Divine Suspense: On Kierkegaard’s 'Frygt og Bæven' and the Aesthetics of Suspense 9783110562651, 9783110563504, 9783110562873, 2018939090

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense
Chapter 2: Narrativity, Heroism and the Knight of Faith
Chapter 3: Bakhtin, Suspense and the Knight of Faith
Chapter 4: Symmetry of Suspense
Conclusion
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Index

Citation preview

Andreas Seland Divine Suspense

Kierkegaard Studies

Edited on the behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge in cooperation with Peter Šajda

Monograph Series 39 Edited by Heiko Schulz

Andreas Seland

Divine Suspense

On Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven and the Aesthetics of Suspense

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge in cooperation with Peter Šajda Monograph Series Volume 39 Edited by Heiko Schulz

ISBN 978-3-11-056265-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-056350-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-056287-3 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939090 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

| Søren Kierkegaard: Venerable Father Abraham! […] you who were the first to know that supreme passion, the holy, pure, and humble expression for the divine madness that was admired by the pagans… Edgar Allan Poe: And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?

Acknowledgements Work with the present study saw the tragic passing of two great colleagues and friends, Catharina Stenqvist and Thord Svensson. With Thord, we always went at it from two completely different points of view, but it never bothered us; that was awesome. Catharina, I owe you the very opportunity of writing this dissertation; this one is for you. There are a lot of fantastic people to whom I owe gratitude and respect with regards the completion of this study. Chief amongst these are my supervisors, Erica Appelros and Marius Timmann Mjaaland. Thank you! The best of what the present study holds would not have been possible without your diligent care and sharp criticism. I know I am not the most guidable of students, and this makes me all the more grateful for your efforts and time. Next, and of enormous importance to my thoughts and ideas during the writing of this work, come all the hallway reveries and lunch time ruminations upon the problems of language, time, and narrativity, upon Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the nature of religious experience. I know I have tormented you with more than your fair share of odd philosophical reflections and you have my gratitude, my dear pleronauts: Paul Linjamaa, Joel Kuhlin, Ervik Cejvan, and Martin Lembke. I would also like to extend an enormous amount of gratitude to the interdisciplinary research seminar, Forskarseminariet för religionsfilosofi, etik och systematisk teologi, where I have been given the opportunity to present my arguments and gain invaluable feedback over the last four years, and which has been a constant source of inspiration and ideas: Jayne Svenungsson, Elisabeth Gerle, Johanna Gustafsson Lundberg, Matz Hammaström, Per Lind, Andreas Nordlander, Roy Wiklander, Lovisa Nyman, KG Hammar, Leif Stille, Patrik Fridlund, Gerth Hyrkäs, Ulrica Fritzson, and Jerker Karlsson. Likewise, National forskarskola i religionsfilosofi has also been a rewarding forum for the exchange of ideas and perspectives: Mikael Stenmark, Ulf Zackariasson, Karin Johannesson, Johan Eddebo, Francis Jonbäck, Lotta Bråkenhielm Knutsson, Ingrid Malm Lindberg, Oliver Li, Mikael Leidenhag, Maria Klasson Sundin, and Mikael Sörhuus. Also deserving of honorable mention are Jonna Lappalainen, for her constructive criticism and perceptive comments in the role of opponent at my final seminar; Heine Alexander Holmen, who read and commented upon a part of this dissertation, and has always given his moral support; Joacim Sprung and Roe Fremstedal, for each in his own way pointing me in the right direction; MarieLouise Karttunen, for deft editing and a nimble understanding of the intricacies of language; and Kjell Eyvind Johansen who, once upon a time, led me into Kierkegaard’s world, and laid the basis for my doctoral studies.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-001

viii | Acknowledgements

To all the rest of my wonderful colleagues and friends at Centrum för teologi och religionsvetenskap, it has been a true pleasure. Next to last, to my family – to my mother and father for always supporting me, and always being there, and for having tucked my nose into books: it seems I got stuck there; to my sister and husband and my three dear nephews; to my affinal family which has embraced me into their fold – thank you all. Lastly, to my elementary family, to my partner, Cathrine Felix, for all her philosophical acumen, patience (lots of patience) and care and support and love, and to my two children, Katja and Lukas: I owe you more than I can say. The publication of this study was made possible through the generous support of the Erik and Gurli Hultengren Foundation for Philosophy (Erik och Gurli Hultengrens fond för filosofi). I am deeply grateful.

Contents Introduction | 1 In essence | 1 Theoretical background | 1 Introductory consideration of FB’s rhetorical structure | 4 Scope, aim, and further research | 9 Methodology | 14 Motivation | 16 Outline of the overarching argument | 18 Additional remarks regarding the argument of the study | 19 Four technical details | 21 Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense | 23 Introduction | 23 1 The importance of suspense | 25 2 The paradox of suspense | 31 3 Widening the scope of the problem | 32 4 The different theories | 34 5 Motivating a novel solution | 37 6 Imminence and the temporal dimension | 41 7 Imminence and aesthetic narratives | 43 8 Uidhir’s objection | 44 Conclusion | 46 Chapter 2: Narrativity, Heroism and the Knight of Faith | 47 Introduction | 48 1 The general definition of a hero | 53 2 Abraham’s heroism and tragedy | 55 3 Two orders of discourse | 86 4 A story about a story | 89 5 Cross and Lippitt | 94 6 Faith, apartness, and pure passions | 98 7 Writing the ineffable | 122 8 Conway’s argument: Silentio as an unreliable narrator | 128 Conclusion | 141

x | Contents

Chapter 3: Bakhtin, Suspense and the Knight of Faith | 145 Introduction | 145 1 Bakhtin and Kierkegaard | 150 2 The epic hero and the novelistic hero | 157 3 The knight of faith and the knight of resignation | 161 4 A different take on the double-movement | 176 5 Faith and suspense | 179 6 Some points for and against Davenport’s interpretation of faith | 182 Conclusion | 187 Chapter 4: Symmetry of Suspense | 190 Introduction | 190 1 Suspense in theory | 191 2 What does it mean? | 195 3 Considering the fantastic | 198 Conclusion | 199 Conclusion | 200 Bibliography | 204 Abbreviations | 210 Index | 211

Introduction In essence This is a study about the concept of suspense, and about Søren Kierkegaard's Frygt og Bæven (hereafter “FB”). The study outlines a novel, philosophical conception of suspense, it then demonstrates that suspense, so understood, is a central feature of the concept of faith outlined in FB and, furthermore, a central feature of how FB is rhetorically composed. The study argues, therefore, that suspense is central to both how FB describes faith, and to how this description textually unfolds: in other words, that a symmetry of suspense exists between the conceptual and the rhetorical. In Enten-Eller, the aesthete A argues that every classical work of art is a seamless combination of its subject matter and how this is artistically treated in the work;1 in a classical work of art, therefore, form and content harmonize. In the context of a text, or narrative, what is said is reflected in how it is said. This is precisely how this study reads FB: as an aesthetic work wherein form and content harmonize and how something is said can be seen to corroborate what is said. The idea is that form and content both essentially involve an element of suspense, meaning that from the perspective of suspense, the what and the how of FB make coherent sense.

Theoretical background The present study falls logically into two parts, the first of which comprises Chapter 1 and concerns the philosophical nature of suspense. This part may be read independently of the rest. Chapter 1 is an attempt to add a novel perspective to the ongoing debate regarding the nature of suspense in philosophical aesthetics. The focus of this debate lies on what is known as the ‘paradox of suspense’: suspense seems, commonsensically, to require uncertainty, yet it is at the same time possible to experience suspense upon repeated encounters with the one and the same narrative, and repetition logically negates uncertainty, thus creating a paradox. The debate surrounding suspense has grown out of the work of Kendall Walton, Robert Yanal, Richard Gerrig, and Noël Carroll, and belongs to the field of analytic philosophy of aesthetics. The present study offers a critical survey of the discussion in its present form and formulates an alternative interpretation of || 1 SKS 2, 61 / EO1, 54 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-002

2 | Introduction

suspense by going outside of the established debate and incorporating aspects from literary theory, most notably from the work of Peter Brooks. The second part represents, in broad terms, an application of the theory developed in Chapter 1 to FB, and comprises the rest of the study, three chapters. The theoretical background of this part is more complex than the first, it has three separate levels: first, rival interpretations; second, explanatory theories; third, tacit theory. By “rival interpretations” I mean alternative philosophical assessments and analyses of FB. The major part of my work in this study – really the major part of any philosophical study – consists of rationalizing my proposed idea in relation to a set of competing and complementary ideas. Thus, what I do, essentially, is to develop an idea by positioning myself in relation to already existing ideas, explaining how my idea is different, and motivating why this difference is important, and how it captures something in Kierkegaard’s original text that I believe others have not emphasized. When it comes to rival interpretations, I primarily engage with the modern Anglo-American reception of FB. The reason for this is foremostly methodological. It is not that the study is ignorant of all the work done on FB outside of the Anglo-American tradition, for example in the Danish reception of FB, or in Continental readings of the work that take their interpretative cues from phenomenology, or from post-structuralist thought (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, et al.), or studies written in a more historically oriented fashion than the present one. It is simply the case that it would be unmanageable to develop my argument in relation to all of these at once. What is more, it would not be beneficial for the clarification of the ideas involved. Prudence calls for a limitation of the material that informs any study, and since the concept of suspense that is the heart of this investigation is developed in dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy, it is natural to keep to that tradition throughout. Moreover, as I make clear in the section “Motivation”, the issue of suspense in relation to FB is not a topic that has been much pursued in any school of interpretation as far as I have been able to ascertain. The key rival interpretations that I engage with are of three different types: first, there are the ones that primarily function as foundations for the ideas that I develop, the shoulders that I stand upon; second, there are the ones that I explicitly dispute; third, there are the hybrids of the aforementioned. The reason that I term the first type of interpretation as “rival”, even though my relation to them is chiefly one of dependence, is that that I crucially also move beyond them. Thus, even if my view is related to these, it is not wholly contained within them. Note,

Theoretical background | 3

also, that this reliance never regards every aspect of the mentioned interpretations’ view on FB, but regards isolated facets. The most important interpretations of this type are the ones by Alastair Hannay, Merold Westphal, and Joakim Garff in his “Den Søvnløse”. The latter is not written within the Anglo-American tradition, but in the Danish, nonetheless it is a crucial study for the arguments of the present work, and probably the study that lies closest to the perspective that I argue for here. Next, comes the works that I explicitly dispute, and though I do not rely upon them as I do the works in the first category, they are maybe even more important for giving my interpretation the shape and form that it has. The two most important here are John Lippitt2 and Daniel W. Conway. Lastly, we have those thinkers that fall into both of the prior categories, where I rely and incorporate some of their ideas, and distance myself from others: C. Stephen Evans, Andrew A. Cross, and John J. Davenport. Next in my categorization of the theoretical background to my engagement with FB comes what I termed “explanatory theories”. These theories are not interpretations of FB, but are theories that influence how I read and develop my interpretation of that work. The most important here is G. W. F. Hegel, next, Mikhail Bakhtin. The last of my tripartite distinction regarding my theoretical background was “tacit theory”. It cannot be any question that my study is firmly embedded in the Anglo-American tradition, yet there is at the same time a sense in which it is not. The present study develops a line of reasoning that deviates from the philosophical horizon of Anglo-American thought as it is traditionally formulated. To trace how the rhetorical composition of a philosophical work reflects its conceptual ideas, and vice versa, is not an angle that Anglo-American philosophers pursue. Likewise, the meta-philosophical point of view that I sketch in the “Methodology” section below is also at odds with the mainstay of this tradition. These aspects reveal an influence from Continental philosophy, and though this influence comes from multiple sources, one of the most important ones is Paul de Man. This is not, though, present on the level of the theories I develop. I am not here explicitly responding to de Man, incorporating him as a dialogical partner. I am, however, implicitly responding to him in the sense that the understanding of FB that

|| 2 The present study engages with the first edition of Lippitt’s guide to FB on Routledge (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, 2003). Lippitt’s update and revision of his original arguments in a second edition of the work (John Lippitt, The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, 2016) came to my attention too late in the writing process to address. A consideration of Lippitt’s revised position will have to wait for another occasion.

4 | Introduction

I develop is written from a vantage point disclosed in de Man’s work. Consider de Man’s reading of the scene about reading in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.3 In his analysis of this scene de Man’s shows how the literal or thematic level of the text stands in stark contrast to the text’s rhetorical level; in other words, de Man shows that what Proust’s says contrasts with how he says it.4 Though I do not follow de Man in how he analyzes the rhetorical level of the text, and thus do not share his exact preoccupations, his perspective is an abiding inspiration for this study. What I take from de Man is an understanding of how the rhetorical levels of a text may interact with its conceptual level (what de Man calls the “literal or thematic level”). What I do is to apply this understanding together with my theory of suspense to the text of FB, thereby discovering, contra de Man’s case with a Proust, a harmony or symmetry between the two different levels of the text. In this sense, de Man is a tacit influence on the present study, though he is not explicitly invoked in my discussions. The Anglo-American discussion has predominantly treated FB as a philosophical work in a logocentric sense, as a work geared towards the communication of a propositional thought or logos. It has been seen as a text that, in different ways, attempts to reveal a truth about the nature of faith and the religious to its reader. Though the present study does not deny that FB attempts to say something about the nature of faith, in a wide sense of the verb, it argues that FB’s point and purpose is not to instill in the reader a theoretical conviction in regard to the nature of faith. Hence, FB is not a philosophical work in a conventional sense. Given FB’s rhetorical structure, this ought not to come as a surprise. In a nutshell, what I do in this study is to develop an analytical reading of FB that moves beyond the logocentric horizon.

Introductory consideration of FB’s rhetorical structure FB is composed of five parts: “Forord”, “Stemning”, “Lovtale over Abraham”, “Problemata”, and “Epilog”. The first three of these are introductory in nature. They announce and contextualize the issue discussed in the “Problemata” part of the work, a segment that in itself comprises four chapters; the problem in question is the story of Abraham as a paradigmatic example of faith. “Forord” presents

|| 3 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way, pp. 113–114. 4 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, pp. 59–67.

Introductory consideration of FB’s rhetorical structure | 5

the question of faith in relation to the Hegelian philosophy fashionable in Kierkegaard’s day, and also the pseudonymous author of FB, Johannes de Silentio, and his relation to philosophy. “Stemning” opens in a whole new vein – as a fairy tale: “Der var engang en Mand…”5 It tells the story about a man, fascinated by the story of Abraham, who relates to the story by re-telling it with alternative plot lines, all so as to underscore the exceptionality of the original. This is representative of a strategy consistently employed throughout FB, as Silentio often attempts to shed light upon the story of Abraham by contrasting it with other stories – using a narrative to explain a narrative, as a melody through counterpoint can help bring out something from another melody. The next part, “Lovtale over Abraham”, sings Abraham’s praise as a hero, emphasizing the importance of the figures of the hero and the poet as the source of a higher ideal in the life of humankind.6 Then there follows the “Problemata”, a section that contains Silentio’s theoretical discussion of the story of Abraham and what it says about faith, a discussion that, importantly, does not finalize anything, but leaves open the various questions it asks. Thereafter, the “Epilog” underscores a theme prevalent throughout FB, namely, that faith is not something that reaches any kind of conclusion in the life of human beings; it is not something that one can finish and be done with. Like love, faith is a passion. It is something that each and every one has to live through, continually.7 It ought to be clear already from this brief overview that FB does not operate like a conventional work of philosophy. It does not attempt the rational grounding of an idea by argumentatively promoting its veracity; indeed, its main theoretical section does not present any firm conclusion at all. Moreover, FB as a whole employs different modes of discourse within the same text. It tells stories and makes interpretive claims in regard to these stories, together with theoretical claims in regard to nature of faith. At the same time, it does not gather its own discourses into an overarching and explicit compositional structure. The transition from “Forord” to the story in “Stemning”, for example, happens without any form of comment or explanation. There is no consistent meta-discursive voice in

|| 5 SKS 4, 105 / FT, 9: “Once upon a time there was a man who…” 6 “Dersom der ingen evig Bevidsthed var i et Menneske… hvor var da Livet tomt og trøstesløst! Men derfor er det ikke saaledes, og som Gud skabte Mand og Qvinde, saa dannede han Helten og Digteren eller Taleren.” (SKS 4, 112) In English: “If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness... how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! But precisely for that reason it is not so, and just as God created man and woman, so he created the hero and the poet or orator.” (FT, 15) “Eternal consciousness” is in this passage tied to something capable of uniting mankind to a common cause beyond the transience of everyone’s individual life. 7 SKS 4, 209–210 / FT, 121–123

6 | Introduction

FB that interprets the text for the benefit of the reader. There is no explanation of what is going on, and why.8 The text just unfolds, like an event in its own right: a discursive event that revolves around the story of Abraham. This not to say that FB does not draw a certain picture of faith, that it does not make claims about its nature. It does, but it does not, however, make the added claim that what it says is true. On the contrary, it makes plain that what it says is a paradox:9 therefore, a picture that is rationally untenable. Yet, even if it does make the paradoxicality plain, this is still the picture of faith that it gives. There is no logical move of the type: “Thus, because of this paradoxicality, we have to assume that…,” followed by a transition to a different interpretation. Instead, Silentio says that the paradoxical and contradictory picture is the only way to save Abraham, to make Abraham into a paradigm of faith. If faith exists, then it exists as a paradox.10 In Chapter 4, I summarize the rhetorical structure of FB, specifically the structure of the three problemas,11 by comparing them to the following joke: Question: “Is faith truly something ineffable?” Answer: “I cannot say.” The point with this is that there is a sense in which FB both says, and does not say, that Abraham is a paradigm of faith, just as the above joke both makes the claim that faith is ineffable, and does not make that claim, at the same time. Rather than stating something, rather than delivering a message, the joke, and FB, create a kind of aporetic experience for their audience. They both begin something that is not developed to its conclusion, to its ultimate clarification; rather the issue is left hanging – it is left suspended. It is possible that faith exists, but if it does, then it is as a paradox – as something that cannot rationally be the case because it is self-contradictory, like a square circle.

|| 8 There are instances of this – for example, at the end of “Foreløbig Expectoration” (SKS 4, 147 / FT, 53) – but, as I have said, there is no consistency. 9 SKS 4, 128–129; 141; 145; 149; 163; 177–178 / FT, 33; 47; 51; 55; 71; 88 10 Responding to this aspect, Roland M. Green borrows a phrase from Paul Dietrichson (Paul Dietrichson, “Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Self”), and calls FB a “theological shock treatment” (Roland M. Green, “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling”, p. 258). On a connected note, Merold Westphal writes: “For Kierkegaard the problem with his present age was not the absence of eschatological trust, but the bourgeois complacency that equated civic virtue with genuine faith. Protected by immersion in a social order that had been effectively deified, the individual was immune to the fear and trembling of ever being alone before God” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith, p. 76). 11 With the word “problemas” I refer to the three chapters explicitly entitled “Problema” that help make up the “Problemata” section of FB. The reason I do not simply use the term “problemata” is to avoid confusion as the section also includes “Foreløbig Expectoration”. Therefore, “problemas” refers to the “Problemata” section minus “Foreløbig Expectoration”.

Introductory consideration of FB’s rhetorical structure | 7

In light of this, it is telling to consider how Silentio positions himself in relation to philosophy. As mentioned, this is done right at the beginning of FB, in “Forord”. In this part, Silentio begins by raising the question of faith in the context of philosophy. It is then immediately questioned whether philosophy truly is capable of handling the question of faith. Does faith represent a theoretical question, or is it rather something else, a practical task?12 Silentio claims that one has to distinguish between grasping what faith is, and being grasped by faith.13 He claims, therefore, that faith is beyond philosophy, as grasping it is not enough in order to know it, you have to experience it. This same structural relationship between faith and philosophy is then repeated in Silentio’s own relation to philosophy. Silentio’s discourse invokes philosophy, and even if he says that his discourse is not meant to be a part of philosophy, it is nonetheless something that unfolds in dialogue with it, and depends upon it. There is, therefore, a tension here. Silentio denies that he is a philosopher, yet he uses the language of philosophy. He speaks in tune with philosophy, but does not speak from a position within the philosophical system. From what position does he then speak? He does not say. Rather, he claims to speak from a position simply outside of the philosophical system. He is an “extra-writer”.14 He writes out of inclination, not out of necessity, and not out of any intention to contribute to the collective project of philosophy. Furthermore, he writes not out of any desire to be read, but simply for its own sake.15 This aimless quality that Silentio professes on behalf of his own writing captures, I believe, the already mentioned aporetic quality of FB. As one who speaks, or writes, Silentio does not speak from, or on behalf of, a specific position. The point and purpose of his writing is not, therefore, to manifest a position. He is speaking from the outside in a manner that is not meant to complement the system, but in doing so he is nonetheless using the system and its concepts and questions: not to achieve something that is recognizable from within the system, but so as to open the system towards a possibility that principally transcends it – that

|| 12 SKS 4, 102 / FT, 7 13 SKS 4, 103 / FT, 7 14 SKS 4, 103 / FT, 7. Note that the English translation uses the term “supplementary clerk” for the phrase “Extra-Skriver”. This does not really make sense, for if you supplement something, you work with it, and within it, but, as is clear from Silentio’s context, he does not do this. 15 Note the contradiction in this move: Silentio writes to us that he has no desire to be read by us, as if writing has any other purpose than being read. I take his statement not to mean that he does not want to be read at all, as that statement makes no kind of sense, but that he does not want to be read in a certain manner. He does not want to be read as one usually reads philosophy. Thus, the contradiction underscores the unconventional nature of FB as a philosophical text.

8 | Introduction

faith actually exists as a level of meaning beyond what philosophy can grasp, but one that can be grasped by every individual in terms of his/her unique individuality. Thus, what I am going to argue in this study is that FB is not so much a philosophical text as a text that attempts to crack philosophy open, and make it aware of something beyond itself. This strategy is exactly what it attempts to do with its reader as well, to make the reader aware of an unthinkable possibility, that one can only face God in a state beyond the collective and communal dimension of conceptual thought and, which according to the ideas of FB is the same, beyond the ethical.16 Suspense comes into this because what FB creates is suspense in the face of the possibility of faith’s existence as something beyond reason and the ethical. Moreover, I argue, suspense is also an element because it forms a key aspect of how faith would manifest itself in an individual in terms of FB’s conceptualization of it. The difference, therefore, between the Anglo-American discussion at large and the point of view developed here lies in the different approaches to the rhetorical structure of FB. While the Anglo-American discussion does not ignore this aspect of the work, it seldom addresses it as the key feature in the manner that this study proposes. The style in which FB is written is often seen as a factor that makes the interpretation of the work purposely difficult, an instance of indirect communication meant to get the reader to think for him/herself.17 FB is, however, approached as having a meaning, as presenting an idea, though in a difficult manner, like a riddle that the reader has to crack. The present study sees it differently. FB does not convey a meaning to its reader, it conveys an effect. It makes the aesthetical suggestion that Abraham is a || 16 In “Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification”, Kjell Eyvind Johansen argues that “[t]he movements of faith in Fear and Trembling have no impact on the rightness or wrongness of what is done, but it is expected that our understanding of the claims of ethics are transformed from the religious point of view” (Kjell Eyvind Johansen, “Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification”, p. 276). What I argue in this study is in line with the first half of Johansen’s claim, that faith does not affect the ethical nature of Abraham’s act. It disputes, however, the latter half, that the religious reorients a person’s understanding of the claims of ethics. I argue that the understanding is inherently ethical – in the technical sense that Silentio gives to this concept – and that the religious is solely found in a break with this level of meaning, with the understanding. Thus, I do claim that the religious does represent a privileged point of view, a sui generis level of meaning, but I add to this that how it is possible for the religious to do this is utterly paradoxical and incomprehensible – it is beyond reason and understanding. 17 See, for example, John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 1–2.

Scope, aim, and further research | 9

knight of faith, and presents a theory of what this would mean, a theory that has the consequence that Abraham finds himself in a special state of suspense, of divine suspense. At the same time, this theory is communicated in such a way that it gives rise to a state of suspense in the reader. The reason that it makes an “aesthetical” suggestion is twofold: First, because the idea that Abraham is a knight of faith is not something that is rationally defended, nor presented as rationally defendable; rather it is insinuated in the aporetic manner described above. This type of aporetic insinuation is something I see as aesthetical in nature – it is a fleeting appearance, not a concrete theory. Second, the insinuation is indirectly strengthened by the presence of suspense in the rhetoric of the text. Thus, what is said is corroborated by how it is said through an aesthetical effect. The point, therefore, is not to argue a truth, but to attune the reader to an imaginary possibility. It is to place the reader in a position that makes him/her see and feel something of what it means to have faith – faith comes with a dimension of suspense, the text places the reader in suspense. The strategy, hence, is not to convince, rationally, but to appeal artistically, aesthetically.

Scope, aim, and further research In comparison with many other philosophical studies of Kierkegaard’s thought, this analysis is quite narrow in scope. The horizon of enquiry is defined and delimited by the phenomenon of suspense and by the text of FB. The study explores if, and in what sense, the concept of suspense could be said to function as an interpretative key to the work. It does not seek to explore how its interpretation relates to a wider interpretation of Kierkegaard. The reason for this is not that the latter cannot be done, but rather out of consideration of the feasibility of such a wider exploration within the parameters of a philosophical dissertation. The idea that I explore and defend in this study is of a dual nature: first, on the theoretical level, Silentio’s concept of faith involves an essential dimension of suspense; second, on the rhetorical level, suspense is a feature of how this conceptualization of suspense is communicated to the reader. The apex of my argument is the essential entwinement of the theoretical and the rhetorical levels of the text, the coherence of form and content. Thus, to the extent that my approach would serve as a more general approach to Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, this would be with a view to this overall coherence. I believe there could be something to such an idea, for example in Enten-Eller,18 where the rhetorically

|| 18 SKS 2, SKS 3 / EO1, EO2

10 | Introduction

enacted conflict between the aestheticist and the ethicist could be seen as mirroring the idea that the ethical and the aesthetical represent different levels of meaning, or different forces, in conflict within every human being.19 Likewise, it is probably the case that the plot-repetitions in Gjentagelsen20 somehow reflect aspects of the idea of repetition found in that work. Exploring these possibilities, however, demands more time and space than the current study has at its disposal although they are exciting avenues of further research, especially if it can be shown that different aspects of faith are illuminated by how the form and content of the different works interact, just as the interaction in FB points toward the element of suspense. It is also a possibility that the ideas of the present study may show themselves fruitful beyond the study of Kierkegaard. Analyzing faith in terms of suspense, for example, may represent an actual theory about what is at stake in faith, and not just a theory about Silentio’s understanding of it. If so, one would be in a theoretical position to distinguish faith from belief as an inherently much more complex phenomenon, and thereby approach the issue of religion from a novel philosophical angle, not just as essentially involving a theistic conviction, but involving a unique frame of mind. Along a wholly different track, suspense, as I conceptualize it, could well be the kernel of a new answer to the philosophical question: what is literature? As I explain in Chapter 1, suspense is tied to how narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content). My preliminary suggestion, therefore, is that one could possibly distinguish literary narratives from non-literary narratives in terms of the interplay between temporality of form and temporality of content (it is my theory that it is the said interplay that engenders suspense). Since I began this sub-section by broaching the subject of what this study will not do, I would like to say something more about that topic: this study is not historically oriented. It does not seek to make sense of FB on the basis of Kierkegaard’s biography,21 nor does it explore FB in terms of how the text overtly and

|| 19 Victor Eremita does note that the thought has struck him that the aestheticist and the ethicist may be the same person (SKS 2, 20 / EO1, 13). Observe that against the conventional reading of the stages – that the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious form stages of existential development – an objection could be raised that such an interpretation represents an ironical re-inscription of Hegel into the heart of a philosopher who by and large attempts to break with Hegelian logic and teleology. 20 SKS 4 / R 21 For example, the speculation that FB is written as a response to Kierkegaard’s failed relationship with Regine Olsen; for more on this, see Alastair Hannay (Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, pp. 189–190). Note that to the extent that I speak of an “intention” in relation to the text, and I do, it

Scope, aim, and further research | 11

covertly goes into dialogue with the philosophical discussion of its time. This is not to say that the study ignores FB’s historico-philosophical roots, but rather that the historical setting that spawned FB is not what the study is aiming to uncover. In regard to the latter point, I am following the Anglo-American discussion. The aim of this discussion has never been to uncover the historical truth of the text. The interest lies rather in how Silentio engages with the perennial questions of the philosophy of religion: What is religion? What is the nature of God, the divine? What is faith? How does the religious relate to the ethical? And so forth. Thus, in the Anglo-American discussion, FB is taken as a dialogical partner in a more general philosophical discussion than that of its specific historical setting. It is in this form that I will engage with it, with a focus on the issues of faith and suspense. The correct categorization of the present work is that it belongs to the confinium between philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of religion in terms of its focus on suspense and faith. This, I argue, is also a correct reflection of the nature of FB itself. FB is a creature of the borderland between philosophy, religion, and aesthetics. In my view, it represents a philosophico-aesthetical attempt to communicate the nature of faith. Let me give a sense of the proportions of the study. Though my ultimate aim is to show how the rhetoric and theory of FB harmonizes in a fine-balanced counterpoint, the main brunt of my discussion is concerned with the theoretical side of the matter, arguing that suspense is a component of how FB conceptualizes faith. This takes place in Chapters 2 and 3. The shortest chapter, Chapter 4, is where I argue that suspense repeats itself on the rhetorical level of the text. Importantly, however, the chapter does not stand alone, but ties in with, and builds upon, arguments from Chapter 2, and reflects an example of the theory constructed in Chapter 1. Having sidelined the issue of historical truth somewhat brazenly in the above, I want to say a bit more about how I relate to the matter before moving on. In my view, the question of historical accuracy is one of interpretational strategy. To aim for historical truth is to build a contextualized understanding of a text in terms of the text’s relations to a constellation of historically verified sources. It is

|| is not in terms of a historical psychological state (Kierkegaard’s), but of a communicative intent apparent in the text in terms of how it speaks to the reader. In most cases “communicative intent” refers to the propositional meaning of the sentence, but in cases of, for example, irony and Gricean implicatures, communicative intent will differ from propositional meaning.

12 | Introduction

to situate the text in the company of other texts that are representative of the primary text’s day and age, and to show how the primary text reflects and deflects upon the ideas treated therein.22 This is a good interpretational strategy. It is not, however, the only good interpretational strategy. There is nothing wrong with changing how one situates a text theoretically, if that is motivated by the ideas the text contains. Call the latter a topical reading, instead of a historical one. The present study is a topical interpretation of FB with a view to the issue of faith and suspense. Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, who is introduced in Chapter 3, is brought to bear upon Silentio’s theory of the knight of faith because his thought can be shown to have profound similarities with Silentio’s that help bring to light tacit and implicit aspects of Silentio’s thought. The explanatory connection between Bakhtin and Silentio is a topical one, not a historical one, since Bakhtin wrote after Kierkegaard. However, even a topical reading should be sensitive to the nuances of the text which may not surface without a basic understanding of a text’s historicophilosophical roots. A good example of this, in relation to the present study, is the concept of the ethical operative in FB. Some of the arguments and perspectives that I criticize in the course of the present work can be traced back to a difference in how one interprets Silentio’s concept of the ethical.23 The essence of my criticism in these cases can be reduced to the fact that my opponents do not see Silentio’s concept of the ethical as inherently Hegelian,24 and this creates discrepancies between what they say about FB, and what FB itself says, as its concept functions in an Hegelian manner, as I demonstrate. The interpretation one has of the ethical in relation to FB is vital to how one understands the work as a whole. Faith is defined in contrast to the ethical. Thus, how one understands the ethical will to a large extent determine how one understands faith. As it is approached in this study, FB’s conceptualization of faith can basically be described as a confrontation between Abraham, epitomized by St. Paul and

|| 22 For a study that does precisely this, see Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. There Stewart argues that it was not Hegel himself that Kierkegaard had in mind with his critique of Hegelianism in FB, but the “Danish Hegelians”. 23 For example, Conway’s argument in Chapter 2, eighth section, and Davenport’s argument, Chapter 3, sixth section. 24 In order to see the importance of Hegel, consider the fact that it is Hegel’s ethical philosophy that is consistently invoked as a contrast to Abraham’s faith, as demonstrated by the fact that each of the main theoretical discussions in FB, the three problemas, begins by staging a confrontation between the figure of Abraham and Hegel’s thought (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 75).

Scope, aim, and further research | 13

Christian tradition as the father of faith,25 and the principles of Hegelian ethics, Sittlichkeit. In FB both the Christian tradition and Hegelian ethics are taken to be true, but they are also understood to be mutually exclusive in that they cannot both be simultaneously true because what Abraham does as he sets out for Moriah is not an ethical act. There is nothing good and right in what he does. Yet, if he is the father of faith, what he does is precisely good and right. By virtue of this, Hegelianism and Abraham are brought into a collision with each other as the thing that defines right (Hegelian ethics), and the thing that defies right while still exemplifying what is good in terms of its divine origin (Abraham). The concept of faith elaborated in FB, according to the interpretation for which I argue, is born out of this collision. It is exemplified by Abraham, and Abraham’s break with Hegelian Sittlichkeit. Crucially, however, because of the essential relationship Hegel establishes between Sittlichkeit, language, and conceptual thought, breaking away from Sittlichkeit is breaking away from reason. Faith is beyond reason, it is a paradox. Note, however, that faith’s break with reason is not of a fideistic nature. As I argue, faith is not a belief; thus when I say that “faith is beyond reason” this does not mean that faith is a belief unsupported by rational evidence as in the case of fideistic belief.26 No, faith is a direct, unmediated relation to God, and it holds a level of meaning beyond what can be represented in language and conceptual thought. Faith, therefore, is something wholly other than reason, yet, like reason, it is able to inform intentions and, in its own way, rationalize behavior, though only in a manner that is incomprehensible from the point of view of rationality. Thus, when I say that “faith is a paradox” I do not mean simply in the sense that faith makes the person that has it exhibit paradoxical properties. I make the stronger claim that the religious sphere itself is paradoxical, and that it is for this reason that the faithful exhibits paradoxical properties. The religious is incomprehensible and ineffable, yet it is real, but only on the wholly individual level. In accordance with the concept of faith elaborated in FB, one stands before God in absolute isolation, or not at all. In summary, this study can be thought of as a surgical procedure with a specific aim and target: suspense and its relation to workings of FB. It attempts to motivate the use of, and to use, suspense as an interpretative key to FB. Moreover, and initially, the study argues for a novel philosophical conception of suspense.

|| 25 Merold Westphal writes that Abraham is “the one whom St. Paul presents in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 as the paradigm of faith and to whom Hebrews 11 gives more attention than anyone else in its catalogue of the heroes of faith…” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 62). 26 I discuss FB’s relation to fideism more in detail in the conclusion of this study.

14 | Introduction

Methodology A philosophical study is an attempt to create a novel line of reasoning, to formulate a new idea, to gain a new perspective upon some principal issue. How it goes about doing this, at least in the case of the present study, is by attempting to write a logical-argumentative story that presents a series of interconnected arguments taking the reader from a postulated, and hopefully, intuitive starting point to a surprising, or novel, conclusion. This is not to say that it writes a story in the conventional sense. It does not produce a representation of a series of happenings and events, replete with characters and their interconnected actions. Rather, it is a series of discussions in which the consequences of a certain perspective are laid bare and defended. A philosophical story is the development and elaboration of a thought, wherein the thought is explored from the point of view of alternative ideas about the same matter. Philosophy is a critical discipline. It investigates ideas and concepts by analyzing them in terms of logical possibilities, logical consistency, and conceptual coherence. Like Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, a philosophical study begins with a question of principal nature and a proposed answer. Its modus operandi is then to examine critically the answer in terms of possible counter-examples and counter-arguments, and to spell out the implicit logical consequences of the answer in order to measure these consequences against related issues. For example, hypothetically, if one engages with the question: “Does free will exist?” then, no matter how one answers, the answer will have consequences for how one theorizes the nature of morality that that may affect how one chooses to answer. Thus, generally speaking, a philosophical study proceeds by exploring how an idea affects other, related ideas, and its aim is to achieve a sort of equilibrium, a neat overall coherence of ideas. To the present author, however, there is nothing like an end of philosophy, a final neat overall coherence of ideas. As I see it, there is not a single coherent set of ideas that describes the world in all its dimensions (ontological, aesthetical, and ethical). Rather, there are several such sets of ideas, and these are what philosophy explores. Philosophy is a kaleidoscopic discipline whose value lies in the multiplicity of perspectives that compose it. It is the rational exploration of all the different ways in which we can coherently conceptualize the world and its phenomena. Its value lies in how it can make us rethink our own ideas and our own theoretical perspectives. I believe Theodor Adorno encapsulated it perfectly

Methodology | 15

when he wrote that “the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.”27 I do not present this characterization of philosophy because I believe it to be a straightforward and non-problematic definition of it. Many philosophers see themselves as scientists working to uncover the principle truths of various subjects, for example, of truth itself, of ethics, of the human mind, of language, of mathematics, and so forth. I present it in order to be frank about the idea of philosophy that informs this study. The present work attempts to move beyond the established, to explore a new line of reasoning, not to solidify existing theories, or simply continue along existing trails. Moreover, it sees value in doing so. As stated, the present study falls logically into two separate parts. The first is a straightforward philosophical exploration of the phenomenon of suspense operating as described. The second follows suit for the most part, with the added feature that it not only considers the arguments and ideas of FB, but also aspects of its rhetoric and composition that pertain to the issue of suspense. The analytical tools needed for this examination are, however, developed as part of the chapter upon suspense, and the added feature is, therefore, merely the application of these tools to FB. Aside from the above general methodological considerations, I also want to say something about my argumentative strategy. Philosophical research is not conducted separately from its exposition in reasoned discourse. An idea is only as good as its arguments. Thus, philosophical method is intimately tied to how the philosophical discourse unfolds and is structured in a compositional sense. The compositional structure of my argument is one of gradual development. What I mean by this is that the main theoretical concepts that I use in this study – “suspense”, “imminence”, “apartness”, and “pure passion” – are gradually developed throughout the course of my argumentation. The same holds, therefore, for my reading of FB itself. The reason for this is that the concepts intersect with multiple levels of Silentio’s thought, and, thus, layer after layer of their significance have to be elucidated and revealed in order to do them full justice. I do this because I believe the proper way to develop an interpretational argument is to do it carefully, step by step, so as to build an overall coherence in one’s reading, and make plain how the overall vision holds all the different elements together. True, there is a trade off in terms of ease of comprehension. Having the concepts developed gradually over the course of many pages means that one has to read the argument from start to finish in order to gain a proper grasp of it. Yet I believe that this is compensated || 27 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 80.

16 | Introduction

for by the clarity such a development brings to the overall structure of the idea I am presenting. The chapter in this study where this argumentative approach will foremostly be an issue for the reader is Chapter 2. In terms of length this chapter could conceivably have been portioned into two, or three, smaller chapters, so as to ease the task of comprehension. However, doing so would create a set of chapters that were so intimately linked to each other thematically that comprehending the one without the other would not be possible. The reason for this is that Chapter 2 explores how the issues of faith, heroism, and narrativity constitute a tangled knot in FB; a knot that involves both the rhetorical and the conceptual levels of the text. Moreover, I believe it to lie in the essence of FB’s interpretation of these issues that they precisely form a knot, and hence that the issues ought to be explored in terms of their entanglement.

Motivation There are multiple reasons behind a project on the scale of a doctoral dissertation. However, I believe that the primary motivation is always simple: to do something that has not been done, or if it has been done, to do it in a novel way, to do it better. This is certainly the primary motivation for the present study. The present study attempts to achieve something novel in two ways: first, by arguing for a new philosophical theory of suspense; second, by showing how suspense can amount to an elegant interpretative key to FB. To my knowledge, the issue of suspense in relation to FB has received scant theoretical treatment. The exception is a paper by John J. Davenport28 that mentions the logical implication of suspense given the theory of FB, but Davenport does not discuss suspense as a principal feature, nor does he explore the issue at length. (I dissect Davenport’s interpretation in Chapter 3, sixth section.) This study is an attempt to rectify this by examining FB from the perspective of suspense.29

|| 28 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”. 29 It ought to be mentioned that John Milbank has also touched upon the issue of suspense, though he has not made of it an interpretational perspective and he has not explored it in the same narrative sense elaborated here (John Milbank, “The Sublime in Kierkegaard”). There is also a sense in which the issue is touched upon in Jacques Derrida’s Literature in Secret, the companion-piece to The Gift of Death (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret). In this work Derrida speaks of a “suspension of sense” in relation to God’s demand for Isaac’s sacrifice (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, p. 155), and in relation to

Motivation | 17

More fundamentally, however, this study has grown out of a personal philosophical interest in the relationship between philosophy and literature; an interest in how philosophical texts may be said to operate meaningfully on a level beyond that of straightforward propositional communication. As an undergraduate and master’s student, I had a fascination for those philosophers whose use of words somehow surpassed what they said: where how something was said, its poetical and aesthetical qualities, shone with its own light, separate from, but connected to, its message. In other words, works of philosophy in which language is foregrounded. Consider, for example, the tone that one finds in Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous writings, the manner in which Nietzsche addresses his reader in a confiding and ironic, but primarily lively style. Take the opening of On the Genealogy of Morals: “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?”30 We, we, we; there is a persistent “we” in Nietzsche, and, as I see it, this “we” is of the utmost importance to how the text strikes the reader. The “we” creates a sense of camaraderie, underscored by Nietzsche’s ribald humor. It is you and me, Nietzsche says and, with this device, we, the readers, are drawn in. Nietzsche creates scenarios of you and me against the world, against dogmatism (Beyond Good and Evil), and against slave morality (On the Genealogy of Morals). It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to go into the details of this, but I believe that Nietzsche’s tone is central to what he is attempting to do, and to how he is to be interpreted. Other philosophers do the same thing, though in different ways, exploiting the possibilities of linguistic communication in order to do something more than simply relay truth and argument: Plato, Lucretius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and, of course, Søren Kierkegaard. The present study is an exploration of one of the ways in which Kierkegaard does this.

|| Abraham’s response to that demand; something Derrida ties to secrecy as an essential property of literary communication – both Abraham and literature involve an element that is essentially secret. The issue of suspense could be said to be implicitly present in Derrida’s theorizing, though not explicitly. 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 451.

18 | Introduction

Outline of the overarching argument Simplified, the main argument of this study is as follows: Chapter 1 presents what I designate the “imminence theory of suspense”, arguing that suspense has an essential connection to narratives as sui generis aesthetic objects; by the latter I mean that suspense is tied to how narratives can be a unique form of aesthetic phenomenon different from, say, architecture or symphonic music. The main issue in the modern discussion of suspense is what is known as the “paradox of suspense”, and the main drift of the chapter is to show how the imminence theory of suspense allows one to resolve this paradox. Chapter 2 argues that faith, as it is conceptualized in FB, is a narrative concept.31 What this means is twofold: first, that the communication of faith presupposes the use of narratives. This reason for this has to do with the ineffability of faith. If faith cannot be put into words, then the presence of faith in a text presupposes a narrative that deals with an extra-textual experience of faith. Second, faith is narrative because having faith means being a knight of faith, that is, a hero of faith; being a hero, however, means playing a certain role in a story. Consequently, the concept of faith can only appear in and through a narrative. The last point may seem obvious but, as I demonstrate, the point has consequences that are not so obvious, especially as a consistent reading of FB that focuses upon the narrative and heroic nature of the knight of faith leads to some controversial views of what, exactly, faith is: to whit, an essentially irrational state of mind, categorically different from a belief. Furthermore, Chapter 2 argues that the purpose of FB is not to argue for the truth of its own conceptualization of faith, but to suggest aesthetically that Abraham exhibits this kind of faith. Chapter 3 capitalizes theoretically upon the fact that the knight of faith is a hero, and as a hero, belongs essentially to a narrative. It utilizes the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin in order to analyze how the knight of faith’s narrative conceptualizes time, and from this shows that suspense forms an essential part of what it means to have faith. Put differently, being a knight of faith means that one belongs to a certain narrative, or story which is defined by suspense, more specifically, by a certain kind of suspense – divine suspense.

|| 31 Though the present study explores the relationship between Kierkegaard’s thought in FB and the issue of narrativity, it does not go into the discussion about Kierkegaard’s theory of self and its relation to the narrative theory of self. For discussions treating the latter, see, for example, John J. Davenport, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality, and Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative.

Additional remarks regarding the argument of the study | 19

Chapter 4 pursues the issue of suspense on another level in relation to FB. It focuses upon the three identical endings of the problemas, the main theoretical discussions of the work, and argues that these endings give rise to a sense of suspense in the reader. This creates what I call a symmetry of suspense between the text and the theory aesthetically suggested by the text in relation to Abraham. Thus, there exists a sense in which what FB says and how it says it come together in the same phenomenon – suspense. Form and content are harmonized.

Additional remarks regarding the argument of the study As stated, the above recapitulation of the study is simplified and idealized. In its actual form, the argument of the study is a lot messier than the impression I have provided of it. It has to be. The study contains not only the main argument, but also subarguments and discussions of related issues that are important in order to rationalize and defend the main approach. It also contains counter-arguments, and objections to these, along with considerations of kindred theoretical views, and how these relate to the present. Take Chapter 2 which is by far the longest of the work. It spans half of the study, and as such it deserves a short introduction all of its own. It is composed of a collection of interwoven discussions centered upon the issues of faith, narrativity, and heroism. The function of the chapter is to ground and motivate the argument given in Chapter 3, that faith essentially involves a narrative dimension of suspense, and in Chapter 4, that suspense is a feature of the rhetorical composition of FB. Chapter 2 begins with a consideration of the nature of a hero, then moves on to a consideration of how Silentio portrays Abraham as a hero by comparing him, as a knight of faith, to Agamemnon as a tragic hero. The conclusion is that Abraham is a hero by virtue of how he breaks categorically with the ethical. Agamemnon, in contrast, is a hero by virtue of how he breaks with the ethical by virtue of the ethical itself. The chapter then argues that the concept of the ethical operative in FB is Hegelian: something that comes especially to the fore through the concept of tragedy. Importantly, it is shown that the Hegelian concept of the ethical is essentially bound to language and to conceptual thought – ethics, language, and conceptual thought are all defined through the concept of universality. A categorical break with the ethical constitutes, therefore, a break with the universal. Hence, Abraham’s categorical break is a break with language and conceptual thought – with

20 | Introduction

reason.32 In other words, faith is inherently ineffable and incomprehensible. It is not something that can manifest itself through the universal, that is, on an intersubjective level. This raises the issue of the communicability of faith. If the interpretation that the chapter gives is correct, then faith is incommunicable, or, at least, it is not straightforwardly communicable. I term this the “problem of communicability”. The chapter goes on to argue that the problem of communicability is essential to the rhetorical composition of FB – to how FB mixes narratives and theoretical commentary, poetry, and philosophy, or different modes of writing in the same text. This leads to the view that the communicative intent of FB is not to argue for the truth of a certain theory of faith, but to suggest aesthetically that the explicitly paradoxical theory of faith that it presents constitutes Abraham’s situation. Consequently, the purpose of FB is not to establish the truth about Abraham, or about faith (it is not a philosophical text in a conventional sense). It is to mediate the reader’s relation to the story of Abraham in an aesthetical sense. It is to facilitate the reader’s imaginative relation to Abraham. This, however, represents a controversial reading of FB compared with the Anglo-American discussion. The chapter enters this controversy through a discussion of the issue of Abraham’s state of mind in regard to Isaac as he sets out to sacrifice him. It is shown that in accordance with the aesthetic approach exemplified in this study, Abraham logically believes that Isaac will die if sacrificed. There are, however, good arguments to the contrary. The chapter focuses on John Lippitt’s contention, and seeks to argue against his position by problematizing the interpretation of faith upon which it is grounded. The argument against Lippitt involves various other issues as well, the most important of which is a leading argument against any interpretation of FB that seeks to make faith out to be something inherently ineffable. In short, this argument is that if faith is ineffable, then faith is not rationally relevant. My defense against this is to turn yet again to Silentio’s use of narrative, and to show that though faith is ineffable, it is possible to give a partial narrative definition of in terms of a concept of apartness. The point is that even though one cannot say what faith is, one can say something about how it affects an individual that has it. One can give a partial symptomatic definition, and thus discuss faith in a rational manner. This point is then related back to the issue of how FB is written, and how it utilizes narratives in order to bring the reader into contact with faith. Narratives

|| 32 One reasons in terms of concepts and, according to Hegel, concepts are linguistic in nature.

Three technical details | 21

are used because they are the only possible route through which faith can be approached within language. If what faith is cannot be rendered in words, then the only viable approach to it from within words is through a narrative – through a description of it as ineffable and incomprehensible, a description that presupposes an experience of it as such, thus a description that centers upon a narrative about this experience. Lastly, Chapter 2 considers an alternative reading of the rhetorical composition of FB, the crux of which is that Johannes de Silentio is meant to function as an unreliable narrator in relation to faith. Hence, the reason faith is made out to be ineffable is not because it is ineffable, but because Silentio does not comprehend it. According to this reading, the real lesson of FB lies not in grasping what the text says about faith, but in grasping Silentio’s failure to grasp faith. The chapter then argues against this alternative reading, thus strengthening its own case.

Four technical details Respecting the pseudonymity of FB, I speak of Johannes de Silentio as its author. I refer, however, to the author as Søren Kierkegaard when the philosopher with whom I am in discussion at the time does so. Though this study inscribes itself into the Anglo-American philosophical discussion of Kierkegaard, yet it quotes Kierkegaard in the original Danish. The reason is that, to a large extent, the study’s perspective of certain key concepts in Frygt og Bæven hinges upon how these concepts resonate within the Danish language, rather than how their anglicized forms are read: for example, how Silentio defines the ethical as “det Almene”, translated as the “universal” (also in this study, but here the word is contextualized and explained). Right off the bat, the concepts of the “universal” and “det Almene” are not strictly semantically equivalent. In the context of a concept of ethics, “the universal” has a Kantian connotation, while “det Almene” has more of a Hegelian feel. (Kantian ethics are absolutist. Hegelian ethics are relative to a social order, to a culture, to the communality of a group of individuals and its collective mind-world.) Moreover, the word for faith in Danish, “Tro”, is exactly same as for belief, thus in certain instances where the English translations say “belief” I would have said “faith”, with great significance for the argument. Furthermore, this work reflects a study of Kierkegaard’s original work, and not of his translations into English. I do, however, provide English translations in footnotes throughout, citing Hong and Hong’s English editions of Kierkegaard’s collected works. Note, however, that these translations do not govern the discussions presented, and that

22 | Introduction

my own choice of words in translating certain concepts differs from that of Hong and Hong. When it comes to how I speak about God in this study, I have tried out different solutions, but have in the end deferred to tradition and the use of masculine pronouns. This is not because I, philosophically speaking, see any reason to gender God (quite to the contrary), it is because Abraham’s God is a male figure (in the English translation, God is explicitly referenced as the “Lord”), thus it would be awkward to speak of him as “s/he” or with like locutions. Likewise, I find that full avoidance of pronominal reference quickly becomes difficult to pull off rhetorically. Unless otherwise noted, every emphasis in the quotes is the original author’s.

Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense But that’s not a story, Sniff yelled. No suspense at all! Tove Jansson1

The objective of this chapter is to argue for a novel theory of suspense, called “the imminence theory of suspense”, and with it, a novel solution to the paradox of suspense. The imminence theory holds that suspense arises in situations which are wholly defined in terms of something to come, situations oriented towards a future not yet here being defined precisely in terms of it not yet being here. This theory, if correct, lets one deny that suspense requires uncertainty, and hence resolves the paradox of suspense.

Introduction In high school, my Norwegian teacher used to explain the main plot and the main themes of the novels and plays the class were to read before we actually read them. For example, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, he said, was about women’s role in society and the home, and he went on at great length about the ramifications of Nora leaving Torvald and the children in the final scene.2 Now, even though he had, in this lecture, essentially told the class everything that happens in A Doll’s House, the reading of the play was still a riveting and suspenseful experience for me. It was with much emotion that I witnessed Nora walk out the door in the final pages. But how could it have been so given that I already knew from the start that she was going to do this? Should not my foreknowledge of the plot have hindered me from being drawn into the weave of events? For even though I had foreknowledge of how it was going to end I still observed Nora’s fight against her own past actions and society’s strictures with no small degree of trepidation and suspense. This reaction – suspense even though one has foreknowledge of what is going to happen – is the central issue in what is known as the paradox of suspense. One may perhaps here object that “suspense” seems an overly dramatic notion to use in relation to Ibsen as it is primarily a notion associated with lesser

|| 1 Tove Jansson, Kometen kommer, p. 53. My translation. 2 Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-003

24 | Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense

kinds of literary endeavors – romance, crime, horror, and so forth – and hence that the feeling that suspense is tied to intense melodrama. Against this, I am going to attempt an argument to the effect that suspense is a much more ubiquitous phenomenon, that it in fact is tied to the aesthetic nature of narratives, or, to be more precise, to the manner in which narratives can potentially become sui generis narrative aesthetic objects. Paraphrasing Thomas Nagel, just as there is something that it is like to be a 3 bat, there is something that it is like to enjoy a novel, a movie, or a play. There is something that it is like to enjoy a narrative. The experience comes with a specific kind of phenomenological quality. Or, at the very least, I am here going to assume that this is the case. Assumption: There exists a sui generis narrative aesthetic feeling, that is, a species of aesthetic enjoyment arising specifically from narratives. Working from this assumption, the genuinely narrative aesthetic feeling ought to, logically, come as a response to properties inherent in the narrative as an aesthetic medium. Otherwise, why else should the aesthetic feeling which is subject to the assumption be sui generis narrative? In light of the objection that suspense is out of place in relation to Ibsen, let us begin this chapter by considering the following question: What are the unique properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium? This consideration will furnish us with an argument to the effect that suspense is a feature of the narrative aesthetic experience per se, something that justifies its use in contexts above and beyond those of pulp fiction, and thereby includes the likes of Ibsen. Moreover, it will make Sniff’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, correct. Before turning to this introductory discussion, though, let me clarify the structure of the chapter as whole. Its ultimate aim is to explore the issue of the paradox of suspense, and to suggest a novel solution to this paradox – what I will call “the imminence theory of suspense”. In order to do this, I proceed as follows: first, I explore the relation of suspense to what I term the “aesthetic narrative”; second, I provide a more detailed account of the paradox of suspense in terms of the existing philosophical debate; third, I widen the scope of the problem raised by the paradox of suspense to include not only token repetitions of narratives, but type repetitions as well; fourth, I give a brief overview of the main theoretical responses; fifth, I promote the need for, and argue in favor of, a novel solution to the paradox of suspense; sixth, I explore the connection between the imminence theory of suspense and time; seventh, I connect my initial characterization of suspense to the imminence theory of suspense developed later on; and, finally, I || 3 Thomas Nagel, “What it is like to be a bat?”.

