Classics and the Western Canon discussion
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Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
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Lia wrote: "So, what happens after that kind of “death?” Asking for a friend......"Depends on what your friend chooses to do with it? She/he may choose to go on to be as "immortal" as K in some field. Or he/she may ....
Is it what some people choose to label "free will"?
(I am currently listening to a series that included an interview of Candace Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If curious, it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0Ezo...)
Lily wrote: "Can someone provide a definition of "faith" from Kierkegaard/Silentio perspective? I'm lost as to what it is.Or call it to my attention from the text...."
He never provides a definition because for him it's a paradox, and therefore indefinable. But he does give us several examples, and he tries to describe the phenomenon of faith.
What faith appears to be is a way to cope with the disappointment, the losses, and the heartbreaks of reality by resigning those things as actualities, acknowledging their impossibilities, but idealizing them and choosing to live for them anyway.
Maybe it's the times we are living through right now, but I'm reminded of the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr., who somehow knew he wasn't going to get there, but had faith anyway:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...
And we still aren't there. But faith opens up a way of living as if we were, and by living that way, the possibility of that seeming impossibility is available to us.
That's my best shot at it...
Here is my shot at SK's faith.1. Faith is a knowledge claim. Hope leaves a little wiggle room and faith does not, which makes faith a knowledge claim. Hope is not the same as faith. When the faithful say, “Jesus walked on water,” they are not saying they hope Jesus walked on water, but rather are claiming Jesus actually did walk on water. I think SK would say most people, or The Crowd, only have hope.
2. Faith is somehow its own form of aesthetic full of pathos.
3. Faith claims are completely non-rational which contradict rationality resulting in The Absurd and existential anxiety when contemplated. The response to this is to accept the non-rational and infinitely resign the rational. Camus calls this response acceptance and resignation a form of philosophical suicide. Kierkegaard suggests however, if faith is performed properly, the impossible becomes magically possible, which just seems to be piling on the non-rationality.
4. Faith is also personal and subjective defying further attempts to describe it. Which, if you ask me, is a common and convenient way of shutting down the conversation there.
5. Faith also appears to be a verb of only momentary duration, requiring all the acceptance and resignation to be reworked into repeated actions by way of the absurd.
Lia wrote: "So, what happens after that kind of “death?” Asking for a friend... ." ."It seems, for Kierkegaard, that the "whole content" of the knight's life is resigned, but not forgotten. He turns it inward and it becomes spiritually transfigured. The actuality of his love is renounced by his act of resignation, but the knight of faith chooses to "live joyfully and happily every moment by virtue of the absurd, every moment to see the sword hanging over the beloved's head and yet to find, not rest in the pain of resignation, but joy by virtue of the absurd."
The choice for the knight at this point is to either live in the sorrowful, painful, but peaceful rest of resignation, or to make the movement of faith and live joyfully in a state of anxiety.
Or as Beckett says, "I can't go on. I'll go on."
David wrote: "1. Faith is a knowledge claim. Hope leaves a little wiggle room and faith does not, which makes faith a knowledge claim. Hope is not the same as faith. When the faithful say, “Jesus walked on water,” they are not saying they hope Jesus walked on water, but rather are claiming Jesus actually did walk on water. I think SK would say most people, or The Crowd, only have hope..."I would say it’s the exact opposite of a knowledge claim. It’s not intellectual, it’s an unresolvable paradox that cannot be solved with knowledge or intellect.
The text says nothing about Jesus walking on water, or having actual, specific belief about that. That kind of dogmatic belief in literal truth of the bible seems decidedly post-Abraham. I’d venture to say that Kierkegaard calls Abraham’s faith “primal” precisely because it is faith BEFORE organized religion, dogma, rabbinic exegesis, scholastic rationalizing.
It might point to an expression of belief in a “truth,” but this is a truth as subjective lived experience, attitude, development, and not objective knowledge.
David wrote: “ 2. Faith is somehow its own form of aesthetic full of pathos.”
That’s an interesting interpretation, especially since Kierkegaard explicitly states in the next section that he is bringing up drama, Aristotle’s Poetics, aesthetics tales of tragic heroes and immediacy and concealment and disclosure in order to elucidate their unlikenesses to the Akedah. That is, the sphere that Abraham operates in (religion, faith) is not ethics (reason, public language, duty), and not aesthetics.
Thomas wrote: "The choice for the knight at this point is to either live in the sorrowful, painful, but peaceful rest of resignation, or to make the movement of faith and live joyfully in a state of anxiety. Or as Beckett says, "I can't go on. I'll go on."
Thanks but that’s just absurd. (duh.)
I hate to say this, but I’m increasingly coming to see Beckett as literally endeavouring to “fail better,” that is, failure itself is taken as achievement, which somehow doesn’t seem to signal joyful embrace of contradictions.
I’m still preferring his mentor, Joyce, and Sir Bloom’s joyful, sensual, passionate, compassionate, fully lived contradictions in anxiety.
To recycle David’s quote earlier:“For that passion is required. Every movement of infinity occurs through passion, and no reflection can bring about a movement. This is the perpetual leap in existence that explains the movement, whereas mediation is a chimera which according to Hegel is supposed to explain everything and which is also the only thing he has never tried to explain.”
It’s almost as though his problem with Hegel is that Hegel attempted to confront the paradox that is faith by reflection, through knowledge, intellect, and not passion, not lived experience, existence.
Maybe that’s why SK/ JS serves us up with such detailed, thick descriptions of stories of individuals going through inward crisis, as opposed to a methodical, precise, logical treatise laying out exact arguments and conclusive knowledge claims.
