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The suspension of the ethical and the religious meaning of ethics in Kierkegaard's thought

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Notes

  1. See for instance M. Vogel, “Kierkegaard's Teleological Suspension of the Ethical: Some Reflections from a Jewish Perspective,” inThe Georgetown Symposium on Ethics, R. Porreco, ed. (New York and London: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 19–23.

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  2. I wish to emphasise that my analysis is limited toFear and Trembling since, in his other models of religious existence, Kierkegaard returns to Lutheran tradition and stresses the rift between religion and the whole complex of human values. In light of these other models, Kierkegaard is critical of Abraham's experience and believes that his act “was not carried out in earnest.”Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, 6 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1977), 2222 — numbers refer to passages. Kierkegaard believes that Abraham's experience, which is limited and does not continue throughout his life, reflects Jewish rather than Christian tradition — while Christianity indeed brings a sacrifice, in Judaism there is only a test. (ibid, and also 2224) In my book,Kierkegaard — Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1991), Part II, Chapter 3, I describe three basic attitudes to the world and its values found in Kierkegaard's work: 1) Affirming the world and its values. 2) Denying the world and its values, while concealing the rift. 3) Affirming the open rift with the world and its values. As I show, these three models of religious existence appear synchronically throughout Kierkegaard's life though, diachronically, the growing tendency is to emphasize the rift. Obviously, most ofFear and Trembling gives expression to the first religious model and I examine this text here in isolation from other options. I shall resort to other texts to explainFear and Trembling, inasmuch as they reflect the religious model typical of this text.

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  3. On this question, see the book by Ronald M. Green,Religion and Moral Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), who offered this as his central thesis in regard to religion as a whole. My aims here are more modest and focus on an analysis of Kierkegaard's position. No doubt, the implications of this analysis might go beyond our understanding of Kierkegaard's philosophy. Green himself grapples with Kierkegaard'sFear and Trembling (pp. 121–128), but his analysis seems to rely on a very personal interpretation.

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  4. See for instance C. Stephen Evans, “Is the Concept of an Absolute Duty toward God Morally Unintelligible,” inKierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1981), pp. 141–151; J. Donnelly, “Re-examining Kierkegaard's ‘Teleological Suspension of the Ethical’,” inLogical Analysis and Contemporary Theism, ed. J. Donnelly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972), pp. 294–331; Philip L. Quinn, “Religious Obedience and Moral Autonomy,” inDivine Command and Morality, ed. P. Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 49–66. I discuss their views in several places in this article.

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  5. See Evans, “Is the Concept of an Absolute Duty toward God Morally Unintelligible,” p. 145.

  6. P. L. Quinn, “Religious Obedience and Moral Autonomy,” p. 61.

  7. Evans, p. 145.

  8. See S. Kierkegaard,Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 18–20, 35. For further discussion see below.

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  9. Compare J. G. Murphy. “Kantian Autonomy and Divine Commands.”Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 227; P. L. Quinn, “Religious Obedience and Moral Autonomy,” p. 62, stipulation 45.

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  10. Fear and Trembling, p. 59.

  11. Compare Quinn, p. 63, stipulation 50.

  12. SeeFear and Trembling, pp. 58–59. In certain places in this text, Kierkegaard indeed writes that Abraham's decision is justified. See, e.g., pp. 55–56, 62. However, even if a certain weight is granted to these formulations, there is no intention to claim that Abraham is morally justified, but that Abraham is justified — even if not morally justified — in heeding God's command. For an analysis of this sort see L. P. Pojman,The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 85–86. See also below.

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  13. See Edward F. Mooney, “Abraham and Dilemma: Kierkegaard's Teleological Suspension Revisited,”International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 19 (1986): 40, note 11. Several solutions could be suggested to this problem, though none of them seems satisfactory. I will look at one of them in more detail. In his mentioned article, Evans claims that religious duties are rational, since Abraham had a personal and special relationship with God. As a result of his special experience, Abraham knew God well, as a good God worthy of his faith (Evans, p. 145). However, the rational-religious duty is not moral since, as Evans argues, Kierkegaard believed that “If an act is moral, then anyone ought to be able to perceive it as moral regardless of what experience he may or may not have had” (ibid, p. 147). According to Evans, Abraham's conflict is hence between the religious-rational duty and the moral one, but this approach fails to supply a plausible explanation of the uniqueness and gravity of this conflict. Why is Abraham's conflict characterized by such fear, trembling and anxiety, and what turns Abraham, when facing this conflict, into a knight of faith? How does this conflict differ from all other conflicts of duties?

