do not merely stand opposed in their conclusions about the world, but stand opposed even in their very conceptions of how to reason about the world–not only their beliefs but their very criteria for what should be believed, their standards for what counts as evidence for what, differ sharply. Because the very standards of reasonableness differ between these two opposed forms of reason, reasoning conducted from within one form will appear not merely mistaken but absurd or crazy from the perspective of the other–thus, there is what I would call a “madness” relation between these opposed forms of reason. Beliefs that appear wildly improbable, irrational, or even impossible from the perspective of one form may actually be the most rational position according to the other. Climacus (the pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments), then, is not merely noting that some isolated Christian beliefs violate commonly-accepted norms of rationality. He is contrasting full-blown systems of rationality, with their own norms for reasoning and belief. I won’t try to pin down Kierkegaard’s structural analysis of reason that explains how it can take these opposed forms. In the very least, it involves passions in some central way. The important thing to get is that the Christian worldview results in a form that is opposed to all non-Christian worldviews. This insight from Philosophical Fragments applies to Fear and Trembling in the following way: what Fragments does for reason in general, Fear and Trembling does for certain domains of practical reasoning. Kierkegaard, through Johannes de Silentio, utilizes the Abraham story to show that Abraham’s faithful beliefs and decisions are simply absurd according to

5 worldly standards of reason, and to bring home to the citizens of Christendom the awful truth that they themselves have embraced those worldly standards of reason. This is the first key to understanding that Fear and Trembling does not contain an irrationalist position on ethical reasoning. The second key is the position of the pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio. Johannes has great respect for Abraham, but he himself does not have faith. He is Abraham’s admirer but not his imitator.8 Johannes is, then, solidly entrenched in the worldly form of reason to which faithful reason is opposed. Throughout Fear and Trembling, then, Johannes will refer to Abraham and his decisions and beliefs as a paradox, as impenetrable to thought, and as absurd. These are all expressions of the “madness” relation that faithful reason bears to unfaithful reason; as one inhabiting an unfaithful form of reason, Johannes is constrained by his standards of rationality to see Abraham’s actions and beliefs as absurd. Johannes’s superiority over others in his situation, in Christendom, is that he sees clearly the opposition of faithful reason to the kind of reason he himself thinks by; and it is this opposition that Kierkegaard is so desperate to drive home to Christendom.

II With the two keys in place, I can proceed to my reading of Fear and Trembling. I’ll examine three central elements of the book: the contrast between the knight of faith and the knight of infinite resignation, the teleological suspension of the ethical by the direct command of God (found in Problems I and II), and the issue of Abraham’s silence (found in Problem III). In each case, I’ll show how seeing each as pointing out a particular way in which faithful reasoning

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He says, “I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; that is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for that.” SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34.

6 departs from worldly reasoning can illuminate the text. I’ll then briefly consider a fourth element of the text, the theme of sin and grace, and note how it relates to the first three. Finally, in the next section, I’ll show how my (non-irrationalist) reading harmonizes equally well with the Kantian or Hegelian interpretation of Johannes’ conception of the ethical. (1) The first apparently “irrationalist” element of Fear and Trembling is the contrast between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. 9 When faced with the command that Isaac be sacrificed, the knight of infinite resignation “resigns” Isaac, looking away from this vulnerable temporal attachment to some “eternal” source of personal worth and happiness. Abraham, the knight of faith, having made the movement of infinite resignation (being willing to give Isaac up), believes that he will “get Isaac back” and once again wraps up all his happiness in this life and his sense of personal significance in this temporal relationship– and he believes as he does “by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.”10 Why does Abraham believe with such surety that Isaac will be given back to him? Because God had promised him that it would be through Isaac that God would make Abraham into a great nation. So Abraham simply believes God’s promise and believes God able to fulfill his promise (even though it means believing, as the writer to the Hebrews says, that God may raise Isaac from the dead)–and he believes it with such strength that he wraps all his happiness and sense of significance into the object of that promise. This point is worth dwelling on. Abraham didn’t just decide out of the blue to believe that he would receive Isaac back. He believes as he does because he believes that God has promised him Isaac. And Kierkegaard certainly appreciates that this is Abraham’s reason for believing as he does. The telling of the 9

See John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, New York: Routledge 2003, pp. 35-76, for a discussion of a number of treatments of this issue. 10 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46; see also SKS, 131 / FT, 36.

