Similarities Between Fear And Trembling Kierkegaard

Facing the growing intellectual embrace of objective values and truth in his time regarding matters of how one should live, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard recognized a crisis in the (then) modern conception of selfhood. Similar to the way in which the Greeks speculated about the “good life” (E.g. the way Aristotle associated his idea of eudaimonia with the attainment of the highest form of human rationality), a collective desire for certainty and objective truth amongst his contemporaries seemed to be threatening individual being. He saw, in the efforts of the German philosopher Hegel among many others, a move to systematize reality through reason and externalize individual being so as to create a larger, more sensible collective in accordance …show more content…
Ethical belief can grasp at reasons for belief, but faith has nothing to rest on but the self. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes makes the comparison that, “while the tragic hero is great because of his moral virtue, Abraham is great because of a purely personal virtue” (59). The sole reliance of faith on the self and a private relationship to God brings the individual to a realization of their selfhood. In reference to his earlier work Either/Or, both the aesthetic and ethical versions of existence do not bring the individual this far, and the example of Abraham exposes issues in both on the path of becoming. The aesthete does not take up the responsibility of existence and selfhood in the first place, while the ethical tries so systematically, through the faculties of reason, to achieve the self that he becomes a part of the universal and reasonable. For Kierkegaard, the self lies entirely in the secret relationship to the wholly other Christian God that each individual has the potential to possess. Each has the capability to be a state of constant becoming before the divine other, through a paradoxical and completely private