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  14. Evans, p. 146.

  15. Fear and Trembling, p. 59.

  16. See, for instance,On Authority and Revelation, trans. W. Lawrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). pp. 25–26, 103–120;Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 36;Christian Discourses, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 333–346;Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 1051, 4881.

  17. SeeOn Authority and Revelation, pp. 108–109, 116–117.

  18. For a more complete analysis of the Kierkegaardian approach to authority see my book,Kierkegaard — Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, Part II, Chapter 1.

  19. P. Geach, “The Moral Law and the Law of God,” inDivine Commands and Morality, p. 172.

  20. See J. Rachels, “God and Human Attitudes,” inDivine Commands and Morality, pp. 45–46.

  21. Ibid, p. 46.

  22. J. Donnelly, “Re-examining Kierkegaard's ‘Teleological Suspension of the Ethical’,” p. 316.

  23. Ibid, pp. 316–317.

  24. Ibid, p. 317.

  25. Compare B. Russell, “What is the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,”Inquiry 18 (1975): 341.

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  26. Fear and Trembling, p. 30.

  27. See P. L. Quinn, “Moral Obligation, Religious Demand and Practical Conflict,” inRationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment, eds. R. Audi and W. J. Wainwright (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 203. It is noteworthy that Quinn, with commendable intellectual honesty, admits that his present views differ from those he had offered in his previous paper (above, note 4). In the latter, based on the assumption of God's goodness, he had claimed that religious duties are moral duties. Nevertheless, Quinn still assumes in his later paper that God's goodness is the reason for Abraham's duty to obey (p. 204). In order to avoid a new reductionist deadlock in which religious duties derive from moral ones, he suggests a new analysis of God's goodness “in the sense of being metaphysically complete and self sufficient in his being the source of all existence.” (p. 205). Zagzebski criticized this view of God's goodness and indicated that, in the final analysis, Quinn admits that God's goodness includes moral goodness as well and, if so, it is hard to assume a contradiction between two parts of divine goodness. See L. Zagzebski, “Book Reviews,”Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989): 108. Beyond this criticism, Kierkegaard would not accept Quinn's position regarding divine goodness for two reasons: a. Kierkegaard's concept of God's goodness is closer to the traditional concept of moral goodness. b. As we demonstrated, the duty to obey is not based on divine goodness. Nonetheless, the importance of Quinn's last article for the understanding ofFear and Trembling is that, for the first time, it poses the logical conditions that are required for the Kierkegaardian conflict to emerge.

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  28. For an analysis of different options in the formulation of this theory and an extensive bibliography see A. Sagi and D. Statman “What Could Be the Meaning of the Idea that Morality Depends on Religion,” (Hebrew),Iyyun 38 (1989): 103–136.

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  29. P. Brown adopts divine command morality and formulates a drastic version of this conclusion: “In the proverbial story of Abraham and Isaac, the lesson is presumably that he thought itright to obey God's command to sacrifice the boy.” See P. Brown, “Religious Morality: A Reply to Flew and Campbell,”Mind 72 (1968): 578. In this context, it is important to indicate that Adams, Quinn and others, developed a modified version of divine command morality, claiming that morality's dependence on religion relates only to the family of deontological concepts (wrong, ought, etc.) and the God referred to as a loving one would not order a cruel act. See R. A. Adams, “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness,” in P. Helm, ed.,Divine Commands and Morality, pp. 83–108; P. L. Quinn,Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), ch. 6. This approach would clearly be unacceptable to Kierkegaard, who believed that God had indeed commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and defined this command as opposed to morality.

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  30. See P. Quinn, “Moral Obligation, Religious Demand and Practical Conflict,” pp. 206–208.

  31. Fear and Trembling, p. 60.

  32. See B. Russell, “What is the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,” p. 340.

  33. Fear and Trembling, p. 68.

  34. Ibid. As Evans pointed out in “Is the Concept of an Absolute Duty toward God Morally Unintelligible,” p. 141, this view is close to Kant's inReligion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 142ff.

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  35. Fear and Trembling, p. 30.

