PROFESSOR: Chris Latiolais
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Phone # 337-7076
latiolai@kzoo.edu

Knights of Resignation; Knights of Faith

"What then is education? I believe it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age." (p. 46).

INTRODUCTION:
THE RHETORICAL COMPLEXITY OF FEAR AND TREMBLING:

Like all of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, Fear and Trembling presents special challenges to the willing reader. Like the audience of satirical performances or ironic communication, the reader finds herself on stage or in the limelight. Why? Because how one takes what is staged is part of what is at play in the performance. If the author sincerely believes what is said, would he not sign his name, authorize what is said, and therein communicate it as authoritative? Why would Kierkegaard’s signature be removed, covered by a pseudonym or “false” authority? How far, or in what sense, is Kierkegaard distanced from this author? Why the pseudonym “Johannes de Silentio,” which clues the reader to something not said or, indeed, unsayable – hence “silent”? The reader becomes entangled in this web of questions attendant upon any breakdown of direct communication. Who, after all, is the author, and what is his viewpoint? What, finally, is the reader independent understanding of the subject matter, and how does he or she assess the “authority” of Johannes de Silentio? If my own motivations in life are cited by such an authority as curtailed, stunted or even self-deceptive, how will I address the encompassing challenge of reading the other pseudonymous “authorities” through whom Kierkegaard indirectly communicates? To the point, if this “indirect” communication makes me face up to my own grasp upon life, then how will I play out Kierkegaard’s challenge to work out my own understanding or “authority” on who I am, on the significance of my life?
The subtitle, Dialectical Lyric, combines “dialectic” or rational-ethical self-determination and “lyricism” or aesthetic-erotic self-realization — that is, philosophy and art. The “de Silentio” nomination suggests that the conceptual resources of philosophy and the aesthetic media of art will be used but leave something unsaid or in silence. Most importantly, the title “Fear and Trembling” alerts the reader to the experience of danger, risk, perhaps the terrifying. Finally, Hamann’s proverb — “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not” — puts the reader on special notice. The son of Targuinius Superbus sends a messenger to his father asking for advice. Not trusting the messenger, Tarquinius remains silent, taking the messenger into the garden where he cut off the heads of the tallest poppies. The son understood by this that he should behead the leading men of the city he desired to control. The messenger, who conveys instruction, may be untrustworthy or uncomprehending and nevertheless effectively establish communication with the father. Here, then, even before the Preface, readers are warned that Johannes the messenger may not comprehend what is to be communicated and nevertheless effect comprehension in the reader. Readers of Fear and Trembling soon know that the author, Johannes de Silentio (“John of Silence”), is gripped in a frightening struggle to grasp the Abraham and Issac story, the “faith” of a man who expects the impossible.
It’s important to understand, then, that the author of this Dialectical Lyric will use both philosophy and poetry — both aesthetic persuasion and rational argument — but is neither philosopher nor poet. Johannes does indeed call up the powers of the poet, while denying being one, and he does indeed reason as a dialectician, while denying being a philosopher. He is, we will see, a “knight of resignation,” a religious figure, but “poetice et eleganter [in a poetic and refined way] a supplementary clerk” who points beyond both art and philosophy to something higher. We readers may comprehend the message he himself can not.
The Preface is a biting and sarcastic indictment of modern day readers. The target of his ridicule is the present-age Danes, who crowd onto the new mass transit system of horse-drawn trollies (Omnibuses) that they have “bought into” as municipal shareholders. De Silentio uses the omnibus (“transport for anyone and all”) as a metaphor for the mass enthusiasm for Hegelian system-thinking, which purports to “doubt everything” and “go beyond faith” — without, however, “one suggestive hint or one little dietetic prescription with respect to how a person is to act in carrying out this enormous task” (5/18). In this way, our author “envisions his fate in an age that has crossed out passion in order to serve science, in an age when an author who desires readers must be careful to write in such a way that his book can be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap.” Ironically, the preface notifies readers that the existential authority of this “dialectical lyric” will demand more than an “enterprising abstractor, a gobbler of paragraphs . . . [or] systematic ransacker” — who ultimately “conveniently skim[s] during the after-dinner nap.” Individual passion, not mass excitement — “a quiet and solitary thinker, not a shouting street watchman” (6/19) — is required to read Fear and Trembling. Most importantly, however, the meaning of the dialectical lyric addresses an individual who seeks a “significance only for [himself or herself],” as Descartes is credited with doing in his Meditations on First Philosophy. As the name “de Silentio” (of silence) indicates, such a significance must be born quietly, in solitude and for oneself; its meaning cannot be a systematically transported for mass, anonymous consumption. In short, this authority tells of a task that “each must do for himself” — alone, by oneself, in “silence” then -- for which no shared method or universal system is available. The task of “catching up to oneself” can only be done alone “in fear and trembling”; it cannot be had “at the bargain price” of mass-consumer therapies or techniques.
After the Preface, we read the Exordium, which gives four different ways of “going along” with Abraham, in fear and trembling, on his journey to Mount Moriah; each followed, surprisingly, by a different parable of how a mother might wean her child. Here our author begins, in fairy tale fashion:

One upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard that beautiful story of how God tempted [fristede] Abraham and how Abraham withstood the temptation [Fristelsen], kept the faith, and, contrary to expectation, got a son a second time. When he grew older, he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had fractured what had been united in pious simplicity of the child. The older he became, the more often his thoughts turned to that story; his enthusiasm for it became greater and greater, and yet he could understand the story less and less (9).

Modern mass transit “beyond faith” — that is, the present age failure to even raise the question of what faith is -- leaves this child-grown-old behind. De Silentio is obviously telling his own story here. He refuses to forget his own childhood fascination, but he is now “sleepless,” vigilant to the significance of Abraham’s faith – which, however, can not be comprehended by rational means. The subject matter to be communicated by our pseudo-authority is, then, faith. The subsequent “Eulogy on Abraham” establishes De Silentio as a “poet” of remembrance, which is then followed by Problema: three theological questions about faith. Before these questions are addressed, however, “Preliminary Expectoration” clears out various analogies for understanding what type of relation faith is. Here, chivalric love and its two champions, “knights of faith” and “knights of resignation,” are discussed as analogies for faith. “Epilogue” underscores faith as a passion that must be generated anew in each instance.
We must first gain a working understanding of our relation to the author (Section 1), and then turn to his distinction between the “external world” and “the world of Spirit” (Section 2). We can then analyze the distinction between faith and resignation as two “movements” of spirit, which I analyze as revealing a deep dimension of interpersonal relations (Section 3). Finally, the famous “teleological suspension of the ethical” then comes into view as a way of living that takes ethical reciprocity as “binding” but not absolutely defining of interpersonal relations (Section 4).

