Ep. 333: Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” on Faith (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point started doing Philosophy for living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 333 is something like, can violations of ethical principles be justified by faith? Or maybe just what's the relation between ethics and religion? And we're concluding our lengthy engagement with Soren Kierkegaard by talking about his book Fear and trembling, published in 1843, after his book either or that we spoke about in our three previous episodes. For more information about this book and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer seriously struggling with my faith in this text. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Seth: This is Isaac breathing a sigh of relief and being a little bit pissed off on Mount Moriah.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan draining the deep sadness of life and infinite resignation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:55 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, not Much Fear or Trembling in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Mark: I think we had finished the first two stages, the aesthetic stage and the ethical stage, and we said, hey, let's get back to it. And rather than do a new text, this one chronologically made a lot of sense. And supposedly we read about it before, but in our old episode that was mostly on the Sickness unto Death, we just touched on this. And I have a feeling that I probably wrote this book off as being not philosophical enough. And when starting to read it this time, I felt much the same way that we could kind of jump past the first whole first half of the book.

But then on more consideration, I felt like, yes, he this is a very creative literary exercise. It's all about the Abraham story that we'll get into. And he sort of tells it in a bunch of different ways, and he's trying to really just make us think hard about this and really open our hearts to what he's going to have to say. So I decided I would try to take it that way and got quite a bit more out of it. But we're only talking about still about the first half of the book, this time through the first of the three problems which show up in the latter part of the book.

So maybe we'll have another episode on this and we still won't be done with the Kierkegaard. Or maybe we let's just see how things go today. How'd you guys feel?

2:11 Seth: Well, for my part, I was enthusiastic about kind of tackling this more, and I just didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked. So I'm happy that we're structured the way we are, but I also will be interested to see where the conversation takes us.

2:27 Dylan: So I find myself in reading it again. I guess it's the second or third time I've read at least a big chunk of Fear and Trembling. I never read some of the end of it, and I had two big thoughts. And if I think about your question about engaging with faith and stuff, and Kierkegaard's use of the Abraham story, I come away thinking that it is a good choice for him. I think that especially as a vehicle for interpretation of what faith would mean. And I find myself appalled at taking it to its conclusion about the deep interiority that would be completely inaccessible.

And I suppose that's part of Kierkegaard's deal, You know, that the infinite is accessible through the One. And on a rereading his characterization of the emphasis of the story on infinite Abraham and how he has this. It's a appalling story. How can we. We have to come to grips with it. You know that Abraham loves his son, yet he's going to obey God, and he can't even hardly. He can't even speak of it and sacrifice his son. And Kierkegaard takes this process of trying to vividly put us there. And I found myself just thinking about Isaac. What does Isaac do after this?

Abraham drags him up the mountain, bound up. He is unquestionably going to slit his throat and sacrifice him. And because his interior faith tells him to obey God. And then Kierkegaard goes around talking about how, well, basically Isaac's going to understand this. He's going to be like, oh, I'm so glad you know, So I believe in your faith. And I find myself just. It just infuriates me. My heart starts racing. And I imagine being in that situation. I imagine walking up to Abraham with Isaac tied up on the mountain, and I would tackle and kill Abraham.

That's what I would do.

4:39 Mark: All right. Dylan let himself be affected by this story and take it seriously. Wes, did you let Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard's avatar for this book, into your heart?

4:50 Wes: I did not. I didn't take the stories personally, and therefore it's much less exciting to me. So I think in a way, the question is, how do you know whether you're a person of the faith or whether you're just insane?

5:03 Dylan: Yes.

5:03 Wes: How do you know if you're Abraham and maybe you're Charles Manson? And typically, when you're making a decision about what to do, it's governed by some norm. Right. For Kierkegaard this is the universal. And there's some public criteria for whether or not you're insane, whether or not this is actually good, whether or not this is actually right. There are dangers to that. Conformity. Conformism. There are lots of things that people do according to what seems to be the universal, which are racist or nationalist, or people think they're in the name of the good.

Right. So it's not a way out, but it's certainly. There's more reassurance than that, than waking up one day and saying, oh, well, God, talk to me. And so I have to go kill my son. And. And of course, you're asking yourself, you know, you may not be asking this to yourself, but if you're still a little bit sane, you're saying to yourself, did God really talk to me, or should I go see a doctor, Should I go see a psychiatrist or whatever they had back then, or go see my rabbi, or is God actually talking to me? And so maybe the question of faith is just as terrifying as that, as Kierkegaard's making it out to be.