7 Abraham story in Hebrews 11 highlights Abraham’s reasoning here quite vividly, as Abraham’s believing the promises of God throughout his life is the central theme of Hebrews 11:8-19, and verses 17-19 say directly that Abraham’s reason for believing that he would get Isaac back is that God had promised him offspring through Isaac and that Abraham believed God and believed that God would even raise Isaac from the dead if he had to in order to fulfill the promise.11 The reason that Kierkegaard would have appreciated this feature of the Abraham/Isaac story is that it is Hebrews 11, more than the Genesis passages about Abraham, which is the key text for Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s telling of the Abraham story in the section “A Tribute to Abraham” is clearly modeled on the summary of the Abraham story in Hebrews 11, and parts of it are nearly direct quotes from Hebrews 11. What is more, Kierkegaard’s language throughout Fear and Trembling is at crucial points directly inspired by Hebrews 11–in particular, his repeated references to Abraham’s belief that he would “get Isaac back” and the reason for his belief being “by virtue of the fact that for God everything is possible,” both obviously references to Hebrews 11:19. So Abraham believes as he does for a very specific reason, the promises of God, and Kierkegaard appreciates that fact. It is here that it becomes obvious that Kierkegaard is contrasting two opposing forms of reason instead of contrasting some universal rational response to an irrational response. From the perspective of faithful reason–a governing worldview that includes a personal God who speaks and who acts with power in the world without being identical to it–Abraham has perfectly good reasons to believe as he does. In fact, Abraham’s belief (that he will get Isaac back) is every bit as well grounded as my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow–better, even, since God could stop

11 “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.’ He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead; hence, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.” Hebrews 11:17-19 (RSV).

8 the sun, but he will never break his word. John Lippitt’s interpretation, though basically similar to mine, needs some correction here. He thinks that faith is believing God’s promise against the evidence, since all the evidence points to Isaac’s death.12 I agree that faith is believing God’s promise, but faith means embracing a worldview and its corresponding form of reason where God’s promises count as evidence, indeed the very best evidence available. So where is the absurdity? You might say (as Andrew Cross has) that this seems to remove all the absurdity from the situation altogether, because Abraham is perfectly reasonable in believing that this omnipotent, truthful God will fulfill his promise.13 But Abraham’s decision is absurd from a certain point of view. There are certain worldviews, certain “forms” of reason, on which (a) God’s promise could never count as evidence for anything at all, and (b) nothing at all could ever count as evidence that a miracle would be performed. There are a number of such worldviews–and most importantly, as I will argue in the next section, both Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics fit into this category. The sort of worldview I have in mind is any worldview that denies an omnipotent personal God who is other than the world and who intervenes in the world miraculously. The form of reason that emanates from such a worldview would deny that any possible experience could count as evidence for such an acting God. From the perspective of such a form of reason, Abraham’s belief cannot be anything other than absurd. So Johannes’s declarations that he “cannot understand”14 Abraham and that Abraham’s believing that God would do a miracle to fulfill his promise is the same as believing “by virtue of the absurd”–in general, Johannes’s inability to understand Abraham–is a function of the fact that he is mired in unfaithful patterns of reasoning, ones that cannot admit of a God who speaks with

12

Lippitt, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 69. Andrew Cross, “Fear and Trembling’s Unorthodox Ideal,” Philosophical Topics, vol. 27, pp. 227-253. See Lippitt’s discussion of Cross in Lippitt, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 66-76. 14 SKS 4, 132, 151 / FT, 37, 57. 13

9 authority and acts with power at particular points in the world. Johannes is stuck trying to make sense of Abraham’s thought process in terms of a pattern of reasoning foreign to Abraham, and he makes a mess of his attempt to “describe the movements of faith,”15 a faith he cannot understand. His description of the knight of faith in contemporary life, for instance, makes no mention of any promises made by God to this knight, and so Johannes portrays the knight as believing apparently contradictory things.16 This, I take it, is what Abraham looks like to Johannes, who cannot imagine hearing the voice of God and believing in his promises and his power. There is one more objection to consider: Johannes, and many of the people to whom the book is presumably directed, are not, in fact, self-conscious adopters of an anti-Christian metaphysics and epistemology. Many of them would assent to the broadly Christian metaphysics I mentioned. So why is Abraham’s decision still absurd to Johannes? This goes right to the heart of Kierkegaard’s project. His point is that in many of those who would give intellectual assent to a Christian worldview, those beliefs don’t go through to the core of their being–their inability to reason as a faithful person would shows that their reasoning is in fact anti-Christian even if they assent to Christian propositions. It is hard to reason faithfully, he thinks, even when the conclusions follow quite straightforwardly from beliefs that we have. “God will give me Isaac back” follows fairly straightforwardly from the following propositions: God is omnipotent, God is truthful, God has promised me Isaac. It is quite easy to assent to these on paper, when sitting in my living room, or when answering membership questions for a church; presumably, Johannes himself may well do so. It is incredibly difficult, though, to actually allow these beliefs to govern my reasoning, to move so quickly and trustingly with confidence and joy (as Abraham does) to

