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91 Chapter Six  Fear and Trembling: A Higher Plane I n Fear and Trembling as in Repetition, the theme of movement pervades the text and helps to illuminate its coherence. This book’s pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, explores the biblical story of Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice his son Isaac, discussing in particular the “movements” of resignation and faith that characterize Abraham’s religious existence. While the emphasis in Repetition is on an actualizing movement—the transition from ideality to existence—Johannes de silentio seems to be quite preoccupied with movements of elevation and descent. This is not to say that Fear and Trembling proposes an alternative movement to repetition: the individual’s power for actualization, or kinesis, remains the criterion of truth, and Abraham’s movements exemplify the realization of this truth. In this third 1843 text Kierkegaard is concerned to set up a kind of scale of spiritual, existential value; to place Abraham and his faith at the top of this scale; to articulate what is required of the individual who ascends to the highest, religious form of consciousness; and to reveal something of God’s transcendent power. In the preface and epilogue that frame the text, Johannes de silentio invokes a comparison between the world of commerce and the “world of ideas.” He complains that his intellectual contemporaries—in other words, Hegelians—set a “low price” on faith, placing it at the bottom of a scale of value that ranks the concept as the highest form of truth. Just as cargoes of produce may be destroyed in order to inflate their price, so some measure needs to be taken in the spiritual world in order to elevate the value of faith. Echoing Repetition’s attempt to accomplish a reversal of the movement of truth so that the idealizing direction of knowledge is replaced by the actualizing direction of existence, Fear and Trembling argues that the relative positions of faith and conceptual thought within the Hegelian system must be reversed: intellectual reflection is relegated to the lowest level of the aesthetic, and faith ascends to a height that properly reflects Abraham’s greatness. The spiritual elevation that characterizes the movement of faith is expressed through the recurring image of a dancer’s graceful leap. In a draft title page for Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses the pseudonymous name Simon Stylita, “Solo Dancer and Private Individual,” and gives the book the subtitle “Movements and Positions.”1 This links the idea of a scale of value consisting of various existential positions (aesthetic, ethical, religious ) to the idea that religiousness consists of repeated existential movements , a sequence of leaps: movement is required in order to attain the position of faith, and indeed the position itself is dynamic. The image of elevation is also a useful expression for Fear and Trembling ’s relationship to Repetition. Kierkegaard published these texts together , and they are companion pieces intended to be read alongside one another: both are concerned with subjective truth—with love—and its conflict with ethics; both oppose Hegelian mediation with an inward, existential movement; both articulate an elevation of consciousness in the hope of effecting such a transformation in the reader. However, Fear and Trembling may be distinguished from Repetition insofar as the character of Abraham offers a positive paradigm of religious faith. Abraham is, above all, a man who makes a movement: he travels for three days to Mount Moriah, and in his heart, soul, or “inwardness” he makes a leap of faith at every moment along the way. If Repetition sets out the criteria for existential truth—fidelity, truthfulness to oneself or to another; actualization, for the constancy of faith can be attained only through its repeated coming -into-being; and passion, the inward, subjective power that effects this movement of actualization—then Fear and Trembling presents the fulfillment of these criteria. There can be little doubt that Abraham is existentially “higher” than the fiancé: although they both find themselves in conflict with ethics and facing the loss of a loved one, in the case of Abraham his love and his loss cannot be separated from his relationship to God, and this gives them an absolute significance. More crucially, for Kierkegaard the distinctive mark of faith is the preservation of love within one’s finite, earthly existence—and this is precisely what Abraham achieves, and what the young man of Repetition fails to achieve. For these 92 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming [18.217...

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