De Silentio Research Articles

Sørena Kierkegaarda pojęcie lęku

In Either/Or Søren Kierkegaard introduced the concept of absolute choice, and them in Fear and Trembling he wrote a lot about the leap of faith, nevertheless neither Judge Wilhelm nor Johannes de Silentio gave the motive that could have brought a particular man to make the choice of his own self in order to have an authentic life. For this reason – as Vigilius Haufniensis – Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Anxiety to answer the following questions: what prompts a man to choose himself? is it something that impels him “from the outside”? or maybe – some "internal" persecutory power? and what testifies to the man the possibility of making such a choice? Therefore, the purpose of this work is to analyze the Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety (in the context of his interpretation of the Fall of First Man) as the main condition and the explanation of the absolute choice.

Kierkegaard, Spiritual Crisis, and Anxious Faith: Battling for Faith in Fear and Trembling and Strengthening in the Inner Being

Abstract This study shows that, for Kierkegaard, the crisis of faith plays an essential role in the life of faith. To demonstrate this, it compares pseudonym Johannes de silentio’s portrayals of religious crisis in Fear and Trembling with similar sketches in Strengthening in the Inner Being, an edifying discourse published on the same day as Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard agrees with de silentio that the life of faith is tethered to struggle, but unlike his pseudonym, who is baffled by the source of Abraham’s bold trust, Kierkegaard is more confident about identifying that which gives him strength: an inner, divine affirmation.

Abraham’s Faith: Both the Aesthetic and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling

In this paper, I examine Johannes de Silentio’s presentation of the faith of Abraham, deriving therefrom a new way of conceiving his notion of faith as a paradoxical co-inhabiting of both the aesthetic and the ethical stages, rather than as a rejection, synthesis, or overcoming of them. Relying largely upon Silentio’s account of Abraham’s faith as anxious but not doubting, I argue that the interpretations of Fear and Trembling by Alastair Hannay and Mark C. Taylor fail to account for some essential aspects of Silentio’s depiction. I conclude that faith, as it is described in Fear and Trembling, cannot be philosophically understood as it is not an object for thought but an existential perspective one lives.

Johannes de Silentio, dimensões da sua escrita

On this paper, we seek to analyze one of the many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes de Silentio, author only of book Fear and Trembling. We will discuss how he presents himself as a poet and an admirer. Also, we will look into how these categories are also analyzed in Practice in Christianity and in Sickness unto Death, written by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, the Christians par excellence. From there, the poet and the admirer will be discussed with Kierkegaard’s critique of the mass. In the end, we will show reasons for the importance of this poetic role into the religious.

Could a Divine-Command Theory of Moral Obligations Justify Horrible Acts? Some Kierkegaardian Reflections

Abstract This paper considers whether a divine-command theory of moral obligation (DCT) could justify morally horrible acts, partly by examining Kierkegaard’s writings. It argues that only the commands of a God who is essentially good could be morally justified, and thus no defensible version of a DCT could actually justify horrible acts. In Works of Love Kierkegaard defends such a DCT, and thus is committed to the claim that any actual commands of God must be aimed at the good. This is consistent with the claim that if we knew that a command that is alleged to be from God is directed at what is bad, the command must not be authentic. The issue raised by Fear and Trembling, where Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio considers the “binding of Isaac” story, thus raises crucial epistemic issues, which cannot be settled without considering how one might come to know that a purported revelation from God is authentic, as well as how one might come to believe that some particular moral belief is wrong. The paper defends the view that if one knew that a revelation from God was authentic, then one could be justified in holding a moral view on some particular issue, such as veganism, that clashes with the dominant views of one’s contemporaries.

Kierkegaard's Socratic Alternative to Hegel inFear and Trembling

AbstractSøren Kierkegaard'sFear and Tremblinghas 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.

