Zeal For Truth

In the last post (link), I introduced what Kierkegaard calls a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” This is something strictly from the point of view of mankind because ethics is for man. The primary thrust of this suspension was the notion of an absolute duty toward God in that this absolute duty has the authority to suspend ordinary ethics. This suspension, if it is possible, would have the superficial look of a tragedy but would more closely resemble a passion. A tragedy remains planted in the ethical; this duty supersedes it. Kierkegaard contends that the ethical comes from one’s relation to the absolute (i.e. God) and not vice versa. If this is the case, then there is such a thing as an absolute duty towards God that overrides the ethical. This is the paradox of faith. Kierkegaard also suggests that “[i]f such is not the case, then faith has no proper place in existence, then faith is a temptation, and Abraham is lost, since he gave into it” (Fear and Tembling, 60).
For Kierkegaard, faith must be something wholly other from the universal/ethical. Faith is the unintelligible paradox, infinitely personal and subjective. Confusing it with the immediate (as early phenomenology was doing at the time) is a travesty. One knight of faith cannot help another. Here we can see Kierkegaard taking a radical rejection of Aristotle’s Virtue-Happiness link, something that Kant began to reject in his categorical imperative. Because of this radical difference in faith, one’s duty is done out of duty towards the absolute, not because the duty is ethical or because the result may be happiness. Duty is done regardless of its consequences or ethical nature. Unlike the tragic hero who renounces himself for the universal, the knight of faith “renounces the universal in order to become the individual” (F&T, 65). The knight of faith embraces difference absolutely. The true knight of faith cannot be repeated in ceremony, ritual, or practice. The true knight of faith stands alone and absolutely different from mankind.