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. It would be misleading to call it a 'sequel', but the two books grew from the same movement of thought: the author sets out to present the 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 make the case for religion's legitimacy—its independence from philosophy.

The task is not easy. When Kierkegaard wrote this book, Hegelian philosophy was triumphant in Germany and was beginning to make inroads in Denmark.

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—but not in the form of concepts, as philosophy does; rather in the form of representations—images, metaphors—making it accessible to all. This, however, is a lower form of truth's manifestation:

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 provokes Kierkegaard's indignation. The privilege that philosophy—and Hegelian philosophy in particular—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 dissolve. He wants to establish the singularity of this third sphere—to explore it, and to grasp its meaning, its modalities, and what is at stake within it.

To put it plainly: (Hegelian) philosophy claims to go further than faith and religion, since it constitutes a more developed form 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. Two telling examples expose the limits of this abstraction.

The first of these is 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 taken for granted 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 unsettles one's entire sense of self; 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 is really at stake for him: 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 marshals 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.

Can the 'substance of faith' really be grasped in this way? How, if faith by its very nature eludes speculative philosophy? Entirely different categories will be needed—and, beyond that, an entirely 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 the most searching way: the story of Abraham.

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