On Fear and Trembling’s Motif of the Promise: Faith, Ethics and the Politics of Tragedy

Abstract This article interrogates the concepts of faith, the ethical, and tragedy in Fear and Trembling by examining Johannes De Silentio’s allusions to heroic characters. I argue that these heroes are emblematic of faith or tragedy through their orientation to a promise in their respective mythic narratives. Abraham’s faith in the covenant with God commits him to the reconcilability of virtue and the good life, while the tragic heroes’ commitments to the ethical reveal their inability to transcend the (tragic) presumption that virtue and the good life are ultimately incommensurable. I conclude by sketching a politics corresponding to De Silentio’s conception of tragedy.

Das Verhältnis von Selbstwerdung und Gott bei Sören Kierkegaard. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme

Abstract In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard (alias Johannes de Silentio) writes that Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac for God’s sake as well as for his own sake. Drawing mainly on The Sickness unto Death I will argue that Kierkegaard construes Abraham as becoming a true self, that is, as someone who becomes self-transparent before God. What this means and how our relationship with God is supposed to be involved in the process of becoming a self is the focus of my paper. While various articles have been written on that topic, my aim here is to give the most charitable interpretation of Kierkegaard’s theses and the theological concepts involved.

Fathers and sons

In this article, I take a closer look at the inconsistencies of Johannes de Silentio's position in Fear and Trembling. First, the article lays out the different inconsistencies of de Silentio's text. Secondly, I argue the case that the ultimate tension of the Abraham narrative is the way in which it points toward the self-sacrifice - and teachings - of Christ. Thirdly, I consider Robert A. Paul's reconstruction of Freud's analysis of the foundational myth of Moses and the establishment of Western civilization. Whereas it is Paul's point that we need to re-experience the guilt of mythical crimes to make sense of Christian atonement, I suggest that we must go through Abraham's - potentially fatal - faithful suspension of the ethical in order to understand why both God and loving deeds must ultimately be understood as self-sacrificial and other-concerning.

Faith, Recognition, and Community

This article looks at “faith-in” and what Jonathan Kvanvig calls the “belittler objection” by comparing Hegel and Kierkegaard’s interpretations of Abram (later known as Abraham). I first argue that Hegel’s treatment of Abram in Spirit of Christianity and its Fate is an objection to faith-in. Building on this from additional Hegelian texts, I argue that Hegel’s objection arises from his social command account of morality. I then turn to Johannes de Silentio’s treatments of Abraham in Fear and Trembling and Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love to argue that Kierkegaard defends faith-in as part of a moderate divine command account of moral knowledge. Finally, this article concludes that the belittler objection is ultimately an objection to faith-in as a divine command source of moral knowledge or obligation rather than a social command source.

Johannes de Silentio and the art of subtraction: from voice to love in Fear and Trembling

When a man has filled his mouth so full of food that for this reason he cannot eat and it must end with his dying of hunger, does giving food to him consist in stuffing his mouth even more or, inst...

The Binding of Abraham: Levinas’s Moment in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Most readings of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling take its account of the Abraham and Isaac story to imply fairly obviously that duty towards God is absolutely distinct from, and therefore capable of superseding, duty towards neighbor or son. This paper will argue, however, that the Akedah, or ‘binding’ of Isaac, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, depicts it, binds Abraham to Isaac in a revitalized neighbor relation that is not at all subordinate, in any simple way, to Abraham’s God-relation. The two relations are defined by an intimate mutual tension, a dynamic of passionate inwardness that responds to the immediate demands of the neighbor as fully as the ethics that Levinas notoriously accuses Kierkegaard of having ignored. It is also the dynamic of time consciousness, which for Levinas is fundamentally ethical. I show that Kierkegaardian faith can be viewed as the dynamic of time-consciousness transformed by passionate inwardness into one’s God-relation—that is, converted into a certain religious mode of life. The ethics corresponding to this—an ethics of neighbor love superseding the ‘social morality’ that Silentio, following Hegel, calls the ‘ethical’—would then be the same dynamic of time-consciousness transformed by passionate inwardness into one’s neighbor-relation. The key to the argument is seeing the need to substitute for the spatial dichotomy ‘interior/exterior,’ which results in so much trouble when comparing Levinas and Kierkegaard, the temporal contraries ‘giving up’ and ‘getting back.’

