Fear and Trembling

This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of faith in the history of philosophy. Firmly rooted in post-Kantian ethical universalism, Fear and Trembling attempts a first approximation at defining the relation between faith, deliberative choice, passion, and the limits of rational morality. It is a work that challenges our received notions of faith as immediate certainty or intuition and takes us to the limits of human understanding. Faith, for Kierkegaard, as exemplified in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a matter of passionate interiority that defies intelligibility. In faith, we are gripped with an anxiety whose object is the paradox that tempts us to trespass the bounds of our understanding and our conventional ethical worldview. True faith is a rare human achievement that places the singular individual in an absolute relation to the absolute. Can the conviction of a passionate interiority which unifies a life around a singular decision be justified? Can passion or a purely personal virtue be reconciled with the public demands of ordinary social morality? Are there instances in our ethical life where our commitments force us to become an exception?