We can't take any solace in either objective truth or in shared normativity, let's say, with other people. It's something that we know purely personally, and therefore we have no good criterion for distinguishing it from madness. And yet we have to take the leap anyway. I don't know. We'll find out as we get into this. As far as, like, Kierkegaard, I think I'm done with Kierkegaard forever. He's a beautiful writer. It's very poetic, but syntactically, it's a nightmare, in my opinion. I find it so difficult to read. I don't know if you guys feel the same way, even more than the other readings.

So, my. When I get furious, it's like I feel like Kierkegaard is trying to stab me. Complete fucking disregard for the audience. Even though it's clever and it's poetic and it's beautiful. I don't want to disentangle all of this stuff syntactically. I'm sick of that. It strikes me as self indulgent at a certain point. So, yes, I have very mixed feelings about Kierkegaard.

7:08 Seth: Strikes you that way?

7:10 Wes: Why? He's a young man. He's brilliant. There's absolutely no denying the brilliance, both philosophical and poetic. But at a certain point it wears on you. And maybe we've just done too many of these episodes in a row.

7:22 Mark: Well, I wish I'd had access with either or to an audiobook version because it was so long and I probably would have gotten through the whole thing. There was some method of having my phone read to me that I was able to do with, like, the Second Sex, another similarly super long book that I just. For whatever, maybe the PDF we were using, maybe I forgot, but I wasn't able to get that. So that was, you know, actually reading. But Fear and Trembling, as such a famous book, there was a really nice audio version of it on audible. So I listened to the whole thing straight through.

And then I listened to the part that we talked about again today, a second time. And the second time, I don't know, it was just. It was beautiful to hear it, but I was aggravated because I kept hearing some of the same words over and over again. And, like, if you just tune out for a second, there's these narrative things. Like, at the very beginning, it's like, you know, this is Kierkegaard writing as Johannes de Silentio, who has his own preface saying, pretty much, people today, they think they're religious, but they're just bourgeois and they treat religion too cheaply.

Let's put faith where it belongs, as a difficult achievement. But then immediately after that, he introduces another character. There once was a man who was fascinated by the story of Abraham, and he obsessed about the story of Abraham. So it's a character within a character within a character talking about another character, Abraham, and giving the Abraham story in, like, four different ways, emphasizing different things. Like, was Isaac really okay with it, as Dylan said? Or did Isaac even notice? Like, they give several versions of it. The story in Genesis is very short and doesn't tell you what Isaac thinks about any of this and doesn't give you any hint of Abraham's inner state, which I guess is why this could be so evocative, because it's just.

Yep. He goes up the mountain, he pulls out the knife, he's about to slit, and God shows up. Oh, Isaac did speak to his father and said, my father. And he said, here I am, son. And he said, behold the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham said, God will provide himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. So the two of them walked on together. This is the extent of Isaac's speaking up during this. Apparently they walked for three days, didn't talk about anything. Where are we going, dad? You know, there's no account of that.

9:26 Wes: So this is. And then he said, at the critical moment, he said, hey, look, Isaac, look at that bunny over there.

9:32 Seth: And then he chloroformed him.

9:34 Wes: Chloroformed them, Took them to the ground.

9:37 Mark: We could provide our several other versions of this to fill in the details.

9:42 Wes: We should make our own version.

9:44 Seth: Yeah, well, so I'm going to struggle with this conversation only because I went and I looked at a few different ways that, like rabbinic and Jewish interpret and Jewish philosophers and so forth interpret it. And it's not worth going into some of the gyrations and machinations that they. They put themselves through. But one thing that did hear from it, that I would just caution, and it's something that I don't know how to tease out of the Kierkegaard text, is there's the notion, I think he touches on this at one point, that Abraham is unique and special in a certain way with respect to his relationship to God.

And more importantly, or not more importantly, but also he's of a generation that had a more direct relationship with God. And I mentioned this on the original podcast we did with Daniel that I listened to earlier this week. What's the other text I forgot? We were Sickness unto Death. Sickness unto death? Yeah. You know, that there's the whole thing, like, you know, once Moses gets the book, that's it as far as the personal relationship with God thing. So the idea that Kierkegaard would use the Abrahamic story to try to pose a dilemma, let's call it, for his contemporary audience, there's one reading where you can just kind of discard in the same way that you might do for a Christian tradition that, you know, imitatio dei, where you're supposed to imitate Christ, which was a very medieval.

