Fear and Trembling

⚖The case for it

Abraham raises the knife over Isaac and philosophy breaks. Kierkegaard's meditation on faith as the 'teleological suspension of the ethical': the leap beyond reason, beyond universal morality, into the absolute relation with the absolute. The knight of faith walks among us looking ordinary. The knight of infinite resignation is easier to spot. You'll never read Genesis 22 the same way.

— the canon

✕The case against

Four retellings of the same Abraham story, then three Problemata that circle it again: Kierkegaard does not argue so much as orbit. The pseudonym lets him assert the knight of faith without ever producing one, and a teleological suspension of the ethical is one fanatic's permission slip away from horror, an objection the book raises and then admires instead of answering.

— the honest librarian