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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2021
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.
This paper was first presented as a talk at College of the Holy Cross and St. John's University. Vivien Zelazny, Mary Nichols, Jeffrey Bernstein, Mary Townsend, Derek Duplessie, Chase Padusniak, Tim Rice, Philip Lee, Andrea Schutz, Andrew Moore, and Matte Robinson all helped shape its argument and refine its prose.
1 Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals and Papers, vol. 1, ed. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 221Google Scholar.
2 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Existence and Ethics,” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Rée, Jonathan and Chamberlain, Jane (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 31Google Scholar. But for an attempt at a rapprochement between Levinas and Kierkegaard see Simmons, J. Aaron and Wood, David, eds., Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. Merold Westphal's contribution, “The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard.”
3 Levinas, “Existence and Ethics,” 34.
4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 47Google Scholar. As with Levinas, there has been an attempt to draw out affinities between Kierkegaard and MacIntyre, in John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd, eds., Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue (Chicago: Open Court Books, 2001), although MacIntyre's own contribution to the volume does little to alter his original assessment.
5 Wolin, Richard, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 319CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite this critique, Arendt's characterization of Socrates in The Life of the Mind owes much to Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus. See Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Books, 1971)Google Scholar. My thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article for pointing this out.
7 On the similarities between Strauss and Kierkegaard see Leora Batnizky, “Leo Strauss,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2016 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/strauss-leo/; Melzer, Arthur, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Havers, Grant, “Kierkegaard, Adorno, and the Socratic Individual,” European Legacy 18, no. 7 (2013): 833–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dinan, Matthew, “Strauss, Kierkegaard, and the ‘Secret of the Art of Helping,’” Idealistic Studies 44, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 249–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 321Google Scholar.
9 Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, June 4, 1951, in Faith and Political Philosophy, ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 88–89.
10 Pangle, Thomas, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 172Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., 181.
12 See Matuštík, Martin, “Kierkegaard as a Socio-political Thinker and Activist,” Man and World 27 (1994): 211–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Kierkegaard's Radical Existential Praxis, or: Why the Individual Defies Liberal, Communitarian, and Postmodern Categories,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin Matuštík and Merold Westphal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995), 239–64; and Alison Assiter, Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished Selves (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
13 Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).
14 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, trans. Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 75. See Michael Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Alison Assiter, “Lukács, Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Political,” in The Kierkegaardian Mind, ed. Patrick Stokes, Adam Buben, and Eleanor Helms (London: Routledge, 2019), 423–34; Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019); and Jamie Aroosi, The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
15 David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jacob Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
16 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 43.
17 Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates, 9.
18 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 625–26.
19 For a good overview of the nature of, and various approaches to, the pseudonymous authorship see Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 24–45, and Matuštík, “Reading ‘Kierkegaard’ as a Drama,” in The Point of View, International Kierkegaard Commentary 22, ed. Robert Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), 411–30.
20 Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 245–47. But see Clare Carlisle, “Johannes de Silentio's Dilemma,” in Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling”: A Critical Guide, ed. Daniel Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 44–60; Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991); Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Olivia Blanchette, “The Silencing of Philosophy,” in “Fear and Trembling” and “Repetition,” International Kierkegaard Commentary 6, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993), 29–66.
21 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 626.
22 Citations to Fear and Trembling are to Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh and C. Stephen Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and will be given parenthetically in-text.
23 Jacob Howland, “Fear and Trembling's ‘Attunement’ as midrash,” in Conway, Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling,” 27–28.
24 Ann Ward argues that Silentio objects to the diminution of human greatness implied by Hegel's reduction of human greatness to “world-historical individuals,” whose greatness is a result the mediation of Spirit in world history instead of virtue. In Ward's reading, Kierkegaard aims to counteract the life-denying effects of the belief that one lives at the end of history. Ann Ward, “Abraham, Agnes and Socrates: Love and History in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling,” in Love and Friendship, ed. Eduardo Velasquez (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 297–337.
25 “Infinite resignation” bears a close family resemblance to Hegel's account of “infinite personality” or “infinite negativity,” as discussed below. For more on Hegel's account of infinity and Fear and Trembling see Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, 270, and Blanchette, “Silencing of Philosophy,” 46–47.
26 As Daniel Conway puts it, Silentio “is at his lyrical best when granted the freedom to blur the boundaries and tweak the categories established, supposedly, by the imperious System.” Conway, “Particularity and Ethical Attunement: Situating Problema III,” in Conway, Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling,” 209.
27 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14.
28 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), §78.
29 Silentio's praise of Descartes contrasts with the approach taken by another Kierkegaardian pseudonym, Johannes Climacus. Kierkegaard's unfinished biography Johannes Climacus shows the difficulties encountered by Climacus in actually trying to doubt everything. Climacus's book, Philosophical Fragments, distinguishes Socratic doubt from Cartesian and Hegelian doubt. Silentio is more optimistic about the prospects of modern philosophy than Climacus, at least. Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandem Est: A Narrative, in Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 118–72. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this contrast.
