Table Of ContentFEAR AND TREMBLING
REPETITION
KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS, VI
FEAR AND TREMBLING
REPETITION
by Søren Kierkegaard
Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1983 by Howard V. Hong
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02026-6
ISBN-10: 0-691-02026-4
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855.
Fear and trembling; Repetition.
(Kierkegaard’s writings; 6)
Translation of: Frygt og bæ; ven and of Gjentagelsen.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Christianity—Philosophy. 2. Sin. 3. Repetition (Philosophy) I. Hong, Howard
Vincent, 1912–
II. Hong, Edna Hatlestad, 1913–. III. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855.
Gjentagelsen. English. 1982.
IV. Title. V. Series: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855.
Works. English. 1982; 6.
BR100.K52 1982 201 82–9006
Preparation of this volume has been made possible in part by a grant from the
Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the
guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America
14 15 16 17
CONTENTS
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
Fear and Trembling
by Johannes de Silentio
PREFACE
EXORDIUM
EULOGY ON ABRAHAM
PROBLEMATA
PRELIMINARY EXPECTORATION
PROBLEMA I Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?
PROBLEMA II Is there an Absolute Duty to God?
PROBLEMA III Was It Ethically Defensible for Abraham to Conceal His
Undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, and from Isaac?
EPILOGUE
Repetition by Constantin Constantius
[PART ONE]
[Report by Constantin Constantius]
[PART TWO]
REPETITION
[LETTERS FROM THE YOUNG MAN AUGUST 15 TO FEBRUARY 17]
[INCIDENTAL OBSERVATIONS BY CONSTANTIN CONSTANTIUS]
[LETTER FROM THE YOUNG MAN]
TO MR. X, ESQ.
[CONCLUDING LETTER BY CONSTANTIN CONSTANTIUS]
SUPPLEMENT
Key to References
Original Title Page of Fear and Trembling
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to Fear
and Trembling
Original Title Page of Repetition
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to
Repetition
EDITORIAL APPENDIX
Acknowledgments
Collation of Fear and Trembling in Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s
Collected Works
Collation of Repetition in Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s Collected
Works
NOTES
Fear and Trembling
Repetition
Supplement
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
Of all Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, Fear and Trembling and
Repetition are perhaps the most closely personal. At the same time, they
exemplify Kierkegaard’s view of the optimal relation between a writer’s
experience and his writing, a relation he formulated later in Two Ages (1846):
The law manifest in poetic production is identical, on a smaller scale, with the law for the life of
every person in social intercourse and education. Anyone who experiences anything primitively also
experiences in ideality the possibilities of the same thing and the possibility of the opposite. These
possibilities are his legitimate literary property. His own personal actuality, however, is not. His
speaking and his producing are, in fact, born of silence. The ideal perfection of what he says and what
he produces will correspond to his silence, and the supreme mark of that silence will be that the ideality
contains the qualitatively opposite possibility. As soon as the productive artist must give over his own
actuality, its facticity, he is no longer essentially productive; his beginning will be his end, and his first
word will already be a trespass against the holy modesty of ideality. Therefore from an esthetic point of
view, such a poetic work is certainly also a kind of private talkativeness and is readily recognized by the
absence of its opposite in equilibrium. For ideality is the equilibrium of opposites. For example,
someone who has been motivated to creativity by unhappiness, if he is genuinely devoted to ideality,
will be equally inclined to write about happiness and about unhappiness. But silence, the brackets he
puts around his own personality, is precisely the condition for gaining ideality; otherwise, despite all
precautionary measures such as setting the scene in Africa etc., his one-sided preference will still show.
An author certainly must have his private personality as everyone else has, but this must be his ἄδυτον
[inner sanctum], and just as the entrance to a house is barred by stationing two soldiers with crossed
bayonets, so by means of the dialectical cross of qualitative opposites the equality of ideality forms the
barrier that prevents all access.1
This text and also the text and the draft on loquacity2 clearly express
Kierkegaard’s view that an author’s private experience can legitimately be used
in his writing only in transmuted form, that is, as the universally human, not as
personal disclosure. Therefore, a reader does not need to know anything at all
about the writer and the leaden personal particulars that have been transmuted
into the gold of the imaginatively shaped pseudonymous work.
