Saving Abraham

Abstract

As is frequently noted, the subtitle of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous Fear and Trembling-Dialektisk Lyrik-seems to impute to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, the self-contradictory status of or, perhaps more colloquially, philosophical poet.1 Johannes de silentio thus inhabits two literary realms, the philosophical-dialectical and the poetical-lyrical, and it is from within that cohabitation that he writes Fear and Trembling. This disciplinary boundary crossing is not unfamiliar to students of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature, particularly that of the European Continent, and it certainly was not unfamiliar to writers and philosophers in Copenhagen during Denmark's Golden Age. When writing of himself, however, Johannes de silentio seems incapable of unifying the two realms in a manner suited to his subtitle. He writes: The present author is by no means a philosopher. He ispoetice et eleganter a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes. (FT 7; SKS 4, 103/ In this passage in his Preface, Johannes de silentio casts himself as the poet, definitely opposed to the philosopher. While the philosopher interests him- or herself in the systemeither by writing the system, or promising that there will be a system-Johannes de silentio is an elegant and poetic clerk. He does not write world historically, he does not aim to move World Spirit closer to Absolute Knowledge and the system's end; he writes because it is a pleasure for him to do so, especially when his writings promise not to be read. Yet Johannes de silentio is a dialectician, and admits as much further into the book. By means of introduction to the three Problemata of Fear and Trembling, he writes: In order to perceive the prodigious paradox of faith, a paradox that makes a murder into a holy and God-pleasing act, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham again, which no thought can grasp, because faith begins precisely where thought stops-in order to perceive this, it is now my intention to draw out in the form of problemata the dialectical aspects implicit in the story of Abraham. (FT 53; SKS 4, 147) Thus, the second half of the work is a dialectical project. Johannes de silentio allows this fact to overtake his poetic identity in Problema III: But here I stop; I am not a poet, and I go at things only dialectically (FT 90; SKS 4, 180). A dialectical lyricist, Johannes de silentio seems incapable of instantiating poetry and philosophy in some happy medium between the two.4 Rather, he is an example of both the dialectician and the lyricist, the poet and the philosopher. He is separately the poet of Abraham and the dialectician trying to explain Abraham-but he is not these simultaneously, as the relation of the Problemata (where he claims to be only a dialectician) to the rest of the work (where he claims to be only a poet) makes somewhat clear. Johannes de silentio claims to understand only the ethical, to find faith ever incomprehensible. In so doing, he distances himself absolutely from his hero, Abraham, the paradigmatic knight of faith. Yet, as we will see, Johannes de silentio is not a knight of faith precisely because, confronted with the paradox of Abraham, he seeks mediation. Knowing that Abraham is a murderer, he tries to make Abraham's murder ethically justifiable-and yet he also denies the possibility of Abraham's justification. This is not the same as remaining simply within the ethical, from which perspective one must condemn the knight of faith. The more he argues for Abraham's justifiability, the more he conceals what he knows about Abraham: that nothing about Abraham as the knight of faith can be known or justified. …