Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Faith and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical

A father prepares to sacrifice his son. Described in ordinary ethical terms, the action is horrifying. Described through the biblical story of Abraham, it is associated with faith. Fear and Trembling asks what happens when these descriptions meet. If admiration for Abraham is to mean anything, it must confront the action that would otherwise make us condemn him.

Søren Kierkegaard published the book in 1843 under the name Johannes de Silentio. The pseudonymous speaker admires Abraham while repeatedly declaring that he cannot understand him or make the movement of faith himself. That distance shapes the work. We hear someone trying to think through an experience he does not claim to possess.

The question concerns the relation between faith and ethical justification. Can the individual stand in a relation to God that cannot be expressed through reasons everyone else can recognize? If so, how could this differ from a person's private conviction that they are exempt from an obligation? The book makes the difficulty acute without supplying a procedure that reliably resolves it.

The biblical narrative supplies the framework: Abraham is commanded to offer Isaac, travels to the place of sacrifice, and is stopped before killing him. Johannes asks the reader to attend to the journey and the ordeal, rather than let knowledge of the outcome make Abraham's conduct seem easy or safe.

On his account, Abraham loves Isaac. Without that love there would be no sacrifice of what he cherishes, and the example would lose its force. A father indifferent to his child would not become Abraham simply by performing a similar outward act. The relation to Isaac is essential to the problem.

Johannes also insists that Abraham believes he will receive Isaac. He does not picture Abraham as having exchanged every hope in this life for compensation only in another. The tension is that Abraham is willing to give up the son he loves while trusting in the promise attached to that same son. Looking back from the rescue can conceal the difficulty of holding both together before the outcome is known.

That treatment distinguishes the book from a lesson about taking a calculated risk. Abraham does not have a reassuring probability estimate. Nor is the story offered as a case in which a bad action becomes acceptable merely because it happens to end well. The question concerns the character of the commitment during the ordeal.

Johannes's inability to understand Abraham is not an incidental confession. It prevents the book from becoming a straightforward instruction manual for faith. He can describe distinctions, examine alternatives, and evoke admiration. He does not claim that these activities supply the experience they discuss.

The preface criticizes an intellectual culture eager to move beyond faith and doubt as though both were easily acquired achievements. Against that impatience, Johannes presents faith as a task whose difficulty should be acknowledged. His elaborate examination of Abraham is part of refusing to treat inherited religious language as evidence that its demands have been met.

The pseudonym also requires care in attribution. We can say that Kierkegaard constructs a particular exploration of faith. When presenting the exploration's specific assertions, it is often more accurate to name Johannes. Otherwise the reader may mistake the claims of a deliberately situated speaker for an uncomplicated summary of Kierkegaard's entire authorship.

This caution is not a way to make every conclusion disappear. The book's arguments can still be assessed. It means attending to how they are presented: through a speaker who understands the ethical description of Abraham's action but cannot reconcile that description with the faith he admires.

At the start of Problem I, Johannes calls the ethical the universal. In this argument, the universal supplies obligations that apply to individuals and make their actions intelligible in terms others can share. The individual's ethical task is to express a life within that order, rather than claim an exception merely because of personal preference.

A father's obligation to love his son belongs to this account. Abraham's preparation to sacrifice Isaac therefore cannot be explained by saying that an ethical requirement was absent. The requirement gives the religious trial its disturbing character. If it could simply be ignored, there would be little left to suspend.

The argument draws a distinction between acting against an obligation for a higher ethical reason and claiming an end beyond the ethical order itself. In an ordinary conflict of duties, someone can offer reasons about what the circumstances require. Other people may reject those reasons while still understanding the proposed justification. Abraham cannot supply that kind of justification for the singular command.

The term universal should not be stretched into a criticism of every shared rule or every attempt to make a general judgment. Johannes needs the ethical to have genuine authority. His paradox depends on that authority remaining strong enough to condemn the action it cannot justify. Replacing ethics with a collection of trivial conventions would weaken the problem rather than solve it.

Johannes compares Abraham with tragic heroes, including Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus. In his treatment, these figures sacrifice a particular attachment for a larger ethical end. Their suffering can be understood through the public significance assigned to their actions. Whether a reader endorses those sacrifices is a separate question from whether their proposed reasons are communicable.

