Samuel Tang '22 — Fearless and Not Trembling

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 are difficult to reach, difficult to communicate through words, and relative to each person. Johannes highlighted the sad truth that an author “who wants readers must be careful to write in a way that he can be comfortably leafed through”, since “passion has been done away with for the sake of science” (43). Much like the world of Johannes, Tang’s world is the classroom, where a student who wants a good grade must write in clear and concise manners that suits the taste of a teacher. Tang and his fellow peers have no limits in terms of creative and interesting ideas that they feel passionate about, but each time an assignment is given, they cherry-pick through their garden of ideas until they find one that best conforms to the logic-based rubric. For Johannes, the ethical is not a channel that one can use to grasp faith, for “it uses pure categories and it doesn’t appeal to experience” (113). One who views the world through the universal ethical scope does not truly experience or embody the philosophies that they study. The whole point of studying philosophy is not to be able to carry out a logical argument that carries no weight in relation to your personal life, just like how faith is not supposed to be an attempt to see everything as logical and coherent or abide by a system defined by someone else. As Kierkegaard said, “to have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind so as to win God’’ (“PHILOSOPHY - Soren Kierkegaard”). In his refusal to write the paper, Tang surrenders his mind to the absurd, completely disconnecting himself from the temptations of the universal. Other students are still bound by their desires for a grade, but not Tang. Tang is above that. Tang has found faith in his own understanding and sees no need for Dr. Vong to critique his thoughts. Maybe someone else might need to write a paper to discover their own philosophical revelations, but that is their path. As Johannes said, “faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for in that case it would be cancelled” since “the single individual is quite unable to make himself intelligible to anyone” (Kierkegaard 99). In his quest for philosophical revelation, Tang simply cannot express his deepest thoughts in terms of the universal. Any attempt to do so would ultimately be futile, just like how it is impossible for the average ethical man to understand a knight of faith. That is not to say that Tang is the only knight of faith, because others in the class can be just as faithful to their philosophical pursuit, except their relation to their absolute is different from that of Tang’s. With this being said, how can we be sure that Tang is not simply a lazy student with poor habits?

Well for starters, we are talking about Tang here, the good looking, hardest working student in the class. But even more importantly, a simply lazy student is ultimately bound to the universal and he will immediately break down when he returns to his room. Tang, however, is a knight of faith who accepts his fate for what it is, resolutely keeping to his faith in his philosophical enlightenment. When Abraham was tested by God’s request for the sacrifice of Isaac, “his faith was not that he should be happy sometime in the hereafter, but that he should find blessed happiness here in this world. God could give him a new Isaac, bring the sacrificial offer back to life. He believed in the strength of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since been suspended” (65). Unlike Abraham, the lazy student would lament over the fact that he is losing an opportunity to obtain a grade. He does not trust that the value he loses over this paper will ever be reconciled through his faith to his philosophical pursuit. To him, the class is only a way to get easy As. If that aesthetic condition is not afforded to him, the whole endeavor becomes a pointless one. Furthermore, the lazy student would have gone on a much longer speech than Tang. Instead of making a swift rejection of the paper, the lazy student would try his best to build up his own image and express his supposed faith in philosophy to the rest of the class. To Johannes, the lazy student is someone who “wants to express his absolute duty in the universal” and “becomes conscious of the latter,” thus entering a “state of temptation” (98). To truly be a knight of faith, one must be free from temptation by expressing their absolute duty outside of the universal instead of under its influence. Perhaps in this regard, Tang can do even more to distance himself from the universal of the classroom by straight up dropping out and cutting all ties between his pursuit of philosophy and the academic duty of the classroom. But alas, doing so does not really bring Tang to a more secure relation with his faith in philosophy. A knight of faith does not always need to reject the ethical to stay true to faith. Sometimes they can overlap. For Tang, he simply has to distance his thoughts and revelations from the temptation of molding his ideas to get a good grade. Staying in the class encourages him to share his ideas and hear new ones. But then one must ask the question, why should Tang have to refuse to write a paper? Is there really a conflict between faith and the ethical?