1
Johannes de Silentio

Fear and Trembling is rhetorically demanding. The reader must acknowledge five essential facts about the text. First, the author, Johannes de Silientio, addresses his readers in religious resignation: he is a knight of resignation whose authority is “higher” than either aesthetic or ethical spheres of existence. Second, his communication is therefore neither poetically indirect and evocative nor dialectically direct and argumentative but instead a complex use of both aesthetic and philosophical means to point beyond both to a higher form of existence. Third, this authority thereby stages a “trial of readership,” plotting the fundamental question of whether the reader’s will has been “weaned” from mundane authority -- that is, a will capable of being moved by something beyond desire or intellectual insight -- and hence capable of holding onto something exotic and paradoxical to practical reason. Fourth, the parables, analogies, stories and problems therefore demand a reader willing to make trial of herself, to sleeplessly test whether she is able to admire something exemplary and insurpassable in a way that cannot be explained to others as a matter of aesthetic pleasure or rational insight. To take such a figure as Abraham as a paradigm of a superlative manner of living, as binding upon one’s will, but not as either erotic desire or rational law but instead as greatness, this isolates Johannes the admirer absolutely and renders him silent. Five, if the individual will “bound” in this solitary fashion is “higher” than the will that binds itself to universal moral law, then Kierkegaard indirectly addresses his readers, “daring to say to the noble one [a spirited reader] who wants to weep for [Abraham, the knight of faith]: Do not weep for me, but weep for yourself.” (FT 66).
This rhetorical trial of readership is also divulged in the Exordium. Johannes de Silentio, the “authority” of Fear and Trembling, assumes the role of a caregiver vis-a-vis his readers, but the point of his parent-like responsibility is that readers must ultimately stand on their own. He will say, at the end of Problema 1, “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourself.” Maturation beyond the ethical requires “weaning” the reader from absolute dependence upon philosophical reason. A religious existence first opens up, for Johannes, when one realizes that certain questions can not be answered by universal rational principles. Universal ideals of mutual respect and moral responsibility tell me what one should do but not what I should do. The former is a question of justifying mutual obligations binding on any rational agent; the latter is a question of grasping what the situation demands as binding upon me alone as I strive to become the person I uniquely hold myself to be. The former offers common reasons for anyone who wants to act according to the universal moral point of view. Remember that the modern “omnibus” is a municiple and hence anonymous transport or movement for anyone, not a movement that one does “on one’s own.” As we will see, these individuating movements will be called the movements of “infinitude” and “finitude.” The latter asks for the significance or meaning of actions for me as I am uniquely motivated to make sense of my own existence. For Johannes de Silentio, this latter question concerning the significance of the individual emerges as the question of faith. This is the question of whether there is something binding upon the individual as uniquely sighted by a creator god. Unlike the universal moral law, which is binding on all alike, the measure or criterion of “standing before god” is absolutely individuating in how it binds. In Genesis, Yaweh’s promise and command are addressed to Abraham and to Abraham alone.
Given this view of a unique relation and its attendant isolating motivations, a religious authority can only offer assistance by denying its possibility. The authority with such a religious mission must, like a mother weaning her child toward independence “blacken her breast” (11) or “virginally conceal her breast” (12), or become “more and more . . . separated” (13) or give “stronger sustenance” (14) — or, finally, “raise the knife” — to readers who draw close to drink deep of common understanding (Verstand) and worldly wisdom (Vernunft). The lesson here is that such mundane and common resources of mutual assistance are themselves “suspended” within questions that address the individual as an individual. The author must both appeal to and yet repel the reader, communicate and yet offend reason. Hence, Johannes de Silentio offers analogy and parable to awaken the reader’s independent and ultimately unique struggle to gain a footing in such matters. The reader’s will must be weaned from dependence upon the common and shared understanding that makes us transparently like others — from desires (motivated by pleasure), moral reciprocity (practical reason), and even our ability to loosen the ego’s “rage for order” (Rel A). The mother’s nourishing breast and the father’s guiding hand are some of the most poignant images of a parent’s care for a child, representing the support, protection and self-sacrifice characteristic of childrearing. Nevertheless, this “horizontal” reciprocity and support must ultimately be “suspended” within a more demanding, “vertical” posture of absolute separation and isolation, despite worldly parental bonds. One must finally take a stand on one’s own and become responsible for one’s own “end” in life, not by “negating” common ends but, instead, by affirming them within one’s individual teleology — “standing [alone] before God,” as Anti-Climacus has it. The issue of this trial is “individual” truth -- or, better stated, the quality of veracity of an individual’s relation to his or her own existence, a relation that can not be shared. Here we identify a source of meaning and motivation that arises from the significance of one’s own life as individuated. “Weaning” in this sense is certainly a matter of fear and trembling, because those who care for us absolutely must “blacken the breast” or “draw the knife” — i.e. resist the temptation to disburden us, to take over or assume this task for us. To step in for another in this matter — though motivated by every fiber of our earthly love — would be to play God. If Johannes de Silentio’s “message” is that one must do this work for oneself, then “care” must assume the dark hue of “indifference,” paternal love the dark hue of infanticide. Such a movement is a “weaning” from the “horizontal” worldly community of mutual concern and understanding to a “vertical” spiritual relation of individual significance.
Johannes de Silentio captures the “ambiguity” of weaning — care takes the form of rejection — in another metaphor: the stark contradiction of “giving birth to one’s father.” In the realm of spirit — and in a corresponding psychoanalytic sense — it is the maturity of the child that first releases the parent from the role of absolute caregiver, allowing the parent to appear in the world (“born”) as human, as exposed, vulnerable and ultimately alone in making peace with life and death. Often, we understand our parent’s struggles first when we ourselves become parents; only then do we recognize them as mortal individuals who in “fear and trembling” struggled. As innocents, we take our parents to be permanent, invulnerable and all-powerful. If their “offenses” looked absolute and our anger what the world deserved, then our maturity “releases” or “for-gives” them into a mortality, as perhaps weak, blind, selfish or cowardly but all too human. This recognition of human frailty “gives birth” to our parents; they stand before us for the first time as ultimately isolated before questions of life and death. Because this recognition allows parents to appear as mortal for the first time, our maturity so to speak “gives them birth” in our regard. The temporal contradiction of backward causality makes sense as a way of talking about spiritual emergence or our own “rebirth.”
Any parent who has watched his or her child face death at an early age must understand what it means to be spiritually “weaned” by one’s child. The child must finally look elsewhere for answers -- “refusing” the breast, “receding” from grasp, “denying” its parents in the sense of recognizing death as an ultimate master beyond parental mastery. The child matures by “giving up” its innocent image of parents as gods controlling life and death, and this maturity “weans” a parent by forcing their eyes upward, in rage, fear and trembling, most often in resignation, only sometimes in faith. A mother’s aching breasts, so full and yet empty, a father’s trembling hands, so powerful and yet weak, represent the birth pains in flesh of spiritually acknowledging one’s impotence in matters of life and death. Such trial gives birth to spirit, and children may well precede parents.

