A GAMEMNON AND ABRAHAM: THE TRAGIC DILEMMA OF KIERKEGAARD'S KNIGHT OF FAITH

Abstract

They were both men commanded by a god to kill an innocent child. So it is not surprising that, in the course of her reading of Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Martha Nussbaum pauses to note the parallel. She says, 'So far, Agamem non's situation seems to resemble the plight of Abraham on the mountain: a good and (so far) innocent man must either kill an innocent child out of obedience to a divine command, or incur the heavier guilt of disobedience and impiety.'1 Nussbaum's suggestion is that both Agamemnon and Abraham confront tragic choices. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes much of a comparison between Agamemnon and Abraham but insists that the two men represent radically different types. For him, Agamemnon is the paradigmatic tragic hero; Abraham, by contrast, is the exemplary knight of faith. In this paper, I propose to use the sort of perspective on Agamemnon Nussbaum's reading of Aeschylus provides as the basis for mounting a challenge to certain aspects of the Kierkegaardian portrait of the contrast between the tragic hero and the knight of faith. If I read things aright, we had best think of the situations of both Agamemnon and Abraham as practical dilemmas. Johannes de silentio, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous stand in, fails in his lyric treatment of these two figures to plumb the tragic depths of the conflicts they confront. I begin by sketching out a recent philosophical account of the nature of dilemmas and emend it slightly in order to achieve better fit with what Nussbaum has to say about tragic conflict. Next I draw attention to those aspects of Nussbaum's reading of Aeschylus which indicate that she takes Agamemnon to be in a dilemma so conceived. I then proceed to argue that Kierkegaard's remarks about Agamemnon in particular and about tragic heroes more generally should be understood to imply that Agamemnon is not in a dilemma and, in fact, have been so understood by commentators on Fear and Trembling. In the penultimate stage of my argument, I try to cast some light on Kierkegaard's notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical by showing how he employs it to effect a transfer from the case of