Philosophy of Religion

Fear and Trembling

♡+

Søren Kierkegaard

1843

Written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio and published on the same day as Repetition, Fear and Trembling meditates on the story of Abraham and Isaac to illuminate what Kierkegaard calls the teleological suspension of the ethical — the terrifying possibility that God might demand of an individual something that transgresses every ethical norm. Abraham cannot explain himself to anyone; he cannot speak his faith into the language of the universal. He acts from absolute relation to the absolute — and this is precisely what makes him, for Kierkegaard, the father of faith rather than a murderer. The book asks whether such faith is still possible in the modern world, and whether any of us is capable of it.