Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Patrick Gardiner

Author:Patrick Gardiner [Gardiner, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

Things are quite otherwise with Abraham, the ‘knight of faith’. The tragic hero, we are told, still treats the ethical as his ‘telos’ or goal, even if this entails subordinating particular duties to its attainment. Abraham, on the other hand, has transgressed the ethical altogether, having a higher telos outside it ‘in relation to which he suspended it’. And this ‘relinquishment of the universal’ involves a degree of distress that surpasses any attributable to his moral counterpart. He stands isolated and alone, without the possibility of justifying to others an action which, at the level of rational thought and conduct, must necessarily appear outrageous, indeed absurd. As a particular individual he has placed himself in ‘an absolute relation to the absolute’. If his action is justifiable, it can only be by reference to a divine command that is addressed to him alone and whose content is such that he cannot hope to render what he does intelligible by human standards; according to those, he must be deemed either to be mad or else simply hypocritical. Moreover, the very attempt to vindicate himself in humanly understandable terms would be tantamount to seeking to evade the conditions of the task assigned to him, a task that presupposes an absolute duty to God which transcends the domain of ethical discourse and which must be fulfilled in the face of all temptations to the contrary. It was by resisting these temptations – moral as well as natural – that Abraham withstood the trial to which his faith was subjected. He was prepared, in other words, to follow through to the end the frightening consequences of his paradoxical commitment; therein lay his true claim to the ‘greatness’ which is often, but largely unthinkingly, accorded him.

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