Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

On 16 October 1843, in Copenhagen, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, then 30, published Fear and Trembling under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, John the Silent. The book returns again and again to the story in Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and then stops him at the last moment. Johannes says he can admire Abraham but cannot understand him. If a person sacrifices a child for a purpose they believe is higher than morality, that is a murder in ethical terms. How, then, is Abraham not a murderer?¹²

Kierkegaard distinguishes Abraham from a tragic hero such as Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek fleet can sail. Agamemnon gives up a personal love for a greater ethical good that everyone can understand and weep over. Abraham has no such public justification. He acts on a private relationship with God that cannot be explained to anyone, which the book calls a teleological suspension of the ethical. The knight of faith believes, with absurd confidence, that he will somehow get Isaac back, and he lives in ordinary life without showing it. The book argues against the Hegelian idea that the individual should fit into the universal order of society and reason. Kierkegaard also broke his own engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, and some read the book as a reflection on that choice. The popular phrase leap of faith is a later summary, not his wording.²¹

Kierkegaard's stress on the single individual, on anxiety, choice and passionate commitment, became the foundation of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and the theologians Barth and Tillich all drew on him.¹