Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54801 in Books
• Published on: 1983-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Danish (translation)

Customer Reviews

Yes, yes, yes (you must read this)...
Kierkegaard is more personality, more energy of being, more outward agony, than nearly anyone who has ever lived, and to read Kierkegaard for treatise more than his infectious spirit is to miss the cornerstone of his treatise: Life's enduring ecstasy is synonymous with personal involvement, even when that involvement is partially or inaccurately informed. In other words, Abraham may have been willing to kill his son (so, stop, apologetic churches, reading this story as Abraham's faith that Isaac would mysteriously be salvaged!) and definitely didn't give a damn about your religious/philosophical platitudes in such a case. In a post-9/11 universe, this story, or its darker interpretations, is particularly unpopular, but policy without a pinch of Kierkegaardian humility devolves the lot of us into people of spiteful assumption rather than devotion.

sacrifice and loss
I am not able to comment on the accuracy or flow of the translation--the only Danish I know is the one that the kid from the mailroom used to bring by every morning--and so I am only able to engage the main ideas: faith. sacrifice. ethics. Each one negating the other, or at least any pair negating the third. Kierkegaard emphasizes that for faith we must sacrifice ethics because--as Job learned the hard way--God transcends morals. But it is also true that faith in ethics leads us to abandon sacrifice, as does an ethical interpretation of faith, and--perhaps most importantly--ethics can require that we sacrifice our faith.

I interpret this as meaning that on the one hand, we may find ourselves breaking our own laws to follow what we believe. For if you are pursuing something worth pursuing, and it happens to run beyond the law, are you going to abandon the chase?

But it is easy to break laws, and hard to break hearts (at least, that is, you must be hard to do so). And so doing the right thing in regards to your ethical understanding of action can lead you to sacrifice the mutual faith that you have with other people. In some ways, this is what Isaac confronts. The man on the way home sure of a steak dinner isn't a knight of faith--he is at best a pawn. Abraham too is not impressive here. What Isaac gave up was, so I have come to think after years of thought on the matter, much more weighty. He went up the mountain with faith in his father and in God; he was forced to sacrifice one to maintain the other. We will never know which. And that is the nature of love in a world in which doing the right thing is sure to involve breaking SOMEONE's law. [17]

Theological Tour de Force
This edition of 'Fear and Trembling' is an excellently produced and translated edition, with the interesting and helpful prefaces and selections of journal quotes typical of the Writings series.

'Fear and Trembling' presents a very penetrating, and ultimately disturbing, investigation into the personal and 'existential' implications of the religious concept of faith, as illustrated by the story of Isaac's sacrifice in Genesis 22.

Reviewers like to analyse the text either in respect to the biography of Kierkegaard, or of his literary output (or in relation to the other book in this collect, 'Repetition'), which are fair enough, but nevertheless, this book stands on its own with the question of whether religious faith can be a 'teleological suspension of the ethical.' This sounds like it could be a tendious philosophical excercise, but his erudition and literary skill constantly defies ones attempt to reduce or domesticate the paradoxes which he throws forward to his reader. The text still today offers each reader a choice of his own.