15 16

SKS 4, 132 / FT, 37. SKS 4, 133-136 / FT, 38-41.

10 the conclusion. This just shows that even if we assent to them, our reasoning is de facto governed by contrary beliefs. So, many of the citizens of Christendom who give assent to Christian doctrine are implicitly anti-Christian in the deep-seated assumptions that actually govern their thinking, and it is this fact that Kierkegaard aims to bring out in Fear and Trembling. The point of the whole faith/infinite resignation discussion, then, is to contrast faithful with unfaithful reasoning with respect to the question of what things in life to invest in and care about. The knight of faith trusts God’s word preeminently and sees all empirical considerations through the lens of that word, while the worldly knight, embroiled as he is in (explicit or implicit) anti-Christian “worldly understanding,” can invest only in those things that his unfaithful epistemic commitments allow him to reason that he will actually have. (2) The second apparently “irrationalist” element of Fear and Trembling, found in Problems I and II, is the one that has probably occasioned the most discussion. It is the claim that, by virtue of an absolute relation to God, Abraham teleologically suspends the ethical, conceived of as “the universal.”17 As with the faith/infinite resignation issue, this is just another point at which Kierkegaard (using Johannes) is contrasting faithful with unfaithful reason. Problem I and problem II each express different aspects of what it means to conceive of the ethical as “the universal.” The first aspect (from Problem I) is that “it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times.”18 The second (from Problem II) is that it is “the divine,” which means that thus it is proper to say that every duty is essentially duty to God, but if no more can be said than this, then it is also said that I actually have no duty to God….If in this connection I then say that it is my duty to love God, I am actually pronouncing only a tautology, inasmuch as ‘God’ in a totally abstract sense is here understood as the divine–that is, the universal, that is, the duty.19 17

This is what led Blanshard to call Kierkegaard a moral nihilist. Blanshard, “Kierkegaard on Faith,” p. 116. SKS 4, 148 / FT, 54. 19 SKS 4, 160 / FT, 68. 18

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This is just to say that if the ethical is “the universal,” it is not the result of some contingent personal relation to God, but actually constitutes the individual’s relation to God. From the perspective of faithful reason (dependent on a properly theistic worldview), Abraham’s decision makes perfect sense. God can establish personal contact (speak) with people other than through the requirements of ethics and impose obligations that depend on those particular contacts. Such obligations may not be reducible to general (universal) obligations, and may actually constitute exceptions to such general obligations.20 Abraham’s decision, though, does not meet either of the requirements of the ethical conceived of as the universal. Johannes, mired in this conception of the ethical, recognizes that Abraham’s action violates the requirements of the universal and tries to say what would have to be the case for Abraham’s action to be justified. First, there would have to be a teleological suspension of the ethical–the universal could not apply to all people all the time. But this is just to say that the universal is not the universal, a contradiction. Second, there would have to be an absolute relation to God–a relation above and beyond the requirements of ethics on the basis of which particular ethical requirements could be overridden. But, again, this is just to say that the universal is not the universal, a contradiction.21 Johannes concludes that Abraham’s life is “so paradoxical that it simply cannot be thought.”22 We are to conclude instead that faithful ethical reasoning (Abraham’s) operates according to an entirely different standard for ethical decision-making, one which does not see the ethical as “the universal” in Johannes’ sense. The heart of the irrationalist reading of Kierkegaard is to 20

They can also constitute exceptions to social norms and are not themselves reducible to social norms–so this point holds as well for a Hegelian reading of “the universal.” More on this in the next section. 21 Notice that these are actual logical contradictions, not the weaker sort of “contradiction” (some sort of tension) that appears in other places in Kierkegaard’s corpus. Johannes, in trying to make sense of Abraham on an unfaithful form of reason, is driven to actual logical contradictions, on the basis of which he declares Abraham’s decision unthinkable. 22 SKS 4,150 / FT, 56.

