Comparing Fear And Trembling

In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard delves into the paradoxical topic of faith and how it surpasses the ethical. Within the section entitled “Problem 1”, he proposes that Abraham, who rises above the universal, cannot be considered a hero and is instead simply a knight of faith. In this précis, I will re-construct Kierkegaard’s argument about Abraham and faith. In the beginning of “Problem 1”, Kierkegaard discusses the idea that everyone’s ultimate goal, or telos, is to reach the universal, which “applies to everyone”, and “when this has been incorporated by the ethical it can go no further” (107). Under this idea, the tragic hero would be one who has reached this highest possible level of ethics and has nothing else to gain in life. In this case any individual would be able to understand and explain the tragic hero and his or her actions as ethical. Some provided examples of these heroes are three different men who sacrificed their children: one for the sake of his country winning a war, one to fulfill a promise to God, and one to obey a law requiring the father of the guilty to kill the

His sole purpose for nearly sacrificing Isaac was to prove his faith for both God and himself. This directly contradicts the idea that a hero is someone who acts for the good of the people rather than for his or her self. Abraham’s actions are unexplainable in the sense that they have nothing to do with the ethical; in fact, the ethical is his temptation in this situation. His goal in sacrificing Isaac was to display his faith, yet if he followed the rules of ethics which say that “a father shall love his son more dearly than himself”, he would be failing to fulfill his Godly duty (112). If Abraham had been a tragic hero, he either wouldn’t have been willing to kill Isaac because of this ethical duty to him, or he would have sacrificed and lost Isaac then proceeded to focus on the good of the people.