A Buberian Critique of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling : Implications for Leadership and Fighting Evil

Abstract

86 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 A Buberian Critique of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Implications for Leadership and Fighting Evil Haim Gordon Haim Gordon is an associate professor. in the Department of Education at Ben Gurion University. His most recent books are: Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle, coauthored with Rivca Gordon (Greenwood Press, 1995); QUicksand: Israel, the Intifada, and theRise ofPolitical Evil in DemocraCies (Michigan State University Press, 1995); Fighting Evil: UnsrmgHeroes in the Novels ofGraham Greene (Greenwood Press, February 1997). He is currently working on a book on Martin Heidegger and poetry. Dr. Gordon has been active in struggling for peace and human rights in Israel. For the past two decades, and especially since the beginning of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising, I have been concerned with fighting evil, both as a personal engagement and as a philosophical question. By personal engagement I mean that, together with other concerned Israelis and Palestinians, I spent much time and energy fighting, using democratic means, against those who abuse the human rights of Jews and Arabs. In the past few years I have concentrated specifically on fighting those who abuse the rights of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, andthose who attempt to halt the peace process with the Palestinians. Let me just add that struggling for justice by engaging in such a fight was frequently a dangerous and trying undertaking; it took its personal toll. My focusing on the philosophical problem offighting evil and struggling for justice has led me to publish three books and a number ofpapers on this topic.! While fighting evil and struggling with the philosophical questions I often turned for guidance to the Bible, and to existentialist pltilosophers who discussed the Bible. To my consternation, I found that despite my great admiration for Soren Kierkegaard's writings and my appreciation ofFear and Trembling, this remarkable book taught me little about fighting evil and struggling for justice. There seems to be a major paradox here. In exalting terms, Kierkegaard describes Abraham as a knight offaith, as a founder of a true religion, as a teacher of all humankind. Yet there seems to be nothing to learn about fighting evil here and now from Kierkegaard's presentation of the Patriarch and his interpretation of Abraham's existential situation. This paradox was all the more frustrating since Abraham IHaim Gordon and Rivca Gordon, Sartre and Evil: GUidelinesfor a Struggle (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Haim Gordon, QUicksand: Israel, the Intifada, and the Rise ofPolitical Evil in Democracies (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995); and Haim Gordon, Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels ofGraham Greene (Greenwood Press, 1997). A Buberian Critique o/Kierkegaard 87 did relate to evil, for instance in his pleading with God to save the people of Sodom and GomoiTah. Questions emerged. Is not Kierkegaard's version of Abraham, the patriarch, the biblical leader, and the knight of faith, a bit too philosophical, too dialectical? Doesn't Kierkegaard's Abraham rely solely on selected passages and hence remind us too much of Jesus? Isn't presenting Abraham in this manner a distorting ofbiblical leadership? I cannot hope to answer these difficult questions here; they would probably require writing a book. Instead I shall dwell on some ofthe salient weaknesses that I found in Fear and Trembling. I shall also suggest that Martin Buber's discussion of biblical leaders seems to be much truer to their historical existence than Kierkegaard's presentation ofAbraham as a knight offaith. Hence, especially now in an age ofso-called progress, in which evil is widespread, Buber's discussion ofthe Bible and biblical leaders is a much more promising guide for us simple people who have decided to fight evil. In passing I should mention that Buber criticized Kierkegaard's ontology in his essay "The Question to the Single One."2 In that essay, however, he did not discuss Kierkegaard's misconstruing of biblical texts and of basic biblical messages. Buber discussed Fear and Trembling briefly in his short essay "On the Suspension of the Ethical."3 In that essay Buber pointed out, correctly in my view, that Kierkegaard did not take into account that religious fanatics...