Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

CHAPTER NINE: Kierkegaard’s Challenge

172 chapter nine Kierkegaard’s Challenge Søren Kierkegaard lays a deeply troubling challenge to any and every attempt such as ours, inspired by Socrates, to shed some light on what is at stake in the crux text recounting Abraham’s binding of Isaac for sacrifice—and thus on the core teaching of Scripture altogether. If Kierkegaard is right, then the entire enterprise of this book is misguided; and therefore we cannot avoid a sustained confrontation with Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard claims that the philosophic rationalism rooted in Socrates can never grasp the moral and human meaning of faith as it is paradigmatically exhibited in the story of Abraham on Mount Moriah: ‘‘If faith is nothing but what philosophy makes it out to be, then Socrates already went further , much further, whereas the contrary is true, that he never reached it.’’∞ The faith that authentically experiences God’s commandments or their moral meaning remains ‘‘a paradox, inaccessible to thought’’ (66), ‘‘which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves o√’’ (64). ‘‘Abraham is the representative of faith, and that faith is normally expressed in him whose life is not merely the most paradoxical that can be thought but so paradoxical that it cannot be thought at all’’ (67). Kierkegaard does not mean, however, that the moral meaning of the experience of faith is ine√able. He proceeds to demarcate that meaning by indicating the precise sense in which philosophic rationalism fails and errs in its attempt to comprehend it.≤ Kierkegaard’s argument may be characterized as having two moments, one more negative and one more positive, the first of which proves to be less disconcerting for philosophic rationalism than does the second. To begin with the negative and less perturbing moment, Kierkegaard asserts that the philosophers in their attempt to understand faith have ignored or avoided what he calls the ‘‘teleological suspension of the ethical ,’’ in which he finds the source of the ‘‘angst’’—the profound moral dread, and concomitant ‘‘strife with God’’—that is intrinsic to the crescendo moments of genuine faith. Kierkegaard takes it for granted that the ethical rationalism originated by the Greeks and above all Socrates reaches full maturity in the thought of Hegel (he refers in particular to Hegel’s Kierkegaard’s Challenge 173 Philosophy of Right, pt. 2, subsec. 3), who teaches that the ethical is the universal, to which the individual must subordinate himself; every moral imperative or commandment must be understood as a principle applicable to and obliging all moral beings. From this it follows, Kierkegaard observes, that every duty toward God is in fact such only incidentally, as a particular expression of a universal duty. Nay, the truly divine or highest becomes the universal ethical principle itself. ‘‘ ‘God’ is used in an entirely abstract sense as the divine, i.e. the universal’’; and the individuality of God ‘‘becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought’’ (78).≥ Kierkegaard retorts that the living God experienced in faith is an Individual , or the supreme Individual, revealing Himself to chosen human individuals and surpassing in rank and priority any principle or set of principles. As is nowhere made more vivid than in the story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, the living God issues singular commandments to specific human individuals requiring and testing the capacity for ‘‘personal ’’ worship of precisely this transmoral, supreme status of the Divine Individuality as ‘‘absolute.’’ The purest manifestation of divine revelation comes in a call that tests a specific human individual’s angst-ridden capacity to make a sacrifice that requires apparent violation of moral principle or law. Yet Kierkegaard adds that in the final analysis the violation is only apparent—Abraham is no murderer, though he would have to be on Hegelian or philosophic terms—for every moral principle and law must be understood to receive its true dignity from its subordination to the individual Creator. The call to Abraham presupposes and transcends dialectically , it does not set aside, the otherwise inviolate prohibition against a father’s taking the life of his innocent and otherwise untroubled son, at least where the common good does not evidently require such killing. ‘‘The paradox can also be stated by saying that there is an absolute duty toward God. . . . [I]f this duty is absolute, the ethical is reduced to a position of relativity. From this, however, it does not follow that the ethical is to be abolished, but it acquires an entirely di√erent expression, the...