Abraham's defining characteristic within the exordium: silence. Who, after all, could understand him? Why speak of his task at all? As a figure of Faith, he must look inward, toward the tension between his task and its context--God's request must be incommensurable with the context in which the request is made. By asking of Abraham something other-worldly--outside the world's norms, God places Abraham in a position of absolute isolation. God strips Abraham the crutch of communication, of community. Abraham cannot dilute his question with the input of others. To kill one's son does not even warrant consideration. To pose such a question would imply insanity, on the asker's part. How can one describe his interaction with God, when the request made contains within it an absurd, inhuman request: And God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.'"So, like a knight of Faith, he collects his things in silence, then guides his horse and son, for three days, on foot the the top of Mount Moriah--all that time, battling the distance between his reality and the request. Isaac, being Abraham's only son, came after a long bout of infertility. Finally, God, his savior, grants him the son he desired for so long, only to immediately--like a capricious ass--take him away again, not by natural causes or an accident, but through a proclamation to the father. Without any other evidence, he accepts this request, alone. What kind of huberis or deference must someone possess to follow through, so resolutely, with such a request. How can someone so confidently--at least ostensibly confidently--proceed, suspending everything known before hand? If such a law were universalized, in the Kantian manner, what kind of world would come into existence? At this juncture, Abraham's decision seems absolutely in-line with protocol. Of course, this is only retrospectively the case. The observers, proclaiming such idiocy, with confidence, forget the process through which such a decision must be made. The same progression must be true of the man who hears voices for un-Gods. The structure remains the same, but one decision is worshipped while the other disclaimed.
I am very confused at to what you are trying to say. Most of this seems like what I read in the first Problema with detailing of the nature of Abraham's situation in respect to the Ethical (Universal), but at the end you make reference to a person's possible relationship with the un-Gods, claiming the structure of the progression in the decision making to be identical with the man of Faith. At first I thought you might be saying that atheists (those who ungod) have Faith which became universalized in the Kantian manner and now from the point of view of the universal judges acts of Faith, but you point out a difference in a difference (the difference?).
ReplyDeleteThe picture with the text was an interesting choice. While I personally tie what a person identifies as their beliefs with what they think they know, I am not sure Kierkegaard would make the same claim. I think he would put knowledge in the universal and Faith in the Absolute, which are as different as night and day. The universal has the ethical, the judgement, the communication. The Absolute is inherently private and is a teleological suspension of the universal.
A point that springs to mind from your post and especially from the quote you have selected at the top of this page is that faith is rooted in meditation and decisiveness. What Abraham does, he does because he trusts that the outcome will be pleasing to God, and he believes (not only in the existence of God as a Divine Creator but) that God will guide him in spirit toward a 'good life.' I just dropped many loaded terms on the table, but I think that to have and to pursue faith is centrally dependent upon being decisive (and reaching decisiveness through personal, meditative thought) that faith is the most fruitful and important path of individual belief.
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