12 understand Kierkegaard himself to be endorsing the view that the ethical is the universal and to be arguing that Abraham’s action exceeds the bounds of the ethical so understood. But it is only the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, who does not himself have faith, who actually identifies the ethical as the universal. Abraham is only impenetrable to thought, his action only absurd, from the perspective of the form of unfaithful reason that Johannes occupies; his action is completely rational from the perspective of faithful reason. There is a potential objection at this point. My interpretation says that Abraham made all of his decisions according to faithful standards of reasoning, so it is not as if he reasoned according to Johannes’ conception of “the ethical” most of the time and then set it aside for certain decisions. Someone might object and say that the fact that the ethical is “teleologically suspended” implies that Abraham was in fact claimed by the ethical some of the time, and so my contention that Abraham just operates within an entirely different form of reason with its own standards of ethical reasonableness cannot be right. There are at least two possible answers to this objection. One is to regard “suspension” as something permanent, so Abraham actually never operates within the ethical. This interpretation is not unheard of, but the fact that Johannes describes Abraham as “having been in the universal” before suspending it calls it into question.23 There is another option: recall that Johannes himself is decisively enmeshed in the naturalistic, unfaithful form of reason that cannot but see Abraham’s beliefs and actions as absurd. So Johannes doesn’t understand what is really going on inside of Abraham; he can only see the external expressions of his decisions and beliefs. But many of Abraham’s actions are in fact consonant with the requirements of the universal. So it appears to Johannes that Abraham spends much of his life reasoning according to Johannes’ own conception of the ethical and only suspends this conception for a few of his decisions. But, in fact, Abraham never actually operates 23

SKS 4, 149 / FT, 55.

13 according to Johannes’ standards of rationality at all, and this is what Johannes cannot get his mind around. So the “teleological suspension” language is itself misleading, an artifact of Johannes’s attempt to make sense of Abraham within a form of reason opposed to Abraham’s own. I’d like to pause a moment and discuss the relation between the first two “irrationalist” elements of Fear and Trembling. They are united in that both are instances where faithful reasoning leads to beliefs and decisions that are simply absurd by the lights of the form of worldly, unfaithful reasoning that Johannes (and, I think Kierkegaard would say, much of the Christendom of his time) inhabits. They can come apart, though, since it is possible to be inconsistently faithful. This accounts for an apparent discrepancy in the text.24 In his discussion of the teleological suspension, Johannes says that Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac is done “by virtue of the absurd,” and is “so paradoxical that it simply cannot be thought.”25 Earlier, though, in the discussion of the knight of faith, he says that he could understand Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac (he mentions what he would do if he were commanded to sacrifice his son), but what he couldn’t understand was Abraham’s joyfully confident belief that he would get Isaac back.26 What are we to make of this? If we distinguish, as I have, between two ways that faithful reasoning opposes unfaithful reasoning, we can understand this as an attempt to highlight both–even if, Johannes could be saying, I could understand Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac, I still couldn’t understand his trust that he would get Isaac back. Now, we could read this as an accidental slip by Kierkegaard where he forgot the limitations of his pseudonym, but there is reason to think that he is doing this intentionally. Just before Johannes describes how he would 24

Evans, in Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, p. 71, points this discrepancy out. He concludes that Johannes does not find Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac absurd but only his belief that he would get Isaac back. I, as will become clear, disagree. 25 SKS 4, 150 / FT, 56. 26 SKS 4, 130-131 / FT, 34-35.

