Do you consider yourself a person of faith (of any sort)? Why?.Do you ever find yourself in a serious situation with no clear right answer? How did you feel?.Have you ever been required to give up something important to you? Why did you need to give it up? How did you handle the situation? How did you feel?.Have you ever done something that you cannot explain? Why were you unable to explain it? Do you think you did the right thing?.Please consult this list of essential terms so that students may better understand the text and questions.
All readings will be cited from this source. This Launchpad uses the freely available Walter Lowrie translation of Fear and Trembling from Religion Online. Ultimately, Kierkegaard articulates a highly existential understanding of the self and of Christianity, presenting a vision where the individual may transcend society and universal moral law. Rather than a genteel piety within a culture of Christendom, Kierkegaard understands Abraham’s faith as highly isolating, anxiety-ridden, and rationally absurd. While Kierkegaard does highlight Abraham’s faith, this faith is quite unlike more popularly accepted understandings of the term. Kierkegaard rejects abstracted narratives of Abraham’s sacrifice (such as interpreting the ordeal as a parable of faith) and guides the reader to reckon with Abraham’s anxiety. In order to do so, Kierkegaard centers his existential exploration of Christianity on the figure of Abraham, who is called by God in Genesis 22 to sacrifice his son, Isaac. He hoped to problematize what he felt were overly simplistic and uncritical interpretations of Christianity. Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling in 1843. As in the passage quoted above, the narrator Johannes de Silentio speaks directly to us. Kierkegaard regularly wrote under pseudonyms, and Fear and Trembling is no exception. Based in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard wrote prolifically in an effort to revive the Christian faith among Europeans and also explored aesthetics, ethics, and social criticism. He is often called the “father of existentialism” for his exploration of anxiety and absurdity. S øren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher. I am able to make from the springboard the great leap whereby I pass into infinity, my back is like that of a tight-rope dancer, having been twisted in my childhood, hence I find this easy with a one-two-three! I can walk about existence on my head but the next thing I cannot do, for I cannot perform the miraculous, but can only be astonished by it.” The dialectic of faith is the finest and most remarkable of all it possesses an elevation, of which indeed I can form a conception, but nothing more. “Generally people are of the opinion that what faith produces is not a work of art, that it is coarse and common work, only for the more clumsy natures but in fact this is far from the truth.
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