1 The importance of suspense | 25

consider a possible objection to the theory developed in the previous sections, and present conclusions.

1 The importance of suspense Traditionally, artworks are distinguished into two different categories dependent upon the manner in which they are realized: the temporal arts and the spatial arts. The temporal arts include, for example, music and narratives, while the spatial arts consist of such forms as architecture, painting, and sculpture. Importantly, the distinction does not deny that time is an issue when it comes to spatial artworks, nor, vice versa, that spatial properties are an issue in temporal ones. It says something about the relative importance of these two dimensions when it comes to the two different types of art in question. A symphony, for example, needs to develop over time in order to be what it is. It consists of a complex set of notes and chords played in a structured sequence by a multitude of instruments. A statue, on the other hand, exists as it does without there being any analogous temporal development of the material itself. The temporal dimension of spatial artworks is located solely within the spectator, but when it comes to the temporal artwork, the artwork itself structures the time that the spectator partakes in. This is, therefore, the first property of the narrative as an aesthetic medium. Narratives are temporal, meaning that the narrative itself, the actual telling of it, whether this is done by words on a page, by a theatre company upon a stage, or actors on the silver screen, needs to develop over time in a structured sequence in order to be what it is, a fact I will express in the following manner: Narratives have temporal form. Interestingly, it is not only the form of the narrative that is temporal. In order to define what constitutes a narrative, it is common to argue that narratives are representations of sequences of events, an event being an occurrence at a certain place during a temporal interval. In other words, a narrative describes something that happens in time. In Jonathan Culler’s words: “To make narrative an object of study, one must distinguish narratives from nonnarratives, and this invariably involves reference to the fact that narratives report sequences of events.”4 || 4 Jonathan Culler, “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative”, p. 190. This is a widely held view. For a variety of additional references, see, for example, Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 30; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 92; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 33; and, for a perspective gathered from a more general philosophical context, J. David Velleman, “Narrative Explanation”, p. 1.

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Therefore, when it comes to narratives as an aesthetic medium there are two separate temporal dimensions: one of form and one of content. As music, by which I mean instrumental music, is not representational in the same sense as a narrative, narratives are uniquely singled out by the simultaneity of these twin temporalities. Approaching narratives by focusing upon these twin temporalities is roughly equivalent to how the Russian Formalists5 analyzed narratives in terms of a story’s fabula, the story in itself imagined as something separate from its telling (the narrative’s content, the sequence of events described), and sjužet, how the story is told (the narrative’s form, the actual telling of it). What I want to suggest here is that the sui generis properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium is found in the interplay between a narrative’s twin temporalities. Narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content). Inspired by the Russian Formalists, Peter Brooks has done something similar to this in his Reading for the Plot. In this work Brooks defines the mentioned interplay between the twin temporalities as “plot”: To keep our terms straight without sacrificing the advantages of the semantic range of “plot,” let us say that we can generally understand plot to be an aspect of sjužet in that it belongs to the narrative discourse, as its active shaping force, but that it makes sense (as indeed sjužet itself principally makes sense) as it is used to reflect on fabula, as our understanding of story. Plot is thus the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse.6

Turning from the Russian Formalists to the work of Roland Barthes, Brooks continues: “Plot – I continue to extrapolate from Barthes – is an interpretive structuring operation elicited, and necessitated, by those texts that we identify as narrative, where we know the meanings are developed over temporal succession in a suspense over final predication.”7 Brooks’ point here is that in any plotted narrative (in any narrative where the interplay between the twin temporalities is an explicit issue) the events referred to (content) are actively mediated by the event of their telling (form). In other words, the timing with which something is said, and how it is said, directly influences our appreciation of this something and the meaning it makes. Let me exemplify, and I quote from Robert Yanal’s paper “The Paradox of Suspense”:

|| 5 The Russian Formalists were a loose affiliation of literary critics and scholars operating in Russia from ca. 1915 to 1930. The most prominent members associated with this school are Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobsen. 6 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 13. 7 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 19.

1 The importance of suspense | 27

Narratives, fictional and factual, commonly raise in their audience suspense. A narrative lays out over time (not all at once) a sequence of events; and because the events of the narrative are not completely told all at once, questions arise for the audience which will be answered only later in the narrative’s telling.8

What Yanal points to in this extract is one feature of how the telling actively mediates the told, or how form forms content. The telling holds back certain information only to disclose it at a later, more dramatically suitable time – it times when something is said. Ibsen, for example, does not tell his audience straight away what is going to happen in A Doll’s House. Instead he lets events and tensions build over time so as to make the final scene strike us with an acute emotional impact. If, for example, he were to place the final scene at the beginning of the play, it would not strike one in the same manner. Accordingly, this “acute emotional impact” is a function of how the story is told, that is, of how its meaning is developed over time in terms of the narrative’s form. Now, the two extracts from the works of Yanal and Brooks both refer to suspense in the context of how meaning is developed over time in narratives: Yanal by accentuating how a narrative effectively holds back information only to reveal it later on; Brooks by underscoring that narratives are those texts (or stage performances, etc.) “where we know the meanings are developed over temporal succession in a suspense over final predication.”9 Common to both is the view that narratives develop gradually towards some retroactively defining moment (a final disclosure) in terms of their temporal form – suspense being viewed as an effect of this motion of gradual development. The view that narratives develop their meaning over time can also be approached from the following angle: Whatever is said in a narrative is said in terms of an ongoing event of saying. Narration has to take the form of a temporal process of enunciation where whatever is said at a certain point in time automatically stands in relation to past statements, and if it is not the last thing said, to statements yet to be made. This means that whatever is disclosed in a narrative is never fully disclosed because it is not fully contextualized until the narrative has run its course. What a narrative really says, therefore – and in parallel, what the story is really about – cannot be properly decided before everything is said, before final predication is made. A telling example of this is Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In this novel, the last couple of scenes hold a revelation that recasts the whole of the narrative. Nothing up until that point has been what you as a reader has believed || 8 Robert Yanal, “The Paradox of Suspense”, p. 146. 9 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 19.

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it to be because the narrator of the story has systematically been leaving out certain things, and once they are added everything changes. I will leave the details of this revelation for the reader him/herself to pursue. This is not to imply that it is impossible for a narrative to state early on how it will end. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, for example, makes its ending quite clear from the beginning: “It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet.”10 But even if one knows this (and the additional details surrounding this “poo-tee-weet” which are also disclosed), the fact is still that one does not know what this really means until one has actually reached the end and placed the “poo-tee-weet” in its proper context. “Poo-tee-weet” represents birdsong which is a recurrent motif in Vonnegut’s narrative. It is associated with the inexplicable meaninglessness of utter tragedy, and hence is given a quite distinct symbolic meaning through the unfolding of the narrative which, of course, it does not have when the phrase is first mentioned; rather, it comes from how it is used over the course of the narration.11 Let me recapitulate. We began this discussion with the question: What are the sui generis properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium? Answer: The interplay between the twin temporalities of form and content. Narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content), the crux here being that the timing of how something is told, its placement in a wider narrative development, is a key factor in what this something says and what meaning it has. Moreover, given their temporal form, every narrative consists of a gradual development, and a narrative’s meaning is, as a result of this, fluid throughout the process of this development. What has been told always stands in danger of being retroactively recast and determined anew in the course of novel revelations and new information (ref. The Sense of an Ending). That is, this danger exists until the narrative arrives at, as Brooks terms it, its final predication.12 Suspense, I suggest, in line with Yanal and Brooks, is a response to this gradual development. It is a reaction to the fact that, as a narrative is underway, as one reads, or observes, the narrative’s meaning is in constant state of re-negotiation; in other words, what the narrative really says, and what the story really is, is suspended up until the narrative has run its course, and final predication has been given.

|| 10 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, p. 16. 11 Observe that “poo-tee-weet” is an example of what I define as a “narrative concept” in Chapter 2, as its proper meaning is a function of how it figures in Vonnegut’s story. 12 Terry Eagleton can be seen to embrace a view of the aesthetic narrative like the one I have proposed here in his The Event of Literature (Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 199).

1 The importance of suspense | 29

Let me give a further quote by Brooks regarding this dynamic nature of the narrative: The actions and sequences of action of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in terms of their significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code structuring actions according to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the “saturation” of the matrix of the sentence now fully saturated.13

What Brooks here means by “the sentence” is the narrative as such. Just as a full sentence grammatically communicates a complete thought, so the finished narrative is what communicates the complete thought, or meaning, of the narrative. In light of this, I suggest that suspense is an affective reaction to the unfolding of the narrative, to its movement towards completion, or “saturation”. In other words, suspense is a reaction to how a narrative’s temporal form gradually forms the story it tells. Given, as earlier argued, that this movement toward full meaning is what characterizes the narrative as an aesthetic medium, we can now see that suspense has to be a principle feature of the narrative aesthetic feeling. It is by no means the only feature, but it is, given its relation to the temporal form of narratives, a central feature. Hence, reporting suspense in relation to Ibsen is not out of place, and suspense does not need intense melodrama. Moreover, Sniff was right in pointing out that a proper aesthetic story involves suspense. Note that I here have not fully defined suspense, nor has it been my intention to do so. I have merely argued that suspense is intimately related to the aesthetic narrative. As will be made clear in what is to come, there are many further ways to account for the exact nature of suspense. Before moving on to these, and to the consideration of the paradox of suspense, I want to say something about the notion of the “aesthetic narrative” as it has been used above. As I have theorized it, the aesthetic narrative is characterized by twin temporalities: one of form and one of content. And, as I have made clear, the commonplace definition of a narrative is formulated in terms of temporality of content. This definition states, in one variation or another, that a narrative is a representation of a sequence of events; in other words, that a narrative

|| 13 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 287. My emphasis.

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describes something that happens in time. According to this definition the sentence “Pierre walks” is a narrative.14 Now, the following question arises: What distinguishes what I have in mind with the phrase “aesthetic narrative” from narratives of the type “Pierre walks”? Answer: The temporality of form. The crux of the aesthetic narrative is that it develops the story it tells over time, and this is essential to the meaning that the story has. In order to exemplify this, just think about the emotional impact of the final scene of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the effect of the final disclosure in Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, or of Vonnegut’s “pootee-weet”. Against this it could be countered that “Pierre walks” is also developed over time in the minimal sense that it takes time to read it, or state it. In other words, that in order to convey a message the material symbols have to be realized in time. While this is true, in the sense that time is a condition for the conveyance of the message, it is not true in the sense that “this development over time is essential to the meaning the story has”, that is, that while time is a passive precondition to the act of conveying the message, just as time is a passive precondition if we are to observe a statue, time is not an active component in the meaning of the message, as it is in the three examples above. And it is there that the difference lies. Narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content). The sentence “Pierre walks” does not actively utilize the temporal dimension of the telling to make any kind of effect; hence it is not an aesthetic narrative in the sense I am attempting to explore. Put simply, there is no interplay between the twin temporalities of form and content. Aesthetic narratives, in the sense explored here, demand more complex narrations.15 The exact nature of this complexity must be left aside for another occasion. For the purposes of the present it is enough to note that this is the way it is.16

|| 14 It is what Genette calls a “minimal narrative” (Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 30). 15 Just to be absolutely clear, I am not here stating that the above defined sense is the only way in which a narrative can be aesthetic or have an aesthetic effect, just that it is an important aesthetic effect as it is tied to nature of a narrative as a work of art. 16 Note that certain narrative genres, like the joke and the haiku (both of these describe an event, or a series of events, and hence are narrative), depend upon foreknowledge, and familiarity with the genre, in order to be experienced with suspense. In these cases, the reader, or listener, has to know that the discourse will unfold with a surprising, or striking, twist in order to be experienced with suspense because their forms are too brief to be able to establish this on their own. From this, one can conclude that part of the narrative complexity that I take to be definitive of the aesthetic narrative stems from the narration’s ability to create the impression that something more is going to happen, that is, to establish a temporal relation to a future not yet here.

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With this I will leave this discussion and turn to the issue of the paradox of suspense.

2 The paradox of suspense Above I approached suspense as an affective reaction to how a narrative’s temporal form gradually forms the story it tells. In the philosophical discussion regarding the paradox of suspense the essential feature of this affective reaction has been held to be uncertainty. Suspense comes from an uncertainty over how a narrative will end. Or, to place this into the context of what I have said above, suspense comes from the fact that what a narrative really says, therefore, and, in parallel, what the story is really about, cannot be properly decided before everything is said. In more general terms (so as to include real life situations), suspense comes from an uncertainty over what will happen. Hence, according to the uncertainty model, the reason one feels suspense, say, if one is scratching a lottery ticket, is because one does not know what the ticket will show. Similarly, the reason that one feels suspense when one is in a hospital waiting room while doctors are operating on one’s father is because of uncertainty over how the surgery will go. And, by the same token, when one reads a novel, the suspense of the story is an effect of uncertainty over the story’s outcome. Cuddon’s and Habib’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory defines suspense as follows: “A state of uncertainty, anticipation and curiosity as to the outcome of a story or play, or any kind of narrative in verse or prose.”17 Contrary to what this view of suspense would lead one to believe, though, it is not uncommon for people to report a feeling of suspense upon repeated readings, or viewings, of the same book, movie, or other kind of narrative. Noël Carroll, for example, attests that he has watched “…King Kong at least fifty times, and yet there are still certain moments when I feel the irresistible tug of suspense.”18 Kendall Walton gives a quote by Leonard Bernstein to much the same effect: “I’ve seen [West Side Story] about five thousand times maybe. And I always end up in tears.”19 And it is not difficult to find more reports of the same phenomenon. In his review of Haruki Murakami’s novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Nathaniel Rich writes: “Murakami is a charming travel companion.

|| 17 J. A. Cuddon and M. A. R. Habib, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p. 698. 18 Noël Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense”, p. 71. 19 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 259.

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Though we know where we’re going, and must endure plenty of bumps in the road, the trip is rarely boring…”20 The problem with such testimonies and reports is that repetition goes against the principle of suspense described above. Given that a person has a normal, functioning memory, and that not too much time has passed between the first and the second experience of the narrative, the person will remember what happens in a story upon a repeat reading of it, and, eo ipso, this rules out uncertainty, hence it also rules out a reaction of suspense. The fact that people, in spite of knowledge of the outcome, report feelings of suspense when re-reading a novel, or re-watching a movie, or something similar, is what is known as the paradox of suspense. Robert Yanal neatly formulates it as follows: (i) Repeaters experience suspense regarding a certain narrative’s outcome. (ii) Repeaters are certain of what the outcome is. (iii) Suspense requires uncertainty.21

I will use Yanal’s three-point formulation of the paradox of suspense as a reference point in the discussion that follows.

3 Widening the scope of the problem The perceptive reader will have noticed that the above formulation of the paradox of suspense does not cover my initial anecdote about Ibsen. It does not, because the above formulation strictly concerns token repetitions: repetitions of exactly the same narrative twice or more. This is an unnecessarily weak formulation of the issue. An argument can be made to the effect that type repetitions ought likewise to engender a suspense paradox.22 To be clear, I will treat the kind of general foreknowledge one has if a narrative has been explained to one prior to having experienced it as a form of type-knowledge. Type-knowledge and prior explanation may not be exactly the same, but given that both are in the form of a general, non-detailed foreknowledge of what is going to happen, they are similar enough. The argument for the inclusion of type repetitions in the paradox of suspense is as follows: If a narrative falls under the rubric of a certain easily recognized

|| 20 Nathaniel Rich, “The Mystery of Murakami”. 21 Robert Yanal, “The Paradox of Suspense”, p. 148. 22 Aaron Smuts, for example, gives a formulation of the paradox that also captures this type of repetition, though he does not argue the issue as I do here (Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 282).

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type of narrative, say that it belongs to a certain distinctive author, or that it belongs to a certain genre, then there is a good sense in which a person acquainted with this author, or this genre, knows, roughly, how the story will unfold without having seen, or read it. Take, for example, the long running TV show, Supernatural, centering upon the adventures of Sam and Dean Winchester. If one has seen a couple of seasons of this show, then no uncertainty remains about how the plot of an episode (or string of episodes, if their plots are entwined) is going to pan out. Sam and Dean will defeat the bad guy. They will bicker and argue, but ultimately be there for each other when needed. And Dean will eat unhealthy foodstuffs. Take a different example, a new novel by Haruki Murakami: The protagonist is going to be male; he is going to be at a loss over what he is doing with his life; he is going to cook and clean and listen to music and get caught up in the life of some extraordinarily mysterious woman, or women, and frequently run into adventures involving supernatural forces; and in the end it will be ambiguous whether he is any the wiser for it all.23 These examples are not isolated cases. Kendall Walton notes, for example, that: “Some adult traditions – ancient Greek theater, Javanese Wayang Kulit – have a relatively fixed repertoire of standard, wellknown plots, which nevertheless remain alive and exciting for the audiences.”24 Vladimir Propp has argued that fairy tales always follow a strict sequential plot structure.25 A comedy will not end in tragedy, and a tragedy will not end in laughter. The point here is that even if we are not token repeaters of a narrative, there is a good chance that a seasoned reader, or a cineaste, will be a type repeater. And while a type repeater may not have the exact details of a story’s outcome, s/he will have enough hermeneutical prejudices about a given story line to be fairly sure of how it will end, hence no uncertainty and no suspense. The objection could be made, however, that it is misleading to compare token repetition with type repetition in as much the type repeater necessarily lacks knowledge of the exact details of the narrative. In light of this, it can be argued that it is precisely the exact details of the narrative that, in the case of the type repeater, engenders suspense. The suggestion being that suspense, for the type repeater, does not come from uncertainty with regard to what will happen, but, rather, how it will happen. What exact course will the story take? What subplots and plot twists will it utilize? What exact characters will it involve? What will be the fate of the support characters? And so on.

|| 23 A prime example of this, would be Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 24 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 260. 25 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.

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There are two main problems with such an objection: First, given that a type repeater knows the outcome of the main plot of a narrative, s/he also knows the ultimate end result of all the different subplots that it contains; hence, even if s/he does not have detailed knowledge of how the subplots turn out, s/he knows enough to cancel out any real narrative uncertainty about them, for their denouements will align with the main story. Second, shifting the focus from what will happen to how it will happen also shifts the general approach to the narrative. Uncertainty about how something will happen in a narrative is a metanarrative uncertainty as opposed to a narrative uncertainty: it is uncertainty about which specific narratological devices a narrative will employ, and which it will not. Therefore, one cannot simply say that type repetitions involve metanarrative suspense as opposed to narrative suspense proper. In that case, the shift would have to show itself as a consequent feature in type repeaters’ reports about suspense, which would then be framed in terms of the craftsmanship of the story, and not the story itself. In other words, if a type repeater reports suspense over how a story will pan out – that is, reports narrative suspense, not metanarrative suspense – then this objection fails. I have already quoted Nathaniel Rich to this effect apropos Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki…, and therefore the objection fails. From the above consideration, we can gather that the paradox of suspense involves more than merely cases of repeated readings in the strict sense. It touches the general issue of how our foreknowledge of a narrative affects our experience of it. Hence, it is clear that the paradox of suspense raises the more wideranging problem of how it is possible for us to experience suspense from narratives where we have even just a general foreknowledge of what happens.

4 The different theories The issue of the paradox of suspense has spawned a host of different theoretical responses. In this section, I sketch the major positions.26 For convenience, I keep to the first formulation of the paradox involving token repetitions, but it has to be understood that the paradox can easily be widened in scope in terms of the above. Kendall Walton has claimed that repeat suspense is caused by the fact that we grasp narratives fictionally. A fictional grasp, argues Walton, is a sui generis

|| 26 For the reader interested in a more detailed overview over the different suspense theories, I suggest Christy Mag Uidhir’s article, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”.

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way of relating to a narrative, one which differs from the real-world way of grasping something. A fictional grasp is make-believe. So, when a person engages with a narrative, s/he engages in an imaginative game of make-believe and, as the repeater’s knowledge about how the story ends is not part of the scenario of makebelieve then and there, it is of no consequence.27 Noël Carroll has defended a similar view.28 Thus, Walton and Carrol deny (ii) in Yanal’s paradox of suspense: that repeaters are certain about the outcome.29 Richard Gerrig also denies (ii), though for different reasons. Gerrig’s suggestion is that repeat suspense is possible because exact repetition is impossible in reality proper. A narrative, on the other hand, is something that can, claims Gerrig, be exactly repeated. Gerrig writes: “Specifically, I propose that readers experience anomalous [repeat] suspense because an expectation of uniqueness is incorporated within the cognitive process that guides the expectations of narratives.”30 In other words, according to Gerrig, real-world experiences have taught us that exact repetitions are impossible, hence, with this wired into our cognitive apparatus, we approach everything, narrative included, with “expectations of uniqueness” – even narratives we have read before, and this is what engenders repeat suspense in such cases. We simply cannot believe that it all is going to turn out exactly as before. Contrary to Walton, Carroll, and Gerrig, Robert Yanal’s solution to the paradox of suspense is to deny (i).31 His idea is that repeaters who claim that they feel suspense mislabel and misidentify what they are feeling. Suspense requires uncertainty. Uncertainty is impossible for repeaters of sound mind. Hence, repeaters who claim to feel suspense are confused. Somewhere in an imagined borderland between Yanal’s solution and Walton’s, one finds Uidhir’s. Though Uidhir’s position is not exactly the same as either of them, it has similarities with both. Yanal, as we have seen, denies that people are competent judges of their own emotional states; Uidhir, takes this a conceptual step further, and denies that suspense is a genuine emotion at all. Rather, what we call “suspense”, according to him, picks out “the class or sub-

|| 27 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 261. 28 Noël Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense”, pp. 87–88. 29 In a recent article, “Virtualities of Plot and the Dynamics of Rereading”, Raphaël Baroni has defended a variation of this position, and though he stresses the “virtual”, that is, the non-actualized, yet present, possibilities within a text as a source of suspense in an intriguing way, his position relies in essence upon Walton’s and Carroll’s (and, to an extent, Gerrig’s). 30 Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, p. 170. 31 Robert Yanal, “The Paradox of Suspense”, p. 153.

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class of emotions(s) chiefly demarcated by the necessity of uncertainty and primarily the province of theories concerning how we emotionally engage with narratives.”32 For Uidhir, then, as for Walton, suspense is a fact of narrative engagement. But unlike Walton, suspense for Uidhir is not a homogenous and unified phenomenon; it is a composite of disparate emotional responses and reactions. Hence, what triggers a sensation of suspense at one time, say, uncertainty, need not be the same another time around, though the sensations are roughly the same as both arise out of narrative engagement, something that, according to Uidhir, gives them an apparent unity. To quote Uidhir: So, when true repeaters report feeling suspense upon repeat viewings, they aren’t far from the mark. That is, they are reporting feeling the same emotion as reported felt in the initial encounter, and these repeater feelings, though not evoked in the same manner as those initially, nevertheless are evoked in a manner predicated on those initially evoked. On this view, although uncertainty vanishes for true repeaters, its effects can still be felt in terms of subsequent repeater feelings of apprehension.33

As we see from the extract, in the first encounter with the narrative suspense is triggered by uncertainty over the outcome; in the next encounter suspense is triggered by apprehension of what is known to come. Moreover, as Uidhir goes on to state, it is not necessarily the case that apprehension always takes over either. There can be myriad reactions at work. Given his position, Uidhir’s main argument must contradict the view that suspense is a genuine emotion. His argument runs something along the following lines: If one attempts to resolve the paradox of suspense with a theory that is suspense realistic (i.e. holds that suspense is a genuine emotion), this will necessarily lead to another paradox, the paradox of suspense realism. This paradox arises, essentially, between the claim that suspense is a genuine emotion, and that which Uidhir regards as fundamental to any theory of emotions: that emotions are individuated and defined by their phenomenal character.34 A consequence of suspense realism is, Uidhir believes, that suspense is not simply defined by its phenomenal character but, necessarily, through its arising out of an engagement with a narrative. And, according to Uidhir: “No theory of the emotions carves its constituents according to narrative and non-narrative significance.”35 Hence, since suspense is defined as something essentially narrative,

|| 32 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 162. 33 Christy Mag Uidhir, “An Eliminativist Theory of Suspense”, p. 129. 34 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 165. 35 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 168.

5 Motivating a novel solution | 37

suspense is not a genuine emotion. I provide a more detailed presentation of Uidhir’s argument later in the chapter. One common characteristic of all of the above-mentioned solutions to the paradox of suspense is that they all keep (iii) intact. Suspense requires uncertainty. Aaron Smuts’ theory, however, denies this. Smuts’ point of entry into the topic is the observation that the feeling of suspense demands that we actually care about what happens. Thus, suspense does not, according to Smuts, originate with a sense of uncertainty regarding what is going to happen, but with a strong desire for a sequence of events to turn out in a certain way. This desire is then frustrated in as much as the reader cannot manipulate the events of the narrative, or the situation. “When one realizes that one’s ability to make a difference is frustrated, one feels suspense.”36 Suspense, therefore, is generated by one’s inability to influence and act despite a strong wish to do so.

5 Motivating a novel solution Let me begin by taking issue with the different solutions proposed, with the exception of Uidhir’s to which I return after having proposed my own solution. Given the tripartite structure of the paradox, there are three main strategies for handling it. One can reject (i), like Yanal, and deny that repeaters experience suspense, even though they report that they do it. This is problematic as it amounts to denying that a subject feels what s/he says s/he feels, thereby denying a subject’s authority concerning his/her own emotional states. Uidhir makes a solid argument against Yanal on this point, concluding that such a move is untenable in light of our commonsensical view of a subject’s relation to his/her own emotions.37 Alternatively, one can deny (ii), like Walton, Gerrig, and Carroll, and claim that there is some sense in which an agent is uncertain about the outcome of a narrative, even one whose conclusion, in reality, is known in advance. The general problem with this strategy is that one would have to argue for a subsystem of suppression operating within the parameters of an agent’s full knowledge. For given that a narrative sets in motion an event without revealing how the event turns out – hence uncertainty, hence suspense – the reader / viewer who knows the ending must have a mechanism in place that inhibits the activation of this knowledge in order to experience suspense. This, moreover, if true, ought to be a

|| 36 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 284. 37 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 165.

38 | Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense

clear-cut phenomenological feature of repeaters’ experience of repeat-narratives. As soon as a repeater begins a certain narrative, functional amnesia has to kick in.38 Even to someone like Walton, to whom the absence of the relevant knowledge comes from the fact that the knowledge is not part of what the agent make-believes at the time, there has to be some mechanism that clearly separates one’s actual knowledge from one’s make-believe, and this mechanism is, in effect, a form of functional amnesia. And if functional amnesia is a consequence of the theory, then one is also left with the absurd consequence that in-depth reading is impossible because if it were not then one would remember how the story goes when beginning it anew, in which case suspense would not be possible. Before moving on to the third and last strategy, I would briefly like to consider an objection to the above counterargument. It is possible to mount an argument to the effect that there has to be something like a subsystem of repression within the parameters of an agent’s full knowledge. Consider, for example, someone with serious depression, a man who has lost his girlfriend. With her gone, he struggles with his will to continue living; he simply cannot imagine his life without her, and he despairs. This man may rationally understand that life goes on without her, and he may understand that in his bleakest hours he is exaggerating his woe. There are, as the saying goes, plenty of fish in the sea, and his life has no truly necessary connection to hers. His life is his own, and so forth. Still, the realization that his depression is irrational does not necessarily allay it. His emotional reaction, the depression, can very well co-exist with his knowledge that it is not a rational reaction. In light of this example, one can argue for a subsystem of suppression where one’s knowledge does not affect one’s emotional reaction, and if this is possible in one emotional context, it ought to be possible when it comes to suspense as well. The problem with this counter-counterargument is that depression and suspense are not exactly parallel phenomena. True, both in the understanding of suspense under consideration and in the counter-counterargument, there is something we can call a “subsystem of repression” in the sense outlined but, contrary to suspense, depression is not directly caused by the absence of knowledge. What happens in the case of depression is that the knowledge does not alleviate the depression when it is introduced and, therefore, the knowledge has to be in some sense repressed, that is, isolated from the mental mechanism of depression that is at work. It is not, however, the absence of this knowledge that is the cause of the depression in the first place. Knowledge is not the key factor. The man is not depressed because he lacks knowledge of the fact that it is possible to exist || 38 Gerrig himself points to this fact, “Is There a Paradox of Suspense? A Reply to Yanal”, p. 172.

5 Motivating a novel solution | 39

without his girlfriend. He is depressed because he is emotionally dependent upon the girlfriend’s love, and now that love is denied him. Depression has an emotional reality separate from the man’s cognitive understanding of his situation. This is important because, in suspense, knowledge is the key factor. Absence of knowledge is what provides uncertainty which, in the current model, is what engenders suspense. Therefore, the counter-counterargument fails to promote the existence of a subsystem of repression exactly in the form that is needed, and the initial argument against the second strategy to resolve the paradox of suspense is sound. The third and last strategy to resolve the paradox of suspense would be to deny (iii), that suspense needs uncertainty. This is what Smuts opts for, and what primarily speak for this strategy are the grave difficulties that face the other two options.39 In this chapter I follow this line of reasoning, although it is not without its own problems. If one is to deny (iii) one would firstly have to come up with a new theory as to what creates suspense; secondly, one would have to explain the strong commonsensical intuition that suspense is grounded in uncertainty. With regard to the second of these problems – how it has come to be seen as intuitive that suspense requires uncertainty when, in reality, this is not the case – Smuts raises the issue but he does not really provide an explanation for it; merely speculating that it may be because people confuse suspense with surprise. According to Smuts, surprise necessarily involves an element of uncertainty. Moreover, because suspenseful narratives often involve surprises, this can generate an expectation of surprises in relation to suspense – an expectation that can, on its own, generate suspense: “…one can feel suspense if they think a surprise is up ahead.”40 Hence, Smuts suggests that the notion of uncertainty may

|| 39 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 283. Observe that Smuts also tries to promote the negation of (iii) with an argument concerning historical re-enactments, which he claims represent cases where we have full foreknowledge of what is going to happen, and yet habitually experience suspense; hence they are a form of proof that (iii) is wrong. Against this, it can be argued that one would solve the historical re-enactment case if any of (i), (ii), or (iii) were to be rejected, and therefore that it is not an argument against (iii). 40 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 284. An interesting issue here, though I will not explore it at length, is that it seems impossible for Smuts to account for suspense arising from the expectation of surprise in terms of a frustration of a desire. In such a case Smuts’ model would have to argue that suspense arises from a desire not to be surprised, but if you have a desire not to be surprised, why read a story that you would expect to contain surprises? Thus, his explanation of how suspense becomes so associated with uncertainty seems to contradict his own theory about suspense.

40 | Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense

have become connected to suspense by association through surprise, but that is the extent of his explanation. As to the first problem, we have already seen Smuts’ formulation: “Suspenseful situations are those where we want to affect an outcome – that is, where we strongly desire to have a causal impact – but our desire is frustrated.”41 To illustrate, Smuts uses the example of a dog wandering onto the highway. An observer seeing the dog may very well react with suspense, that is, if s/he sympathizes with the mutt’s fate. A driver actively attempting to avoid the dog, on the other hand, will not feel suspense but mostly adrenaline. Suspense is the reaction of an observer at a remove from the scene of the events, but who nonetheless desires a certain outcome for them. That is the essence of Smuts’ theory. Added to the desire-frustration mechanism that constitutes the core component of his theory, Smuts also, importantly, specifies that his theory only concerns “imminent events”: “The desire-frustration theory of suspense holds that the frustration of a strong desire to affect the outcome of an imminent event is necessary and sufficient for suspense.”42 The reason he makes this particular specification can be made plain through the example of past events, which are potentially ideal for the primary conditions that Smuts lays down: One can have a strong desire to affect their outcome, but absolutely no possibility of fulfilling it – ergo, one has frustrated desire. What I am getting at is that it is not uncommon to have some feature of one’s past that one intensely wishes had been different, and where one is, for obvious reasons, helpless to change. Let me take an example: I was sixteen, and feigned drunken stupor in order to impress a girl. I grew up in a place where such a strategy was not completely half-witted. But I had no luck. The girl spotted the next-to-non-existent alcohol percentage upon the bottle I carried, and began to laugh herself silly, and with her, the whole party. This is one of those episodes in my life which I intensely desire to have had a different outcome. I can still all too vividly remember the shame. It is also an episode that I am powerless to affect. Therefore, it fulfills the main condition laid down by Smuts’ theory. It is not, however, an episode that stirs any feelings of suspense. Why? It does not stir any feelings of suspense because imminence is lacking. Now, though I do side with Smuts as to what is wrong with the paradox of suspense, I do not believe his proposed theory is satisfactory because its primary feature can be shown to be unnecessary. Consider the following: By tying the desire-frustration theory to imminent events in the manner I have shown, Smuts

|| 41 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 284. 42 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 284.

6 Imminence and the temporal dimension | 41

effectively gives his theory two separate components: the desire-frustration component, and the imminence component. The first of these is the principal component, according to Smuts, as it is what gives the theory its name. However, the desire-frustration component needs the imminence component in order to capture suspense and obviate counterexamples like the case of past events I made above. The two components are logically separate elements of Smuts’ view. They have no necessary connection to each other. This is something that allows us to raise the following question: Does the imminence component really need the desire-frustration component? My argument is that it does not. I believe what the example from past events truly shows is that imminence and the temporal dimension are central to any analysis of suspense, as Smuts theory does not add up without them. What is more, I believe that one may be able to define suspense through this aspect alone, without recourse to the rest of Smuts’ theory. That is what I attempt in the following: to define suspense in terms of imminence and the temporal dimension.

6 Imminence and the temporal dimension A state of imminence is the proverbial calm before the storm. It is the presence of a future not yet become fully present, the state of something being there without it being there… yet. Imminence is a temporal relation to a future event on the verge of moving from potentiality to actuality, and that is present in terms of this operation of emergence. The suggestion I want to make is that we understand suspense, not in terms of an uncertainty over what is going to come, but in terms of the fact that something is going to come, in terms of the fact that something is imminent. The suggestion is therefore that suspense consists in a state of imminence. Earlier I gave three examples of situations involving suspense: the lottery ticket, the hospital waiting room, and a novel. In the common explanation, all of these involve suspense because they involve uncertainty: What will the ticket show? Will surgery be successful? How will the story turn out? According to Smuts’ theory, on the other hand, these situations involve suspense, not on account of an uncertainty but on account of one’s frustrated desire to influence how the different situations develop. What I suggest, however, is that suspense comes from these situations being defined in relation to something imminent. Scratching the ticket, sitting in the waiting room, reading a story, these are all situations wherein the present is defined in relation to something to come. They are what they are by virtue of a peculiar kind of temporal structure. They are oriented towards a future not yet here, precisely in light of its not yet being here. In all three,

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the present is, so to speak, suspended in anticipation of what is to come, and that is, I suggest, what suspense is. Suspense consists in a state of imminence. It comes not from uncertainty over what the ticket will reveal, nor from our inability to influence this outcome, but from the fact something is about to reveal itself. Suspense is an affective response to the fact something is about to, that a process is underway, not yet complete though present in terms of being incomplete and ongoing. Put differently, suspense is a reaction to the fact that the dice is falling. Even if one were to know how the dice would fall, suspense would still accompany the fact that the outcome has not yet become actual, but is underway. Suspense comes from incompleteness. If this is correct we can avoid the paradox of suspense by rejecting (iii). Uncertainty is not required for suspense. At same time, if suspense can be explained solely in terms of imminence, then the desire-frustration component of Smuts’ theory can be eliminated by virtue of Ockham’s razor. What one is left with is then what I call the “imminence theory of suspense”. What speaks for the imminence theory, therefore, is that it is a simpler, more elegant version of Smuts’ full theoretical framework. Additionally, the imminence theory of suspense also lets one more easily account for how uncertainty has come to be so strongly associated with suspense, contrasting with Smuts explanation of the connection in terms of the expectation of surprises. Uncertainty is strongly associated with suspense because uncertainty is often involved in suspense situations as an added feature. The lottery ticket, the surgical procedure, and the first reading of a novel (if this is also in a type sense), all involve an element of uncertainty. The future that is imminent in all three cases is unknown. Uncertainty is, therefore, a factor in many situations involving suspense, but it is not what makes them suspenseful. It is an added feature.43 In order to better see what I am getting at, consider the following passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In it Woolf describes a scene of suspense by specifically stressing the temporal dimension at the same time as she rules out the need for uncertainty:

|| 43 Note that this option, claiming that uncertainty is an added feature of many suspense scenarios, is not open to Smuts in the same manner. Suspense, according to him, is essentially a frustration of desire, and the presence of something unknown would not add anything to this.

7 Imminence and aesthetic narratives | 43

For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.44

A feeling of suspense, Woolf writes, “before Big Ben strikes”. A text book repeat scenario, moreover, one in which no desire is frustrated either. The example thereby constitutes a counterexample against Smuts at the same time as it verifies the imminence theory. For why does Clarissa Dalloway feel suspense? Because of the imminent striking of the clock.

7 Imminence and aesthetic narratives At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that suspense is a central feature of what I called the “narrative aesthetic feeling”. It is an affective response to the interplay of the twin temporalities that characterize the narrative as an aesthetic medium. I approached this from a variety of angles, one of which was the following: Suspense is a reaction to how a narrative’s temporal form gradually forms the story it tells. The question arising at this point in the chapter is: How does the imminence theory of suspense relate to my initial characterization of suspense? And the answer, it would seem, being hand in glove. The imminence theory of suspense holds that suspense consists in a state of imminence, which is a temporal relation to a future event on the verge of moving from potentiality to actuality that is present in terms of this operation of emergence. Thus, in a state of imminence the present is, so to speak, suspended in anticipation of what is to come. In striking similarity to this I explained what it means for a narrative’s temporal form to form the story it tells as follows: The meaning a narrative creates, the story that it tells, is a function of how the narrative develops, of what it tells over time. When a narrative is underway, as one reads or observes it, the narrative’s meaning, the nature of the story, is in a constant state of renegotiation. A narrative builds tensions, it creates expectations, it misleads in order to surprise. Suspense, I claimed, was a reaction to this feature of the narrative: it develops over time. Suspense is a reaction to the fact that what the narrative is really saying, and what the story really is, is suspended up until the narrative has run its course and final predication has been provided. In other words, suspense is tied || 44 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 2.

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to the imminence of this final predication. To quote Yanal yet again: “A narrative lays out over time (not all at once) a sequence of events; and because the events of the narrative are not completely told all at once, questions arise for the audience which will be answered only later in the narrative’s telling.”45 Hence, in terms of this impending disclosure (the impending final predication of the narrative) narratives structurally involve the phenomenon of imminence, of something to come.

8 Uidhir’s objection Through the foregoing discussion I have argued for a novel theory of suspense which is suspense realistic. According to this formulation, suspense is a genuine emotion. As mentioned earlier, however, Uidhir has mounted a principle argument against any theory of suspense that claims that suspense is a genuine emotion, and I will now turn to this. As explained earlier, the paradox of suspense realism, as Uidhir terms it, arises between the claim that suspense is a genuine emotion, and a claim Uidhir regards as fundamental to any theory of emotions, that emotions are individuated and defined in terms of their phenomenal character. A consequence of suspense realism, Uidhir believes, is that suspense is not only defined by its phenomenal character, but also by being of narrative origin. As already quoted above: “No theory of the emotions carves its constituents according to narrative and non-narrative significance.”46 If we go into the details of his argumentation, it is apparent that Uidhir’s reasoning here is of a meta-theoretical bent. Uidhir writes that a principal task of a theory of suspense is to resolve the paradox of suspense. The paradox of suspense largely concerns the issues in narrative engagement. So, issues in narrative engagement must be standard for suspense theory (that is, both foundationally and motivationally constitutive of suspense theory).47

On the other hand: a theory of the emotions takes issues in narrative engagement to be nonstandard (that is, neither foundationally nor motivationally constitutive of a theory of the emotions). If an emotion takes as standard what analysis in a theory of the emotions takes as nonstandard,

|| 45 Robert Yanal, “The Paradox of Suspense”, p. 146. 46 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 168. 47 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 168.

8 Uidhir’s objection | 45

then there can be no such emotion as that emotion (that is, according to a theory of the emotions, that emotion does not exist).48

Uidhir’s argument is that because the principle task of any theory of suspense is to resolve the paradox of suspense, theories of suspense have to accept narrative engagement as a standard way of how suspense originates. In other words, suspense, as it becomes theorized, is necessarily bound up with a narrative origin, so that what one speaks about as suspense in theories of suspense cannot be approached without reference to narratives. This because the problem of repeat suspense is primarily a problem connected to narratives. But this, Uidhir claims, goes counter to any plausible theory of the emotions, as what defines and individuates emotions is solely their phenomenal character – their feel – and not their origin. Put differently, suspense, as theorized, becomes inseparable from the phenomenon of narratives, and that disqualifies it as a genuine emotion, as emotions are not, according to Uidhir, bound to phenomena in this manner – at least not genuine, basic emotions. My critique of this argument is twofold. Firstly, though narratives are an important source of suspense,49 suspense is not solely of narrative origin. Scratching a lottery ticket, waiting in a hospital waiting room, these are good examples of non-narrative suspense situations, along with Clarissa Dalloway’s suspense in relation to the imminent tolling of Big Ben. And in the same vein, Smuts speaks about the baseball pitcher who, having thrown his ball, is forced to watch whether his throw is accurate or not.50 In other words, suspense is not bound to narratives in such a manner that it is impossible to consider the feeling without considering a narrative. The connection between narratives and suspense is

hence not as strong as Uidhir seems to argue. Secondly, it is true that narratives are a privileged source of suspense, a source, moreover, that exhibits certain peculiar features, like the phenomenon of repeat suspense. According to Uidhir, this privileged relation constitutes a problem as, in his view, suspense becomes a feeling in some sense necessarily associated with narratives, and hence not a real, genuine emotion in itself. In contrast to Uidhir, I would like to point out that the imminence theory of suspense takes a different spin on this privileged relation. Instead of seeing the connection as

|| 48 Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Paradox of Suspense Realism”, p. 168. 49 See here what Smuts speaks about as the “narrative imbalance” (Aaron Smuts, “The DesireFrustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 281), i.e. the fact that suspense seems to occur more commonly in situations of narrative engagement than in our daily lives. 50 Aaron Smuts, “The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense”, p. 284.

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detrimental to suspense, the imminence theory enables one to see something logical in it. As explained in the section leading up to this one, narratives structurally involve the phenomenon of imminence. They time, and build up to, their own ends, and the whole of a narrative plays itself out in light of this end, any narrative takes place with its own end hanging over it as an imminent event. As such, it is no wonder that narratives are privileged sources of suspense, even on repeat encounters. The above two arguments recast the relationship between suspense and narratives so as to show that Uidhir’s argument that suspense is not a genuine emotion fails: firstly, because there is no necessary connection between narratives and suspense in the sense needed by Uidhir; secondly, because the privileged relationship that does exist can be explained in a quite natural way.

Conclusion True to its name, the imminence theory of suspense holds that suspense consists in a state of imminence. It claims that suspense arises in situations wherein something is about to happen, and this relation of about to is what defines the situation as such. For example, when scratching a lottery ticket, numbers or symbols are about to reveal themselves, and it is this temporal relation of about to that provides suspense. It is not uncertainty over what those numbers or symbols are (though uncertainty is, in this example, an added feature of the situation). Likewise, in narratives capable of engendering suspense, there is also something about to happen, the outcome, the endplay of the story, and here, like in the example of the ticket, it is not uncertainty of this outcome that creates suspense, but the fact of an imminent event. This approach to suspense allows one to resolve the paradox of suspense by denying that suspense requires uncertainty. Moreover, it makes sense of the fact that narratives are privileged sources of suspense, seeing as narratives and suspense share a similar temporal nature.

Chapter 2: Narrativity, Heroism and the Knight of Faith The aim of this chapter is threefold. First, it prepares the ground for the arguments of the next chapters. Chapter 3 argues that suspense is a principal feature of what it means to have faith. The argument is built upon the ideas that faith is a sort of heroism, and that to be hero necessarily means to play a certain structural role in a narrative. The present chapter argues for precisely these ideas. Chapter 4 extends the analysis of Chapter 3 by showing that suspense not only figures in FB’s theory about faith, but also in how FB rhetorically presents this theory. Second, the present chapter shows that focusing upon faith as something heroic, and the knight of faith as a hero, has certain logical consequences for the concept of faith that is developed in FB. As Abraham is not a hero in an ethical sense – he sacrifices Isaac without moral cause – he is a hero of a different order than the ethical: a religious hero. The religious, therefore, is not ethical. Now, the “ethical” for Silentio does not designate what we conventionally mean by that term – Silentio’s “ethical” is inherently bound to, and an expression of, the intersubjective dimension of human life, a dimension that also comprises language and conceptual thought, thus reason itself. Abraham’s heroism constitutes a break with the whole of this dimension. Faith is consequently something essentially ineffable and irrational. It represents a level of meaning beyond the communicable and comprehensible. Third, the chapter explores how the text of FB rhetorically speaks about faith, given that it is not something that one really can speak about. It shows how FB, of necessity, has to employ narrative devices in order to get its ideas across. In general, therefore, the present chapter charts the complex relations between narrativity, heroism, and faith in FB. Part of the reason for the comparatively great length of the chapter is that I believe these issues ought to be explored in conjunction with each other in order to make plain the coherence of the perspective I propose.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-004

48 | Chapter 2: Narrativity, Heroism and the Knight of Faith

Introduction The claim that binds together all the different arguments of the present chapter could be formulated as follows: FB’s form is central to its content. How FB is written, how it is rhetorically composed,1 its mix of narratives and theoretical discussions, its grounding in the perspective of a specific narrator, Johannes de Silentio, and his story, these are all elements that are rational given what it attempts to communicate. FB’s mix of literary narratives and philosophy is not an embellishment, a flowery way of stating what could have been stated with a straightforward sentence; no, the form is core to the project. As regards the concept of “narrative” that I employ, it follows the discussion of the prior chapter: narratives report sequences of events; they depict temporal occurrences like Abraham’s journey to Moriah. Any discourse that attempts to capture something that happens in its dimension of unfolding is a narrative. Focusing on how FB is plotted and composed is not something new. Every commentator that has attempted to read the true message of FB as grounded in Silentio as an unreliable narrator2 has done the same thing. 3 Reading FB in this manner involves the attempt to seek out a hidden message buried beneath the surface of the discourse. C. Stephen Evans, for example, has likened Silentio to Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse’s famous novels.4 Wooster, the narrator in these novels, is a bumbling fool with a comically brilliant misunderstanding of reality. Evans’ point is that in FB, just as in Wooster’s stories, it is only through coming to terms with the narrator’s misrepresentation of the facts that the facts themselves will appear. Thus, when reading FB, one cannot take what Silentio says at face value, but must understand his peculiar perspective upon faith in order to grasp faith itself. My twist will be not to read Silentio as an unreliable narrator, yet still focus on FB’s rhetorical composition. I will focus on how the text, through narratives and self-reflective commentary, stages faith as something beyond its own grasp.

|| 1 By “rhetorical composition” I mean how a text’s formulations are woven together and plotted in time: that is, how and when something is said, in contrast to what is said. 2 In literary theory an “unreliable narrator” is a narrator who shows him/herself to be untrustworthy in relation to the story s/he tells, or the subject s/he treats, in such a way that the untrustworthiness becomes an implicit element of the communication itself. Wayne C. Booth is commonly held to have coined the term in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 3 For an overview of this issue, see the sixth and seventh chapters of John Lippitt’s Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 135–206. 4 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, p. 64. Evans also discusses the issue of Silentio as an unreliable narrator in “Faith as the Telos of Morality”.

Introduction | 49

The focus, therefore, will not solely be upon what the text says, but upon how the text continually insists upon attempting to say something that it knows cannot be said. I will read the text’s evasive maneuvers in regard to its chosen subject matter as grounded in the fact that faith, according to FB, truly is incomprehensible and ineffable. By “evasive maneuvers” I mean Silentio’s claims not to understand faith, the absence of a concrete, positive definition of faith, faith’s characterization as something paradoxical and incomprehensible, Abraham’s inability to speak, Silentio’s use of narratives instead of argument in order to get at what faith is about, and so forth. Contrary to Evans, I will argue that the point is not to grasp why Silentio fails to grasp faith, but to grasp that it cannot be grasped, at least not in a form that is straightforwardly communicable, and that that is all that anyone can grasp. I am going to argue that FB portrays faith as a “higher level of reality” to which reason is denied access. Faith represents a level of meaning that is incomprehensible for rational thought. In other words, I will argue that FB’s intention is, from within language, to point towards a truth that transcends what can be presented in language. Given that FB aims, through language, to open a window onto something beyond language, one of the core problems that informs the structure and composition of FB, according to my perspective, is the problem of communicability: How does one say something that cannot be said? FB’s response to this problem is to operate with the ineffable as an explicit category, actively speaking about faith as something unspeakable. This is a move that is both delicate and tricky. The danger with it is that one may inadvertently land in a position that defines faith as ineffable in a substantial sense: a position that holds ineffability to be the mark of the religious. If it is treated as such, then anything that could be meaningfully described as ineffable would logically be religious. For example, the phenomenological feel of emotions and sensations, the redness of red, could logically be called ineffable, and hence therefore “be” religious.5 In order to avoid this situation, faith has to be portrayed as something utterly sui generis, as something that has a reality all its own, one that categorically defies representation in language. Put differently, there has to be something that it is like to have faith, a phenomenological state that is just as ineffable as the phenomenological redness of red. In order to operate with the concept of ineffable in this manner, however, Silentio has to employ narratives. The ineffable has to be portrayed as a certain

|| 5 To say that the phenomenological feel of an emotion or a sensation is ineffable is a variation of Frank Jackson’s claim in his Mary’s room experiment that the qualitative experience of a color is not reducible to a thorough conceptual understanding of the nature of color in relation to the human nervous system, see “Epiphenomenal Qualia”.

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extra-textual, non-conceptual something, and doing this from within a text demands the description of a character and his personal relation to this ineffable something. It demands a certain someone who mediates between the textual and the extra-textual, and a narrative of this relation, or else the ineffable can have no place within the textual. The characters that serve this purpose in FB are primarily Abraham, in regard to faith itself, and Silentio, in regard to Abraham as a bearer of a relation to faith itself. I will in the course of this chapter promote the idea that it is the problem of communicability that gives FB its rhetorical form. This will connect FB’s form to its content, in as much as the problem of communicability arises out of this content: FB’s theory of faith. I will also show that the fact that faith can only be approached narratively makes it into a narrative concept, which is a concept whose meaning is established by how it figures and functions within a narrative. To take an example of a narrative concept tied to a specific narrative, consider the castle in Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle. The castle is a prototypical narrative concept. The meaning it has is tied to the unattainability that accompanies it in the story; an unattainability that gains flesh and form by how it is repeatedly portrayed throughout the scenes of the novel. The castle is a thing that defies K.’s attempts to gain access at every turn. My point is that one can understand the castle in terms of its structural relation to K. and the rest of the village as this plays out through the narrative; and this on a level that is independent of what one believes the castle ultimately to symbolize (God, absolute truth, the empty yet sublime ideological core of modern society). Thus, one of the ideas that I try to promote in this study is that faith in FB operates on a level that is comparable to the castle in Kafka. Faith is something that is present in FB as a narrative concept. It is a structural point in the story of Abraham and Isaac as FB attempts to convey it: something one has to grasp in terms of the role that it plays, but whose ultimate meaning escapes the reader in the same way as the ultimate meaning of the castle. The structure and argument of the chapter is as follows: The first section offers a general definition of a hero, emphasizing how a hero is essentially a narrative concept, defined by its function and role in a narrative (only on a more general level than that of Kafka’s castle; i.e. not only in terms of one story, but any story whatever). The second section turns to the issue of what makes Abraham, the knight of faith, into a hero. It explores the issue by taking a look at how Silentio contrasts and compares the knight of faith with an established type of hero, the “tragic hero”. The section shows that while these are both heroes by virtue of the difficulties that they brave, they differ in terms of the nature of these difficulties. The tragic hero is one because s/he has the strength to perform an action that is both

Introduction | 51

morally right and morally wrong at the same time; moreover this comes at a great personal cost to the tragic hero. The knight of faith is a hero because s/he does something that is ultimately right – it is God’s command – but not recognizably so morally and rationally. As it is, the knight of faith’s action is categorically wrong, and it is the knight’s cross to bear that it cannot be otherwise. The knight of faith is exempted from the ethical by virtue of a clandestine relation to God; an exemption that is not recognizable to human reason, hence not for ethics. The discussion of what distinguishes the knight of faith raises the problem of communicability. If the knight of faith is a hero by virtue of a clandestine relation to God, then his/her status as a hero is a problem, both for him/herself if s/he were to attempt to explain him/herself to others, and also for someone who is trying to conceptualize his/her nature and essence. If the relation is something essentially clandestine, then it cannot be disclosed and revealed without loss of essence. An exposed secret agent is no longer a secret agent. The secret agent, however, is different from the knight of faith in that it is theoretically possible to expose him/her. S/he is secret relative to one set of people, and disclosed relative to another set (his/her employers). The knight of faith, on the other hand, is in his/her essence “higher than the universal”.6 S/he is secret relative to all people. S/he stands outside of the intersubjective dimension of human life; s/he stands outside of what is in essence universal, that is, communal and shared, like language and ethics.7 The knight of faith cannot, therefore, be exposed and revealed. His/her behavior does not make sense intersubjectively speaking, and s/he cannot communicate his/her reasons for action through words. Faith, the relation to God, cannot be mediated into the intersubjective. To put it differently: Abraham cannot speak. Faith is ineffable. It is incomprehensible.8 The third section makes the brief, but important, point that given the problem of communicability, we ought to understand the whole of FB as attempting to suggest aesthetically what it manifestly cannot say. The implication of this is that FB is not a work that attempts to present a theoretical truth about faith. Instead, it attempts to communicate to its reader on an aesthetical level, that is, to || 6 SKS 4, 149–150 / FT, 55. 7 Neither language nor ethics exists if it does not exist in terms of a relationship between people. 8 As regards the relationship between the notions of “incomprehensible” and “ineffable”: If something is “ineffable” then one cannot formulate a definition of it. One cannot describe it. Consequently, one cannot have a grasp of truth and falsity in relation to it, as truth and falsity are properties of sentences. And, therefore, one cannot comprehend something ineffable in the sense of having knowledge about it. The concepts of “ineffability” and “incomprehensibility” are therefore co-extensive. If one has knowledge (in some loose sense) of something ineffable, then the knowledge one has of it has to be experiential, non-propositional.