You know, there were a lot of variations on that theme in medieval Christianity. But, you know, by the time Kierkegaard's writing, that idea of the totally monastic self sacrificing, like, you can't be the Lamb of God, there's just no reason to do it. And for that matter, you know, trying to emulate saints who have certain extraordinary events and activities that go on in their life. So that's my primary struggle with this. So then that drops me into a hermeneutic or a style of reading where I'm just taking it for its aesthetic value, but also for trying to look at the argumentation and think about it in terms of how is he leveraging the story to talk more generally about the religious versus the ethical, not get too caught up in being so fixated on Abraham and Isaac because it will aggravate you.

Yeah, Dylan, when you said you said, I'm horrified. What did you say? He said, I'm appalled. At first I thought you were talking about. You were appalled at the Abraham story itself. I realized you were talking about him. Or maybe you're appalled by both.

12:22 Dylan: I don't know the other. Besides having something of a visceral reaction and trying to take up Kierkegaard's call to take it seriously, I also found myself paying attention to the way in which he's leveraging the universal. You know, and this has been the theme in the readings that we've been doing of him, that he's trying a different tack on or a twist on accessing the universal with the finite or the individual and reaching for the infinite, but through the individual. And he formulates this in terms of a paradox. And this is the paradox of faith and all that stuff.

And I again found myself. And this has been a theme for. In lots of philosophy, but it's been really there in the German idealism. And it's just this, if you're going to try to reach for the infinite or the universal, the lever arm is so big that you can just do such stupid things. If you are reaching to understand the infinite and actualize it as something accessible in your life, the lever is too big. This is related to. It's like the question of whether you're insane or whether you're right. It's so far from being pragmatic and being guided by some principle, but then making decisions, it just leads to horrifying consequences.

And this is where when you get a paradox, you ought to realize there's some big part of it where it's just that you made a wrong turn. Right? Zeno's Paradox is. You know what the answer to Zeno's Paradox is? Besides, you know, learning something about how the next version of math is. It means that you screwed up. Of course, the arrow gets to the

14:11 Wes: tree is that you might be a redneck comedian. Jeff Foxworthy. But also, I'm thinking of, like, combining in with Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil's like, how's that working out for you? You know, if you find yourself about to stab your son because God just talked to you, he just might be insane. You might not be in touch with God. I mean, in a way, some of this is about whether we accept the world that's being described by this text. And the world is one which is sort of parceled off in a significant way from our world, from our real natural world, where we don't think there are miracles and we don't think God talks to anyone.

From the standpoint, from the natur. Naturalistic standpoint. If there was someone like Abraham who thought God told him to kill his son, yet he was just crazy, and there is no further significance to it beyond that. If the stories. To have any meaning, we have to either accept that the world was once very different and there was this point where the divine and the mundane, the ordinary world, kind of rubbed up against each other and produced these very weird results, or we have to interpret it allegorically in the way that Hegel was doing, in the way that Kant was doing, in the way that Kierkegaard, I think, was.

Is kind of lamenting. He's lamenting that magic that happens, the magic friction, when the divine and the mundane really do get to rub up against each other. There's been a kind of a deflationary approach to that, I think, with Kant and Hegel. And. Yes, that's just. Okay. It's an interesting allegory, the Abraham story, let's say what it means. And Kierkegaard thinks that's too safe and too easy and misses something about faith.

15:50 Dylan: I think that's the right interpretation of Kierkegaard. I would. He's smart about this. In talking about other kinds of. Is it infanticide if it's always just any child, any of your children, or does it have to be a baby? It's a baby.

16:11 Wes: So what if it's just Dylan's trying to figure out which crime to charge

16:14 Dylan: him with your grown child. Anyway, so he brings up Agamemnon.

16:20 Wes: Right.

16:20 Dylan: And Greek tragedy. And he has, in the background of that presentation, the basic claim that the Christian version of tragedy embodied in Abraham is greater. It's actually in touch with the divine in a way that the story of Agamemnon is not right.

16:39 Wes: A tragic hero is something different.

16:41 Dylan: Yeah. And I don't mean to be conflating them. I mean, I think he's talking about them making the distinction of the tragic hero versus Abraham.

16:49 Mark: Since you bring it up, just lay out what it is that we can explain why Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, even though, you know, it still involves supernatural stuff, but at least, you know, his society, whatever. The oracle was public, you know, hey, you, please burn your daughter and you'll have a calm sea. And if you don't, you're all going to die in Troy or whatever the exact wording of it was. But just the fact that then the audience and his fellows could all accept that this was a necessary thing. So, yes, it's horrible that he. For him, that he has to do this, but we can all console him and we can say, wow, he put aside his personal affection for the greater good. And we can't say that according to Kierkegaard about Abraham.

17:28 Wes: So it's still in the domain of the ethical.

17:30 Dylan: Exactly.

