There are some ways in which Kierkegaard might appear to be diminishing the importance of ethics. At least such is the impression some take away from Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s most read text, and the one most readily found in relatively popular editions. Fear and Trembling features the well known idea of the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, though that is an aspect of Kierkegaard that looms larger in general discussions of Kierkegaard from a distance rather than detailed up front engagement with his work as a whole.
The ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ evidently leaves some with the impression that Kierkegaard is downgrading the importance of ethics, and at the extreme some suggest that Kierkegaard is recommending religiously inspired violence, though I do not think that any who can be described as a competent reader of Kierkegaard has ever reached such a conclusion.
Now the ‘misreadings’ of Kierkegaard have a particular interest in that he was certainly extremely aware of the difference between the message of a text and the way that readers take a text, and was aware that ‘misreading’ is a part of reading. The beginning of Fear and Trembling does after all feature a discussion of different possible readings of the Abraham and Isaac story.
Fear and Trembling does how start off with the story of the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son to God, the last minute appearance of an animal as a substitute sacrifice, and Kierkegaard’s suggestion that Abraham always retained some faith that he would not be required to carry out the appalling deed. The ‘teleological suspension’ at its simplest is the willingness to sacrifice ethical requirements to obedience to God, in the belief that in the end God will not make any ethical outrage necessary.
Kierkegaard’s account does also make it clear that he particularly concerned with ethics as it pertains to the kind of ancient community, in which nothing seems higher than the customary ethics of that community, along with ethics as pure duty to universal law. That is his targets are antique communal ethics, which he finds to be most completely expressed by Aristotle, and the kind of universal obligations associated with Kant’s ethics. So Kierkegaard is apparently en enemy of both virtue ethics and deontology. There is certainly no reason to think he is a utilitarian or consequentialist of any kind.
Either/Or, published in the same year as Fear and Trembling, though composed substantially earlier, might be taken to confirm that anti-ethical theme at least so far as the ethical point of view of Judge (Assessor) William appears to be mocked as complacent and subordinated to the concluding sermon, ‘Ultimatum’. Though of course some have taken it as a straightforward advocacy of the point of view of William. This approach is definitely lacking in appreciation of the overall nature and flow of Either/Or.
So we might think that Kierkegaard’s early books (alongside Repetition) are meant to take us away from ethics to a personal subjective engagement with religion, and to some degree he is. I am not just setting up a position in order to knock it down here and we can take it that Kierkegaard was aware of the range of likely interpretations of texts, which in all their complexity were written to have an unsettling polemical effect.
Kierkegaard certainly writes to unsettle the ethical assumptions of the reader, but it would be a mistake to take that too far in a supersession of ethics direction or a divine command theory direct either. I do not suggest that Kierkegaard was opposed to divine command theory, just that there is more going on than can be captured by such a positioning.
The Concept of Anxiety was published the year after Fear and Trembling and Either/Or and that is not just an accident, but has to be seen as a strategic choice by Kierkegaard in which he expects those who have been unsettled by reading the two earlier text to reach a new understanding of ethics. The Concept of Anxiety suggests there are to kinds of ethics, metaphysical, which is to say Aristotelian and ‘dogmatic’ which is to say related to Christian insights, the beliefs known as dogma.
Kierkegaard’s concern here is account for original, or hereditary, sin in terms adequate both to faith and to the philosophical legacy Enlightenment, Idealism, and Romanticism. The metaphysical kind of ethics can cover the Kantian as well as Aristotelian approaches, and indeed the Hegelian approach which might be regarded as a combination of those two. It overlooks a psychological understanding that matches the insights of dogma, that is the anxiety that arises from dealing with free will and the wish to place responsibility for sin of some external agency, such as the human race since Adam and Eve, rather than inner feee will.
Kierkegaard’s account is to some degree a development of Kant’s position on sin and radical evil in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, but in terms which take us beyond the temptation towards self-interest in Kant’s understanding of radical evil, to the self-consuming spiral of anxiety in which we become aware of the capacity for sin in us and try to find some external agency, which can be held responsible. Kant’s suggestion that we follow reason instead of ‘radical evil’ itself only acknowledges the power of a moderate hedonism hardly distinguishable from Kant’s vision of what is necessary to promote human action in history of a kind that leads to republican governments under law.
The anxiety in Kierkegaard refers to the awareness of inner responsibility for sin, and the tendency to externalise it. In that case maybe what it is at stake in Abraham taking Isaac to the place of sacrifice is that fear of God’s intentions is an externalisation of his own sinful tendencies. The references to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the need to not question it, may refer to avoiding some blaming of God for our own sin. We should not look into God for sin, but into our own fear of responsibility, which leads us to sin, since in the externalising kind of thinking, we give all the responsibility to God. Love leads us not to question God, but to investigate the sin within us. At any rate we should not wish to take on the role of violent scourge of the sinful, which only God should exercise, as he showed by providing a substitute sacrifice to Abraham.
The second kind of ethics in Kierkegaard is then one of responsibility and self-awareness, the capacity to make judgements which are rooted in our subjectivity, and which are concerned with our love for the neighbour as ourself, fully investigated in Works of Love, where my love for neighbour as myself requires developed responsible self capable of self-love, not a self abnegated before others or relying on externalised notions of communal ethics or universal law.
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