"The Happiness of 'Slight Superiority'": Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Resentment

My aim in this essay is to pair Kierkegaard with the German-born philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). I am particularly concerned to juxtapose their complementary investigations into the etiology and operation of resentment, which both thinkers identified as exerting a powerfully retardant force within the bourgeois societies of late modern European culture. Indeed, both were concerned to demonstrate the extent to which the corrosive power of resentment had transformed the religious injunction to “love thy neighbor” into a culturally sponsored program to “beggar thy neighbor.” 
 The result of this pairing, or so I hope to demonstrate, is a productive division of philosophical labor: From Nietzsche, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s readers may gain a clear sense of how a community founded on ressentiment may accommodate “healthy” expressions of comparative advantage and relative superiority. Even when exaggerated and amplified, however, these expressions pose no threat to the conservative, contractionary structure of the ethical life of the community in question. In particular, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment may explain that, and why, the seemingly daring meditation conducted by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling yields such a muddled and unsatisfying conclusion.

Kierkegaard on the eternal validity of the self

The mysterious phrase, ‘the eternal validity of the self,’ is clearly quite important in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. A reader of those works will see that becoming aware of your eternal validity is a prerequisite for becoming both Judge William’s ‘ethical man’ and Johannes de Silentio’s ‘knight of faith,’ but the same reader is likely to be unsure just what it means to become aware of yourself in your eternal validity. In this paper, I discuss and critique various accounts of the concept of the eternal validity of the self. Then, I offer an account of that notion which proceeds from careful attention to Judge William’s use of the phrase in Either/Or. Finally, I connect my account with some of Kierkegaard’s writings beyond Either/Or.

From the Shadows of Mt. Moriah

Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, purports to be an individual who admires faith but cannot attain to its unearthly standards. The discontinuity between Kierkegaard, who self-identified as a religious author, and de Silentio, who approaches Abraham in self-doubt, is apparent—and as a result, some have argued for an utter dissociation between these two authors. I argue that such dissociation undermines the potency of the work, especially with regard to the perspective on faith presented therein. The significance of de Silentio’s perspective becomes clear when set against the backdrop of Kierkegaard’s view of the relationship between anxiety and faith; in this light, de Silentio turns out to represent an early stage of the individual’s religious development, and Kierkegaard turns out to have recently surpassed this stage before writing the work.

Going No Further: Toward an Interpretation of “Problema III” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Abstract The concluding paragraphs of “Problema III” in Fear and Trembling feature a narrator determined to defend the good name of Abraham. Rejuvenated by his excursion to the aesthetic-ethical confinium, Johannes de silentio endeavors to defend the ethical merit of Abraham’s notorious promise of divine providence. Along the way, however, Johannes unexpectedly arrives at the realization that his supposed bond with Abraham is little more than a fabrication on his part. As “Problema III” approaches its conclusion, Johannes suspends his quest for self-understanding. Without Abraham as his traveling companion, he will go no further