  36. See P. L. Quinn, “Moral Obligation, Religious Demands and Practical Conflict,” pp. 203–208.

  37. Fear and Trembling, p. 78.

  38. Compare E. Mooney, “Abraham and Dilemma: Kierkegaard's Teleological Suspension Revisited,” p. 24.

  39. Fear and Trembling, p. 70.

  40. It is noteworthy that Sartre inExistentialism and Humanism (London: Eyre and Methuen, 1980), p. 31, suggests the hypothesis that perhaps Abraham's problem was whether the voice he had heard was indeed the voice of God. However, this is not the problem raised by the text, which is concerned with Abraham's decision, namely, what should Abraham do when facing a conflict between God's voice and his moral duty. For further discussion see: A. Sagi, “Kierkegaard and Buber on the Dilemma of Abraham in theAkeda,” (Hebrew),Iyyun 37 (1988): 248–262. See also my book, Part II, chapter 1, section 3.

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  41. E. F. Mooney, “Abraham and Dilemma: Kierkegaard's Teleological Suspension Revisited,” p. 35.

  42. Ibid, pp. 35–36.

  43. Either/Or, Vol. II, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 171–172.

  44. SeeConcluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 179–180.

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  45. Either/Or, Volume II, p. 171.

  46. Mooney, p. 37.

  47. Ibid.

  48. On this issue compare R. M. Adams, “Autonomy and Teleological Ethics,”Religious Studies 15 (1979): 194.

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  49. For a formulation of the dilemma in modern analytic discourse and extensive bibliographical references see A. Sagi and D. Statman “What Could Be the Meaning of the Idea that Morality Depends on Religion.”

  50. This contradicts Wisdo's thesis, who claims that Kierkegaard endorses horn (a) in Euthyphro's dilemma. See D. Wisdo, “Kierkegaard and Euthyphro,”Philosophy 62 (1987): 221–226. I believe that Wisdo's analysis fails to take into account, first and foremost, the assumptions necessary for describing the conflict inFear and Trembling, which includes endorsing horn (b). Secondly, the text which he chose in order to corroborate his claim is not sufficiently clear, and cannot be used to corroborate any particular version of Divine Command Morality.

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  51. This possibility is first suggested in theBook of Jubilees 17: 16–17, but Kierkegaard did not know this book. For further discussion see my article “Kierkegaard and Buber on the Dilemma of Abraham in theAkeda,” p. 249, notes 6–7.

  52. On Authority and Revelation, pp. 132–133.

  53. Works of Love, p. 158. It is worth noting that Kierkegaard goes on to suggest an additional reason for loving human beings, seemingly unrelated to God's goodness. He claims that, since God is transcendent and not part of existence, He is unable to accept human love directly. However, this argument is definitely linked to the previous one since, if God is not good and gracious, why should love for human beings be a form of love for God? In this context, it is important to mention that there are other approaches in Kierkegaard that emphasize the duty of absolute deliverance to God and the renunciation of human love. For a systematic analysis of this question see my bookKierkegaard — Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, Part II, chs. 2 and 3.

  54. This accepted formulation of Kierkegaard's position is not so simple. In “Problema I” inFear and Trembling, Kierkegaard claims that there is indeed a paradox in the act of resignation, since it entails the suspension of the universal: “Faith is this paradox, namely, that the single individual is higher than the universal” (ibid, p. 55). Kierkegaard thus stresses that the act of resignation entails faith. Further on Kierkegaard juxtaposes the absurd of resignation to the absurd of returning to the world — “He acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely the absurd that he as a single individual is higher than the universal⋯ He gets Isaac back again by virtue of the absurd.” (Ibid, pp. 56–57.) For an extensive analysis of this tension see my bookKierkegaard — Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, Part II, ch. 3.

  55. InRepetition, p. 229, Kierkegaard explicitly identifies between return to the world and the universal. The latest English translation ofRepetition is included inFear and Trembling.

  56. Fear and Trembling, p. 74.

  57. Ibid, pp. 75–76.

  58. See ibid, pp. 78–79.

  59. Ibid, p. 78.

  60. See R. G. Swinburne, “Duty and the Will of God,” in P. Helm, ed.,Divine Commands and Morality, pp. 120–134.

  61. Fear and Trembling, p. 67.

  62. Part II, Chapter 1, Section 3.

  63. SeeFear and Trembling, p. 60;Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 2898, 4479.

  64. SeeSoren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 185;On Authority and Revelation, pp. 117–118.

  65. On Authority and Revelation, p. 38; see alsoSoren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 234.

  66. Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 4479, and see also 2898, 6235.

  67. See L. P. Pojman,The Logic of Subjectivity, p. 86.

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    Avi Sagi

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I wish to thank my friend Danny Statman for his careful reading of the manuscript and his very useful comments.

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Sagi, A. The suspension of the ethical and the religious meaning of ethics in Kierkegaard's thought. Int J Philos Relig 32, 83–103 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01315426

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