Fear & Trembling
My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers.
*Notes on Fear & Trembling, including elements of Either/Or
Kierkegaard’s system of personal development consists of a progress through four distinct outlooks on life: the aesthetic, the ethical, religiousness A, and religiousness B. A key question then, is how this transition occurs, a problem made more poignant by the fact that this progression cannot be interpreted as a steady, continuous, commensurable betterment but rather as gestalt shifts between largely-incommensurable outlooks. A necessary part of these transitions is the “leap”. Since this leap is not sufficient in itself to facilitate these transitions, I will elucidate what this leap is by first exploring what other moves one must make to facilitate these transitions, before arriving at a positive definition of the leap: the will acting on a promise legitimated by skeptical reasoning and grounded by immanent reasoning and indirect communication.
We begin our investigation with immanent reasoning for this is what a rationalist opponent, such as Hegel, may consider to be a sufficient resource to transition from one stage to the next. Such a view goes: after examining, through reflection alone, one’s immanent resources and their tensions, one can, through reason alone, determine, maybe not a fully positive conception of the next stage, but a direction to move towards that nonetheless, if one repeats this process enough, will lead one to the next stage. By “through reason alone”, I mean to say: one’s assuredness and expectation of the outcome of this transition, and consequently the motivation to enact such a transition, can be traced to nothing other than the logical coherency of a series of arguments conforming to the law of reason.
Kierkegaard would not deny that transitions between these four stages might happen in increments rather than one enormous leap, but he would disagree that the appeal to reasons stemming from immanent resources is enough to facilitate this leap for the simple fact of incommensurability between stages. This incommensurability can be seen in Fear and Trembling as Johannes De Silentio, in the ethical stage, struggles to make sense of anyone in religiousness B: “I have sought in vain to spy out the incommensurability of genius in him” (97). In other words, the immanent resources in an advanced stage are so different from a previous stage such that the latter cannot comprehend, much less, reason soundly about his path forward.
In Either/Or, the ethical Judge William struggles to explain the benefits of the ethical to the aesthetic A even when using an immanent appeal: “I wish only to force you to the point where the necessity of making a choice[, the defining characteristic of the ethical,] manifests itself and there-after to consider existence under ethical qualifications ... If only the choice is posited, all the esthetic returns, and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful” (76). We can imagine A’s hesitancy to such a mode of argumentation. First, he can doubt whether the ethical really does preserve the passion of the aesthetic. Second, whatever aesthetic passion that is preserved might be so alien to his current free, commitment-less experience of the aesthetic as to be considered two separate, and therefore non-commensurable, entities. Third, Judge William’s major advocation for the ethical: the meaningfulness of commitment, is completely incomprehensible to A with his current immanent resources.
It is thus better to understand, at least a large proportion, of Judge Williams’ attempt in this paragraph not as immanent reasoning but as a promise. Should A choose to adopt Judge Williams’ advice it cannot be only due to the soundness of his arguments, but because he has faith in these promises: the preservation of passion and the meaningfulness of commitment. That is not to say immanent reasoning is impossible, in fact promises would be blind and ungrounded if they weren’t grounded by immanent reasoning. My claim is this: because stages represent having different immanent resources, to the extent that an immanent appeal through reasoning alone is sufficient to motivate the transition, one already needs to adopt the resources of the next stage. Put negatively: to the extent you aren’t already in the next stage, immanent reasoning will not be enough to get you there, and you will be required to act on your faith in promises rather than being convinced by argumentation.
There is another method to ground promises, for the teacher to get the student “to consider existence under [different] qualifications” (76). That is, through indirect communication. We have already established how objective, direct, rational arguments, which falls under actuality, is limited in communicating subjective, personal states of existence, which falls under ideality: “Ideality is not a chattel that can be transferred from one person” (218). While the outer manifestations of an individual, their reasoned arguments included, can never directly gives us access to their inner world, we can however, catch glimpses of their ideality indirectly through their actuality. Through an innocuous remark, an awkward smile, etc. we get glimpses of subjectivity indirectly and, however fallible and limited, gain access into the perspective and resources that are work in their world: what it feels like to be them. These insights can also ground our faith in promises.