2

THE “EXTERNAL” AND “SPIRITUAL” WORLDS

It is different in the world of the spirit. . . . Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac. (p. 27).

The “spiritual” world is the domain of the self. The “richness” or “poverty” of this world is measured in terms of how the self “possesses” itself. The quality of the will, its “passion” or “hold upon existence,” is the scale of its wealth. It is an inverted world in which who one is as fundamentally distinct from what one possesses (things, power, status, etc.). Possessing oneself is attained only in striving, and what one attains is not a what but a how: a way of “holding oneself” within existence. “Work” does not necessarily alter the world but the self’s relation to the world; payment is a matter of becoming oneself. Anti-Climacus defines the self as a reflexive, practical-evaluative “self-relating relation” that exists by way of making a qualitative distinction between “losing” or “gaining” oneself. Such qualitative distinctions in terms of which the will takes a stand on itself form a sharp contrast to the quantitative distinctions of the “external world.”
The contrast between the “spiritual” and “external” world is most sharply — if implausibly — posed in terms of interpersonal relations. Admiration, love, friendship are usually thought of as relations between two or more persons, but Johannes de Silentio is primarily interested in how an individual -- considered in isolation from the other member of the relationship -- “wills” or “holds onto” the other, which is a spiritual matter and abstracted from “external” or “objective” facts. In describing chivalric love, Johannes says that the one who is absolutely committed to another has “grasped the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient unto oneself” (44). This focus upon the spiritual quality of the isolated self, rather than the “external” or “objective” facts about the relationship, may lead one to suspect that Johannes de Silentio’s is committed to solipsism or “individualism.” This is far from the case. Care from others -- parents, lovers, friends -- is indisputably crucial to human life, but such regard, whether positive or negative, can never disburden me of the spiritual question of how I myself will take over such real relations.
It’s important not to associate such claims with the rugged “self-reliance,” “individualism” or “Go-for-it” images so effectively manipulated by contemporary advertising, which lulls one back into the comfortable stupor or anonymous group membership. The great allure and danger of advertising images -- positive images of the person I want to be -- is that one is attracted to the other side of such images, to a positively-charged way of being seen,”taken” or recognized by others, which is doubly disburdening. By hiding under a pre-packaged way of being recognized, one casts others in the anonymous role of a “canned response” or “prescribed regard,” thereby disburdening both self and other from their own grappling with the relationship. In short, the pre-packaged way of being “taken” consigns both self and other to anonymous roles and thereby “de-spiritualizes” interpersonal relations.
The logic of “invocation” might help us understand the “two-sidedness” of interpersonal relations. The presence or “closeness” of another human being is not something “given” — as physical proximity is, or electronically mediated communication, or even as factual existence plus one’s thought of it. Instead, one must in effect “work” at opening or exposing oneself to another, and there is an important sense in which this “opening oneself to another” is something one must do on one’s own, by oneself. I am suggesting that the claim that “even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient unto oneself” be understood as the individual’s responsibility to become that in which and through which another person is present, beheld, or manifested. Tendering or “making room” for another is, of course, most commonly a cooperative endeavor, but in an important sense, the individual is responsible for himself or herself as capable of granting or according another place in his or her world. This is not to deny the commonly cooperative nature of such coexistence; instead, it is to affirm individual responsibility within such reciprocity. Doing things with others or being with others is unmistakably relational and cooperative, but members of such relations are themselves individually responsible for keeping a shared or intimate place open within which mutual encountered is first possible. The commitment an individual makes to remaining open to another may dissipate or be revoked, and this “movement,” in all likelihood, is the most essential element of identity or becoming oneself. In this sense, being with another is like invocation or prayer, because the caller or believer must first gather her own individual powers of beckoning or summoning, and this opening of oneself for reception is something the other can’t do for me: it my own response ability.
Paradoxically, however, one first learns from the other how to make such movements. The other grants one this ability to receive, “teaches” one how to summon or call, gives one the power of invocation or spirit of prayer. The peculiar logic of invocation or prayer is that the other is both goal and condition, both extant and immanent, both the object of my striving and yet the very power of my reach. Who I am is somehow both given by the other and yet something I myself must become. So, even in this most emphatic dependence upon another for one’s identity — as being his or her lover or friend — one is, at the same time, “sufficient unto onself” in maintaining one’s openness. This is the “work” of being with others -- the “inverted” world of spirit -- where the other is paradoxically both (1) what first gave me standing (other as origin of self) and yet (2) what first attained standing through my regard (self as origin of the other).
Spiritually qualified, love is the “work” of the will’s fidelity, its commitment or devotion to another, and there is an important sense in which this quality is not the type of thing for which “external” or “objective” confirmation could be given. Spiritually, the presence of another is sustained by my being open or ex-posed to her, and this work is like invocation or prayer, since I must first “call forth,” “make room” or “hold open” a space in which the other has standing. If we lose this dimension of interpersonal relations, then everything becomes a matter of “external” or “objective” categories of physical presence and signs. For Johannes de Silentio, chivalric love as a spiritual category is a trial of fidelity. Am I able to hold myself open to another as necessary for becoming myself? Is my hold upon this finite event of meeting another infinite? Do I take this temporal advent of another as my eternal significance? While these questions do indeed “isolate” the lover, they are anything but solipsism. In fact, the spiritual question of interpersonal relations is whether there is enough “will” or “self sufficiency” for true openness to another. Understood spiritually, love must first be qualified as the will’s invocation of another. Without such self-exposure or self-opening, all the “objective” “external” facts accumulate as only so much debris over a carcass.
“Objectively” or “externally,” another person exists in time and space as a conscious biological being alongside others. We have the “external” or objective evidence of behavior, action and speech to prove whether or not another is true friend, faithful lover or real parent. Common sense tells us that interpersonal relations are a matter of knowledge, effective skills and hence rationally grounded choices communicable to others. This is indisputably true. “Spiritually” understood, however, everything is different. Whether I exist is a matter of whether I have taken a stand on who I am, which is not something provable. Whether another exists in the shared realm of spirit is likewise not a matter of objective evidence for anyone but, instead, of subjective conviction for us. Just as members of religious congregations do not know but only believe that faith is shared, so too friendship and love are not objective matters but subjective convictions.

