Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 261 bland. There is a true dialectic in Mead between the internalization of conventional meanings and emergent, reflexive, or creative thought that arises in problematic situations. The latter tendency, which is key to the conception of problem-solving (praxis) human intelligence, is forcefully inhibited by internalized common understandings (or information as opposed to knowledge as an active mode), thus partly accounting for reification in thought and alienation in praxis. However, it also suggests that alienation may itself force a problematic solution in which creative knowledge can emerge. That, all too schematically, is the result of the Marx-Mead synthesis. Goff's general solution centered on a nonpositivistic epistemology of praxis is compelling but begins to falter on the cogency of Mead's contribution to the origins of alienation. Of course, it may be unrealistic to expect a complete solution to that philosophical conundrum from a slim volume on the sociology of knowledge, but what is reasonably expected is some suggestion of how a rejuvenated sociology of knowledge would proceed from here. (,off persuades us that we can work on these problems from a self~ philosophical position, and that helps. JOHN WALTON University of California, Davis Robert L. Perkins, editor. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals. University , Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. Pp. xii + 251. $24.75. Kierkegaard predicted that Fear and Trembling alone would be sufficient to preserve his name fi)r posterity. Certainly, this observation has been borne out in the sense that Fear and Trembling along with Either~Or are the two books most intimately and consistently associated with Kierkegarrd's name in the academy. This fact is in itself a most curious one, because it is this same Fear and Trembling that has most perplexed, exasperated, befuddled, and even been ignored by Kierkegaard scholars. Those of his interpreters who have been intent upon discovering the real Kierkegaard behind the many masks worn during the pseudonymous period have not succeeded in finding him behind the mask named Johannes de Silentio. It is not surprising that this is so. Kierkegaard warns his readers repeatedly against the exercise of Kierkegaard hunting in the sprawling pseudonymous corpus and especially in Fear and Trembling. As deeply personal as this book is in its intent, viz. to explain himself to his beloved Regina, it is nevertheless as essentially polemical and dialectical in its nature. So thoroughly is this so that the book seems to defy any final accounting. Even so, most of Kierkegaard's persistent readers eventually try their hands at Fear and Trembling much as Sisyphus tries to conquer his mountain. The trying, however, inevitably tells us more about how the reader reads and understands Kierkegaard than about Kierkegaard himself. Robert Perkins has assembled a collection of twelve original essays on Fear and Trembling. It is to my knowledge the first such book ever published in the English language, and a rich and interesting one it is. The essays range in their foci from historical analyses of the problem of the Akedah (the binding of Isaac, Genesis 22), 262 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY through studies of the book's criticisms of Kant and Hegel, to critical studies of Fear and Trembling's notion of absolute duty to God, the teleological suspension of the ethical, and religious silence. Other essays offer a comparative study of Abraham and Camus's character, Mersauh, in The Stranger, an analysis of Fear and Trembling as an attack on the rise of capitalism in nineteenth century Denmark, and an argument that .Johannes de Silentio's view of religious faith as involving a teleological suspension of the ethical is in no way Kierkegaard's own view. The two opening essays are historical in nature and are concerned with the problem of the Akedah. Louis Jacobs offers a very lucid and coherent account of the fluidity within the Jewish tradition's interpretation of Genesis 22. David Pailin's essay follows, offering a careful and detailed description of the Enlightenment interpretations of this narrative. The essay brings out the varying tactics used during the period to harmonize the biblical narrative and the prevailing cannons of reason. Perkin's own contribution to the volume follows Pailin's. It...