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

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Abstract

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.’

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Notes

  1. Kierkegaard 1995, 20. Henceforth WL.

  2. Pascal, Pensées 295.

  3. Dudiak 2008, 113-114. The terms ‘indicative’ (for ‘the being of God’ or ‘what we say about God’) and ‘imperative’ (for ‘the call of God,’ ‘our self-transformation’) are Westphal’s, whose thesis that ‘what we say about God should have a direct bearing on our own self-transformation’ (Westphal 2004, 2) prompts the discussion in Dudiak 2008 (see p. 101). Dudiak defines ‘ethically adequate’ on p. 115. For Levinas’s notion of the ‘face,’ see Levinas 1969, 187–219.

  4. Levinas makes this point in two essays, ‘Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics’ and ‘A Propos of ‘Kierkegaard Vivant,’ in Levinas 1996 (henceforth PN), 66–79.

  5. Among the many studies comparing Kierkegaard and Levinas are Hanson 2010, Janiaud 2006, Katz 2005, Paradiso-Michau 2013, Sheil 2010, Simmons 2007, Simmons 2011, Simmons and Wood 2008, and Westphal 2008. See also Ferreira 2001 (124–31) and Kangas 2007 (136–40).

  6. See, for example, Kierkegaard 1980b, Taylor 1973, and of course, Kangas 2007.

  7. Kierkegaard 1983, 55. Henceforth FT.

  8. On the necessity for passionate inwardness in the ethical relation, see Kierkegaard 1992, 350–51, 568–69.

  9. See Kangas 2007, 160–94.

  10. For Levinas’s idea of ethics as revelation, see Kangas and Kavka 2008, 134.

  11. For example, ‘identity is not only departure from self; it is also return to self’ (1987, 55). See also Levinas 1998c, 102–113, henceforth OB.

  12. ‘[A] point as central … as any’ in Kierkegaard’s works is the contention that neighbor-love is also ‘an absolute command’ along with the love of God (Dudiak 2008, 106). See Ferreira 2001, 119–120, and Kierkegaard 1995 (WL 177), where the reference is to love’s ‘infinite debt.’

  13. See Kierkegaard 1980a, 123–34. Anxiously antipathetic to what God has in store for him, this failed Abraham could well be an example of demonic anxiety over the good. The demonic is so common, according to Kierkegaard, that a demonic-failed Abraham should come as no surprise.

  14. That is, he turns it into an ethical, not an absolute duty (Kangas 2007, 135).

  15. However, there are questions in the Midrash. Commentators wonder why Isaac mysteriously drops out of the story once Abraham is ordered to put down the knife; Abraham apparently descends the mountain alone. There is also a tradition that, unsurprisingly, Abraham’s relations with Sarah do suffer. See Spiegel 1993, 3–8.

  16. As Simmons notes, the ‘justification’ is a paradoxical one since Abraham must keep it to himself; normally, a justification can be shared (Simmons 2008, 48).

  17. See Derrida 2008, especially p. 60. Kangas makes a similar point (2007, 127).

  18. See FT 62, 81; Kierkegaard 1992, 204, 210, 244.

  19. FT 74. See also Simmons 2007, 336.

  20. The distinction is preserved because Isaac remains the child of God’s promise. Thus, for Abraham, the father of faith, the ethical does not at all coincide with the religious, however close their intertwining. See Simmons 2007, 335–36.

  21. OB 115. See also Westphal 2010, 48. Only with the arrival of the ‘third’ do questions of what Levinas calls justice arise, concerning the responsibilities of others and one’s responsibilities to oneself (OB 128). But prior to justice, prior even to consciousness, the encounter with the other makes one a human subject. Levinas’s revolutionary idea, that this encounter is already fundamentally ethical, represents a powerful if controversial answer to the question of why, even in the shadow of the Holocaust, we are not ‘duped by morality’ (Levinas 1969, 21). The reason morality is not a fraud is that even before there is a human consciousness capable of being duped, ethical categories are preoriginally determinative for everything human.

