Fear and Trembling

Introduction

Fear and Trembling (Danish Frygt og Bæven) is Søren Kierkegaard's 1843 pseudonymous work, published under the name Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence), on the biblical narrative of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). The work is one of the founding texts of the existentialist tradition and the canonical Kierkegaardian treatment of the teleological suspension of the ethical — the doctrine that the religious individual's absolute relation to the absolute can suspend the requirements of the ethical universal.

The work is also one of Kierkegaard's most accessible. Where the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and the later religious writings can be dauntingly long and technical, Fear and Trembling is a short, intensely focused, literary-philosophical meditation. It is the Kierkegaard text most commonly assigned in undergraduate philosophy and theology courses.

Form, length, date, language

Fear and Trembling is a short book of approximately 40,000 words in Danish, published in October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. The work appeared in a remarkable burst of Kierkegaardian publication: 1843 saw Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and several volumes of religious upbuilding discourses, all by a thirty-year-old who had begun publishing two years earlier. The original language is Danish; the standard scholarly editions in English are Walter Lowrie's (1941) and the Howard and Edna Hong Princeton edition (1983).

The choice of the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio is significant. The narrator is of silence because, as he repeatedly declares, he cannot understand Abraham — the religious individual's faith is incommensurable with the ethical-rational frameworks the narrator commands. The pseudonym embodies the methodological recognition that what is at issue cannot be directly described from outside.

Why it was written

Kierkegaard's 1841 breaking of his engagement to Regine Olsen is the personal background against which Fear and Trembling must be read. Many scholars treat the work as Kierkegaard's coded reflection on his own situation — the sacrifice of his own happiness for what he took to be a higher calling. The Abraham-Isaac narrative provides the structural pattern for the reflection on his own act.

The broader philosophical purpose engages the Hegelian framework Kierkegaard spent his career opposing. Hegel's Philosophy of Right treats the ethical universal (the family, civil society, the state) as the proper realization of human freedom; the religious individual who claims to act above the ethical is, on the Hegelian framework, simply confused or self-deceived. Fear and Trembling argues against this position: Abraham's faith is not a confused version of ethical action; it is a fundamentally different mode of relation, in which the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute that the ethical universal cannot capture.

Structure and argument

The work divides into a Preface, an Exordium (with four variations on the Abraham story), a Speech in Praise of Abraham, and three Problems (philosophical questions about Abraham's situation).

Preface and Exordium. The narrator distances himself from the spirit of speculative reasoning that wishes to go further than faith; he insists that faith is the highest, not something to be merely surpassed. The Exordium presents four variations on Abraham's three-day journey to Mount Moriah, each imagining what Abraham might have said or felt, none of which the narrator finds adequate to the actual Abraham.

Speech in Praise of Abraham. A meditation on Abraham as the father of faith, accompanied by the recurring recognition that the narrator cannot understand what Abraham did. The Speech distinguishes the knight of infinite resignation (who gives up what is most precious by recognizing it is inevitably lost) from the knight of faith (who gives up what is most precious and yet expects to receive it back). Only Abraham is the second.

Problem I: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? The first technical philosophical question. If the ethical is the universal, and Abraham's intended action (sacrificing Isaac) is contrary to the ethical universal, then either Abraham is a murderer or there must be something higher than the universal that can suspend its requirements. The narrator argues that the second is the case in Abraham's case: the religious individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute that suspends the ethical universal.

Problem II: Is there an absolute duty to God? The second technical question, related to the first. The ethical universal requires that I act for the universal good; the absolute duty to God can require that I act in a way the universal cannot recognize. The argument develops the structure of religious obligation as a category distinct from ethical obligation.

Problem III: Was it ethically defensible of Abraham to conceal his purpose from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac? The third question addresses the silence of the religious individual. Abraham cannot communicate what he is doing to those around him, because what he is doing cannot be made intelligible in the categories they share. The discussion explores the relation between concealment and the religious individual's predicament.

Key passages

• Preface — the narrator's distancing from speculative philosophy.
• Exordium — the four variations on Abraham's journey.
• Problem I, opening — the ethical as such is the universal.
• Problem I, middle — Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal.
• Problem III, on Abraham's silence — the analysis of why Abraham cannot speak.
• Closing — the contrast between Abraham as knight of faith and the various lesser figures.

Reception history

Fear and Trembling was not widely read outside Denmark during Kierkegaard's lifetime. The European reception developed in the early twentieth century alongside the broader Kierkegaard revival. The dialectical theology movement of the 1920s (Barth, Brunner, Bultmann) made Fear and Trembling foundational; the existentialist movement of the 1930s and 1940s (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Marcel) extended the reception into philosophy proper.

The work has had unusually wide cultural reception beyond academic philosophy and theology. Its treatment of the relation between religious commitment and ethical-social norms has been taken up in literary criticism, contemporary moral philosophy, and the broader cultural conversation about religious experience.

The contemporary scholarly reception is substantial. Edward Mooney's Knights of Faith and Resignation (1991), Stephen Mulhall's Inheritance and Originality (2001), C. Stephen Evans's Kierkegaard's Fragments and Postscript (1983), and Clare Carlisle's Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: A Reader's Guide (2010) are among the major recent commentaries.

Contemporary engagement

The standard English translations are Walter Lowrie's (Princeton, 1941, widely used pedagogically), Howard and Edna Hong's (Princeton, 1983, the scholarly standard), Alastair Hannay's (Penguin, 1985), and Bruce Kirmmse's (Liveright, 2022). Major recent scholarly work includes the commentaries listed above and substantial engagement in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Continental Philosophy Review, and the journals of philosophical theology. Active scholarly debates concern the relation between Johannes de Silentio's voice and Kierkegaard's own position, the interpretation of the teleological suspension of the ethical, the place of Fear and Trembling in Kierkegaard's broader corpus, and the contemporary applicability of Kierkegaardian religious individualism.

Further reading

• Kierkegaard — the author
• Existentialism — the tradition the work helped found
• Christian Theology — the religious tradition the work transforms
• Hegel — the philosophical antagonist whose framework the work attacks
• Free Will — the concept Abraham's decision presupposes
• Belief Systems — the structure the work analyzes through the figure of faith

The founding text of religious existentialism. The most-read of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works.