17:30 Wes: Which is why is it so the tragic hero is still in that domain of the ethical because it's for the greater good. But Abraham is not. Is the point.

17:36 Seth: Okay.

17:37 Wes: Abraham is at no time a tragic hero. Page 57, just in case you're about to challenge me on this.

17:43 Seth: This is one of the branches of taking this away, put a pin in it. And we'll come back to this notion that it's not for the. This is completely on Abraham and not part of a broader context. I'll come back to that.

17:58 Mark: So I was looking at this as some sort of virtue ethics or a critique of virtue ethics, right. When Nietzsche came along and looked at an Aristotelian virtue ethics and said something like, morality is not so simple as just there are these virtues and if you have them, then you're the sage, you're the virtuous person, that they're incommensurate virtues, that there are different ways of being awesome. And the way you should maybe think about that is just think about who you're really impressed by. And so you might get a figure like Mozart come to mind.

If you've ever seen Amadeus or anything about Mozart then like, he's so full of life, he's so talented, but he's also a schmuck. I mean, he's also like, he's a very one sided figure. And Nietzsche was okay with. You could have people that are not, maybe not in the traditional moral sense good, but yet they're great. So Kierkegaard is likewise pointing out his. The character that Johannes de Silentio is describing who reveres Abraham.

18:53 Dylan: So.

18:54 Mark: And then I guess eventually it's Johannes himself that is talking here throughout. Most of the essay is just really, you know, so here's a raw piece of data. I find Abraham awesome. He's the father of faith. In fact, we all, you know, everybody as part of this religion has signed off that he is one of the most virtuous people. But yet look at this thing. It seems like by ethical standards he's either a murderer. He had to walk for days planning this thing. So even though he didn't actually kill him, you know, he had it in his heart or he was just really lucky.

There's A conflict there. So how can we reconcile this? Let's just say it's greatness. We're going to have faith that he is great. Like, just make that a postulate for the whole inquiry. And how is it possible that he could be great? What must be the structure of ethics such that there are these multiple systems of value and the religious one transcends the ordinary ethical one.

19:49 Wes: Dad, why do you keep sharpening your knife? Seems like it's already sharp enough. Don't worry about it, Isaac. Keep marching. It's only two more days.

20:01 Dylan: So maybe this is part of. Besides the visceral reaction regarding the behavior of a father towards a child in the name of whoever else he's obeying. Wes brought up the way in which we would normally come up with normative standards. Kierkegaard has this love affair, infatuation again, with trying to get to the infinite through the individual. And this is part of his sort of. I'll call it just romantic, his romantic notion of faith. But it's at such odds with actually living in a community, because. So unless you just say that, well, no one's ever going to acknowledge that, or there's never any need to acknowledge that someone actually is speaking the word and the truth of God or not. If it's just completely interior and so there's no public ramifications to it, then maybe that's fine.

20:56 Seth: Right.

20:56 Dylan: But it's hard not to imagine that you are sort of doubling down on the notion that some people have special authority because of their special connection with a divine, generally inaccessible source, such that they have privileged knowledge that will affect the way in which your community is working. And there's no answer to that. In fact, from Kierkegaard's perspective, it's unspeakable. Abraham can't even justify himself to anybody. And that's a part of the romance of it. Again, this is just another part that to me, when I. When I play out the story, I just find it appalling. It literally justifies anything, any kind of action. I don't understand how you get what I would normally think of as ethical behavior out of it.

21:42 Mark: Yeah, and Johannes Kierkegaard, pseudonym here, says he doesn't understand it, that this whole thing is praising a thing that he has great respect for, he thinks is part of greatness, but he can't put himself in that mindset and he can't actually understand how it could be. I don't know. Is that a strange way to describe an ethical ideal? As I suppose it's no different than trying to describe anything else divine. You know, I'm trying to describe God. I'm just trying to describe Jesus. And the best I could do is point that this is beyond what words can say.

I can say what it is not. It's different than the tragic hero. It's different than the knight of resignation that we'll talk about that, which is a stage to get to this. But he's saying this is a part of human psychology that we've observed, at least in this story, and it's very unclear. He brings up a couple other examples, at least one of which is a completely made up example, and another which is like Mary from the Bible. But I think as regards actual people, he's like, I don't know who around me has faith in this way. They probably, oh, that's the knight of faith.

He looks like an accountant, he says at one point. So it's very hard to get practical about this. As we are saying, if we want to say that he's doing psychology, he's being just like he was in the other books that we read by him, just like Augustine does, like Pascal does, all these religious scholars that actually did very acute psychology. I think that's our challenge here, is to try to map this onto. We had, you know, the people who don't have a self and they're in the aesthetic mode and then they make a decision and their self comes together and they grasp themselves somehow in eternity, but as creatures are absolutely in time.