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give a certain impression about faith, to appeal to the emotions and imagination of the reader and not to reason. The fourth section draws lines of continuity from Joakim Garff’s “Den Søvnløse” to the present chapter, arguing that the present chapter shares Garff’s general approach. Central to Garff’s work is the view that FB attempts to convey aesthetically the feeling of fear and trembling characterizing Abraham’s approach to Moriah, as this would constitute the emotional reality of Abraham’s situation given that he truly is a knight of faith. This, however, demands that one interprets what it means for Abraham to have faith in a certain way. In order to react with fear and trembling, Abraham must believe that Isaac will die by virtue of being sacrificed, otherwise there would be precious little to fear or to tremble about. The fifth section explores John Lippitt’s argument that Abraham actually does not believe that Isaac will die as the result of the sacrifice. The sixth section argues against Lippitt. It makes a case for a different interpretation of the relevant passages in FB to which Lippitt appeals. As part of its alternative interpretation, it also develops a more detailed approach to the incomprehensibility and ineffability of faith and establishes that it is possible to give a partial definition of faith in narrative terms – thus concretizing how faith reveals its presence in a narrative. The partial definition is given by virtue of the concept of apartness. The seventh section builds upon the sixth section’s more detailed approach to the ineffability of faith in order to explore a novel aspect of the need for narrativity when expressing something ineffable through textual discourse. The eighth section considers and argues against an alternative approach to the rhetorical form of FB, and to how the form is necessarily connected to what it says, exploring Daniel W. Conway’s argument that Silentio is an unreliable narrator, and that the true meaning of FB can only be apprehended if one comes to see how Silentio unconsciously distorts what he is speaking about. Conway’s argument is a more elaborate version of Evans’ claim, quoted above. Two general remarks: The following chapter will not explore Silentio’s definition of faith as a “double-movement”.9 This takes place in the next chapter. Furthermore, there exists an implicit theory about levels of religiosity in FB. Silentio, for example, who states that he is no knight of faith, still confesses to be in possession of a “lyrical conviction” about the existence of God.10 Additionally, in

|| 9 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36. 10 SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34.

1 The general definition of a hero | 53

Silentio’s description of the “knight of resignation” there are elements that suggest this knight has some fundamental relation to God, though not that of Abrahamic faith.11 Even though such an implicit theory exists, in the following I use the word “religious” exclusively to denote the religiosity of the knight of faith.

1 The general definition of a hero Let me begin with the “formal” definition of a hero: A hero is a protagonist. S/he is the main character of a narrative. Consequently, in order for an individual to be a hero there has to exist a narrative in which the individual plays the main part. This essential connection between the concept of a hero and how a hero figures and functions within a narrative, makes the term into what I have called a narrative concept. The reasoning behind this claim is quite straightforward: Suppose that an individual could be a hero without being a protagonist. If so, the individual would be a hero without a story – a state of affairs that immediately begs the question: by what right is this individual then called a “hero”? How does one rationalize the ascription if one cannot show that the individual has done something to earn it? To show that the individual has done something to earn it, on the other hand, is to tell a story, thus, to make him/her into protagonist. Either, therefore, a hero is a protagonist, or the ascription is groundless, and the application of the concept without meaning. The above understanding of a hero is, for example, found in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.12

Frye then goes on to list the different kinds of heroes that exist on the basis of their power of action and comparative abilities, ranging from the supernatural to the sub-mundane. Laying aside this taxonomy, the important thing for my purposes is that the hero, according to Frye, is the one in a narrative that does something. The hero is the author of the action, or actions, about which the narrative

|| 11 SKS 4, 138 / FT, 43. 12 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Crticism, p. 33.

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revolves. S/he is the center-point of the sequence of events that comprises the narrative. Frye is here not interested in exactly what a protagonist does, morally speaking, but in the fact that s/he does (and the magnitude of power needed for this action). Thus, Fry operates with a formal definition of a hero.13 Commonsensically, the formal definition of a hero is incomplete. I will term the commonsensical definition a “substantial definition” of a hero. According to it, a hero is someone who has, through courage and nobility of character, saved the day: a fireman who has rescued an old lady from a burning building; a jogger who catches a run-away stroller as it speeds downhill towards a heavily trafficked intersection, the baby still on board. Notice that the commonsensical definition is not the only substantial definition of a hero available. A substantial definition is one that ascribes to the concept of a hero some kind of value and importance: moral or ethical value and importance, for example, but it could also be, as is the case with Silentio’s Abraham, religious value and importance – or, it could at least be argued that this is what FB makes of Abraham, or attempts to make. It is also important to notice that the examples gathered from common usage do not contradict the more technical usage we find in Frye, and which I suggest. The fireman and the jogger of our examples are the center-points of two different sequences of events, and they are both the authors of some important deed. It is only that the concept of a hero is colloquially reserved for those whom show morally exemplary qualities. A junkie, for example, in search of the greatest ever dose of heroin, and doing all sorts of despicable things as part of his quest, would not colloquially qualify as “a hero”, though the story of the junkie would make the junkie a hero in the more technical sense. Consequently, the formal and the substantial definitions of a hero are not at odds with each other, but the formal is broader and more inclusive than the latter. Whereas for Frye, the concept of a hero is defined in terms of its role in a narrative, the common usage adds to this definition the aspect of moral exemplary qualities. Common sense lays down ground rules for what is acceptable and what is not. A hero is not the protagonist of just any old undertaking. S/he is, however, always a protagonist.

|| 13 For a related view, see Stephanie S. Halldorson: “It may be self-evident but it bears repeating that the hero is always and only built upon a fictional narrative. Even if a heroic act happens in factual reality (e.g., a fireman rescuing a kitten from a burning building) the hero and the readers are separated by and meet within the narrative of the act itself: the story as it is told.” (Stephanie S. Halldorson, The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction, p. 6.)

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Silentio can be seen to argue for something along the same lines in the opening of “Lovtale over Abraham”.14 There he notes the reciprocal dependence of the concepts of the “hero” and the “poet”. A poet is not a poet if s/he does not chronicle a hero’s exploits, that is, tell a story. Vice versa, a hero is not a hero if someone does not elevate him/her to that status in terms of a chronicle of his/her exploits. Therefore, a hero is a hero in terms of a story.

2 Abraham’s heroism and tragedy For my purposes, the reason it is important to understand that a hero is essentially a function of a narrative has to do with the role that Abraham plays in FB. On a prima facie level, there cannot be any doubt that in the eyes of Silentio Abraham is a hero of faith. Just consider the chapter, “Lovtale over Abraham”. Here Silentio non-apologetically praises Abraham’s greatness. Abraham is proclaimed to be a guiding star capable of saving the anxious, “men Eet er, at blive beundret, et Andet, at bilve en ledende Stjerne, der frelser den Ængstende.”15 Abraham is presented as an ideal, an exemplar – a hero in a substantial sense. Along the same lines, there cannot be any doubt that, to Silentio, having faith is defined as a special kind of heroism, consequently that the heroic constitutes a substantial feature of what it means to have faith. This is a fact apparent not least in the name that Silentio gives to the individual that has faith: “knight of faith”.16 A knight is an archetypical heroic figure in Western literature, something reflected, for example, in how Miguel Cervantes plays upon the figure of the knight for comic effect in his Don Quixote. Thus, in as much as having faith means being a “knight of faith” in the sense of being a hero of faith, then faith is a narrative concept. Having faith means belonging to, or living in, a certain kind of story. In the following I provide a more detailed argument for this view by exploring how the knight of faith is defined in comparison and contrast to the tragic hero.

|| 14 SKS 4, 112–113 / FT, 15–16. 15 SKS 4, 117 / FT, 21: “…but it is one thing to be admired and another to become a guiding star that saves the anguished.” 16 SKS 4, 133 / FT, 38.

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2.1 Hannay on Silentio’s concept of tragedy A significant portion of Silentio’s discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac (in the following I refer to it as the “story of Abraham”) is conducted through contrasting the story of Abraham with other stories, notably with another specific type of story, the tragedy. Abraham’s story is contrasted to that of Jephtha, of Brutus, of Agamemnon, of Shakespeare’s Richard III, of the Merman and Agnete, to name some central figures. Coming to terms with the particular nature of the story of Abraham means, therefore, that one has to come to terms with Silentio’s concept of tragedy, and how they differ. In exploring Silentio’s concept of tragedy, I concentrate upon Silentio’s treatment of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. I have two reasons for this: first, Silentio’s discussion of Agamemnon is representative of his treatment of tragedies in general; and second, the story of Agamemnon is the tragedy that Silentio discusses in most detail when juxtaposing the tragic hero with Abraham. My exploration takes as its starting point Alastair Hannay’s Kierkegaard: A Biography. In this work, Hannay argues that whereas a tragedy is defined as a collision of the ethical against the ethical, the story of Abraham is defined as a collision of the religious against the ethical. Thus, Hannay’s argument is that the tragic hero and the knight of faith are heroes of different kinds of stories with different kinds of plots. Consequently, they are different kinds of heroes. Yet, even though they are different, they are not incomparably so. Hannay writes that Kierkegaard’s intention in FB is “to grasp and portray the noblest of all tragedies, and this he finds exemplified in a version of the story of Abraham and Isaac.”17 Thus, Hannay explicitly terms the story of Abraham a “tragedy”, even though, at the same time, he makes clear that it is a tragedy that stands apart from every other tragedy. The story of Abraham has something that makes it more dignified and elevated – more noble. This “something” is its religious dimension. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a “religious tragedy” as opposed to the “ethical tragedies” of the tragic dramas of antiquity.18 || 17 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 189. 18 Calling the story of Abraham and Isaac a “religious tragedy” is taken from Philip L. Quinn, (Philip L. Quinn, “Agamemnon and Abraham: The Tragic Dilemma of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith”, p. 192), and not from Hannay. The idea of a “religious tragedy” or, more correctly, a “Christian drama” is also mentioned in FB itself, though it is not directly applied to the story of Abraham and Isaac (SKS 4, 178 / FT, 88). Rather, in the relevant passage it is doubted whether faith and the life of the faithful really can be given an aesthetic treatment, that is, whether the essence of faith truly can be communicated in a narrative form. Some commentators take this to be impossible, see for example Adam Wood, “Is the Tragic Always the Tragic? Kierkegaard on

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In order to proceed I begin by considering the nature of the ethical tragedy in more detail, henceforth referring to an “ethical tragedy” simply as a “tragedy”. Hannay argues that Kierkegaard’s understanding of tragedy in FB is Hegelian,19 observing that Kierkegaard defines a tragedy as a story centered upon a dramatic “collision” between different ethical norms in the life of its protagonist. Hannay: “The tragic action is demanded by the ideals of ethical life but is also blameworthy on account of the suffering it is bound to incur.”20 The tragedy of the “tragic hero” is that s/he is ethically bound to do something unethical. For example, in Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia for the greater good of his people because he has offended the goddess Artemis.21 In retaliation, Artemis withholds the winds that are meant to carry the Greek war fleet to Troy and demands Iphigenia’s sacrifice if they are to be released. Thus, in order for there to be a war, Iphigenia must die. This amounts to a collision in the life of Agamemnon between the norm that calls for him to be a good ruler for his people, and the norm that calls for him to be a good father to his daughter. A good ruler would secure the war effort; a good father would protect his daughter. The collision constitutes a dilemma: a situation in which Agamemnon is split between two courses of action that are both right, but also mutually exclusive; moreover, they are wrong in relation to each other. The central ordeal that Agamemnon faces is of having to decide which norm can justifiably suspend the other.22 The question of justification is important. The crux of the tragic hero’s fate is that s/he is justified in his/her wrongdoing, or, even more

|| Antiquity and Modernity in Shakespeare”. However, it is hard to reconcile such a view with the fact that the story of Abraham and Isaac is, in FB, taken to exemplify faith. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a story, after all; thus, an aesthetic treatment of faith. Still, since according to Silentio it can never be absolutely definitive whether Abraham is a knight of faith or merely a murderer, as faith is beyond thought and incomprehensible, then this might be the reason that Silentio does not clearly state that faith can be given an aesthetic form. It cannot be given aesthetic form because such a form cannot definitively get the message across: nothing can, not definitively. 19 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 190. For additional views on Kierkegaard’s indebtedness to Hegel when it comes to the tragic, see: Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, p. 34–36. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence, pp. 44–46; and Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 87. 20 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, 190. 21 Euripides, Bacchae and Other Plays. 22 Ref., Quinn: “In that story, his duty to the well-being of the expedition to Troy is the higher expression of the ethical that justifies Agamemnon ethically suspending the ethical duty to his daughter without exceeding the ethical’s own teleology.” (Philip L. Quinn, “Agamemnon and Abraham: The Tragic Dilemma of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith”, p. 185.)

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extreme, s/he is ethically bound to it, a bond that does not, however, absolve the act from nonetheless being wrong. A tragic act is an act that is ethically right at same time as it is not. A tragic act is an ethical contradiction. In Hegel’s own words from the Aesthetics: The original essence of tragedy consists then in the fact that within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification; while each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying and infringing the equally justified power of the other. The consequence is that in its moral life, and because of it, each is nevertheless involved in guilt. 23

In sum, the tragic hero is a protagonist who is forced to betray one valid norm for another competing, valid norm, and a tragedy is a narrative that tells such a story.

2.2 Quinn’s alternate take on the concept of tragedy Philip L. Quinn has argued against a Hegelian take on Kierkegaard’s understanding of tragedy in FB. Building upon an earlier work by Hannay,24 Quinn has argued that Agamemnon does not face a dilemma as part of his tragic situation. Agamemnon is not split between two mutually exclusive courses of action. Instead, Quinn claims, the two norms that come into play stand in a logical relation to each other in the sense that one norm logically overrides the other in terms of ethical importance.25 There is, therefore, never any question of what Agamemnon ought to do. To borrow a formulation from Evans: “the ethical duties grounded in the family are trumped by a higher duty that is grounded in the state or the nation.”26 Hence, what Agamemnon ought to do is to act as a ruler. His role as ruler is ethically more important than his role as a father. Consequently, there is no ethical ambivalence in Agamemnon’s situation, no collision in the Hegelian sense, no conflict. Agamemnon is not ethically pulled in two different directions

|| 23 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: Volume II, p. 1196. For a further discussion about Hegel’s concept of tragedy see Robert R. Williams’ Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. Williams’ emphasis is that the Hegelian tragedy is a conflict within the ethical order, a conflict of right against right that disrupts the very fabric of the ethical (Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God, p. 126). 24 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: The Arguments of the Philosophers. 25 Philip L. Quinn, “Agamemnon and Abraham: The Tragic Dilemma of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith”, pp. 186–187. See also, Kjell Eyvind Johansen, “Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification”, p. 270. 26 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 69.

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at once. Rather, to the extent we can speak about a collision, or a pull in two different directions, it is a collision and a pull between the demands of love and the demands of duty, that is, between what Agamemnon wants to do and what he has to do. Quinn’s argument is based upon Silentio’s description of the ethical as a teleological hierarchy. As Silentio describes it, some norms are ethically more important than others: “Dog det Ethiske har indenfor sit eget Omfang Adskillige Gradiationer; vi ville see, om der i denne Fortælling finds noget saadant høiere Udtryk for det Ethiske, der ethisk kan forklare hans Adfærd...”27 Given this, it is logical to think that a norm that is higher up in the teleological hierarchy is able to override a norm that is lower down. If not, the very concept of a hierarchy would seem pointless. The tragic, according to Quinn, therefore, revolves around a contradiction between the emotional and the ethical, between the personal and the socially expected. It is not, as it is for Hegel, a contradiction in the ethical itself.

2.3 Against Quinn Though I understand Quinn’s reasoning, I believe he interprets Silentio’s idea of an ethical hierarchy of norms in too formal and bureaucratic a manner. According to his perspective, it is as if what is ethically right is a question of which paragraph has application. Against this, consider the fact that norms are bound to social roles, that social roles are defined in terms of a set of norms and obligations, and, therefore, that the norms and obligations by which a person is bound vary according to social role. This is something that Quinn admits: The Hegelian notion of das Sittliche underlies Kierkegaard’s conception of the ethical. On this conception, we are to think of the agent as embedded in a nested sequence of concrete social institutions of increasing comprehensiveness. Individuals belong to families, which in turn belong to nations. The several institutions in such a hierarchy are sources of various ethical requirements such as duties and obligations, and requirements from different sources can conflict.28

|| 27 SKS 4, 151 / FT, 57: “But within its own confines the ethical has various gradations. We shall see whether this story contains any higher expression for the ethical that can ethically explain his behavior…” 28 Philip L. Quinn, “Agamemnon and Abraham: The Tragic Dilemma of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith”, p. 185. As regards the view of Hegelian ethics Quinn puts forth, Evans writes: “Ethical obligations then stem from such concrete social institutions as the family and the state, which is

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In as much as ethics always takes the form of concrete social institutions, then ethics always consists of individual roles that fill the functions that define those institutions. Given this, Agamemnon’s tragedy can be understood as a collision between two different social roles.29 As a father, Agamemnon is bound to love and protect his daughter. As a ruler, he is bound to love and protect his people, something that means that he has to secure victory in the war against Troy. If we follow Quinn and say that the ethically more important norm logically overrides the less important one, this means that Agamemnon’s role as ruler overrides his role as a father in the sense that Agamemnon does not face any kind of normative dilemma. The higher norm puts the lower norm out of play. However, if there is no normative dilemma, then this means that Agamemnon no longer is, ethically speaking, the father of Iphigenia: that he no longer has that role. For if norms are tied to social roles, and the hierarchically higher role overrides the lower, in the sense of removing all traces of a normative dilemma, then it is difficult to see it otherwise than as a logical annulment of the role of father. It has to be an annulment, because if the ethical is composed of social institutions, Quinn’s overriding would have to manifest itself in those social institutions in order to manifest itself ethically. This is unreasonable, because as a consequence of Quinn’s view, Agamemnon would, by force of his circumstances, no longer be the father of Iphigenia ethically speaking. His fatherhood would have come undone. How could he still be Iphigenia’s father if he was not bound to her by the norms and obligations that define the social role of the father? Quinn’s view, therefore, ultimately contradicts Euripides’s story and how Silentio presents it, because the crux of the presentation is that the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia is a story about a father that has to sacrifice his daughter. This is the reason it makes sense to compare it to the story of Abraham. Instead of understanding the hierarchical relationship between different norms as one wherein a higher norm can logically override a lower, I suggest we understand it in the sense that a higher norm can take precedence over a lower. A higher norm can, as Silentio says, suspend a lower. And Silentio further notes that when something is “suspended”, it is not cut away, removed, or annulled. It || for Hegel the pre-eminent source of ethical duty” (C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 69). Regarding the fact that Quinn ascribes to Silentio / Kierkegaard a Hegelian view of ethics in FB, this is something I argue to be correct later in the section. 29 John J. Davenport also formulates the situation of the tragic hero in terms of heroes’ conflicting roles: “tragic heroes cannot fulfill all the duties associated with their multiple roles because of an unfortunate conflict between them” (John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 213).

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is kept intact inside the higher telos in relation to which it is suspended.30 What I suggest with the concept of “precedence”, therefore, is that a higher norm can suspend a lower in the sense that one moves away from the conflict without settling it; the conflict is still there, bubbling under the surface. Thus, the question is not which of the norms is correct given the situation, “correct” in the sense of true, the question is which of them have priority. Having priority, however, does not take away the ethical force of the other norm in question. Having priority means that one norm has more force than the other. Consequently, the tragic hero is both right and wrong in his/her action. S/he is more right than s/he would have been had s/he chosen differently, yet s/he is still wrong. In the precedence model, right is a question of degree, and not of either / or, as it seems to be for Quinn. Later in the chapter where Silentio makes his comment about the nature of suspension, “Problema I”, he describes the relationship of the higher and lower norm as one parallel to the relationship between emotions and the ethical: Den tragiske Helt bliver endnu indenfor det Ethiske. Han lader et Udtryk af det Ethiske have sit τελος i et høiere Udtryk af det Ethiske, han nedsætter det ethiske Forhold mellem Fader og Søn eller Datter og Fader til en Følelse, der har sin Dialektik i sit Forhold til Sædelighedens Idee.31

This comparison confirms my suggestion. If the higher and the lower norm are related as ethics and emotion, then it is apparent that the issue is one of precedence and not overriding. An ethical imperative does not logically override an emotional inclination in the sense that it annuls it and puts it out of play. It takes precedence over it. If it had annulled it, then it would have been phenomenologically impossible for a person to experience a struggle between what s/he desires and what s/he knows to be right. To deny the existence of this kind of struggle is absurd. In terms of my suggestion, therefore, one can keep to the Hegelian concept of tragedy as constituted by a collision between norms. For though it is the case that one norm can take precedence over another, this does not mean that the first logically cancels out the second; the two are still, in principle, in conflict. I follow, therefore, the later Hannay in his Hegelian reading of FB. Contrary to Quinn, I see

|| 30 SKS 4, 148 / FT, 54. 31 SKS 4, 152 / FT, 59: “The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its τελος in a higher expression of the ethical; he scales down the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a feeling that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of moral conduct.”

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a tragedy as a collision between norms, and the essence of a tragic hero as being someone who is ethically bound to do something unethical.32

2.4 The nature of Abraham’s “tragedy” Having thus defined a tragedy, we can move on to formulate an understanding of what is so special about the story of Abraham. According to Hannay, what distinguishes Abraham is the manner in which he breaks categorically with the ethical. In contradistinction to the tragic hero, Abraham “lacks ethical justification. But according to Fear and Trembling, that is exactly what makes him a hero.”33 Thus, Abraham does not face a collision of norms. He is not ethically justified in sacrificing Isaac. Consequently, he does not do what he does because it is the reasonable thing to do. More importantly, even if he acts against the ethical, he is still a hero. What does this mean? (I take it for granted that Silentio does not mean “hero” in accordance with a formal definition of a hero.) The issue of Abraham’s heroic status is a delicate one. It has to do with the relationship between the ethical and the religious, and with what, exactly, the religious is. Hannay’s view, indicated by the above quote, is that the religious represents a distinct sphere, or level of meaning, one different in kind from that of the ethical (and from that of the aesthetical).34 God speaks to Abraham, and bids him sacrifice his son. What makes it imperative for Abraham to perform the sacrifice, therefore, is God’s command, but this command does not make the act

|| 32 Compare what Williams says about Hegel’s understanding of tragedy: “For Hegel, the tragic hero is both innocent and guilty. He is innocent and not immoral because he does what is right and justified. But he is also guilty because his action unavoidably infringes other justified powers and rights” (Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God, p. 132). 33 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 196. 34 It ought to be noted that by stating that Abraham “lacks ethical justification”, Hannay opts for a reading of FB that makes the religious out as being something contrary to the ethical in an essential sense, by which I mean that the religious does not simply represent a different kind of ethics: say, a divine command ethics as opposed to an ethics rooted in social institutions, in Hegelian Sittlichkeit. No, the religious is something different to ethics per se. It is something that cannot be universalized. It is not something that regulates and orders the interaction between people. For other interpretations along these lines see, for example: Kierkegaard’s Instant by David J. Kangas: “The essential conflict of Fear and Trembling can be summarized this way: it is between an ethical duty and an absolute duty, between a duty that can be formulated as a universal, and a duty that must remain singular, exceptional” (David J. Kangas, Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 126). Or, Gregor Malantschuk, The Controversial Kierkegaard, pp. 23–24. The perspective argued for in this study is in line with Hannay and the other mentioned authors at this point.

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ethically imperative. If it had, then, contrary to what Hannay says, Abraham would have had ethical justification, and he does not. Yet, even without ethical justification, the sacrifice is imperative. The force of its imperative, consequently, has to be of a different order than that of the ethical. The religious sphere must, then, be something beyond the ethical sphere,35 capable of having its own type of meaning, of making sense in a way that is not shared by, nor translatable into, the ethical. Hannay: “The collision that Abraham’s faith is presented as a way of averting is not an ethical collision in the sense of a tragic conflict of duties, or a conflict between duty and feeling, but rather a collision with ethics as such.”36 Hannay’s view is neatly summed up in how Silentio rounds off “Problema II”: Either there exists an “absolute duty” towards God that takes precedence over the ethical as such, or Abraham is lost, and faith does not exist.37 Whereas the tragic hero, therefore, faces a collision of the ethical against the ethical, Abraham faces a collision of the religious against the ethical, of absolute duty against ethical duty. Moreover, this is not the only collision that he faces. In Abraham’s situation, there exists an additional collision, namely, the religious is pitted against itself in a collision all its own. John J. Davenport writes in regard to this latter, intrareligious collision: For God also commands Abraham to love Isaac and to trust in His original promise; so demanding Isaac’s life appears as an obstacle both to his human duty and to his reliance on God’s promise that a holy nation of descendants will come from Isaac.38

Abraham’s situation, therefore, can best be described as a “double-collision”: the religious against the ethical, and the religious against the religious. This is what makes Abraham’s story nobler, or of a higher nature, than any tragedy. The collision that defines it is not merely a collision within the ethical, but with the ethical. Abraham is not split and torn between different norms, but between the normative and God. God, moreover, is himself split in relation to Abraham. God contradicts himself when he asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God has already promised

|| 35 Williams points out in a footnote that the idea of the religious as something beyond the ethical seems already to be present in Hegel (Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God, p. 353). 36 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 194. My emphasis. 37 SKS 4, 171 / FT, 81. Note that even though the absolute duty is called a “duty”, it is not itself ethical. This is contradictory, but a contradiction that is part of the paradoxical nature of faith as Silentio describes it. 38 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 207.

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Abraham Isaac. He has promised Abraham that he, through Isaac, will be the father of a great people, a promise he breaks by demanding that Abraham ends Isaac’s life. The resulting layered knot of conflicts is what I have in mind when I call the story of Abraham and Isaac a religious tragedy as opposed to an ethical one. Having established the nature of Abraham’s tragedy in terms of how it differs from a regular, or ethical, tragedy, I will turn to the issue of the heroes of these tragedies, and compare these to each other: first, the tragic hero.

2.5 The tragic hero and the nature of the ethical In this section, I argue that the tragic hero has two major defining characteristics: first, the tragic hero is the personification of the values of a certain ethical order, a personification made especially vivid by the harrowing circumstances of his situation; and, second, in the tragic hero the individual’s interior becomes a disclosed part of his exterior, that is, the emotional cost of being ethical becomes a manifest part of how others see him/her. I begin by considering the first characteristic. Prima facie, what makes Agamemnon into a “tragic hero” is that he accepts the difficulty of his situation, and acts accordingly. He puts aside his role as father, and acts as ruler. He does this although fully aware that in so doing he betrays his most basic ethical obligations towards his daughter. By doing the right thing he thus betrays both Iphigenia, by failing to be her father, and himself, by failing to act as the father he is. Agamemnon’s claim to heroism comes, therefore, from the fact that he is willing to do something horrendously wrong for the sake of doing what is ultimately right. Evans writes in regard to the figure of the tragic hero: “The tragic heroes are explicitly designated as representatives of the ethical…”39 The tragic heroes are “representatives” in the sense that they embody and personify the values and norms of a specific community. In the first section of this chapter, I provided an ethically substantial definition of a hero as a protagonist who shows morally exemplary qualities. To Evans, this is what the tragic hero is, with the qualification that the “morally exemplary qualities” that the tragic hero exemplifies are relative, not absolute. To the Greek mind of its day, Agamemnon personifies ethics itself, but to us, he does not. Evans: “I believe that few contemporary ethicists

|| 39 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 69.

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would approve of the idea of a monarch sacrificing his daughter in order to make possible a military adventure.”40 I believe Evans is right in his description and characterization of the tragic hero, though he distorts the story of Agamemnon somewhat in his modernization of it, as he leaves out the fact that the sacrifice is demanded by a god.41 Given the existence of gods as meddling and powerful as the Greek, I imagine ethics would look quite different than it does in our divinely barren world, thus the ethical intuitions born of this world are not really relevant in judging Agamemnon. However, this observation actually corroborates Evans’ point. Given the existence of gods, ethics would be different. Agamemnon belongs to a very different ethical order, and we understand him in the context of this, as a symbol of what this ethical order considers right and good. Still, I would like to add to Evans’s point that there exists another symbolic dimension to the figure of the tragic hero; there exists another level on which the tragic hero is exemplary. This is the second of the two definitive characteristics that I noted at the beginning of this section. As it is conceptualized in FB, the tragic hero is not only a symbol of a specific ethics, but is a symbol for what it means for humans to be ethical per se. According to Silentio, being ethical presupposes the performance of a certain psychological operation. My idea is that Agamemnon, the tragic hero, makes this feature of what it means to be ethical absolutely plain and disclosed. The tragic hero does not solely personify the values of an ethical community, but, on a more abstract and general level, personifies a human being’s relation to ethics no matter the specifics of the ethics involved. In order to argue this, I will begin by examining exactly what Silentio means by the “ethical”. Hannay lists three characteristics of the ethical in FB: It is uni-

|| 40 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 70. 41 As regards the fact that the sacrifices of both Agamemnon and Abraham are demanded by a god, Silentio holds that there is an elementary difference between them seeing as Abraham’s relation to God is a wholly private affair, whereas Agamemnon’s relation to Artemis is a public one. (SKS 4, 182–183 / FT, 92–93.)

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versal. It is divine. It is disclosed (meaning that it is inherently rationally intelligible and publicly communicable).42 Evans can be seen to agree with this.43 In the following, it is the first and the third characteristic that are of importance.44 Of the above characteristics, the first, universality, is what is most revealing as regards the nature of the ethical. At face value, the claim that ethics is universal seems to make it absolutist in the manner of Kantian ethics.45 However, several philosophers have argued that it is not universality in the Kantian sense that is at issue in FB.46 It is Hegelian universality. As Merold Westphal contends, it is “the concrete universality of the social order.”47 What this means can best be explained with reference to the idea of social roles that I used in my discussion of Quinn. There I made the point that in as much as ethics is constituted through concrete social institutions, then ethics consists of the individual roles that fill the functions that define those institutions. These institutions are what Westphal calls “the social order”: “In Hegelian terms, then, || 42 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 195. 43 C. Stephen Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality: A Reading of Fear and Trembling”, p. 214. In a similar fashion Johansen defines the ethical in FB as: argumentative (that is, inherently reasonable), public, and universal (Kjell Eyvind Johansen, “Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification”, p. 269). Note, however, that Johansen operates with a more Kantian interpretation of universality than what I do here. 44 I will leave aside the question of why exactly ethics is divine as it does not directly affect the argument, and neither am I certain that it is correct. In the passage at the beginning of “Problema II”, where Silentio does state that ethics is divine, this is done in order to disparage the Hegelian view that it is only through the ethical that a human being may to relate to the divine (SKS 4, 160–161 / FT, 68–69). Hence, the divine nature of ethics seems more a feature of Hegel than of Silentio. In a related context, Westphal notes: “But nothing Silentio says about Sittlichkeit suggests that it presupposes a divine command meta-ethic” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith, p. 68). Thus, in Silentio’s appropriation of Hegelian ethical theory, he leaves out its divine basis. In reality, the whole crux of FB could be said to be the aesthetic suggestion that the divine is something absolutely different from both ethics and rationality. 45 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 15. 46 As regards the contention that the concept of the ethical operative in FB is Kantian, and not Hegelian, this is something that is implicitly ruled out by the discussion that follows in the main text by the inherently Hegelian view about the close connection between language and the ethical operative in FB, both of which are defined in relation to the universal – this being the concrete universal of the social order. In other words, both language and ethics are products of concrete human intersubjectivity. This said, it is obvious that the thought of FB owes a lot to Kant; then again, so does Hegel. 47 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 76. See also Evans (C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, pp. 66–67). For a basic, introductory overview of the issue of Kierkegaard’s concept of the universal, see Chapter 4 of Lippitt (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 81–109).

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the universality of the ethical designates not Moralität, with its inner conviction of personal conscience, but Sittlichkeit, the public life of a people, institutionalized in family, civil society, and the state.”48 There is, therefore, a radical difference in what “universality” means in the Kantian and the Hegelian approaches. Per the Hegelian approach, what makes the ethical “universal” is that it exists by virtue of human interaction. The ethical is the dimension of how human interaction is formalized and organized. It is the social dimension per se, the complex game of how we behave towards one another in concrete encounters relative to our social standing. Ethics is “universal” not in the sense of absolute validity, but “universal” in nature, in the way that it exists.49 The above characterization can be confirmed by Robert R. Williams’ study of Hegelian ethics and the latter’s reliance upon the concept of recognition. Williams argues: “Right is properly appreciated only when its rational-universal grounding in intersubjective recognition is understood.”50 Thus, according to Williams, Hegel’s concept of right only makes sense when understood as a function of intersubjective recognition, as a function of concrete human interaction. Right only exists within human interaction. Furthermore, reciprocal recognition is the main structural feature of any ethical community.51 An ethical community exists in and through the shared enterprise of recognition. Williams goes on: Both right and ethics are conceived as interhuman modes of existence. In mutual recognition, nominalist individualism is transcended in principle; for mutual recognition establishes a nonheteronomous, concrete universal subject or general will that is constituted when individuals overcome their isolation and abstraction.52

This puts us into a position to appreciate why Hannay’s third characteristic of the ethical is something “disclosed”, that is, rationally intelligible and publicly communicable. In reality, being “disclosed” and being “universal” is the same thing, for a thing can only be universal in the sense defined above if it is disclosed, that is, if it is something inherently shared, intelligible, and communicable. Silentio confirms as much when he writes: “Det Ethiske er som saadant det Almene, som

|| 48 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 76–77. 49 To illustrate the difference, think about the Latin root of the word “universal”: universalis means “of, or belonging, to all”. The ethical is universal in the sense that exists by virtue of belonging to “all”, that is, by virtue of being something shared. (In its root, the word “universal” mirrors the Hegelian concept of “Allgemeine” which is how “universal” translates.) 50 Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, p. 111. 51 Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, p. 2; 25. 52 Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, p. 117. My emphasis.

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det Almene er det igjen det Aabenbare” (Kierkegaard 1997c, 172);53 that is, because it is the universal (“det Almene”) it is the disclosed (“det Aabenbare”). Given this, the ethical must have natural connection to conceptual thought because the only way it can organize human interaction in terms of institutions and roles is by being constituted in terms of concepts. Consider the following: If doing the right thing means acting according to social roles, then it presupposes that one is able to recognize which social roles operate in any given situation. This recognition demands concepts and conceptual thought. Agamemnon’s dilemma, for example, demands that he recognizes that he is torn between two senses of what is right, between two social roles. To Hegel, the connection between ethics and conceptual thought is essential. Conceptual thought is a function of language,54 and language and ethics are both defined by his concept of Geist. Let me quote Williams quoting Nicolai Hartmann on the nature of Geist: It is the sphere in which we are situated and nurtured by birth, education and historical influence. It is an all pervasive reality that we know in culture, customs, language, thought forms, prejudices, dominant values – all as supra-individual and nevertheless real powers, in the face of which the individual stands virtually powerless and defenseless, because his own being no less than all the others is permeated, carried along and shaped by these.55

Geist is the collective mind, or mind-world, of a society and culture. It manifests itself in how representatives of the culture reason and behave, in their ethics and language. It is what makes ethics and language into what they are. Thus, ethics and language, and therefore conceptual thought, are connected at the root.56

|| 53 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82: “The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed.” 54 Tracing Hegel’s understanding of thought and language back to Schelling, Jere O’Neill Surber notes: “it is through language that all that is external and foreign to consciousness is appropriated by consciousness and made its own in the form of concepts” (Jere O’Neill Surber, “Introduction”, p. 11). Michael N. Forster has argued to the same effect, though he traces Hegel’s understanding of language and thought primarily to Herder, and notes that Hegel vacillates upon the issue throughout his career, though ultimately confirming it in his later works, i.e. thought’s dependence upon language (Michael N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language, p. 150–160). 55 Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, p. 267. The original quote is from Nicolai Hartmann, Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, p. 497. The translation is Williams’. 56 The following quote from Hegel’s early work, First Philosophy of Spirit, is especially illuminating: “speech [i.e. language] only is as the speech of a people, and understanding and Reason likewise. Only as the work of a people is speech the ideal existence of the spirit, in which it ex-

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The same connection between the ethical and conceptual thought, between how people think and behave, can also be found in FB. The connection is apparent in as much as Silentio defines both language and the ethical as universal: “Det Ethiske er som saadant det Almene…”57 And: “Saasnart jeg taler, udtrykker jeg det Almene, og naar jeg ikke gjør det, saa kan Ingen forstaae mig.”58 The universal (“det Almene”) constitutes the essence of both ethics and language – the ethical is the universal, language expresses the universal. This demonstrates that in incorporating a Hegelian view about ethics Silentio also incorporates a Hegelian view about language and conceptual thought, and their connection to ethics,59 a necessary move given how Hegel thinks about ethics.60 An important consequence of Silentio’s Hegelian position is that in as much as conceptual thought is defined by the universal, then so is human reason. We reason in terms of concepts, and concepts are given us by language, by the universal. Having established this, I can move on to explaining what I meant by claiming that the tragic hero personifies not only the values of a particular ethical community, but, more generally personifies what it means for an individual to be ethical: not in the sense of adherence to a code of conduct, but in the sense of what such adherence means for an individual, what it does to an individual to adhere.

|| presses what it is in its essence and its being; speech is a universal [mode of expression], recognized in itself, and resounding in the same way in the consciousness of all; every speaking consciousness comes immediately to be another consciousness in it. In respect of its content too, speech comes to be true speech for the first time in a people, for now it expresses what each one means; barbarians do not know how to say what they mean; they only half say it, or they say the direct opposite of what they want to say; for [ethical nature, which is] what memory, the process of coming to speech, first makes ideal, is only present in a people” (G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, pp. 244–245). 57 SKS 4, 148 / FT, 54: “The ethical as such is the universal…” 58 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60: “As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.” 59 Since this is a difficult issue, I will here make an exception to my strategy of not going into Kierkegaard’s other works, and point out that the above view of language, concepts and ethics is also readily apparent in Enten-Eller (SKS 2, 71–77 / EO1, 64–71). 60 Harvie Ferguson has argued for the same connection between the human understanding, thus language, and the ethical in FB. In confronting Abraham, Ferguson points out: “The understanding is helpless just because, properly speaking, it belongs to the ethical sphere. It is a human universal, and cannot make sense of the exception” (Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity, p. 105).

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As was just made clear, conceptual thought and ethics are universal in the sense that they constitute the social and communal dimension of a human being’s life. As reasonable creatures, humankind thinks and behaves collectively.61 In as much as man behaves in accordance with society, speaks its language, and follows its norms, human beings express the universal. Above I quoted Williams to the effect that the ethical individual, or the “concrete universal subject”, is constituted through an “overcoming” of the individual’s “isolation and abstraction”. In order to be part of the collective, one has to set aside one’s individual inclinations. Becoming ethical, therefore, presupposes an operation of “overcoming”. The individual has to surmount, subdue, or sublate part of him/herself in order to realize him/herself as an ethical individual.62 What Williams says about the individual’s relation to the ethical in Hegelian thought runs parallel to Silentio’s view about what it means for the individual to become ethical. In “Problema I” Silentio writes: Det Ethiske er som saadant det Almene, og som det Almene Det, der er gjeldende for Enhver, hvilket fra en anden Side lader sig udtrykke saaledes, at det er gjeldende i ethvert Øieblik. Det hviler immanent i sig selv, har Intet uden for sig, der er dets τελος, men er selv τελος for Alt, hvad det har udenfor sig, og naar det Ethiske har optaget dette i sig, da kommer det ikke videre. Umiddelbar sandselig og sjælelig bestemmet er den Enkelte den Enkelte, der i det Almene har sit τελος, og dette er hans ethiske Opgave, bestandig at udtrykke sig selv i dette, at ophæve sin Enkelthet for at blive det Almene.63

|| 61 This is not to say that it is impossible to act otherwise, to act out of emotion, and counter to what is expected, it simply points out that by so doing an individual cannot rationally defend his actions. 62 See the following passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality. His true original nature and substance is the alienation of himself as Spirit from his natural being. This externalization is, therefore, both the purpose and the existence of the individual; it is at once the means, or the transition, both of the [mere] thought-form of substance into actuality, and, conversely, of the specific individuality into essentiality. This individuality moulds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is, and only by so doing is it an intrinsic being that has actual existence; the measure of its culture is the measure of its actuality and power. Although here the self knows itself as this self, yet its actuality consists solely in the setting-aside of its natural self” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 298). The view is repeated in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 195). 63 SKS 4, 148 / FT, 54: “The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τελος [end, purpose] but is itself the τελος for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further. The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τελος

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Thus, in order to become ethical the individual has to express (“udtrykke”) the universal, and in order to do this, s/he has to sublate (“ophæve”) his/her particularity (“Enkelthet”) and become the universal (“det Almene”). Moreover, it is in the universal that a human being has his/her telos, that is, the goal and measure of his/her life: who s/he is, the role s/he has to play. Note that because of how the ethical is defined here, the ethical is not merely the “ethical” as we like to think about it in moral philosophy, it also denotes one’s socialization and culturally defined self-understanding. Silentio revisits the individual’s relation to the ethical in “Problema III”: Det Ethiske er som saadant det Almene, som det Almene er det igjen det Aabenbare. Den Enkelte er som umiddelbar sandselig og sjælelig betsemmet den Skjulte. Hans ethiske Opgave er da den, at vikle sig ud af sin Skjulthed og blive aabenbar i det Almene.64

Here the pattern repeats itself: In order to become ethical the individual has to sublate his/her hiddenness (“Skjulthed”) and disclose him/herself in the universal. As is apparent from the two passages, being ethical presupposes an act of becoming ethical. If a person “is ethical”, this does not simply mean that s/he abides by, and conforms to, the norms governing his/her situation, it means that the person has sublated his/her immediate sensory and psychic nature (his/her particularity, his/her hiddenness) and expressed him/herself in the universal; being ethical is grounded in a psychological operation. On a connected note, Terry Eagleton has argued that this view is fundamental to the ethical philosophies of both Kant and Hegel, pointing out that you can only become ethical through an act of sacrifice: “For Hegel as for Kant, the ethical involves relating one’s particularity to the universal… [I]n both cases the structure is one of sacrifice, as the particular is subordinated to the well-being of the whole.”65

|| in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal.” 64 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82: “The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden. Thus his ethical task is to work himself out of his hiddenness and to become disclosed in the universal.” 65 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 44. Note that, on a more general level, this is basically how the Enlightenment saw human beings’ relation to the cultural, as involving an essential shift away from the human being’s “natural” being. Peter Sloterdijk writes: “Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial naturalness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlightenment’s reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they

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There are clear cut Freudian overtones to this. The “immediate sensory and psychic nature” of a person is his/her interior, his/her feelings, sensations and private thoughts: the mental elements that belong to him/her, and exclusively to him/her, in terms of his/her existence as a unique human individual. In “Problema III” Silentio defines this dimension of human existence as the “aesthetic”.66 The rationale behind this is that the interior of a human being constitutes his/her subjective reception of the world, his/her thoughts and feelings about how things strike him/her, and what impressions things make. The aesthetic, if anywhere, is found here, in pleasure gained from how things impress themselves upon one.67 The interior, however, is also precisely what an individual has to sublate in order to become ethical. Ethics demand that a human being sets aside his/her personal reactions and preferences – his/her interior. In “Problema II” Silentio writes: “For den ethiske Betragtning af Livet er det da den Enkeltes Opgave, at afføre sig selv Inderlighedens Bestemmelse og udtrykke denne i et Ydre.”68 To quote Westphal: “The aesthetic must sublimate itself in the ethical and the id must learn to subordinate itself to the superego.”69

|| are, live ‘unnaturally.’ What was natural in them was ‘lost’ and became ‘distorted’ and ‘misshapen’ through civilization. Human individuals are never in the ‘center of their beings,’ but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they ‘really’ are or could be” (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 53). 66 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82. It ought to be mentioned that Silentio uses the word “aesthetics” both to denote aisthesis, that is, the domain of emotions and perceptions, of how a subject experiences, and to denote a theory of art (the latter especially in “Problema III” in relation to narratology and the makings of a good story). Moreover, Silentio uses the term in both ways without making the fact explicitly clear. I take this to indicate that the two levels are implicitly seen to be connected, that art ultimately rests upon aisthesis. 67 See the following general statement by George Pattison on Kierkegaard’s concept of the aesthetic: “For such an individual – a nineteenth-century flâneur or a member of the modern leisure society – life itself has become theatre. This is the epitome of the aesthetic attitude portrayed in such a figure as Johannes the Seducer. In this aesthetic world there is no concrete, stable matrix of meaning and significance. Everything is only what it seems: perspective, point of view, image” (George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, p. 115). Similarly, Kai Hammermeister defines it as follows: “The aesthetic existence is one of sensuality; it is characterized by an immediacy in which man exists as a being governed by drives and sensuality, determined exclusively by his nature and driven by the search for pleasure as his highest principle” (Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, p. 130). 68 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69: “Thus in the ethical view of life, it is the task of the single individual to strip himself of the qualification of interiority and to express this in something external.” 69 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 78.

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In the common scenario, therefore, becoming ethical is an interior, psychological operation in which the individual overcomes, s/he sublates, his/her individual preferences in order to adjust him/herself to the parameters of the social order. By being thus directed against subjective preferences, it is important to note that what an individual has to go through in order to express him/herself in the universal is likewise interior. It is private. What other people see is what a person does, not the tremors of the soul that potentially underlie that behavior, that is, other people do not see what it costs the individual to adjust. My suggestion is that the described operation of becoming ethical, the “sacrifice”, to use Eagleton’s terminology, represents the principle relation of an individual to the ethical in FB. It is what the ethical means seen from the vantage point of the individual qua being a unique, singular existence. The reason I have sought to clarify this is that it allows me to shed additional light upon the tragic hero, thereby adding to Evans’ description of him. Consider the following: Typically, the cost of becoming ethical is hidden in the interior of the individual. In Agamemnon, however, this is not so because the collision of norms that define his situation turn him inside out, allowing the cost of becoming ethical to be disclosed. The reason for this is that what Agamemnon has to overcome in order to adjust to the parameters of the social order is likewise an element of the social order. Filling the role of “subjective preference” in his case is his role as father, in terms of which he is bound to love and care for his daughter because such an emotional bond is part of what it means to be a father, socially speaking. As Silentio writes in relation to Abraham: “Der er intet høiere Udtryk for det Ethiske i Abrahams Liv, end dette, at Faderen skal elske Sønnen.”70 Thus, in as much as Agamemnon is forced to suspend his role as father in relation to his role as ruler, he is forced to suspend his love for Iphigenia in relation to what is right: a fact that is conspicuous to any observer that understands the socio-ethical ramifications of what is going on. Therefore, by virtue of the collision that defines his situation, the cost of becoming ethical is disclosed in Agamemnon’s situation, something I take to be a feature of the tragic hero at large, as Silentio is never interested in Agamemnon in particular, but always Agamemnon as a tragic hero. There are several passages in FB that confirm the disclosed nature of Agamemnon’s, the tragic hero’s, grief and travails, for example: “Og trænger Smerten end eensomt ind i hans Bryst, har han kun 3 Medvidere i Folket, snart skal det hele Folk være Medvider i hans Smerte, men ogsaa Medvider i hans Daad, at han for det

|| 70 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 59: “There is no higher expression for the ethical in Abraham’s life than that the father shall love the son.” See also, SKS 4, 151 / FT, 57.

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Heles Vel vilde offre hende...”;71 or: “Den egentlige tragiske Helt offrer sig selv og alt Sit for det Almene; hans Gjerning, enhver Rørelse i ham tilhører det Almene, han er aabenbar, og i denne Aabenbarelse Ethikens elskelige Søn.”72 Just to be clear: In the latter quote, Silentio accentuates that in the tragic heroes every impulse and affect (“Rørelse”) belongs to the universal and disclosed, confirming my argument. For impulse and affect are aesthetic elements. They are feelings. They belong to an individual’s interior, and are hidden, at least in accordance with the normal order of things. Yet, in the tragic hero, they are disclosed. In light of this, I believe, the tragic hero not only personifies the values of a certain ethical order, but also the principle struggle and sacrifice inherent in an individual’s relation to the ethical. The reason it is important to establish this, is that it says something about what makes the tragic hero into the special kind of hero s/he is. It is not only that s/he shows morally exemplary qualities under especially grave and dark circumstances, it is also that s/he personifies what it means for an individual to be ethical per se. This s/he does by making the struggle and sacrifice involved in becoming ethical into a manifest and disclosed phenomenon. Consequently, the tragic hero utterly embodies the universality and disclosed nature that Silentio takes as characteristic of the ethical. The tragic hero belongs to the universal, heart and soul. S/he is, as Silentio, phrases it: “the beloved son of the ethical” (“Ethikens elskelige Søn”). Having established this about the tragic hero, I turn to the knight of faith.

2.6 The knight of faith The knight of faith is not a tragic hero. By itself this is not an accomplishment. Most people are not tragic heroes. There is, however, something special in the “not” of the knight of faith, a fact illustrated in Hannay’s description of the story of Abraham as nobler than any tragedy. For in order for something to be “nobler” than something else, the things have to be comparable, and one comparably

|| 71 SKS 4, 151 / FT, 57: “Although the lonely agony penetrates his breast and there are only three persons in the whole nation who know his agony, soon the whole nation will be initiated into his agony and also into his deed, that for the welfare of all he will sacrifice her…” 72 SKS 4, 201 / FT, 113: “The authentic tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything that is his for the universal; his act and every emotion in him belong to the universal; he is open, and in this disclosure he is the beloved son of ethics.”

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greater than the other. Thus, the reason the knight of faith is not a tragic hero is not because s/he falls short of qualifying as one, but because s/he goes beyond the qualifications, and ends up being something else. What is comparable between the knight of faith and the tragic hero is that they both face a collision. What is of a higher order regarding this collision in the case of the knight of faith is that s/he faces a collision with the ethical, categorically speaking. The knight of faith is not called to action by a higher norm, but by God. And God is higher than ethics. If he were not, as Silentio argues in “Problema II”, then God would be an invisible, waning point, “en afmægtig Tanke”,73 because his relation to humankind would be constrained by the ethical, his/her importance nothing more than that contained by the ethical. God would be inseparable from the ethical, and the ethical inseparable from God. Following the logic of FB, the word “God” would denote nothing more than, to use Williams’ phrasing, an “interhuman mode of existence”. But, according to Silentio, it is not like this. God is the absolute.74 Silentio: Troens Paradox er da dette, at den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, at den Enkelte, for at erindre om en nu sjeldnere dogmatisk Distinction, bestemmer sit Forhold til det Almene ved sit Forhold til det Absolute, ikke sit Forhold til det Absolute ved sit Forhold til det Almene. Paradoxet kan ogsaa udtrykkes saaledes, at der er en absolut Pligt mod Gud; thi i dette Pligtforhold forholder den Enkelte som den Enkelte sig absolut til det Absolute. Naar det da i denne Forbindelse hedder, at det er Pligt at elske Gud, saa siges dermed noget Andet end i det Foregaaende; thi er denne Pligt absolut, saa er det Ethiske nedsat til det Relative. Heraf følger dog ikke, at dette skal tilintetgjøres, men det faaer et ganske andet Udtryk, det paradoxe Udtryk, saaledes at f. Ex. Kjærlighed til Gud kan bringe Troens Ridder til at give sin Kjærlighed til Næsten det modsatte Udtryk af hvad der ethisk talt er Pligt.75

|| 73 SKS 4, 160 / FT, 68: “…an impotent thought…” 74 Westphal has pointed out how this move constitutes a critique of Hegelian philosophy: “Implicit in these formulae is the charge that Hegel absolutizes the ethical. This would mean that our relation to God is so thoroughly mediated via the social order that faith becomes indistinguishable from socialization, and the individual’s relation to God is no longer a personal one” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 77). 75 SKS 4, 162 / FT, 70: “The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual – to recall a distinction in dogmatics rather rare these days – determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. The paradox may also be expressed in this way: that there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute. In this connection, to say that it is a duty to love God means something different from the above, for if this duty is absolute, then the

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Thus, since s/he is defined by his/her relation to God, to a power beyond the ethical, it is not within the ethical that the knight of faith has his/her nature and essence. It is not his/her lot to embody morally exemplary qualities. Silentio: Det er ikke for at frelse et Folk, ikke for at hævde Statens Idee, at Abraham gjør det, ikke for at forsone vrede Guder. Kunde der være Tale om, at Guddommen var vred, da var han jo kund vred paa Abraham, og Abrahams hele Gjerning staaer i intet Forhold til det Almene, er et reent privat Foretagende. Medens derfor den tragiske Helt er stor ved sin sædelige Dyd, er Abraham stor ved en reen personlig Dyd.76

What this means, concretely, is that in the eyes of the ethical there is no other judgment for what Abraham does other than that what he does is wrong. Ethically speaking, Abraham is a murderer.77 Whereas the tragic hero, therefore, can be excused for the atrocity s/he commits, and the atrocity can even be rationalized and understood as the proper thing to do, there is no such excuse or rationalization for Abraham. Abraham has been called to act by a power beyond the ethical. As such, he cannot make himself understood within the ethical. In Silentio’s Hegelian terminology, his position cannot be mediated into the universal. It cannot be disclosed. Abraham cannot explain and rationalize his behavior to others. Silentio: “Abraham kan ikke medieres, hvilket ogsaa kan udtrykkes saaledes: han kan ikke tale”;78 and: “Troen selv kan ikke medieres ind i det Almene; thi derved hæves den. Troen er dette Paradox, og den Enkelte kan aldeles ikke gjøre sig forstaaelig for Nogen” (Kierkegaard 1997c, 163).79

|| ethical is reduced to the relative. From this it does not follow that the ethical should be invalidated; rather, the ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression, such as, for example, that love to God may bring the knight of faith to give his love to the neighbor – an expression opposite to that which, ethically speaking, is duty.” 76 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 59: “It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the state that Abraham does it; it is not to appease the angry gods. If it were a matter of the deity’s being angry, then he was, after all, angry only with Abraham, and Abraham’s act is totally unrelated to the universal, is a purely private endeavor. Therefore, while the tragic hero is great because of his moral virtue, Abraham is great because of a purely personal virtue.” 77 SKS 4, 165–166 / FT, 74. Johansen confirms this interpretation: “The duty which Abraham is obeying does not find its expression in the reality, or the objective and universal meaning of the act, since his act is and remains an act of murder” (Kjell Eyvind Johansen, Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification, p. 271). 78 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60: “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak.” 79 SKS 4, 163 / FT, 71: “Faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for thereby it is canceled. Faith is this paradox, and the single individual simply cannot make himself understandable to anyone.” Note that this inability to communicate is not a physical state of muteness.