14 sacrifice Isaac (but not be able to “get him back” in faith), he says that he could only sacrifice Isaac “in the capacity of tragic hero, for I cannot come higher.”27 But the tragic hero, unlike Abraham, has an ethical justification for his decision. So, really, Johannes is not in fact claiming to understand how Abraham could make the decision to sacrifice Isaac. Instead, he is positing an alternative situation to Abraham’s, where there is in fact an ethical justification for sacrificing Isaac, to highlight another “absurd” aspect of faithful reasoning (Abraham’s belief that he would get Isaac back). So both Abraham’s belief that he would get Isaac back and his decision to sacrifice Isaac are absurd from the perspective of unfaithful reason, but both are the most rational thing to do by faithful standards of reasonableness. (3) The third “irrationalist” element of the book, found in Problem III, is Abraham’s silence. Like the other three, this element is a point at which faithful reason comes into conflict with the form of unfaithful reason that Johannes inhabits; faith allows for ethically justified silence, whereas Johannes’ conception of ethics does not. Silence, though, is more than just a characteristic of faithful reason that can conflict with unfaithful reason. It is also a consequence of the conflict between opposed forms of reason. Because of this dual role, it is a bit harder to explicate. One of the characteristics of Johannes’ understanding of the ethical as the universal is that the universal is what he calls “the disclosed.”28 That is, for my action to be ethical, I must be able and willing to give publicly intelligible reasons for that action. Abraham, though, is silent, and does not give such publicly intelligible reasons. Why not? What is it about reasoning governed by a faithful worldview such that it may render someone without publicly intelligible

27 28

SKS 4, 130 / FT, 34. SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82.

15 reasons for his or her ethical actions? The answer to this question is a bit complicated and it will help to distinguish between three claims, of varying modal strength, that Johannes could be making here. (a) The first is that faithful reason is such that it is at least possible for a right ethical decision to be made even in the absence of publicly intelligible reasons. (b) The second is that it is actually the case that Abraham’s situation is such that his decision is made without publicly intelligible reasons. (c) The third is that Abraham’s decision necessarily lacks publicly intelligible reasons. It is important to note that any of the above three claims is enough to establish the absurdity of faithful reason vis-à-vis Johannes’ form of reason. Johannes’ conception of the ethical as the universal disallows the very possibility of a truly ethical decision made without publicly intelligible reasons. And yet, I think that Johannes is advancing all three of these claims. When we ask ourselves what it is about Abraham’s faithful worldview that makes these claims true, though, we get a different answer with respect to the third claim than we do with respect to the first, and both answers apply to the second claim. The reason that the first claim is true, that it is possible for there to be a genuinely ethical action in the absence of publicly intelligible reasons, is simply the fact that “reason” can take on different forms that bear a “madness” relation to each other–this is just the claim that we earlier saw in Philosophical Fragments. So decisions made according to one form of reason are not made for reasons that are intelligible to people in an opposed form, because they won’t count for them as reasons at all. Now, there is nothing particularly distinctive to a theistic worldview here; many atheistic thinkers have made similar attacks on the “universality” of reason. Nevertheless, it is enough to contrast faithful reason to the universalist positions on ethical reason that Johannes occupies, since Abraham’s decision is unintelligible on such a position.

16 The second claim seems to be true for basically the same reason, the fact that reason can take different forms, with the simple addition of the claim that Abraham’s society didn’t occupy the same form of reason that Abraham did. So, had he tried to give his reasons for acting as he did, they would not have been intelligible to his society. Now, this claim (along with the first) is easily transferable to the situation of the contemporary Christian. It is possible that the contemporary Christian could find herself in a society to whom faithful reasoning is simply unintelligible, and I think Kierkegaard would say that this was actually the case during his lifetime. There is a problem with this interpretation, though, and it brings up the third claim. Presumably, at least Sarah, and perhaps Isaac as well, share Abraham’s faith and so do not occupy an opposing form of reason. His reasons, then, should be intelligible to them at least. But he remains silent even to them. Is there something about his situation that renders his reasons necessarily unintelligible to others, even others who share his faith? There must be something irreducibly private about his reasons for acting as he does. The reason for this, I think, is that God spoke directly to him and not to others, so that the revelation that was his reason for action was a private revelation. Assume for a moment that I am a contemporary of Abraham. I also have a personal relationship of faith with Abraham’s God. God gives Abraham the command to sacrifice Isaac, which I do not hear. It may be that the most reasonable thing for me to think, even reasoning faithfully as I do, is that Abraham is somehow deceived or has gone mad. After all, I do not have access to God’s revelation to Abraham, and from what I know about God, it seems most unlikely to me that he would give such a command. Now, I would not (as Kant and Hegel would) conclude that such a command is impossible, but I may be justified in concluding