  22. See Dudiak 2008, 109. In what follows, the context should make it clear whose ‘ethical’ is meant.

  23. For God as the ‘middle term,’ see WL 112. Kierkegaard also, however, calls the neighbor the middle term in any relation between two people, such as erotic love: see WL 142.

  24. Levinas 1969, 42; Dudiak 2008, 107–9; Kangas 2007, 136–37. Similarly, ‘mediation is the greatest threat for Abraham’ (Simmons 2008, 48)—only in his case the threat is the danger that something will act as a filter in his God-relation. The paradox cannot be mediated (FT 66).

  25. Midrash in the literal sense may have been the furthest thing from Silentio’s mind, but his multiple versions of Abraham’s ordeal are a reminder that a traditional exegetical strategy in the biblical context is to allow an embarrassment of creative interpretations, in hopes that one of them might prompt a new perspective on the text. As Clare Carlisle notes, Kierkegaard, through his pseudonym, significantly augments the biblical account: ‘The interpretative work done in Fear and Trembling consists … in attributing an inwardness to Abraham that is not there in the text’ (Carlisle 2000, 61). For interpretations of Kierkegaard’s text as Midrash, see Howland 2014; Katz 2005, 26; and Paradiso-Michau 2007, 333.

  26. Thus, Maharba may be an example of the ‘enthusiastic ethicist’ (Kierkegaard 1992, 568–69).

  27. Of course, a ‘poetic individuality’ such as Maharba can teach us about a stage he has not yet reached (FT 88). In Midrash, too, ‘everything depends’ upon the relations (FT 92) in which the personalities are entangled.

  28. This journal entry ‘should have put an end to “divine command morality” interpretations of Fear and Trembling …. The pain of the ordeal is that God withdraws behind a contradiction: a duty is imposed that explodes the very idea of duty. No one lays down an absolute duty. In this sense, an absolute duty would emerge not from God, but in the withdrawal of God’ (Kangas 2007, 135–36).

  29. According to Shalom Spiegel, the references to G-d in Genesis 22 are exactly symmetric: five occurrences of Elohim followed by five occurrences of YHWH (Spiegel 1993, 121).

  30. See Kangas 2007, 134–35.

  31. Simone Weil thinks we cannibalize one another: ‘We get comfort, energy, and stimulation from the people we love. They affect us in the same way as a good meal after a hard day’s work. So we love them like food. It is indeed an anthropophagous love’ (Weil 1970, 284–285). See Astell 2006.

  32. This is not to say that there was no tradition of a myth of child sacrifice. Boehm 2004 argues that the myth, and not an actual practice, suffices to provide the background for the Akedah.

  33. FT 68–69. One does not relate to the ethical or universal at all: one only does it, as one’s duty. The moral law would consider any attempt to ‘relate’ to it irrelevant and presumptuous. This is another reason for distinguishing the neighbor-relation from the ‘ethical.’ Kierkegaard and Levinas would agree that the ‘ethical,’ as Silentio describes it, does not take into account the neighbor as other—that is, as another single individual to whom one must relate in self-denial.

  34. For a detailed overview of Levinas on the subject of time, see Severson 2013.

  35. See, for example, WL, 57-58. This is not to say that Kierkegaard would consider all prioritizing of God as “showing preference.” Kierkegaard does place a higher priority on the God-relation, but that is because it is precisely the God-relation that can teach us how not to show preference.

  36. On God as what ‘conditions’ the Good, rather than vice versa, see Simmons 2007, 335.

  37. For example, throughout Purity of Heart.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express my deep gratitude to the following people for their assistance over the long history of this paper: Jeffrey Bloechl, Jeffrey Hanson, Vanessa Rumble, J. Aaron Simmons, and anonymous reviewers who supplied detailed criticisms and suggestions that were very much appreciated.

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  1. Department of Mathematics and Department of Philosophy, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, USA

    Robert C. Reed

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Reed, R.C. The Binding of Abraham: Levinas’s Moment in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling . SOPHIA 56, 81–98 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0496-7

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