Lia wrote: "I would say it’s the exact opposite of a knowledge claim. It’s not intellectual, it’s an unresolvable paradox that cannot be solved with knowledge or intellect. "You are certainly correct in saying faith is not intellectual because all things intellectual must be resigned, (which ironically must include even the arguments made in this work). What remains after infinite resignation are unquestionable assumptions which we can fairly call knowledge claims. In other words JS is suggesting the way to resolve an unreasonable paradox without rational knowledge or intellect is non-rational knowledge. It is a non-rational response to non-rational conditions. Acceptance and resignation.
The introduction to my Cambridge edition says:
What exactly does Abraham believe? What does he think as he rides to Mount Moriah with Isaac and the knife? Commentators have found this a difficult question. On the one hand, Abraham knows, says Johannes, that Isaac is to die by his own hand: “at the decisive moment he must know what he himself will do” (p. 105). Yet Johannes insists that Abraham continues to believe “by virtue of the absurd” that God will not in fact require Isaac of him: “He climbed the mountain, and even at the moment when the knife gleamed he believed – that God would not demand Isaac” (p. 29).I don't know if Abraham reads books, but he appears to know things. Plus, there is no room for doubt in these leaps of faith; something without doubt implies certainty, i.e., knowledge claim. That is fideism in a nutshell. By contrast, hope, contains an element of uncertainty. Here is one from the text:
Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
If Abraham had doubted when he stood on Mount Moriah, if he had looked about in indecision, if by chance he had spotted the ram before drawing the knife, if God had permitted him to sacrifice it instead of Isaac – then he would have gone home, everything would have been the same, he would have had Sarah, he would have kept Isaac, and yet how changed!
Lia wrote: "Or as Beckett says, "I can't go on. I'll go on."Thanks but that’s just absurd. (duh.)..."
Yes. And life is like that some days.
David wrote: “ In other words JS is suggesting the way to resolve an unreasonable paradox without rational knowledge or intellect is non-rational knowledge. It is a non-rational response to non-rational conditions. Acceptance and resignation.” My problem with this is that to call that knowledge implies a knower standing outside the object of what is “known”. Yet, JS says this of faith itself:
“Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed. If someone deludes himself into thinking he may be moved to have faith by pondering the outcome of that story, he cheats himself and cheats God out of the first movement of faith... for the movement of faith must continually be made by virtue of the absurd, but yet in such a way, please note, that one does not lose the finite but gains it whole and intact. For my part, I presumably can describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make them. In learning to go through the motions of swimming, one can be suspended from the ceiling in a harness and then presumably describe the movements, but one is not swimming. In the same way I can describe the movements of faith. If I am thrown out into the water, I presumably do swim (for I do [III 89] not belong to the waders), but I make different movements, the movements of infinity, whereas faith makes the opposite movements: after having made the movements of infinity, it makes the movements of finitude.”
JS out right admits he cannot understand a person living in faith, nor can he make the movement of faith, he can at best describe the movement, but stands outside it. What makes it faith is personally, individually making the movement, the leap. Standing outside like a spectator titrating it into congealed, static knowledge “cheats himself and cheats God out of the first movement of faith.” It’s not an object of knowledge that can be intellectually processed, that can be cognitively possessed. It’s something that can only be lived ... which probably contributes to why people retroactively label Kierkegaard an existentialist, he struggles with the paradoxes existence he himself lives in, not pieces of knowledge or factoid or received wisdoms.
David wrote: “ The introduction to my Cambridge edition says:
What exactly does Abraham believe? What does he think as he rides to Mount Moriah with Isaac and the knife? Commentators have found this a difficult question. On the one hand, Abraham knows, says Johannes, that Isaac is to die by his own hand: “at the decisive moment he must know what he himself will do” (p. 105). Yet Johannes insists that Abraham continues to believe “by virtue of the absurd” that God will not in fact require Isaac of him: “He climbed the mountain, and even at the moment when the knife gleamed he believed – that God would not demand Isaac”(p. 29)”
That sounds like JS’s description of Abraham making the movement to the end of reason, at which point he proceeds to move with the help of God after reason can help him no further. From his interactions with God he can reasonably deduce fragments of conclusions, or so JS speculates, comfortably sitting by the fireside, contemplating, reflecting, but not living what Abraham lived, not making the movement of faith, but ironically trying to make it an intellectual exercise, and Kierkegaard makes sure we know he fails.
David wrote: “ I don't know if Abraham reads books, but he appears to know things.”
Did he know “things,” or did he know God (as in he met him, not he knows the definition and constitution of God)? He didn’t read the bible and imagine and deduce and induce and rationalize what God might be like, God personally visited him in his tent, made promises, fulfilled promises, tested him repeatedly, gave “good gifts”. He didn’t get any of these from books, from other people passing on pieces of “knowledge,” again, it’s lived experiences, maybe habituated attitude towards this deity he interacted with for his whole life, and not factoids.
David wrote: “ Plus, there is no room for doubt in these leaps of faith; something without doubt implies certainty, i.e., knowledge claim.”
Again, I don’t read this as knowledge claim. He did not doubt God as an individual (0r whatever, I don’t have words for it) he’s having a relationship with, kind of like if God says “jump” and Abraham will only ask “how high.” He didn’t not-doubt his knowledge, his intellect, what he trusted absolutely is this partner he’s having a relationship with, which is, again, existential, interpersonal, relational, passionate, and not about having absolute certitude in some factoid or secret knowledge he possesses.
If anything, it would seem to be a kind of epistemic humility, in accepting his rationality has its limit. (in fact, within this narrative, it turns out what he thought he could know for certain was wrong, he will not plunge his knife into Isaac.)
I see what you’re getting at.
So, what happens after that kind of “death?” Asking for a friend...