17 that it is most unlikely that he did. So it is possible that, in some situations, even giving acceptable reasons to another person of faith may prove impossible. We must be cautious, of course, in applying this third claim about Abraham to contemporary Christian believers. The Christian revelation, the Bible, is not a private revelation received by one but a revelation given to many; and even if it is the (private) internal testimony of the Holy Spirit that grounds the reception of the revelation, there are many who have that same testimony. So the irreducible silence of Abraham, a silence that even applied within the community of faith, may not be in effect in the community of Christian faith.29 There are hard philosophical questions associated with this third claim, and I am sure that I have not even really begun to treat them satisfactorily. No matter what you do with this third claim, though, the first two are quite enough to establish the absurdity of faith vis-à-vis Johannes’ unfaithful form of ethical reason (whether that be Kantian or Hegelian), and since they are the most obviously applicable to the situation of the contemporary faithful Christian, I daresay they would be the ones that Kierkegaard would most like to emphasize. (4) I’d like to briefly mention a fourth element of the text that others have seen as central. Evans mentions that it is not only the standards of ethical decision-making that are on trial in Fear and Trembling, but the adequacy of the ethical as a form of life, because of its inability to deal with sin and guilt.30 Ronald Green goes so far as to say that the primary point of the book is the underlying theme of sin and gracious forgiveness, and that therefore the discussion of the ethical justification for Abraham’s decision is intended to point the way to this theme and not to point to another ethical standard by which Abraham’s decision makes ethical sense. In fact, he 29

Of course, private revelation is something of a controversial topic in Christian circles, so I’ll leave this question open. 30 C. Stephen Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1993 (The International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), pp. 9-27. The portion of the text that this issue is focused on is in Problem III. See SKS 4, 188 / FT, 98.

18 thinks, understanding Abraham as acting unethically actually serves to point more strongly to the need for grace. He protests, then, against “inappropriately ethicalizing Abraham’s conduct.”31 I agree that the ability of a conception of life that makes ethical conduct the end-all, beall of existence to deal with sin is an important issue here, and Kierkegaard certainly thinks that the religious form of life must move beyond the ethical. I also agree that the underlying theme of sin and grace is ultimately one of the focal points of the book–Abraham is a “a guiding star that saves the anguished”32 because he provides hope for all those who cannot meet the demands of the ethical conceived of as the universal, some examples of which we meet in Problem III. I see no reason, though, to dismiss any attempt to “ethicalize” Abraham’s decision. In fact, it is only the worldview according to which Abraham’s decision makes sense ethically that can deal with sin. For the guilt of sin to be dealt with, there must be a God who can be trusted and who can miraculously intervene in the lives of sinners (the issue in the faith/infinite resignation contrast), this God must be free to decide how the ethical is to be fulfilled instead of the ethical being unalterable and merciless (the issue in Problem I), and our relationship to God must not be exhausted by our ability to fulfill ethical requirements (the issue in Problem II). In other words, those who cannot meet the demands of the ethical understood as the universal have hope for forgiveness only if the ethical is not the universal–and if that is so, then Abraham’s decision can make ethical sense. So, far from protesting the ethicalization of Abraham, the underlying issue of sin and grace requires precisely that worldview on which Abraham’s decision makes ethical sense.

III 31

Ronald M. Green, “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alistair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 278. 32 SKS 4, 117 / FT, 21.

19 I’ve argued so far for a reading of Fear and Trembling that understands the various “absurdities” in Abraham’s beliefs and actions (his belief that he’ll get Isaac back, his decision to sacrifice Isaac, and his silence while he does so) as functions of an opposition between two forms of reason: faithful reason and a particular form of unfaithful reason that Johannes de Silentio inhabits. The major distinguishing mark of this form of unfaithful reason is its understanding of the ethical as “the universal,” and all that goes along with that understanding. I’ll now argue that this reading makes sense, for each of the three apparently “irrationalist” elements, whether this form of unfaithful reason is understood as Hegelian or as Kantian. It follows from this that resolving the Kant/Hegel debate is irrelevant to the debate over Kierkegaard’s irrationalism. (1) First up is Abraham’s belief, “by virtue of the absurd,” that he would get Isaac back. As I said before, this belief makes perfect sense in a faithful form of reason. There are two elements to Abraham’s reasoning here, though, that appear absurd on both Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of reason: the fact that the voice of God counts as supreme evidence that trumps all empirical evidence, and the fact that Abraham believes that God will bring Isaac back miraculously if he does not stop the sacrifice. Kantian metaphysics rules out the very possibility that God, or the voice of God, could ever be an object of experience. Since all possible experience is governed by the intuitions of space and time and by the various concepts of the understanding, God can never be experienced. This has two consequences in the Abraham case. First, no voice could ever be construed as the voice of God, and so a “promise of God” can never count as evidence for anything at all. Second, nothing could ever justify a belief that a miracle had or would occur, since the very conditions of the possibility of experience rule out any breaking of empirical laws. So Abraham’s belief that he