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How does Abraham exist then? “Han existerer som den Enkelte i Modsætning til det Almene... Er han berettiget? Hans Berettigelse er igjen det Paradoxe; thi dersom han er det, er han det ikke i Kraft af at være noget Almeent, men i Kraft af at være den Enkelte.”80 What makes Abraham into a hero, therefore, has to be found in how he responds to something beyond the ethical. This “responsiveness to something beyond the ethical” is faith. Abraham is a hero because he manifests faith. He is a hero because he does as God commands even though he knows that what God commands is ethically wrong. Furthermore, he is a hero because he believes in God even though God reneges on his/her word. God has already promised that through Abraham’s descendants, through Isaac, all the people of the earth will be blessed. Thus, by demanding Isaac’s sacrifice, s/he apparently contradicts this promise. Yet Abraham has faith that God will uphold his promise. And that is the whole crux of it: Abraham has faith. He has faith in the face of one of the most horrific events imaginable: the murder of his own son, rightfully demanded by an incomprehensible God.81 Hannay writes: What Abraham believes, says the author, is that even if he carries out God’s command he will keep Isaac “in this life”, not that “he should be happy sometime in the hereafter”. In Hegel’s terms, he believes the ideals of the ethical life will be preserved even if he carries out an act in direct contravention of those ideals. Hegel said that tragedy affords a glimpse of eternal justice, the state of things in which the tragic action is vindicated. But Abraham acts as if that state of things were already true here on Earth. He does so “on the strength of the absurd”, believing that “for God all things are possible”.82

Just as Agamemnon is a tragic hero because of how he responds to his collision, Abraham is a knight of faith because of how he responds to his double-collision. But here their similarities end. Agamemnon is a hero of human beings’ relation to the ethical. Abraham is a hero of human beings’ relation to God. To quote G. K. || Abraham cannot speak in the sense that he cannot convey his religious reasons for acting. He cannot mediate his religious state into the universal, into a form that can be intersubjectively and publicly shared. He has not lost the ability to speak in itself (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 130). 80 SKS 4, 155 / FT, 61–62: “He exists as the single individual in contrast to the universal… Is he justified? Again, his justification is the paradoxical, for if he is, then he is justified not by virtue of being something universal but by virtue of being the single individual.” 81 The fact that it is both “rightful” and “incomprehensible” is precisely the core of the paradox of faith. 82 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 192. The relevant quotes from Kierkegaard can be found in SKS 4, 131; 141 / FT, 36; 46.

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Chesterton: “For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point – and does not break.”83 Chesterton’s remark is an apt characterization of both Agamemnon and Abraham. Both of them are forced to extreme ends in terms of their situation, but they persevere, showing themselves to be exemplary: heroes in a substantial sense. And as heroes, they are bound to the narrative that makes them so. They are what they are in terms of the collision that defines their stories. This argument demonstrates the existence of a sense in which Abraham can be called a hero: a hero in terms of his relation to the divine, a religious hero as opposed to an ethical hero. It does not show the more general idea, that I also put forth in the introduction to this chapter, that faith itself is heroic. An argument to this end, however, is implicitly contained in what has been developed so far.

2.7 Faith as a species of heroism When contrasting Abraham to the tragic hero, it became apparent that faith must consist in responsiveness to something beyond the ethical: “must”, because if not, then the only relation between humankind and God would be that of the ethical. If so, God would have no other significance in relation to an individual other than an ethical one. God would simply be the ethical by another name. As a consequence, Abraham would be lost. His story would not be a story about faith, but about insanity and immorality. The whole of FB is built upon the idea that that is not the case. Abraham is the father of faith, a paradigm of the relation of a human being to God. FB is an attempt to make plain the consequences of this view, one of which being that there has to exist a level of meaning beyond the ethical / the universal / the conceptual. There has to be, because the only way to save Abraham, to make Abraham into an exemplar of faith, is by making faith into something capable of making murder into a godly act.84 If not, God is constrained by the ethical, and Abraham is lost. Consequently, having faith consists of the above described responsiveness, attunement to a frequency beyond the ethical and rational bandwidth. It also consists of a break with concrete universal of the social order although not in the sense that faith has to lead to hands-on unethical acts; rather, that one who has faith relates to an authority beyond that of the ethical. Likewise, Hannay also || 83 G. K. Chesterton, The Dover Reader, p. 368. 84 SKS 4, 147 / FT, 53.

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suggests that “if Abraham is to remain a hero, then the individual must take priority over the general or the universal.”85 It is this priority of the particular over the universal, the individual over the ethical, that characterizes faith. In Silentio’s description from “Problema I”: Troen er netop dette Paradox, at den Enkelte som den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, er berettiget ligeoverfor dette, ikke subordineret, men overordnet, dog vel at mærke saaledes, at det er den Enkelte der efter at have været som den Enkelte det Almene underordnet, nu gjennem det Almene bliver den Enkelte, der som den Enkelte er det overordnet; at den Enkelte som den Enkelte staaer i et absolut Forhold til det Absolute.86

Faith, therefore, calls for an “extremity of individuality”. In order to have faith, a person has to rise above society, language, and reason. What speaks to a person by virtue of his/her unique individuality has to outweigh what speaks to him/her in terms of his/her participation in the universal. “Troen derimod er dette Paradox at Inderligheden er høiere end Yderligheden…”87 The interior has to outweigh the communal and shared. There is no other way of having faith, therefore, other than facing a collision of the religious against the ethical. This is what it means to be responsive to something beyond the ethical. You stand in relation to a higher power, a power exempted from the ethical (“den Enkelte som den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, er berettiget ligeoverfor dette”). As such, faith necessarily involves a conflict between life’s actual final authority, God, and the only authority that is communally recognizable, ethics. In conclusion, Abraham is a hero of faith, and faith, more generally, is a form of heroism. Faith does not come lightly. Just as the ethical demands the sacrifice of one’s particularity, the religious demands the sacrifice of the ethical. It demands that the individual lives a certain kind of story, the plot of which entails a collision between the ethical and the religious. Faith sets an individual apart from society and other people, an “apartness” that, as I demonstrate, defines the knight of faith narratively: a definition that will let me make sense of the observation that in as much as faith is something heroic it presupposes a narrative. The knight of faith is narratively identifiable, at least partly, in terms of his/her actions, || 85 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 194. 86 SKS 4, 149–150 / FT, 55–56: “Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior – yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.” 87 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69: “But faith is the paradox that interiority is higher than exteriority…”

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in terms of the quality of apartness that s/he exhibits. Silentio indicates this point in “Problema II”: Om den Enkelte nu virkelig ligger i en Anfægtelse eller han er Troens Ridder, det kan kun den Enkelte selv afgjøre. Imidlertid lod der sig dog ud af Paradoxet construere nogle Kjendetegn, som ogsaa den kan forstaae, der ikke er deri. Den sande Troens Ridder er altid den absolute Isolation, den uægte er secterisk.88

This is my first mention of the concept of apartness, which is central to my proposed understanding of the knight of faith in this study. Here it is only presented in the barest outline as the sense in which the knight of faith must deviate from the norm if s/he truly is a knight of faith. Later it will be shown that there exists a certain kind of system to his/her deviation. A knight of faith will, to an extent, exhibit behavioral markers. There is, however, an implicit problem in the foregoing to which I have not drawn explicit attention: the problem of communicability. I now turn to this.

2.8 The problem of communicability If the religious is, to use Hannay, a dimension in which the particular takes priority over the universal, then the religious is not universalizable, not translatable into the universal. Consequently, the religious goes against the very essence of the ethical, which is also the point: In order for Abraham to be saved as a paradigm of faith, the religious has to be something other than ethics. Ethics, however, is conceived of as the interhuman dimension of existence. To claim that the particular takes priority over the universal is to break with this dimension. The religious cannot constitute a shared ideal, “cannot” because it is not interhuman,

|| 88 SKS 4, 170 / FT, 79. My emphasis: “Whether the single individual actually is undergoing a spiritual trial or is a knight of faith, only the single individual himself can decide. But from the paradox itself several characteristic signs may be inferred that are understandable also to someone not in it. The true knight of faith is always absolute isolation; the spurious knight is sectarian.” Connected to this, Silentio at one point defines the knight of faith in terms of his capability to express the sublime in the pedestrian: “Men at kunne falde saaledes ned, at det i samme Secund seer ud som stod og gik man, at forvandle Springet i Livet til Gang, absolut at udtrykke det Sublime i det Pedestre – det kan kun hiin Ridder, – og dette er det eneste Vidunder” (SKS 4, 136 / FT, 41: “But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian – only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.”). This also confirms that there exists some kind of extraordinary property definitive of the knight of faith.

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it is individual. As explained earlier, the ethical demands an operation in which the individual sublates his/her particularity and realizes him/herself in terms of the universal. Particularity cannot be the “terms of the universal”. Particularity is the antithesis of the universal. It is what has to be sublated and overcome. The religious is, therefore, not an ideal for humankind, only an ideal for the individual. This brings with it the problem of communicability. Given the above, the religious cannot be presented in the following form: “Here is what we should do…”; “Here is how we should live as individuals…”. There is no “we” in the religious. There is no shared truth. The religious speaks to us in terms of our individuality. Thus, the idea Silentio raises cannot be presented as something we have in common: as universal. It cannot be presented as a truth. If something is true, then it is essentially the same for everyone. A truth presupposes a shared level of experience. A truth is universal. The religious is not. One of the main defining aspects of FB is that Silentio does not attempt to present the religious as a truth. To the contrary, Silentio consistently terms it a paradox. It is made out to be nonsensical given the standards of reason, something incomprehensible and ineffable. This paradoxicality of faith is mainly explored in the three problemas, FB’s principal theoretical chapters. The basic form of the paradox is given by the feature I have argued to be definitive of the knight of faith: the knight of faith’s “responsiveness to something beyond the ethical”. As explained, this means that through the religious the individual takes priority over the universal.89 “Troen er netop dette Paradox, at den Enkelte som den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene...”90 Translating Silentio: Faith is the paradox that the individual, qua his/her individuality, or particularity, is higher than the universal. What makes this into a paradox can be appreciated on two levels: First, the claim that the particular is higher than the universal inverts the conceptual order between particularity and universality. A universal is what is common to a set of individually distinct particulars. Hence the universal necessarily has a more abstract and elevated nature than the particular. A particular is identifiable as what it is in terms of conforming to a universal, and is therefore dependent upon the

|| 89 Note that in the following reasoning I am going to use “individuality” and “particularity” interchangeably. 90 SKS 4, 149 / FT, 55: “Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal…”

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universal for its intelligibility – it is subordinate to it.91 Second, the claim that the particular is higher than the universal goes against the principle of the Hegelian ethics outlined above. According to Hegelian ethics, an individual has to sublate his/her particularity in order to become universal. Ethically speaking, the particular is subordinate to the universal.92 Claiming that through faith the individual is higher than the universal is paradoxical, because the claim inverts the relationship, both ethical and conceptual, between particularity and universality. As such, the statement does not make sense. Senselessness, however, is precisely what, according to Silentio, characterizes Abraham and, by extension, the knight of faith. The aim of the problemas is to work out how this senselessness practically manifests itself in the story of Abraham. If Abraham is to be someone one has cause to admire, then: “Problema I” – there has to exist a teleological suspension of the ethical; “Problema II” – there has to exist an absolute duty towards God; “Problema III” – Abraham cannot speak, and must, therefore, be justified in his silence. All of these are inexplicable, paradoxical aspects. A teleological suspension of the ethical would mean that there exists behavior that takes on the exact form of ethical wrongdoing, yet is not ethically wrong because ethics is suspended. Suspension, however, does not make the act ethically right. As argued earlier, if one suspends something, it is still there, bubbling below the level one has moved on to. In this context, suspension means that something has rightfully taken precedence over the whole of the ethical: a paradoxical gesture given that ethics is the authority on right and wrong. An absolute duty towards God would mean that there exists a duty that is private and personal, that is, a duty that places that the individual outside of the ethical. “Duty” is, however, an ethical concept, which makes the idea of a nonethical duty paradoxical.

|| 91 This is so whether or not one is a nominalist, or a realist, the difference between these persuasions being the nature of the existence of universals, and not whether or not particulars are understood by virtue of universals. 92 Jeremy Walker argues that the paradox of claiming that the particular is higher than the universal emerges “if we supply the implicit theory of ethics which underlies them, and which I summarized in the two propositions that the ethical is the universal, and the universal is higher than the particular. Now this implicit ethical theory is not described in Fear and Trembling. To get an idea of it… we should look back at the Hegelian ethical theory of the Philosophy of Right.” (Jeremy Walker, “The Paradox in Fear and Trembling”, p. 140–141) And, as I’ve argued, it is the Hegelian theory of ethics that underlies FB.

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The issue treated in “Problema III” is whether or not Abraham is justified in not speaking to either Sarah, Eliezer, or Isaac about what he is about to do; that is, if he is right in covering up and hiding his real intention in taking Isaac to Moriah. The question, therefore, is principally the same as the one treated in “Problema I”. If the ethical is suspended in relation to the act of sacrifice, it is surely suspended in relation to withholding his intentions. “Problema III”, therefore, does not generate any novel formulation of the paradox of faith but, rather, explores different aspects of Abraham’s situation.93 Furthermore, that the religious is not a truth shows itself in the fact that all three of the problemas have an open ending. They do not conclude anything. They all round off in the following manner: Either there exists a teleological suspension of the ethical / an absolute duty towards God / an absolute relation to the absolute, or else Abraham is lost, and there is no such thing as faith.94 FB, therefore, does not decisively conclude that Abraham actually is a knight of faith, a fact that does not in way count against its analysis of the knight of faith. On the contrary, in accordance with FB’s analysis, faith is not something that can manifest itself as a truth. Faith is an absolute relation to the absolute, one in which the individual is higher than the universal. The act of not concluding, therefore, of leaving it open, fits naturally with the picture of the religious that is given. By not concluding, Silentio presents the logical consequence of what he himself says. He shows that he knows full well that faith is not something that can be manifested through words – not straightforwardly. Faith is incommunicable, ineffable. “Saasnart jeg taler, udtrykker jeg det Almene, og naar jeg ikke gjør det, saa kan Ingen forstaae mig.”95 Yet, Silentio does speak about it. Hannay: The pseudonymous author says that in order for Abraham to be understood as other than a criminal or insane, a new “category” is required. He doesn’t say what it is; the benefits and costs of breaking with the ethical are left for the reader to ponder, though again, be it noted, not of simply infringing the basic requirements of the ethical – universality, immanence, and disclosure – but of actually breaking with them as requirements. The choice of pseudonym (de silentio) indicates that in pondering this second-level break the reader is poised at the very edge of communicability. Fear and Trembling takes poetry, or literature, as a way

|| 93 The main issue of “Problema III” is its exploration of the hiddenness of the knight of faith in relation to the hiddenness of the aesthetical hero, and its explanation of the words that Abraham actually does say to Isaac in the biblical story. For a discussion of the intricacies of “Problema III”, see Robert L. Perkins’ “Abraham’s Silence Aesthetically Considered”. 94 SKS 4, 159; 171; 207 / FT, 66–67; 81; 120. 95 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60: “As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.”

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of presenting Abraham heroically, to the edge of religion as what cannot be grasped in philosophical terms, the “philosophy” here being only negative, clarifying the logical distance between what can and what cannot be understood.96

The problem of communicability, therefore, is that the religious is ineffable. Abraham cannot explain himself. He cannot justify his actions. By extension, Silentio cannot say in what faith consists. He cannot say what is revealed to Abraham through his relation to God. Hence, faith cannot be defined other than as something that cannot be defined, as something nonsensical and paradoxical. However, Silentio does speak about faith, even if there is nothing to say, strictly speaking. Rather, what he does is to speak about the fact of its unspeakability. Ineffability lies at the heart of how Silentio sees the story of Abraham. “Abraham tier – men han kan ikke tale, deri ligger Nøden og Angsten.”97 The fact that Abraham himself does not attempt to explain what he is doing to anyone is the key to the whole mystery of faith. Abraham’s silence, according to Silentio’s Hegelian understanding, represents a break with the universal. The problem, then, is to get this across to the reader: to describe, through speech, a state of affairs which revolves around an essential inability to speak; to enable the reader to imagine this scenario and to place him/herself in it. The problem, therefore, is to attune the reader to a certain nonsensical possibility – Abraham’s divine silence.

2.9 Concluding remarks In this section, I have explored the nature of faith by comparing Abraham and Agamemnon, the knight of faith and the tragic hero. I have argued that Silentio sees Abraham as a hero of a different order to that of the tragic hero. He is, however, a hero, and consequently heroism is a substantial feature of what it means to have faith. By virtue of my argument in the first section, therefore, having faith means playing a certain kind of role in a certain kind of narrative. I have also pointed out one complication with the heroic nature of Abraham and, by extension, of the knight of faith. The knight of faith is a hero in terms of how s/he responds to something beyond the ethical, something beyond the universal. Having a nature beyond the universal, however, means that it cannot be of the universal, which means that faith cannot manifest itself intersubjectively. The religious has no role to play in the concrete universal of the social order. || 96 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 195–196. 97 SKS 4, 201 / FT, 113: “Abraham remains silent – but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety.”

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Abraham’s status as a hero, therefore, is dependent upon something that cannot become intersubjectively manifest, thus that cannot be known and disclosed through words. At first glance, this may seem to go against my argument that faith is something narrative. For how can one tell the story of something that cannot be told? How can one show that Abraham is a knight of faith if faith is not something that can be shown? The answer to that is the mentioned apartness of the knight of faith. Though one cannot show faith, one can show that there is something to Abraham that cannot be shown, that he has some inexplicable quality by virtue of standing in relation to something beyond the universal. Apartness will not prove that Abraham truly is a knight of faith, but it will intimate it, it will suggest it, especially if the inexplicable quality is explicitly thematized and theoretically commented upon alongside its presentation. Towards the end of the last subsection, I quoted Hannay when he observed that, in FB, “the reader is poised at the very edge of communicability. Fear and Trembling takes poetry, or literature, as a way of presenting Abraham heroically, to the edge of religion as what cannot be grasped in philosophical terms…”98 FB needs literature, the narrative element, in order to communicate the nature of faith. It needs it because faith is not something that can be disclosed through words, communicated straightforwardly through language. Literature, a narrative, will let Silentio present faith precisely as something ineffable and inexplicable that figures in the life of a character, Abraham. Moreover, this is also how Silentio himself finds this concept of faith, as contained within a narrative in the Bible. It is interesting to note, therefore, that narrativity figures as essential to the thought expressed in FB on two levels: First, in terms of the concept of faith presented. Faith is something heroic, therefore bound to, and defined by, a story, one that centers upon a collision between the religious and the ethical. Second, narrativity is needed to give expression to the concept of faith, to give it a communicable form. I believe these two are connected in the sense that the reason faith is made out to be narrative in FB is that it is only through a narrative form that faith is communicable, not to say, thinkable. Thus, faith is not narrative in an essential sense. For, essentially speaking, there is nothing to be said of faith. Faith places the individual higher than the universal, which is paradoxical. What is to be said can only be done through a narrative, through a story about how this “higher level of reality” manifests itself in an individual. || 98 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 196.

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In the remaining parts of this chapter, I explore how the issue of narrativity figures in FB from a broader angle, investigating what I suggested above, that Silentio needs the narrative in order to disclose what cannot be straightforwardly said. Furthermore, I connect a reading born of this perspective to other perspectives and arguments regarding the true meaning of FB. In the next section, I discuss how the theoretical passages of FB relate to its narrative passages, since the theoretical passages cannot be said to unproblematically disclose the truth about the latter.

3 Two orders of discourse It is worth noting that for all his focus upon the story of Abraham, Silentio never simply tells the story. He comes close in “Foreløbig Expectoration”,99 but here what he recounts is fragmented; it is mediated and contextualized by his own relation to the story: “Hvis Loddet faldt paa mig at tale derom, da vilde jeg begynde med at vise…”100 Furthermore, what he says is contextualized by a wider discussion upon the nature of faith (faith as a double-movement), together with the consideration of two other stories of two other knights of faith (the anonymous man on his way home for a dish of cooked lamb’s head, the young man and the princess). Silentio also comes close in the four stories that make up “Stemning”, but here he does not say what did happen; rather, he sketchily draws scenarios that did not happen, juxtaposing these with descriptions of an infant getting weaned, and contextualizing the juxtapositions with an unknown man’s fascination with Abraham. Nowhere in FB is the story of Abraham simply told, and left at that, a fact equally true of all the narratives found in the work. These narratives are always accompanied by philosophical observations and theoretical arguments. They are never there for their own sake, but in order to catch and reflect different aspects of the main story in FB, the story of Abraham. What I mean when I speak about the stories, or narratives, that comprise FB, are all those parts of the discourse that report, or that invoke a report of, an event, or a sequence of events. Examples of the former are those stories that Silentio recounts from beginning to end, such as the two stories about the two knights of faith other than Abraham, and the story of the Merman and Agnete found in

|| 99 SKS 4, 123–147 / FT, 27–53. 100 SKS 4, 127 / FT, 31: “If it fell to my lot to speak about him, I would begin by showing…”

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“Problema III”. Examples of the latter are the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Shakespeare’s Richard III, or the story of Abraham itself. These are stories that Silentio invokes, relying upon their existence in an already told form. Evans remarks, a propos the written structure of FB: “It is as much poetry as philosophy, and any attempt to summarize its contents must inevitably falsify the character of the work as a whole.”101 In terms of genre, therefore, FB is neither / nor, neither a literary narrative, nor a philosophical treatise, but a bit of both – a strange kind of hybrid. The hybridity of FB becomes even more interesting than it seems at first glance when one reflects upon the impossibility of confirming the truth about faith and the religious, as argued in the prior section. In light of this impossibility, I would like to suggest that the reason for this hybridity, this dual textual nature, is that Silentio attempts a sort of conceptual parallax in order to get at faith.102 The word “parallax” signifies the displacement of an observed object relative to the changed position of the observer and is utilized by astronomers in order to calculate the true distance to objects out in space. My suggestion is that the double nature of the discourse in FB attempts something of the same. Faith cannot disclose itself straightforwardly through language. A philosophical treatise about faith, therefore, is out of the question. On the other hand, in “Problema III” Silentio raises a doubt about whether faith and the religious can truly be presented in an aesthetical way, simply in the form of a drama, a story.103 This idea is somewhat ironic given Silentio’s own reliance upon the biblical story of Abraham as a source for understanding faith.104 Then again, as noted, Silentio does not simply tell the story, but presents it alongside philosophical discourse together with

|| 101 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 61. 102 The idea of using the concept of a parallax in relation to Kierkegaard and FB is taken from Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View. Note, though, that I am not using the concept of a parallax in the same theoretically pregnant sense as Žižek, but simply as a metaphor. Note also that Žižek himself has borrowed the philosophical use of the term from Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. 103 SKS 4, 178 / FT, 88. 104 It ought to be noted that Silentio’s understanding of faith does not originate purely with the story of Abraham. The notion that he presents in FB is born out of how the story of Abraham contradicts and contrasts with Hegelian philosophy. Hegelian philosophy, therefore, rubs itself off onto the Silentio’s understanding of Abraham, making him indebted to Hegel for his conception of faith. For example, claiming that in faith the individual is higher than the universal is a direct inversion of the Hegelian understanding that it is through the universal that the individual becomes a proper person. As I have already explained, becoming ethical means that the individual has to sublate his particularity in terms of the universal, and becoming ethical means socialization. Silentio’s definition of faith, therefore, is relative in meaning to Hegelian philosophy.

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other, similar stories. The intention behind this maneuver may be to capture faith by virtue of the dialectical juxtaposition of the two orders of discourse – story and commentary (I view the other narratives operating in the text as a species of commentary seeing as they are meant to contrast with the story of Abraham) – thereby creating a parallax between the two orders of discourse. What I mean by this is that by dividing the text between the two orders of discourse, Silentio can make an implicit case for the reality of faith without contradicting himself. By telling the story and portraying scenes from it, then commenting upon these narrative elements, contrasting them to other narratives and so forth, Silentio casts a certain light upon the story of Abraham. He emphasizes, for example, in the form of the open endings of the three problemas, that one cannot know that Abraham is a knight of faith,105 a fact that stands to reason given the concept of faith for which he argues. Yet, that Abraham is a knight of faith suggests itself given the constant juxtaposition of Silentio’s theory about the knight of faith and Abraham. Reading FB is like coming into a room where there are two people: one lies on the floors in spasms (the story of Abraham); the other stands over at the other end of the room reading from a medical work about the symptoms of epilepsy (Silentio’s theoretical interpretation, his commentary). Now, the scene does not prove that the one on the floor has epilepsy, but the scene, taken as a whole, does structurally suggest it, just as FB, taken as a whole, contains the same structural suggestion in regard to Abraham, that he is a knight of faith. Note, though, that this “structural suggestion” is on the level of the aesthetical. It is, because it is an appearance, an impression: one that announces itself on the level of the work taken as a whole, in virtue of the interplay of the two discourses. It is not grounded, or proven, but implied. The parallax created by the two types of discourse, therefore, creates an aesthetical suggestion. Silentio places Abraham’s actions before us, and he places before us a possible explanation of these actions. At the same time, he makes it plain that one can never be certain that the explanation is correct but, because of faith’s nature, one cannot know whether the explanation is incorrect either because, given the nature of faith, there is no way conclusively to establish that a person actually is a knight of faith, or not. With this firmly printed in our mind, the explanation and the action are placed before us, and left at that. In light of

|| 105 SKS 4, 159; 171; 207 / FT, 66–67; 81; 120.

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this, it makes sense that FB is subtitled: “Dialectical Lyric”,106 a lyric made possible by virtue of the dialectics of the different discourses of which the text is composed.107 The line of inquiry pursued in this chapter establishes FB as an ultimately aesthetic work. FB’s purpose is not to establish the true, theoretical nature of faith. Rather, it establishes that that cannot be established, and instead attempts to mediate aesthetically the reader’s relation to the story of Abraham so that the reader him/herself might imaginatively approach that story as if Abraham truly was a knight of faith. It seeks to make a certain kind of impression, not impart a certain kind of truth. I return more thoroughly to the question of the nature of this impression in Chapter 4, and elaborate upon it by showing how it is related to another aesthetic effect contained in FB, namely suspense. Next I turn to and explore another, connected aesthetic interpretation of FB, Joakim Garff’s.

4 A story about a story My reason for turning to Garff is twofold: first, to present a like-minded approach to FB, thereby inscribing my own interpretation into a certain tradition: the aesthetic reading;108 second, to introduce the issue of Abraham’s fear and trembling and its importance for this type of reading. The reason for this course is that the issue of Abraham’s fear and trembling is a good way to show how the aesthetic reading differs and relates to other approaches to FB. The discussion with which I begin my consideration of Garff leads, as this chapter progresses, to a general defense of the type of approach exemplified in this study. The defense is given in the sixth section. In “Den Søvnløse”, Joakim Garff describes FB as a narrative about a narrative, a text that attempts to weave a story about another story.109 The intent of this is to

|| 106 SKS 4, 99 / FT, 1. 107 This answers the following concern raised by Ronald M. Green: “Thus the book is subtitled a ‘dialectical lyric’, which is itself something of a contradiction in terms: a work at once both philosophical and poetic” (Ronald M. Green, “Deciphering Fear and Trembling's Secret Message”, p. 96). It is at once philosophical and poetic precisely because it balances these two orders of discourse against one another. 108 An “aesthetic approach” to FB is one that holds that the purpose of FB is to communicate with its reader on an aesthetic level, rather than on a theoretical one. 109 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 158.

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aesthetically position the reader by means of a second story in relation to a first. The manner in which Garff claims that FB operates is, therefore, parallel to the metaphorical example I gave in the prior section about the possible epilepsy and the reader. Given this, Garff also makes the point that there are levels to the discourse that operates in FB: “story” and “commentary”. The “story” is the story of Abraham; the “commentary” is how that story is theoretically and narratively interpreted, or positioned for interpretation. The reason that Garff calls the entwinement of these two levels a “story” (a story about a story) is that the intent of FB is, according to him, to disclose and convey the true, dramatic nerve of the story of Abraham: the fear and trembling of Abraham’s journey to Moriah.110 The objective that FB tries to achieve, therefore, is aesthetical, hence the medium is aesthetical. (You cannot convey feeling through detached analysis.) FB’s objective is to facilitate the formation of the reader’s imaginative relation to Abraham’s journey, to convey a feeling of the impossibility of Abraham’s situation, caught as he is in a double-collision (God against God, and God against the ethical). Garff points out that Silentio argues that the nerve of the story of Abraham has been dulled and lost by people’s overfamiliarization with how it ends. The fact that God provides a ram as a substitute for Isaac has caused the fact that Abraham could not possibly have known that this would happen to be glossed over in people’s reception of the story.111 To quote Silentio: “Det man udelader af Abrahams Historie er Angesten; thi mod Penge har jeg ingen ethisk Forpligtelse, men mod Sønnen har Faderen den høieste og helligste.”112 Accordingly, the emotional suffering that Abraham has to endure as part of his journey has been neglected. And the intention behind FB is to capture and communicate this pain – this fear and trembling.113 The point of doing this is that a state of fear and trembling is the reality of Abraham’s situation given that he is a knight of faith in the sense that I have argued, a position shared by Garff. Silentio does not attempt to argue for the reality of faith (as we have seen, he makes it plain that this cannot be done). Instead he tries to bring the reader one step closer to faith by letting the reader witness faith. He tries to adjust the gaze of the reader so that s/he can come to appreciate a || 110 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 163. 111 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 162–164. 112 SKS 4, 124 / FT, 28: “What is omitted from Abraham’s story is the anxiety, because to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and holiest.” 113 Garff is not alone in claiming that this is an important intention with FB. For another perspective that also argues for the viability of this approach see Green. “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling”, or Bo Kampmann Walther’s “Web of Shudders: Sublimity in Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’”.

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certain version of what happened to Abraham. In other words, what Silentio is trying to do is to mediate our relation to the story of Abraham by casting it in certain light (FB is story about a story). His game is not to prove anything, but to place the reader in a position that lets the reader connect with a certain what if, and thereby come to appreciate the immensity of what it would it mean, were it the case that Abraham was a knight of faith; essentially, therefore, leaving it up to readers to draw their own conclusions as regards the story.114 In light of this, it is apparent that the interpretation of FB developed in this chapter so far parallels that presented by Garff. The main difference is that whereas Garff grounds his interpretation in a general approach to Kierkegaard’s authorship, I ground mine in a consideration of Kierkegaard’s / Silentio’s definition of the knight of faith in relation to the tragic hero, and the connected problem of communicability. Having positioned my interpretation in relation to Garff’s, let me pursue the discussion in the direction indicated by Garff’s interpretation: the issue of fear and trembling. Why does Abraham feel fear and trembling? In what experience are the emotions rooted? The short answer to this is that he experiences fear and trembling because of the double-collision. Abraham’s fear and trembling is a parallel phenomenon to Agamemnon’s distress and suffering, that is, they are parallel to the extent that the knight of faith is parallel to the tragic hero. As explained, the relationship between these figures is complex. There is a basic kinship between them in as much as they both face a collision. On the other hand, Abraham’s collision, though comparable with Agamemnon’s, is qualitatively distinct from the latter’s: Abraham has broken with the ethical, and stands apart from it; Agamemnon incarnates it. Abraham’s position apart from the ethical, moreover, does not only mean that his actions take place beyond good and evil, it means that they are beyond conceptual thought. Abraham acts for reasons that cannot be rendered in words and cannot be made communally accessible. Whereas, therefore, Agamemnon is disclosed and intelligible, Abraham is hidden and irrational. Now, here is the crux: Abraham’s irrationality is not only present in his relation to others, but also in his relation to himself. This is something I explore at length in what follows, but the view can be grounded easily in what I have developed so far: Reason is defined by the universal. Faith is explicitly not universal. Thus, in as much as there exists a problem of communicability in relation to faith – that is, faith cannot be mediated into the realm of reason – then this is no less the case for Abraham himself as for anyone else. In brief, Abraham is split between his reason and his faith, and Abraham’s fear and trembling, if it is rooted

|| 114 Earlier on I quoted Hannay to this effect also (Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, p. 195–196).

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in the double-collision, is rooted in this split. Fear and trembling originate in how a force beyond reason, God, calls Abraham to sacrifice his own son. My suggestion is that if faith is beyond reason, as this study argues it is, then this causes Abraham to relate to the sacrifice on two categorically distinct levels simultaneously: through faith and through reason. Abraham is split between his faith in God and his religious conviction that what God does is right, and his rational conviction that the outcome of a human sacrifice is death and that what he is about to do is murder, therefore wrong. Abraham’s state of fear and trembling stems from his inability to reconcile faith and reason.115 Abraham cannot be humanly certain that Isaac will not die. On the contrary, in terms of human certainty, he is certain that he will, in as much as he himself is committed to sacrificing him. Yet, Abraham has faith. He has faith against reason, against himself, against God. Accordingly, the state of fear and trembling comes from the imminence of Isaac’s death,116 and all the complexities connected to this event. Isaac is doomed in terms of reason, and saved in terms of faith (God’s original promise). Abraham lives split between these two certainties (the religious / the rational), and with the understanding that only one of them is rational: that Isaac will die. I believe the following quote from a novel by Martin Amis succinctly captures the essence of Abraham’s situation: “Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.”117 The “awful thing” is that something awful can happen. Abraham has no coherent and unified take on his own situation, thus he cannot but wait and see, while his son’s life lies in the balance. The split in itself can therefore be said to be what fuels the fear and trembling. In other words, the split, or collision, that defines Abraham’s story also defines his interior, just as it does with Agamemnon.118

|| 115 As is made clear later, this does not involve ascribing to Abraham two logically contradictory mental states. Lippitt has, for example, argued against that kind of approach (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 67–68). It does not involve two contradictory mental states, because, I argue, “having faith” and “believing” are not logically comparable. “Believing” is realized through the universal; “having faith” is constituted in a way that makes the individual higher than the universal. 116 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 162–163. 117 Martin Amis, Money, p. 9. 118 Connected to this issue, see the following remarks by Silentio regarding the Virgin Mary where the issue is also the split between the event’s meaning on the religious contra the socioethical level: “Vel fødte Maria Barnet vidunderligt, men det gik hende dog paa Qvinders Viis, og denne Tid den er Angstens, Nødens og Paradoxets. Engelen var vel en tjenende Aand, men han var

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I will not further embroil myself in this issue at this point. The above consideration is provided so as to set the record straight regarding Abraham’s fear and trembling from the outset; the issue is further clarified as I proceed. The important thing to note for the present argument is that, per the aesthetic approach, Abraham does believe that Isaac will die as a result of the sacrifice. Death is the reasonable outcome of the situation.119 Abraham’s state of mind in regard to the sacrifice is important, because it is not universally agreed among the commentators of FB that Abraham actually holds this belief. Some argue that Abraham’s faith gave rise to the belief that death would not be the outcome of his journey to Moriah no matter what happened. In the following I explore the question of what Abraham believed concerning Isaac’s fate, and defend the view that Abraham did believe that he would be the agent of Isaac’s demise by sacrificing him as, without this element, it is hard to see why there should be any fear or trembling in his story. I will acknowledge, however, as indicated above, that those who argue that Abraham did believe that Isaac would not die have a point in as much as Silentio makes it plain that Abraham had faith that Isaac would not die, and that he would come back even if he did die. But having faith and having a belief are two very different things according to the interpretation I am going to promote. || ikke en tjenstvillig Aand, der gik til de andre unge Piger i Israel og sagde: foragter ikke Maria, hende hændes det Overordentlige. Men Engelen kom kun til Maria, og Ingen kunde forstaae hende. Hvilken Qvinde blev dog krænket som Maria, og er det ikke ogsaa her sandt, at den, hvem Gud velsigner, forbander han i samme Aandedrag?” (SKS 4, 158 / FT, 65: “To be sure, Mary bore the child wondrously, but she nevertheless did it “after the manner of women,” and such a time is one of anxiety, distress, and paradox. The angel was indeed a ministering spirit, but he was not a meddlesome spirit who went to the other young maidens in Israel and said: Do not scorn Mary, the extraordinary is happening to her. The angel went only to Mary, and no one could understand her. Has any woman been as infringed upon as was Mary, and is it not true here also that the one whom God blesses he curses in the same breath?”) 119 This idea can also be seen to be confirmed by Erich Auerbach’s reading of the story of Abraham in Mimesis. Auerbach emphasizes Abraham’s unbearable foreknowledge of Isaac’s impending death, and connects this to the emotional impact that the story gives. “God says, ‘Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest.’ But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story… Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it… here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present…” (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 10–11). The temptation Auerbach speaks of is the temptation not to do it (what Silentio speaks of as the “temptation of the ethical”), and the only reason that would be a temptation would be if the danger to Isaac’s life was seen by Abraham as something very real.

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The argument I explore is John Lippitt’s.120 In order to so, however, I must begin with a view developed by Andrew A. Cross, as Lippitt’s argument is an explicit critique of Cross.121

5 Cross and Lippitt Cross’ position has two major features: first, he argues for a view similar to Garff’s, that it is necessary to interpret Silentio’s Abraham as having the belief that Isaac will die as a consequence of his actions, otherwise, Abraham’s journey to Moriah loses the dramatic nature that Silentio ascribes to it;122 second, unlike what I have argued in this chapter so far, Cross does not hold that Abraham is a religious hero. Rather, Cross claims that Abraham is an “existential hero”, and that what Silentio terms “faith” in relation to Abraham ought not to be understood as something religious, but as a wholehearted commitment to Isaac in spite of imminent loss.123 Thus, for Cross, “faith” is not a theological concept, but a special kind of existential or psychological state. Faith is a way of relating to an object that is not “cognitive”, but “practical”: a practical mode of existential orientation. What makes Abraham into a hero for Cross is the fact he “leaves his [Isaac’s] fate up to God, even as he takes it to be certain that God will disappoint.”124 Abraham’s heroism is that he loves in spite of imminent loss. Cross,

|| 120 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling. 121 Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”. 122 Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”, pp. 235–236. 123 Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”, p. 239. Casting Abraham as an existential hero, and not as a religious one, thus eliminating God in relation to what makes Abraham into a hero, is something that other scholars besides Cross have argued. Jerome I. Gellman, for example, builds upon the work of Edward Mooney (Edward F. Mooney, “Abraham and Dilemma: Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension Revisited”) and Martin Buber (Martin Buber, “On the Suspension of the Ethical”) in order to argue that: “The story Kierkegaard tells about Abraham and Isaac is therefore a parable for the choice between two kinds of self-definition, and thus has only an indirect association with the ‘morality’ and ‘religion’ of the standard interpretation…The story is not about Abraham’s daring to kill his son, but about Abraham’s having the courage to define himself as an individual, other than as a father, willing to ‘sacrifice’ his son to this self-determination” (Jerome I. Gellman, The Fear, the Trembling, and the Fire, pp. 6–7). 124 Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”, p. 243. It should be mentioned that Cross returns to, and elaborates upon, his view of Kierkegaard’s concept of faith in a later paper entitled “Faith and the Suspension of the Ethical in Fear and Trembling”. However, in as much as it still holds that faith is a kind of practical mode of existential orientation, it faces the same difficulties as his earlier paper, under discussion here.

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therefore, must be said to identify the knight of faith much more closely with the tragic hero than, for example, Hannay does. Against Cross, Lippitt has argued that Abraham actually does believe that he will not lose Isaac. He believes it even as he draws his knife. This is so, according to Lippitt, because Abraham “continues to trust God despite the utter lack of evidence (to ‘human’ reason) that this makes any sense.”125 Lippitt’s position is that Abraham is in possession of a “higher order belief” to this end. It ought to be noted that Lippitt does not use the specific phrase but it seems, nonetheless, to be fitting, for as Lippitt explicitly does say: I do not want to claim that Abraham comes to replace one belief (Isaac will die) with another (Isaac will live). Rather, as I see it, the former is what human reason dictates – what the evidence supports – but Abraham’s faith is such that he believes the latter.126

It is clear from this that, according to Lippitt, Abraham’s faith gives rise to a belief that stands above mere human reason. In critiquing Cross, Lippitt argues against both of the two major features definitive of Cross’ view. Lippitt alleges that Cross’ definition of faith does not make coherent sense of how Silentio describes it. Most glaringly, Cross fails to make sense of this in his contention that faith is not theological, but a practical mode of existential orientation. In Cross’ own words: “This raises the question of whether faith, as construed here, requires theistic belief at all. The answer, curiously, seems to be no.”127 Lippitt counters this by stating that the view clearly “flies in the face of the text.”128 Abraham gains faith precisely through his connection to God, by standing in an absolute relation to the absolute. Silentio: “Troen

|| 125 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 69. 126 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 71. 127 Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”, p. 250. It ought to be mentioned that the concept of faith developed in this study does not necessarily involve a theistic belief either. Faith is ineffable, its content is impossible to express in words. Therefore, it is nonpropositional, and describing it as a “theistic belief” would be wrong. In many ways, the concept of faith promoted here will show itself to be quite similar to Cross’ conception, with the marked difference that the practical mode of existential orientation is a function of the knight of faith’s relation to God, and not possible without it, as Cross contends (Andrew A. Cross, “Fear and Trembling's Unorthodox Ideal”, p. 228). 128 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 75.

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er netop dette Paradox… at den Enkelte som den Enkelte staaer i et absolut Forhold til det Absolute.”129 Lippitt employs the same strategy when countering Cross’ other contention, that Abraham has the belief that Isaac will die, if sacrificed. Lippitt turns to concrete textual counterexamples. The following passage is indicated as especially problematic for Cross, hence also for Garff and for my own perspective: “I al den Tid troede han; han troede, at Gud ikke vilde fordre Isaak af ham, medens han dog var villig til at offre ham naar det forlangtes.”130 Taken at face value, the passage does contradict what Cross suggests, a fact that is especially conspicuous in the English rendition, which is the version Lippitt quotes in his text.131 In the English translation the word “tro” is rendered “belief”. In the original Danish, though, it is ambiguous whether Abraham believed that God would not demand Isaac of him, or whether he had faith that he would not. Lippitt interprets this in terms of a belief, though it is not certain that is the best interpretation, and it is certainly not the case that it is the only interpretation. It is not, however, the case that such a line of argument would help Cross, since “faith” for him has a technical and specific meaning. It would not make sense to say that Abraham had Crossian “faith” that God would not sacrifice Isaac, Crossian “faith” being a wholehearted commitment in spite of imminent loss. However, as regards the perspective I have outlined in this chapter, one can go a long way to counter Lippitt by stressing the different nature of “faith” and “belief”. I return to this issue in the next section. Lippitt’s argument in favor of his own position is that it succeeds in making sense of those passages where Cross’ position fails.132 In relation to Cross’ interpretation of faith, I believe Lippitt has a point. It seems drastic to remove the divine from the concept of faith developed in FB. As for Cross’ contention with regard to Abraham’s belief about Isaac’s fate, however, one must not lose sight of the fact that Cross has a good argument supporting his view, even if it seemingly contradicts certain passages of the text. If one endorsed some variation of Lip-

|| 129 SKS 4, 149–150 / FT, 55–56: “Faith is precisely the paradox… that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.” 130 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 35: “During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded.” For Lippitt’s discussion, John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 71. 131 Lippitt uses a version of Alastair Hannay’s translation of FB, FT2. 132 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 69.

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pitt’s position, then one would be faced with the problem of exactly why Abraham experienced fear and trembling on his approach to Moriah. If Abraham had a higher order belief to the effect that Isaac would not die no matter what, Abraham would have no reason to fear Isaac’s death. And what is then left in terms of worry and tension? A possible answer to this could be the fact that Abraham breaks with the ethical in the sense that he has the intention of sacrificing Isaac, hence that he has the intention to do something wrong. This intention itself could be the source of worry and tension, of fear and trembling. However, if Abraham truly does not believe that any hurt will come to Isaac, does he then truly have the intention of doing something wrong? It does not seem reasonable since, in terms of his higher order belief, nothing wrong will follow. Moreover, as Lippitt himself also points out, it is not as if his position makes coherent sense of all the different descriptions and characterizations that Silentio provides of faith either.133 Silentio: Men saaledes som Opgaven er stillet Abraham, skal han jo selv handle, han maa altsaa i det afgjørende Øieblik vide, hvad han selv vil gjøre, og altsaa maa han vide, at Isaak skal offres. Har han ikke vidst dette med Bestemthed, saa har han ikke gjort Resignationens uendelige Bevægelse...134

Thus, Silentio himself says that Abraham must know (“altsaa maa han vide”) that Isaac will be sacrificed, hence die, yet have faith (“tro”) that he will not. (This supports the suggestion I am going to argue for, the categorical distinction between belief / knowledge and faith.) Additionally, Silentio defines faith as a passion, as something on the emotional level, a fact that makes more sense in relation to Cross than to Lippitt: “Troen er et Vidunder, og dog er intet Menneske udelukket derfra; thi det, hvori alt Menneskeliv enes, er i Lidenskab, og Troen er en Lidenskab.”135 Connected to this, Silentio also defines faith as a new form of subjective interiority: “Troens Paradox

|| 133 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 72. 134 SKS 4, 206–207 / FT, 119: “But given the task as assigned to Abraham, he himself has to act; consequently, he has to know in the crucial moment what he himself will do, and consequently, he has to know that Isaac is going to be sacrificed. If he has not known this for sue, he would not have made the infinite movement of resignation…” 135 SKS 4, 159 / FT, 67: “Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion.”

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er dette, at der er en Inderlighed, der er incommensurable for det Ydre, en Inderlighed, der vel at mærke ikke er identisk med hiin første, men en ny Inderlighed.”136 As a result, it is clearly an aspect of faith that it constitutes a way of relating emotionally to the world, one that is different from common emotions. One of the truly interesting things about placing the discussion between Cross and Lippitt in relation to the line of reasoning I have developed is the greatly varied concepts of faith that the three perspectives reveal. According to Cross, faith is a wholehearted commitment in spite of imminent loss. To Lippitt, it is a higher order belief (which is not to say that it is only that, but that is an important element of it). And as I’ve made clear, faith is something incomprehensible and ineffable, a sui generis level of meaning that transcends human reason. Like Cross, I would say that it is an existential state, but, contra Cross, siding with Lippitt, one that is clearly theological. In the next section I demonstrate that there are further similarities between Cross’ position and my own. Moreover, as I have made clear, my counter to Lippitt’s argument against the view that Abraham believes that Isaac will die if sacrificed, depends upon my developing the idea that faith is something intrinsically different from belief, thereby enabling me to offer a different interpretation of the passage Lippitt references. To this end, I now turn to the question of faith more explicitly.

6 Faith, apartness, and pure passions Three things are going to happen in this section: first, as announced, the main argumentative arc is the argument against Lippitt; second, my argument against Lippitt will lead me to develop a general defense of the aesthetic approach to FB in the form of a defense of an “irrationalist reading” of FB: one that holds that faith is ineffable and incomprehensible, and thus, non-communicable in rational form.137 It is because of this incommunicability that the only mode of presentation open for faith is the aesthetic one, the type of dialectical lyric exemplified in FB. The reason that a defense of the irrationalist reading is needed is because it is only by showing that faith is something categorically different from human reason that I can defend the view that faith is not a form of belief. The argument || 136 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69: “The paradox of faith is that there is an interiority that is incommensurable with exteriority, an interiority that is not identical, please note, with the first but is a new interiority.” 137 For a wider treatment of faith as something inherently incomprehensible, see Merold Westphal’s “Chapter 6: Kierkegaard and the Logic of Insanity” in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 85–103.

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given here will therefore deepen and elaborate upon the break between the knight of faith and the universal defended in the second section of this chapter.138 Third, by establishing the nature of faith as a type of sui generis state of mind, non-reducible to reason and to normal emotions, I am able to concretize my proposed narrative understanding of faith by pinpointing exactly how faith manifests itself in the observational behavior of a knight of faith, meanwhile elaborating what I earlier described as the “apartness” of the knight of faith.

6.1 The rationalist and the irrationalist reading of FB What I call an “irrationalist reading” of FB is by Ryan Kemp called a “straightforward reading”;139 “straightforward” because the reading is in line with Silentio’s explicitly stated position. FB abounds with passages where Silentio emphasizes the impossibility of understanding Abraham as a knight of faith, precisely because of faith. For example: Naar jeg derimod skal til at tænke over Abraam, da er jeg som tilintetgjort. Jeg faaer i ethert Moment Øie paa hiint uhyre Paradox, der er Indholdet af Abrahams Liv, i ethvert Moment bliver jeg stødt tilbage, og min Tanke kan, trods al sin Lidenskab, ikke trænge ind i det, ikke komme et Haarsbred videre.140

Or: “Abraham kan jeg ikke forstaae, jeg kan i en vis Forstand Intet lære af ham uden at forbauses.”141 Or: “Det viser sig da atter her, at man vel kan forstaae Abraham, men kun forstaae ham saaledes, som man forstaaer Paradoxet.”142 || 138 The analysis given in this section in regard to this break is further deepened in Chapter 3. 139 Ryan Kemp, “In Defense of a Straightforward Reading of Fear and Trembling”. Note that in my argument I only endorse two of Kemp’s three characteristics of “a straightforward reading”, his second and third: that FB is primarily about faith, and contains a strongly irrationalist reading of it (Ryan Kemp, “In Defense of a Straightforward Reading of Fear and Trembling”, p. 49). Kemp’s first characteristic – that FB represents Kierkegaard’s actual opinion of faith – seems to me to be a hypothesis about the role of FB and what it says about faith in relation to Kierkegaard’s works at large, which is a question outside of the scope of the present discussions. 140 SKS 4, 128 / FT, 33: “Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however; then I am shattered. I am constantly aware of the prodigious paradox that is the content of Abraham’s life, I am constantly repelled, and, despite all its passion, my thought cannot penetrate it, cannot get ahead by a hairsbreadth.” 141 SKS 4, 132 / FT, 37: “Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed.” 142 SKS 4, 207 / FT, 119: “Here again it is apparent that one perhaps can understand Abraham, but only in the way one understands the paradox.”

