Happiness, Ethics & God

 I have not read Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. This I consider a lapse on my part, a gaping hole in my education. Maybe you will do better than me.

The following comes from Ryan Kemp's An Unlikely Meditation on Modern Happiness Rereading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling.” , published by Hedgehog Review. I can, at least, learn something about Kierkegaard.

First, an explanation for the essay:

In his preface to Fear and Trembling (1843), Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym, Johannes de silentio) says he hopes no one will read his book. Further, he predicts his wish will be granted because of the reading proclivities of his contemporaries, whose one requirement of a book is that it can be consumed during the afternoon nap.

With this new (and beautifully rendered) translation of Fear and Trembling by Bruce Kirmmse, professor emeritus of history at Connecticut College, W.W. Norton & Company is hoping to entice, if not new readers, then at least new purchasers of Kierkegaard’s classic retelling of the biblical narrative of Abraham and Isaac. Continued fascination with the work (interest that Norton believes justifies this, the sixth, English translation) is both predictable and somewhat surprising.

That faith in God makes one more ready to participate in this world: 

One possible answer is that Fear and Trembling is as much a meditation on happiness as it is on faith. Kierkegaard claims that while he loves God, and even has the courage to obey his commands, he doubts that he can both be a Christian and a full participant in the world. He admits that his relationship to God is decidedly not one of faith, but rather what he calls “infinite resignation”: He refuses to trust that loving God, and all that this entails, leaves any room for enjoying life, including the small pleasures of marriage or the consolations of friendship. In contrast, what makes Abraham so remarkable is that though he believes God demands the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham trusts that God will nevertheless restore him. Thus, the boldest claim of Fear and Trembling is that faith, far from tempting a person toward worldly resignation, actually draws a person into a more gratifying relationship with it. Only the person of faith is positioned to truly embrace this life.

The ethical person:

Though Fear and Trembling could be read primarily as a comparison of two religious attitudes (what earlier we called “resignation” and “faith”), it also explores an outlook that Kierkegaard calls “ethical.” An ethical person, though by no means crudely egoistic, approaches life with specific ideas of what she is owed if she plays by life’s rules. Those rules are largely moral: If I respect you, you owe me respect in return. Many of these rules receive, if only implicitly, a cosmic emphasis when a person regards right conduct as having earned her a life free of pain and hardship, at least of the most traumatic kind. When the universe breaks the rules (a cancer diagnosis, car accident, or failed relationships), bitterness and resentment are justified. This is why one will often say of a particularly good person who is also dealt a bad hand, “He deserved better!” The fact that the language of “desert” recommends itself in these moments suggests that many of us move through life in this mode of ownership. Since most of us at least tacitly acknowledge that the universe doesn’t really respect these rules of ownership, we also carry around a constant low-level anxiety that the things we love can be robbed at any moment. 

Why the faithful person is happier in the world sounds to me awfully like Buddhism, or Muddy Waters singing about how you cannot lose what you never had; the things of this world being ephemeral, even an illusion:

Now, Kierkegaard contrasts this with faith. Imagine a person who acknowledges that all of the attachments that the ethical person regards as objects of ownership are anything but. To the contrary, God insists that one’s personal happiness must be absolutely sacrificed for the sake of one’s neighbor. The particular goods that fill one’s life are not owed in any strong sense; they are gifts. What the ethical person sees as objects of ownership, the person of faith gives up to God in order to receive again as objects of grace. Not only does this transformed disposition liberate one’s loves from a kind of domineering co-dependence, it frees one to enjoy those same objects in a different way. Kierkegaard supposes, credibly it seems, that the ethical person’s tacitly precarious sense of ownership actually diminishes her ability to engage wholeheartedly with the goods of the world. This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up.

Being merely ethical leads to an unpleasant dilemma:

Well, then, why—on Kierkegaard’s view—would anyone choose a life of faith? Because a life that exists solely in the ownership mode is one of despair, a spiritual sickness that finally becomes so acute a person begins to consider, even if one can’t yet comprehend, a religious solution. This is where Fear and Trembling’s story about happiness pushes the contemporary reader to consider its story about faith. What if the two are inseparable? 

Which brings me to a point I reached in prison: we ignore the spiritual at our peril. Beyond the physical and the psychological is the spiritual, that ineffable quality holding together the physical and the psychological which keeps us alive. I came to this conclusion after reading Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia by Gabriel Bunge, and reflecting on my own issues with depression and reading on the limits of anti-depressants. Despondency attacks the spirit as well as the mind. What I have learned from reading the writings of other Orthodox Christian thinkers got me into the Orthodox Church, has helped me to live. 

For those thinking themselves lost, think about this, and reach out for the help provided by both books.

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