Fear And Trembling

The “Preliminary Expectoration” offers the main thrust of Kierkegaard’s argument. It is structured similarly to the prelude in that it engages with a series of scenarios that are briefly explored and then used to prove that there are things that cannot be understood or known. This section of the text plays the role of the thesis in the dialectic; in the sections that follow, he engages with the antitheses, the negatives that challenge his argument. His argument is complicated, as it deals with faith, which he repeatedly says is unknowable. As Kierkegaard writes, faith cannot be understood except by its absence or the absurd. He provides a metaphor that a person who learns “the motions of swimming” is not swimming until “thrown into the water” (79). Still, even though he has yet to get his feet wet, he attempts to describe those motions.

The crux of his argument is that there are three movements in life, each one a step beyond the previous one. First, there is the finite or the aesthetic. This is the movement of life that deals with life as experienced. It is the realm of the universal and the ethical. If one stops at the aesthetic, one will not attain insight or higher knowledge. A person stuck in the finite might be like the person who hears an oration on Abraham and decides to kill his son. A person left in the aesthetic can only reflect upon themself and society, for they can only love God without having faith or knowing God. Kierkegaard claims that “he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God” (77).

The second movement is the “movement of infinite resignation,” and it goes beyond the aesthetic (75). Through that movement, they resign themselves to a great loss. They experience the loss of what they love and suffer at the loss before eventually learning to live with it. A tragic hero is one who can make this move and become the knight of infinite resignation (65). He can sacrifice something he loves for the betterment of the world and thus go beyond the aesthetic. Poets write of their deeds, and so it is easy for Kierkegaard to “think” himself “into the hero,” but understanding Abraham’s actions requires one more step (71).

The third movement is the “movement of faith” (78). The knight of faith sacrifices or is willing to sacrifice something he loves but gets it back through the absurd, as it is literally impossible to get something back that has been lost. Through faith, the knight of faith gets what he wants even though it is a paradox. For Abraham, the paradox is that he would kill Isaac but does not lose Isaac. For another knight of faith, it might be a separate process altogether. The knight of faith, however, will never reveal what that process was. Kierkegaard admits he has “not found any reliable example of the knight of faith” in part because the knight of faith blends into society but lives a deep inner life (80). He is able to “take delight in everything” and with “the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things” (81). This knight of faith has made two movements past the aesthetic and has a personal relationship with God that is possible only through the struggle of losing something and the embrace of the absurd.

Kierkegaard is often interpreted as describing a “leap of faith,” but he does not use this term. Instead, authors writing about Kierkegaard added the idea into his work. A leap implies something that does not require struggle as much as courage and a willingness to embrace the absurd. Kierkegaard argues, rather, that one needs to struggle to embrace the absurd and that, by embracing it, one can choose to make a controlled movement of faith rather than a blind leap.

To make his point simpler, Kierkegaard employs an extended metaphor of a man who cannot marry the princess he loves. Unlike the man in the prelude who could not understand Abraham’s actions, Kierkegaard can make sense of the story to “illustrate” his argument’s “relation to reality” (85). The man has three options: he can scream in pain, resign himself to the pain, or embrace the absurd and know that his love will be returned to him. Kierkegaard implies that the third option is not understandable to him, although it is the best path available to the man. Since every man can “make the movement of infinite resignation,” it would be “cowardly” to talk oneself into believing they can make the movement (103). But the movement of faith is “a question between him and the Eternal Being,” so no man has a right to imply that “faith is something lowly” (103). Kierkegaard is frustrated with the effort in his time to “go beyond faith” because it saps one of the need for a personal connection with God, thus draining life of its joys and pleasures. He laments people’s need to go beyond faith because, by doing so, “with its miracle of turning water into wine, it goes further, it turns wine into water” (78). Faith requires the absurdity of believing one can turn water into wine without needing to understand how or why; taking away that absurdity and paradox robs life of purpose.

Kierkegaard’s larger point is that there is no absolute or definite truth. He notes that most people hear of Abraham and think that he was great because “he loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice to Him the best” (63). However, most do not recognize that “the best” is “an indefinite expression,” one that is completely subjective (63). According to Hegel, an absolute truth could be discovered or learned, but Kierkegaard suggests just the opposite: there are no truths when it comes to religion or faith. Each person must have a personal relationship with the divine, and that relationship can only be gained through struggle, the fear and trembling each of us must experience. Kierkegaard notes the irony: “It is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel” while understanding “Abraham is a trifle” (70). In fact, it is much the opposite. Hegel is (relatively) easy to grasp, while Abraham is impossible.