(a.)
After dinner last night, I opened up Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and began looking for something to get my mind off of a pressing issue that’s been driving me insane as of late. So, as with most of the books I possess and have read over three times, I flipped through the pages in search of marginalia worthy of scrutinization, which I never found. Instead, found poorly sketched emoti-scrawlings (similar to this) that, I hoped, were placed along side large paragraphs underlined with a crooked hand in order to summarize some profound “thunder-bolt” philosophical revelation.
No such luck.
I can usually pick at a text until the pages have nearly disintegrated into sand. Not this time. Rereading #4 didn’t do much for me but remind me of my already pretty firmly set ideas about Kierkegaard’s atheological ontology and epistemology. But I did find the sacrifice narrative of Genesis 22 (the text Kierkegaard is giving an analysis of in Fear and Trembling) to yield some interesting ideas when read as a psychological narrative instead of a strictly theological narrative.
(b.)
[1.] Isaac and the Ram: Child/Property, Indispensable/Dispensable, Conscious/Non-conscious, etc. The two are set in opposition to one another and shed light on Abraham’s mis-perception of Isaac as exhibiting the qualities which the ram possessed. Seen in this manner, the ram sacrificed on Mt. Moriah does not seem to be an editorial interpolation functioning to distract the readers from the “cruel” and absurd demands of a wrathful God. Instead, it is a narrative device, the symbolic embodiment of values and attitudes (supervenient upon those values) that need to be sacrificed in order for Abraham to become the “father of many nations,” or, before that, simply, to live up to his birth name.
[2.] A Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?: The journey to Mt. Moriah underscores the process of individuation that Isaac undergoes, which is probably the most overlooked but, nonetheless, most fundamental element of the narrative. Kierkegaard explains, as he does elsewhere, that prior to the subject’s qualitative leap from one dimension of subjectivity to another (see here for more details) the subject is in a state of anxiety, which the qualitative leap resolves. Language, custom, and consciousness itself are retroactively reflected upon, re-categorized, retrofitted to the dimension the dimension of subjectivity the subject, posterior to the leap, inhabits (see Repetition).
For Kierkegaard, “consciousness emerges precisely through the collision” of “Ideality” (i.e. the dimension of subjectivity that is no longer a sufficient means of understanding the moment of anxiety) and “Reality” (i.e. the dimension confronting the non-functioning dimension, absurd by virtue of its linguistic, cognitive, etc. inexpressibility and simultaneous comprehensibility, however subjective this may be).
[For more on "the collision," see Princeton University Press' 1983 publication of Fear and Trembling, pages 274-275.]
Abraham and Isaac experience such a collision, where the Ethical and the Religious confront one another, rendering inutile the language and customs of the former (or the “universal”) and, intuitively, revealing the efficacy of the latter as its replacement.
[3.] Departure, Ascension, Descent, and Restoration: Perhaps most compelling of all is the concept of Restoration, a theme that finds expression, albeit in a different form, in the book of Job as well.
In contradistinction to Job, however, Abraham’s loss is a direct consequence of his submission to God’s direct command, and is not a material loss but a psychological one. And, more importantly, what is restored is not material but psychological, serving to elucidate how the paradoxical event strengthens the preexisting father-son relationship – a relationship at risk of absolute failure by dint of unquestioned attitudes, practices, and beliefs – by placing it under a new set of categories befitting to it.
