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While the material itself is of high quality this editon failed to meet my expectations. The description of this kindle book promises the whole text. However, the text from which it is derived is an abridgement consisting of only 1/3 of Fear and Trembling. Half of the content was simply a summary of Kierkegaard (grealt resembling the wikipedia entry) instead of the actual text. It's not worth paying money for a public domain author when you don't even receive the whole work.
Is my faith justified. In reality they only show that his philosophy was instep with the fictional world of some hand picked literature.In the bits where he is actually addressing the story of Abraham the closest he comes to justifying Abraham's actions still fall far short of any modern standard of ethics. Kierkegaard assumes faith is automatically justified by virtue of its own existence. Instead he assumes that all faith in God is well founded.
Hardly instep with a world that has disavowed one mans ability to own another.So what of the fundamental question at hand. I would have said no before reading this book, and I still feel that way. He never questions or even addresses whether or not Abraham's (or anyone else's) faith is well founded. Ie, is this really the will of God. He argues that Abraham sacrifices Isaac in absolute faith believing that God will restore his son to him.
He is a possession that can be given away, Isaac's life may belong to his father or to God but it was never his own. In doing so he removes an ethical question from the equation. But including this simple question would undermine the veracity of one of his competing sources of ethics, the idea that the will of God (as we perceive it) is intrinsically ethical.This whole book is of course meant to address whether or not Abraham's decision to execute Isaac was ethical. I'm not sure if I'll read Kierkegaard again.
Here's the thing with philosophy: if you agree with all of it you either haven't read enough philosophy or you weren't paying close enough attention.While Kierkegaard presents some very well considered thoughts about what faith is, how one comes by it and how one acts when one has it his other arguments here stand on unchecked foundations. It is explained that it must be Isaac that is sacrificed because he is the best thing that Abraham has. While I certainly wouldn't doubt that Abraham cherished Isaac above all things, this assumes that Isaac's relationship with Abraham is not just as a cherished son but as a valued possession who is completely subject to the will of his father. Can the Abrahamic God make and unethical act ethical, simply by commanding it. The only thing they do uniformly include is an element of faith or sacrifice (though none of them include a sacrifice even remotely as extreme as Isaac). I was impressed with his early analysis of faith here and I suspect he has other ideas that would have merit. This is a rather glaring hole since even if one assumes the Abrahamic God is real one can still have faulty assumptions about him and his will.
But I'm leery that his other works may also start making conclusions before establishing a viable foundation.I think Spinoza's thought's on ethics and behavior in Ethics (Penguin Classics) are much more viable. Once you call into question the authenticity of God's command to sacrifice Isaac you lose a lot of ground in defending Abraham's actions.Kierkegaard goes on to discuss a variety of fictional stories with negligible relations to the story of Abraham. He seems to think that fiction, some specifically written with a moral agenda *coughfaustcough* provide justification for unquestioning faith and prove the veracity of his claims to the real world. Kierkegaard's arguments for God's ethical "get out off jail free card" are simply too desultory, fragmentary and lacking in foundation to convince me. He's also much more readable which is saying something since he wrote it 200 years before Kierkegaard.
364) songs of all time. Yet the highest passion in a man is faith. The heart of Jephthah's story is at Judges 11:30--34 And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, "If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, 31 then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering." 32 So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them: and the LORD gave them into his hand. It is the subject of numerous artistic interpretations and the keynote episode in almost all philosophical and theological discussions of theodicy, the question of God and evil.Among other things Kierkegaard points out, this episode is far more difficult than either the story of Job or the story of Jephthah, a judge of the tribe of Gilead. Both understood the paradoxes which lead to the absurdities of our daily life, and Kierkegaard applied this thinking to revitalize Protestant theology.The book addresses three specific questions in addition to the analysis of Abraham's faith.1.
When he saw here, he tore his clothes and said, "Alas, my daughter. He is the first `modern' thinker, one of the two founders, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, of Existentialism, which began to understand the problems of 17th--19th century rationalism. Human sacrifice was `known' but not condoned in Israel, but keeping a promise was binding in the most important sense. I have far too little space remaining to unpack that statement, so we move on. Get an edition with as much commentary as possible.
Fear and Trembling A Philosophical Masterpiece by Sõren Kierkegaard is so short, you wonder why you would need notes and commmentary. This is an important work as much for its brevity as for its depth.The story of God's ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is, to my knowledge the ONLY episode in the Bible which is the entire subject of a major philosophical work. Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical. Kierkegaard is a Lutheran philosopher/theologian, maybe the greatest Protestant theoretician. 34 Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. This journey must have been painful in the extreme, for both the personal loss and the literal immorality of the act he intends.Thus is Kierkegaard's primary objective, the study of the difficulty of faith.
