Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

For those believing that God can resolves all of our ethical questionings (since our moral supposedly stemmed from Him) Kierkegaard is here throwing a brick in the wall.

Genesis. Chapter 22. Here is one of the supposedly most famous passage from the Bible, the one where Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac. An angel will rescue the child, but how disconcerting is such story! God, asking a father, to murder his own child, simply to prove his faith...

For the philosopher, deeply show more Christian, it's a passage that raised serious questions. Abraham is presented as a role model, but was he? What to make of a man who wouldn't have hesitated to sacrifice his son? Should we follow his example, and abide to faith 'blindly'? These questions tortured him, and, he delves upon them in here.

The thing is, he was baffled by the many paradoxes contained in such a story. A sacrifice, first and foremost, is about giving something away to obtain something else. Yet, Abraham is here sacrificing his own child for no certain reward. Is Abraham a murderer? How would an average person react in his position? Would we blindly obey God and kill a child -*our* child? Or would we have ask God to take his life Himself, or, even, to take *our* life instead? And Isaac? What did he thought afterward about a father who had been ready to kill him at such a whim? What did he thought afterward of a God that demanded his death by murder? Yes, he survived... but here was a child who had a knife put under his throat! The whole gesture is also questionable: what differentiate here Abraham from a pagan king who, for example, sacrifices his own child too, but to save his people from a famine? The pagan, at least, do so out of concern for others (he is an individual negating his own feelings to serve his community); in the case of Abraham, it was purely selfish, as the purpose was just to prove his personal faith... And how such selfishness can, yet, be presented as being the more exemplary? And what about murder? If you should not kill, then why such command should be abolished? Because God demanded it? But what about personal responsibility? And can faith gives the right to do anything, even a cruel, horrible deed, even an irrational deed, simply because 'it's God's will'?

Kierkegaard had an answer to it all. For him -again, deeply Christian- Abraham wasn't a killer but a knight of the faith; and, as such, his deed was admirable precisely because he renounced to serve others but himself only, as per God's command in that particular situation. As an atheist, of course, I find that twist in reasoning too convenient to be a rational explanation (but, then again, it's not about being rational but faithful...). Yet, here is a must-read: if his answer is merely wishy-washy, his questions, nevertheless, are highly relevant. show less

What was it that made Abraham's "test" such a remarkable event? We are already aware of the great faith that Abraham exhibited through his trust in God's promise (before the birth of Isaac) that his seed would produce a great nation despite his advanced age and his wife's barrenness. His "test" wasn't in obeying God's order to sacrifice his beloved son, no matter how difficult or distasteful, nor was it in believing that God would not ask him to commit an "unethical" act such as murder, nor show more even in what must have been the agonous eternity of those three days riding on an ass with Isaac to the place of slaughter. The heroic aspect exhibited by Abraham on the slopes of Moriah, according to Kierkegaard, was that his faith transcended understanding and rose above the rational to enter into the "absurd." The paradox of God's request required Abraham to believe that God's promise of a future nation founded upon his seed (Isaac) would still exist untainted even while God demanded he offer that very seed in sacrifice; that God would give him the happiness of "having" his son while also taking him away, not in hoping that God would change his mind at the last minute. Kierkegaard imagines Abraham's anxiety as he raised the blade over his son and it was the overcoming of this "Fear and Trembling" that made Abraham a true hero and a "knight of faith."

"So either there is a paradox... or Abraham is done for."

I've read snippets of Kierkegaard over the years but this is the first complete work I've tackled. I'm glad I did. It's a thoughtful insight by a thoughtful man trying to make sense of the insensible. While I have separate issues with Kierkegaard's version of Christianity (Lutheranism), it's a pity to me the twisted turns that later men and women took with his ideas in the ensuing madness of atheistic existentialism and absurdism later exemplified by the likes of Camus and Sartre. show less

This book argues for the importance of discovering one's own identity. Through that process, one can develop his own individuality as a person. The author claims that in order to eventually become self-aware, one must overcome hopelessness and denial. Kierkegaard is certainly thought-provoking, even though he isn't always rational. Although the overall perspective has much to offer as a phenomenological explanation of existential despair, it falls well short in terms of a coherent show more metaphysical theory of the self and its attendant states. If one challenges some of his underlying presumptions, especially his assertion that God had to have created the self, it is especially challenging to embrace his conception of the self. And if one does not believe this, it is hard to accept the rest. However, the text is consistently insightful and engaging. show less

A short book that feels like a marathon, Søren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death looks and is daunting. It is a dense philosophical treatise that goes deep into notions of despair, the self and existence – hardly crowd-pleasers – and also topics that are deeply unfashionable nowadays like faith and the state of Christianity. It is a book that can inflict on us passages like the following, which is by no means the only example:

"If the relation which relates to itself has been show more established by something else, then of course the relation is the third term, but then this relation, the third term, is a relation which relates in turn to that which has established the whole relation." (pg. 10)

And yet, alongside all this academic wordiness and dry dialectic, Kierkegaard can also deliver lines such as "with despair a fire takes hold in something that cannot burn" (pg. 18). The best example of the headache-inducing yet ultimately nourishing nature of the book, and perhaps of philosophy in general, is when Kierkegaard delivers the maddening line "To understand and to understand; are these then two different things? Certainly" (pg. 111), only to follow this up with a clear and interesting discussion of what he means by this, namely that there is a "distinction between not being able to understand and being unwilling to understand" (pg. 117).

Of course, no one is coming to philosophy, particularly philosophy of the calibre of Kierkegaard, with a view to finding their next beach read. Even so, the dense and gloomy nature of the book can be fatiguing, even though Kierkegaard can turn a phrase occasionally, and is bracingly critical of Christendom the church as opposed to Christianity the creed. Even when the book is uplifting it is hard-earned; you have to follow it closely in order to appreciate the positive, uplifting aspect of what he is writing about. Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not discouraging but uplifting, "since it views every man with regard to the highest demand that can be made of him: to be spirit." (pp21-22)

For all the toughness of the meat, and the difficulty in hunting down the kill, there is plenty that is nourishing and satisfying for a reader in Kierkegaard. My feelings with regard to The Sickness Unto Death – and largely why I'm open to reading philosophy in general – is encapsulated in something speculative Kierkegaard writes on page 149: "To be a particular human being is [perhaps] to be nothing; just think – and then you are the whole of humanity." show less