3
Knights of Resignation; Knights of Faith

PRELIMINARY EXPECTORATION

In the “Preliminary Expectoration,” de Silentio offers the famous images of the “knight of resignation” and the “knights of faith” to analyze the two movements of an “absolute relationship.” Faith is a “double movement” of first “giving up” (infinite resignation) and the “getting back” (faith within the finite). As the title of this section indicates (ex = from; pectus = breast), the analogy is “from the breast,” which has the positive connotation of “from the heart” and the negative one of “coughing out.” The dual meaning underscores yet again the liabilities and rewards of communicating indirectly, through analogy or parable, particulary about a subject matter about which one must ultimately remain silent. Of course, Kierkegaard intends such communication to lead readers into “an absolute relation the absolute,” but here de Silentio attends to the two “movements” of such an “absolute” relation to another. Analyzing chivalric love allows de Silentio to clearly distinguish faith as a passion from either an aesthetic emotion or ethical attitude. Such a passion will prove “absurd” from any “earthly” (secular) perspective. Indeed, it’s precisely the willful “suspension” of a commonsense attitude to the “external” world that defines faith. In what follows, I will calls this relation a “defining relation” to distinguish it from erotic (aesthetic) or rational (ethical) relationships.
De Silentio begins with this description:

A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relation is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality. . . . First of all, he assures himself that it actually is the substance of his life, and his soul is too healthy and too proud to waste the least of it in an intoxication;. He is not cowardly; he is not afraid to let it steal into his most secret, his most remote thoughts, to let it twist and entwine itself intricately around every ligament of his consciousness -- if his love comes to grief, he will never be able to wrench himself out of it. He feels blissful delight in letting love palpitate in every nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as the soul of one who has drunk the poisoned cup and feels the juice penetrate every drop of blood -- for this is the moment of crisis. Having totally absorbed this love and immersed himself in it, he does not lack the courage to attempt and to risk everything. (41-2)

