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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life. Episode 333, Part 2. We've been discussing Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. I think we wanted to get to the most philosophical part of what we read, which is problem one. Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? So page 54 of our version, and let's just get really clear on the terms we've thrown around. Infinite, absolute, universal, eternal, all these things, and they don't all mean the same thing for sure. It's just. It's confusing how, for instance, in the ethical work that we read before, the ethical leap was embracing the universal, which is.

Comes from Kant, right? That thinking universally is thinking, I'm not going to do this action for my reasons. I'm going to do it for universal reasons. I'm going to do it for reasons that would work even if it were a universal law. So it is aligning yourself with the larger society, with the larger system that is the universal. But yet you're supposed to jump into that and do it. Absolutely. I'm not sure what that means, other than don't be whimsical about it. Don't, like, be ethical one day and not be ethical the next day. And it seemed even in that earlier language, somehow you were connecting with God, with eternity by making this absolute choice.

Should we disambiguate that even as a precursor to getting into this text here? Or did I just do it as much justice as we can?

1:30 Wes: Well, I think, Mark, you did a good job of explaining why it is right. He would begin this problema one by saying, the ethical as such is the universal. I think this is the Sort of thing we are so used to, it might not even occur to us to explain it to listeners. But. But the average beginner or someone who's not read that much philosophy, that probably would be a very puzzling sentence, I think. And yeah, the basic idea is just that these are standards that apply universally, that when I ought to do something, you ought to also do it. We ought to do it.

It's universal. It applies to everyone equally and helpfully. Kierkegaard tells us that it applies to everyone. It applies at all times. And in that sense, according to Kierkegaard, it. The ethical becomes a. So this. This is a weird way of putting it, becomes a telos, becomes the end or the purpose of all action. It's a weird way to put it because this is precisely what Kantian ethics. It's the thing that Kantian ethics contrast the ethical to. Right. So in Aristotle, the telos is flourishing or happiness. And the ethical is subordinate to that, to that end, to that, that purpose.

And we do activity in accordance with virtue because that's just what happiness is, and that's what it means to be functioning. Well, in Kierkegaard's case, the ethical itself becomes the end or the purpose. So Kant would say, we don't do things to be happy. We do things because they are obligatory. We are subject to categorical imperatives. And it sounds like Kierkegaard is saying, well, the categorical imperative is just the telos. Then am I reading this?

3:08 Mark: Do things to be good.

3:09 Dylan: Yeah, because that's the telos, right? That's the thing at which the. For sake of which you're doing it.

3:15 Mark: I don't like his use of this because he reserved in either or the telos as a descriptive term that you just see, this is the kind of thing that through deterministic laws, this kind of creature will grow into. And yes, you can make those observations about yourself, but unless you are choosing, unless you're getting in there and exerting your freedom. So saying the telos is a thing to be aimed at. I mean, I guess it's using your freedom. So it's different than he was using it before. It's just a different book.

3:45 Wes: I guess the individual has his telos in the universal. It's a kind of odd way to put things. I think it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, the universal, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. So the way we ordinarily think of this, the singularity, is inclination. It's desire. It's just what I want to do based on my impulse. That's singularity. I'm just doing what I want. I'm being me as an organism in need or with desires or whatever. And it's only insofar as I'm thinking about the universal that I would do anything else, that I would suppress my desires for the sake of some higher thing.

Now, in practical terms, that could just be. Well, I do some hypothetical reasoning and I want to not act on immediate impulses. I want to pass the marshmallow test because I have bigger goals, bigger desires for later on. And that is not necessarily in and of itself ethical.

4:43 Dylan: But if the marshmallow is the universal, then it is.

4:46 Wes: Yeah. If I'm passing up the marshmallow not because I'm going to get two marshmallows later, but because it's the right thing to do. The right thing to do becomes. That's the ultimate telos. Yeah, but the I get the universal marshmallow. The satisfaction of being good.

5:00 Dylan: Now I understand Ghostbusters way better.

5:04 Wes: Right. So it's an interesting way to put it. Annul his singularity in order to become the universal. It's as if I'm becoming this subject, transhuman, or this subject who's outside of any particular human subject, who only does things, because that is what you ought to do. And in the moment where I do what I ought to do, I kind of get out of my particular self, out of just being Wes, and I become this universal ethical subject.

5:33 Mark: So maybe this is not an addition to what he said in either or, but it's a correction because according to either or, the ethicist thought that you could buy surrendering to the universal. You're actually asserting your individuality, and that's the only way you can be a full self is in a social context relating to other people, not this free floating, aimless nothing. And it seems like here he's saying, no, actually surrendering to the ethical. Well, that actually just makes you sort of a drone, a cog in the machine. You're surrendering your individuality. To get that back, you're going to have to do something further.

6:09 Wes: Kierkegaard wants to get the individual back. So simply surrendering to the ethical as the universal is not going to be enough.

6:16 Dylan: I think this is a really good place to start these first two paragraphs. He's clarifying the character of the ethical as becoming the universal. And then we get his definition of faith is this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal.

6:33 Wes: Right?

6:34 Dylan: And so he's engaging this. In the end, the question seems like the answer is yes. Faith is the teleological suspension of the ethical.

6:43 Wes: Yeah.

6:44 Mark: Page 55. Faith is, namely this paradox that a single individual is higher than the universal. Yet please note in such a way that the movement repeats itself so that after having been in the universal, he as the single individual isolates himself as higher as the than the universal. If this is not faith, then Abraham is lost. Then faith has never existed in the world. And then he adds, I don't understand this part. He's never existed in the world precisely because it has always existed. So by saying, he repeats the movement. This is by saying it's not like you enter and then you fall back.

No, it's you repeat the movement, you go higher. There's all this very metaphorical discussion of doing the movements and even talks later about like people today don't respect very precise dancing, because that's essentially what you're doing metaphorically when you ascend to the universal and then ascend past the universal.

7:37 Wes: For the ethical, that is social morality is the highest. And if there is in a person no residual incommensurability in some way that this incommensurability is not evil, that is the single individual who is to be expressed in the universal, then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had or what can be deduced from them by consistent thought. In other words, we can just be pagans. We don't need Christianity. If morality, social morality is the end all, be all. And there isn't this paradoxical incommensurability over and above that that needs to be addressed by faith, right in this, this Christ figure who unites the concrete and the abstract, the universal who unites the divine and the mundane.

8:21 Mark: All these guys are very into the Greeks. And so yes, the next section is talking about what is it when people say the Christian world has a. Has a light shining in it that the pagan world didn't have. But the pagan world had a lot of great ethical thinkers. So if we want to say anything is being added to that, then it can't just be that the be all and end all of human life is to be the ethical person. Because the pagans had that just fine.

8:44 Wes: It's very confusing because as Dylan has pointed out, what does it mean for the single individual to become, quote unquote, higher than the universal? Isn't that just going to justify potentially anything? So the end of 55 faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual is the single. As the single individuals higher than the universal is justified before it, not as inferior to it, but as superior, yet in such a way. Please note. Okay, Mark, did you already read this, or is he being repetitive? No, he's.

9:14 Mark: He likes to be repetitive.

9:16 Wes: Right. Please note that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as a single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal, becomes a single individual who as a single individual, is superior. That's a terrible sentence. And that the single individual, as a single individual, stands in absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated. Again, he's attacking Hegel here. For all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal. It is and remains for all eternity a paradox impervious to thought. And yet faith is this paradox. So I think it's good that we've given listeners a good taste of what is so fun about reading this text, what makes it so delightful,

9:57 Seth: or why,

9:57 Mark: if someone's reading it to you, if you're listening to an audiobook, you might be like, wait, didn't I just hear that part?

10:04 Dylan: Their beat frequency.

10:05 Seth: All right, so the mediating aspect of the universality as the individual, what is it is reconciled, is subsumed or whatever. The idea here is he's trying to put an end to dialectical movement by saying once an individual has gone through mediation through the universal, it's almost like they get kind of, like, levered up. I think lever is a word Dylan used in the last episode. It's like you go through it and then you come out and you don't come out just simply to be put into a situation where you're subordinate to another universal. And you don't come out of the mediation by going back down to where you were.

So where are you going to go if anything is happening and there's any kind of positive forward movement for you as the single individual vis a vis the universal? It's got to be, you know, up, forward, back, I don't know. But it can't go back. It can't be the same place, or there's no. Nothing's happening. And what he seems to be saying here is once you've gone through that mediation process, now you stand above the universal in terms of understanding, I guess what it is that mediation by the universal means, and in some sense, you no longer require it, because where you are, that position of post mediation is not itself mediated and can't be mediated by anything else.

And that's. I don't know, St. John of the Faith, you know, pure unity in Christ or God or something like that maybe. I don't know.

11:38 Wes: Yeah. To say it's mediated. Right. Means to say it can't be subsumed under a concept. It's Hegel's way of saying that. So. Right. A concept or the universal. So if I'm talking about Abraham's particular action being. Or about to be murdering his son, I can't mediate that under concept by saying, okay, this falls into this category of ethical norms. One does this, one does that. Thou shalt do this, thou shalt do that. It's unique, it's singular. That's beyond the universal spot, beyond any conceptual articulation of a norm. That's the sense in which it cannot be mediated. It's a paradox. It's impervious to thought. So you get something that is. It's normative because God said, do it. But at the same time, it's not structured in the way that anything normative ever is structured for us.

12:30 Dylan: Yeah, you can't have. This is why the middle. Discussion of the middle term. Business. Right. So on 57, he's just telling the story. Abraham gets Isaac back again by virtue of the absurd. Abraham is at no time a tragic hero, but is something entirely different, either a murderer or a man of faith. Abraham does not have the middle term that saves the tragic hero. So that middle term is the relation that allows you to get from the universal to the individual. And in being singular, that middle term would mediate that. And in this case, there is no mediation. There's no way for you to cross, multiply, or to transform from one to the other to communicate the position.

13:17 Wes: Yeah, the middle term. So in the case of the tragic hero, right. It's the greater good. It's the thing that I'm trying to achieve, that that nullifies what would normally be the right thing to do. I shouldn't really kill my daughter unless I need to get somewhere, unless I need to get the hell out of Troy. But in this case, Abraham can't be saved by that kind of logic by saying there is some higher good operating here that in this case suspends the normal ethical working of things.

13:46 Seth: So does that mean, Wes, the way you characterized it, that faith is a universal, but it's an unmediated universal, Like,

13:55 Mark: I don't know, it's not a universal.

13:56 Wes: I think he's saying it's universal.

13:57 Mark: I mean, there's the. The word faith refers to more than one thing. Supposedly it is a word. So it does sound like a universal.

14:05 Seth: I mean, it's a concept, and that it certainly Sounds like a universal.

14:08 Mark: I guess every relation that you have that an individual has with God is sui generis. But then it would be hard to really say I want to be a person of faith. Like, well, what does that mean? Do you want to be like Abraham? Well, no, I don't want to be like Abraham. God, no. I should be able to characterize what it is that is great about Abraham or what faith is. It's got to be a universal of some sort, right?

14:28 Wes: It's an extension of an old idea that faith is non conceptual. Faith is the thing that we're doing when we don't have knowledge, right? Kant said, I'm making room for faith by taking God out of metaphysics, out of a debate about what's knowable or not knowable. God is not knowable, but therefore we can have faith in them. Faith is precisely the relationship we have to things. It can't be aspects, can't be elements of experience, can't be governed by concepts. Non mediated, non discursive. Just this immediate relation, which in Plato was something like intellectual intuition.

It's like an intuitive relationship to a Platonic form or to an intellectual object, which is the kind of thing that Kant himself objected. If you're going to have a relationship to God. For Kant, if you could have a knowledge relationship to God, it would have to be intellectual intuition. And the same things with any of the other noumena, the soul and all that stuff. If you wanted to have knowledge, relationships to noumena, it would have to be intellectual intuition. He rules it out. So instead of intellectual intuition, we're left with this thing, faith.

We believe it, but we can experience it, we can't know it. And then I can't decide, not in the empirical sense of the word. Constants of experience, sorry, term of art. Obviously we can have the experience of faith, but I mean like a cognitive experience of an object, of an empirical object. Let's just be very specific. So I think Kierkegaard goes farther here to say that when we're thinking about this non conceptual aspect of faith, which again is not a new idea. I think what's new here is that, well, hey, the ethical is conceptual and it rules out even that aspect of the conceptual.

It's not that just doesn't. It doesn't involve like empirical experiences of objects. It also doesn't involve ethical experience as we know it. I think that's Kierkegaard's point in a nutshell. He's expanding this idea of the non conceptuality of faith.

16:21 Seth: I'm taking back to something Dylan said earlier, when the individual, by virtue of the absurd, and it's precisely absurd that he, as the single individual, is higher than the universal. So the unmediated, or the paradox that cannot be mediated, is a spiritual trial. If you put yourself as the single individual above the universal, you're not supposed to kill your children, but you're gonna. And you teleologically suspend the ethical. What is the trial?

16:53 Wes: I think he wants it not to be a trial.

16:55 Mark: The temptation, usually when you're, you know, you're set on the course to do your duty, and the temptation is to, say, to go along with your inclination. So if you know you're supposed to kill your daughter to make it so you could sail away from Troy, and then you say, no, I love my daughter too much. I'm not going to do that. You've given into the temptation, but it's the personal temptation. It's the love. And here he's saying Abraham, like it's absolutely essential that he. He loved his kid, but the love at issue is the duty that he had to love your son more than yourself. So he's being tempted toward the ethical. According to Kierkegaard's analysis, he'll say, this

17:35 Wes: paradox cannot be mediated. For as soon as Abraham begins to do so, he has to confess that he was in a spiritual trial. The spiritual trial explanation of the Abraham story is, to Kierkegaard, a cop out. It's the thing that he wants to reject. Oh, you know, it's like a traditional explanation of the story to people whose Kierkegaard is trying to be more radical than that and say, it wasn't just a spiritual trial of Abraham. This is kind of what faith is. Faith is the willingness to transcend the ethical in this way.

18:02 Dylan: Yeah. So the story itself is an illustration, but it's not Abraham explaining faith insofar as well, you can't make this internal connection any more than Abraham could experience it as a trial and have it be faith.

18:20 Wes: He asked us to consider. Suppose Abraham had succeeded in sacrificing Isaac. On the spiritual trial version of the story, he comes back to the universal in the sense that he would have to say, okay, this was wrong, and now I have to repent. I passed the spiritual trial part. Well, I'm a little confused about this, actually, now that I'm looking at it on page 57 here. But he seems to think that this spiritual trial story brings things back to the ethical, and he wants to say he gets Isaac back again by virtue of the absurd. So he doesn't get Isaac back in some weird sense that he repents over what he's done or what he was going to do.

So let me put it this way. I think if Kierkegaard is right, there is no repentance required. If he succeeds in sacrificing Isaac, it doesn't come back down to the ethical plane. It's not like, okay, well, that's the wrong thing to do in the real world. But this is the God world. It never gets subsumed under the ethical. It wouldn't be something that one would be required to repent.

19:23 Mark: And why can't we just say that, that it was a different layer of the ethical? I mean, I know we didn't read the second question, which is do we have an absolute duty to God? But that just seems like an obvious interpretation. Is that the duty to God is an ethical duty and it exceeds all other duties. It seldom comes up in a direct way. Usually it's through the mediation of we were given the laws, we were given the book, and so we obey the laws, we obey the book, we align ourselves with the universal. But if God decides to bypass that and give you a command directly, then of course you are morally obliged.

God is. Why not just say he's a divine command theorist? Whatever God says is good right now, that actually becomes good, contra Plato. And so that's my duty. Sorry, the ethical thinking that it was the universal got it wrong. What the ethical really is is whatever God says. It's just that usually God acts in a very uniform way and lays down the law and just obey the law.

20:21 Wes: Let me point out one thing here. Saying that we have an ethical duty to do whatever God tells us to do is not the same thing as saying that we have an ethical obligation to God himself to do what he tells us to do. We have to ground obligation in some way. We can't ground it. We might ground it by saying it's whatever God says to do. But you can't say, well, how do you ground obligation? Well, it's whatever we're obligated to do. Do in respect of what God commands.

20:45 Mark: I mean, he made us. He's bigger than us. Isn't that another? We owe him so much.

20:49 Wes: At some point, I think, you know, you. We scrape bedrock and then it becomes very confusing. I think intuitively understood, you know, why do what is ethical to do? It's very hard to explain why we ought to do what we ought to do. We can understand it in subjective terms, in terms of feelings like empathy, but if you want to describe it more abstractly, you do what Kant does, right. With talking about issuing ourselves laws that we obey. And that is also, I think, a very confusing explanation. Just getting back to the. I think, well, Mark, you're trying to say, well, why not just say it's an ethical.

21:20 Mark: Yeah, I'm trying to give a counter argument.

21:22 Wes: Yeah, right. Why doesn't this fall within the ethical? Because you're just saying you have a higher ethical relation to God. And I think he wants to see the ethical in terms of this mediated, conceptual, universal thing where the ethical is about our relationship to subjects in general, not to the big cheese. It's about, you know, I ought to do this and that with respect to any other rational being like me. It's not just about my personal relationship with God. When I'm talking about that personal relationship, I've transcended the ethical.

21:49 Mark: I think you're right. I think that Kant, according to Kierkegaard, Kant and Plato figured it out. This is what the ethical is. If anything is ethical, this is what the ethical is. It's defining yourself in relation to the whole of humanity. And so the divine command theory is ruled out, but yet there's a residuum, let's say, such that we should. Even though what you're doing is not ethical, it's supra ethical. God can have a veto power over the ethical, but that's faith. And he's only gonna, you know, the fact that he's only talking to you, you know, if he were just somehow to declare to everybody, then that would be.

Isn't there a Jewish. We've probably. I've quoted this before, you know, it is no longer in heaven. If God were to come down and say, you know, actually, good is now evil, evil is now good, then the people would be right in saying, screw off. You already gave us the law. Ethically is the universal. You can't just change it like that.

22:43 Seth: That's correct.

22:44 Wes: Or tell you that green is red and red is green. Yeah. This gets us into all sorts of philosophical paradoxes that we don't want to get into. But is God bound by reasons? Is God bound by the normative? Or does he. You know,

22:59 Seth: I just found a little bit of text later on from what you were saying was it's like he mentions Agamemnon and Brutus and all this and says, if we said they were having spiritual trials, would that help them be understood? Or if we say that they believe what they're doing is right by virtue of this absurd, would that give us any better understanding? So we have to look back. I think we've used the term teleological suspension of the ethical, but on page 59, he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos outside it in relation to which. So I would like to know how Abraham's act can be related to universal. Right. Is there any way to find a point of contact between what Abraham did and the universal other than that he transgressed it?

23:47 Wes: Yeah, I think we actually ought to read. Read more of this passage, if that's okay with you guys.

23:51 Seth: Yeah, go ahead.

23:52 Wes: So I think I would start on page 59 at the first full paragraph. The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is very obvious. The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its telos. 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. Here there can be no question of a teleological suspension of the ethical itself. So that's just the idea that there's a greater good that you're doing this for.

Abraham's situation is different. By his act, he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos outside of it in relation to which he suspended it. For I certainly would like to know how Abraham's act can be related to the universal, whether any point of contact between what Abraham did and the universal can be found other than that Abraham transgressed it. It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the state. That Abraham does it as Agamemnon was doing it, is not to appease the angry gods. Therefore, while the tragic hero is great because of his moral virtue, Abraham is great because of a purely personal virtue.

On a little further, the ethical in the sense of the morals, entirely beside the point insofar as universal was present. It was cryptically in Isaac, hidden, so to speak, in Isaac's loins, and must cry out with Isaac's mouth, do not do this. You are destroying everything. Great poetic flourish there.

25:18 Mark: Oh, you got the ethical in your loins there.

25:22 Wes: Yeah, the ethical is just a glint in the murderer's eye or something. Now doesn't make sense. It's a glint in the murderee's loins. But okay, yeah, it makes no sense.

25:36 Mark: A purely personal virtue. So again, I want to relate this to Nietzsche, who is criticizing ethics by saying there is no just one standard. Who's better let's put everybody on a scale. The Mother Teresa, she's the best. And down there, you know, there's multiple ways. So there is a value that Abraham's behavior was exhibiting that just is not on the moral scale. It's just a fundamentally different kind of value. And he's arguing it's higher, but I'm not sure how, what perspective you could use outside to justify that. From the religious perspective, it's higher. From the ethical perspective, he's just a murderer or crazy like those are just two different incommensurable perspectives.

26:19 Seth: The continuation of what Wes had just read. 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. The unity of the two is correctly expressed in the word. It's an ordeal, a temptation. What does that mean? As a rule, what tempts person is something that will hold him back from doing his duty. But here the temptation is the ethical itself, which would hold him back from doing God's will.

What is duty? Duty is simply the expression for God's will. So again, we don't know if this is what Kierkegaard thinks or what whoever the author of this particular section is, or whatever dream figment that the author is transcribing or what he overheard at lunch. But if you're willing to suspend the ethical for God's sake, it seems like that's your path to being a knight of faith. And like Dylan said at the beginning, the outset of this conversation, terrifyingly dangerous.

27:20 Mark: Well, maybe that clue, you know, that it's for God's sake. And for your sake is the same thing is a clue here. You know that when you are affirming yourself in your absolute relation to the absolute, you're affirming yourself, but not in a selfish way, not in the petty way, in a super awesome way, in an eternal way.

27:41 Seth: I'm sure David Koresh and Jim Jones thought that.

27:44 Wes: Therefore, although Abraham arouses my admiration, he also appalls me. He's inducing the reaction in us that he wants to do this whole associating to David Koresh and the rest of this mistake. You know, what if the individual made a mistake? What Kierkegaard is doing with that point is asking us to imagine that, you know, what if he was just a madman and not someone who's talking to God? And how could you possibly know? How could you Know, if you're. And even in more minor circumstances, how could you ever distinguish your faith in God from madness? Even when it's not a question of

28:16 Mark: transgressing the ethical. Misunderstood God. He says that specifically. God talks to me all the time. I just. God has a big vocabulary. Sometimes they don't quite get it.

28:26 Seth: And a fake accent.

28:28 Mark: I was surprised that, you know, in my question to start this whole episode, can violations of ethical principles be justified by faith? And I thought I was laying a trap there. Because justification refers to public norms, it actually can't be justified. But he. On a quote we already read the bottom of page 55, top of page 56, faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual, as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, but not as inferior to it, but as superior. So I mean, is this just the opinion. Is the word justified being just thrown around by this pseudonym?

Or is there a sense of justification that says not just that these are two incommensurable spheres that can't talk to each other, but that is he justified? I'm looking at 62 the next. Just searching ahead 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.

29:27 Wes: Yeah, this is a really good point, Mark. If we were to put him on trial, what would his justification be? Well, God told me to do it.

29:34 Dylan: God told me to do it.

29:36 Wes: If we believed him, I think we'd have to agree he was justified.

29:39 Dylan: Oh, it just makes me think immediately of Socrates. Right.

29:42 Wes: And.

29:43 Dylan: And you brought it up effectively, Socrates' daemon earlier. And Kierkegaard points to Socrates as being sort of the closest one, Right. To this kind of connection to faith in the divine amongst pagans. And I mean, this might be something Kierkegaard would be also resonating with is Socrates at least points to his daemon in his own apologies and a defense. Right. And makes a kind of plea, kind of claim to his. His correctness. Abraham going on trial. I don't even know what that looks like. Abraham going on trial would be just befuddlement. Right. In the way the story is rendered. From Kierkegaard's point of view, there wouldn't be a recognition that he was being

30:31 Mark: wrong by bringing up Socrates. You're making me want to think about what Kierkegaard had to say in the concept of irony about Socrates and his use of the daemon that I guess it's by. I'm going to pay attention to the daemon and not what my society tells me. That's in this context, saying no to the ethical. The ethical is society pushing on you. And I'm going to listen to my inner voice. And so that's creating. That's irony that I'm. Irony was all about being able to say no to something. And the good kind of irony was with implicit reference to saying yes to the transcendent. And so that's exactly what Abraham is doing. He was just being ironic. I'm just gonna, ironically, kill my son.

31:12 Wes: This does all point to a real and important tension, which is that we can be too involved in the ethical in the sense that we become conformist. And we think we're doing the right thing. As I mentioned before, we think we're doing the ethical thing, but really we are just following conventions that turn out to be maybe even horrific. On the other hand. And so you might want to think, I'm not going to be a conformist. I do my own research. I get on the Internet. I'm not going to be deceived by the powers that be. And there's a grain of truth in that approach, let's say.

But one is all in danger of becoming a conspiracy theorist and a crank. And there are many people who think of themselves as individualistic and defiant, and they think of themselves as people who can think for themselves no matter what the social pressures. But really, they're just cranks and conspiracy theorists. And the same thing goes for faith, I think. So maybe the parallel here is there is some sense in which we want more than the ethical. And I think Kierkegaard says faith is a passion. At some point in this.

32:18 Mark: That's the end of our section.

32:19 Wes: Yeah, yeah. That's the part of it that he wants to get. That's more than simply the ethical. He doesn't want that to be discarded by reducing religion to the ethical. But it's also horrifying. And I think, you know, he says we forget the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. He doesn't want the story of Abraham to be whitewashed because there is something horrific about faith. At least. It should kind of make you sick to think about it. It should make you sick to your stomach to think about what's involved in the leap of faith and the risk that's being taken. You know, there's the risk of being a conspiracy theorist and a crank or a madman and all the rest of it. I guess that's my way of describing the risk. Maybe, you know, be better to describe it as something even more profound.

33:04 Seth: It should be terrifying in the sense of inspiring awe, right? Not horrifying in terms of fear necessarily, or disgust or. But really like the. You think about what it takes to put yourself in that position, to overcome all the social norms. The ethical, by the way, it's a self overcoming too, because at the stage of the ethical you've created, your life is a work of art in some respect that you have made conscious choices to create. And suspension of the ethical is suspension of that self in some respect as well. So not to be done lightly and to be respected and suitably feared.

And to your point, Wes, it can go the other direction, obviously, the suspension of the ethical, where the ethical is unethical or whatever, somehow the cultural norms are oppressive or unjust in some way. You have to start bringing a discussion around justice. At least that's a rationalization or justification for why you would make those decisions. It's just that you're absolutely right when you point out that human pathology almost always takes it in the wrong direction. It's like the instances of the people who make a noble stand and suspend the ethical to protest the Vietnam War or something like that.

Those examples are much fewer and farther in between than megalomaniacs who abuse it. And like you said, the cranks that suspend rationality and not just the ethical without teleology.

34:39 Mark: I did think of Hannah Arendt talking about totalitarianism where groups, not individuals. This is important, the important difference where the telos of the German people is more important than what you'd normally consider ethical. But that's, you know, an attempt, a false attempt at creating, you know, a higher ethical. It's not the same as what's going on here, even though it might sound like it would likewise justify horrific actions. Should it be called the sublation of the ethical rather than the suspension of the ethical? Because. Right.

You described Seth, the creation of the personality is a work of art. Well, that sounds like the aesthetic, but you're right. When you hit the ethical, you get to keep the aesthetic. You just get to recontextualize it under this ethical. So when you get to the religious, it should not be anti ethical. It should recontextualize the ethical in a higher framework that you are the enlightened individual. And so, you know, insofar as you're obeying your unmediated relation with God, which I think should be a free relation with God, he makes this point in either or.

35:45 Seth: Did he charge you? He didn't charge me anything.

35:48 Mark: Okay, this is that we should not leave here today. Without trying to figure out how this one example is supposed to actually apply to regular people having faith, the section ends.

36:00 Wes: We have 60 seconds to do it.

36:02 Mark: Well, the section ends with when a person walks, what is, in what sense the hard road of the tragic hero? There are many who can give him advice. But he who walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him, no one understands him. 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. It seems like there's a non sequitur there. And so this is what I feel like we need to understand. Is it just the example of faith then can inspire us to do faith in our own little ways?

We're never going to be. Our faith is never going to be. I guess in its essence, maybe it is as horrifying. But we're never going to be called on to kill our kids. That is just a given. But to have faith in God as providential and leading me through life, you know, everybody can enter this. This is what the average person thinks faith is. Dylan is shaking his head.

36:56 Dylan: I don't think this book has anything to do with how we ought to live our lives. I think it is a self indulgent philosophical, jamming his thumb in Hegel's eyes to say that this is what faith is. I saved faith from fricking Hegel and saved faith from Kant and this is what it is. And he's just laying in front of people because he's making a kind of philosophical argument about it, but has no intention about helping guide people about how they ought to live their lives and live life or even live a life in faith. He's talking about what it's like as a philosophical exercise, as an internal experience, what it would look like if I were to analyze it.

37:42 Wes: I feel bad now about my earlier criticisms because it feels like we're just piling on.

37:48 Mark: I was thinking about faith as a hermeneutic strategy that when I read a book, you know, what we call the principle of charity usually is, especially a book like this that just on the face of it and the first time I read it years ago just pissed me off and I just found it annoying. This is not aimed at me. This is aimed at like the average religious person who just doesn't understand what he is actually advocating and advocating for faith, that he thinks like, oh, you just go and you believe what the church tells you and just kind of, you know, don't let those naughty individual Thoughts bear you down.

And Kierkegaard is trying to address those people. I'm not one of those people, so I don't care about this. That was my initial reaction. This time I'm like, was very explicitly like, what if I try to have. Have faith that the author is a genius and has something good to say? What can you get out of that? I mean, I think that's to some extent what we always do. But we have countered that in our podcast, of course. And I don't begrudge you your reaction a bit, because having too much respect and reverence for these authors is a lot of the problem that I think this podcast is designed to fight.