Now I'm the ethical individual. I've signed on with my role in society and I've gained some maturity. I know who I am, I'm well grounded. But yet now he's saying there's a stage beyond that, that there's a way to be more mature or get more out of life that most people don't get here. You know, there's some way to be even greater than this thing that he was praising in the last book.

23:45 Seth: I mean, is there not some echo of German Romanticism here? It feels like it because he's recast the aesthete as being, you know, completely isolated, not even in touch with society, much less with the divine. And we know, you know, the romantic notion was that, well, I guess not aesthete, it's more the artist, but you get the point. And then, you know, his characterization of the ethical person is really kind of the artist of their own life. Somebody who builds and chooses and forges a self, so to speak, and does it in a context of their contemporary Society.

But, you know, if he looked at that and then he said, oh, and part of that is you pick a church, you know, in your hometown or wherever it is, and so there's work, marriage, friendship, and let's call it worship. There's no mention of that in at least the stuff we read on the ethical. But also, I think the question here is, what does the elevation to faith or religion do for the self that you don't get out of the ethical? Like, maybe that's one way to phrase it.

24:55 Wes: I just wanted to respond to the whole connection to Romanticism, because I think he thinks he's challenging the Romantic idea that one can get access to the absolute through the aesthetic. I think you're right that there are still elements of Romanticism left here. So I think we should think about that, why it comes across as romantic, even though he seems to be explicitly rejecting that thesis. Kant was the one who said, well, you can't know God conceptually. He's not part of the natural world and part of experience. So the kind of cognitive apparatus we have makes him unknowable to us.

And you can't prove or disprove his existence, but you can have faith. And faith is something outside of cognition. Faith is something outside of the conceptual. German idealists, subsequent to Kant, I think, were a bit unhappy with that, and they got excited about the idea of the aesthetic being like this wormhole to the divine. I'm gonna. I'm gonna break through the spatiotemporal continuum. And I think Kierkegaard is challenging that, so he wants to make it even more spooky in a way. There's another wormhole here, is what I guess what I'm trying to say.

But it's not the aesthetic. But, Seth, you were. What was the last thing you said about the ethical? You were trying to put us onto a different question.

26:09 Seth: Once we get through the ethical or get to the ethical, many people would look at that and think, well, that's perfectly fine existence. There's nothing wrong with that. So the question is, what's missing that the leap of faith will gain you. I know there's. We're talking about the divine and the infinite, but I think there's something essential about construction of the self or being fully realized. You know, we were using the word authentic, I think, in the last episode. But there has to be something about the way the individual becomes a fully realized self. That requires faith, requires at least the concept of the infinite. You know, forget about actually being visited by angels and all that. Stuff. I think there's something essential in that move around just construction of the self.

26:55 Wes: What has God ever done for us? No, I think it's a good question. Once we've got the ethical, what do we need the divine for?

27:03 Mark: And I wish this book was written as either or book three, like specifically addressing Judge from the second book book. Because then it would be clear. Because there's things that don't map out. You know, maybe this was by writing it with a different pseudonym. He's just like erasing the board. I described one way of not being a shallow bastard. Let me try to get it a different way and use it. You know, start with a different conceptual framework completely. So it might not map easily. But, you know, there are parallels here. Things suggest to me that this is supposed to be a construction on top of what he put before.

27:39 Dylan: So we had.

27:40 Mark: Between the aesthetic and the ethical, you more and more enter a stage of despair where you realize that just floating around, chasing your desires, you're never going to get what you want. The things that you want are going to go away. They won't actually be that satisfied anyway. Everything is boring. So once you really reach the right state of despair, then you're ready to make the jump to kind of surrender something. I'm not going to obey my whims anymore. I'm going to have a personal social contract and say, this is who I am. I'm going to erect something, the self, and that is going to direct me.

And so in this one we have a description of the knight of resignation, the K N I G H T of resignation, which sounds like somebody who is filled with despair in this way, you know, it again started like amor fati. I'm resigned that things are going to happen to me. I don't have control of everything. And then somehow this likewise, let's like despair. Prime the esthetic to jumping to the ethical. If you're already at the ethical, you still might, I guess, worry about things going wrong, you losing all your stuff or whatever. When you're able to then sort of trust in, you know, whatever happens, things are fundamentally okay or something.

