At the level of religious faith, which is the theme of Fear and Trembling, the significance of these intimations becomes at last fully manifest. While the importance of moral requirements is not as such denied, the absolute sovereignty of the ethical can no longer be assumed; rather, it is transcended by a perspective in which the self-sufficiency of morality, regarded as a socially established and universally acknowledged institution, is explicitly challenged. The notion that a person might be conscious of an ‘exceptional’ mission, to be fulfilled at whatever cost and in the face of
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