Kierkegaard expressly employed indirect communication in works such as
Fear and Trembling and Repetition in order to take himself as author out of the
picture and to leave the reader alone with the ideas. The pseudonymity or
polyonymity of the various works, Kierkegaard wrote in “A First and Last
Declaration,” “has not had an accidental basis in my person . . . but an essential
basis in the production itself, which, for the sake of the lines, of the
psychologically varied differences of the individualities, poetically required a
disregard for good and evil, contrition and exuberance, despair and arrogance,
suffering and rhapsody, etc., which are limited only ideally by psychological
consistency, which no actual factual person dares allow himself or wishes to
allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality.”3
A historical and biographical approach to any work may afford some
illumination, but such an approach becomes eccentric if it diverts attention from
the author’s thought to the author’s life. Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard
took special care to prevent his readers from being so diverted, from committing
the genetic fallacy. No writer has so painstakingly tried to preclude his readers’
collapsing writer and works together and thereby transmogrifying the works into
autobiography or memoir. Yet few writers have been approached so consistently
from the biographical angle. And none of Kierkegaard’s other writings has been
so consistently treated from that perspective as have Fear and Trembling and
Repetition.
Kierkegaard was well aware, however, that one reader would inevitably use a
biographical approach to whatever he wrote, for she was part of that personal
history, the incidental occasion for poetic productions that in their universality
are addressed to every individual. She was, of course, Regine Olsen—in a
special sense, that single individual (hiin Enkelte). In a retrospective journal
entry from 1849, Kierkegaard reviewed his motivation for writing Either/Or
(published February 20, 1843):
when I began as an author I was “religiously resolved,” but this must be understood in another way.
Either/Or, especially “The Seducer’s Diary,”4 was written for her sake, in order to clear her out of the
relationship. On the whole, the very mark of my genius is that Governance broadens and radicalizes
whatever concerns me personally. I remember what a pseudonymous writer5 said about Socrates: “. . .
his whole life was personal preoccupation with himself, and then Governance comes and adds world-
historical significance to it.” To take another example—I am polemical by nature, and I understood the
concept of “that single individual” [hiin Enkelte] early. However, when I wrote it for the first time (in
Two Upbuilding Discourses),6 I was thinking particularly of my reader, for this book contained a little
hint to her, and until later it was for me very true personally that I sought only one single reader.
Gradually this thought was taken over. But here again Governance’s part is so infinite.7
The prototype for Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and the other
polyonymous works was the maieutic method of Socrates. “Viewed Socratically,
every point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, vanishing, an
occasion,”8 according to Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments.
For Socrates, there is “a reciprocal relation, in that life and the situations are for
him the occasion to become a teacher and he in turn is an occasion for others to
learn something.”9
The point of departure and, viewed from the vantage point of the completed
work, the vanishing occasion of Either/Or was the breaking of the engagement
between Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen on October 11, 1841. According to a
journal entry from May 17, 1843, Kierkegaard broke the engagement primarily
out of concern for Regine: “If I had not honored her higher than myself as my
future wife, if I had not been prouder of her honor than of my own, then I would
have remained silent and fulfilled her wish and mine—I would have married her
—there are so many marriages that conceal little stories.”10 But then he would
have had to initiate her into his father’s melancholy, “the eternal night brooding
within me,” and into his life during the period of estrangement from his father—
all of which he thought would crush her. The diary of the imaginary and
imaginative seducer was intended to be read by Regine with himself in mind and
thus to dissemble and to ease her out of the relationship and the pain of its
fracture. This was achieved more easily and more quickly than he had expected,
for in June 1843 she became engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, who had been
her teacher before Kierkegaard met her.
After completing the editor’s preface to Either/Or (November 11, 1842),
Kierkegaard worked on Two Upbuilding Discourses (published May 16, 1843;
preface dated May 5, 1843, Kierkegaard’s thirtieth birthday) and the
pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est. The two
discourses are titled “The Expectancy of Faith,” expanded with the subtitle
“New Year’s Day,” and “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above.”
The text of the first is on justification by faith, in which “There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female . . .”
(Galatians 3:23-29). The text of the second is Kierkegaard’s “first love,” “my
only love”:11 “Every good and every perfect gift is from above . . . receive with
meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:17-22).
The other work, Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est (Pap. IV
B 1), is a preliminary study of doubt cast in the form of the intellectual
biography of Johannes Climacus, a university student who is exploring the
implications of the Cartesian methodological dictum that philosophy begins with
universal doubt. The piece ends with a brief discussion of consciousness
(interest), which doubt presupposes. Consciousness is a relation of opposition
between ideality and actuality, an opposition discovered through repetition.12
Johannes Climacus was set aside as a work in process, although Johannes
Climacus returned the following year (1844) as the author of Fragments and
again in 1846 as the author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard
returned to the theme of repetition, however, and in a few months during 1843
wrote not only Repetition but also Fear and Trembling and Three Upbuilding