There is another way in which rationality and reasoning makes this promise more attractive, to be worthy to be leaped into. Unlike immanent reasoning, skeptical reasoning does not bolster the promise by grounding it but by legitimizing it. What I mean to say is that in our post-enlightenment age in particular, and especially for the rationalists, there is a tendency to view acting on promises, in the way I have defined them, to be illegitimate. A more exaggerated caricature of such a view would go so far as to claim that every action should only proceed if grounded upon reasoning as irrefutable and sound as that of a mathematical proof. The assumption is that reasoning is a legitimate impetus for action while promises are not. Skeptical reasoning directly addresses these assumptions and speaks to those who, despite the many legitimate promises offered to them, are still scavenging for more reasons before they are assured enough to act.
Skeptical reasoning works by generating doubt. It generates doubt about a specific topic initially that, if pursued to its conclusion, becomes a doubt about the legitimacy of rationality in general. The entirety of Fear and Trembling can be seen as such a doubt-generating tool of skeptical reasoning. We are invited alongside Johannes De Silentio to investigate the Abraham and Isaac story in the old testament. While, in the beginning, we merely doubt, as Johannes does, the soundness of his particular interpretations of the story, it soon becomes obvious, given the exhaustive interpretative approaches offered, that it is the very method of trying to understand Abraham rationally that is to be doubted and transcended.
Put more generally, skeptical reasoning wants to show that reason itself is to be doubted, simply because, once one starts doubting, one cannot escape doubt through reason alone. The argument goes as such, if one is skeptical about a specific topic, one is implicitly dogmatic about something they are sure of, if not their very skepticism itself. One can continue to use reason to examine the grounding of the skepticism ad infinitum but there is no stopping of this. “If I want to keep on doubting, I shall never in all eternity advance any further, because doubt consists precisely in and by passing off that certainty as something else” (222). What does stop doubting must be faith in some promise, one must state, out of faith and not reason “the buck stops here”. “If I hold on to the certainty as certainty for one single moment, I must also stop doubting for that moment. But then it is not doubt that cancels itself; it is I who stop doubting” (222).
Put another way, if you think a specific conclusion of reason, say “bring sunscreen”, is legitimate and deserves to be acted upon, while I am skeptical, you can only refer to further reasons “the sun will rise tomorrow”, “the sun has risen everyday”, ad infinitum. Through reason alone you cannot ever resolve me of my skepticism, unless I agree that one specific grounding is true, not because of even more reasoned arguments, for then it would cease to be the grounding, but because it seems like a valid promise. When you believe reason to be legitimate therefore, you really are already implicitly agreeing upon the legitimacy of promises. Skeptical reasoning renders promises an equal if not more legitimate basis of action not by lifting promises up but by bringing reasoning down, by showing how reasoning cannot gain their certainty without promises.
Socrates has such a privileged position in Kierkegaard’s works precisely because he was a master of skeptical reasoning. While the Sophists provided formulated conclusions and objective truths, Socrates went around skeptically deconstructing others’ positions while claiming his own ignorance. By doing so, he wrestled truth away from the objective sphere and placed the burden again on the subject. It was up to the subjects to gain access to truth and, importantly, in a deep and embodied way.
To make an intuition in the Socratic example explicit: another way of saying that skeptical reasoning legitimizes promises is to say that it legitimizes subjectivity, since promises are nothing but promises of a radical change in subjective experience grounded by glimpses of subjective truth and immanent objective reason. Skeptical reasoning shows us that the important truths, the truths that matter to us are not the objective ones but the subjective ones that we as finite individuals must each learn anew for ourselves. In fact, this enhanced recognition of one’s subjectivity, defined as the finitude of our existence and the private nature of our pursuit for truth, characterizes the progression of these four stages. The aesthetic life has little subjectivity: one thinks everything is possible, that there is infinite time, and makes little commitments that define a subject. The ethical life is defined by commitments that define one’s subjectivity: before I take on the objective duties of a father, I have to subjectively recognize myself as one. The religious is even more subjective as whatever objective laws and duties that might exist in the ethical is also suspended. The relationship to God is purely subjective. As a result, skeptical reasoning not only legitimates the leap but is a force in and of itself that facilitates the transition between stages.
We have come to the leap itself, the last part of the transition that needs to be explained. Perhaps we can think about the moment of the leap as the will situated in a space of many different promises. The leap itself is the act of the will which decides to change in accordance to one of these promises. This leap is not grounded on reason alone for promises are not grounded on reason alone. Yet, this leap is also not blind for promises are grounded upon immanent reasoning and glimpses of subjective truth and legitimized by skeptical reasoning.