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In a work that focuses upon the psychological dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought, Vincent A. McCarthy has argued that Kierkegaard saw in Christianity a truth of experience which could not be subsumed by thought, a truth which was in fact a scandal to thought (the theme of Training in Christianity) and a truth of history (the Christ-event) which could never be reduced to merely one more necessary event in the unfolding of Spirit in history.143

The position defended so far in this chapter is in line with McCarthy’s idea although, relative to FB: Faith / the religious is a truth of experience, not of thought, and as such, it is a scandal to thought, a paradox. As touched upon earlier, some commentators, for example Evans (mentioned in the introduction), Lippitt,144 and Daniel W. Conway (I turn to him in section eight of this chapter), have taken Silentio’s failure to understand faith, not as saying something about faith itself, but as saying something about Johannes de Silentio’s relation to faith. Their claim is that Silentio is an unreliable narrator when it comes to faith, an unreliability that may be read as indicating a hidden message in the text; that is, that the true meaning of the text can only be grasped if one reflects upon who says what and why. The reason that Silentio skirts and circles the issue of faith has not, therefore, something to do with the nature of faith per se, but is done so as to enable Kierkegaard, by virtue of being the author of both the author (Silentio) and the text, to make an indirect point. This is an idea that can find immediate confirmation in the famous epigraph that opens FB, the quote by Johann Georg Hamann: “Was Tarquinius Superbus in seinem Garten mit den Mohnköpfen sprach, verstand der Sohn aber nicht der Bote.”145 This has been interpreted as saying something about Silentio’s relation to the message he delivers; therefore, that we as readers ought to look with suspicion upon his assertions regarding his own understanding of it, or rather his professed lack of understanding of it.146

|| 143 Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 139. 144 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 53–54; 163. 145 SKS 4, 100 / FT, 3: “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.” 146 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, pp. 63–64. There exist different interpretations of the meaning of the epigraph. Green, for example, argues that it is the reader that is in the position of the envoy of the story, i.e., that Kierkegaard, through Silentio, communicates an intention that escapes the reader not attuned to the hidden message of the communication. “On the basis of this epigraph, it easy to conclude that the reader of Fear and Trembling is in the position of the envoy: recipient of a message not meant for him and one whose deepest meaning

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Approaching FB by making Silentio out to be an unreliable narrator is a necessary strategy if one’s goal is to retain faith as essentially comprehensible. If faith is not incomprehensible, then Silentio’s characterization of it as such must stem from how he misconstrues it, and not from faith itself. The lesson of FB is then to see how and why Silentio goes wrong. Thus any “rationalist reading” of the concept of faith in FB must, at some level, uphold the tenet that Silentio is an unreliable narrator. A “rationalist reading” is here understood to be a reading where faith is framed as being able to manifest itself as a shared truth, that is, on the level of the universal. I do not follow this line of reasoning. This is not to say that I harbor any illusions about Silentio’s grasp of faith. He quite clearly professes his inadequacy. However, according to the straightforward reading I propose, Silentio’s inadequate understanding is how it should be because faith involves something that defies human understanding.147 Being a knight of faith means, as argued in the second section, that one stands in absolute relation to the absolute, to God. By standing in such a relation, one stands above, or beyond, the universal. Being beyond the universal in this manner, means, according to Silentio, that one’s situation cannot be represented in thought, cannot be thought (ref. McCarthy’s point): Troen er netop dette Paradox, at den Enkelte som den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, er berettiget ligeoverfor dette, ikke subordineret, men overordnet, dog vel at mærke saaledes, at det er den Enkelte, der efter at have været som den Enkelte det Almene underordnet, nu gjennem det Almene bliver den Enkelte, der som den Enkelte er det overordnet; at den Enkelte som den Enkelte staaer i et absolut Forhold til det Absolute. Dette Standpunkt lader sig ikke mediere; thi al Mediation skeer netop i Kraft af det Almene; det er og bliver i al Evighed et Paradox, utilgængeligt for Tænkningen.148

|| escapes him” (Roland M. Green, “Deciphering Fear and Trembling's Secret Message”, p. 95). However, I do not believe Green follows the logic of what he is saying here in his own interpretation of FB, because he argues that the hidden message of FB in reality also concerns the envoy, in as much as it concerns everyone, FB’s true, hidden intention being to tell its reader something about the nature of sin and grace. What Green lacks in this paper, therefore, is an answer to exactly why Kierkegaard goes to such lengths to hide his message. 147 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 162 148 SKS 4, 149–150 / FT, 55–56: “Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior – yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for

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This is a point I argued earlier, but it bears repeating. Having faith means being beyond the universal, but we think in terms of the universal. Consequently, having faith means being beyond thought. This point is made clear by the last sentence in the passage above. According to it, faith cannot be mediated; mediation takes place by virtue of the universal, therefore faith is a paradox, inaccessible to thought. The reasoning presupposes that thought is identical to mediation by virtue of the universal, otherwise inaccessibility to thought would not follow. This can be confirmed by the issue developed later by Silentio, especially in “Problema III” that Abraham cannot speak: “Abraham kan ikke tale...”,149 in the sense that Abraham cannot communicate and convey his reasons for sacrificing Isaac. He cannot make them plain because his reasons are contained in his private relationship with the absolute, and that relationship is beyond the universal. Silentio: “Abraham kan ikke medieres, hvilket ogsaa kan udtrykkes saaledes: han kan ikke tale. Saasnart jeg taler, udtrykker jeg det Almene, og naar jeg ikke gjør det, saa kan Ingen forstaae mig.”150 Thus, according to Silentio, we both think and speak in terms of the universal. In light of these considerations, it is no wonder that Silentio emphasizes the impossibility of understanding Abraham. Abraham is incomprehensible because a direct relationship with God cannot be mediated into the universal, cannot be thought. Consequently, the perspective argued for here is an irrationalist reading, holding as it does that faith, and acts of faith, are beyond rational justification and rational comprehension. (Though, as I will show at the end of the current section, there are actually ways in which the perspective can partially be rationalized, though this is only relative to the individual qua his/her unique individuality, and thus not in an universally valid manner.) In order to proceed with the main argument of the current section, the argument against Lippitt’s claim that Abraham believes Isaac will not die, I am going to defend the irrationalist reading of FB. This is necessary, because separating faith from belief in the sense needed to counter Lippitt is essentially grounded in such a reading.

|| all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought.” 149 SKS 4, 202 / FT, 115: “Abraham cannot speak…” 150 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60: “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.”

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6.2 Motivating the rationalist reading Let me begin by considering the rationalist reading in a little more detail. Though the reading contradicts what Silentio’s explicitly states, it is easy to understand why one would want to support it. For one, the alternative is, prima facie, philosophically unsatisfactory: If faith is something that cannot be thought, then what is its value to thought? What is its value to philosophy? Philosophy is a discipline of reasoned discourse. As such, claiming that faith is incomprehensible places it outside of the scope of philosophy. To a philosopher, it can seem like a defeat. Added to this consideration is the fact that Alasdair MacIntyre has starkly discredited Kierkegaard’s irrationalism in his seminal work After Virtue.151 The focus of MacIntyre’s critique is Kierkegaard’s theory of the transition between the three stages of life (the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious). MacIntyre points out that in terms of Kierkegaard’s theory, nothing can truly motivate an agent to become ethical, as the choice between ethics and aesthetics is a choice between different ways of comprehending and relating to the world, hence a choice between different ways of making choices.152 The choice between the ethical and the aesthetical, and, similarly, between the ethical and the religious, is therefore, always arbitrary. This is untenable as a theory of ethics, according to MacIntyre, because it makes the ethical inherently groundless, eliding any line of consideration that could convince an agent to be ethical, rather than following his/her baser impulses.153 Though MacIntyre does not address the issue of religiosity in After Virtue and nor, therefore, the issue of the religious relationship to the ethical, he does make

|| 151 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 39–47. 152 It should be mentioned that MacIntyre’s interpretation of the role of the different levels of meaning present in the life of the individual (the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious) differs from the interpretation elaborated in this study. According to this study, the ethical is the concrete universal of the social order. As such, it is connected to conceptual thought and to the mind-world of the society into which an individual is born. In other words, an individual is always a part of the ethical, whether s/he wants to be or not, as it informs the very concepts s/he thinks with, and his/her rational faculty to do so. As I see it, the incommensurability between the ethical and the aesthetical is one with the incommensurability between emotion and reason. I am here thinking about the manner in which emotions and reason can pull an individual in different directions. Take the example of a desire for a cigarette. If you have this kind of desire, it does not matter how well you understand that a cigarette is bad for you, you still desire it. Hence, the desire is unaffected by rational argument. The two levels are incommensurable. Personally, I believe that the incommensurability of the stages amounts to something along these lines and, therefore, that MacIntyre’s interpretation misses the mark. 153 For more on this, see Anthony Rudd, “Alasdair MacIntyre: A Continuing Conversation”.

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an influential case against the general idea that the stages are incommensurable in relation to one another.154 I mention these two lines of consideration in order to make a general case for why one would opt for a rationalist reading of FB in the context of the modern discussion. Lippitt does this, and his interpretation will be the focus of what is to follow. The crux of Lippitt’s reading is that if FB is approached with Silentio’s unreliability as a narrator in mind, one finds a hidden message in the work regarding the nature of sin, grace, and forgiveness.155 In brief, the true subject of FB is not faith, but a certain theological dimension of human existence. FB’s hidden intention is to divulge a truth about this theological dimension, a truth about sin and grace, and the nature of forgiveness, thereby presupposing that the theological itself (the religious itself) constitutes a shared, communicable truth, in as much as the existence of sin presupposes the existence of God. If we link this back to what I have already explained in regard to Lippitt’s take on faith, we see that his view is that faith constitutes a privileged relation to religious truth, one that gives rise to higher order beliefs. I will not go further into the details of Lippitt’s position given that I do not share his rationalist approach. Instead, I will take issue with how he theoretically promotes this approach. Lippitt’s argument in this regard is in the form of a consideration weighing in against the alternative irrationalist reading. The argument is a variation of the claim that framing faith as something inherently incomprehensible places it outside of the scope of philosophy, in which case, according to Lippitt: 1) there is nothing to say about faith; 2) there is nothing that distinguishes faith from “any other form of incomprehensible behavior”; and, 3) there is no reason to admire faith.156 In order to promote an irrationalist reading of faith, I take issue with Lippitt’s three arguments, beginning with 1). In order to counter this argument, I would

|| 154 The influence of MacIntyre’s reading of Kierkegaard upon Kierkegaard studies can be seen, for example, in the John J. Davenport’s and Anthony Rudd’s Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. For more papers engaging with or critiquing MacIntyre’s reading see, for example, MacIntyre’s follow-up paper “Once More on Kierkegaard”, Bruce Ballard’s “MacIntyre and the Limits of Kierkegaardian Rationality”, Gordon D. Marino’s “The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics”, and Chapter 10 of Davenport’s Will as Commitment and Resolve. 155 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 171. His views here are inspired by the work of Roland M. Green, “Enough is Enough!: Fear and Trembling is Not about Ethics”, and Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality. 156 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, pp. 52–53.

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like to distinguish between two different perspectives through which faith can be approached: the first-personal, and the third-personal.

6.3 The narrative angle When Silentio proclaims his inability to understand Abraham, as quoted above, I believe he is referring to the first-personal level of faith, to its phenomenological and experiential dimension. As McCarthy has observed (quoted above), the religious is a truth of experience, not of thought. What Silentio cannot understand – therefore, what is beyond understanding – is what Abraham experiences in terms of his absolute relationship with the absolute. Indeed, as Lippitt himself argues in a later paper, “What Neither Abraham nor Johannes De Silentio Could Say”: What then is Johannes ultimately claiming when he says that he cannot “understand” Abraham? There seems good reason to read him as denying just the phenomenological understanding: his repeated attempts to think himself inside Abraham’s head seem ultimately to end up in a failure to grasp the phenomenology of Abraham’s specific position.157

That faith is, first-personally speaking, ineffable and incomprehensible does not, however, mean that it is categorically impossible to speak about it, nor conceptualize it. This can still be done from a third-personal point of view, in terms of a narrative about how the knight of faith behaves. Or, rather, this can be done if it is the case that what the knight of faith directly experiences in terms of faith, translates into a recognizable form of behavior. I would like to draw attention to the issue argued in the first section of this chapter: In as much as the knight of faith is a hero of faith, then there has to exist a story by virtue of which s/he becomes that hero. In the second section of this chapter I established that Silentio does make the knight of faith out to be a special kind of hero, the protagonist of a special kind of story – a hero, though, in terms of something that cannot manifest itself intersubjectively, a hero due to a personal relationship with God, thus posing the problem of determining whether a person is this kind of hero or not. Yet, as was also made clear, the knight of faith, by virtue of being an individual who is higher than the universal, will exhibit a quality of apartness: The knight of faith is responsive to something beyond the ethical; s/he is tuned into a different frequency than the rest of us in terms of orienting in the world. Consequently, faith will necessarily manifest itself in a

|| 157 John Lippitt, “What Neither Abraham nor Johannes De Silentio Could Say”, p.88.

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deviance from what is considered normal, from the concrete universal of the social order. A description of this apartness, or deviance, will then constitute a recognizable form of behavior which can inform a third-personal concept of faith. Such a description will, however, not amount to a full definition, seeing as the behavior in question could possibly have causes other than faith. Nonetheless, it still means that there is something to say about faith, even if it is, in essence, ineffable. Hence, in relation to Lippitt, my view can be said to have its cake and eat it too: it finds a way to say something about faith all the while that it sees faith as something inherently ineffable. Garff can be taken to support this line of thought as he points out that Silentio, by comparing different narratives starring a knight of faith, imbues the knight of faith with “a narrative identity”.158 Therefore, against Lippitt’s 1): There is something we can say about faith, and there is a way to engage with it philosophically in terms of the intersubjectively manifest behavior it makes possible.

6.4 Green’s argument against the narrative angle Contrary to the above, certain commentators have contended that Silentio argues against the possibility of any kind of third-personal description of the knight of faith. Roland M. Green, for example, writes the following: Johannes lets us know that the capacity for such knighthood is not confined to the older heroes and saints of faith but remains available to every human being. He imagines a knight of faith residing in the Copenhagen of his day. No outwards signs reveal this person’s spiritual depth.159

“No outward signs reveal this person’s spiritual depth.” No noticeable feature distinguishes the knight of faith as a knight of faith thereby, from a third-personal point of view, making him/her indistinguishable from anyone else.

|| 158 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 178. 159 Roland M. Green, “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling”, p. 261. See also Kjell Eyvind Johansen, “Fear and Trembling – The Problem of Justification”, p. 268.

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The passage to which Green refers is taken from “Foreløbig Expectoration”. It describes an ordinary person as a knight of faith, a man on his way home fantasizing about a dish of cooked lamb’s head.160 Counter to what Green claims, however, Silentio does not argue that the knight of faith cannot be known by any outward signs whatsoever. What he argues is that the knight of faith does not betray any sign of the numinous or the infinite, that is, of God. Silentio’s point in the passage is that even if the knight of faith is defined in terms of a direct relationship with God, this does not directly shine through in his behavior or person. Quite to the contrary, at first sight, the knight of faith seems to be as at one with the world as the most mundane and down-to-earth person that one could imagine: Jeg slutter mig lidt nærmere til ham, passer paa den mindste Bevægelse, om der ikke skulde vise sig en lille uensartet Brøks-Telegraphering fra det Uendelige, et Blik, en Mine, en Gestus, et Vemod, et Smil, der foraadte det Undelige i sin Uensartethed med det Endelige. Nei! Jeg examinerer hans Skikkelse fra Top til Taa, om der ikke skulde være en Revne, igjennem hvilken det Uendelige tittede ut. Nei! Han her heelt igjennem solid... han tilhører ganske verden, ingen Spidsborger kan tilhøre den mere.161

As is plain, it is not argued in the above passage that there are no outward signs whatsoever when it comes to the knight of faith, only that a special type of outward sign is absent: the numinous variety. Two further considerations can corroborate this interpretation: first, that Silentio immediately after the above quoted passage goes on to contrast the described knight of faith with the knight of infinite resignation: “Intet er at opdage af dette fremmede og fornemme Væsen, hvorpaa man kjender Uendelighedens Ridder.”162 Hence, the point of emphasizing the down-to-earth character of the knight of faith need not be read as a strategy aimed at making him someone inherently indistinguishable from the average person – that is, categorically unknowable by || 160 SKS 4, 133–136 / FT, 38–41. This man is often referred to as the “tax-collector” in the commentary literature, on account of the fact that Silentio points out that he could well be one, in terms of his utter normality. It should be mentioned, however, that it is never established that he actually is one. 161 SKS 4, 133–134 / FT, 39: “I move a little closer to him, watch his slightest movement to see if it reveals a bit of heterogeneous optical telegraphy from the infinite, a glance, a facial expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that would betray the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from top to toe to see if there may not be a crack through which the infinite would peek. No! He is solid all the way through… He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more.” 162 SKS 4, 134 / FT, 39: “Nothing is detectable of that distant and aristocratic nature by which the knight of the infinite is recognized.”

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outward signs, as Green indicates – but actually to distinguish him from the other category of knight with which Silentio operates in FB. I will not elaborate upon the nature of the knight of resignation here, simply noting that Silentio consistently characterizes this knight in terms of a general detachment from the world, contrary to the engagement that characterizes the knight of faith.163 For example, in one striking passage Silentio describes the knights of resignation as “strangers in the world”: Mængden af Mennesker lever fortabt i verdslig Sorg og Glæde, disse ere Oversidderne, som ikke komme med i Dandsen. Uendelighedens Riddere ere Dandsere og have Elevation. De gjøre Bevægelsen op efter og falde ned igjen, og ogsaa dette er en ikke usalig Tidsfordriv og ikke uskjøt at see paa. Men hver Gang de falde ned, kunne de ikke strax antage Stillingen, de vakle et Øieblik, og denne Vaklen viser, at de dog ere Fremmede i Verden.164

Second, my interpretation can be corroborated if one considers the narrative that Silentio goes on to tell about this everyman knight of faith which describes a certain distinguishing feature precisely, thus disproving the claim that Silentio argued for the theoretical impossibility of any third-personal description. Consider the story about this ordinary man as Silentio narrates it: The man is on his way home, and as he walks, he dreams about a dish of cooked lamb’s head with a passion worthy of a restaurateur. During the walk, he lives for the prospect of this dish. But, as luck would have it, or would not have it, the man is poor. He is utterly impoverished. Yet he still believes that his wife will have prepared the dish. He gets home, and she, of course, does not have it ready for him. Despite this, the man is still the same. “Hans Kone har den ikke – besynderlig nok – han er aldeles den Samme.”165 The man is not disappointed. He is not angry. He is not sad. He is not frustrated. And he is none of these things because he relates to the world and what happens to him in terms of faith: “Han lader 5 være lige med en Sorgløshed, som var han en letsindig Døgenigt, og dog kjøber han hvert Øieblik, han

|| 163 “The knight of infinite resignation” and the “the knight of resignation” are terms for the one and the same figure in FB. The psychic movement of resignation that is characteristic of this knight is defined as an “infinite” movement (SKS 4, 135; 141 / FT, 40; 46–47). I will explore the nature of this knight in Chapter 3. 164 SKS 4, 135 / FT, 41: “Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world.” 165 SKS 4, 134 / FT, 40: “His wife does not have it – curiously enough, he is just the same.”

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lever, den beleilige Tid til den dyreste Priis; thi han gjør end ikke det Mindste uden i Kraft af det Absurde.”166 Here I believe we have the feature which distinguishes a knight of faith: The knight of faith has an unreasonable attachment to the world, to the objects of his/her passions and interests; unreasonable in the sense that the knight of faith is protected against the emotional despair of disappointment. That is, the knight’s passion for some object, in this case a cooked lamb’s head, is independent of that object. His/her passion does not become dampened, or frustrated, by this object’s non-existence, or impossibility; and the reason for this is that s/he connects to the objects of his/her affection through faith.167 Silentio goes on in regard to this man: Paa Veien kommer han forbid en Byggeplads, han træffer en anden Mand. De tale et Øieblik sammen, han opfører i et Nu en Bygning, han disponerer over alle Kræfter dertil. Den Fremmede forlader ham med den Tanke, det var vist en Capitalist, medens min beundrede Ridder tænker: jo kom det derpaa an, kunde jeg sagtens faae det.168

In this scene, the pattern repeats itself. The man’s passion is not dependent upon real world realization. In the moment when he stands before the construction site, he truly lives for the building that is being erected. It is his passion. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. He is poor and dead broke, and, consequently, not in a position to be responsible for such an undertaking. His passion, on the other hand, takes no notice of this. It moves and operates by its own laws. My, as of yet, tentative suggestion, therefore, is that one of the principal ways in

|| 166 SKS 4, 135 / FT, 40: “With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd.” 167 Note that I here go against Garff’s interpretation of the same story. Garff, in a manner akin to that of Green, holds that this nameless knight of faith does not reveal any sign of being a knight of faith in his behavior (Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 171). This, I hold, is not true for the reason given above. Moreover, I am not certain that Garff can reconcile this point with his later assertion that the different stories of the knight of faith show that the knight of faith has a “narrative identity”, i.e., can be identified by how s/he behaves in a story. Lippitt also supports Green’s reading of the example (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 44). Pattison, however, argues as I do, that the person is recognizable by virtue of how he relates to the world through the absurd (Georg Pattison, “Bakhtin's Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard”, p. 107). 168 SKS 4, 134 / FT, 40: “On the way he passes a building site and meets another man. They converse for a moment; in an instant he erects a building, and he himself has at his disposition everything required. The stranger leaves him thinking that he surely is a capitalist, while my admired knight thinks: Well, if it came right down to it, I could easily get it.”

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which the knight of faith’s apartness manifests itself is in how he emotionally responds to the world. The existence of this distinguishing feature has two consequences in relation to my argument: on the one hand, it disproves Green’s claim that the knight of faith cannot be known by outward signs; on the other, it shows, contra Lippitt’s 1), that there is a way to characterize the knight of faith even though faith itself is incomprehensible. Faith can be characterized by virtue of how the knight of faith responds emotionally to what happens to him/her. This is not to say that such a characterization could constitute a full definition of faith, because an uncommon emotional response could well have another explanation than faith, say, a form of madness. Nonetheless, such a response would be a feature of how faith would manifest itself in the behavior of a person if s/he actually had faith. Thus, it is a symptom of faith, not a definitive feature. So far, though, I have only shown the feature in relation to one of Silentio’s descriptions of the knight of faith. In order to properly establish it, I will show that it is equally present in the most important example of a knight of faith: Abraham.

6.5 Abraham’s apartness I have already touched upon the above issue in relation to the story of Abraham, though not in the same terms. What I said earlier (in the second section), was that even though God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham has faith that Isaac is not lost. He even has faith that Isaac would not be lost if he were actually to plunge his knife into his son’s chest. As Silentio writes, apropos Abraham and the sacrifice: “Han siger nemlig: dog vil det ikke skee, eller hvis det skeer, da vil Herren give mig en ny Isaak i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde.”169 My suggestion, at this point, is that Abraham’s faith that Isaac will not be lost is tantamount to producing a similar kind of relation between Abraham and Isaac as between the anonymous man and the dish of cooked lamb’s head. In both cases the passion in question is independent of what befalls, or does not befall, the object of love in the real world. This suggestion can be confirmed if one explores the further intricacies of how Silentio describes Abraham’s psychology in relation to Isaac. One of the main points that Silentio emphasizes in relation to this is the ease with which || 169 SKS 4, 203 / FT, 115: “In other words, he is saying: But it will not happen, or if it does, the Lord will give me a new Isaac, that is, by virtue of the absurd.”

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Abraham deals with God’s halting the sacrifice, returning Isaac to him, and providing a ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead. Silentio writes: Han blev da vel overrasket ved Udfaldet, men han havde gjennem en Dobbelt-Bevægelse naaet hen til sin første Tilstand, og derfor modtog han Isaak gladere end den første Gang… Ja dersom Abraham i det Øieblik, han svingede sit Been over Æselets Ryg, har sagt til sig selv: nu er Isaak tabt, jeg kunde ligesaa gjerne offre ham her hjemme som reise den lange Vei til Morija – saa behøver jeg ikke Abraham, medens jeg nu bøier mig syv Gange for hans Navn og halvfjersindstive Gange for hans Gjerning. Dette har han nemlig ikke gjort, hvad jeg kan bevise deraf, at han blev glad ved at modtage Isaak, ret inderlig glad, at han ingen Forberedelse behøvde, ingen Tid til at samle sig paa Endeligheden og dens Glæde. Hvis det ikke stod sig saaledes med Abraham, da havde han maaskee elsket Gud, men ikke troet; thi den, der elsker Gud uden Tro, han reflekterer paa sig selv, den, der elsker Gud troende, han reflekterer paa Gud.170

As is plain from the passage, Abraham does not have to readjust to the sudden twist of the plot. Just as in the case of the anonymous man and his non-existent dinner, there is no anger, and no despair. Even more importantly, Abraham is not disconcerted about having to face Isaac after the fact, merely surprised at the particular turn of events, and joy that his son is returned to him. The issue of disconcertment is important as it is one that Silentio explicitly underscores. He contrasts his description of Abraham’s actions with how he imagines he would have fared himself under similar circumstances. Being incapable of faith, Silentio states he would have used resignation as a surrogate, becoming, therefore, a knight of resignation instead of one of faith.171 What this means, is that the only way Silentio would have been able to ride out to Moriah with Isaac was if he had, at the outset, resigned himself to the fact that Isaac was now lost: Jeg havde i samme Øieblik, som jeg besteg Hesten, sagt til mig selv: nu er Alt tabt, Gud fordrer Isaak, jeg offrer ham, med ham al min Glæde – dog er Gud Kjærlighed og vedbliver at være

|| 170 SKS 4, 131–132 / FT, 36–37: “No doubt he was surprised at the outcome, but through a double-movement he had attained his first condition, and therefore he received Isaac more joyfully than the first time… Indeed, if Abraham, the moment he swung his leg over the ass’s back, had said to himself: Now Isaac is lost, I could just as well sacrifice him here at home as ride the long way to Moriah – then I do not need Abraham, whereas now I bow seven times to his name and seventy times to his deed. This he did not do, as I can prove by his really fervent joy on receiving Isaac and by his needing no preparation and no time to rally to finitude and its joy. If it had been otherwise with Abraham, he perhaps would have loved God but would not have had faith, for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.” 171 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 34–35.

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det for mig; thi i Timeligheden kan Gud og jeg ikke tale sammen, vi have intet Sprog tilfælleds.172

And because of this, “thi hvis jeg havde faaet Isaak igjen, da havde jeg været i Forlegenhed”,173 a fact that would have, as he writes, corrupted the whole story: “Jeg havde fremdeles ved min Adfærd fordærvet hele Historien...”174 In order to be able to bear the ride to Moriah, Silentio would have had to steel himself for the disappointment of loss prior to the fact. He would have had to accept from the beginning that Isaac was going to die, and that his love for his son was going to be of the tragic variety. Consequently, he would have been disoriented by the twist of the plot that returned Isaac to him, since at that point he would already have been treating his son as dead. Isaac proving otherwise would therefore cause confusion and disconcertment. Contrary to Silentio’s projections regarding himself, Abraham shows no sign of confusion. He is not disconcerted and has no difficulty in immediately receiving Isaac with love and joy, a sign that his ordeal has not affected his love for his son as it would have affected Silentio’s. This is the crux: Abraham keeps his love, while Silentio would have had to quench it, reducing it from an active passion to a velleity. It is worth mentioning, however, that even though there is no disconcertment, there is surprise. Thus, the turn of events is unexpected, yet not something that elicits the emotional response logically connected to this unexpectedness. The reason for this, I believe, is that just as with the anonymous man and the dish of cooked lamb’s head, Abraham’s passion for Isaac is independent of what befalls the object of love in the real world. In a word, there is split between the knight of faith’s emotional relation to reality and his/her sense of reality. Abraham and the man caught up in the fantasy of a cooked lamb’s head are therefore similar in this respect: They have pure passions. By this I mean that their passion, their love for and engagement with their respective objects, are independent of what happens to those objects in the real world. The dish of cooked lamb’s head does not exist, and yet the man is unperturbed. He has no adverse reactions, but not because he was not really passionate about the cooked lamb’s head to begin with; no, rather because his passion takes a specific form. It is born

|| 172 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35: “The moment I mounted the horse, I would have said to myself: Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy – yet God is love and continues to be that for me, for in the world of time God and I cannot talk with each other, we have no language in common.” 173 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35: “…for if I had gotten Isaac again, I would have been in awkward position.” 174 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35: “Furthermore, by my behavior I would have spoiled the whole story…”

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of faith. So even though the dish does not exist in the here and now, his connection to it is secured in terms of this faith. The same applies to Abraham. Abraham can both sacrifice Isaac and see Isaac returned to him with the same heart, and not because he does not have a heart, but with love. He can do this because his relation to Isaac is secured by virtue of faith. His passion is no longer bound by what happens in the real world. It is, in a sense, absolute: otherworldly, infinite. As Silentio writes in “Lovtale over Abraham”: “thi det er stort at opgive sit Ønske, men det er større at fastholde det, efter at have opgivet det; det er stort at gribe det Evige, men det er større at fastholde det Timelige, efterat have opgivet det.”175 To keep holding on to the temporal, even after one has given it up, does not mean that one retracts the operation of relinquishment, but that one regains what one has given up on a different level, in a different way (ref., the point raised against Lippitt that faith constitutes a new form of subjective interiority, a novel way of relating emotionally to reality). This is the true meaning, per my suggested interpretation, of the claim that Abraham “had faith” that Isaac would not be lost. He could not be lost, because Abraham’s relation to Isaac was mediated by Abraham’s relation to God. So that even though God demands Isaac of him, God also secures him, that is, secures Abraham’s emotional relation to him (ref., the intrareligious collision of God contradicting himself in his promises to Abraham).176 To clarify: When I say that “God secures Isaac” this means that Isaac is secured on the religious level. How this is going to show itself in the world, to reason, is another matter entirely, which is why Abraham is surprised to have Isaac returned to him even though he had faith that this would happen. In Chapter 3 I

|| 175 SKS 4, 115 / FT, 18: “[F]or it is great to give up one’s desire, but it is greater to hold fast to it after having given it up; it is great to lay hold of the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.” 176 Sharon Krishek has drawn attention to the same feature of the knight of faith, and to how it is represented in the two stories discussed above. Additionally, she points out that the pattern is repeated in the story about the young man and the princess (I discuss this story in Chapter 3). Krishek writes: “From the point of view of the existential drama that concerns us here, the three stories of faith are, structurally and essentially, the same. They all articulate the need to acknowledge the insecurity and often helplessness that temporality and finitude oblige us to experience, and their protagonists uncompromisingly accept the status of everything that they care about as profoundly lost. At the same time, and precisely against this background, the stories demonstrate the astonishing ability of their protagonists to affirm, with joy, their relation to the lost thing” (Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 119). Eagleton also points to the same feature of Abraham’s emotional life in the following passage: “Like the Lacanian analysand on the road to recovery, Abraham refuses to give up on his desire for the impossible, holding fast to the finite even as he resigns himself to the fact that nothing on earth will satisfy his longing” (Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 44).

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show that suspense, as definitive of faith, is tied to exactly this aspect; divine suspense is to live in imminence of God’s intervention, it is to be connected to a temporal horizon beyond the natural one. By virtue of the two stories of a knight of faith, it is clear that faith does have an intersubjectively manifest effect. Faith can, therefore, be conceptualized and understood in terms of this effect, in terms of pure passion, an unreasonable emotional attachment. Near the end of “Problema III” Silentio asks: But what did Abraham accomplish through his ordeal at Moriah? He answers: Abraham remained true to his love: “At han blev sin Kjærlighed tro.”177 Note the wording in the original Danish. The word “tro”, which is also the word for faith, is what signifies that he remained “true”. Through it all, Abraham remained true to his love; that is his accomplishment. The knight of faith’s passion burns with a flame that cannot be disturbed by anything on the earthly level.178 Yet it is a passion precisely for the earthly: “Han troede ikke, at han engang skulde blive salig hisset, men at han skulde blive lyksalig her i Verden.”179 Thus, I can counter Lippitt’s 1): There is nothing to say about faith if faith is made out to be something utterly incomprehensible. There may be nothing to say about the first-personal experience of faith, but this does not hinder one in approaching it from the outside, in terms of how faith affects the manifest behavior of the person in question, and on this level there is something to say. Someone of Lippitt’s persuasion may find my answer unsatisfactory. Then again, that faith is philosophically unsatisfactory seems to be the core of how Silentio views the matter, as faith is a state wherein the individual is higher than the universal. In this context, note the following passage: “Philosophien kan og skal ikke give Troen…”180 The above discussion of faith as pure passion ought to be viewed as a first formulation of the issue. I return to the topic at length in Chapter 3 where I propose an explanation of how faith can make something like pure passion possible. I tie the idea of faith as pure passion to the idea of faith as a double-movement. || 177 SKS 4, 207 / FT, 120: “He remained true to his love.” 178 Ref., the following quote from “Lovtale over Abraham”: “…i dybere Forstand ligger Troens Vidunder i, at Abraham og Sara vare unge nok til at ønske, og at Troen hadde bevaret deres Ønske og dermed deres ungdom” (SKS 4, 115 / FT, 18: “...in the more profound sense, the wonder of faith is that Abraham and Sarah were young enough to desire and that faith had preserved their desire and thereby their youth.”) 179 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36: “He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world.” 180 SKS 4, 129 / FT, 33: “Philosophy cannot and must not give faith…”

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6.6 Revisiting Cross and Lippitt Given the new developments, it is interesting to revisit Lippitt’s and Cross’ view of faith sketched out above. In light of my suggested interpretation of faith, Cross can be seen to be right about faith in as much as he points out that it involves a special kind of emotional relation, what I termed “a practical mode of existential orientation”. The feature of pure passion mirrors Cross’ view here. Cross is wrong, however, in claiming that this special kind of emotional relation alone constitutes faith, thereby removing the need for the divine. On the contrary, the special kind of emotional relation is an effect of the knight of faith’s relation to the divine. The special kind of emotional relation is faith approached on the third-personal level, approached narratively and from the outside. Faith on the inside, in contradistinction, is a direct and personal relation to God, but that is something incomprehensible that defies human understanding. What is comprehensible, however, is how faith manifests itself in concrete behavior, concrete behavior that is made plain through the two stories recounted above. Lippitt, on the other hand, is right in as much as he points out that Abraham, through faith, is secure in his relation to Isaac. He is also right in stressing that faith is theological. The above interpretation gives reason to believe that Lippitt is wrong, however, in claiming that faith manifests itself in the form of “a higher order belief” that Isaac will ultimately be spared no matter what. The next subsection elaborates the argument against Lippitt.

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6.7 Faith versus belief As regards Lippitt’s argument to the effect that Abraham does not believe that Isaac will die as a consequence of the sacrifice, this can now be countered. The passage referenced by Lippitt as central to his argument is as follows: “I al den Tid troede han; han troede, at Gud ikke vilde fordre Isaak af ham, medens han dog var villig til at offre ham naar det forlangtes.”181 As suggested, there is a difference between “belief” and “faith”. A belief is a propositional attitude. A proposition is communicable.182 It is universal, per the Hegelian thought of FB. A belief, therefore, belongs to the universal. Faith, however, does not. Already at this point it becomes apparent that there is a problem with the idea of a “higher order belief”. Even if it is “higher order”, that is, not grounded in human reason but in faith, the belief itself becomes communicable by virtue of being a “belief”. A “higher order belief” would represent a mediation of faith in terms of the universal, as it makes faith into something on the level of human reason, the difference from other beliefs being that the “higher order beliefs” have a special type of source. The reason this is problematic is that it paints a picture of faith where faith does not utterly break with human reason, but consolidates itself with it, forming something on the level of “faith-reason”. But if so, then logically a knight of faith would be able to communicate his/her “faith-reasons” for his/her actions to other people. Now given that these other people are not knights of faith themselves, and thus do not have a personal relation to God, they may not understand these reasons. Their lack of faith would exclude the knight of faith from society, making

|| 181 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 35: “During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded.” See also, John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 71. 182 I believe that a proposition has to be communicable in the sense that it is possible, in principle, to communicate it, given the existence of sentient creatures capable of communication. If a proposition is not thus communicable, then it is not possible to render it in language. Language is per definition communicable. If it is not possible to render something in language, then you get a problem with regard to the properties of truth and falsity. Propositions are, per definition, bearers of truth-conditions. They are either true or false. Thus, a linguistic statement that details the truth-conditions of a proposition will express the proposition. In order for a proposition to be an incommunicable proposition, therefore, it has to be one of which one cannot state the truth-conditions; but that means that the object in question is not a proposition, as it does not have truth-conditions.

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the knight of faith, in this sense, something “higher than universal”. But, importantly, there seems to be no good reason that other knights of faith should not be able to relate to the first knight’s “faith-reasons”. This, however, runs contrary to what Silentio states in “Problema II”. There he makes it clear that the true knight of faith always finds him/herself in “absolute isolation”, and that religious companions are only for charlatans.183 “Troens Ridder han er alene anviist sig selv, han føler Smerten af, at han ikke kan gjøre sig forstaaelig for Andre...”184 Something that includes other knights of faith: “Den ene Troens Ridder kan slet ikke hjælpe den anden. Enten bliver den Enkelte selv en Troens Ridder derved, at han tager Paradoxet paa sig, eller han bliver det aldrig. Compagniskab i disse Regioner er aldeles utænkeligt.”185 For this reason, I do not believe that it is possible to hold that faith involves a “higher order belief”. Consequently, I believe one has to interpret the passage he mentions, not in the sense that the Abraham has a “higher order belief” that Isaac will not die, but that Abraham is certain in his relation to Isaac by virtue of faith: he has pure passion; he loves by virtue of faith.186 This makes him incapable of losing Isaac. Hence he is certain that God will not demand the sacrifice: certain on the level of faith, not on the level of human reason. Furthermore, that this is not a belief about what is concretely going to take place in the world becomes apparent if one reads the above quote in its context: I al den Tid troede han; han troede, at Gud ikke vilde fordre Isaak af ham, medens han dog var villig til at offre ham, naar det forlangtes. Han troede i Kraft af det Absurde; thi menneskelig Beregning kunde der ikke være Tale om, og det var jo det Absurde, at Gud, som fordrede det af ham, i næste Øieblik skulde tilbagekalde Fordringen. Han besteg Bjerget, endnu i det Øieblik da Kniven blinkede, da troede han – at Gud ikke vilde fordre Isaak. Han blev da vel overrasket ved Udfaldet, men han havde gjennem en Dobbelt-Bevægelse naaet hen til sin første Tilstand, og derfor modtog han Isaak gladere end den første Gang. Lad os gaae videre. Vi lade Isaak virkelig blive offret. Abraham troede. Han troede ikke, at han engang skulde

|| 183 SKS 4, 170 / FT, 79–80. 184 SKS 4, 171 / FT, 80: “The knight of faith is assigned solely to himself; he feels the pain of being unable to make himself understandable to others…” 185 SKS 4, 163 / FT, 71: “The one knight of faith cannot help the other at all. Either the single individual himself becomes the knight of faith by accepting the paradox or he never becomes one. Partnership in these areas is utterly unthinkable.” 186 Davenport has also pointed out the fact that Abraham loves Isaac “through loving faith in God” (John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 230).

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blive salig hisset, men at han skulde blive lyksalig her i Verden. Gud kunde give ham en ny Isaak, kalde den offrede tillive.187

In this passage two things count against the idea that it is about “higher order beliefs”: first, Abraham’s surprise. If he did not believe that God would demand Isaac of him, why would he be surprised when God did not? This indicates that Abraham’s certainty that Isaac would not be sacrificed is not a certainty about what is concretely going to take place, but rather a certainty grounded in some level different from that of the real, as I suggested with the concept of pure passion. Second, that Silentio goes on to stress Abraham’s “belief” even after he imagines Abraham to have sacrificed Isaac, which also suggests that Abraham’s certainty is not about what is concretely going to take place. It is something of a different nature, thus confirming my position against that of Lippitt. One way to grasp what I am saying in this subsection about the difference between faith and belief is to think about their different directions of fit. It is common in philosophy to distinguish between belief and desire, for example, in terms of their different directions of fit in relation to the world. A belief is patterned upon a state of affairs in the world. A desire is a pattern into which the world is to be molded. A belief captures and reflects the world as it is. A desire changes it, or attempts to do so. Faith, on the other hand, neither attempts to fit with the world (belief), nor make the world fit with it (desire). Faith is a relationship to the world mediated by a relationship with God; it is a relationship to a future made possible through God.

|| 187 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 35–36: “During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question, and it certainly was absurd that God, who required it of him, should in the next moment rescind the requirement. He climbed the mountain, and even in the moment when the knife gleamed he had faith – that God would not require Isaac. No doubt he was surprised at the outcome, but through a double-movement he had attained his first condition, and therefore he received Isaac more joyfully than the first time. Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed.”

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6.8 Concluding remarks In this section, I have countered Lippitt’s argument that Abraham does not believe that Isaac will die as part of the sacrifice by showing that interpreting Abraham’s state of mind concerning Isaac’s fate as a belief leads to unwanted consequences, principally the existence of something that could be termed “faithreason”. Furthermore, I have engaged with one aspect of Lippitt’s argument against interpreting faith as something inherently incomprehensible, namely that that course would entail there being nothing to say about faith. I have countered this by conceding that, indeed, there is nothing to be said about faith in a first-person sense. As McCarthy has argued, faith is a truth of experience, not of thought. Yet one can characterize faith third-personally, that is, narratively, which led me to characterize faith in terms of pure passion. Lippitt’s argument against framing faith as something inherently incomprehensible had two additional aspects, however, and I want to turn briefly to these. In addition to asserting that there can be nothing to say about faith if faith is incomprehensible, Lippitt also suggests: 2) there is, then, nothing that distinguishes faith from “any other form of incomprehensible behavior”; and, consequently, 3) there is no reason to admire faith. As regards Lippitt’s 2), this is true, but it is also exactly why, as I argued in the third section, that Silentio has plotted FB in the manner he has, combining and juxtaposing two levels of discourse, in order to make the aesthetical suggestion that Abraham is a knight of faith. Yet of course, as Silentio makes plain, one cannot really be certain. Thus, stating that faith cannot, in principle, be distinguished from any other form of incomprehensible behavior is like kicking down an open door. As regards Lippitt’s 3), this is also true, in an ethical sense. However, an individual qua his/her individuality may very well find something to admire in Abraham, and Abraham’s wholly personal relation to God. Without the possibility of such a personal relationship with God, the highest authority in the life of humankind would be the ethical. It would be society.188 As Silentio puts it, the

|| 188 Westphal points out that for Hegel there is no higher authority in the life of man than the ethical; this because God, for him, in some sense is the ethical: “This is to say that true religion affirms the family, the economy, and the state as the decisive presence of God on earth and that true religiosity consists in thoroughgoing socialization” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 82). Connected to this, Green has argued that, according to Silentio, if ethics is the highest authority in the life of human beings, then sin is inescapable: “If there is to be an escape from sin, then ethics itself must not be the final word on our personal

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ethical would be both what gives an individual’s life its meaning and what limits it. It would be his/her whole world.189 “Dersom nu det her Udviklede forholder sig rigtigt, dersom der intet Incommensurabelt er i et Menneskeliv, men det Incommensurable der er, kun er det ved et Tilfælde, af hvilket Intet følger...”190 An individual’s particularity, his/her individuality and incommensurability, would be nothing but a thing that has to be sublated in order for the individual to express the ethical. Individuality in itself would be of no significance. As Silentio says, nothing would follow from it. It would be a means to an end, the end being the realization of the ethical. This could generate a reason for admiring the religious, a thirst for something higher than the standards of society.191 As it is represented in FB, the religious is the only route for an individual to realize his/her individuality without becoming a villain, that is, without falling short of the ethical: Troen er nemlig dette Paradox, at den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, dog vel at mærke saaledes, at Bevægelsen gjentager sig, at han altsaa, efterat have været i det Almene, nu som den Enkelte isolerer sig som høiere end det Almene. Dersom dette ikke er Troen, saa er Abraham tabt, saa har Troen aldrig været til i Verden, netop fordi den altid har været til. Thi hvis det Ethiske ɔ: det Sædelige er det Høieste, og der intet Incommensurabelt bliver tilbage i Mennesket paa anden Maade, end at dette Incommensurable er det Onde...192

|| destiny. Ethics must not be the highest possibility of human existence, as Kant in his most optimistic moods wanted to believe. It must instead be transcended by a more ultimate possibility in which forgiveness and the suspension of merited punishment becomes realities. In short, it must be possible for there to be a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’” (Roland M. Green, “Deciphering Fear and Trembling's Secret Message”, p. 107). 189 SKS 4, 160 / FT, 62. 190 SKS 4, 160–161 / FT, 62: “Now if this train of thought is sound, if there is nothing incommensurable in a human life, and if the incommensurable that is present is there only by an accident from which nothing results…” 191 Michelle Kosch has argued that no really plausible account has been given as to why the ethical fails, why it is “…inadequate to the situation of existing subjectivity” (Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard, p. 139). The above outlines such a possible account, yet one that never can amount to a complete defense of the religious in relation to ethical. The reason for this is simple: Such a defense, in order to be effective, would itself have to amount to something ethical because it would have to make sense ethically speaking, but the religious does not make sense in this regard. The religious is responsiveness to something higher than the universal – i.e. the ethical. Thus, when Kosch states that FB cannot rationalize a move from the ethical and to the religious (Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard, p. 159–160), this is correct, but what she asks for is also impossible, at least from within the perspective of FB that is developed here. 192 SKS 4, 149 / FT, 55: “Faith is namely this paradox that single individual is higher than the universal – yet, please note, in such a way that the movement repeats itself, so that after having

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As a final thought before moving on, I want to raise one problem regarding my idea about pure passion: If the knight of faith relates to his/her object of affection in the described manner, how is it that Abraham experiences fear and trembling as he rides to Moriah? Does not the fact that God, in some sense, secures Isaac negate any fear Abraham may have? My answer has to do with the issue of Abraham’s split nature, discussed in the fourth section of this chapter. Even if faith secures Abraham’s emotional relation to Isaac, this does not make the act of killing one’s own son any less atrocious. Abraham may be emotionally secure in his love for Isaac no matter what happens to the boy, because he has faith, but he likewise understands that what he is doing, ethically and rationally, is killing him. As I stated earlier, the split is itself what fuels the fear and trembling. Thus, Abraham may not feel sorrow about Isaac’s impending death in terms of his emotional love for him, yet Abraham does have an adverse emotional reaction to the fact that he knows that Isaac’s death is wrong, and that it is his fault; moreover, that it is wrong of him not to feel sorrow. The fear and trembling are tied to the ethical reality of the situation, and comprise a species of horror born out of a rational realization of what is going on. As I have argued, Abraham can no more fathom faith in terms of reason than any thirdperson observer can, a fact that sheds additional light upon the following quote: “Ham kan Betragteren slet ikke forstaae...Abraham kan man ikke græde over. Man nærmer sig ham med en horror religiosus, som Israel nærmede sig Sinai-Bjerget.”193 Important to this line of reasoning is the fact that Silentio consistently speaks of the ethical as something that tempts Abraham.194 In order for the ethical to be a temptation, Abraham has to know that what he is doing is not ethical. Moreover, he has to know what the ethical option is. Abraham has to be able to relate to what he does in an ethical way at the same time as he relates to it in terms of faith, faith being what drives him in his behavior (God’s command). Abraham, therefore, has to be of two minds about what he is doing. Even more striking, as I argued in the fourth section, Abraham’s existence as an exception to the universal has to manifest itself in Abraham’s own psychology and understanding of

|| been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal. If this is not faith, then Abraham is lost, then faith has never existed in the world precisely because it has always existed. For if the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest and if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way such that this incommensurability is not evil…” 193 SKS 4, 154 / FT, 60–61: “The observer cannot understand him at all… One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a horror religiosus, as Israel approached Mount Sinai.” 194 SKS 4, 153; 202 / FT, 60; 115.

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himself, and this means that Abraham cannot rationalize his first-personal relation to God in terms of his own understanding. Just as Abraham cannot speak and explain himself to others, he cannot speak and explain himself to himself. He cannot convince himself that what he is doing is rationally right. Here lies his fear and trembling, and, incidentally, ours as well: the possibility of “justified” break from everything right and good; that is what is horrifying. “Abraham tier – men han kan ikke tale, deri ligger Nøden og Angsten.”195 Having discussed one approach to countering Lippitt’s claim that if faith is incomprehensible, then there is nothing to say about it, in the next section I explore a different, related response to the claim, one inspired by Garff.

7 Writing the ineffable The argument in the following is not Garff’s; it is my own. It is, however, profoundly inspired by Garff. In “Den Søvnløse”, Garff raises the same worry as Lippitt, though with a slight twist. Garff asks: If Silentio defines faith as something ineffable, why is it that he keeps writing about it?196 If faith is ineffable, then there is nothing to say about it. It cannot, as argued, be the object of a philosophical discourse traditionally conceived. The difference between Garff and Lippitt, however, is that Lippitt uses this point to promote the view that Silentio (or rather Kierkegaard) does not hold that faith is something utterly incomprehensible, since Silentio does say something about it. Garff, on the contrary, holds that Silentio’s act of saying, that is, how the text is rhetorically and compositionally structured, shows that faith is indeed something incomprehensible and ineffable. Thus, when Silentio admits his failure to understand Abraham and to understand faith, the distance Silentio creates between himself and faith is not, according to Garff, a fact specific to Silentio’s understanding, which it is for Lippitt;197 rather, this is done in order to illustrate something essential about faith itself, and in order to be able to write about it. There are theatrical elements to how Silentio speaks about faith.198 By “theatrical elements” I mean that Silentio explicitly presents and stages himself and his || 195 SKS 4, 201 / FT, 113: “Abraham remains silent – but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety.” 196 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, pp. 160–162. 197 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 53. 198 And not only when he is speaking about faith, although faith is what interests us here. Silentio also dramatizes himself in relation to the spiritual crisis of modern life, the fundamental

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reactions to faith. He thematizes his failure of comprehension, and makes it a part of his presentation. Such a rhetorical strategy, I suggest, is necessary, because if the ineffable, the incomprehensible, is to have a presence in an act of communication, its presence is one marking the limits of this act. Ineffability, if it is to show itself through words, has to show itself as a place where words cannot go. The discourse, therefore, has to in some sense fail and, further, in order to make the ineffable present, it must reflect upon its failure. Garff: “Af samme grund kan teksten kun sige, hvad den ville gøre, men ikke selv gøre, hvad den vil…”199 Consequently, because the ineffable can only be explicitly manifested as a limit to what can be said, a discourse revolving around the ineffable has to reflect upon itself as an act of communication. It cannot state what cannot be stated, but it can make a point out of the fact that there is something it cannot state. To make this latter statement, however, demands that the discourse reflects upon its inability, hence that it reflects upon itself. This constitutes a demand for narrative: a story about how the text relates and fails to capture the ineffable element. In a word, all the discourse can tell is a story about what it cannot, but by doing this it can actually bring the reader into proximity to the ineffable – not in terms of a direct relation, but indirectly, in terms of a narrative of its failure.200 Garff: Som man derfor bør nærme sig Abraham med religiøs rædsel, således må også den tekst, der griber ud efter det ubegribelige, være en tekst, der stedse røber sin viden om, at den ikke lader

|| lack of commitment and passion that Silentio finds to be endemic to modernity and the Hegelian philosophy characteristic of it. For a discussion of this, see Daniel W. Conway’s “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” (Conway 2003). Later in this chapter I argue against Conway’s conclusions, although the analysis itself underscores much of importance. 199 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 164. My translation: “For the same reason the text can only say what it wants to do, but not do what it wants…” 200 Ref.: “Paradokset er altså ikke blot, at Johannes de silentio skriver om det, hvorom man ikke kan skrive og derfor burde tie, paradokset er tillige, at det alene, at det alene er ved en retorisering av tavsheden, man kan gjenindsætte Abraham i den temporalitet, hvori hans frygt og bæven hører hjemme” (Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 163). My translation: “The paradox is not only that Johannes de silentio writes about something one cannot write about, and therefore ought to have been silent, the paradox is moreover that it is only by making silence into a rhetorical act that one can place Abraham into that temporal frame where his fear and trembling belongs.” See also the following comment by Conway: “If constituted exclusively as a paradox, after all, faith forever eludes the grasp of reason and ultimately frustrates all efforts to understand Abraham. This is why Johannes retreats so regularly to the role of aspiring encomiast: The paradox of Abraham’s faith may defy understanding, but it invites our admiration” (Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, pp. 193–194).

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sig skrive, idet den vil være en tekst om en tekst, som ikke selv var tekst, men en paradoksal handling.201

Silentio’s self-dramatization when he speaks about faith and how he fails to understand it is, therefore, no contingent feature. True, we could conceivably have dealt with a knight of faith as the author of FB, that is, with an author who confessed to having first-hand experience of faith. By virtue of this, however, the alternative author would not be able to avoid the dramatization and narrativity I have discussed. That is, a knight of faith could not, just as Silentio cannot, communicate the incommunicable otherwise than as something incommunicable. To claim otherwise would be to claim that Abraham really can speak and explain his position to others; it would be to claim that Abraham is not higher than the universal, which, to recycle Lippitt’s phrase, flies in the face of the text.202 Consequently, qua someone who speaks about faith, a knight of faith would be indistinguishable from Silentio. Even the potential claim that s/he was a knight of faith would be without consequence as s/he would not be able to prove it. Furthermore, a knight of faith would be equally at a loss in understanding Abraham, because one can only become a knight of faith in terms of one’s own unique individuality. As was made clear in the second and sixth sections, there is no intersubjectivity on the level of faith; there is no common ground between various knights of faith. This line of reasoning regarding how Silentio reflects upon his relation to the ineffable supports the move between the first-personal and the third-personal perspectives, defended in the prior section; it pinpoints the importance of such a move in a discourse that revolves around the ineffable. For what I spoke of as “theatrical elements” comprise a move wherein Silentio utilizes a third-person perspective on himself, a narrative perspective, in order to speak about something that cannot be spoken about, that cannot be straightforwardly grasped through words. || 201 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p. 164. My translation: “As one, therefore, ought to approach Abraham with religious fear, so also must the text that seeks to grasp the ungraspable, be a text which occasionally reveals that it itself understands that it is a text that it is not possible to write, this because it wishes to be a text about a text that itself was not a text, but a paradoxical act.” 202 Connected to this, is the discussion that opens the chapter “Lovtale over Abraham”, where Silentio argues for the reciprocal dependency of the “hero” and the “poet”. These figures are dialectically (reciprocally, by way of mutual dependence) defined in the sense that a hero is only a hero if s/he is praised through a chronicle of his/her exploits, and the poet is only a poet if s/he is a chronicler of exploits, hence someone praising a hero (Kierkegaard, 1997c, pp. 112–113). In English: (Kierkegaard 1983, 15–16). In other words, a hero like the knight of faith is not the one to tell the story about a hero like the knight of faith; only a poet like Silentio would do that.

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The thing that cannot be grasped through words, for Silentio, is Abraham and the reason for this is that Abraham is an individual who is higher than the universal, and has an absolute relation to the absolute. He is defined in relation to something ineffable and incomprehensible. Stating that something is ineffable and incomprehensible, however, is to put an absolute distance between the reader and the thing in question. If something is ineffable and incomprehensible, then the reader has, per definition, no hope of grasping it. The reader relies upon words. Words are useless. It is here that Silentio intervenes with his own person, with his relation. We, as readers of FB, are drawn into a relation with the ineffable dimension of Abraham’s character by virtue of Silentio’s relation to it. Silentio’s person, moreover, is not the only character in FB who mediates the reader’s relation to Abraham’s faith. After the general introduction, FB opens with a section entitled “Stemning”.203 This section tells the story of a nameless man (not to be mistaken for the anonymous man with the dream of cooked lamb’s head). The nameless man is fascinated by Abraham: “Hans Ønske var at være tilstede i den Stund, da Abraham opløftede sit Øie og saa Morijaberget i det Fjerne, den Stund han lod Æslerne tilbage, og gik ene med Isaak op til Bjerget; thi det, der beskæftigede ham, var ikke Phantasiens kunstrige Væven, men Tankens Gysen.”204 What introduces us to the story of Abraham and Isaac in FB is precisely the nameless man’s relation to that story. And what is central to this relation is, to use Hannay’s translation of FB, “the shudder of thought” (“Tankens Gysen”).205 “The shudder of thought” is the nameless man’s reaction to the incomprehensibility of what Abraham does, something made plain by the four retellings of Abraham’s journey that immediately follow the introduction of this concept. As touched upon in the beginning of the third section, each retelling gives another version of what did not happen in Abraham’s journey and subsequent actions at Moriah in order, by way of contrast, to emphasize what did happen, why what happened is so incomprehensible, and why the events of the story make thought shudder. Silentio:

|| 203 SKS 4, 105–111 / FT, 9–14. 204 SKS 4, 105 / FT, 9: “His wish was to be present in that hour when Abraham raised his eyes and saw Mount Moriah in the distance, the hour when he left the asses behind and went up the mountain alone with Isaac – for what occupied him was not the beautiful tapestry of imagination but the shudder of the idea.” 205 FT2, 9. Hong and Hong translate this as “the shudder of the idea” (FT, 9); to my mind “shudder of thought” is a more accurate translation, as it is thought itself that shudders before the possibility inherent in the story of Abraham.

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Saaledes og paa mange lignende Maader tænkte hiin Mand, om hvilke vi tale, over denne Begivenhed. Hver Gang han da efter en Vandring til Morija-Berget vendte hjem, da sank han sammen af Træthed, han foldede sine Hænder og sagde: «Ingen var dog stor som Abraham, hvo er istand til at forstaae ham?»206

The main point in this context is that the incomprehensibility of Abraham is not given to us, the readers, directly, but as mediated through the character of the nameless man – it his thought that shudders. The nameless man, just like Silentio, serves as an intermediary, a medium, who connects us to something to which we ourselves cannot relate. By virtue of these characters’ mediation, the incomprehensibility becomes a narrative element – something they relate to, and which we relate to because they do so. In this form, we can relate to it. Consequently, the presence of the ineffable in discourse presupposes a subject that stands in a relation to the ineffable, and who then speaks about it as something ineffable. The discourse in question, therefore, has to proceed narratively, indirectly, and self-reflectively. FB proceeds in precisely such a manner: indirectly, self-reflectively, and by way of narratives. The text intimates the ineffable by presenting how it manifests itself in relation to a character. Abraham is made out to be a knight of faith by virtue of Silentio’s and the nameless man’s relation to him. Abraham is a representative of the ineffable by virtue of their testimony and perspective. In a parallel manner, the ineffable itself is shown, to the extent that it is shown, by how it manifests itself in the life of the three knights of faith: Abraham, the man fantasizing about the lamb’s head, and the young man. These three figures, therefore, also mediate between the ineffable and the reader. Silentio mediates our relation to Abraham. Abraham mediates our relation to faith. Either way, the text creates a narrative distance between itself and the ineffable, the ineffable either being Abraham as a knight of faith, or the experience of faith. Garff confirms the presence of this strategy of narrative distance: Han [Silentio] vælger i stedet at lade en række tekstuelle figurer mime fortællingen om Abraham og lader derved den begivenhed, han ikke selv begriber, gysende gribe andre, – andre, der vel at mærke ikke lader det blive ved gyset, men gentager fortællingen om Abraham eksistentielt i deres egen fortælling.207

|| 206 SKS 4, 111 / FT, 14: “Thus and in many similar ways did the man of whom we speak ponder this event. Every time he returned from a pilgrimage to Mount Moriah, he sank down wearily, folded his hands, and said, ‘No one was as great as Abraham. Who is able to understand him?’” 207 Joakim Garff, “Den Søvnløse”, p 164. My translation: “He [Silentio] chooses instead to let a score of textual figures mime the story about Abraham, and thereby lets the event he himself

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The question that opened this section was the following: If Silentio defines faith as something ineffable, why is it that he keeps writing about it? The answer is that Silentio writes in a manner that actually does make faith out to be something ineffable. By using narrative, the ineffable appears before the reader by virtue of the different characters who relate to it: Abraham and the other two knights of faith, the nameless man, Silentio himself. In other words, the opening question can be turned against itself in the following manner: If faith is not something ineffable, why is it that Silentio writes in the manner he does? By consistently describing faith as beyond thought, and mediating the reader’s relation to faith through characters in various narratives, it is clear that the ignorance Silentio exhibits in relation to faith is intentionally staged. Consequently, if Silentio is an unreliable narrator, he is so on purpose. This raises the following challenge to any rationalist reading of FB: What is Silentio’s purpose in deceiving his reader? The crux of the problem is that if faith can be rationally comprehended, then what is gained by portraying it as not so? As I see it, if given a rational reading, FB risks being reduced to a purely aesthetical exercise wherein the compositional ingenuity does not serve some higher purpose, as it does on the irrational reading, but merely constitutes a form of enjoyable obfuscation. The composition of FB would be, in a demeaning way, pure rhetoric. If the truth of FB only comes to the fore if the reader reflects upon who says what and why, then the “who” and “why” have to have some substantial answers pinned to them. Moreover, the hidden message of FB has to be connected to Silentio’s reason for deceiving his reader. In the next and final section, I explore an argument that counters the above challenge, while holding to a rationalist reading: an argument that specifically takes the question of Silentio’s motivation into consideration when considering Silentio an unreliable narrator.208

|| cannot grasp, shudderingly grasp others – others that, please note, not only shudder, but repeat the story about Abraham existentially in their own story.” In regard to the strategy of narrative distance, see also Walther who writes about the “strong iterative or digressive structure” of FB (Bo Kampmann Walther, “Web of Shudders: Sublimity in Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’”, p. 761): a text which moves by “repetitions and pathway into paradigmatic sub-narratives” (Bo Kampmann Walther, “Web of Shudders: Sublimity in Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’”, p. 761). This is for the following reason: “Johannes de Silentio has surely understood that the subjunctive modality is a fine instrument for ‘tuning’ the reader’s attentiveness; the protagonist merely reflects it, as in a tale, a metaphor, or a song” (Bo Kampmann Walther, “Web of Shudders: Sublimity in Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’”, p. 762). 208 Note that there is marked difference between Silentio’s intention as the staged narrator of the text, and Kierkegaard’s. The question here is not about Kierkegaard’s intention, but about Silentio as part of the text.

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The two other examples of interpretations of Silentio as unreliable narrator that I have mentioned, those of Evans and Lippitt, do not go into a consideration of the question of Silentio’s motivation, a fact I take to be detrimental to their formulations; consequently, I do not engage them in a closer reading on this point.

8 Conway’s argument: Silentio as an unreliable narrator The argument by Daniel W. Conway that is explored in this section is an amalgam of two of his papers: “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, and “Abraham’s Last Word”. The argument presented is not one Conway himself has presented in full. It is created on the basis of two separate arguments that he gives, but, as will be shown, these are two separate arguments that logically fulfill each other, and that, therefore, can advantageously be taken in conjunction.209

8.1 The crux of Conway’s position The central claim of Conway’s combined argument is found in the first paper and states that FB is not directly concerned with the issue of faith at all, but with the person of Johannes de Silentio and his failure to relate to faith.210 The deception that Silentio perpetrates in relation to faith – his unreliability – is, in this view, grounded in Silentio’s failed relationship to faith. The deception is not an aesthetical way of avoiding saying what could have been said but, rather, the symptom of a spiritual deficiency and a psychological problem. On Conway’s reading, it is Silentio’s spiritual deficiency that is the real subject matter of FB, its hidden message. Silentio’s spiritual deficiency, Conway argues, is illustrative of the spiritual crisis of modern society, and FB is a polemical attempt to combat this crisis, a polemical thrust which only comes to the fore if one sees Silentio’s game for what it is. Conway’s argument in “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” is in the form of a close reading that focuses upon the “dramatic structure that informs

|| 209 One major difference between the two texts is that “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” speculates as to how Kierkegaard intended FB to be read, while “Abraham’s Last Word” does not contain speculations of this sort, but relates to Silentio as the author of the text. I do not place weight upon this detail. 210 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, pp. 90–91.

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the opening sections of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.”211 And though Conway solely focuses upon the opening sections of the work, he claims that what he finds there has consequences for the work as whole.212 Two things inform Conway’s reading: Silentio’s presentation of his own relation to faith, and his description of his age as a wayward age that has lost its relation to faith. On the surface, Silentio strikes one as someone fascinated by faith and the story of Abraham. At the same time, he describes his own age as a time that essentially lacks faith. Therefore, Silentio gives the impression of being someone who has risen above his age in spiritual matters. He also gives an impression that his elevation is quite important to him. But, as Conway points out, appearances can deceive, and Silentio’s elevation falls a good deal short of the divine. Silentio is no knight of faith, and he does not claim to be. What is more, he shows no inclination to aspire to the role either. He seems to be, as Conway puts it, in a state of “passional stasis” when it comes to faith: content to admire it from a distance. Conway: “He is in fact content to remain as he is, despite the vast spiritual gulf that separates him, by his own admission, from Abraham.”213 Thus even if Silentio, on the surface, has risen above how he describes his age, in reality, he seems to be no better than it. He has his gaze set upon faith, but his feet are not taking him anywhere.214 Thus, if push came to shove, he would prove himself to be just as out of touch with faith as everyone else. If one entertains the idea that Conway is right in this reading, one faces a variation of the question raised at the end of the seventh section: Why does Silentio write? If Silentio is not writing in order to disclose the nature of faith, that is, disclose it to the extent that it can be disclosed, as I am suggesting, why communicate? Conway’s answer is psychological: Silentio writes out of self-contempt. Silentio does not write FB primarily in order to communicate truths and facts, but as a psychological exercise, or psychological exorcism. Silentio writes in order to keep his self-contempt at bay, a self-contempt born of the knowledge that he has no impetus to pursue faith, and the understanding that this is a failing.215 Silentio

|| 211 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 87. 212 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 91. 213 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 99. 214 In interpreting the nameless man from the chapter of FB entitled “Stemning”, Conway makes a great deal out of the nameless man’s contentment with merely admiring Abraham by observing him from a distance (Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 93). 215 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 99.

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writes, therefore, in a confessional manner, addressing himself to his reader, staging himself in his writing, so that he can align himself with a peer cohort or constituency that is demonstrably superior to his dispirited generation, then he can claim for himself a comparative advantage in passional resources and spiritual development. This advantage in turn absolves him of any obligation to aspire any further to the faith of Abraham: he has advanced so far beyond his generation that only congratulations and praise are in order.216

Silentio writes in order to rationalize his own failing and to spin his own story in such a way that he seems to be doing something right, all the while it shines through that he is actually doing something wrong. In Conway’s opinion, FB is an aesthetic work. It is aesthetic because it attempts to communicate through enactment, not through an explicit discussion. It shows, it does not tell. According to Conway, Kierkegaard “stages the drama of Fear and Trembling to set Johannes up for an educative failure,”217 a failure that is educative for us. In the character of Silentio we see fascination with faith gone wrong, and we see exemplified the spiritual poverty of modern society, its lack of religious passion.218 The true lesson of FB, therefore, lies in understanding how fundamentally wrongheaded Silentio is, and, therefore, how everything he says about faith is born out of this wrongheadedness. Conway: Just as the bustling commerce of modernity serves as a distraction from its pandemic faithlessness, so Johannes’ elliptical mediation on Abraham diverts his attention (and ours?) from his own spiritual void… Johannes may be too busy and distracted to interrogate his own motives for evading this spiritual crisis, but Kierkegaard positions us to do so for him.219

What makes Abraham into something ineffable and incomprehensible, in this picture, is the simple fact that Silentio needs him to be ineffable and incomprehensible. Silentio needs him to be unapproachable in order to have an excuse not to approach. The ineffability and incomprehensibility, therefore, are symptoms of Silentio’s twisted perception, not properties of Abraham, or of faith. I want to raise two problems in relation to Conway: the problem of the hero and the poet, and the problem of Abraham’s silence. Consideration of the latter comprises the bulk of the remainder of this section. I begin with the former.

|| 216 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, pp. 99–100. 217 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 88. 218 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 101. 219 Daniel W. Conway, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, p. 102.

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8.2 The problem of the hero and the poet Conway’s argument in “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” revolves around what he perceives as a “passional stasis” in Silentio. If faith truly is as important to Silentio as he makes it out to be, why does he not pursue it? Why does he give the impression of being content to admire it from a distance? To Conway, this is interpreted as a sign of Silentio’s spiritual deficiency, which is what forms the core of his interpretation. Yet, within the sections of the text on which Conway bases his interpretation, there is a passage that can explain Silentio’s passional stasis without the need for recourse to Conway’s theory of self-contempt. The passage is the opening of “Lovtale over Abraham” where Silentio argues for the reciprocal dependence of the “hero” and the “poet”.220 Silentio argues that a hero can only be a hero if a poet elevates him/her into that position by telling the tale of his/her exploits; vice versa, a poet can only be a poet if s/he has a tale to tell, that is, if s/he has a hero to praise. Importantly, these are two different people. Whereas the hero is defined by his/her exploits, the poet is defined by the tales s/he tells about these exploits, and by his/her admiration for the hero’s achievements. The poet, according to Silentio, is a person who admires from a distance, and therefore exhibits passional stasis. Thus, in as much as Silentio is a poet (he is the author of a dialectical lyric), he will exhibit passional stasis. Conway could, of course, claim that the picture Silentio draws here is part of his deception, that Silentio’s understanding of the poet is part of his ploy to exalt his own position. Yet a case could be made that there is something to Silentio’s description. Telling a good tale is its own art and craft. It takes a different skill set from that of actually doing a heroic deed, and it takes its own kind of dedication. In light of this, a case can be made for Silentio’s separation between the hero and the poet, and if so, then Silentio’s passional stasis can be explained by this fact, without recourse to Conway’s psychological interpretation. The problem posed by the configuration of the hero and the poet counts against Conway by showing that the phenomenon of passional stasis does not necessarily mean what Conway takes it to mean, hence, that he would need further argument in order to properly solidify his case; as it stands it is weakened.

|| 220 SKS 4, 112–113 / FT, 15–16. Note that I believe “poet” can here be taken in the loose sense of a literary author.

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8.3 The problem of Abraham’s silence The gist of the problem raised by Abraham’s silence is that the ineffability of faith is not only a feature of Silentio’s relation to faith, but also of Abraham’s. In the biblical story, Abraham does not speak to other people about the command he receives from God, a silence Silentio takes to be absolutely central to what the story has to say about faith. The reason Abraham does not speak is that no one would understand. God is not accessible to corroborate his story. Thus, Abraham cannot prove that he acts upon God’s word. He cannot make the divine nature of his undertaking manifest. In a word, the divine aspect is ineffable. The relation of faith portrayed in the biblical story, therefore, is one in which Abraham’s relation to God is uniquely his own. Thus, contrary to what Conway states, ineffability is not merely Silentio’s projection. If Abraham is an epitome of faith, then ineffability is a feature of faith.221 Abraham’s silence receives its most detailed treatment in the “Problemata” chapters of FB. It is therefore outside of the scope of Conway’s first paper which bases its argument on the opening sections of FB. Consequently, it is excusable that Conway does not address the issue in the paper. This, however, does not stop it from posing a problem in as much as Conway takes his reading as consequential for FB as such. Abraham’s silence is the main point of discussion in “Problema III”, but it is a recurrent issue in FB taken as a whole. In “Problema I” Silentio writes: “Abraham kan ikke medieres, hvilket ogsaa kan udtrykkes saaledes: han kan ikke tale. Saasnart jeg taler, udtrykker jeg det Almene, og naar jeg ikke gjør det, saa kan Ingen forstaae mig.”222 The point is also stated in “Problema II”.223 I have earlier connected this to the fact that Abraham is described as being higher than the universal, something that has the consequence that his situation cannot be represented by thought or in language. In the later paper “Abraham’s Final Word”, Conway captures the full meaning of this (though in order to criticize it): Central to Johannes’s sketch of the knights of faith is the non-negotiable fact of their isolation from (human) others. There is simply no language in which they could possibly convey to others the particular content of their interiority and the specific nature of their religious

|| 221 It ought to be mentioned that Silentio reads a lot more into the nature of this silence than is readily apparent in the story itself by placing Abraham’s silence into context with a Hegelian understanding of ethics. 222 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60: “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.” 223 SKS 4, 163 / FT, 71.

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obligations. (This also means, presumably, that there is no language in which the knight of faith can communicate to himself the nature of his religious obligations.) It is therefore crucial to Johannes’s interpretation that the patriarch is unable to communicate with (human) others – hence his insistence that Abraham did not and cannot speak.224

In relation to Conway’s argument, it is apparent that if the inability to capture and convey the content of faith is a characteristic of Abraham himself, then Silentio’s silence, his inability to speak about faith, is not grounded in some inauthentic relation to faith, as Conway argues, but is a substantial reality of faith. Consequently, it is fundamental to the type of reading that Conway represents that it finds some explanation for Abraham’s silence that does not make it into a substantial feature of faith. For example, it can argue that Abraham’s silence actually is a projection, that it is not a feature of the biblical story in the manner Silentio presents it (and I have presented it above). Rather, that this represents a manner in which Silentio distorts the story of Abraham as it is found in the Bible.

8.4 Conway’s counterargument As mentioned, Conway does not take issue with this in the paper discussed above, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”. He does, however, in “Abraham’s Last Word”. Presently, I will turn to his argument in the latter paper, so as to let it complement the first. In his later paper Conway argues for the importance of the fact that what Silentio presents as Abraham’s final word in FB, is not the final word in the story as it is found in Genesis 22. Silentio: Imidlertid er der dog opbevaret et sidste Ord af Abraham, og forsaavidt jeg kan forstaae Paradoxet, kan jeg ogsaa forstaae Abrahams totale Tilstedeværelse i dette Ord. Han siger først og fremmest ikke Noget, og i denne Form siger han hvad han har at sige. Hans Svar til Isaak har Ironiens Form, thi det er altid Ironi, naar jeg siger Noget, og dog ikke siger Noget... Han svarer da: Gud skal see sig om Lammet til Brændoffer min Søn!225

|| 224 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 178. See my arguments in Chapter 2, fourth section and sixth section, in regard to the nature of Abraham’s fear and trembling. 225 SKS 4, 206 / FT, 118–119: “But a final word by Abraham has been preserved, and insofar as I can understand the paradox, I can also understand Abraham’s total presence in that word. First and foremost, he does not say anything, and in that form he says what he has to say. His response to Isaac is in the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and still do not say

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But as Conway points out, Abraham’s truly last word comes when Abraham responds to the angel God sends to stop him from going through with the sacrifice. His last words are: “Here I am!”226 The fact that Silentio does not give an accurate account of the biblical story represents, Conway argues, an intentional distortion. This is important, as Conway believes that the inclusion of this sentence paints a picture of Abraham that contradicts the picture that Silentio paints: As it turns out, Johannes not only misidentifies Abraham’s final word, focusing instead on the famous promise of divine providence, but also avoids a direct confrontation with the patriarch’s genuinely final word. It is no coincidence, I propose, that Abraham’s final word in Genesis 22 – “Here I am” – conveys his response to the angel’s salutation, especially inasmuch as this response announces the kind of moral awakening that Johannes cannot allow himself to attribute to Abraham. This practice of avoidance, I further propose, illuminates the ulterior motives that inform the “dialectical lyric” of Fear and Trembling.227

Conway’s idea is that Abraham is not as silent as Silentio makes him out to be; consequently, that the dimension of silence and incomprehensibility that Silentio finds to be definitive of Abraham, in reality is not.228 What truly defines the character of Abraham is rather the “Here I am” that he utters atop Moriah. Conway’s argument, therefore, relies on a counter-interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac, one that suggests itself on the basis of Silentio’s omission. As I have discussed earlier, Abraham’s defining feature is his absolute, individual relation to, and trust in, God – his responsiveness. As explained in the second section, it is his commitment that makes Abraham into a hero of the religious order, his faith as he rides to Moriah. Just as Agamemnon is an ethical hero by virtue of doing the right thing in the face of the normative collision, so Abraham is a religious hero by exhibiting faith in the face of the double-collision. This picture of Abraham, according to Conway, is a misrepresentation of the story found in the Bible. Silentio argues, says Conway, that “Abraham was great because he had faith. But he had faith only because he was already resolute, which Johannes understands to mean steadfast, unyielding and unchanging”.229 And precisely by exhibiting faith, that is, resolve, in the most intense of all moments, drawing his knife upon his own son, Abrahams becomes “the father of faith”. In Silentio’s world, it is this scene that establishes Abraham’s “claim to || anything… Therefore he answers: God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son!” 226 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 176. 227 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, pp. 176–177. 228 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 178. 229 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 186.

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greatness”.230 Therefore, “[a] strategic deception – not to mention a flicker of doubt, a change of heart, and a subsequent act of disobedience – would signal a lack of resolve”.231 Such a lack of resolve would show that Silentio’s characterization of Abraham is misguided and wrong. According to Conway, it is for this reason that Silentio omits Abraham’s truly last word. These words show that Abraham is lacking resolve.232 They manifest the true nature of Abraham. Even more importantly, they do so through an act of speech. Thus, it is not Abraham’s silence that holds the key to his character, as Silentio claims, but what he says. Silentio is wrong both when it comes to Abraham’s silence and in his characterization of Abraham as defined by faith, understood as resoluteness or absolute commitment. The reason that Abraham’s words disclose a lack of resolve, according to Conway, is that they represent a halt in the execution of the sacrifice that precedes the explicit command not to sacrifice Isaac. Conway: In responding to the angel’s salutation, in announcing himself one final time in the fullness of his presence, Abraham preempts the angel’s subsequent command and renders it superfluous. In responding to the angel’s salutation, that is, Abraham has already suspended the commanded sacrifice of Isaac, prior to the angel’s command that he do so.233

The fact that Abraham stops and answers the angel shows a lack of resolve on Abraham’s part because it is an act of disobedience with regard to the divine command to which he is bound. The voice that interrupts him is just that, an interruption. It does not immediately announce a counter-command, but calls to him, and in jumping at the opportunity to answer that call, Conway contends that Abraham discloses a lack of resoluteness. Conway invokes Emmanuel Levinas’ reading of the story of Abraham in emphasizing this. Levinas, a propos of Kierkegaard’s FB, writes: In his evocation of Abraham, he [Kierkegaard] describes the encounter with God at the point where subjectivity rises to the level of the religious, that is to say, above ethics. But one could think the opposite: Abraham’s attentiveness to the voice that led him back to the ethical order, in forbidding him to perform a human sacrifice, is the highest point of the drama.

|| 230 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 186. 231 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 186. 232 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 188. 233 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 190.

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That he obeyed the first voice is astonishing: that he had sufficient distance with respect to that obedience to hear the second voice – that is the essential.234

Thus, in Conway’s Levinas-inspired reading, the fact that Abraham is open to the call of the angel and does not push through with the sacrifice, is interpreted as a lack of resolve. The words “Here I am” disclose a willingness to be interrupted and avoid sacrificing Isaac. Abraham, therefore, is not characterized by resoluteness, or absolute commitment – in other words, by faith. Rather, what truly characterizes him, according to Conway, is a “moral awakening” at the last minute,235 a moral awakening that is expressed through speech, not through silence. Given the above line of thought, it seems like Kierkegaard / Silentio has intentionally left out Abraham’s truly last word in order to make the story fit his own devices.236 Consequently, the silence and incomprehensibility that Silentio ascribes to Abraham are projections. They are not features found in the story properly interpreted. If one reads FB with this in mind, what you get is not a treatise about the incomprehensible and non-ethical nature of faith; what you have is a study of Silentio’s failed relationship to faith, a relationship wherein Silentio makes faith out to be something that it is not. This observation ties the argument of “Abraham’s Last Word” in with the argument found in “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”. In “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” the argument is that in Silentio’s relation to faith we have before us an example of impoverished spirituality: a person with a devotion to faith that in his devotion holds faith at a distance, romanticizing faith’s unattainability. In “Abraham’s Last Word”, Conway adds that because of how Silentio distorts the text, “Johannes thus appears in Fear and Trembling as what I call a knight of morality – that is, as an unwitting advocate of the primacy of ethical universality.”237 The reason for this is that by excluding the scene on Moriah, Silentio confirms that the scene is antithetical to the Abraham that he presents. Thereby, according to Conway, he confirms that he is wrong in his estimation of Abraham. Why else suppress the scene, and distort how the story truly plays out, if not because the scene in question proves one wrong? “Rather than challenge himself to comprehend the story of the Aqedah, Johannes instead edits this story to accommodate the limits of his understanding.”238 Consequently, and in light of Conway’s “correct” Levinasian reading, || 234 Emmanuel Levinas, “A Propos of ‘Kierkegaard Vivant’”, p. 77. 235 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 177. 236 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 184. 237 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 177. My emphasis. 238 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 184.

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Abraham is not great by virtue of his ultimate resolve. He actually does not possess such resolve. Therefore, Abraham does not possess faith in the sense that Silentio argues. On the contrary, what he exhibits is openness to interruption when executing the sacrifice, thus an unwillingness to make the sacrifice even when divinely commanded. Ultimately, what Abraham possesses is an ethical character.

8.5 Against Conway’s counterargument I want to point out four weaknesses with how “Abraham’s Last Word” attempts to explain away Abraham’s silence. First, Conway’s argument builds upon Silentio’s omission of Abraham’s “Here I am”, and while it is correct that this utterance is not mentioned in FB, it is not true that the scene atop Moriah is neglected. Actually, it can be seen to be of great significance to the idea presented in FB. This, however, is not made clear in “Problema III” which is the part of FB that Conway focuses upon in his analysis in “Abraham’s Last Word”. The reason for Conway’s focus is that “Problema III” deals with the issues of what Abraham says, and does not say. Hence, Conway sees it as telling that the part of FB that deals with Abraham’s speech and silence, does not mention Abraham’s reply to the angel atop Moriah. Even so, I think it is a misstep on his part not to take into consideration Silentio’s earlier discussion about the event. The discussion I am thinking of takes place in “Foreløbig Expectoration”. It is the passage I addressed earlier, wherein Silentio imagines himself undertaking the same journey as Abraham.239 The reason that this passage is of great significance is that it shows exactly what it is that Abraham succeeds in doing at Moriah. As we have seen, Conway argues that what he achieves is to be open to the ethical even while under a divine command and that this is the reason that Silentio omits it. According to Silentio, however, where Abraham succeeds – and where he himself would have failed – is in accepting Isaac’s return with joy. Silentio: Jeg havde fremdeles ved min Adfærd fordærvet hele Historien; this hvis jeg havde faaet Isaak igjen, da havde jeg været i Forlegenhed. Det, der faldt Abraham lettest, vilde falde mig svært, det igjen at være glad ved Isaak!...240

|| 239 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 34–35. 240 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35: “Furthermore, by my behavior I would have spoiled the whole story, for if I had gotten Isaac again, I would have been in an awkward position. What was the easiest for Abraham would have been difficult for me – once again to be happy in Isaac!...”

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Could one not, therefore, as easily imagine that the reason that Silentio omits the “Here I am” is that the utterance is of no real importance to his interpretation of the story? Silentio’s fascination is with the paradoxical psychology of Abraham, with the emotionality that faith makes possible – the new form of subjective interiority: “en ny Inderlighed”.241 In other words, FB is not primarily concerned with the ethical consequence of the story of Abraham and Isaac, but with the unique existential condition exemplified by Abraham. As such, what exactly took place upon Moriah is not of prime importance. What is of prime importance is Abraham’s reaction to what happened, a fact apparent in how Silentio continues the discussion after having established that he himself is inadequate to fill Abraham’s shoes. He continues by imagining what would have happened if the angel had not come: “Lad os gaae videre. Vi lade Isaak virkelig blive ofret. Abraham troede. Han troede ikke, at han engang skulde blive salig hisset, men at han skulde blive lyksalig her i verden. Gud kunde give ham en ny Isaak, kalde den offrede tillive.”242 By changing the story at the same time as he underscores that nothing of significance is altered by this change, Silentio underscores exactly what he finds important in the event: Abraham’s relation to Isaac and the feature I have suggested that we refer to as a “pure passion”. In regard to this specific aspect, the angel’s appearance or otherwise made no difference. This counterargument to Conway’s position may not be enough to convince him to give it up. It shows, however, that there is something forced in how he attempts to re-introduce the ethical through the crack in Silentio’s narrative: forced in the sense that Silentio is not as blind to the events on Moriah as Conway makes him out to be. Moreover, it is also forced in the sense that the omission need not be as damming as Conway holds, an outcome that depends on whether Conway’s Levinasian reading is “better” than Silentio’s or not; that is, whether Abraham’s “Here I am” correctly can be described as a “lack of resolution”. I return to the latter question in the fourth weakness I find with Conway. Before that, in examining the second weakness, I deepen the claim about the forced nature of Conway’s reading. It shows in several places. At one point, for example, Conway attempts to show that Silentio himself is aware that the ethical is “the highest court of appeal”, and that Abraham is wrong in withholding his intention from Isaac.243 The passage in question is near the end of “Problema III”, and it is

|| 241 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69: “a new interiority”. 242 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36: “Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed.” 243 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, pp. 182–183.

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true that Silentio indicates that Abraham is not ethically justified in withholding his intention from Isaac.244 However, this does not show, as Conway claims, that Silentio “reveals himself as a crusading knight of morality”.245 It just shows that Silentio is consistent within his own theoretical framework. The whole point is that Abraham is not ethically justified in his behavior, yet is justified, ineffably so. Abraham is higher than the universal. He has absolute relation to the absolute. As Silentio continues after the passage Conway quotes: Det viser sig da atter her, at man vel kan forstaae Abraham, men kun forstaae ham saaledes, som man forstaaer Paradoxet... Enten er der da et Paradox til, at den Enkelte som den Enkelte staaer i et absolut Forhold til det Absolute, eller Abraham er tabt.246

The reason Conway reads the passages differently is that he approaches them from the perspective of Silentio’s omission. To my mind, this makes him insensitive to the text itself. On the other hand, his point is that the text ought to be read against the grain. But why then seek to find confirmation of this in the text? This brings me to the third weakness with Conway’s argument: The explicit issue that Silentio discusses in “Problema III” is not what Abraham says and does not say per se, but with what he says, and does not say, in relation to the ethical. The problem Silentio poses at the beginning of the chapter is the following: “Var det ethisk forsvarligt af Abraham at han fortiede sit Forehavende for Sara, for Elieser, for Isaak?”247 Thus the issue of Abraham’s silence is posed in relation to the mentioned trio, as they are the concrete ethical instances in Abraham’s situation. In light of this, it is not strange that Silentio does not consider Abraham’s exchange with the angel. His object of enquiry is not Abraham’s relation to the divine, but to the ethical. Still, it is factually wrong of Silentio to state that Abraham’s words to Isaac were his last words. Then again, these words were his last words uttered in the context of the ethical, an observation that brings me to the fourth and final weakness that I find with Conway’s position, namely, that Conway treats the angel as if the angel were not a direct manifestation of God, that is, a divine phenomenon.

|| 244 SKS 4, 206–207 / FT, 119. 245 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 183. 246 SKS 4, 207 / FT, 119–120: “Here again it is apparent that one perhaps can understand Abraham, but only in the way one understands the paradox…Thus, either there is a paradox, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is lost” (Kierkegaard 1983, 119–120). 247 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82: “Was It Ethically Defensible for Abraham to Conceal His Undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, and from Isaac?”

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I think it is telling that Conway downplays this feature: It is also worth noting that the second command does not issue directly and unambiguously from the God of Abraham, but from an unseen “angel” Although the narrator of Genesis identifies the second command as issuing from an “angel of the Lord,” Abraham might not have been in possession of this knowledge, much less the narrator’s confidence in it.248

It is true that God does not address Abraham directly in the scene on Moriah, unlike when he bid him sacrifice Isaac, rather using an intermediary, an angel; and it is clearly a step down from God to an angel. It is also true that the angel does not directly command Abraham to stop, but calls to him: “Abraham, Abraham!” Hence, Abraham is not explicitly commanded to stop, but only hailed. (Though, notably, in the same way that God hailed him, when he bid him undertake the quest to Moriah.) However, it is not as far a step from God to an angel, as from God to merely “a voice” which is what Conway insinuates in the above quote, by suggesting that Abraham could not have known that the words he hears were spoken by an angel. Genesis 22 is explicit upon the fact that it is an angel that speaks. Moreover, an angel, while not identical to God, is of divine and godly nature. Thus, it seems wrong to read this on the ethical level. Abraham halts his knife because God speaks to him in the form of an angel, and this is something religious. That he halts the knife, therefore, does not necessarily indicate irresoluteness; it could as well be a sign of his commitment to God, since an angel would not act on its own behalf, but on behalf of God. Put differently, Conway’s position depends upon framing the angel as a representative of the ethical. The ethical order, however, is the concrete universal of the social order, and even if he speaks to Abraham, thus manifesting the universal, he is not a representative of this order, for an angel does not belong to society. He is not part of any social institution.249

On account of the above four weaknesses, I hold one should be unconvinced by Conway’s interpretation of Abraham’s silence in “Abraham’s Last Word”.

|| 248 Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 188. 249 This does, however, raise the interesting question of how God and the angel can speak without actually belonging to the concrete universal of the ethical order. This question is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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8.6 Concluding remarks Establishing the failure of Conway’s argument in “Abraham’s Last Word” brings me back to Conway’s first paper, “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”. Conway’s argument here was that Silentio was an unreliable narrator who wrote FB in order stave off his own self-contempt. He asserts faith to be incomprehensible and unattainable so that he does not need to achieve it. In order for this picture to work, however, Conway has to find a way to explain Abraham’s silence which shows that the ineffability of faith is not merely an aspect of Silentio’s relation to faith, but of faith itself, the biblical story of Abraham being Silentio’s prime entry into the nature of faith. Conway does not go into this in “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling”, and his attempt to explain this in “Abraham’s Last Word” I have shown to be unconvincing. Thus, as it stands, nor is “The Confessional Drama of Fear and Trembling” convincing. In conclusion, in light of discussion of the problem of the hero and the poet and that raised by Abraham’s silence, I find that Conway’s case for Silentio as an unreliable narrator fails.

Conclusion Let me collect the different lines of thought that compose this chapter, and combine them into a rational whole. Leaving aside the arguments against Lippitt and Conway, this chapter argues for an essential connection between how FB is written and what it says: between its rhetorical composition and its message or content. This is approached from three different angles: first, by arguing, in the second section, that Abraham is explicitly made out to be a hero, not an ethical hero, but a religious one. By virtue of the argument in the first section, this connects Abraham and, by extension, the knight of faith, to narrativity in an essential sense. The definition of a knight of faith, however, also brings with it a problem of communicability. Faith is a personal and clandestine relation to God. It places the individual higher than the universal, a position that cannot be made manifest within the universal, and therefore that can neither be communicated, nor be ethically valid – since the concept of the universal defines both language and ethics.

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How, then, can the knight of faith depend upon narrativity if a narrative is something linguistic, a certain mode of discourse?250 The second section addresses this issue by noting that the ineffability and incomprehensibility itself can function as a narrative indicator of faith. If an individual truly is a knight of faith, and what characterizes the knight of faith is that s/he is raised to a higher level than social reality, then this ought to show itself as a deviance from social reality, a quality of apartness. The nature of this apartness is picked up again in the sixth section. Based upon Silentio’s descriptions of the two different knights of faith, “apartness” is defined as “pure passion”: The knight of faith’s object of love is secured for him/her through his/her relation to God. His/her passion is “pure”. It is independent of the actual, real world of the object of his/her passion, yet wholly directed towards this actual, real-world object in a divinely mediated sense. This feature lets one give a partial, narrative definition of the knight of faith, and therefore shows how the knight of faith’s heroic nature ties in with narrativity. The second angle is contained in the third section. In essence, the problem of communicability comes from the fact that there is no shared, intersubjective dimension of the religious. Moreover, the problem of communicability comes from the fact that the religious is only rendered possible by breaking with the shared and intersubjective per se. There is no religious truth, which is why the theoretical passages of FB all end in paradox, and why faith itself is defined as a paradox. Given this, FB cannot argue that Abraham is a knight of faith as this would mean that it was able to fully, and without contradiction, characterize faith through language. The third section argues that what FB does instead is to make an aesthetical suggestion that Abraham is a knight of faith. It does this by a parallax, by compositionally juxtaposing the theoretical passages and commentnarratives with the story of Abraham. It is never stated unproblematically that Abraham is a knight of faith, but Silentio’s theoretical understanding of a knight of faith is presented alongside the story of Abraham, thus making the suggestion that he is one in terms of the structural composition of the work. In a word, the suggestion is made implicitly through the rhetorical, or textual, event of the juxtaposition of theory and story. In the fourth section, this angle is pursued further by disclosing its relation to Garff’s approach to FB. In his approach Garff points out that FB is a story about a story. FB is a text that attempts to aesthetically mediate the readers’ relation to another text, that is, to open the reader’s mind to a certain perspective onto the

|| 250 To claim that a picture can tell a story is not a counter-example to this claim. A series of pictures is meaningless without an interpretation. An interpretation is dependent upon concepts and language.

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biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. It does this in an aesthetical way, not by analysis, as faith is ineffable. Garff’s idea is that Silentio attempts to get the reader to connect to Abraham’s fear and trembling in his approach to Moriah. This makes sense because the fear and trembling is an effect of Abraham’s being a knight of faith and stems from Abraham’s position beyond the ethical, in the sense that he has been divinely called to sacrifice his own son. Comparatively, Agamemnon’s distress has the same apparent cause: both Agamemnon and Abraham have to sacrifice their child. In contrast, though, the reason Agamemnon has to do this is found within the ethical. For him, sacrificing Iphigenia is the right thing to do. For Abraham, the impetus to sacrifice comes from beyond the ethical. His reason is a reason that reason cannot disclose. His action cannot be shown to be the right thing to do. Therefore, it is not the right thing to do – for the ethical is the disclosed. But yet, paradoxically, the sacrifice is the non-ethical right thing to do. That is, it is if, paradoxically, God is above the ethical (the universal), and God can suspend the ethical. And God can do that, or Abraham is a murderer, and there is no double-collision, no fear and trembling. In a word, Abraham’s fear and trembling originates with his responsiveness to something beyond the ethical, a responsiveness that collides with his clear-eyed understanding of the ethical consequences of his action. This is why, for Abraham, the ethical is the temptation: “Abraham kan ikke tale; thi det Alt Forklarende kan han ikke sige, (ɔ: saa det er forstaaeligt), at det er en Prøvelse, vel at mærke, en saadan, hvor det Ethiske er Fristelsen.”251 There is a good reason that Garff insists that what FB attempts to convey to its reader is aesthetical. Given the nature of what it states, FB cannot convince its reader about the truth of Abraham’s situation. It cannot because faith is paradoxical, ineffable, and incomprehensible. It can however aesthetically intimate, aesthetically suggest, that Abraham is a knight of faith. It may well be completely preposterous to one’s rational mind that there should exist a truth beyond what can be rationally conceived, that God should be higher than the universal, but in terms of one’s imagination, the idea is easily entertained. Like the nameless man of “Stemning”, one can be entranced by what is possibly contained in the story of Abraham: its shudder of thought. The consequence of the fact that Abraham can only be approached as a knight of faith in an aesthetical sense is that it binds the concept of the knight of faith to narrativity by binding it to the concrete story of Abraham.

|| 251 SKS 4, 202 / FT, 115: “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable): that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.”

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The third angle is contained in the seventh section. It is an argument to the effect that if the ineffable is to figure as a part of rational discourse, then this demands narrativity. It goes without saying that something that is ineffable cannot appear in discourse. It can, however, appear by virtue of the term the “ineffable”. But by presenting it thus, one needs a character that can relate to this object that cannot, by itself, make an appearance. This is precisely what happens in FB. The nameless man of “Stemning” and Silentio himself relate to Abraham as ineffable; they relate to Abraham as a knight of faith. Abraham, the anonymous man on his way home for a dish of cooked lamb’s head, and the young man all relate to faith itself as ineffable. All of these characters play the narrative roles of intermediaries between the reader and the ineffable. Again, therefore, we have a way in which concept of the knight of faith is narrative, is essentially tied to a story. In sum, therefore, the narrativity of FB’s form is necessary in order for it to get across its message, and the knight of faith is a narrative concept.

Chapter 3: Bakhtin, Suspense and the Knight of Faith This chapter has two aims: first, to argue that suspense is a principle feature of what it means to be a knight of faith and, consequently, that having faith means to be in a state of imminence; second, to explore the similarities between the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and that of Mikhail Bakhtin, arguing for a novel point of intersection between their different philosophies.

Introduction There are four types of heroes in FB: the knight of faith, the knight of resignation, the tragic hero, and the aesthetic hero. They are all heroes for different reasons: As we have seen, the reason the knight of faith is a hero is a tricky issue. Strictly speaking, there is no such reason. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is not a heroic act by ethical standards. Truth be told, it is not even ethically or rationally justifiable. Its justification, if it has one, comes from Abraham’s private relation to God. Thus, Abraham’s status as a hero also comes from this relation. If he is a hero, he is a hero because he is willing to sacrifice what is most important to him for the greater glory of God, but whether or not this is the case is something only “known” to him. I say “known” because the knowledge involved here is not of a type that can be represented in thought and language, but is found exclusively in Abraham’s privileged relationship to God. In brief, Abraham himself does not know, in the sense of conceptual, propositional knowledge, whether or not what he does is right. He knows it to be wrong in terms of the universal, and he “knows” it to be right in terms of faith.1 In contradistinction to Abraham’s sacrifice, Agamemnon’s sacrifice is a heroic act by ethical standards. Agamemnon’s act of giving up his daughter is the right thing to do as a ruler in order to secure the war against Troy. Thus, whereas the knight of faith is a clandestine figure, the tragic hero, represented by Agamemnon, is an inherently disclosed one. The tragic hero’s reasons are dictated

|| 1 Earlier on, I quoted Conway to this effect (Daniel W. Conway, “Abraham's Last Word”, p. 178); moreover, the point was touched on both in Chapter 2, fourth section, and Chapter 2, sixth section. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-005

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by the concrete universal of the social order; the knight of faith’s reasons are inherently his/her own.2 The tragic hero is an ethical hero. The knight of resignation is a figure I have only mentioned in passing. S/he will be one of the main foci of the present chapter. Lippitt summarizes the knight of resignation’s bid for heroism as follows: The knight of infinite resignation has a recognizably heroic quality, which inheres in the fact that being prepared to renounce the joys and passions of finite existence for some “higher cause” can both be recognized as requiring courage, and be judged as ethically admirable.3

This leaves the aesthetic hero. The aesthetic hero will not be made the object of any extended consideration in this study. This type of hero is discussed by Silentio in “Problema III” in relation to the problem of Abraham’s religious silence. The aesthetic hero’s function is to represent a different kind of silence in contrast to Abraham’s. The manner in which an individual becomes an “aesthetic hero” is by holding silent so as to save another.4 Thus, contrary to Abraham, the aesthetic hero can speak, but chooses not to do so in order to do something good for a fellow human being (or to do something the aesthetic hero perceives as good). And contrary to the tragic hero, the aesthetic hero is not an ethical hero because s/he is not disclosed in the universal as a hero. The aesthetic hero is hidden, and his/her heroism comes from how s/he hides; following the theoretical framework of FB, to hide is antithetical to the ethical: “…Ethiken fordrer en uendelig Bevægelse, den fordrer Aabenbarelse.”5

|| 2 Consider the following: “Hvorfor gjør Abraham det da? For Guds Skyld og aldeles identisk hermed for sin egen Skyld. For Guds Skyld gjør han det, fordi Gud fordrer dette Bevis paa hans Tro, for sin egen Skyld gjør han det, at han kan føre Beviset” (SKS 4, 153 / FT, 59–60: “Why, then, does Abraham do it? For God’s sake and – the two are wholly identical – for his own sake. He does it for God’s sake because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake so that he can prove it.”) 3 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 42. 4 SKS 4, 176 / FT, 86. See also (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 130). Note, however, that there are multiple ways in which to become an “aesthetical hero”, and that silence is not a necessary component in all of them. Thus, when I speak about the aesthetical hero as defined by his silence, this is in reality in relation to a certain type of aesthetic hero. The reason that I do not clarify this in the main discussion is that it is precisely this type of aesthetic hero that interests Silentio in “Problema III”, and because the distinction is really of no consequence for the discussion at hand. 5 SKS 4, 200 / FT, 112–113: “Ethics demands an infinite movement, it demands disclosure.”

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As can be seen from the description of the aesthetic hero, his/her function is to serve as a contrast to the knight of faith, a contrast that underscores, and helps us understand, the nature of the knight of faith’s silence. This is a function shared by all the different heroes of FB, excluding the knight of faith him/herself; they are contrasts present in order to bring different aspects of the knight of faith into perspective. The tragic hero, for example, serves as a contrast to the knight of faith’s relationship to the ethical (I have explored this in Chapter 2, second section). This raises the question of what the knight of resignation is there to bring to light. Answer: The knight of resignation is there to help explain, by way of relevant contrast, the knight of faith’s emotional relationship to reality. I therefore revisit the phenomenon of pure passion explored in Chapter 2, sixth section, in my consideration of the knight of resignation. We shall see that it was no coincidence that it was in my discussion of this phenomenon that the issue of the knight of resignation first arose. Commentators Edward F. Mooney,6 Sharon Krishek,7 and John J. Davenport8 have argued that the essence of the knight of faith is found in how s/he contrasts with the knight of resignation. It is not difficult to see why one would opt for this view. It is in his discussion of the relationship between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation that Silentio gives his most comprehensive definition of faith: faith as a “double-movement”. Thus, whereas the relationship between the knight of faith and the tragic hero quickly escalates to involve the ineffable, there is more to be said about the relationship between faith and resignation in terms of this double-movement, thereby making it seem a more fruitful approach. Westphal has criticized Mooney, Krishek, and Davenport, arguing that the issue of resignation versus faith is a preliminary discussion that builds up to the main issue, which is the relationship between faith and ethics.9 Westphal points correctly to the fact that the discussion of resignation is contained within the chapter “Foreløbig Expectoration”, while the issue of faith’s relation to the ethical is the main point of interest in each of the three problemas. The latter, therefore, has a greater place on the center stage of FB, seen in its totality. In the perspective developed as part of this chapter, there is no center stage. It is not the case that one of the two contrasts mentioned is more important than the other. They are two different angles by which one can approach the knight of

|| 6 Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation. 7 Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. 8 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”. 9 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith, pp. 69–81.

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faith, one illustrative of the knight of faith’s relationship to the ethical, the other of his/her emotional relationship to reality (i.e. the aesthetical). The essence of the knight of faith is, in either case, his/her responsiveness to something higher than the universal. That said, I believe that in the foregoing I have pointed towards a quality in the knight of faith wherein the two angles of approach relate to one another: apartness. In Chapter 2, second section, I argued that the knight of faith’s apartness, his/her deviance from the ethical, is an essential aspect of faith. The crux of this is that faith is only realized in an individual who is higher than the universal (i.e. the ethical). Now, the ethical, in FB, is understood as the concrete universal of the social order. It defines how we culturally behave towards each other in terms of our different social roles and the institutions embodied in those roles. In terms of being higher than the universal, therefore, the knight of faith must, in some sense, deviate from the social order. In Chapter 2, sixth section, I argued that the way s/he does this (if s/he is not called upon by God to sacrifice his/her own son, or some other task) is through pure passion. The knight of faith deviates from social norms in terms of how s/he emotionally responds to the events of his/her life.10 This feature, therefore, allows one to connect the issue of the knight’s emotional relationship to reality with his/her relationship to the ethical. Moreover, it enables a partial, narrative definition of the knight of faith. The idea of this chapter is to utilize the knight of faith’s narrative nature in order to say something about what it is like to have faith. The aim, therefore, is to say something about the first-person perspective involved in faith. The aim is not to disclose the nature of what is revealed in the knight of faith’s personal relation to God. This is, per definition, outside of what can be revealed. Rather, the aim is to get at what this personal relation to God does with a person. How does it affect a person’s perception of reality? What is it like to live with faith in the sense defined by Silentio? In other words, what is it like to have pure passion? My argument is to the effect that faith involves an essential dimension of suspense. In Chapter 1, suspense was defined in terms of imminence. A situation characterized by suspense revolves around something that is about to happen. Suspense is a temporal relation to a future event on the verge of going from potentiality to actuality, one that is present in terms of this operation of emergence. My argument regarding suspense and the knight of faith is that by virtue of his/her personal relation to God, the knight of faith is caught up in just such a || 10 I have already established that emotional responses are a part of social roles; fathers, for example, are meant to love their sons (SKS 4, 151; 153 / FT, 57; 59).

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temporal relation. No matter what the world looks like at certain point in time, no matter what difficulties the knight of faith faces, s/he has faith. S/he has faith that God will set things right. S/he has faith that something will happen. His/her relationship to the future possibilities enabled by God, therefore, is logically one of suspense. Moreover, I am going to show that the same mechanism that creates suspense, allows the knight to exhibit pure passion. In arguing this, my focus will be upon the relation between the knight of faith and that of the knight of resignation, seeing as this contrast concerns the knight of faith’s emotional nature, his/her subjective interiority and first-person perspective. My argument will partly utilize the thought of the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In an essay entitled, “Epic and Novel”,11 Bakhtin has argued that what distinguishes an epic narrative from a novelistic one is how the two types of narrative conceptualize time.12 In the epic, time is finalized. An epic narrative essentially concerns something that has happened in the “epic past”.13 The notion of the “epic past” does not denote the real, historical past, but an aesthetically glorified past, a mythical one. In contradistinction to epic time, novelistic time is “openended”.14 The novel is geared towards a future not yet presented. It is structurally incomplete, and plays upon its own incompleteness. It presents a picture wherein something is left out, and seeks to complete the picture. It is, in its very nature, oriented towards the fact that something more is going to happen. As such the novel is characterized by imminence – by suspense. Bakhtin’s concept of the novel conforms to what I described in Chapter 1 as an “aesthetic narrative”. The epic narrative, however, is not an aesthetic narrative in this technical sense. As Bakhtin himself makes clear, the epic narrative is not a narrative of suspense.15 Its aesthetic quality is of another order, the exact nature of which I explain as part of my argument. The main point is that these two types of narratives translate into the two different types of heroes, heroes that, therefore, belong to two different conceptualizations of time. My argument is that the knight of resignation and the knight of faith fit neatly into the distinction between the epic hero and the novelistic hero, as Bakhtin explains it. The knight of faith lives in an openended narrative, while the knight of

|| 11 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”. 12 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 38. 13 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 13. 14 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 11. 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 32.

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resignation’s narrative is finalized and closed. Consequently, the narrative characteristic of the knight of faith is one that is structurally geared towards suspense. The structure of this chapter is as follows: The first section discusses the relationship between Bakhtin and Kierkegaard, and argues for the relevance of employing Bakhtinian theory in an effort to understand the latter. The second section explores Bakhtin’s concepts of the epic and the novelistic hero as two types of heroes that belong to stories that conceptualize time in two different ways. The third section turns to the distinction between the knight of resignation and the knight of faith, and Silentio’s definition of faith as a “double-movement”. It argues for what is essentially a cumulative understanding of the double-movement, meaning that the double-movement is a sequential movement composed of two discrete parts, that are both equally necessary. The fourth section briefly explores the non-cumulative understanding of the double-movement, and argues against it. The fifth section argues that suspense is a central feature of the knight of faith, and explores the connection between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation, and Bakhtin’s concepts of novelistic hero and epic hero, ultimately suggesting that these two pairs of heroes are differentiated in accordance to a similar logic, namely in regard to how their stories conceptualize time. The sixth section contrasts my suggested interpretation of faith with Davenport’s understanding of as faith as “eschatological trust”. The contrast is interesting since Davenport also emphasizes the aspect of suspense.

1 Bakhtin and Kierkegaard The root of the philosophical relationship between Bakhtin and Kierkegaard is one of direct influence. As Tatiana Shchyttsova explains, Bakhtin read and appreciated Kierkegaard at an early stage in his career,16 and though Bakhtin never explicitly wrote about Kierkegaard, there is no doubt that he was strongly influenced by him. Alex Fryszman concurs, and writes, “[i]t is thus hardly accidental that Bakhtin’s works on poetics are considered to exhibit clear hermeneutic and rhetorical traces of his reflections on Kierkegaard’s authorship.”17

|| 16 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 106. 17 Alex Fryszman, “Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seen Through Bakhtin's Prism”, p. 102.

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In her paper “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, Shchyttsova argues that what ultimately connects Bakhtin and Kierkegaard is an idea of “responsive subjectivity”.18 The fascinating thing about Shchyttsova’s idea is that Bakhtin and Kierkegaard realize the element of “responsive subjectivity” in two different ways: Kierkegaard instantiates it in terms of how he writes, that is, in terms of a maieutic rhetorical strategy; Bakhtin, on the other hand, makes “responsive subjectivity” a cornerstone of how he theoretically understands subjective existence, an understanding that underlies his work in literary theory and the philosophy of literature. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Kierkegaard does not argue for a definite conclusion in FB. He does not argue that Abraham is a knight of faith. Rather, as I have put it, he aesthetically suggests it, leaving it up to the reader to make up his own mind about the matter. It is precisely this “leaving it up to the reader” that Shchyttsova terms a “maieutic rhetorical strategy”. It is a strategy that instantiates the idea of responsive subjectivity. It does so in as much as what a reader gets out of FB is a function of how he responds to the text. Truth is not given to the reader as a ready-made object.19 Rather, to understand what the text attempts to communicate, the reader must actively work it out for him/herself.20 While Kierkegaard relates to the idea of “responsive subjectivity” in how he writes, Bakhtin, on the other hand, approaches it in what he writes. Central to his

|| 18 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 113. 19 Note that this is actually an essentially Hegelian view. Ref., the following quote from the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Against this view it must be maintained that truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 22). According to Hegel, truth is the product of a dialectical development or, rather, it is this dialectical development grasped in its unfolding. Truth is processual. It cannot be given, or transferred, but you can be drawn into it. 20 It is interesting to relate this to Silentio’s opening passage in “Foreløbig Expectoration”, where he makes this precise point that what characterizes the spiritual is that in that sphere you cannot be handed a truth ready-made, like bread from a baker, but that you have to work for it: “I Aandens Verden er det anderledes. Her hersker en evig guddommelig Orden, her regner det ikke baade over Retfærdige og Uretfærdige, her skinner Solen ikke baade over Gode og Onde, her gjælder det, at kun den, der arbeider, faaer Brødet, kun den, der var i Angst, finder Hvile, kun den, der stiger ned i Underverdenen, frelser den Elskede, kun den, der drager Kniven, faaer Isaak.” (SKS 4, 123 / FT, 27: “It is different in the world of the spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac.”)

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concerns is the idea: “‘To be’ means to answer…”21 Bakhtin argues that to exist as a subject means to be caught up in a dialogical event wherein opposing perspectives meet and contrast with each other. To be a subject means to be subject to relations to other subjects, and to manifest one’s existence in terms of responses to these others. Existence, for Bakhtin, is essentially responsive. According to Shchyttsova, “the idea of ‘responsive subjectivity’ means that I personally, that is, responsively, am involved in that being-event which historically happens ‘between me and the others’…”22 On the basis of the above, it becomes clear that Kierkegaard implicitly operates with a theory about subjective existence of the kind that Bakhtin explicitly formulates. In order for Kierkegaard’s maieutic communicative approach to make sense, he has to presuppose that subjects are responsive in the sense elaborated by Bakhtin. Thus, as Shchyttsova writes, “…Kierkegaard’s activity as a ‘subjective thinker,’ his maieutic approach itself, is a practical implication of Bakhtin’s philosophical concept; and vice versa, Bakhtin’s prima philosophia is a theoretical (more precisely, quasi theoretical) implication of Kierkegaard’s works.”23 Thus, as Shchyttsova portrays it, the relationship between Bakhtin and Kierkegaard is not a mere one-way street. Their relationship is not one in which Bakhtin simply develops and elaborates ideas present in Kierkegaard’s work. Rather, Bakhtin responds to an implicit dimension therein, and in elaborating this dimension, he not only shows himself to be in continuity with the Danish philosopher but, importantly, he opens Kierkegaard’s works up to novel interpretations and new layers of meaning. He unearths “hidden treasures”, so to speak. A case in point is Bakhtin’s idea of “polyphonic writing”, a topic that Fryszman has discussed at length in relation to Kierkegaard.24 To Bakhtin a “polyphonic” text is a text composed of a multiplicity of perspectives that intermingle, but do not fuse into one dominant point of view (similar to the two orders of discourse that I pointed towards in Chapter 2, third section; also pertinent are Kierkegaard’s numerous pseudonyms and their complex interrelationship). Bakhtin

|| 21 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 116. 22 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 116. 23 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 114. 24 Alex Fryszman, “Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seen Through Bakhtin's Prism”. For a wider discussion of Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony and polyphonic writing, see Gary Saul Morson’s and Caryl Emerson’s Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, especially “Polyphony: Authoring a Hero” (Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 231–268).

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develops the concept of polyphony primarily in his study of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. A “multiplicity of perspectives” means, in the context of Dostoyevsky’s novels, that they do not revolve around some central truth, or point of view. Rather, they are written in a manner that seeks to expose and present several truths, several points of view, and show how these interrelate and interact. According to Bakhtin, each character in a Dostoyevskian novel, including the narrator, represents some ideological position, and none of these positions are ever allowed to take center stage as the story unfolds. Instead, they are all shown in terms of the event of their dialogical interaction. Consider the issue of the protagonist in a Dostoyevskian, polyphonic story. In a non-polyphonic story, what Bakhtin terms the “monologic story”, the hero moves, thinks, and speaks as defined by his role in the plot of the story as such.25 In the polyphonic story, in contrast, there is no “plot of the story” as such. Instead, the author lets the hero and the other characters develop by virtue of their own interior logic: Thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is a fully realized and thoroughly consistent dialogic position, one that affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. For the author the hero is not “he” and not “I” (“thou art”). The hero is the subject of a deeply serious, real dialogic mode of address, not the subject of a rhetorically performed or conventionally literary one. And this dialogue – the “great dialogue” of the novel as a whole – takes place not in the past, but right now, that is, in the real present of the creative process.26

Thus, according to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s novels do not tell a story in a conventional sense. Narratologically speaking, the novels do not unfold in accordance with an author’s intentional design and arrangement. The author of a polyphonic narrative facilitates the story, s/he does not command it. The formal structure of such a story, therefore, is to let the different characters in the story, narrator included, interact on their “own” accord, the story being the staged event of their interaction.27 It does not let this interaction happen formulaically in order to manifest some overarching psychological, religious, ethical, or sociological truth, but rather in order to manifest the dialogical event of the interaction itself:

|| 25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 52. 26 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 63. 27 In other words, he makes all the characters of the story, including the author in his/her role as narrator, come together as “responsive subjects” towards one another.

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A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.28

As stated, the concept of “polyphony” / “polyphonic writing” is one that Bakhtin formulates, but which one can implicitly trace back to Kierkegaard, making eminent sense in relation to the latter. As Fryszman states, even if Bakhtin develops the concept in his interpretation of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard’s rupturing of familiar literary genres and forms of literary communication in his pseudonymous authorship represents a type of poetic praxis that corresponds to Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts and embodies these concepts in a more refined manner than even Dostoevsky’s poetics.29

Thus, exactly as with responsive subjectivity, polyphony is a concept that Bakhtin explicitly elaborates, but that is already implicitly present in Kierkegaard. As Fryszman has done with polyphony, so George Pattison has suggested of Bakhtin’s concept of “carnival”, arguing for its explicit articulation in Bakhtin, and implicit presence in Kierkegaard.30 Bakhtin develops the concept of carnival partly in his study of Dostoyevsky, and more elaborately in his study of François Rabelais.31 According to Bakhtin,

|| 28 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 6–7. Fryszman explains it as follows: “In a polyphonic work, he [Bakhtin] argues, the I of the author rejects his authority as author and is transformed into an active receiver of the discourse of the other. The voice of the author, however, is not for this reason absent. It permeates the voices of the characters, enters into dialogue with them, creates complicated echo effects, supplements them and at times even permeates them” (Alex Fryszman, “Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seen Through Bakhtin's Prism”, p. 116). 29 Alex Fryszman, “Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seen Through Bakhtin's Prism”, p. 108. Shchyttsova supplies a quote from Viktor Duvakin to the effect that Bakhtin himself noted the “amazing proximity of Kierkegaard to Dostoyevsky” (Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker”, p. 115). 30 George Pattison, “Bakhtin's Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard”. 31 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. For an extended discussion about the concept of carnival in relation to Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, see Simon Dentith’s Bakhtinian Thought, especially “Bakhtin’s Carnival” (Simon Dentith, Bakthtinian Thought, pp. 63–84); also Morson

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the notion of “carnival” denotes both a social phenomenon and a literary mode of writing. As a social phenomenon, carnival is a festive overturning of the social order. It is an occasion where everything held in high regard by virtue of institutions and establishment is profaned and up-ended: “During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.”32 Carnival, therefore, is in its very nature scandalous. It is an organized disorganization of social relations. It creates a social space where an operative distinction between high and low, proper and improper no longer exists, but where everything intermingles on the same level. According to Bakhtin, “[p]eople who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square.”33 The literary mode of writing mirrors the social phenomenon. The crux in both is the removal of propriety and hierarchy. The carnivalesque story is one that bends the rules of genre and of reality, and in which the characters act counter to established norms of good and rational conduct. Similar to carnival itself, the carnivalesque story opens a narrative space wherein anything can, and will, happen. Tracing the literary phenomenon of carnival from its historical origins and to Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes: In Dostoevsky’s world all people and all things must know one another and know about one another, must enter into contact, come together face to face and begin to talk with one another. Everything must be reflected in everything else, all things must illuminate one another dialogically. Therefore all things that are disunified and distant must be brought together at a single spatial and temporal “point.” And what is necessary for this is carnival freedom and carnival’s artistic conception of space and time.34

As is apparent in the above quote, Bakhtin traces the beginnings of Dostoevsky’s polyphony to the carnivalesque. He makes it clear that the two modes of writing are connected, though they are not exactly the same. Whereas the principle of polyphony is to let everything play out in terms of an interaction between equals, the basic principle of the carnivalesque is debasement and profanity. The carnivalesque is necessarily connected to a feeling of joy coming from the act of turning an existing world upon its head, and letting everything fall to the same level.

|| and Emerson, “Laughter and the Carnivalesque” (Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 433–472). 32 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 7. 33 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 123. 34 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 177.

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Carnival is in its nature farcical and burlesque. It lives off its negation of the established and proper. As Bakhtin writes in regard to the hero of a carnivalesque story: “carnivalistic legends debase the hero and bring him down to earth, they make him familiar, bring him close, humanize him; ambivalent carnival laughter burns away all that is stilted and stiff, but in no way destroys the heroic core of the image.”35 Thus, whereas polyphony is a way of formally structuring a narrative (i.e. it primarily affects form, how the story is told), the carnivalesque is not simply a formal characteristic, but says something about the content of the story as well. So, when Pattison argues for the viability of interpreting Kierkegaard in light of the concept of carnival, it is with a view to the carnivalesque event of turning an established world upon its head. More to the point, what Pattison argues is that the role of Christ in Kierkegaard’s work is to be the agent of such a radical turnaround. God, by virtue of becoming human, makes a carnivalesque move. Christ is “a scandal to the prudent, the philosophers, the priest, the bourgeois citizen,”36 because in the eyes of eternity, earthly differences and power relations have no meaning.37 Moreover, in terms of becoming human, God has made it possible for us to approach him, and ascend to the level of Christ, but this approach has to be within the carnivalesque scene Christ initiates, outside of the established social order.38 Like Shchyttsova and Fryszman, therefore, Pattison shows that there is a special kind of affinity between Bakhtin’s and Kierkegaard’s thought. This is not to deny that there are major differences also, for example, in terms of their aims and objectives. Though Bakhtin does not exclusively write about literature,39 he does primarily write about it. What is more, Bakhtin is not an explicitly theological and philosophical thinker like Kierkegaard,40 meaning that he is not one to face philosophical issues head on, like the latter. Neither does Bakhtin utilize a literary form of presentation like Kierkegaard. Yet, as we have seen, the conceptual apparatus and theory that Bakhtin develops in order to understand literature is

|| 35 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 132–133. 36 George Pattison, “Bakhtin's Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard”, p. 127. 37 George Pattison, “Bakhtin's Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard”, pp. 112–113. 38 George Pattison, “Bakhtin's Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard”, pp. 127–128. 39 Ref., Bakhtin’s early works like Towards a Philosophy of the Act, and Art and Answerability. 40 Ruth Coates has, however, argued that Christian motifs inform Bakhtin’s writings throughout his career (Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin).

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highly suitable for understanding Kierkegaard’s philosophical work, at least in regard to the three major aspects we have discussed here (responsive subjectivity, polyphony, and the carnivalesque). The suggestion of this chapter is that we can add a fourth point of intersection between the two thinkers: They both operate with a distinction between two types of heroes on the basis of how the heroes’ narratives conceptualize time. My idea is that just as has been the case with the other intersections between their thought, Bakhtin’s later theoretical elaborations can also in this new case serve to bring to light Silentio’s / Kierkegaard’s implicit ideas.

2 The epic hero and the novelistic hero The explicit concern of Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel” is to delineate and define, to the extent possible, the nature of the novel. John Neubauer has pointed out that “Epic and Novel” is Bakhtin’s attempt to counter Georg Lukács’ claim in The Theory of the Novel that the novel is a “bourgeois epic”.41 Lukács sees a line of continuity running from Homer’s The Odyssey to modern novels. Bakhtin argues against this view by contending that there is an absolute difference in how the two forms of narrative conceptualize time. The “epic” as a literary genre has three defining characteristics according to Bakhtin,42 the most important of which, in the current context, is what Bakhtin calls “epic distance”: The epic world is an utterly finished thing, not only as an authentic event of the distant past but also on its own terms and by its own standards; it is impossible to change, to re-think, re-evaluate anything in it. It is completed, conclusive and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value. This defines absolute epic distance. One can only accept the epic world with reverence; it is impossible to really touch it, for it is beyond the realm of human activity, the realm in which everything humans touch is altered and re-thought.43

In Chapter 1, I argued that narratives have two separate temporal dimensions: form and content. Narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content). What Bakhtin is getting at in the above is that the sequence of actions and events that constitute the content of an epic narrative always takes place in a mythical time frame. The aesthetic quality of the epic, its || 41 John Neubauer, “Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel”, p. 275. 42 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 17. 43 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 17.

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charm, comes from how it places its story at an absolute distance from the common world of everyday life. Bakhtin goes on: It is impossible to achieve greatness in one’s own time. Greatness always makes itself known only to descendants, for whom such a quality is always located in the past (it turns into a distanced image); it has become the object of memory and not a living object that one can see and touch.44

What Bakhtin calls “greatness”, therefore, is only possible by virtue of “epic distance”. It is in this property that one finds the power and appeal of the epic as a literary form: “The epic past is a special form of perceiving people and events in art… Artistic representation is here representation sub specie aeternitatis.”45 The story the epic tells is not projected into the “real, relative past tied to the present by uninterrupted temporal transitions; it [is] projected rather into a valorized past of beginnings and peak times.”46 The time in which the epic story plays out, is, therefore, not time as it actually, historically, and phenomenologically exists. It is not a time of change, spontaneity, and sudden shifts. Epic time is at a remove from the temporal reality of everyday life. Epic time is “distanced, finished and closed like a circle… it contains within itself, as it were, the entire fullness of time.”47 The point in the telling of an epic is never the question of, “What is going to happen now?” There is no “now”. The epic, according to Bakhtin, is more like a temporal sculpture than a story. There is no active participation on the part of the reader. The point is not to draw the reader into the action and plot. “Nothing of the sort is possible in the epic and other distanced genres.”48 Instead of participation and suspense, the aesthetic mode of the epic is one of glorification and reverence. This aesthetic mode, characteristic of the epic, translates into a characterization of the epic hero. The epic hero “is a fully finished and complete being… but what is complete is also hopelessly ready-made…”49 The epic hero, Bakhtin continues, has already become everything that he could become, and he could become only that which he has already become. He is entirely externalized in the most elementary, almost literal

|| 44 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 18. 45 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 18. 46 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 19. 47 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 19. 48 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 32. 49 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 34.

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sense: everything in his exposed and loudly expressed: his internal world and all his external characteristics, his appearance and his actions all lie on a single plane.50

The crux of the epic hero, therefore, is that s/he is finalized. S/he is complete and defined, something s/he has to be in order to be the object of glorification and reverence, for one does not revere something unknown, at least not for the quality of being unknown. In accordance with Silentio’s concepts, for example, reverence and glorification would have to be connected to a defined level of meaning – aesthetical, ethical, or religious – and would have to exemplify value within this sphere. The value would then be the true object of reverence. Having defined the epic genre, and the epic hero, let me turn to the novel. The novel, according to Bakhtin, operates in a manner completely counter to that of the epic. Whereas the time of the epic is at a remove from the temporal reality of everyday life, the novel immerses itself in this temporal reality. “The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present…”51 The temporal present, Bakhtin tells us, is in essence and in principle inconclusive; by its very nature it demands continuation, it moves into the future, and the more actively and consciously it moves into the future the more tangible and indispensable its inconclusiveness becomes. Therefore, when the present becomes the center of human orientation in time and in the world, time and world lose their completedness as a whole as well as in each of their parts… time and the world become historical: they unfold, albeit at first still unclearly and confusedly, as becoming, as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.52

The above represents the conceptualization of time characteristic of a novelistic narrative. Bakhtin: This leads to radical changes in the structuring of the artistic image. The image acquires a specific actual existence. It acquires a relationship – in one form or another, to one degree or another – to the ongoing event of current life in which we, the author and readers, are intimately participating. This creates the radically new zone for structuring images in the novel, a zone of maximally close contact between the represented object and contemporary reality in all its inconclusiveness – and consequently a similarly close contact between the object and future.53

|| 50 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 34. 51 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 27. 52 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 30. 53 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, pp. 30–31.

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Time, in an epic, is fixed and static. It is a totality, a whole, present all at once. The epic is bound to play itself out in a certain specific way; it is an arabesque of events. Time, in the novel, is inconclusive and fluid. A novel captures the flow of time as seen from the perspective of a subject: how one moment moves towards the next moment, and then the next, and ultimately towards a future not yet disclosed. A novel captures, therefore, that life does not follow some invariable, predetermined pattern, but involves contingencies and accidents. It captures how time is never present in its totality in any one moment, but unfolds gradually towards something not yet known. Whereas the epic hero faces a certain task that s/he has to accomplish, the novelistic hero, in addition to such a task, has to face time itself. The world of the epic hero is ordered. It is black and white. Every element of the story has its place. The world of the novelistic hero is a world of change, and of uncertainty. As regards the novelistic hero, Bakhtin writes: There always remains in him unrealized potential and unrealized demands. The future exists, and this future ineluctably touches upon the individual, has its roots in him… There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word, like tragic or epic hero, no form that he could fill to the very brim, and yet at the same time not splash over the brim…there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found… Reality… in the novel… bears within itself other possibilities.54

The epic hero is the hero of a story that has clear-cut borders, and that is complete and whole in itself. The novelistic hero is the hero of a story that is open towards future events. There is an inherent imminence to his/her situation, and this imminence is part of the story of which s/he is the hero. Thus, whereas the epic hero is defined down to his/her last detail – s/he belongs wholly to a specific sequence of events – the novelistic hero has always some unrealized element in him/her; that is the logic of the figures. Having established this, I am now going to turn to Silentio’s figures of the knight of faith and the knight of resignation.

|| 54 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 37.

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3 The knight of faith and the knight of resignation When introducing this chapter, I pointed out that the contrast between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation is presented in order to illuminate the knight of faith’s emotional relationship to reality. I have already explored something about this relationship and characterized it in terms of “pure passion”. Pure passion means that, paradoxically, the knight of faith’s emotional investment in some specific object, his/her passion for it, is independent of what actually happens to that object. Thus, the knight of faith has no need for an actual, real-world relationship to the thing that is the object of his/her pure passion. His/her love has no need for confirmation, his/her desire has no need for satisfaction (ref. the example discussed in Chapter 2, sixth section, of the anonymous man on his way home, dreaming about a dish of cooked lamb’s head). This is so, because the knight of faith’s love and emotional engagement is mediated by faith. The knight of faith loves by virtue of faith. In this section, I take a closer look at the details of this, and relate it to Silentio definition of faith as a “double-movement”. The relevant passages regarding faith as a double-movement are found in “Foreløbig Expectoration”. In order to capture Silentio’s idea, my strategy will be to trace the general contours of how Silentio develops it from its first mention to its full elaboration. The first mention of faith’s being a form of movement, a mental or psychological, operation, is made in the context of Silentio’s professed lack of faith: “Jeg er af Naturen et kløgtigt Hoved og ethvert saadant har altid store Vanskeligheder ved at gjøre Troens Bevægelse...”55 In the wider context in which Silentio is writing here it is important to notice that he is calling faith a “movement” for two reasons: first, as is evident from the above quote, because faith is something a person does, a movement he performs (“at gjøre Troens Bevægelse”); second, because faith itself is a passion, an emotional state in its own right, something that moves the agent in question: “Kjærligheden har dog i Digterne sine Præster, og stundom hører man en Røst, der veed at holde den i Hævd; men om Troen høres der intet Ord, hvo taler til denne Lidenskabs Ære?”56

|| 55 SKS 4, 128 / FT, 32: “By nature I am a shrewd fellow, and shrewd people always have great difficulty in making the movement of faith...” 56 SKS 4, 128 / FT, 32: “Love indeed has its priests in the poets, and occasionally we hear a voice that knows how to honor it, but not a word is heard about faith. Who speaks to the honor of this passion?”

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Silentio does not himself take issue with the fact that he operates with faith as a “movement” in two separate senses at once, both as an operation and as a drive, or passion. As I see it, faith is a bit of both: It is a passionate commitment to God that makes possible a psychological operation which lets the knight of faith connect emotionally to objects of affection in a novel and unique manner (pure passion). After having spoken about faith both as a psychological operation and as a passion, it is in terms of the former aspect that Silentio pursues the topic. He turns to the story of Abraham, and describes cursorily, yet again, Abraham’s actions. He notes the problematic nature of his greatness, and then goes on to state exactly what it is about Abraham that he can neither understand, nor emulate, the “movement of faith”: “Jeg kan ikke gjøre Troens Bevægelse, jeg kan ikke lukke Øinene og styrte mig tillidsfuld i det Absurde, det er mig en Umulighed, men jeg roser mig ikke deraf.”57 Here we are given a novel detail about what is involved in faith as a psychological operation: To confidently throw oneself into the absurd (“styrte mig tillidsfuld i det Absurde”). Having made a case for his lack of faith proper, Silentio turns to his most detailed consideration of his own brand of religiosity. He states that he has a “lyrical conviction” about the existence of God and about God’s nature. To Silentio, God is love.58 The conviction, he says, is a source of great solace to him. One has to ask, however, what he means by saying that his conviction is “lyrical”. The answer, I believe, is intimated in what Silentio says next: Guds Kjærlighed er mig, baade i directe og omvendt Forstand, incommensurabel for hele Virkeligheden... Jeg besværer ikke Gud med mine Smaa-Sorger, det Enkelte bekymrer mig ikke, jeg stirrer kun paa min Kjærlighed, og holder dens jomfruelige Flamme reen og klar; Troen er overbevist om, at Gud bekymrer sig om det Mindste.59

The last sentence describes faith proper (“Troen”), that is, Abraham’s faith. In the passage, the difference between faith proper and Silentio’s form of religiosity is made out to be how God figures in the individual’s relation to reality. According

|| 57 SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34: “I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; it is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for that.” 58 SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34. 59 SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34: “To me God’s love, in both the direct and the converse sense, is incommensurable with the whole of actuality... I do not trouble God with my little troubles, details do not concern me; I gaze only at my love and keep its virgin flame pure and clear. Faith is convinced that God is concerned about the smallest things.”

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to Silentio’s lyrical conviction, God is separate from the world. God’s love is incommensurable with reality. As such, Silentio does not trouble God with his worldly sorrows, but loves him with an affection that is elevated above the events of his life. God represents a refuge from these events. God’s hand, therefore, is not seen to be an active part of how reality unfolds. Rather, God represents an alternative to the world, a safe haven from distress and discontent. Faith proper, on the other hand, spins this differently. In this kind of divine relation, God is not separate from what goes on. God cares for the most insignificant thing. His hand is present. On the basis of this, the reason that Silentio’s conviction is “lyrical” seems logically to be that it is not about the real world in the sense of day to day events; it is lyrical as opposed to factual. God is not an integral part of how reality unfolds, but something wholly unto himself, absolutely other. Having said this, Silentio goes on to the experiment of reflecting on what he would have done had he been placed in the same position as Abraham. This is a passage that I discussed in Chapter 2, sixth section, where Silentio introduces the concept of “resignation”, calling it an “infinite movement”; thus, like faith, it is a psychological operation. What Silentio says is that had he been placed in Abraham’s position, his option would have been to use resignation as a surrogate for faith (effectively becoming a knight of resignation).60 What this means is that Silentio would only have been able to ride out to Moriah with Isaac, if he was resigned to the fact that Isaac at that point was already lost. This connects back to how God relates to the world within the parameters of how Silentio relates to God: Jeg havde i samme Øieblik, som jeg besteg Hesten, sagt til mig selv: nu er Alt tabt, Gud fordrer Isaak, jeg offrer ham, med ham al min Glæde – dog er Gud Kjærlighed og vedbliver at være det for mig; thi i Timeligheden kan Gud og jeg ikke tale sammen, vi have intet Sprog tilfælleds.61

Note the last sentence: Within time, God and I cannot speak; we do not have any language in common. This corroborates the picture I have drawn of Silentio’s religiosity. As Silentio sees it, God is separate from concrete earthly and temporal existence. Silentio’s relation to God is something other than his relation to the world.

|| 60 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35. 61 SKS 4, 130 / FT, 35: “The moment I mounted the horse, I would have said to myself: Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy – yet God is love and continues to be that for me, for in the world of time God and I cannot talk with each other, we have no language in common.”

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Not so, Silentio goes on to argue, for Abraham, which is what hallmarks Abraham as a knight of faith. It is with this that Silentio introduces the issue of faith as a double-movement. According to Silentio, Abraham also resigns from Isaac. Abraham gives him up, severs his emotional relation to him in order to deal with the pain of loss, yet immediately thereafter he performs a second movement, faith: “Det sidste Stadium, han taber af Sigte, er den uendelige Resignation. Han gaaer virkelig videre og kommer til Troen…”62 By virtue of faith Abraham wins Isaac back, though not in terms of re-establishing the relation to Isaac from which he has resigned; no, Abraham wins Isaac back by virtue of the absurd. “Han troede i Kraft af det Absurde; thi al menneskelig Beregning var jo forlængst ophørt”;63 and: “men at kunne tabe sin Forstand og dermed hele den Endelighed, hvis Vexel-Mægler den er, og da i Kraft af det Absurde vinde netop den samme Endelighed, det forfærder min Sjæl...”;64 or: “thi Troens Bevægelse maa beestandig gjøres i Kraft af det Absurde, dog vel at mærke saaledes, at man ikke taber Endeligheden, men vinder den heel og holden.”65 In the last quote, Silentio states that the movement of faith has to be made by means of the absurd (“i Kraft af det Absurde”). Faith is a relation to God. It is therefore safe to assume that what Silentio means by the absurd is God. This is later confirmed when Silentio defines the absurd as the fact that for God everything is possible: “jeg troer dog, at jeg faaer hende, i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde, i Kraft af, at for Gud er Alting muligt.”66 In other words, God is the absurd in terms of his capabilities. If so, then according to the quotes above, it is by virtue of his relation to God that Abraham wins back Isaac, wins back the world (“det Endelige”). Faith, therefore, mediates Abraham’s relation to world. It is through God that he relates to Isaac and all the rest of reality. As such, God is not something distinct from reality. For Abraham, contrary to Silentio’s own situation, relating to reality means relating to God.

|| 62 SKS 4, 132 / FT, 37: “The last stage to pass from his view is the stage of infinite resignation. He actually goes further and comes to faith.” 63 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36: “He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago.” 64 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36: “But to be able to lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite, for which it is the stockbroker, and then to win the very same finitude again by virtue of the absurd – this appalls me...” 65 SKS 4, 132 / FT, 37: “[F]or 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.” 66 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46: “Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her – that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.”

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Having drawn up this general picture of faith as a double-movement, Silentio moves on to elaborate and deepen the idea. He does this by telling two stories about two different knights of faith other than Abraham: the anonymous man on his way home for a dish of cooked lamb’s head, and the young man and the princess. I have already discussed the first of these at length. I will therefore concentrate on the second. Silentio begins the second story by asking us to imagine a young man of common origin, a young man who falls head over heels in love with a princess. It is a relationship doomed from the outset, Silentio says. Common sense tells the man to give it up and let it go, to move on. If he is a knight of resignation, however, the young man will do no such thing.67 Knights do not flee from their troubles. Instead, the young man does the following: He makes absolutely certain that his love for the princess is the love of his life, the one thing that has an absolute emotional significance for him. Lippitt has pointed out, correctly, that the love in question is an “identity-conferring commitment”.68 After making certain of this, the young man will go on to make certain of another thing: that the relationship truly is impossible. If both things are certain, the knight will have come to the realization that the content and purpose of his life lie in one doomed wish: to be able to realize this unrealizable love.69 In response to this doomed state, he will perform the movement of resignation. Note, therefore, the resignation is a psychological strategy one performs in order to deal with an impossible emotional situation.70 Silentio: Ridderen gjør da Bevægelsen… Ridderen vil da erindre Alt; men denne Erindren er netop Smerten, og dog er han i den uendelige Resignation forsonet med Tilværelsen. Kjærligheden til hiin Prindsesse blev for ham Udtrykket for en evig Kjærlighed, antog en religiøs Charakteer, forklarede sig i en Kjærlighed til det evige Væsen, der vel negtede Opfyldelsen, men dog atter forso-

|| 67 SKS 4, 136 / FT, 42. 68 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 46. 69 SKS 4, 137 / FT, 42–43. 70 Ref.: “Til at resignere hører der ikke Tro, thi det, jeg i Resignation vinder, er min evige Bevidsthed, og dette er en reen philosophisk Bevægelse, som jeg trøster mig til at gjøre, naar forlanges, og som jeg kan tugte mig selv til at gjøre, thi hver Gang nogen Endelighed vil voxe mig overhovedet, da hungrer jeg mig selv ud, indtil jeg gjør Bevægelsen…” (SKS 4, 142 / FT, 48: “The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement…”)

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nede ham i den evige Bevidsthed om dens Gyldighed i en Evigheds-Form, som ingen Virkelighed kan fratage ham. Daarer og unge Mennesker snakke om, at Alt er muligt for et Menneske. Det er imidlertid en stor Vildfarelse. Aandelig talt er Alt muligt, men i Endelighedens Verden er der Meget, der ikke er muligt. Dette Umulige gjør imidlertid Ridderen muligt derved, at han udtrykker det aandeligt, men aandeligt udtrykker han det derved, at han giver Afkald derpaa. Ønsket, der vilde føre ham ud i Virkeligheden men strandede paa Umuligheden, bøies nu indefter, men er derfor ikke tabt, heller ikke glemt.71

As the above quote makes clear, resignation does not mean that one categorically severs one’s emotional bond to the beloved object; rather, it represents a modification of this emotional bond. One accepts that the object is lost in the sense that it is something utterly unattainable, but one retains a relation to the object as something lost (“Ridderen vil da erindre Alt”). In the case of the young man, what was a relation to another person becomes a relation to an imaginary conception of this person, to a memory, a dream, a fantasy – a mental image (“Erindren”). As the last sentence above testifies, the emotional relation is no longer directed outward to the real world, but bent inward. In other words, it is still there, but not in the form of a relation to exterior reality; it is a relation wholly contained within the person, a relation to an internal object. What Silentio goes on to say next confirms the above interpretation: Fra det Øieblik, han har gjort Bevægelsen, er Prindsessen tabt. Han behøver ikke disse erotiske Nervezittringer ved at see den Elskede o. s. v., han behøver heller ikke i endelig Forstand bestandig at tage Afsked med hende, fordi han i evig Forstand erindrer hende... Han har fattet den dybe Hemmelighed, at ogsaa i at elske et andet Menneske bør man være sig selv nok.72

|| 71 SKS 4, 138 / FT, 43–44: “The knight, then, makes the movement… The knight, then, will recollect everything, but this recollection is precisely the pain, and yet in infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him. Fools and young people say that everything is possible for a human being. But that is a gross error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible. The knight, however, makes this impossibility possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by renouncing it. The desire that would lead him out into actuality but has been stranded on impossibility is now turned inward, but it is not therefore lost, nor is it forgotten.” 72 SKS 4, 138–139 / FT, 44: “From the moment he has made the movement, the princess is lost. He does not need the erotic titillation of seeing the beloved etc., nor does he in the finite sense continually need to be bidding her farewell, because in the eternal sense he recollects her… He

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The last sentence of this quote is especially revealing: When loving another human being, one always ought to be sufficient unto oneself: paradoxical statement, seeing as, commonsensically, love is precisely a relation in which oneself is not sufficient. Rather, one is essentially dependent upon another, the object of one’s affection. Yet this is exactly what the knight of resignation is not, because the object of affection in his/her case is an internal object. In the case of the young man, when he performs the movement of resignation he ends his emotional relation to the princess, but he ends it by bending it inwards, by directing it towards an internal object that is formed in the likeness of the princess, but is no longer connected to the princess herself. In a way, the knight of resignation could be said to be a man who has accepted that the love of his life can only be had in his imagination. Davenport can be seen to confirm the drift of my proposed interpretation of resignation. What I call an “internal object” he speaks about as an “ersatz”, and though his notion of ersatz is not solely psychological as mine is, the ersatz is nonetheless something inherently ideal as opposed to real: “For the knight of resignation by himself, marrying the princess remains accessible only in the ‘infinite’ or atemporal sense of being logically possible and ethically necessary or ideal. Resignation stops with this ersatz state of affairs in the eternal realm…”73 Before moving on to what the story of the young man and the princess has to say about the movement of faith, I want first to consider and discuss an alternative interpretation of the movement of resignation. The reason is that such a discussion will help me provide a clearer picture of my idea, and it is important to have a clear picture of what resignation is, since faith is a movement that succeeds resignation and builds upon it (in the fourth section I give an explicit argument for such a cumulative understanding of faith). In other words, what resignation is, defines what faith is. Moreover, the discussion of this alternative interpretation will let me further clarify the relation between resignation and Silentio’s brand of religiosity. The interpretation I discuss is one proposed by Sharon Krishek.74 Krishek’s interpretation is based upon the assumption that the following passage from Silentio is of key significance to his concept of resignation: Kjærligheden til hiin Prindsesse blev for ham Udtrykket for en evig Kjærlighed, antog en religiøs Charakteer, forklarede sig i en Kjærlighed til det evige Væsen, der vel negtede

|| has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself.” 73 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 203. 74 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”.

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Opfyldelsen, men dog atter forsonede ham i den evige Bevidsthed om dens Gyldighed i en Evigheds-Form, som ingen Virkelighed kan fratage ham.75

What Krishek capitalizes upon in this passage is that Silentio states that the knight’s love for the princess takes on a religious character, and transforms itself into a love for an eternal being (“det evige Væsen”), that is, God, at least according to Krishek. In the quote, moreover, this transformation is said to reconcile (“forsonede”) the knight to the fact that his love is not realizable in a worldly form. Thus, parallel to what Silentio says about his own religiosity, the love of God can be seen to become a source of solace and comfort to the knight. As Krishek writes: “in resignation one’s love for God reconciles one with existence.”76 Counter to what I suggest, therefore, and to what Davenport suggests, the knight’s love is not redirected towards an internal object, or an ideational ersatz. Instead, it is, at least partly, redirected towards God. Krishek: “Resignation, then, is a state of love both for the lost thing and for God, and while being a radical release of one’s hold of the former (having accepted it as undeniably lost), it forms an enhanced focus on the will of the latter.”77 Her idea, in essence, is that the knight’s love for the lost object is sustained through his love for God, just like a husband’s love for his dead wife can be sustained through his love for their mutual child.78 For Krishek, therefore, resignation is a religious movement, one that brings the agent closer to God and, in doing so, reconciles the agent to his/her existential failure, that is, his/her failure to realize the love of his/her life. I believe that Krishek’s interpretation is wrong. Her interpretation overplays the role that God has in the movement of resignation. Moreover, it overplays the degree to which the knight of resignation can be said to be reconciled to his/her loss. My argument is as follows: Reconciliation, on Krishek’s model, is gained through the love of God. As Krishek explains it, reconciliation is the product of two steps: In the first step, the knight of resignation submits his/her will to that of God, accepting his/her situation, that is, the impossibility of realizing his/her love: “The knight, therefore,

|| 75 SKS 4, 138 / FT, 43–44: “His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him.” 76 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 112. 77 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 114. 78 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 111.

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takes it upon himself to adhere to God’s will, even though God’s will is not in harmony with his own.”79 The second step entails transformation or redirection in which the knight’s love for the princess takes on the form of a love for God: “Thus, despite losing a love-relationship of immense importance… he finds a new way to sustain his love for the princess, and therefore reconciles the fact that it cannot be fulfilled in the realm of actuality and finitude.”80 Crucially, therefore, God becomes a substitute for the lost, something that can fill the void left by the love that cannot be, just as a child can be a link to the dead mother in the father’s heart. Krishek’s knight of resignation does not only lose a love of deep importance, but also gains one. As I see it, this scenario does not fit well with the picture that Silentio paints of a knight of resignation. According to Silentio, the knight of resignation is an essentially sad and melancholy figure. Davenport, for example, speaks about the knight of resignation as “elegiac”.81 As I have already quoted Silentio as saying, knights of resignation are “strangers in the world.”82 More to the point, resignation is explicitly described as an operation that reconciles in terms of pain: “denne Bevægelse, der i sin Smerte forsoner med Tilværelsen…”;83 or: “Jeg kan ved egen Kraft resignere paa Alt, og da finde Fred og Hvile i Smerten.”84 In Krishek’s model, it is not possible to understand resignation as something painful in itself as it is based on a positive connection to God. Certainly, the initial loss is painful, but the new relation of love compensates for this. Krishek’s understanding of resignation is as something that moves away from pain, yet what Silentio says seem to be more along the lines of an acceptance of the pain. There is no motion away, but rather an act of coming to terms with how it is. In Krishek’s model, pain is only a factor in resignation to the extent that the knight of resignation does not fully resign. For it is only if a relation to the original object is retained that the knight experiences a sense of loss, hence, of pain. Resignation itself redirects love towards God; it gives the knight an alternative way to realize the love. This is not painful. What is more, the original connection to the original object does not make sense within the parameters of Krishek’s understanding of resignation, since it is an operation that supplants the original with God. Thus, the connection to the original object can only be kept in place if || 79 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 113. 80 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 113. 81 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, pp. 229–230. 82 SKS 4, 135; 144 / FT, 41; 50. 83 SKS 4, 140 / FT, 45: “[T]his movement, which in its pain reconciles one to existence…” 84 SKS 4, 143 / FT, 49: “I can resign everything by my own strength and find peace and rest in the pain.”

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the knight of resignation defies the operation of resignation as Krishek defines it. As she states, the knight of resignation “submits his will to the will of God: while keeping alive his unfulfilled will…”85 In other words, the knight of resignation does not fully submit to the will of God – s/he does not fully resign – and it is the fact that s/he holds back and nurtures his/her original love that creates pain. This, however, makes the pain a secondary feature of the situation. It is there because the resignation is imperfectly executed. According to how Silentio describes resignation, on the other hand, pain is not secondary. It is primary. One is reconciled with the lost in terms of pain. Therefore, I hold, Krishek gets it wrong. In comparison, on my suggested interpretation, pain is a primary feature of resignation. By redirecting his/her love towards an internal object instead of an external one, the agent saves him/herself from the constant frustration of loving something s/he cannot have. By doing this, however, s/he creates a categorical difference between his/her emotional make-up and his/her life in the real world, splitting him/herself in two. How the knight truly feels can never be realized in how s/he lives his/her life; it is only a part of his/her inside, or interior reality. Thus, as s/he goes about his/her business in the world, s/he must constantly relate to a discrepancy between inner and outer. S/he is never truly in tune with the surrounding world. S/he is, precisely as Silentio describes, a stranger in the world. Davenport describes the emotional state of the knight of resignation as follows: “The will disengages from active pursuit, but the love remains.”86 The description confirms the essential discrepancy between inner and outer. The pain, in this model, comes precisely from this discrepancy, from the constant realization that all one has is a dream, a fantasy. Davenport: “Because this kind of resignation brackets active expression of one’s continued commitment, it can sometimes lapse into sentimentalism, or what I call bad romanticism: Werther-like hand-wringing and enjoyment of one’s sorrow.”87 The above refutation of Krishek’s position does not, however, mean that she is wholly wrong in her approach. She is, I believe, wrong in how she conceptualizes resignation, yet there is something to her idea that the knight of resignation has a special relation to God. But this, I believe, is not a part of the operation of resignation per se, but a result of resignation having taken place. To see this, consider the fact that the operation of resignation, Silentio tells us, defines the individual in terms of his/her “eternal consciousness”:

|| 85 Sharon Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith”, p. 113. 86 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 229. 87 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 229.

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Til at resignere hører der ikke Tro, thi det, jeg i Resignation vinder, er min evige Bevidsthed, og dette er en reen philosophisk Bevægelse, som jeg trøster mig til at gjøre, naar forlanges, og som jeg kan tugte mig selv til at gjøre, thi hver Gang nogen Endelighed vil voxe mig overhovedet, da hungrer jeg mig selv ud, indtil jeg gjør Bevægelsen; thi min evige Bevidsthed er min Kjærlighed til Gud, og den er mig høiere end Alt.88

What does Silentio mean by “eternal consciousness”? Consider the following: Whatever “eternal consciousness” is, it is the result of resignation. Resignation, per my understanding, is a movement that redirects one’s love from an exterior object to an internal one. It seems logical, therefore, that the “eternal consciousness” is the individual’s consciousness of him/herself as defined by his/her relation to an internal object; that is, the individual’s consciousness of him/herself as a person defined by his/her loss, defined by his/her act of resignation. I have two reasons that rationalize this view: first, resignation is an operation that allows the subject to be him/herself enough to be self-sufficient; and, second, following Lippitt, quoted above, resignation that takes place in relation to a love represents an “identity-conferring commitment”.89 Thus, there is a sense in which the subject, through resignation, has become self-sufficient in terms of identity, and therefore eternal, that is, forever the same. Being conscious of oneself in terms of this aspect could, therefore, be termed “eternal consciousness”. This line of reasoning opens a different kind of interpretation of the passage that Krishek takes as key in developing her understanding of resignation: Kjærligheden til hiin Prindsesse blev for ham Udtrykket for en evig Kjærlighed, antog en religiøs Charakteer, forklarede sig i en Kjærlighed til det evige Væsen, der vel negtede Opfyldelsen, men dog atter forsonede ham i den evige Bevidsthed om dens Gyldighed i en Evigheds-Form, som ingen Virkelighed kan fratage ham.90

|| 88 SKS 4, 142 / FT, 48: “The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all.” 89 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 46. 90 SKS 4, 138 / FT, 43–44: “His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him.”

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It could be that when Silentio says that the knight’s love takes on a religious character, this is merely metaphorical. It is “religious” in the sense of becoming something hallowed, absolute, and put on high. It is not “religious” in the sense that FB operates with that term, namely, as a force beyond ethics and reason. It does not make sense to say that an affective relation, by virtue of resignation, becomes a force beyond ethics and reason. The consequence of this would be that what Silentio means by the “eternal being” is not God. As it is the object of the knight of resignation’s affective relation, the “eternal being” is the internal object, an object that is “eternal” precisely for the same reason that the eternal consciousness is “eternal”, because the object is self-sufficient and independent of external reality. It is a pure idea, a mental image: a simulacrum. If this is correct, then the act of resignation can be seen to give rise to a radically autonomous form of individuality in the subject. The subject becomes selfsufficient in terms of identity. This novel form of individual existence can then be said to constitute the basis for a special relation to God. As said, in the knight of resignation there is discrepancy between inner and outer, between how the individual sees him/herself, and how s/he understands him/herself to be in the real world. My suggestion is that if such individuals were to relate to God, they would do so in terms of how they see themselves in their own eyes, in terms of their inner, thus hidden, identities. God would be someone to whom they could turn by virtue of this element of themselves that they have withdrawn from the real world. God, therefore, would serve as a viable alternative to the world. Thus, as is logical, the knight of resignation’s relation to God can be seen to coincide with Silentio’s “lyrical conviction”. Silentio, and the knight of resignation, both relate to God as something separate from the world. More importantly, as something they can relate to in terms of their own separation from the world, that is, in terms of their resignation. Resignation does not, therefore, itself come with a special relation to God as Krishek argues, but it lays the ground for such a relation, just as, importantly, it lays the ground for faith proper. Having established this, I will turn to the story of the young man and the princess, and how it helps shed light on the movement of faith: Vi ville nu lade Troens Ridder give Møde i det omtalte Tilfælde. Han gjør aldeles det samme, som den anden Ridder, han giver uendeligt Afkald paa den Kjærlighed, der er hans Livs Indhold, han er forsonet i Smerten; men da skeer Vidunderet, han gjør endnu en Bevægelse, forunderligere end Alt, thi han siger: jeg troer dog, at jeg faaer hende, i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde, i Kraft af, at for Gud er Alting muligt... Han erkjender altsaa Umuligheden og i samme Øieblik troer han det Absurde; thi vil han uden med al sin Sjæls Lidenskab og af sit ganske

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Hjerte at erkjende Umuligheden, indbilde sig at have Troen, da bedrager han sig selv, og hans Vidnesbyrd har intetsteds hjemme, da han end ikke er kommen til den uendelige Resignation.91

Here, the movement of faith is described as something that succeeds the movement of resignation; having redirected his love for the princess from the princess herself to an internal object (resignation) and, through this, having accepted the love as a dead-end, the knight now gains a novel horizon for its realization. He stands to recapture the princess in terms of the absurd, in terms of the fact that for God everything is possible (“jeg troer dog, at jeg faaer hende, i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde, i Kraft af, at for Gud er Alting muligt”). This recapture does not consist of a rekindling of the original relation. It is not a reconnection to the world, to finitude, to what the knight has moved away from and given up. The knight does not un-resign himself: “Troen er derfor ingen æsthetisk Rørelse, men noget langt Høiere, netop fordi den har Resignationen forud for sig, den er ikke Hjertets umiddelbare Drift, men Tilværelsens Paradox.”92 Thus, the knight’s recapture is not identical to a straightforward re-immersion in the real world. Had it been, then it would have been necessary to keep the resignation in place in order to have faith. However, as the last sentence of the passage above testifies, the knight has to recognize the impossibility of ever winning the princess in order to have faith that he will win the princess. The crux of understanding faith, therefore, in the current context, depends on the nature and meaning of this “will”. In what sense, exactly, is it that the knight of faith will win the princess? The answer is that he will win the princess through the possibilities opened up by God’s omnipotence. Importantly, these possibilities are not a part of the real world per se, that is, they do not form part of the world that one can recognize in terms of reason,

|| 91 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46–47: “Now let us meet the knight of faith on the occasion previously mentioned. He does exactly the same as the other knight did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her – that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible... Consequently, he acknowledges the impossibility, and in the very same moment he believes the absurd, for if he wants to imagine that he has faith without passionately acknowledging the impossibility with his whole heart and soul, he is deceiving himself and his testimony is neither here nor there, since he has not even attained infinite resignation.” 92 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 47: “Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence.”

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but rather an added dimension above and beyond the factual.93 The knight accepts failure when it comes to reality proper, he resigns, that is, performs the operation of resignation, but, following this, he nonetheless has faith that he will win the princess, and he has faith because of the absurd, that is, because for God everything is possible. The thing to notice here is that it is through God, through God as something absurd, that the knight recaptures, or positions himself to recapture, the princess. Silentio consistently describes it in this manner, stating that it is through the absurd as a sort of working force that the object of the knight’s affection gains something more than a mere interior and mentally subjective reality (like it has in a state of resignation). Consider the following quotes: “thi, efter at have gjort Resignationens Bevægelse, nu i Kraft af det Absurde at faae Alt, faae Ønsket, heelt, ubeskaarent, det er over menneskelige Kræfter, det er et Vidunder”;94 or: “Og dog, dog er hele den jordiske Skikkelse, han frembringer, en ny Skabning i Kraft af det Absurde.”95 In both passages Silentio uses the locution “i Kraft af det Absurde” to describe how the knight of faith wins back what he has resigned from. A direct translation of the locution would be: “by force of the absurd”. Thus, what lets the knight of faith go beyond resignation is the force of the absurd, this again being identified as God’s omnipotence. The absurd is what makes his recapture of the princess possible, but possible in a sense that does not contradict the worldly and finite impossibility of the matter, absurdly possible. It is not possible in any reasonable and comprehensible sense, but possible because for God everything is possible. It is, in other words, possible in an absurd sense, in a divine sense.96

|| 93 Note here the parallel to the earlier discussion of the knight of faith in Chapter 2, second section, where I argued that faith is something beyond the universal and ethical, capable of its own level of meaning, and wholly incommensurable with reason. Here, again, faith is made out to contain an alternative level of reality to the level of reality under consideration. Earlier this was the ethical, now it is the emotional / the aesthetical; just as faith allowed for an alternative to the ethical, faith now allows for an alternative to the aesthetical. 94 SKS 4, 142 / FT, 40: “…then by virtue of the absurd to get everything, to get one’s desire totally and completely – that is over and beyond human powers, that is a marvel” (Kierkegaard 1983, 48). 95 SKS 4, 135 / FT, 40: “And yet, yet the whole earthly figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd.” 96 My reading here strongly identifies Silentio’s notion of the absurd with his notion of God. According to the reading, God is the absurd. Consequently, it is because of his/her connection to God that the knight of faith exhibits absurd traits. Three things speak for this: first, if faith is ineffable and incomprehensible, it is logical that God, the object of faith, is absurd, seeing as the absurd is, per definition, incomprehensible; second, in the above quote, Silentio explicitly identifies the absurd with God’s omnipotence, thus making the absurd something characteristic of

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A further thing one has to keep firmly in one’s mind when considering this is that faith is a psychological movement that takes the individual away from resignation. Faith delivers the individual into a kind of security in relation to the object of his affection, what I’ve termed “pure passion”. The knight of faith recaptures the princess, but he does not recapture her in the real world, nor is this recapture even a rational possibility in the real world. The knight of faith recaptures her through his faith in God, through God’s omnipotence. God, therefore, steps in and mediates the knight of faith’s relationship to the princess: “mediates” in the sense that it is through God that the princess becomes a possibility for the knight; it is through God that she becomes something more than a mere internal object, an imaginary fixation, a fantasy. This quality of “more” that the princess acquires in the life of the knight is there solely because of faith, because of God. Thus, the knight’s relation to the princess, his love for her, runs through the divine, it is mediated by the divine. One way to think about this is as follows: In the beginning the young man experiences the development of an affectual relation to the princess (aesthetic love), but because the relation is impossible, he performs the operation of resignation – he resigns. The act of resignation does not undo this love. What it does is retract it from any affiliation with the princess as something exterior to the young man. The love is bent inwards. It becomes an interior reality, directed towards an internal object. As explained, this is a sad and melancholy state of affairs. What happens next, however, the movement of faith, represents a release from this melancholy. Through faith the princess is reconstituted as something that the young man may win, and will win, but not, however, on the level of the real world, there he is still resigned, but on a different level, a level opened up through the fact of God’s omnipotence. It is in this sense that God can be said to secure the knight of faith’s object of affection. The reality of the princess as something exterior to the knight of faith is solely by the grace of God, and through this the knight of faith has “pure passion”. His love for a certain something is independent of this something (he is resigned), yet is a love for this something in virtue of his relation to God. God mediates the knight’s emotional relation in terms of divine possibilities.

|| God (“thi han siger: jeg troer dog, at jeg faaer hende, i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde, i Kraft af, at for Gud er Alting muligt”); and third, connected to the passage under consideration, Silentio defines faith as a relation to the absurd: “Denne Bevidsthed har Troens Ridder ligesaa klar; det Eneste, der altsaa kan frelse ham, er det Absurde, og dette griber han ved Troen.” (SKS 4, 141 / FT, 47: “The knight of faith realizes this just as clearly; consequently, he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith.”)

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It ought to be mentioned that there is an ineluctable temporal element to how the knight of faith regains a relation to the princess. The knight’s relation is a relation in terms of divine possibilities, not one of actuality. This issue is further explored in the fifth section of this chapter, and lies at the heart of my argument of how suspense forms a vital component of the concept of faith found in FB.

4 A different take on the double-movement Before connecting Silentio’ two knights to Bakhtin’s two heroes, I want first to explore an alternative interpretation of the double-movement of faith. In the prior section, I argued for a “cumulative” model of the double-movement.97 According to such a model, faith is an operation that is performed after that of resignation, and faith is a movement that depends upon resignation. There exists, therefore, a correct sequence of operations that one must perform in order to realize faith. Given how Silentio describes faith as a double-movement, I believe the cumulative interpretation is obvious: “Vi ville nu lade Troens Ridder give Møde i det omtalte Tilfælde. Han gjør aldeles det samme, som den anden Ridder, han giver uendeligt Afkald paa den Kjærlighed, der er hans Livs Indhold, han er forsonet i Smerten; men da skeer Vidunderet, han gjør endnu en Bevægelse...”98 In spite of the obviousness of the cumulative approach, Ronald L. Hall has argued for a non-cumulative approach to the double-movement.99 In this he has been supported by Lippitt.100 Hall’s idea of the non-cumulative approach is that faith is not an operation that sequentially follows resignation. Rather, faith consists of a refusal to perform the act of resignation. Faith is the active negation of the possibility of resignation. The “double-movement” is not a double movement because it is composed of two, discrete operations, but because faith is structurally defined as an annulment of resignation: Well, my reading of this paradox has it that resignation and refusal are structural elements within faith insofar as existential faith would be impossible if resignation and refusal were

|| 97 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 226. 98 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46: “Now let us meet the knight of faith on the occasion previously mentioned. He does exactly the same as the other knight did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement…” My emphasis. 99 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace. 100 John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 75.

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not real, albeit excluded, existential possibilities. Or, as I like to put it, following Kierkegaard’s suggestion, faith includes resignation and refusal within itself as annulled possibilities.101

Resignation is, therefore, contained within faith as that which faith is not. Hall goes on: Resignation and refusal are not moments that one passes through to get to faith, leaving resignation and refusal behind for good. Rather these are elements within faith, permanently a threat to it, possibilities that must continually be annulled.102

Having outlined Hall’s proposal, I want to turn to the question of Hall’s motivation. Given the obviousness of the cumulative approach, why does he choose a different interpretation? Why does he see a need for it? The answer lies in his interpretation of what it means to have faith. To have faith, for Hall, means authentically embracing the world, and one’s objects of affection. His position is reminiscent of that of Cross. As I showed in Chapter 2, fifth section, Cross defines faith as a practical mode of existential orientation. Faith is a way of relating to the object one loves. Furthermore, according to Cross, faith is a way of relating that gets its peculiar nature from being an open defiance of imminent loss. Faith is a love that loves in spite of the fact that it is going to lose what it loves. Hall can also be said to hold that faith is a way of loving that is defined through an act of defiance, only not of defiance to an imminent loss, but through an act of defiance against resignation: Faith receives and embraces the world just as Abraham was enabled by faith to receive and embrace Isaac when his willing hand was stayed. I can only be said to be able to receive the world, to be able to embrace it, to be able to choose it, and hence to be able to make it my own in a deeply personal way, if I have the power to turn away, the power of renunciation, the will to resignation and refusal.103

Importantly, therefore, according to Hall, and to Cross, and to Lippitt as well in as much as he follows Hall’s model, faith is defined as a special kind of emotional

|| 101 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace, p. 35. What Hall speaks of as “Kierkegaard’s suggestion” here is a statement, not from FB, but from Sygdommen til Døden (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 64). 102 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace, p. 38. 103 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace, pp. 27–28.

