Abstract
In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard1 discusses three philosophical problems raised by the ‘aqedah, the binding of Isaac on the altar.
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1.
Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical (FT, p. 54)?
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2.
Is there an absolute duty to God (FT, p. 68)?
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3.
Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, and from Isaac (FT, p. 82)?
Comparatively little attention has been given to the third problem. This essay will focus on the strange conjunction of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious found there. We shall map the concepts of ‘immediacy’ and ‘the interesting’, the terms Kierkegaard used to draw the lines on his own conceptual map.
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Notes
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958) paras 139, 141.
G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, tr. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) p. 187. The text is from ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’, and forms the last in a series of reflections on Abraham.
See H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 290–1, n. 2.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, tr. W. Wallace, in The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950, reprint of 1873 edn) p. 126.
See Merold Westphal, ‘Abraham and Hegel’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’: Critical Appraisals (University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1981) for a detailed discussion of the issues that would have been raised by the ‘aqedah in Hegel’s philosophy had he discussed it.
Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). This is an exhaustive study of the dialectic of the inner and the outer in Kierkegaard.
Sylvia Walsh Utterback, ‘Don Juan and the Representation of Spiritual Sensuousness’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 47 (1979) 635. This article contains (p. 641) a helpful list of references distinguishing the first immediacy and the second.
Friedrich Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie 1795–97, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Ferninand Schoningh, 1982).
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Writings on Art, tr. and ed. David Irwin (London, 1972).
See H. B. Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The essay by Goethe on Winckelmann (pp. 236–8), though written toward the end of the period (1805) of the greatest enthusiasm for Greece, shows how unargumentative the acceptance of the views of Winckelmann was.
Aage Henriksen, Kierkegaards Romaner (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1954) p. 26.
Louis Mackey, ‘The Poetry of Inwardness’, in Josiah Thompson (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Modern Studies in Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972) p. 17.
Robert Widenman, ‘Confines’, in Niels Thulstrup and Maria Mikulova Thulstrup (eds), Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1980) III, 43–6.
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© 1992 Robert L. Perkins
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Perkins, R.L. (1992). Abraham’s Silence Aesthetically Considered. In: Pattison, G. (eds) Kierkegaard on Art and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22472-2_7
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