Summary: Fear and Trembling

A few months after the publication of Either/Or, in 1843, Kierkegaard published—at his own expense—a new work: Fear and Trembling. We cannot really speak of a ‘sequel’, but the two books were written in the same movement of thought: the author’s aim is to present this third stage, the religious stage, which could only be sketched in Either/Or.

Why not stop at the two conceptions of existence—the aesthetic and the ethical—presented in Either/Or?

To establish the necessity of this third stage, Kierkegaard must restore a place for faith: he must show why it cannot belong to the ethical sphere, and establish the legitimacy of religion—its independence from philosophy.

The task is not easy. When Kierkegaard writes this book, Hegelian philosophy is triumphant in Germany and is even beginning to spread to Denmark.

Yet Hegelianism relativises the importance of religion by reducing it to a surpassed stage in the development of Spirit. For Hegel, religion does indeed express truth. Nevertheless, it does not present truth in the form of concepts, as philosophy does, but in the form of representations—images, metaphors—so that it can be understood by all, accessible to all. But this is a lower form of the manifestation of truth:

It does not at all follow from this that philosophy must reject religion, or perhaps even make it a principle that religion does not contain truth within itself. What must rather be said is that the content of religion is the true content, but only that in religion it exists in the form of representation; and as for philosophy, that it is not philosophy which first teaches substantial truth, and that humanity did not have to wait for philosophy in order to acquire consciousness of truth.¹

This idea provokes Kierkegaard’s indignation. The privilege that philosophy—and in particular Hegelian philosophy—claims for itself, that of being the authentic form in which truth can manifest itself, offends his deeply religious sensibility.

We can now better understand the context in which the book was written, and the author’s intention: to show that beyond the sphere of ethics, reason, and philosophy, there is a sphere in which all their categories vanish. He wants to show the singularity of this third sphere, to explore it in order to grasp its meaning, its modalities, and what is at stake in it.

To sum up: (Hegelian) philosophy claims to go further than faith and religion, since it constitutes a more developed mode of truth—a later stage in the manifestation of the Absolute.

It is this claim that Kierkegaard attacks from the Preface onwards.

To do so, he takes aim at the speculative, theoretical, abstract character of modern philosophy. The limits of this abstraction appear clearly in two privileged examples.

First, doubt. Since Descartes, any philosopher worthy of the name is supposed to doubt, to call into question the truth of the ideas he examines. This has become so self-evident that modern philosophers—Hegelians in particular—treat doubt as a mere theoretical procedure, an inessential and fleeting moment in their reflection. But doubt is above all a practical, existential questioning that shakes the whole sphere of personality; and, above all, it is an immense task: the fruit of a long spiritual discipline that can take years:

What the ancient Greeks, who knew something of philosophy, made the task of an entire life—since the practice of doubt is not acquired in a few days or weeks; the goal reached by the old fighter who had withdrawn from the combats, after keeping the balance of doubt through every snare, tirelessly denying the certainty of the senses and that of thought, enduring without weakness the torments of self-love and the insinuations of sympathy—this task is what everyone begins with.

But Kierkegaard comes to what truly interests him here: faith. Just as the modern philosopher claims to go beyond doubt, he claims to go beyond faith. Yet it was not so in former times: faith was then a task assigned to an entire life; for, it was thought, the capacity to believe is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried old man approached his end, after having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the anxiety and the trembling that had disciplined the young man—anxiety and trembling that the mature man had mastered, but from which no one is entirely delivered, unless one succeeds, as early as possible, in going further.

Thus, the point reached by those venerable figures is the point from which everyone today begins, in order to go further.

Kierkegaard therefore mobilises the full authority of the past—ancient scepticism and early Christianity—against Hegelian philosophy and its supporters.

He points to its abstract, speculative character, which leads it to miss the essence of the very phenomena it analyses: One may well be able to formulate in concepts the whole substance of faith; it does not follow that one has grasped faith—grasped how one enters into it, or how it enters into a person.

Is it possible to grasp the ‘substance of faith’? How can one do so, if faith escapes speculative philosophy by its very nature? One will have to deploy entirely different categories—and, beyond that, a different way of thinking. Kierkegaard does not even present himself as a philosopher, but as a writer: The present author is by no means a philosopher; he is […] an amateur writer, who writes neither a system nor promises of a system.

He will examine a particular passage of the Bible, in which faith is put to the test in a privileged way: the story of Abraham.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading