Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling by Paul Martens

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-206
Author(s):  
Derek Hostetter
Keyword(s):  
Fear And Trembling

scholarly journals Das Verhältnis von Selbstwerdung und Gott bei Sören Kierkegaard. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Thomas Park
Keyword(s):  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
True Self ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Fear And Trembling

AbstractIn Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard (alias Johannes de Silentio) writes that Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac for God’s sake as well as for his own sake. Drawing mainly on The Sickness unto Death I will argue that Kierkegaard construes Abraham as becoming a true self, that is, as someone who becomes self-transparent before God. What this means and how our relationship with God is supposed to be involved in the process of becoming a self is the focus of my paper. While various articles have been written on that topic, my aim here is to give the most charitable interpretation of Kierkegaard’s theses and the theological concepts involved.

On Fear and Trembling’s Motif of the Promise: Faith, Ethics and the Politics of Tragedy

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-84
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Fear And Trembling

Abstract This article interrogates the concepts of faith, the ethical, and tragedy in Fear and Trembling by examining Johannes De Silentio’s allusions to heroic characters. I argue that these heroes are emblematic of faith or tragedy through their orientation to a promise in their respective mythic narratives. Abraham’s faith in the covenant with God commits him to the reconcilability of virtue and the good life, while the tragic heroes’ commitments to the ethical reveal their inability to transcend the (tragic) presumption that virtue and the good life are ultimately incommensurable. I conclude by sketching a politics corresponding to De Silentio’s conception of tragedy.

Kierkegaard's Socratic Alternative to Hegel in Fear and Trembling

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Matthew Dinan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fear And Trembling

Abstract Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.

Die Ausnahme bei Christian Garve und Søren Kierkegaard

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-288
Author(s):  
Sabine Ackermann
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fear And Trembling

AbstractAlthough people have established rules to secure their life and values, they seem to search—and to have searched, time and again, in the past—for exceptions to those rules, and this for different purposes. The article compares two concepts of exception, suggested by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling and by Garve in his Treatise on the Connection between Moral and Politics, respectively. A systematic-critical analysis shows certain intersections between their specific ways of handling the proposed exception. Garve’s concept of exception requires an original status naturalis between countries to increase happiness, and this is claimed by an established sovereign ruling with trust in God for his people. By contrast, the exception of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical turns out, precisely by being based on an individual’s relationship with God, to be incommensurable with purportedly universal social, ethical and political standards. This notwithstanding, both conceptions build on the notion of a human existence, which is subject to and ultimately dependent upon no one except the immortal God.

Kierkegaard on Love

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lippitt
Keyword(s):  
Divine Love ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Fear And Trembling ◽  
Works Of Love

This chapter offers an overview of some key themes in Kierkegaard’s writings on love. After a brief discussion of love in Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, it concentrates on Works of Love. It explores the centrality of divine love and the distinction between love of the neighbor and “preferential loves” such as erotic love and friendship, arguing that for Kierkegaard preferential loves at their best are infused with neighbor-love. It goes on to argue that Kierkegaard’s “vision” view of love anticipates aspects of contemporary such views, such as that of Troy Jollimore. But for Kierkegaard, agapic neighbor-love (and not just erotic love and friendship) requires attention to the particularities of the person loved, so neighbor-love is not just generalized benevolence. Finally, the chapter briefly sketches how the foregoing insights may be applied to the task of distinguishing proper from improper self-love.

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