The Absurdity of Faith in the "Preliminary Expectoration" of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

Abstract

It is sometimes said of Michelangelo that when he sculpted he pulled the figure out from the of marble. With respect to the matter of the absurd, the subject of this paper, it helps to see Kierkegaard in a similar fashion. The of marble for him is a mass made up of many things, including the Bible, the entire history of philosophy (ancient in particular), the history of literature, Hegelianism, and Christendom. Kierkegaard pulls the absurd out of this block. Rather than imposed on the from the very begin­ ning, the absurd is an expression of strains peculiar to the mass on which Kierkegaard works. It is most readily seen to emerge only at the end of a reflective process. I say this to emphasize that beginning directly with the absurd would force us to halt before an abyss. Like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, Kierkegaard's absurd is an abyssal thought, more like a chasm and ending than a beginning, easier to fall into than to go around. In Nietzsche's case, the eternal recur­ rence is an equalizer. We read in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other, even the greatest all-too-human. All-toosmall, the greatest!—that was my disgust with man. And the eternal re­ currence even of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence. Alas! Nausea! Nausea! Nausea! (331) The disgust expressed here, along with the concomitant views of hu­ manity, opens a chasm. By this, I do not mean that Nietzsche's thought has reached its culmination, nor insist that my interpreta­ tion of the passage is conclusive. I want only to indicate that to begin with a thought like eternal recurrence denies access to the block of