If Tang has a strong and steadfast faith in his philosophical beliefs, he can still fulfill his ethical duties as a student and write a paper that simply speaks in prose. In fact, a stronger rejection of the universal would be deliberately writing a paper that does not conform to rubrics and expectations. When Abraham received God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, he had no choice but to teleologically suspend the ethical to follow through with the command. This is what draws a distinction between Tang and Abraham. Abraham faces a conflict in duty, Tang does not. While the ethical expression would condemn Abraham’s actions as murder, the religious expression “is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac,” forming a “contradiction” without which “Abraham is not the one he is” (60). Essentially, the only reason Abraham can be praised for his suspension of the ethical is because he works for the teleological. In the face of the contradiction, Abraham rose above the universal authority of the ethical and suspended it to pursue his faith in what constitutes as a leap faith because Abraham gains nothing from the suspension of the ethical. He loves Isaac with all his heart. Abraham’s love for Isaac is important because “if he did not love Isaac, all thought of offering Isaac would be a temptation” (61). Sacrificing your child is not a convenient or desirable act in any way. We can be sure that in no way was Abraham attempting to appeal to the ethical, because the idea that someone is willing to kill their son in the name of faith is absolutely absurd. In the face of a person like Abraham, we would fear and tremble, which is how we know he is a knight of faith. Tang, on the other hand, borrows from the ethical when he refuses to write the paper. He is merely avoiding work that he does not want to do. He can still be a knight of faith to his own philosophical revelations if he writes the paper. Abraham had to suspend the ethical, Tang did not. Tang is lucky that his relation to the absolute allows him to be somewhat ethical, yet here he is squandering that privilege of being able to write and still refusing to do so. One can even argue that Tang needs to write the paper in order to prove his faith in a trial. He is tempted to get a good grade and therefore contort his paper in a way that achieves this. But if he still resists this, he proves his faith to be even stronger and truer. If he passes up this opportunity, what other reason can there be except that he is lazy and incompetent?

While Tang is able to write a paper without casting his faith in philosophical enlightenment back into the universal, writing one would ultimately risk Tang becoming a tragic hero by inadvertently explaining his trial. In the context of Abraham, “what would explain everything, that it is a trial, one in which the ethical is the temptation - is something he cannot say” (139). If Abraham explained to everyone that he was undergoing a trial of God, people would start feeling sympathetic or even admire him for his tragic journey. This immediately follows his path to be understood and belittled by the universal. His faith becomes nothing more but a tool for gaining pity points and respect. However, Abraham avoided becoming a tragic hero by making “the infinite movement of resignation and giv[ing] up his claim to Isaac, something no one can understand because it is a private undertaking” (139). To ensure the sanctity of his trial, Abraham fully surrendered his most beloved person in the world. This man could be called a true man of faith because he made sure to wipe out any traces which might turn him into a tragic hero. In a way, he almost had to intentionally go against the ethical just to turn himself into someone completely incomprehensible and absurd to the observer. Tang perfectly follows after Abraham by straight-up refusing to write the paper. Sure, it is a test to write a paper and still be true to your faith, but then you are still giving power to the universal when you do not need to give any power to it at all. It is an even greater test to completely reject the universal. It hurts much more to know that you will not get a grade at all and perhaps fail the class as opposed to hastily writing the paper and getting a B. A complete rejection ensures that Tang can never be viewed as a tragic hero. He does reap the benefit of not having to write a paper, but this is a desirable outcome because it only compounds his identity as a knight of faith. For a knight of faith, it is far better to be scorned and misunderstood by others than to have their pity and condolences. When Tang embarked on the path of the knight of faith, he chose the “narrow path of faith [which] no one can advise, no one understands” (95). He wants to be true to his pursuit of philosophy and allow it to be more than just a means for an end grade. But as soon as people know what his true intentions are, they will praise and admire him for his courage and faith in his philosophical enlightenment. To be faithful, Tang can only endure the crushing burden of not taking on the burden of writing the paper.

At the end of the day, the contention that Tang’s refusal to write a paper is justifiable from the knight of faith perspective contradicts itself in its existence. I do not expect this to be taken as rule or as fact. Dr. Vong and the other students can think what they think. Like Johannes de Silentio, I do not claim to know the system, or even that there is the existence of it. But this paper is an expression of my understanding and experience of faith through the tale of Tang. I take my leap of faith that you, the reader, shall remain faithful to your philosophical pursuits and hopefully find a way of thinking that best helps you reconcile with the absurdity of our shared existence.

Works Cited

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes De

Silentio. Translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin, 2003. “PHILOSOPHY - Soren Kierkegaard.” YouTube, uploaded by The School of Life, 26 June 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9JCwkx558o.