Insight Spring 2021

Fearless and Not Trembling Samuel Tang ’22 A streak of lightning cuts through the sky, followed by the deafening roar of thunder. “YOUR KIERKEGAARD PAPERS ARE DUE THURSDAY, NO NEGOTIATION.” Dr. Vong loudly declares to his pupils. Everyone starts to pack their belongings, each begrudgingly accepting the burden.

Suddenly, a loud smack on the table snaps everyone to attention. It is him: Tang, the most brilliant, most handsome, most likable student in the class.

Tang stands firmly without a wisp of fear in his eyes. In a mighty voice, he declares: “Dr. Vong, I refuse to write this paper.” Has Tang gone mad? Over the years, Tang never once questioned Dr. Vong’s authority or instructions.

His papers often scored the highest in the class and demonstrated impressive magnitudes of genius. “You may give me a bad grade. Write me a harsh memo. Do what you want. I accept the outcome.” With this, Tang exits the room. The other students tremble in fear, shaken by Tang’s outrageous behavior. One by one, they cry out for Dr. Vong to do something about Tang’s shameful display. “He’s a bad student! How disrespectful!” Another student cries out: “Who does he think he is?! He probably just didn’t do the reading!” Within the universal mindset of a classroom, it is easy to condemn Tang for his blatant disrespect for the teacher and the assignment.

But before you join the crusade against Tang, stop and consider whether or not writing a paper about Fear and Trembling respects the spirit of the book itself? By refusing to write the essay, Tang demonstrates his understanding of Fear and Trembling far more effectively than those who do write a paper, since Tang takes the steps of a knight of faith and rejects the aesthetic power of grades and social judgement, which limit the freedom of philosophical exploration.

In his refusal to write the paper, Tang refrained from using logic to conceptualize faith. Instead, he was inspired by the reading and did his best to grasp faith by rising above the universal of the classroom. In the book Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio speaks about faith in terms of embracing the absurd and making the difficult move of rising above the universal that is grounded in the ethical and logical. For this reason, almost “nobody will stop with faith; they all go further,” mistaking it as a “skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks” (Kierkegaard 42). In many ways, the concept of “faith” is comparable to “philosophical enlightenment.” Both 40