Alison Assiter: ‘Kierkegaard on Process and Paradox’ (The University of the West of England)
Wednesday 9th of December 2020 - 12:30-13:30 GMT
In Kierkegaard’s famous text, Fear and Trembling, de Silentio appears to appeal to the authority of God expressed through the requirement on Abraham in particular. What God requires of Abraham is simply, according to de Silentio, paradoxical. The requirement on him is not only incomprehensible to us, in the fashion of, for example, a flying dog or a unicorn, but rather it is literally paradoxical. It involves, as de Silentio puts it over and over again in Fear and Trembling, believing ‘on the strength of the absurd’ or ‘believing the contradiction’. ( FT, 70) ‘What I’m offered (he writes) is a paradox’ (FT, 63) The contradiction in question does not appear to be a logical one. So the question is: what kind of paradox is it?
There have been many attempts to try to make sense of what it means and I would like, in what follows, to attempt another explanation. Of course, by its very nature, a paradox cannot be made comprehensible. Indeed, the text is, at least in part about silence and it concerns the impossibility of speaking about certain deeply significant ethical matters.
However, given the significance of the claims in the text and given how seriously the story of Abraham is taken by all the major religions, and indeed, by those who are resolutely secular but who may believe in matters magical or spiritual in some form or another, it behoves us to attempt to make sense of the notion. This is what I will try to do in this paper.
There have been many attempts to try to make sense of what it means and I would like, in what follows, to attempt another explanation. Of course, by its very nature, a paradox cannot be made comprehensible. Indeed, the text is, at least in part about silence and it concerns the impossibility of speaking about certain deeply significant ethical matters.
However, given the significance of the claims in the text and given how seriously the story of Abraham is taken by all the major religions, and indeed, by those who are resolutely secular but who may believe in matters magical or spiritual in some form or another, it behoves us to attempt to make sense of the notion. This is what I will try to do in this paper.
