Fear and Trembling (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) by Soren Kierkegaard

Author:Soren Kierkegaard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-07-19T23:00:00+00:00

Problem II: Is there an absolute duty to God?90

The ethical is the universal and as such in turn the divine. It is therefore right to say that every duty, after all, is duty to God, but if no more can be said, then one is saying as well that I really have no duty to God. Duty becomes duty by being referred to God, but in the duty itself I do not enter into relation to God. For instance, it is a duty to love one’s neighbor. It is a duty by its being referred to God, but in the duty I do not enter into a relation to God but to the neighbor I love. If I say then in this connection that it is my duty to love God, I am really only stating a tautology insofar as “God” here is understood in an entirely abstract sense as the divine, i.e. the universal, i.e. the duty. The whole existence of the human race rounds itself off in itself as a perfect sphere and the ethical is at once its limit and its completion. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought, his power being only in the ethical, which completes existence. Insofar as it might occur to a person to want to love God in some sense other than the one indicated here, he is being quixotic, he loves a phantom, which if it only had enough strength to speak would say to him: “I do not ask for your love, just stay where you belong.” Insofar as it might occur to a person to want to love God differently, this love would be just as suspicious as the love which Rousseau mentions whereby a person loves the Kaffirs instead of loving his neighbor.91

Now if what has been advanced here is true, if there is nothing incommensurable in a human life except the incommensurability that is there only by accident, from which nothing follows insofar as existence is considered ideally, then Hegel is right. But he is not right in speaking about faith or in allowing Abraham to be regarded as its father, for by the latter he has passed sentence both on Abraham and on faith. In Hegelian philosophy the outer92 (the externalization)93 is higher than the inner.94 This is often illustrated by an example. The child is the inner, the man the outer; hence the child is determined precisely by the outer, and conversely the man as the outer by the inner. Faith, on the contrary, is this paradox, that inwardness is higher than outwardness, or to recall a previous expression, that the odd number is higher than the even.95

In the ethical view of life, then, the single individual’s task is to divest himself of the qualification of inwardness and to express this in an outward form. Whenever the single individual shrinks from doing so, whenever he wants to stay within or slip down again into the inward qualification of feeling, mood, etc., he commits an offense and stands in temptation.

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