Or, you know, I don't know, you've somehow just given up worrying about stuff, and then you're somehow primed to jump to having faith. Like, why? What would justify sort of having a general feeling that, like, yeah, I might even be asked to and have to kill my son tomorrow, but that's still okay. And the leap is believing, really believing, not getting worried, and like, shit, I'm in an impossible Situation I have to kill. God has ordered me to kill my son. But like thinking with depth, this is all going to work out okay. Somehow God's going to either give my son back to me, or, you know, he just knows better than I do.

I don't know. Somehow you can make a jump from resignation to faith.

29:34 Seth: It strikes me as maybe not quite right. I think we need to look more at the notions of. So you have words for these other ones. You have the two words, despair and resignation. So what's the word for what happens when everything's great in your stance of faith?

29:51 Mark: I mean, in both cases it's a leap to leap to the ethical or a leap to faith, I'm not sure what. What other word?

29:56 Seth: You're so like, are you content? Are you relaxed? Are you self satisfied? Are you. What's the corollary word to resignation or despair that describes your emotional state? When you make the leap of faith

30:13 Wes: successfully, I think you're there with resignation. Or am I wrong about the misresignation of waystation? Or is that it?

30:19 Seth: And so Mark just characterized it as a way station.

30:21 Mark: Johannes de Silentio keeps saying, I can get to resignation. I understand that it's this final step that I can't take.

30:28 Wes: Right, okay, good point.

30:30 Mark: For he says, nevertheless, I will have faith by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible. Well, letting go of your reason like that is what it kind of comes down to.

30:42 Seth: The issue is in the ethical. Let me try something here. The ethical is very worldly, very grounded in an empirical self, and in the world probably doesn't have the horizon of future and past other than sort of empirically, historically, the way Kierkegaard would like it to. But ultimately the resignation gets you to the point where you have to wrestle with the infinite or the divine, which, because it's not empirical, it's not something you can grasp, ultimately cashes itself out to be a paradox. And in the same way that we were talking about Camus in the absurd, or all of these other ways that we talk about trying to grapple, the leap doesn't take you completely out of your rational consciousness.

I don't think it makes more sense to me if you're going to compare, say, like Kierkegaard and Camus, and say you have to wrestle with the paradox and that's how you figure out how to get meaning in your life. I like Camus answer. I don't understand what Kierkegaard's answer to that's going to be. Because you're not going to become like suddenly like, ah, okay.

31:53 Dylan: So part of that, maybe we can get a little bit in this. Kierkegaard refers to this belief in this whole situation as being absurd or being a paradox. But the other way he talks about it, particularly in the way in which Abraham is going through, is he calls it a test. And temptation refers to this whole process as being a test or temptation.

32:17 Wes: Spiritual trial.

32:18 Dylan: A spiritual trial. And I didn't get a lot out of the notion of genuine doubt going on here that would be the source of the ethical, that the test was that in Abraham passing this test is. There is, I don't know, sadness about it or there is discomfort. But I don't get the sense that for Kierkegaard's interpretation of Abraham, that Abraham ever doubted going through with what he was going through. It's not a case of him hand wringing and shaking his fist at God and then going back and forth and finally coming around. He was always going to go through it.

33:01 Mark: He passed with flying colors.

33:03 Dylan: Yes, this is a big deal for Kierkegaard because it's not that he thought his way through, right? And this is the whole romantic note, you know, he did it on faith. But these words absurd, the absurd paradox, the trial, the test of his faith, those are all aligned with one another.

33:23 Wes: He wants to see it not as a. Simply a test. I think that's the point of him mentioning spiritual trial over and over again, is that he would rather not just see it that way. Right. It's not just that God is testing Abraham to see how obedient he is.

33:37 Mark: If you put it into words like that, you falsified it, right? This doesn't he say that like if Abraham was gonna just say what's going on with him, he'd have to call it a spiritual trial. But then it wouldn't really be a spiritual trial anymore because other people would understand, you know, to. To actually get what he's going through is something that cannot be articulated, that he's encountering the absurd.

33:56 Dylan: And the absurd is unspeakable because of the very character of it being absurd.

34:00 Wes: Well, it's completely non universal, Right? So in a way, it's like this is what. It's like Hegel, you wanted to move beyond the universal or you wanted to make the universal concrete. Here I'm going to get really super, super concrete. But this is page 61 to 62. But if the ethical is teleologically suspended in this manner, how does the single individual in whom it is suspended. Exist. He exists as the single individual in contrast to the universal. And then moving down a little bit, how did Abraham exist? He had faith. This is on 62. He had faith.