38:56 Dylan: I don't mean to doubt his genius, and I agree with Wes about that recognition. You asked the question about what's the takeaway that Kierkegaard has from for faith in the way you ought to hold your faith or faith in everyday life? And I stand by what I said earlier. I don't think he's talking about how one ought to live one's life in this book. He's certainly not providing any guidance for it. And he's not talking about how one ought to try to live faithfully. If anything, the whole book is, in a way, saying, if you're not doing it, I can't tell you how. And if you have to ask how, then you don't know how.

39:38 Mark: So is it just a really unhelpful virtue ethics, just like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand?

39:43 Dylan: I don't think it's the virtue ethics.

39:44 Mark: Here's an awesome way to be. Is to have faith. Well, how can I do that? Well, you probably can't, but you can marvel, be inspired by.

39:51 Dylan: Yeah, I see why you brought up Nietzsche, that concept.

39:53 Seth: But can you have this faith? Can you have this faith?

39:58 Mark: I'm going to have that faith that's in your breast, Seth. I'm ordering it off of Amazon right now. You're commoditized, man. All right, so we agree that we're tired of Kierkegaard and this was enough, and we don't want to do another episode on this. Is that the consensus here? In listening to, like, Problema three, I was just actively confused, and I didn't like the fact that we've read so much Kierkegaard. I should not be this confused at this point. Problema two, I was thinking, you know, I put in slack. This is essential to our project here because I felt like.

So the thing I raised at the beginning of the second half here was trying to get a better sense of connecting what he said in the aesthetic relation of the. The personality thing that we just talked about for two episodes in either or. What he says about God and what he says about proclaiming yourself absolutely and all this stuff, self development, how that relates to what he's saying here and that I do think that he's saying to be not just a mature individual, maybe you're mature at the ethical stage as opposed to the aesthetic stage, but to be the superlative individual, to be all that you can be, then faith is an essential part of life.

And so I'm interested in how that structure works especially. Again, I put a bunch of quotes in my notes from the last episode. Just searching on. You know, when a person links himself to an eternal power for an eternity, the personality declares itself in its inner infinity, and in turn the personality is thereby consolidated. The personality as the absolute he makes himself into, the absolute duty is the expression of his absolute dependence and his absolute freedom and their identity with each other. Only by choosing absolutely, not temporarily, aesthetically, can one choose the ethical.

The absolute is myself in its eternal validity. I find myself in God. I choose myself absolutely from the hand of the eternal God. All this stuff is from the last book. So how does that actually hook up to here? I think reading Problema 2 might help us clear that up. But if this is just merely an academic interest in how his vocabulary maps onto each other and not something that will really teach us any more about what it is to be an awesome human being, then yeah, let's stop.

42:08 Wes: I'm willing to do another episode. I'm willing to not do it. I'll feel guilty. I don't know if. If I make a decision either way.

42:15 Mark: I don't know if you choose not to decide. Wes.

42:19 Seth: Wes always has to read the last, the third book in the trilogy. You know, he just can't. He's a completionist.

42:26 Mark: Next time we're going to talk about Gabriel Marcel's on the ontological mystery from 1933. An actual existentialist post Sartre. Sartre contemporary who is reacting to Kierkegaard and other folks like that. Any closings as we wrap here? Or are we already closed?

42:42 Dylan: I have faith that I'm done.

42:44 Mark: Thank you so much for listening, Seth. I don't want to cut you off.

42:47 Seth: I'm done. I would like to teleologically suspend recording this podcast for my own sake.

42:56 Mark: Well, you're going to just sublate it you'll still be actually thinking about yourself, your voice as being recorded.

43:02 Seth: Yes, but I won't be hunched over on this bed over a microphone that's giving me back pain.

43:08 Wes: I think there's. We're going to have to do a teleological suspension of our Kierkegaard series. Maybe that is the suitable thing to do is to cut it short by one recording.

43:20 Mark: All right, thanks everybody. Let us know what you want us to cover. Email us@peltiallyexaminedlife.com comment on our Facebook, on our Twitter, on our Instagram. We would just love to hear from you. There's a blogs post associated with this episode. You could put comments there that we'll for sure read all these places. Good night, everybody.

43:36 Seth: Good night.