Iphigenia vs. Abraham

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The story of the binding of Isaac, also known as the akedah (Genesis 221) has been subject to many important philosophical commentaries and discussions. One of these is Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, first published in 1843. In this work, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio and provides an illustration of different ways of engaging ethically with life. Among these is the tragic hero, who succeeds in ethical ac- tion only when he is subject to the laws of the generality (be this the State or the Church). Another one is the knight of faith who, unlike the tragic hero, is able to behave morally only when opting for an authentic choice that is unexplainable to the generality because it betrays it. The paradigmatic case of the knight of faith, for Kierkegaard, is Abraham: he obeys God's command to perform the akedah on his son Isaac, thus betraying the societal law of loving one's children more than oneself. Making this decision, Abraham behaves appropriately towards God, yet he does not behave appropriately towards the generality; unable to explain this choice, he remains silent and misunderstood.As Kierkegaard tells us, Abraham betrays the laws of the generality because he opens himself to the expectation of the impossible (for example, that Isaac's life would be spared, or that he would resurrect). This expectation of an impos- sible result is, in my view, partial. That is to say, it is the expectation of one among many impossible results, some of which would work against what Kierkegaard sees as Abraham's hopes. Expecting the impossible without qualification means to consider that the outcome of one's decision may be that everything of which one had previous experiences, and everything that one believed (for example, that God keeps promises), would turn out to be false. This is an outcome that Abraham is not prepared to consider; thus, his expectation of the impossible is qualified, and this seems to be seminal for his agreement to perform the akedah. His misapprehension of what the impossible without qualification entails may be propelled by an error in his intellectual habits, or (perhaps also in conjunction with the former) by communicable and understandable reasons for why he chose to perform the akedah.2 In any of these two scenarios, the role of the knight of faith fits Abraham much more closely than what Kierkegaard envisioned.When comparing Abraham with the character of Iphigenia from Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, it becomes apparent that she exhibits characteristics that allow her to fit the paradigm of someone that makes a leap of faith. Much like Abraham, she faces a difficult choice in which a murder ordered by a divinity is involved. Yet, unlike Abraham, Iphigenia has (and discloses) clear reasons for why she will concede to her self-sacrifice. These reasons, however, do not stem from previous encounters with the divinity; rather, they stem from her moral character. Most surprisingly, Iphigenia is able to sublimate her self-sacrifice into a joyous experi- ence. While she has no expectations of the impossible to occur (namely, her own salvation), she embraces her fate and expects to save Greece.In this article I will explain why I believe that Abraham may not fit the role of the knight of faith as described by Kierkegaard, and how Iphigenia provides an attractive counterpoint to this paradigm. In order to account for the behavior of both Abraham and Iphigenia I will use Aristotle's notion of ... (habit or state) as appears in Nicomachean Ethics II.5. It is not my intention to enter into the debate of whether Kierkegaard's ethics compare to Aristotle's, or to virtue ethics in general.3 Rather, I wish to use Aristotle as a resource to illuminate the point that the ways in which we act are, if not caused, at the very least influenced by the habits we form when responding to feelings.I thus begin my analysis with Kierkegaard's intentions for the work Fear and Trembling. …

Consideraciones en torno a lo ético y lo religioso en Temor y temblor

En este articulo se recoge un breve y elemental análisis del texto kierkegaardiano Temor y Temblor con un particular enfoque hacia las esferas de lo estético, lo ético y lo religioso, preguntándose por una posible interrelación en ellas. Con base en esto, se realizan una serie de anotaciones particulares a los problemas de fondo en la doctrina que ofrece Kierkegaard en esta obra. Dichas observaciones oscilan entre las obras mismas del filósofo danés y lo que la filosofía del lenguaje tendría que decir al respecto. El uso de estas herramientas filosóficas determina para el autor algunos puntos de autoengaño en Kierkegaard y otras inconsistencias en la enunciación del pensamiento religioso desde la perspectiva de Johannes de Silentio frente al mismo Søren Kierkegaard como individuo.

Sublating Reverence to Parents: A Kierkegaardian Interpretation of the Sage-King Shun’s Piety

In the Mengzi there is a hypothetical situation relating how the ancient sage-king Shun would respond if his father had committed murder. This has recently become a source of debate among Chinese philosophers. Here we will apply arguments made by Johannes de silentio (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) about the “teleological suspension of the ethical” related to the action of the biblical Abraham, and link them up to alternative interpretations of the actions of Shun. This challenges the current and traditional interpretations of his actions, suggesting how this new approach can overcome ethical quandaries related to the Mengzian account of Shun’s behavior.

Sublating Reverence to Parents: A Kierkegaardian Interpretation of the Sage-King Shun's Piety

In the Mengzi there is a hypothetical situation relating how the ancient sage-king Shun 舜 would respond if his father had committed murder. This has recently become a source of debate among Chinese philosophers. Here we will apply arguments made by Johannes de silentio (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) about the “teleological suspension of the ethical” related to the action of the biblical Abraham, and link them up to alternative interpretations of the actions of Shun. This challenges the current and traditional interpretations of his actions, suggesting how this new approach can overcome ethical quandaries related to the Mengzian account of Shun's behavior.