Fear and Trembling
I picked this up because it is at one point referenced in God, Human, Animal, Machine, and then I also saw it referenced in Carl Roger’s On Becoming a Person, which I was thumbing through in the bookstore the other day. I picked this up with little knowledge of Kierkegaard beyond those two citations, other than a vague awareness of his status as a philosopher/theologian. This is a strange text to approach as someone without belief. Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and his task to sacrifice Isaac four times and then engages in a discussion. Part of the problem with my read of this is that I can’t meet Kierkegaard at the same starting point. After his description of Abraham’s tale, in the Preliminary portion of the Problemata, he begins: “Thus, then, my intention in telling the story of Abraham is to extract from it, in the form of problems, the dialectical element it contains, so that we might see what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of turning a murder into a holy act that is well-pleasing to God, a paradox that restores Isaac to Abraham, which no thinking can master, because faith begins precisely at the point where thinking leaves off.” ...