Agamemnon, for example, is presented through the conflict between love of his daughter and the undertaking of the Greek forces. The terrible choice can be narrated as a sacrifice for the community. Johannes can understand the hero's sorrow because the explanation remains within an ethical order larger than the particular attachment.

Abraham has no comparable public purpose in the book's account. He is not sacrificing Isaac to save a nation. He cannot explain that the action is required by an ethical principle that others could apply in equivalent circumstances. The command places him, if he is a person of faith, in a relation that cannot be translated into that kind of reason.

The distinction does not imply that public benefit automatically justifies killing. Johannes is analyzing how these stories make a sacrifice intelligible. Readers can challenge the ethical assumptions of the tragic examples while still understanding the contrast: the tragic hero has an explanation available within the universal, whereas Abraham's religious position is claimed to exceed it.

The distinction between resignation and faith introduces another part of the difficulty. Infinite resignation is the movement through which someone relinquishes a finite hope while retaining an enduring attachment to what has been loved. It is not ordinary disappointment or the discovery that the object was worthless all along.

Johannes illustrates resignation through a young man whose love for a princess cannot be realized. The person does not escape the difficulty by forgetting her or replacing her immediately. He gives up the hope of possessing the relationship in ordinary life while preserving his love in an inward form. Johannes regards this as an achievement he can understand.

The example helps distinguish resignation from cheerful optimism. The resigned person recognizes the loss rather than treating it as a temporary inconvenience that will probably vanish. The achievement lies in the way the loss is borne. A promise of later good fortune would change what is being described.

Applied to Abraham, resignation alone would mean giving Isaac up and finding an inward or eternal way of bearing that loss. Johannes thinks faith includes this willingness but goes further. It concerns receiving the finite again, rather than becoming reconciled solely to life without it.

The knight of faith combines resignation with trust that the finite can nevertheless be received. In Abraham's case, this concerns Isaac himself and life with him. Johannes emphasizes that Abraham does not reserve fulfillment exclusively for a distant life beyond the present world.

The phrase by virtue of the absurd names the difficulty of this trust. From the standpoint of human calculation, the ordinary possibilities have been exhausted; nevertheless, faith expects what cannot be secured through them. The phrase should not be diluted into the familiar thought that an unlikely good event might happen. That would make faith an optimistic estimate rather than the movement Johannes is describing.

Nor should the absurd be turned into a general recommendation to accept every contradiction. Its role belongs to this account of religious trust, divine possibility, and the return of the finite. A claim that any belief becomes admirable when it lacks reasons would have a much wider scope than the argument warrants.

Johannes also imagines a knight of faith whose outward life looks ordinary. The person enjoys finite activities without displaying a conspicuous badge of spiritual distinction. This picture matters because the movement concerns how the finite is received, not simply withdrawal from it. An exceptional inward relation need not announce itself through an exceptional public appearance.

The two movements resist being turned into a recipe. Resignation is not a bargain in which someone gives something up to ensure its return. If the return were guaranteed by a technique, the loss and the paradox would have been replaced by a strategy for obtaining what one wants.

Teleological refers to a purpose or end, a telos. A teleological suspension of the ethical would set the ethical in relation to a higher end rather than treat it as the final authority. In Problem I, Johannes asks whether this is what must be admitted if Abraham is to be praised as a person of faith.

His formulation is deliberately difficult: the single individual stands higher than the universal through an absolute relation to the absolute. This individual has first been subordinated to the universal and, in Johannes's formulation, becomes higher through it. Here the absolute concerns God. The claim is not that the individual's desires outrank everyone else's obligations. It is that the religious relation, if genuine, cannot receive its ultimate justification from the ethical universal.

The conditional matters. Johannes repeatedly presents a stark alternative: either Abraham's religious standing involves this paradox, or the ethical description of the deed is not overcome. A reader who rejects the suspension can consequently reject the religious justification. Understanding the argument does not require accepting its most disturbing possibility.

Suspension also differs from abolishing ethics for everyone. The father still loves Isaac, and the ethical demand still has force. That continuing demand helps explain why Johannes speaks of anguish and temptation. If Abraham's relation to Isaac ceased to matter, there would be no conflict of this kind.

