Umph old baby Kierkegaard really stops you in your tracks and makes you look closely at a story you’ve heard a million times but points out that you’ve never actually understood it. As you can probably tell from the cover the story is of Abraham and Isaac. The main question of the book is what makes Abraham the “Father of Faith” and not a murderer? That question is so obvious but why has it never been talked about in any sermon other than the cursory “God said so?”. Kierkegaard wonders this as well. He spends the first section of the book elaborating on the insanity of request. He then describes his version of what faith is and why he’s never found anyone (including himself) that has it. Clearly, I can’t convey an accurate picture of what he was trying to explain in a couple lines but the gist of it (as I understood it) is that true faith requires a dual movement of the soul. The first movement is that of infinite resignation. That is to say releasing attachments that you have. The second movement is the infinite expectation by means of the absurd. This sort of reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat situation. In which one has given something up but at the same time has complete confidence that they will get it back, but that expectation never gets old or inhibits the resignation. Needless to say, it’s a complex idea which I am sure that I am bungling. The book then continues in a short investigation on the ethics of what Abraham did. In the epilogue of the book, he wraps up things nicely where he is talking about his belief that faith is “the highest passion of man” and that perhaps like love is an end to itself. Thus moving past faith, he thinks is part of the human tendency to always ask “what’s next?”. He illustrates this with this story at the very end of the book that has really stuck in my head:
“One must go further; one must go further.” This impulse to go further is an ancient thing in the world. Heraclitus the obscure, who deposited his thoughts in his writings and his writings in the Temple of Diana (for his thoughts had been his armor during his life, and therefore he hung them up in the temple of the goddess), Heraclitus the obscure said, “One cannot pass twice through the same stream.” Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not stop with that, he went further and added, “One cannot do it even once.” Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple! By this amendment the thesis of Heraclitus was so improved that it became an Eleatic thesis which denies movement, and yet that disciple desired only to be a disciple of Heraclitus and to go further-not back to the position Heraclitus had abandoned.