30 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §260.
31 Ibid., §258.
32 Kierkegaard was deeply engaged with this element of Hegel's thought, including an analysis of Hegel's view of Socrates as an appendix to his Magister's dissertation. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 219–37.
33 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §140.
34 Ibid., Addition, p. 180.
35 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 398.
36 Ibid., 399.
37 Velkley's thoughtful account of the role of Socrates in the Philosophy of Right has helped develop my thinking throughout this section. See Richard Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates’ Daimon, and the Modern State,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 3 (March 2006): 579.
38 For a thorough explication of Hegel's account of infinite individuality and its relationship to his political thought, see Jeffrey Church, Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), esp. chap. 3. Church's account generally defends the integrity of the individual in Hegel more than mine does here.
39 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §185A.
40 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 124–25.
41 G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1995), §552.
42 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §270R.
43 Velkley, “Possessed Individualism,” 586.
44 Silentio shares with Socrates a dedication to “infinite resignation.” Faith is a gift bestowed by God's grace and cannot be achieved by human effort as can Socratic knowledge of ignorance or infinite resignation. Silentio does not adjudicate the content of this gift—Christian revelation—focusing instead on its human significance. This is surely one of the notable limitations of Fear and Trembling, and an important reason why it is not Kierkegaard's last word on the problems Silentio here addresses. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this clarification.
45 Pangle, God of Abraham, 172.
46 Both Ward, “Love and History,” and Conway, “Particularity and Ethical Attunement,” persuasively show the ways in which Silentio's “aesthetic” approach to the third problem enlivens his discussion and lends nuance to his consideration of Abraham.
47 Ultimately God provides a ram, not a lamb. The precise character of what Abraham knows is the subject of scholarly controversy. Michelle Kosch outlines three separate possibilities for the “unsayability” of Abraham's private knowledge: “either what Abraham cannot say is unsayable by anyone, or it is sayable in principle, but not by him,” to which she adds a third, that Abraham himself does not fully understand his situation, and therefore cannot explain it (Michelle Kosch, “What Abraham Couldn't Say,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 82 [2008]: 59–78). I agree with John Lippitt both that Kosch's interpretation is unlikely and that Mulhall's is most compelling. See Mullhall, Stephen, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 379–83Google Scholar; Lippitt, John, “What neither Abraham nor Johannes de Silentio Could Say,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 82 (2008): 79–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Ward, “Love and History,” 328–29.
49 Edward F. Mooney also notes the limited ways in which Socrates transcends the realm of the ethical but does not go as far as I do in suggesting that Socrates resembles Abraham in this final section. See Mooney, Edward F., Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 139–41Google Scholar.
50 I thus agree with Pangle who argues—“(as Socrates would have predicted)”—that Fear and Trembling “would appear to be incapable of steadfastly sticking with [the] attempt to attribute the faith of Abraham, or of anyone, to the absurd or indeed insane specific contradiction originally claimed” (Pangle, God of Abraham, 181).
51 Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. Wills, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 81Google Scholar.
52 Neither Silentio nor Kierkegaard appears to have had access to Hegel's early theological writings in which he published what Westphal calls a “bitter polemic” against Abraham. Nevertheless, the existence of these writings confirms Silentio's reading of Hegel. See Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society, 76n52.
53 Daniel Conway, introduction to Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling,” 2.
54 Conway raises the possibility of the interpretation I offer here, but suggests that he will leave its development for “another occasion” (Conway, “Particularity and Ethical Attunement,” 218).
55 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
56 Aroosi views this reference to Heraclitus as Kierkegaard's attempt to show that accepting the world as flux can lead to “Socratic detachment” which “helps remedy our anxious desire to dominate” (Aroosi, Dialectical Self, 96). This may well be so, but Aroosi then links Kierkegaard's purported fluxism with Marx's contention that modern capitalism makes “all that is solid [melt] into air” (96). Aroosi's omission of the pseudonymous authorship of Fear and Trembling leads him to wrongly absorb Kierkegaard into the immanence of Hegelian thought by way of Marx.
57 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 382. See also Carlisle, “Johannes de Silentio's Dilemma,” 59–60.
58 Ronald Green gives the classic answer to this question: Fear and Trembling lacks a discussion of sin. See Green, “Deciphering Fear and Trembling's Secret Message,” Religious Studies 22, no. 1 (March 1986): 95–111 Scholars are rightly fascinated by the “secret” message in Fear and Trembling; the exchange between Kosch and Lippitt is instructive in surveying the terrain. See Kosch, “What Abraham Couldn't Say,” and Lippitt, “What neither Abraham nor Johannes de Silentio Could Say.” My reading is closest to Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality.
59 Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates, 216–18.
60 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 262. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out. The nature of how these options are viewed in light of the specific claims of Christian revelation can be explored only by other pseudonyms—thus the “contest” between Socrates and Christ in Philosophical Fragments—but the possibility of such an investigation is established through the critique of Hegelian historicism laid down in Fear and Trembling.
61 Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 17.