Problem II examines the related question of an absolute duty to God. The issue is whether duties are ultimately expressed through shared ethical obligations or whether there can be a direct relation that places those obligations in a different position. The argument pushes toward the same problem of justification: what could make the claim intelligible to someone outside that relation?

Problem III asks whether Abraham was ethically defensible in concealing his undertaking from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. Silence matters because ethical life includes accountability to other people. Someone's intentions can affect those who have a claim to hear and question them.

Johannes distinguishes Abraham's position from merely keeping a useful secret. The difficulty is that Abraham cannot explain the religious trial in the universal language that would make an ethical justification available. Telling someone that the action is a private trial does not supply the shared reason for which they are asking.

The book explores different forms of concealment through other stories. Their presence prevents us from assuming that silence is automatically holy. Concealment can have several meanings, including forms of refusal or entanglement that deserve criticism. Abraham's silence needs to be understood through the claimed paradox rather than praised just because it is silence.

This is also why difficulty explaining a commitment cannot establish its religious authority. People may struggle to communicate for many reasons. The inability to justify an action does not itself prove that the action belongs to a higher order. That inference would let an absence of justification become evidence of superiority without any further ground.

The most serious objection is practical and philosophical: how does a claimed relation to God differ from mistaken certainty or fanaticism? Someone may be utterly sincere and still be wrong about what they ought to do. If shared ethical reasons cannot test the exceptional claim, the risk of self-deception becomes central.

Johannes does not supply a publicly usable test that certifies a person as Abraham. His account of difficulty and anguish prevents faith from being reduced to casual self-assertion. But anguish alone cannot establish that a command is divine. A painful conviction can also be mistaken.

For the reader, this leaves an unresolved cost in the proposal. The book can show why an alleged suspension would be unlike an ordinary ethical justification. It does not thereby show that the suspension has occurred in a given case. Naming a paradox identifies the problem without deciding which private claims deserve acceptance.

The distinction is especially important when discussing harm. Admiration for a literary and religious account of Abraham does not establish that a contemporary person's claim of divine command licenses violence. The book's difficulty gives us a reason to scrutinize that move, rather than treat it as a lesson that sincerity defeats ethical judgment.

A critic may go further and insist that a purported revelation requiring such harm should be rejected. Another reader may think the religious possibility cannot be excluded in principle. Their disagreement should be stated openly. A summary that announces that faith and ethics simply occupy separate harmless spheres evades the conflict the book was written to expose.

It is tempting to make Abraham a symbol for any difficult personal decision. Choosing a vocation, keeping a promise, or departing from social expectations can involve uncertainty and loneliness. These similarities do not make such decisions suspensions of the ethical. Often their justification depends precisely on ethical reasons that can be shared.

A hypothetical person who refuses a dishonest request, for example, can explain the refusal by appealing to honesty and obligations to those affected. The person might stand alone while remaining within an ethical justification. Isolation is therefore insufficient to establish Johannes's paradox. The proposed relation to God, and its conflict with the universal, are doing indispensable work.

Likewise, the knight of faith should not be reduced to someone who takes bold risks and eventually succeeds. An agreeable outcome does not demonstrate the two movements. Johannes's insistence on the inward relation makes the category harder to recognize than a biography of someone who persevered.

Read the preliminary variations on Abraham with that difficulty in mind, then compare the resignation discussion with Problem I. Ask what changes when Isaac is loved, relinquished, and expected again. Continue to Problem III and ask what Abraham could communicate without changing the kind of justification claimed for him.

The book asks whether praising faith can be reconciled with the ethical judgment its central story provokes. Its power depends on allowing both claims to remain demanding. The reader can admire Johannes's seriousness, question his alternatives, or reject the suspension altogether. What the argument resists is the comfortable thought that Abraham's faith is easy to understand because we already know the story ends well.

• Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Walter Lowrie. Read the preliminary variations, the discussion of resignation and faith, and Problems I–III together.
• Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, the princess example in the Preliminary Expectoration. Separate resignation from the second movement before returning to Abraham.
• Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Problems I and III. Compare the ethical demand with the treatment of silence and the inability to communicate the trial.