You have brought me very low;.For I have opened my mouth to the LORD and I cannot take back my vow." Jephthah's situation is tragic, doubly so in that if he had simply said `whatever' rather than `whoever', a chicken or goat would have easily been the sacrificial offering. 33 He inflicted a massive defeat on them. Avoid the Wilder Publications edition, as it has NO notes and is full of misprints. Is there an absolute duty to God, beyond the ethical.For someone who is schooled in Kant's basis of ethical theory, Kierkegaard's sense of the foundation of morals seems odd, until you realize it is both a universal and Christian through and through, because the ethical universal for Kierkegaard is love of neighbor, just as Abraham's ethical duty was defined by his love for Isaac, and ethical duty is NOT defined by love of God. The heroic faith is not measured by the result, but by what the hero of faith had to endure to get to that end. In simpler terms, this is a variation of the question `Does the end justify the means.' Kierkegaard argued that this was a paradox which was only resolved by faith. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. Kierkegaard, the psychologist, makes a point of the fact that the journey of Abraham and Isaac must have taken several days, more than the three specified, what with the collection of wood, the climb up the mountain, and the building of the altar.
Therefore, the knight of faith may through love of God do something which is the opposite of one's ethical duty toward their neighbor, and that impulse of faith is something he cannot make intelligible to others. You do. Abraham is a hero of faith because of what he endured in spite of the immorality of his intentions.2. No one is a hero for having won the lottery. Kierkegaard's thought is difficult, but we have two things which should help us understand him. Men fall away from faith, because they cannot bear the martyrdom of being misunderstood, and choose the worldly route to proficiency. Since Abraham is driven by faith, he is driven by something of which he cannot speak; but, ironically, not speaking in this circumstance was kinder to Sarah and Isaac than speaking.In his epilogue, Kierkegaard says that unlike science, faith must be discovered anew by each generation, so everyone begins even with Abraham. Less important, but no less impressive is the fact that it is probably the only episode from the Bible which is quoted, albeit loosely, in a song in Rolling Stone's top 500 (Nr.
Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his intentions from Sarah, Isaac, and Eleazar.Kierkegaard says it was unethical for Abraham to not speak, because speech expresses the universal, and the ethical is the universal. Thus, Jephthah stumbled and his daughter was killed through stupidity, similar to Hamlet's indecision and Macbeth's ambition.But Abraham is intending to break the law, and endure considerable pain in the process. In addition, the classic is a work on both moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, as it clearly fits one criterion of that subject, in showing what are the questions which religion is supposed to answer. If no absolute duty to God exists, then faith does not exist.3. `There are perhaps many in every generation who do not even reach it, but no one gets further.But for the man also who does not so much as reach faith life has tasks enough, and if one loves them sincerely, life will by no means be wasted, even though it never is comparable to the life of those who sensed and grasped the highest.'
They have specific meanings given by Hegel referring more or less to what conforms to cultural norms and in Kierkegaard's milieu to its middle class morality. It stands as a class of its own - and this is the radical call of faith, which even the articulate Johannes has no words to positively explicate, save that it is a 'marvel', a 'miracle'. Words like 'ethical', 'universal' are not to be taken in the contemporary sense. Still, in this book some knowledge of Hegelian philosophy/ terminology and Greek mythology is almost indispensable in understanding him aright. Soren Kierkegaard's works are notably difficult to read. It is as the author says, 'faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill to be acquired in a matter of weeks or days.'I would recommend this to any reader with an intellectual and religious bent and for the reflective Christians who are wondering what to make of his faith. Agamemnon in Greek mythology). He succeeds for the most part in describing faith by saying what it is not; the knight of faith can be reduced to neither the knight of infinite resignation nor the tragic hero (eg.
It is better to see faith, from SK's point of view, as a supra-rational act, or better still a gift that is wrought by God. This is what is meant by the famous line that Abraham's act was 'a teleological suspension of the ethical'.Kierkegaard here writes through his pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence, who is anything but silent). Fear and Trembling is perhaps the least formidable in comparison. Many are mistaken to see this as a blind leap or a mindless choice. It is this sort of 'universal ethic' that he wants to separate from bona fide Christian faith.Abraham's famous act of faith in offering his son, Isaac to be sacrificed at the behest of God is a supreme example of what Christian ethic is all about - not a simple conformity to what is generally accepted by human society but a radical obedience to divine commands that may at times fly in the face of the prevailing sensibilities. who seeks to penetrate the mystery of faith with his rational mind. Yet, it is a faith that does not come cheap. Not an easy read but rewarding to those who plough at it, preferably with some help.
There are open quotation marks not followed by closed quotation marks. This review is only for the Wilder Publications edition of Fear and Trembling and does not refer to the content of the book at all. IT IS UNBELIEVABLY BAD. There are open parentheses not followed by closed parentheses. It looks more like a pamphlet than a book.So, by all means, buy and read Fear and Trembling, but do not buy this Wilder Publications version. There are blank pages within the text.the whole text is there, presumably, but the blank pages are distracting.
The print quality is poor. I have not finished reading Fear and Trembling yet, but there are some interesting ideas about faith but also, I think, some theological and philosophical errors, but perhaps I will comment on those once I've read the text a few times.My main reason for writing this review regards the quality of this specific printing. The paper quality is poor. Typos abound to the point of compromising clarity. Punctuation is incorrect and sometimes completely absent. It looks like it was printed on cheap printer paper with a cheap printer, folded, stapled and then glued to a thin waxy cover that has no printing on the spine.
Amazon should not even be selling this poor a quality printing at any price.
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