The book is Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, by a certain ‘Johannes de silentio’, published in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843. The first of our eight seminars, therefore, will celebrate the book’s hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary (two days early).
The actual author was of course Søren Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855), as he acknowledged in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). But Kierkegaard insisted:
‘... if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.’
Johannes de silentio and the other pseudonyms are like characters in a drama by Kierkegaard. He called it ‘indirect communication’, a dialectic of different possible perspectives through which the reader is invited to work out his or her own point of view. Much commentary on Fear and Trembling and the other pseudonymous works is therefore naive and misleading, because it ignores Kierkegaard’s urgent request that their pseudonymous nature should be respected.
Kierkegaard was the thinker who introduced, sometimes through this or that pseudonym, and sometimes directly, in his own name, the word ‘existential’ to convey the project of thinking with the whole of one’s being, as an ‘existing’ thinker, rather than constructing a ‘theory’ or ‘system’ which he said was like a house in which one does not live.
Feuerbach also sometimes used ‘existence’ in this sense, but his project was to secularise religious thinking, whereas Kierkegaard’s primary aim was to affirm religion as irreducible to social ethics.
Fear and Trembling is itself a fundamental document for existential thinking. Heidegger, Jaspers, Binswanger, and Sartre acknowledged their indebtedness to it. The meaning of Kierkegaard’s (pseudonym’s) interplay of interpretations in Fear and Trembling has also been the contentious subject of a continuing comprehensive conversation by generations of theological, philosophical, and psychological scholars for one hundred and seventy-five years.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself generally regarded as one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, held that Kierkegaard was ‘by far the most profound thinker’ of the 19th century. However, Ernesto Spinelli, widely regarded as a leading existential therapist, has recently denounced Abraham’s ‘self-evident lunacy’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘dangerous folly’. This is in line with traditional clinical-psychiatric thinking, for example the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson’s 1945 diagnosis that Kierkegaard was ‘a psychiatric case’, whose writing was ‘a schizoid and certainly utterly incomprehensible presentation by a mind which is quite deviate’.
Are these important demystifying insights into a pretentious and over-rated writer? Or is the existential tradition here degenerating into abject capitulation to uncomprehending psychiatric reductionism?
Fear and Trembling is a searching analysis of the Akedah, the Biblical account of Abraham’s ‘binding’ of Isaac (Genesis, 22:1-19), fundamental for all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The meaning of the Akedah has been debated and disputed for thousands of years by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and (more recently) atheist thinkers. (The Qur’an does not name the son, and there has been debate in Islam as to whether it was Ishmael or Isaac, though today it is generally held to have been Ishmael.)
Kierkegaard emphasised that the sole purpose of his entire vast authorship, both direct and pseudonymous, was religious. But existential therapists in particular routinely ‘secularise’ his writings, thus betraying them by purporting to reduce the religious to the secular-social in precisely the way that Johannes de silentio is questioning and trying to get beyond in Fear and Trembling.
One of Heidegger’s most important early courses of lectures was on The Phenomenology of the Religious Life. But existential therapists all too often disparage the religious experience of their clients and are ignorant of its phenomenology. We shall try to show that Kierkegaard’s work is a fundamental investigation of the existential phenomenology of religious experience, indispensable for an unprejudiced understanding of our clients.
We shall be greatly helped by the participation in a number of the seminars of one of the world’s authorities on Fear and Trembling, Professor John Lippitt, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Professor in the European Philosophy and History of Ideas research group at Deakin University in Melbourne. John Lippitt is the author of many books and papers on Kierkegaard, including the pellucid and comprehensive Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling (second edition, 2016).
In eight seminars, of which you may attend any or all, you are invited to explore in depth the rich variety of interpretations of both the Akedah and Fear and Trembling and their relevance for psychotherapy, and perhaps arrive at your own.
