Fear And Trembling

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1843

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-4

Part 5-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Absurdity of Faith

The central thesis of Fear and Trembling is that faith is a paradox that requires one to embrace the absurd. The absurd is beyond human comprehension and often requires one to believe in two parts of a paradox simultaneously. It is absurd, for instance, that Abraham should expect to father a great nation by sacrificing his son, and yet that is exactly what he expects. It is absurd to believe a man can turn water into wine, but it is more absurd to expect that wine could also be turned back into water (78). And yet acceptance of the absurd, that what has been lost can be regained, is necessary for faith. That is why the movement of faith happens after the movement of infinite resignation. One must recognize “the impossibility” and embrace it; the knight of faith “believes the absurd” with the full passion of his heart (95). This means that faith cannot be faked, as no one can pretend to believe in the impossible.

Nothing about faith can be understood to an outsider, as the experience is subjective and depends on the pain and struggle of the faithful. That struggle is another theme, but even the struggle leads to the absurd. The man who can make the movement of faith is one who has devoted himself to finding passion after living with the pain of loss. In a sense, he is forced to embrace absurdity because of his struggle; he “has only one movement more to make, that is, the movement of the absurd” (184).

So, where does one find faith? Kierkegaard describes the process of acquiring faith, but he cannot convince anyone to have faith, for he cannot become the knight of faith on his own. In fact, he admits to never having “found such a person” who is a knight of faith (80). This is another form of the paradox of the absurd. The knight of faith must exist for anyone to have faith, and yet it cannot be proven that anyone has faith. Religion is predicated on faith, so it follows that people must have faith, albeit faith that no one can understand or comprehend. As Kierkegaard notes, “we reach the paradox”: either one is “able to stand in absolute relation to the absolute […] or Abraham is lost” (203).

The Subjective Nature of Faith

To Kierkegaard, faith is a paradox that proves the limits of the Hegelian “System,” which insists that objective truth can be reached. In Hegelian thought, an argument can be analyzed through a mediation with its opposite. After such mediation, a universal truth can be arrived at. Thus, Hegelian thought is teleological, and one can end at a point of objective truth, which will potentially create a utopia in which the individual is reconciled with the universal. Hegelianism was the dominant thought pattern in Kierkegaard’s time, and two of its largest offshoots (Marxism and Fascism) would come to dominate the late 19th and early 20th centuries politically. But Hegel himself did not espouse a political viewpoint; rather, he simply argued that humans move forward, building on earlier generations and reaching something higher than mere existence.

Kierkegaard agrees with Hegel that humans do move forward to a higher plain and that everyone has the potential to reach it, but he is not optimistic that everyone will get there. “Perhaps many in every generation” will not even be able to reach faith, “the highest passion in a man,” he writes (219). Kierkegaard does not see faith as an ending. Faith is the highest human form, and yet the knight of faith will never be content in faith, for faith does not lead to an endpoint. Instead, it is a constant struggle. Even a person who reaches faith “is kept sleepless” because he “is constantly tried” (146). The end is no end at all—one must continue to find faith all the time. Indeed, even after making the movement of faith, the knight of faith “made every instant the next movement, the movement of faith by virtue of the absurd” (213). That is, faith is constantly regained through the subjective experience of the faithful.

Faith is subjective too, as it is an individual and personal relationship with God. It cannot be understood. Speech “translates” a person into “the universal,” but there is no way for speech to help another understand faith (204). Kierkegaard cannot understand Abraham, as much as he tries to, because Abraham’s movement of faith is necessarily different from another person’s. Even two people who have made the movement of faith cannot help each other understand faith, as “the one knight of faith can render no aid to the other” (135). Faith can only be won through struggle and the embrace of the absurd. Unlike in Hegelian thought, one cannot build upon the work of others and simply start with faith, for faith is subjective.

The Centrality of Pain and the Individual in Faith

Kierkegaard argues that there are three principal movements that lead to faith. In the first, one exists in the finite, grounded in aesthetics and ethics, the aspects of life that contribute to the universal. In the second, one experiences great loss and the pain that accompanies it before resigning themselves to that loss. This is called the movement of infinite resignation (75). From there, a person can choose to embrace the absurd and make the movement of faith through which they will get back what they have lost (78). The movement of faith is the most important of these steps to Kierkegaard, but one cannot make it unless there has been pain and struggle. Faith itself is a painful process, not a joyous one. But that painful struggle, Kierkegaard argues, is the key to finding individual “existence,” and no longer being a slave to the finite (94). But, since “to exist as the individual is the most terrible thing of all,” one might wonder what the point of it is (141).

Kierkegaard noted the limitations of the Hegelian “System.” The System implies absolute knowledge and an endpoint for humans in the universal. Because faith exists beyond the universal, it suggests a higher plane for humans to live in and offers freedom outside the universal. Though the act of finding faith is painful, it leads to something better. When a person reaches faith, they have a personal relationship with God, one in which they are “God’s intimate acquaintance” (146). This experience isolates them from the rest of the world but allows them to understand themselves and the spiritual as well as the universal. Whereas a tragic hero struggles and makes the movement of infinite resignation, they can only address God “in the third person” (146). The knight of faith, however, is “kept in constant tension” by the temptation to return to the ethical, while the tragic hero “finds repose in the universal” (148). The knight of faith has a spiritual freedom and clarity, a “passionate concentration” and “energetic consciousness” that no slave to the finite or even tragic hero will possess (148). The first step requires a great deal of pain, and that pain continues in perpetuity after the next movement, but the freedom of the mind and soul seems a worthy prize. If it were easy and required no pain, “we should have plenty of heroes in our age” since our age does “the highest things by leaping over the intermediate steps” (169). But the faithful “trembles with fear” always, knowing the pain their faith requires (119). No steps, regardless of how painful, can be skipped to find faith.