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relation to finite reality.104 Hall: “In faith a new relation to finitude is thus established”;105 or: “The knight of resignation seeks to transcend the human; the knight of faith seeks to embrace it.”106 Davenport raises two problems with the non-cumulative approach exemplified by Hall, both of which I fully support. First, as mentioned, Silentio himself straightforwardly describes the double-movement in cumulative terms: “For Silentio says plainly and repeatedly that faith includes the tragic / heroic movement of resignation as its necessary but not sufficient condition; resignation in this sense is essential to the very fabric of faith.”107 Second, Silentio clearly differentiates faith from the form of direct emotional investments in finite reality that Hall, Cross and, to an extent, Lippitt makes it out to be: Indeed, Silentio argues that without resignation, faith collapses into the “first immediacy” or aestheticism because resignation is the ethical component that the aesthetic immediacy lacks. So the right reading must explain how faith builds cumulatively on continuing resignation, but the explanations offered by Cross, Hall, and Lippitt all fail on this score.108

Contrary to Davenport, I would not describe resignation as a necessarily “ethical component”, but other than that I fully support his argument on this point, and believe that the two arguments show that the non-cumulative understanding of the double-movement is misguided. Later I describe what distinguishes my account from that of Davenport’s, but first I bring the pieces of this chapter together as a whole.

|| 104 An important precursor to the positions of Hall, Cross, and Lippitt on this point is Edward F. Mooney’s theory in Knights of Faith and Resignation. In this book Mooney argues that faith consists of “selfless care” for the finite: “We can now see how the knight of faith can both renounce and enjoy the finite. He sees or knows in his bones that renouncing all claims on the finite is not renouncing all care for it. The knight… is at home and takes delight in the finite. She cares for the worldly with a selfless care, for she has given up all proprietary claim, all vested or egoistic expectation.” (Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, p. 54.) Thus, Mooney also holds that faith consists of a special kind of relation to the concrete, finite object that one loves, the difference between him and Hall, Cross, and Lippitt being how this “special kind of relation” is defined. Contra Mooney, Hall believes that this relation does include possession, only not possessiveness. To embrace something means to embrace it in its finitude, i.e. with awareness that one may have to let go, something that makes the embraced all the more valuable. 105 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace, p. 27. 106 Ronald L. Hall, The Human Embrace, p. 28. 107 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 226. 108 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 226.

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5 Faith and suspense In the second section of this chapter, I explored Bakhtin’s two types of heroes: the epic and the novelistic. I showed that what distinguishes the one from the other is how their respective stories conceptualize time. In the epic, time is something finite and closed. The epic has a clearly defined beginning, and a clearly defined end, and nothing matters beyond these two poles of the story. The epic is not meant to be temporally realistic. On the contrary, the function of the epic is to imbue a story with a kind of timeless greatness. The epic hero, therefore, as a function of a wholly finalized story, is a wholly finalized figure. In contrast to the epic, the novel is temporally realistic. Time in the novel is fluid and inconclusive. The story moves from one moment to the next without a sense of where it all is going. Instead, the issue of where it all is going appears in the novel as an explicit question: “This specific ‘impulse to continue’ (what will happen next?) and the ‘impulse to end’ (how will it end?) are characteristic only for the novel…”109 The novel, therefore, is defined by imminence and suspense. Consequently, the novelistic hero is a figure that belongs to a story of imminence and suspense, something that shows itself in the fact that s/he is never narratively exhausted, s/he is never defined in the sense of the epic hero, but is always oriented towards something yet to happen, bearing within him/herself some possibility not yet actualized. In this section, I argue that if we divorce Bakhtin’s idea of there being two types of heroes from its contextualization in a discussion about literary genres, and use them more as heroes of two types of narratives, the temporally closed, and the temporally open, then we can see that Silentio’s two knights incarnate these two figures. Through the movement of resignation the knight of resignation concludes his/her own story, or part of it. This can be seen in both of the two examples of a knight of resignation discussed in the prior section. Silentio, for example, when he imagines himself in Abraham’s shoes, states that the only way he would be able to undertake the journey to Moriah, would be if he were at the outset already resigned to the fact that Isaac was lost. In other words, Silentio, through resignation, preempts the conclusion of the sequence of events in which he is hypothetically involved. He reconciles himself from the beginning to how it is going to

|| 109 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”, p. 32. It is of no consequence to the argument, but one can note that Bakhtin’s theory of suspense is based upon uncertainty, and hence that he has serious problem as regards the paradox of suspense discussed in Chapter1.

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end. If God commands Isaac to be sacrificed, then that is what is going to happen. Isaac will be sacrificed. This is why, as I discussed in Chapter 2, sixth section, Silentio states that he would have responded by becoming disconcerted at the point when God stays his hand and returns Isaac to him, because the idea of Isaac not being lost to him would have become alien. This preemptive conclusion is equally present in the story of the young man and the princess. As I have explained, when resigning, the young man accepts the princess as lost to him, as unattainable, but through his resignation he retains his relation to the princess as something lost. He bends his love inwards, and redirects it towards an internal object. He thereby accepts that this love can never truly be, that is, it cannot be realized in the world, yet that it is an integral part of his own identity. As such, he has preemptively concluded part of the story of his life, the content and purpose of his life being defined by his love, and his love being something unrealizable. He has accepted the pain of this, and reconciled himself to it. In both examples, the knight of resignation is the hero of a concluded story, of a story in which he has failed the object of his passion. More to the point, he is the hero in terms of the fact that he preemptively concludes the story through the act of accepting this failure. This touches upon one of the major differences between the figures of the epic hero and the knight of resignation, besides the issue of genre. The epic hero is a fictional construction. The knight of resignation is a real person, or potentially so. Thus, the epic hero is defined by virtue of role and function within a story, while the knight of resignation is defined by virtue of relation to a story. Yet I do not believe this difference destroys the value of the comparison. In resigning, and in understanding him/herself to be resigned, the knight ends a plotline of his/her own life, all the while retaining the importance of the events the plot describes. This is where the melancholy and the elegiac nature of his/her situation originate. What is most important to him/her, to his/her sense of self, is bound to something that is not real or, to put it differently, that is only real for him/her. His/her sense of self is anchored in a temporally closed story, in a story which is no longer a part of the flow of time. Thereby, the knight of resignation identifies him/herself with what is, structurally speaking, an epic hero. Note also the fact that the epic hero, according to Bakhtin, is essentially bound to “timeless greatness”, and the act of resignation, according to Silentio, constitutes an individual’s “eternal consciousness”: an “eternal” consciousness of him/herself because the core of his/her being is now independent of the flux of finite reality. The knight is defined in relation to an internal object, to an idea, in contrast to

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reality. S/he is rooted in something “eternal” in the sense that this something is not of the temporal. Now, the reason that the knights of resignation resign from Isaac and from the princess is that they do not see any possibility in retaining or gaining a proper relation to the object of their love. In terms of human reason, it is impossible. God has commanded Isaac’s sacrifice. The princess is royalty, while the young man is a commoner. These are the things that prompt resignation. I have argued that the double-movement is a cumulative movement: resignation, then faith. The knight of faith, therefore, resigns just like the knight of resignation. Immediately upon having attained resignation s/he executes an additional movement, one that is based upon his/her personal relation to God, and that makes it possible for him/her to reattach him/herself to the object of love, but not, however, in a way that runs counter to the first operation of resignation (which is how Cross, Hall, and Lippitt interpret it). Instead faith makes it possible to reattach in terms of the horizon of divine possibilities – to reattach by virtue of the fact that for God everything is possible. Thus, the knight of faith loves by virtue of faith. Crucially, this changes the conceptualization of time in the knight’s story. The introduction of God trumps the impossibility perceived by human reason. In as much as God is a factor, anything can happen. Following Silentio, as quoted above, even as Abraham holds his knife over Isaac, Abraham has faith that Isaac will not be sacrificed.110 He has faith in this, because no event is conclusive given God’s omnipotence. Reality becomes openended. God represents the permanent possibility that something is going to happen. To repeat Silentio’s description of the young man as a knight of faith: the young man resigns from the princess, then han gjør endnu en Bevægelse, forunderligere end Alt, thi han siger: jeg troer dog, at jeg faaer hende, i Kraft nemlig af det Absurde, i Kraft af, at for Gud er Alting muligt… Han erkjender altsaa Umuligheden og i samme Øieblik troer han det Absurde...111

In other words, the knight of faith is a novelistic hero in as much as his/her story is not concluded, but is always oriented towards the possibility that God is going to intervene. By virtue of this, the situation of the knight of faith is one that is inherently characterized by suspense. As argued in Chapter 1, suspense is a state

|| 110 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36. 111 SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46–47: “[H]e makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her – that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible… Consequently, he acknowledges the impossibility, and in the very same moment he believes the absurd…”

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of imminence, and the knight of faith is caught up in a state of imminence because God’s intervention is always imminent. Thus, both the knight of faith and the novelistic hero relate to time as something inconclusive, as containing as yet undisclosed possibilities. This positions them in relation to each other, and establishes their situation as characterized by imminence and suspense. In light of this, it can be seen that Bakhtin’s differentiation between the epic hero and the novelistic hero, and Silentio’s / Kierkegaard’s differentiation between the knight of resignation and the knight of faith in one crucial aspect follow the same logic. The differentiation is in terms of the conceptualization of time the different heroes incarnate. The epic hero and the knight of resignation belong to stories with a closed temporal horizon, while the novelistic hero and the knight of faith belong to stories with an open temporal horizon. Consequently, having faith, in the sense developed in FB, crucially means to belong to an open temporal horizon, to be in a state of divine imminence, of divine suspense. Silentio: “…Troens Ridder holdes bestandig i Spænding.”112

6 Some points for and against Davenport’s interpretation of faith Before concluding this chapter, I briefly contrast the interpretation of faith developed here with an alternative interpretation argued for by Davenport.113 Davenport’s ideas on many points agree with the interpretation that I suggest, yet deviate on other crucial points, thereby providing a contrast that helps to make the details of my position stand out more clearly. Davenport’s argument is that faith consists of “eschatological trust”. What he means by this is that faith consists of confidence in God as an active power in the world, capable of setting the world aright in ways that are beyond those of human capabilities. Thus, he observes that the telos toward which the ethical is suspended in Kierkegaardian faith is the promised eschatological outcome in which the highest ethical norms will be fulfilled by an Absolute

|| 112 SKS 4, 177 / FT, 79: “…the knight of faith is constantly kept in tension.” Note, “Spænding” could have been translated as “suspense”, and not “tension”. 113 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”.

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power that transcends human capacities and promises to actualize goods otherwise accessible to human beings only as ideal forms in Platonic eternity.114

Practically, this shows itself in the following way: “the agent relates to the eschatological telos not by targeting it as the goal of action, but rather by embracing its possibility with his whole being as the condition for the ultimate significance of all his cares and projects.”115 The “eschatological telos” Davenport speaks about here refers to God’s concrete promises obtained through revelation.116 Therefore, just like in my account of suspense, Davenport holds that faith creates a novel horizon that frames the actions of the knight, one created on the basis of divine promises obtained through revelation. The introduction of this horizon affects both the knight of faith’s emotional attachments to the objects s/he loves,117 and means that the knight of faith lives in a state of suspense pending divine intervention.118 Davenport, therefore, holds, as I do, that suspense is a central feature of what it feels like to be a knight of faith. Furthermore, just as I have argued, Davenport holds that faith is dependent upon a direct, personal relation to God, and he holds that the double-movement of faith is cumulative. These are our major points of agreement. The major differences between our accounts, on the other hand, are found in the nature of the novel temporal horizon that engenders suspense, and in the nature of the direct, personal relation that the knight of faith has to God. In my introduction to this chapter, I mentioned Westphal’s critique of Davenport. Westphal’s claim is that Davenport takes the distinction between the knight of resignation and the knight of faith to be definitive of the latter, and that he omits acknowledging that in Silentio’s discussions in the three problemas the contrast to the knight of faith is not the knight of resignation, but the tragic hero. Put differently, Davenport reads the problem of the knight of faith’s relation to the ethical into the scheme of how the knight of faith relates to the knight of resignation.119 Davenport, therefore, conflates the two different levels that Silentio represents through the figures of the knight of resignation and the tragic hero – he conflates the issue of emotions with that of the ethical. This is already appar-

|| 114 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 199. 115 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, pp. 214–215. 116 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 203. 117 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 215; 230. 118 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, pp. 220–221. 119 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith, p. 74.

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ent in the first paragraph of his paper, where he writes that the knight of resignation represents a “limiting point within the ethical”, thus confirming that he sees the knight of resignation as a representative of the ethical, whereas that is not his role in FB, at least not in terms of Silentio’s explicit presentation.120 This conflation can also be seen if one considers the nature of the “novel temporal horizon” that, according to Davenport, engenders suspense in the life of the knight of faith: “More generally, religious suspense concerns the answer to the ultimate question: in the end, are ethical ideals just an eternal dream doomed to tragic failure, or will they be realized in new reality [sic], in a world transformed by God?”121 The thing that is about to happen, according to Davenport, is a divine act of goodness, an act of setting the world aright. God’s role is to be an ethical guarantor. Through eschatological trust, the knight of faith has confidence in God, and lives in the imminence of the event of absolute justice. One major problem with this is that by framing God as a guarantor of the ethical, Davenport places God within the sphere of the ethical. God is an agent of the ethical’s realization. Davenport is explicit about this. He writes, regarding the suspension of the ethical: On this reading, Abraham never abrogates his duty to love Isaac or consider himself exempted from it, even when he moves to kill Isaac: for Abraham relies absolutely on the (absurd) eschatological possibility that this will not ultimately cause Isaac’s life to end, that he will turn out not to have murdered his son after all. He “suspends” his duty to Isaac only in this sense: he accepts that he can fulfill this duty only if the promised eschatological possibility is actualized by God.122

The teleological suspension, therefore, is not a suspension of the ethical per se. It is a suspension of Abraham’s ethical agency. According to Davenport, the suspension represents an acceptance of the fact that the ethical is ultimately only possible through God’s intervention, this intervention being the object of the eschatological trust. In a connected line of thought, Davenport writes that the ethical ideals “have authoritative content independent of the power that makes them eschatologically

|| 120 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 196. 121 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, pp. 220–221. 122 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 220.

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possible.”123 The “good”, Davenport goes on, is a metaphysically necessary truth, ontologically prior to God.124 What ought to strike one in assessing what Davenport says in the above is that Davenport clearly does not operate with the same concept of the ethical that Silentio does. As I made clear in my interpretation of the tragic hero in Chapter 2, the ethical is Hegelian Sittlichkeit. It is the social and communal dimension of a human being’s life. Ethics is inherently interhuman. It is the structure that mediates human interaction. To speak, therefore, about ethics has having a “metaphysically necessary truth, ontologically prior to God” is clearly to read FB against the grain, and cannot represent a proper interpretation of what it says. There is no ethics prior to the existence of human interaction. Related to this is an issue to which Westphal draws attention. Given Davenport’s interpretation, the “absolute duty” Silentio outlines in “Problema II” makes no sense. For if God is contained within the ethical, how can he justify an act that breaks with the ethical?125 Davenport’s response to this, outlined above, would be that Abraham in reality does not break with the ethical. He does so only in appearance. In reality Abrahams trusts God to make it so that his action is not unethical. Even if he were to sacrifice Isaac, he trusts God to make it so that Isaac does not ultimately die, even if he dies then and there. Again, however, this goes against the grain of what Silentio actually says. Silentio is absolutely clear on the fact that ethically speaking Abraham’s action is murder: “hans Gjernings Realitet er det, hvorved han tilhører det Almene, og der er og bliver han en Morder.”126 Furthermore, given his position, I do not see that it is possible for Davenport to explain the fact the ethical represents a “temptation” for Abraham as the only way that the ethical is a temptation is if the knight of faith knows that what he does is unethical.

|| 123 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 232. 124 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 232. 125 Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith, p. 74. 126 SKS 4, 165–166 / FT, 74: “[T]he reality of his act is that by which he belongs to the universal, and there he is and remains a murderer.” See also the following point taken from “Problema I”: “Med Abraham forholder det sig anderledes. Han overskred ved sin Gjerning hele det Ethiske, og havde et høiere τελος udenfor, i Forhold til hvilket han suspenderede dette.” (SKS 4, 152 / FT, 59: “Abraham’s situation is different. By his act he transgressed the ethical altogether and he had a higher τελος outside it, in relation to which he suspended it.”)

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The reason that Davenport gets it wrong, as Westphal points out, is that he reads the knight of faith’s relationship to the ethical in terms of the scheme established by the knight of faith’s emotional relationship to reality. He conflates the figures of the knight of resignation and the tragic hero. For while it is true that God operates as a guarantor in FB, it is not as a guarantor of the ethical, but of the knight of faith’s emotional relation to what s/he loves. In relation to the ethical, God is not a guarantor. On the contrary, God represents something higher than the ethical. God is a force capable of suspending the ethical in an absolute sense, that is, in terms not germane to that of ethics: a non-ethical suspension of the ethical. In stating this, a philosopher working within the parameters of Davenport’s conception could object that I here implicitly seem to endorse a “strong divine command ethics”: an ethics that holds that God constitutes the source of good and evil; hence, that God is able to define what is good and what is evil, simply through an act of his will. This would enable God to make it right for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac simply by willing it to be so, a view Davenport dismisses as “irrationalist”.127 I do not, however, endorse a strong divine command ethics for the reason, as made clear in Chapter 2, second section, that the knight’s “absolute duty” towards God is not an ethical duty, and that the religious does not constitute a higher-level ethical reality. The only possible ethics, according to FB, is Hegelian Sittlichkeit. Ethics belongs, essentially, to communality and to the finite world. Religiosity, however, is achieved by stepping beyond the communal, and entering into an absolute relation to the absolute, a personal relationship to God. In such a relationship, one is always in a state of absolute isolation, no communality is possible, hence, ethics is impossible. My response does not, however, ward off the objection that I have an “irrationalist” reading of God’s role in FB. As I made clear in Chapter 2, sixth section, I do. God, in FB, is an irrational element. God is something beyond human reason, absurd, incomprehensible, and ineffable. This fact about God, moreover, is, according to what I have argued, what explains FB’s peculiar rhetorical composition. Davenport’s interpretation, on the other hand, owes us an explanation of exactly why Silentio writes in the manner he does. To sum up, Davenport and I share the conviction that suspense is a central feature of the narrative of the knight of faith. We differ, however, in regard to what engenders this suspense. Davenport holds that it is engendered by God’s || 127 John J. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”, p. 207.

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promise of ethical perfection. I hold that it is engendered by God’s mediating the knight of faith’s emotional commitment to the object s/he loves. In other words, while Davenport holds that suspense is part of the knight’s relationship to the ethical, I hold that it is part of the knight’s relationship to the aesthetical. Suspense is central feature of the fact that faith constitutes of a new form of interiority,128 a new form of immediacy.129 Faith allows the subject to connect emotionally to reality in a new way, in a way that is mediated by the temporal horizon opened up by God’s omnipotence.

Conclusion The primary idea argued for in this chapter is that suspense constitutes a central part of what it means to have faith in the first-person perspective because faith opens up a novel temporal horizon for the knight of faith by virtue of God’s omnipotence. The knight of faith secures his/her emotional relation to the objects s/he loves in terms of the fact that for God anything is possible. After resigning, s/he reconnects to the finite world in terms of his/her relation to God, and thereby exemplifies pure passion. This is the double-movement of faith. In exploring the knight of faith’s connection to suspense, I utilized Bakhtin’s concept of the “novelistic hero”. I argued that the knight of faith and the novelistic hero are identical in as much as they both belong to narratives with openended conceptualizations of time. Both the knight of faith and the novelistic hero are caught up in stories that are inherently geared towards something to come – stories that are characterized by suspense. This refers back to what was established in Chapter 1, first section: In as much as the knight of faith is a hero, s/he is a hero in terms of a story. Bakhtin’s argument is that stories conceptualize time in different ways. If so, then the story through which the knight of faith is a hero places him/her in a certain relationship to time. S/he belongs to a certain conceptualization of it. This narrative temporal dimension, I hold, offers a way in which one can rationally approach what it is like to be a knight of faith even though being a knight of faith is, strictly speaking, incomprehensible and ineffable. It makes the knight of faith approachable in this manner because being a knight of faith means belonging to a certain story, and this story is, in Bakhtinian terms, novelistic. The story is openended and

|| 128 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69. 129 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82.

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characterized by suspense. Thus, being a knight of faith means living in suspense, suspense originating from the knight’s relationship to the divine: in other words, divine suspense. As a closing thought, I believe that my view of how one can approach the first-person dimension of the knight of faith can be confirmed by Silentio’s own approach. Consider the following: Through his theory of faith as a double-movement, Silentio explicitly characterizes the first-person perspective of a knight of faith. He says something about what it is like to be a knight of faith, and he describes the psychological operations involved in this. His descriptions raise the following problem: How does one balance Silentio’s theory of the double-movement with what goes on in the three problemas? In the three problemas faith is said to be something that places the individual beyond the universal, beyond representation in rational thought and language. Prima facie, therefore, the double-movement theory seems to say something about what it is like to be an individual standing beyond the universal, but being such an individual is not something one can say anything about, per definition. As part of this chapter we have seen what can be read as Davenport’s proposed answer to this question, namely, to conflate the theory of the double-movement with the understanding of the knight of faith elaborated in the problemas. However, by doing so, as I have shown, Davenport is left with an interpretation of faith that is unsatisfactory because it relies on a concept of the ethical / the universal that is foreign to the concept that operates in FB; he is left with an interpretation wherein the knight of faith is not beyond the universal in any vital sense. My suggestion is that Silentio’s double-movement theory approaches the first-person nature of faith in exactly the same manner as I do with my theory of suspense. It does not reveal anything about faith per se; rather, it reveals something about what faith’s presence does to the individual that has it. It says something about how faith changes this individual by making it possible for him/her to relate emotionally to the world in a novel way: in other words, to behave in a certain characteristic manner that can be described narratively in terms of pure passion. The theory of the double-movement, then, is a theory about the inner, psychological workings that underlie the knight of faith’s characteristic behavior. In order for the knight of faith to be able to exemplify what I have termed pure passion, something like the double-movement has to take place. Thus, the double-movement theory can be seen to be intimately linked to, and dependent upon, a narrative conception of the knight of faith. My contribution is, essentially, to point out the logical consequence that if the double-movement represents a correct description of the inner workings of

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the knight of faith, then the knight of faith necessarily finds him/herself in a phenomenological state of suspense as part of having faith.

Chapter 4: Symmetry of Suspense This chapter discusses the notion that suspense is characteristic of the rhetorical composition of the problemas. The idea is to show that suspense is not only a feature of faith as it narratively theorized in FB, but also a feature of how the work is written, thus establishing an essential connection between form and content. Alternatively put, the chapter explicates the symmetry of suspense that exists between the different textual layers of FB.

Introduction In my general introduction to this study, I said that I was going to argue that form and content harmonize with each other in FB: how things are said can be seen to corroborate what is said. This chapter elaborates and explains exactly how this corroboration could be said to work. It was also made clear in the general introduction that the element that unites the conceptualization of faith and the rhetoric that conveys this conceptualization is suspense. Chapter 3 has argued that suspense is an essential component of having faith. The present chapter argues that suspense is an essential component of how faith is spoken about In Chapter 2, third section, I argued that FB contains two orders of discourse. These entwine, but do not form a coherent whole. Silentio’s theory about Abraham is not confirmed as the truth of Abraham because the theory itself makes no sense. It is paradoxical. The theory states that there exists a level of meaning beyond what we can rationally grasp, and that is faith. Faith is beyond thought and language. It represents a direct relation to God, unmediated by the universal.1 Now, according to my interpretation, having faith means existing in a state of suspense. The idea of the present chapter is to show that the unfolding of the problemas also places the reader in such a state: that the text imitates and recreates the state that it itself describes. Thereby, FB makes possible, I believe, an

|| 1 Ref.: “Troens Paradox er da dette, at den Enkelte er høiere end det Almene, at den Enkelte, for at erindre om en nu sjeldnere dogmatisk Distinction, bestemmer sit Forhold til det Almene ved sit Forhold til det Absolute, ikke sit Forhold til det Absolute ved sit Forhold til det Almene.” (SKS 4, 162 / FT, 70: “The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual – to recall a distinction in dogmatics rather rare these days – determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.”) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-006

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emphatic connection from the reader to Abraham. In other words, when I say that the rhetoric and composition of FB corroborates its own point, I do not mean that it factually proves it, but that it aesthetically emphasizes it. The text facilitates the reader’s imaginative identification with the knight of faith. The structure and argument of the chapter is as follows: The first section argues that the problemas engender suspense by insinuating and indicating that faith actually exists, and exists in a form beyond what is rationally communicable and comprehensible. Thus, faith is framed as a really existing, ineffable possibility in the life of the reader. The idea is that the text functions as a treasure map, and that suspense is engendered in relation to the treasure’s future discovery. The second section explores the consequence that if the text itself creates suspense in the described manner, then there exists a symmetry of suspense in the text, a harmony between form and content. The third section goes on to argue for the presence of an additional aesthetic effect in the text by virtue of the same mechanism that creates suspense: the portrayal of Abraham as aesthetically fantastic.

1 Suspense in theory At first glance, I believe my idea that the problemas are written so as to induce suspense can appear problematic. Suspense is a temporal relation, a state of imminence. The problemas are, however, theoretical pieces. They chart and explore the knight of faith’s relationship to the ethical from three different angles: teleological suspension, absolute duty, and Abraham’s act of not speaking.2 The problemas do not report a series of temporal events like a narrative. Hence, the question becomes: How does time figure in them so as to create suspense? How is the reader placed in a position wherein s/he relates to something that is to come? The answer to this has to do with an aspect that I discussed earlier: the fact that none of the problemas reach a settled conclusion; instead of concluding, all three problemas leave the reader hanging in regard to their respective topics: Either there is a teleological suspension of the ethical / an absolute duty towards God / an absolute relation to the absolute, or else Abraham is lost, and there is no such thing as faith.3

|| 2 SKS 4, 148; 160; 172 / FT, 54; 68; 82. 3 SKS 4, 159: 171; 207 / FT, 66–67; 81; 120. Westphal has noted further structural similarities in the composition of the problemas: “Hegel is mentioned by name at the beginning of each of these

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In my earlier discussion, I argued that the reason they end inconclusively is that it is impossible to conclude anything definitively when it comes to the presence of faith in an individual. Faith, if it is there, is there in the form of a break away from the universal, a break from what can manifest itself in an interhuman mode, that is, ethically, linguistically, rationally. Consequently, faith can only be comprehended as something that cannot be comprehended. If it is there, it is there as a secret, as something that perennially defies disclosure. It is there as a “shudder of thought”, as the possibility that there actually exists something beyond what one can relate to communally that guides Abraham, a hidden dimension (ref., the characterization of faith as responsiveness to something beyond the universal as first elaborated in Chapter 2, second section). The idea I am going to pursue in this section is that the inconclusive endings are not only an expression of the impossibility of saying anything definite about the presence of faith, but that the act of not-saying, of leaving the issue open, also fulfills a more positive function: It creates suspense. Let me explain: When the problemas end on an indecisive note regarding whether Abraham is a knight of faith or not, they performatively manifest the main idea of their own theoretical treatment of faith, namely, that faith is beyond reason. As something beyond reason, faith cannot be made into a well-defined object of rational discourse. Within such discourse, it can only be intimated, that is, one can draw a series of consequences in regard to its presence: If something like faith exists, and it is present in the story of Abraham, then… certain consequences follow. Drawing consequences in this sense is exactly how the problemas operate. They investigate the nature of the paradox that faith represents, that is, what kind of paradoxical qualities faith gives rise to. As Silentio himself notes when introducing the problemas: Det er da nu min Agt af Fortællingen om Abraham i Form af Problemata at uddrage det Dialektiske, der ligger i den, for at see, hvilket uhyre Paradox Troen er, et Paradox, der formaaer at gjøre et Mord til en hellig og gudvelbehagelig Handling, et Paradox, der giver Abraham

|| discussions and the confrontation between Abraham and Hegel intensifies. Each time the structure is the same; the ethical is understood as the universal. If this is the ultimate framework for human existence, then the Hegelian philosophy is correct on this or that central theme, but in such a way that consistency would require Hegel to renounce Abraham as a murderer rather than honor him as the father of the faithful.” (Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, p. 75.)

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Isaak igjen, hvilket ingen Tænkning kan bemægtige sig, fordi Troen netop begynder der, hvor Tænkningen hører op.4

Silentio’s intent, therefore, is never to make faith into something rationally approachable. It is to illuminate the ways in which faith is not rationally approachable. Consequently, when the problemas end by stating that one cannot truly know whether or not Abraham is suspended in relation to the ethical, whether or not he acts out of an absolute duty, whether or not he is justified in his silence, the discourse plays out in a manner that is logically consistent with the idea that it presents. These things cannot be definitively concluded as they make no sense (I argued for the paradoxicality involved in these ideas in Chapter 2, eighth section). However, by ending indecisively, and initially making clear that there is no other viable possibility, the discourses performatively manifest the limit of how far thought may go in understanding faith. By doing this, and this is the crux, the endings place the reader at this limit, and explicitly make it clear that this is what they do. But if there is a limit, then this means that there is something beyond that limit; a limit is a line, real or imagined, that separates two distinct regions or objects. The point is that through the text’s explicit act of manifesting a limit, it implicitly indicates that there is something beyond that limit; a beyond it has defined as faith. Consequently, the text indicates and insinuates, though in no manner establishes, that faith exists.5

|| 4 SKS 4, 147 / FT, 53: “In order to perceive the prodigious paradox of faith, a paradox that makes a murder into a holy and God-pleasing act, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham again, which no thought can grasp, because faith begins precisely where thought stops – in order to perceive this, it is now my intention to draw out in the form of problemata the dialectical aspects implicit in the story of Abraham.” 5 Note that this denial of the possibility of approaching faith rationally, yet affirming its existence beyond the rational, is one of the major strategies through which FB relates to faith. See, for example, the following quote: “Derfor er det, at jeg kan forstaae en tragisk Helt, men ikke forstaae Abraham, om jeg end i en vis afsindig Forstand beundrer ham mere end alle Andre.” (SKS 4, 150–151 / FT, 57: “This is why I can understand a tragic hero but cannot understand Abraham, even though in a certain demented sense I admire him more than all others.” In passing, I would like to point out that “demented” is a somewhat odd translation of “afsindig”, as “demented” has negative connotations not necessarily present in the Danish original.) As regards Silentio’s approach to faith, see also my discussion in Chapter 2, seventh section, where I argue that one of the rhetorical strategies FB uses to bring the reader into contact with the phenomenon of faith is through the testimony of characters that apparently have some kind of privileged relation to the phenomenon, like, for example, Silentio himself.

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Said differently, the absence of a definite answer is in line with the nature of faith as conceptualized, thus the manifest absence of a definite answer corroborates the conceptualization by rhetorically enacting the point. Furthermore, if the conceptualization is corroborated, this indicates that there is something to it. It indicates, therefore, that there truly is something like faith in the described sense. To use an analogy, the endings of the problemas can be seen to be similar in nature to the following joke: Question: “Is faith truly something ineffable?” Answer: “I cannot say.” The response both affirms and denies the thing asked after. As such, the possibility that faith is ineffable is indicated and insinuated, though not established. Added to the above is the fact that there is something anticlimactic to how the problemas end. Even though it is made absolutely clear in how the problemas are introduced that the end product of the discourses is not going to be hard conclusions, they are still unsatisfactory endings. The reason for this is that the problemas are written in the form of rational enquiries into the nature of faith, and how faith manifests itself in the story of Abraham. Each of them begins crucially with a question, with a problem – hence their name.6 The questions then form the center around which the discourses revolve and unfold. The logical response to a question is, of course, to answer. Answers are, however, not given as part of the discourses. Instead, the course of the discussions takes the reader to an explicit act of non-answering, of leaving the issue open because, given how the issue is defined, the answer lies beyond what can be rendered in thought. The reader, therefore, through the unfolding of the discourse, beginning with the question, is set in motion toward an answer, and then is denied this answer with an act indicating that an answer can be found, but only in a region beyond what can be made manifest in thought and reasoned discourse. This, I hold, creates suspense. Faith is made present in terms of a manifest absence. In Chapter 1, first section, I argued that the presence of suspense in narratives is tied to the interplay of the twin temporalities of form and content. I said that suspense is a reaction to the fact that what the narrative really says, and what the story (the content) really is, is suspended up until the narrative has run its course, and final predication has been given. What in effect happens at the end of each of the problemas is a suspension of the “story” that they tell, denying the reader resolution and final predication in regard to the issue discussed. At the same time, as made clear, the discourse indicates that resolution and final predication is possible, albeit not in a textual, discursive form. The existence of faith can only be corroborated through achieving faith, by going beyond the universal in the || 6 SKS 4, 148; 160; 172 / FT, 54; 68; 82.

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necessary sense. Thus, the reader is placed in a state of suspense pending the discovery of whether faith exists or not. The text is like a map pointing towards the location of a treasure, thereby engendering suspense in relation to the event of finding that treasure. Related to this is Shchyttsova’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical strategy, his implicit ideal of the “responsive subject” explored in Chapter 3, first section. According to Shchyttsova, Kierkegaard (therefore Silentio) does not write in a forthright manner. He does not explicitly hand over his ideas to his reader as ready-made objects. Instead, Kierkegaard’s texts serve to facilitate readers’ acquiring their own grasp of the matter he discusses. This accurately describes what is going on in the problemas. Through the unfolding of the text the reader is positioned so as to be able to pursue the issue of faith into a region where the text itself cannot go. The reader’s individual response is consequently alpha-omega to the rhetorical strategy of the text.7

2 What does it mean? Having established that the problemas can be said to create suspense in how they unfold, I want to raise the following question: What is the significance of the fact that suspense operates on two separate levels in FB, both in terms of the nature of faith and how faith is spoken about? Answer: The significance of suspense’s twofold presence in FB is that it gives the work an elegant overall coherence. In Chapter 2, third section, I quoted Evans to the effect that the structure of FB does not lend itself to any simple, coherent interpretation. The quote was as follows: “It is as much poetry as philosophy, and any attempt to summarize its contents must inevitably falsify the character of the work as a whole.”8 Evans’ point is that FB’s composition is such that it pulls in several different directions at once, and therefore any attempt to simplify and concretize its message will inevitably fail since it is part of its message to pull in different directions at the same

|| 7 This mirrors what Silentio says about the spiritual in the opening of the chapter “Foreløbig Expectoration”, where he makes the point that regarding spiritual matters, you cannot be handed truths as ready-made objects, but you have to work for them yourself (SKS 4, 123 / FT, 27). 8 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, p. 61. Lippitt has essentially underscored the same point as Evans, describing FB as a “real can of worms” (John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, p. 2).

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time. In my earlier discussion, I approached this phenomenon by pointing out that FB is composed of two mutually distinct orders of discourse. Though I have not drawn attention to it, in my earlier discussion I made an implicit case against Evans’ point by showing how the divided nature of FB’s composition can be unified in terms of the concept of an “aesthetic suggestion”. By placing its theory of faith besides the story of Abraham as two parallel discourses, the text structurally / aesthetically suggests that Abraham is a knight of faith, even though the text explicitly does not make this claim. My point is that from my perspective one can see that there is coherence to FB’s incoherence. The work’s divided and disunified nature can be rationalized from the point of view that this nature gives rise to a certain aesthetic impression in the reader. True, the work cannot be summarized in a concrete proposition. It does not argue for a theoretical truth. It can, however, be seen to be united in terms of facilitating the reader’s imaginative connection to Abraham and to faith. Thus, FB may not have a propositional core, yet it does have an aesthetic one; its disparate elements come together in an aesthetic effect. I believe the argument of the prior section strengthens this point. In Chapter 2, third section, I argued that the open endings of the problemas showed how the composition of FB diverges into two separate and parallel discourses: narrative and theoretical commentary, poetry and philosophy. The argument of the prior section goes one step further and shows that not only do the open endings, in effect, give rise to an aesthetic suggestion, they also instill an aesthetic affect in the reader: suspense. This is an aesthetic affect that, as I have shown in Chapter 3, is essential to the concept of faith in FB. Moreover, it is an aesthetic affect, as I have shown in Chapter 1, that is intimately bound to the phenomenon of narrativity. Suspense as an aesthetic effect, therefore, attunes the reader to what is aesthetically suggested.9 It operates almost like background music in a movie scene, subliminally underscoring the emotional nerve of the action by mirroring it on another level, simultaneous with the main event, in elegant counterpoint.

|| 9 I underscore the word “attune” because after the foreword that opens FB the next section is precisely entitled “Attunement”, that is, “Stemning”. This section is the one that tells a fragmented story of a nameless man that relates to the story of Abraham in the form of four retellings, all centering upon what did not happen. I argued in Chapter 2, seventh section, that this was done in order to emphasize why what actually happened is so incomprehensible. The retellings, therefore, attune the reader to the absurdity of the story of Abraham if approached as an exemplary tale of faith. It is telling, I believe, that we find the issue of attunement repeated at the center of what FB is all about. The opening section attunes the reader to the fact s/he is going to be attuned.

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Put differently, the aesthetic suggestion makes the unspoken insinuation that Abraham truly is a knight of faith, that the preposterous theory that FB espouses, truly is the case. As explained, what lends credence to the suggestion is that the unspoken quality of the insinuation is in line with the theory of FB. If the theory is correct then stating that theory is contradictory, paradoxical. Therefore, FB makes this plain, and ultimately, when it discusses whether or not Abraham truly is a knight of faith, it leaves the question hanging, insinuating an answer, but never attempting to say something it knows makes no sense to say. However, not only is the insinuation in line with the theory proposed, it is delivered in a manner that creates an aesthetic effect that mirrors the theoretical description given. If the theory is correct, then, as explained, suspense is a principal feature of what it means to have faith, and this theory is delivered in a manner that creates suspense in the reader. There is, therefore, a symmetry of suspense between what is being suggested, and how it is suggested. In other words, how the theory is said corroborates what it says. Suspense, therefore, can be said to bring the disparate elements of FB together into coherence. Of course, this is a coherence that comes with a price. It makes faith out to be irrational, incomprehensible, and ineffable, not truly a philosophical topic, not even an intelligible topic. Faith is the domain of the singular individual proper. Faith can only come to a person in perfect isolation. It is a sui generis type of experience. It holds a level of meaning unique unto itself; a level of meaning only accessible through the individual’s own unicity. Faith is thing between the individual and God. It is not intersubjective, not interhuman. There is nothing to be said about it, other than indirectly, aesthetically. The only one who can speak about it, is one who speaks about its silence – Johannes de Silentio. However, if one accepts the cost of my interpretation, I believe that it demonstrates an elegance in how it interprets FB. It brings form and content into alignment. Moreover, by making this kind of alignment and coherence possible, I believe the argument proposed in this chapter corroborates the argument from Chapter 3 about suspense as a principal component of faith. Consider the argument from design: in a basic formulation, it states that the various forces of nature are simply too well-balanced and adapted towards each other for there not to be some kind of purposeful design to nature as a whole. Now, I am not taking up a position for or against this argument, but making the same basic observation in regard to my interpretation of FB: the fact that suspense can be shown to be present both in the form and in the content of the text simply makes too much sense for there not be something to the reading. The reading makes the two sides of FB’s textual nature add up into a single whole.

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3 Considering the fantastic As I have been centrally concerned with the aesthetic effect made by the problemas in this chapter, I would like, for order’s sake, briefly to explore an additional side to their aesthetic nature, namely, that suspense is not the only aesthetic effect that the open endings create. They also create an image of Abraham as something fantastic. Consider, yet again, the nature of the aesthetical suggestion: It is an unspoken insinuation in regard to the plot of the story of Abraham. The insinuation is that Abraham truly is a knight of faith, and that he acts on the behest of something beyond what is rationally conceivable, God. This makes Abraham out to be something fantastic, and I mean this in the sense of the “fantastic” as an aesthetical category. To see this, consider Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the “fantastic” in his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre: “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”10 According to Todorov, the fantastic is a border category between the real (that which is) and the imaginary (that which is not).11 Now, my point is not that Abraham in any way defies the laws of nature, but that what the aesthetical suggestion does is to make Abraham into a “hesitation” between the real, or the reasonable (he is mad, a murderer), and the imaginary, or the unreasonable (he is a knight of faith). The problemas leave the issue open, and by leaving it open, as explained, they suggest that Abraham is a knight of faith. They suggest it; they do not prove, nor actively claim that he is, and this suggestion makes Abraham into a borderline figure, into a “hesitation”, a figure that could be a knight of faith, and the reader is left at the edge of this possibility. Now, simultaneous with making Abraham into something fantastic, the text, as argued, also creates suspense. It does this precisely in terms of the same possibility, that is, that Abraham actually is a knight of faith. The fantastic and suspense offer two different perspectives upon this possibility. The fantastic sees the possibility as part of the narrative figure of Abraham, and is related to the narrative possibility that he actually is a knight of faith. Suspense, on the other hand, is related to an actual, non-narrative possibility: that the state that the narrative possibly describes is a true rendition of faith, that faith actually is a break from the universal, and, as such, something the reader might experience.

|| 10 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 25. 11 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 167.

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The sum aesthetical impact of the problemas, therefore, is threefold: they create an aesthetical suggestion and supplement and accompany this with a feeling of suspense that attunes the reader to what is suggested, at the same time as the suggestion equally strikes the reader as something fantastic. The text, in other words, intimates something utterly fantastic.

Conclusion The main aim of this chapter has been to argue that suspense is a structural feature of how the problemas are composed: the problemas place the reader in a state of suspense. The importance of this is that, if so, then the reader, through the experience of reading FB, is placed on the same wavelength as the existential state intimated by the text: Abraham’s state of divine suspense. Through what I call a symmetry of suspense the reader becomes attuned to the suggested reality of Abraham’s situation through the very same text that makes this suggestion. The form and content of FB have come together in the phenomenon of suspense. The chapter has additionally argued that the same mechanism that creates suspense also makes Abraham out to be aesthetically fantastic. The consequence of this argument for the study at large is that it shows there to exist an aesthetical coherence to FB.

Conclusion As a way of concluding this study, let me draw an alternate route of connections through my argumentative complex. One can approach my study in terms of four central concepts that together define my take on FB’s concept of faith and its relation to suspense: imminence, apartness, pure passion, and symmetry of suspense. Imminence: In Chapter 1, I defined suspense in terms of imminence. Imminence is a temporal relation towards something that is to come. My idea, or conjecture, is that suspense arises in situations that are temporally openended, and where something is imminent. Uncertainty is not needed for suspense. What is needed is that the moment is essentially unconsummated, and explicitly in the process of becoming so; that is, the moment is defined in relation to an object that is not yet there, yet is present as an object that is not yet there. Apartness: I introduced the concept of apartness in Chapter 2, second section. It refers to the fact that the knight of faith is someone essentially set apart from society and other people. As I showed through my discussion of the difference between the knight of faith and the tragic hero, the knight of faith is defined by his/her responsiveness to something beyond the ethical, beyond the universal. The knight of faith does not fit the social mold. S/he is tuned into a different frequency than the rest of us in orienting in the world. Pure passion: Pure passion is intimately connected to the concept of apartness. It is one of the ways in which apartness will systematically manifest itself in a knight of faith. In Chapter 2, sixth section, I argued that a knight of faith will exhibit deviant emotional responses in regard to events that affect the object of his/her passion. S/he will not be negatively affected by adverse circumstances. Even more extreme, s/he will, like Abraham, be able to sacrifice the object of his/her love, and have the sacrifice cancelled at the last minute, without batting an eye. The knight of faith is able to do this, because s/he loves by virtue of faith; his/her relation to God mediates his/her relation to the objects of affection. Given this, pure passion constitutes a recognizable form of behavior that can inform a third-personal concept of faith; through it one can give a partial, narrative definition. Pure passion is like a symptom associated with a certain disease, though not exclusively. The deviant emotional responses can also possibly be grounded in some sort of psychopathological state, yet they have a strong correlation with faith (ref., the fact that the three stories about the three different knights of faith exhibit exactly the same property), and can therefore be said to inform a concept of it.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-007

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In Chapter 3 I elaborated further upon the nature of pure passion. I argued that the reason that the knight of faith is capable of exhibiting this is that, by definition, s/he belongs to a radically openended narrative. The knight of faith’s direct relation to God enables him/her to live his/her life in relation to a divine, temporal horizon. In short, the knight of faith’s attachment to the objects of affection is grounded in this horizon of divine possibilities, not in the finite possibilities of the real world. This is one concrete way in which the knight of faith orients him/herself according to a different frequency than the rest of us. Moreover, the fact that the knight of faith lives in relation to a horizon of divine possibilities has the added effect that s/he lives in suspense because of the radically openended character of everything that happens to him/her. An omnipotent and incomprehensible God is always there, lurking in the future. Anything can happen. I believe the situation can, on one level, be compared to that described in Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot.1 The point of this play is not whether Godot actually comes, or not, but the fact that the character lives in the event of his coming, and that this event in itself is on the level of the real for the characters. Consequently, there is a clear sense in which the three concepts of imminence, apartness, and pure passion come together in the phenomenon of suspense as it manifests itself in the knight of faith. The knight of faith’s apartness partly takes the form of pure passion, which is made possible by his/her relation to God as a source of infinite possibilities, which again gives rise to suspense, defined as imminence. Symmetry of suspense: This concept refers to the fact that suspense operates on two levels in FB: theoretically and rhetorically. The theoretical sense has already been outlined. In Chapter 4, I showed that the theory is mirrored in how the text of the problemas unfolds. The problemas create suspense by placing the reader on the path to faith’s discovery, and then break off the search by performatively establishing that faith only exists in a form beyond that of the discursive. The twofold presence of suspense creates a symmetry between form and content in the text. The text replicates on its own level of form what it says about faith; suspense of form therefore meets suspense of content. Consequently, I believe suspense can be said to offer a coherent perspective upon FB as a text (ref., Evans’ remark that its composition pulls in different directions); what FB says and how it says it are aligned. Faith and the religious, as described in FB, are paradoxical, ineffable and incomprehensible. What my argument has shown is that even if we accept this, and || 1 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

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do not opt for the argument from the unreliable narrator, faith and the religious are not beyond rational, discursive treatment. True, one cannot theoretically understand what faith is in its essence, as it has to be experienced firsthand; one can, on the other hand, form a partial narrative understanding of it: a two-dimensional sketch of a three dimensional phenomenon. Having thus recapitulated the main lines of my argument and ideas, I want briefly to explore a consequence of what I argue in relation to faith: Can the concept of faith, so artfully elaborated in FB, be said to be fideistic? By “fideistic” I mean that the concept of faith is based on a non-rational conviction. Consider two definitions: first, that of Olli-Pekka Vainio: “In philosophy, fideism usually means a mode of thought or teaching according to which reason is more-or-less irrelevant to (religious) belief, or even that faith is strengthened, not undermined, if one judges that reason is unable to give it support”;2 second, Alvin Plantinga, in a like-minded manner, defines fideism as an “exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth.”3 As I have argued, it is immediately clear that the concept of faith in FB has striking similarities with the fideistic perspective. In FB, faith represents a break with reason. It represents a level of meaning beyond that of the ethico-universal. Vainio, in his work, notes this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought, and describes Kierkegaard (primarily in relation to his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, but the point has wider application) as a “radical fideist”.4 However, at least when it comes to FB, there is one important difference between the fideistic position, as defined above, and Silentio’s: the nature of the break with reason. Both Vainio’s and Plantinga’s definitions of the fideistic position are couched in epistemic terms. Vainio speaks about it as a “belief”, Plantinga points out that the fideist relates to a “religious truth”. Thus fideistic faith, as they define it, is a form of knowledge, even if it is not knowledge proper – a form of knowledge that is explicitly and self-consciously unreasonable. To bring in a term I used earlier in my discussion of Lippitt, fideism operates implicitly with a notion of “faithreason”: it reasons in terms of unreasonable mechanisms by making a conscious move beyond what reason can guarantee. Faith in FB, as I argued, is something very different from this. It breaks more categorically with reason. It is not another type of reason, as this would make it,

|| 2 Olli-Pekka Vainio, Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities, p. 2. 3 Alvin Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God", p. 87. 4 Olli-Pekka Vainio, Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities, p. 12.

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per the theory of FB, into something essentially intersubjective and shared. No, faith is something reason absolutely is not, and faith cannot be understood from within reason. Fideism, on the other hand, can be understood as a sort of systematic unreason. Fideism is reasonable in that it is systematic, and that it is aware that it breaks with reason. It is a reasonable unreasonableness. Faith, in FB, is adherence to a higher level of meaning, one that cannot manifest itself in, or as, reason. Thus, whether one would one want to classify the concept of faith as “fideistic”, or not, is a question of how one defines one’s terms, but either way it has to be made clear that FB, at least in my model, is not fideistic in a classical sense. It is more radical. Lastly, I would like to say something about the philosophical relevance of what I have presented in relation to faith. I believe that what I have argued for here in relation to FB is not indisputably of philosophical relevance, since it does not amount to a defendable theoretical position. Rather, and quite to the contrary, my principal thesis finds FB’s point and purpose in producing a certain complex aesthetical suggestion in order to create a special aesthetical effect in its reader. Then again, philosophy is interested in the nature of reality on its many levels (ontological, ethical, aesthetical), and one way to relate to FB’s concept of faith is to see it as a sort of challenge to our philosophical preconception that reality is conformable to a presentation in the form of a rational theory. What the concept of faith in FB seems to suggest is that reality is not. By portraying faith, and communicating its nature in the complex aesthetical sense that it does, FB leaves one with the image of a higher-level reality that lies beyond what we can grasp with reason. Abraham, as I argued in Chapter 4, is aesthetically fantastic. FB gives the impression that the ultimate nature of reality, the absolute, God, is something we have to face stripped of our reason and, furthermore, stripped of that communality to which reason belongs. In other words, FB gives the impression that the ultimate nature of reality is something one has to face in absolute isolation. One has to face the ultimate nature of reality in terms of one’s own reality as a uniquely existing individual. God can only be faced in radical solitude. In these terms, I, at least, find the thought of the unthinkable to be quite philosophically fascinating. Contrary to what Hegel says, the real is not the rational, and the rational is not the real.5

|| 5 The actual quote, in this translation, runs: “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational” (G. W. F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 20). I have rephrased in order to contextualize, as I believe that the unreasonable nature of God is yet another critique of Hegelianism in FB.

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Abbreviations I use the following abbreviations to refer to Kierkegaard’s key texts: SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 28 vols. (abbreviation: SKS 1–28), København: Gads Forlag, 1997–2013. KW Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. I–XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–1998. EO1 EO2 FT R

Either/Or Part I, KW III. Either/Or Part II, KW IV. Fear and Trembling, KW VI. Repetition, KW VI.

Additionally: FT2

Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin, 2005.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-009

Index Adorno, Theodor 14, 15 Amis, Martin 92 Auerbach, Erich 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 12, 18, 109, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 176, 179, 180, 182, 187 Ballard, Bruce 104 Barnes, Julian 27, 30 Baroni, Raphäel 35 Beckett, Samuel 201 Booth, Wayne C. 48 Brooks, Peter 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 Buber, Martin 94 Carroll, Noël 1, 31, 35, 37 Cervantes, Miguel 55 Chesterton, G. K. 78 Coates, Ruth 156 Conway, Daniel W. 3, 12, 52, 100, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145 Cross, Andrew W. 3, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 115, 177, 178, 181 Cuddon, J. A. 31 Culler, Jonathan 25 Davenport, John J. 3, 12, 16, 18, 60, 63, 104, 117, 147, 150, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176, 178, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188 de Man, Paul 3, 4 Dentith, Simon 154 Derrida, Jacques 2, 16, 17 Dietrichson, Paul 6 Eagleton, Terry 28, 57, 71, 73, 113 Emerson, Caryl 17, 152, 155 Euripides 57, 60 Evans, C. Stephen 3, 48, 49, 52, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 73, 87, 100, 128, 195, 196, 201 Ferguson, Harvie 69 Forster, Michael N. 68 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563504-010

Frye,25, 53, 54 Fryszman, Alex 150, 152, 154, 156 Garff, Joakim 3, 52, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 101, 106, 109, 122, 123, 124, 126, 142, 143 Gellman, Jerome I. 94 Genette, Gerard 25, 30 Gerrig, Richard J. 1, 35, 37, 38 Green, Ronald M. 6, 89, 90, 100, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 119 Habib, M. A. R. 31 Hall, Ronald L. 176, 177, 178, 181 Halldorson, Stephanie S. 54 Hammermeister, Kai 72 Hannay, Alastair 3, 10, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 91, 95, 96, 125 Hartmann, Nicolai 68 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 10, 12, 13, 20, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77, 87, 119, 151, 191, 203 Homer 157 Ibsen, Henrik 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32 Jackson, Frank 49 Jansson, Tove 23 Johansen, Kjell Eyvind 8, 58, 66, 76, 106 Kafka, Franz 50 Kangas, David J. 62 Kant, Immanuel 66, 71, 87, 120 Karatani, Kojin 87 Kemp, Ryan 99 Kosch, Michelle 120 Krishek, Sharon 113, 147, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 Levinas, Emmanuel 135, 136 Lippitt, John 3, 8, 20, 48, 52, 66, 77, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106,

212 | Index

109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 128, 141, 146, 165, 171, 176, 177, 178, 181, 195, 202 Lukács, Georg 157 MacIntyre, Alasdair 103, 104 Malantschuk, Gregor 62 Marino, Gordon D. 104 McCarthy, Vincent A. 100, 101, 105, 119 Milbank, John 16 Mooney, Edward F. 94, 147, 178 Morson, Gary Saul 152, 154 Mulhall, Stephen 104 Murakami, Haruki 31, 32, 33, 34 Nagel, Thomas 24 Neubauer, John 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 17

Shchyttsova, Tatiana 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 195 Sloterdijk, Peter 71 Smuts, Aaron 32, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45 Stewart, Jon 12 Surber, Jere O'Neill 68 Szondi, Peter 57 Todorov, Tzvetan 198 Uidhir, Christy Mag 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 45, 46 Vainio, Olli-Pekka 202 Velleman, J. David 25 Vonnegut, Kurt 28, 30

Pattison, George 72, 109, 154, 156 Perkins, Robert L. 83 Plantinga, Alvin 202 Propp, Vladimir 26, 33 Proust, Marcel 4

Walker, Jeremy 82 Walther, Bo Kampmann 90, 127 Walton, Kendall L. 1, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37 Westphal, Merold 3, 6, 12, 13, 57, 66, 67, 72, 75, 98, 119, 147, 183, 185, 186, 191 Williams, Robert R. 58, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 75 Wood, Adam 56 Woolf, Virginia 42, 43

Quinn, Philip L. 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66

Yanal, Robert 1, 26, 27, 28, 32, 35, 37, 38, 44

Rich, Nathaniel 31, 32, 34 Rudd, Anthony 18, 103, 104

Žižek, Slavoj 87