This is the paradox by which he remains at the apex. The paradox that he cannot explain to anyone else. For the paradox is that he, as a single individual, places himself in an absolute relation to the absolute. You know, this is why I think you guys were mentioning romanticism. And it seems romantic in this wormholing us to be absolutely divine. But it's not doing it by the aesthetic, it's doing it by this other weird thing. So. Well, faith, I guess, if you want to call it weird. But. But absolute relation to the absolute. Is he justified? Again, this justification is the paradoxical.

For if he is, then he is justified not by virtue of being something universal. Right, because if it were, the universal is the ethical, and it's certainly not justified from that point of view. Murdering his son is wrong. Okay, Justified not by virtue of being something universal, but by virtue of being the single individual. It sounds like someone who's right above the law in a way. By virtue of faith, how does the single individual reassert himself that he is legitimate? It is a simple matter to level all existence to the idea of the state or the idea of the society.

He's taking a poke at Hegel here. And either or the judge's conception of the ethical sounded very Hegelian. If this is done, it is also simple to mediate. For one never comes to the paradox as a single individual is higher than the universal.

35:44 Mark: I found the answer to Seth's question was, what's the emotional tone of the Knight of faith on page 50? The knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir to the finite. Well, the knight of resignation is a

35:56 Seth: stranger and an alien happiness. Certainly the description that he puts out there of going through all this just screams out joy.

36:05 Mark: And, well, Abraham is fine with it. It's the person that's contemplating the story.

36:10 Seth: Abraham is matter of fact about it. He's not happy. He's neither resigned nor despairing nor happy.

36:16 Mark: Doesn't it say Genesis 22? And thus he whistled while he walked along and hummed a merry tune did a little dance. No, it doesn't say anything like that. We don't know anything about his inner life.

36:29 Wes: Eh, okay, all right, look, I'm in olden times. Everything sucks. Anyways, it doesn't really matter. Just go do what I got to do. I'm gonna die when I'm 32 anyway. And that'll be old age.

36:40 Dylan: We don't know from the text of the Bible, but we do know from Kierkegaard's rendering and his inflection of the story that it's critical that Abraham is not resigned. He's just in faith. And to the extent that he's going

36:59 Wes: about doing it, he's post resignation.

37:01 Dylan: He's post resignation. Exactly. And I want to say that Kierkegaard's interpretation of Abraham would be just that. He never had resignation. He's the character that always was. God spoke to him, and he just listened.

37:15 Seth: And he had good evidence with his own eyes for the power of God.

37:20 Dylan: Yeah.

37:20 Mark: Yeah. This is not the first time that God spoke to him. It's not like he just woke up that God told him, you're gonna have this son. And time went on, and his wife is 80 and he's 90.

37:31 Dylan: Yeah.

37:31 Mark: And then she gives birth to son. Like, okay, that's a pretty.

37:35 Wes: This really does change, actually. This does change everything.

37:38 Mark: Like, that's a. That's a pretty established.

37:40 Wes: We should have reviewed this.

37:41 Seth: Yeah, no, no, that's.

37:43 Dylan: Yeah.

37:43 Wes: If you've been hanging out with God for 90 years or whatever, however long it is, then. Okay, I don't know how hard is it that hard to have faith at that point, but go ahead.

37:51 Seth: Yeah. That's why I say, you know, if he's seen God smite things and make things, you know, do things, and God says, your descendants will, you know, live through your son, and it will be a mighty nation or whatever the term is. And then he says, I don't have a son, and he's 90. And. But he's like, well, God said it's going to happen. Then he gets a son, and he's like. And then God says, okay, now you got to kill him. He's like, all right, well, either I'm going to get another son, or this one's going to be resurrected or somehow, you know, something's going to happen. I'm just saying, like, Abraham is not in the position of Kierkegaardian contemporaries or us, with respect to what the leap of faith means. Let's just put it that way.

38:31 Mark: Yeah. I'm sort of reminded of somebody who's in a dream or a video game or somehow they realize, like, oh, wow, weird stuff is happening. Okay, what's the next thing? Oh, you want me to kill my son? Okay. I mean, I've completely suspended my critical faculties here with this trip you're taking me on.

38:51 Seth: God, there are psychological states this Goes back to Dylan's concern, right, is that there are people who take drugs and they precisely go into those kinds of states and kill people around them and all that.

39:02 Wes: Yeah. And psychosis and Mr. Manson, you've taken

39:04 Mark: us on this ride. Keep going. What are we doing next? Whose house are we going to chuck?

39:10 Dylan: Why does Kierkegaard disregard the obedience factor? I have it in the margin when I was reading it, and then we were talking about it again and thinking about just the story itself and Abraham's history. Seth brings up the fact that he had all kinds of evidence for the power of God. He's of the generation that God shows up and does shit right in front of your eyes.