20 would get Isaac back, based as it is on a promise of God and a belief that God could perform a miracle, is absurd. Hegelian metaphysics, though considerably different, supports the same conclusion. Since the Absolute is not essentially Other than humanity–since humanity is the Absolute coming to self-consciousness–it would be impossible for Abraham to commune with a transcendent God, and so a promise of God cannot count as good evidence for a belief. Furthermore, again because the Absolute is not other than humanity but is working itself out through humanity, nothing could ever count as evidence that God (the Absolute) would act in a miraculous way (beyond the capabilities of any human or humanity as a whole) at a particular point in history. (2) Next up is the claim that Abraham teleologically suspends the universal because of an absolute relation to God. For Hegel, as has been pointed out often, the individual’s relation to God is just through “the universal,” the norms and practices of the individual’s society, which are the expression of the Absolute. So the idea that such norms could be suspended by a personal relationship to God is just nonsense, since there is no relation to God beyond them (the issue in Problem II). Furthermore, those ethical norms function as the highest end of human existence, since they are the expression of Absolute Spirit, and there is no higher telos by which they can be suspended. So there is no way, from within a society, to suspend those norms except by higher social norms (the issue in Problem I).33 Abraham’s action is taken on the basis of a personal command of God, is not a socially-generated norm, and actually contradicts social norms (the obligations of a father to his son). So Abraham’s decision is absurd by Hegelian standards of reason.

33

This is the situation of the tragic hero, which Johannes contrasts with Abraham.

21 Though, again, Kant’s ethics are quite different than Hegel’s, similar points hold. First, there is no personal relation to God other than the demands of morality, which for Kant are known by universal reason. So there is no possibility that a personal God could suspend any of these ethical requirements, since God cannot be encountered except through these requirements (Problem II). Second, these ethical requirements are universal maxims, are by definition overriding and do not admit of suspension, since there is no higher end for human beings (Problem I). Abraham’s decision, again, is made on the basis of a personal command from God, cannot be universalized into a maxim, and actually contravenes a maxim that most rational beings would have no trouble universalizing (“Do not kill your innocent son”). Abraham’s decision, then, is absurd by Kantian standards as well. (3) Last is Abraham’s silence. For Hegel, since ethical action is determined entirely by social norms, any truly ethical action will always be made for publicly intelligible reasons. For Kant, since all rational beings know the moral law precisely because of their rational nature, any decision in accord with the moral law will be made according to reasons that any rational being could recognize as valid reasons. For both Hegel and Kant, then, a genuinely ethical action taken for reasons that are not publicly intelligible is impossible. Abraham’s action, once again, is absurd on either account. It follows from all of this that the two interpretive keys I mentioned earlier (the distinction between Kierkegaard and his pseudonym and Kierkegaard’s overall project of contrasting competing forms of reason) are severally necessary and jointly sufficient, independently of a resolution of the Kant/Hegel debate, for absolving Kierkegaard of irrationalism. First, the sufficiency claim: we don’t need to say that Johannes has a Hegelian view of the ethical to absolve Kierkegaard of irrationalism. The interpretive keys allow us to

22 realize that Kierkegaard doesn’t embrace Johannes’ conception of the ethical at all, but is simply pointing out its opposition to faithful ethical reasoning. This means that even if Johannes is Kantian, we don’t have to come up with a way for Kantian ethics to be true but able to be suspended in order to absolve Kierkegaard of irrationality, because it doesn’t follow that Kierkegaard is Kantian. Also, while it is true that Kierkegaard’s “competing forms of reason” view is closer to Hegel’s view than to Kant’s (since Hegel thinks that reason can take historically specific forms),34 we can show that Kierkegaard holds this “competing forms” view of reason independently of the debate over whether Johannes is Kantian or Hegelian (my argument from Philosophical Fragments is one way of doing this). So the two interpretive keys are sufficient to absolve Kierkegaard of irrationalism without resolving the Kant/Hegel debate. Second, the necessity claim: even if we attribute a Hegelian view of reason to Johannes, we will still need to attribute a different (non-Hegelian) view of reason to Kierkegaard to save him from the charge of irrationalism, since Abraham’s decision is absurd from the perspective of every form of reason that Hegel recognizes (societal norms). Kierkegaard must hold that forms of reason can emanate from divine revelation. So not only is it unnecessary to show that Johannes is Hegelian (the sufficiency claim), doing so won’t help us as much as Westphal and Evans need (the necessity claim). Therefore, the non-irrationalist reading of Fear and Trembling gains no advantage from attributing to Johannes a Hegelian view of reason. To put this another way, the Johannes/Kierkegaard distinction and the “forms of reason” view are the interpretive keys to saving Kierkegaard from irrationalism whether Johannes is Kantian or Hegelian, and these interpretive keys save Kierkegaard successfully in either case.

