En liten filosofisk analys

Här är en liten filosofisk uppgift jag skrivit för en kurs jag går, därför är den på engelska.

Sören Kierkegaard(1813-1855)

Danish philosopher and theologian, born in Copenhagen, went also to the university there where he got his doctorate. Is seen by many as the founder of existentialism.

"Abraham´s situation is different. By his act he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher "telos" outside it, in relation to which he suspended it. For I certainly would like to know how Abraham´s act can be related to the universal, whether any point of contact between what Abraham did and the universal can be found other than that Abraham transgressed it. It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the state that Abraham does it; it is not to appease the angry gods. If it were a matter of the deity´s being angry, then he was, after all, only angry with Abraham, and Abraham´s act is totally unrelated to the universal, is a purely private endeavor."

From "Fear and Trembling"

Kierkegaard discusses here the biblical text of God´s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, for him Abraham is an archetype for the religious man that goes beyond any kind of universal ethics in order to obey the will of God which is known in the subjective state of the single individual. He distinguishes the religious man from two other types, the aesthetical that lives for the moment and always seeks new adventures, and the ethical man that clings to universality and must therefore make moral choices. Prior to the quoted text above Kierkegaard refers to Agamemnon, Jephtah, and Brutus and calls them "tragic heroes", they were tragic because they all had to make similar sacrifices to Abraham´s, only they all did it for a "good cause", and their actions were therefore related to ethics which belongs to the universal. That´s the big difference between them and Abraham, he had no "good cause", he really didn't have any reason to do it at all except that God commanded it. In other words Abraham had no moral justification for what he was going to do, the command he received was without any connection to any kind of "common sense" or rational thinking, it is totally subjective and irrational. For Kierkegaard this is important, for he believes that God reveals himself in this way and that it is the only way in which the Christian faith can be manifested, in the single individual. I believe this accounts for his view that Christianity is unhistorical, it does not manifests itself in history but in the single individual Christian, "Christ´s life on earth is not a past", he writes in "Practice in Christianity", but a "sacred history" that "stands alone by itself, outside history". Then of course I don't know how he explains the fact that we know of the life of Christ from the Gospel's, that tells us of historical events. Without any history or universal knowledge, how are we to get to know the Christian faith at all? I cannot answer this, because I adopt St. Anselm´s principle "fides quaerens intellectum", but what Kierkegaard is after here is a total discrepancy between faith and reason.