39:34 Mark: Right?

39:35 Dylan: So why isn't it just straight up obedience? Why isn't Abraham just like a dog compared to its master? And Abraham, the world revolves around the dog's owner, and Abraham's owned by God, and he's just going to go do whatever his owner tells him to do. And whatever the owner says is true. If the sky is green, the sky is green. And then if he says, well, actually it's red today, so I guess it's red today. Why isn't that. There's just like straight up obedience and not even obedience with resignation. Just like, I guess that's what I ought to do. Why does Kierkegaard just dismiss that?

40:13 Mark: Dylan, I like this a lot because it sounds like what he was criticizing in the aesthete, that the aesthete who is so refined and reflective but sort of is in a Rousseau sort of way, like, oh, gosh, I wish I could be really authentic with my feelings. I wish I could be just like that unreflected little child. Let's you glorify children, you glorify the noble savage, whatever. And that, that is a trap, a denial, a wanting to throw your authority away. Well, why isn't this person is just a brand of aesthete that is intrigued by the Abraham story.

I don't understand it, but it really intrigues me, freaks me out. It's just that seems like an aesthetic form. And then, gosh, I wish I could be so. Just blindly obeying God in this way. I wish I could have that kind of faith. How is that different from what he was criticizing the aesthete for doing? Other than it has the word religion in front of it and that's, you know, supposed to be better.

41:10 Seth: That's a legitimate question. I think it also points to when you're talking about, you know, the example, like, why does he pick Abraham instead of Job, sure. Job doesn't have the same kind of relationship. He's just some dude. And, you know, then putting aside the whole Manichean bet between God and the devil or whatever, here's somebody who legitimately, like, he's way more in a position of having to take a leap of faith in the face of, you know, a variety of different things, which he does, but he doubts.

41:41 Mark: I thought, am I just making that up? Am I misremembering the story?

41:44 Wes: He kvetches pretty hard at the very least.

41:48 Seth: Yeah, he kvetches pretty hard. But I thought that was the bet, was that Satan says, I bet I can get him to curse you, and he never does or something.

41:54 Mark: Okay, so he doesn't go so far

41:55 Seth: as more like, woe is me. Yeah, but there's another aspect of what happens. The Abraham story has to do with descendants through his child. But in the case of Job, at the end of all this, it's like God presses the reset switch and everything goes back to the way it was. Right. The kids, the flocks, all that stuff. He gets it all back because he proved his mettle. And that's an important point that Kierkegaard addresses. But it's also very relevant in a lot of the commentary that the reward is in this life. And it's critical because. Right. Kierkegaard, one thing he definitely isn't wanting to do is to bring in a notion of everything gets redeemed in the afterlife. The leap of faith is not about saying, like, well, I'll be born again. He means for it to be a worldly position.

42:42 Mark: I was just looking up, did Job get his children back? I think he got new children.

42:47 Wes: No, he didn't get them back.

42:48 Seth: Yeah, he got fresh children.

42:51 Mark: Yep. Yep.

42:52 Dylan: There's a movie I saw or some kind of short which plays this out and makes big fun as Abraham or not Abraham.

43:00 Seth: But is it like, drunk history?

43:02 Mark: Yeah.

43:02 Dylan: And Job, the angel show. No, you know what it was? It was in Good Omens. It was like a side scene in Good Omens.

43:10 Seth: Oh, I might have to go back and watch that.

43:12 Mark: I remember this got brought up in the Brothers Karamazov, as we discussed.

43:16 Dylan: No, but it's in Good Omens because the angel is there and there's a recreation of this conversation and Job's wife is like, what do you mean? They're new kids? And they're like, play it off. They're like, well, you know, you had the old kids, now you got some new kids. What a deal.

43:37 Wes: No, we're even again.

43:39 Dylan: It's awesome.

43:40 Mark: Because of Pass the test, the Lord, this web search. The Lord blessed him with a long life and with seven more sons and three more daughters who were the most beautiful in all the land.

43:50 Seth: There you go.

43:52 Mark: That's what Google pulled out as the most salient thing.

43:57 Seth: You know, it's like when you. You get into a car wreck, but then. And your car's totaled, but the money you get from the insurance company, you get to get a new model and everything's fresh and clean.

44:06 Dylan: And that's exactly how Job felt about

44:08 Wes: his new kids, I'm sure.

44:11 Mark: All right, well, with this break of the joy and fun of Job, we'll get back to Abraham and Kierkegaard's take on it with part two. Please come back next week or become a partially examined life citizen. You can get it right now at partiallyexaminedlife.com support. See ya.