34

In fact, I think this is what Evans and Westphal are picking up with their argument. Noticing that Johannes is Hegelian helped them to realize that Kierkgeaard is also not Kantian about reason. But they wrongly made this the key to absolving Kierkegaard of irrationalism.

23 Therefore, the debate over whether Johannes is Kantian or Hegelian is irrelevant to the question of whether Kierkegaard is an ethical irrationalist. There is one last objection to meet. What of Johannes’ desire to make Abraham less comprehensible? Isn’t the problem, according to Johannes, that we too easily understand Abraham? Aren’t I toning Johannes’ Abraham down by claiming that his faith can in fact be understood? To put the objection another way: if Abraham’s decision really is perfectly rational from a faithful perspective, where is the fear and trembling, the offense of the gospel that Kierkegaard cares so much about? I have two responses. First, what Johannes is attacking is the attempt to understand Abraham in terms of unfaithful worldly understanding (which is the kind of understanding that Johannes himself has). The attempt to justify Abraham by the ultimate outcome of his action, or to understand Isaac merely as an allegory for “the best,” are two such attempts, both of which Johannes vigorously rejects.35 I haven’t toned down Johannes’s attempt to make Abraham less comprehensible in this sense at all. The offense of the gospel, according to Kierkegaard, is an offense felt by worldly reason in the face of the demands of the gospel on our beliefs and decisions, an offense caused by the fact that Christianity demands a complete conversion of the very standards by which we reason, not simply a decision that fits with the standards of reasoning we already accept.36 Second, it is one thing to have an abstract intellectual understanding of why Abraham acts as he does, of the form of reason he inhabits, and quite another to be vividly confronted with Abraham’s situation in all of its concreteness, force yourself to consider what you would do, and see Abraham’s reasons for acting as he does as

35

SKS 4, 155-156, 124-125 / FT, 62-63, 28-29. That is one of the reasons that Kierkegaard is so hostile to the practice of apologetics, which he sees as an attempt to avoid the offense of the Christian gospel by showing the gospel to be rational according to worldly standards of rationality–which, he thinks, inevitably destroys the gospel, because the gospel requires conversion from worldly to faithful standards of rationality. Removing the possibility of offense removes the possibility of conversion and so removes the possibility of faith. See, for example, SKS 9, 198-199 / WL, 192-193. 36

24 anything but absurd. It is precisely this vivid confrontation that Fear and Trembling does so well (and this is one major reason that it can never be replaced by any combination of scholarly articles). This shows that the standards of reason by which we live are not merely a matter of intellectual exercise, so that we can abandon them at will, but are instead of deep existential significance. Fear and Trembling has the power to show us which standards of reason are in fact most deeply entrenched in us. The fear and trembling that Abraham feels is the fear and trembling of being alone before the face of God, incomprehensible and apparently irrational to all those around him, and so without the comfort of society’s approval or even its understanding of his actions. This, too, is a biblical theme: the notion of fear and trembling is most often used in Scripture in association with a meeting with God and a life lived before the face of God.37 Even if we can understand in an abstract manner what might make Abraham’s decision reasonable by his lights, it does not follow that we could really imagine ourselves into Abraham’s shoes, having the courage to stand alone before God, without retreating to the comfort and protection of the approval of other people, and reason faithfully and obediently as Abraham does.

37

See, for example, Philippians 2:12, Hebrews 12:21, Psalm 2:11, Psalm 55:5, Micah 7:17, Job 4:14, 1 Corinthians 2:3 (which is followed by one of the key “offense” passages that Kierkegaard depends on for his perspectival picture of reason I have been exploring in this essay), and Micah 7:17.