Such a relation deserves to be qualified as “defining” because the boy identifies himself as the lover of the princess or, as Anti-Climacus puts it, “by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it” (SUD, 14). It’s crucial that one understand how such a relation differs from aesthetic or ethical relations. The princess is neither the object of erotic desire nor subject of ethical commitment, which would make her significance contingent upon, respectively, sensible or intellectual conditions within the boy. Instead, she is the condition or his identity. The lad lets this finite, temporal moment -- his meeting the princess — “steal into his most secret, his most remote thoughts . . . twist and entwine itself intricately around every ligament of his consciousness” (42). This event is the condition or ground of his desiring and choosing because what he wants and how he wills now rests upon his being her lover. The entirety of his identity is now indexed to this chance encounter, for he “has drunk the poisoned cup and feels the juice penetrate every drop of blood” (42). Such passages underscore that every aspect of his being is now “penetrated” and “entwined” with her significance as defining who he is.
How are we to understand this relation? How could another be the condition of my own identity? If one thinks of identity on the model of autobiography, then their meeting is the datum point or point of reference in terms of which the lad recounts his experiences, actions and involvements as significant. Their meeting is the standard or measure of significance, so that his experience of time is oriented to this moment as the consummation of his life’s “direction,” “sense” or “meaning.” An event is not simply chronologically ordered as “before” or “after” their meeting but, more importantly, narratively qualified or plotted as either holding onto, or losing sight of, his identity as her lover. He accounts an experience or action significant in terms of how it points to, or away from, her existence. One accounts oneself “lost” or “found” according to one’s proximity to her. His “hold” upon the relation becomes a standard or criterion of “winning” or “losing” himself.
Such a relation “cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality.” Why? The impossibility is not sociological or psychological, as if class disparities or prejudice could not be overcome. The relation itself is “impossible.” It does not make sense to hold the finite as if it were infinite, to take the temporal as if it were the eternal, to accept the contingent as if it were necessary. Such a commitment, sense of time or understanding of self is itself contradictory and hence lived as paradoxical. How can another human — merely finite, temporal and contingent -- nevertheless define for one what is infinite, eternal and necessary to my dentity?

He examines the conditions of his life, he convenes the swift thoughts that obey his every hint, like well-trained doves, he flourishes his staff, and they scatter in all directions. But now when they all come back, all of them like messengers of grief, and explain that it is an impossibility, he becomes very quiet, he dismisses them, he becomes solitary, and then he undertakes the movement. (42)

The impossibility of such a relationship prompts the first movement: resignation. This “event” — the blink of an eye (Augenblick) — “summons one’s entire being,” and the only question is whether one has “the power to concentrate the whole substance of his life and the meaning of actuality into one single desire” or “the power to concentrate the conclusion of all his thinking into one act of consciousness.” This first movement is “purely philosophical,” the movement of “infinite resignation” “The knight,” we are told, “will recollect everything, but this recollection is precisely the pain, and yet in infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him." (44). By oneself one makes this movement:

Through resignation I renounce everything. I make this movement all by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft and devoid of enthusiasm and do not feel the significance of the high dignity assigned to every human being, to be his own censor, which is far more exalted than to be the censor general of the whole Roman republic. This movement I make all by myself, and what I gain thereby is my eternal consciousness in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being. (48)

“Giving up the finite” is the “purely human” act of holding onto one’s commitments as somehow in-finite, as more than just “wind through the desert.” Here, the “high dignity assigned to every human being” is understood, not as autonomy or freedom from anything finite, but, instead, as the ability to seize hold of something finite as one’s own dignity. It’s important to underscore that the lad is, so to speak, wounded by the finite and hence open to the world in way thoroughly proscribed by ethical self-determination. In contrast to ethical reflection, in which all finitude is “negated,” infinite resignation holds onto something finite that is not rationally chosen but, instead, given. A merely contingent moment in time, an accidental encounter, which cannot be penetrated and “authorized” as rational choice, defines him. In this sense a defining relation is open to the finite, temporal world of physical necessity. Nevertheless, infinite resignation holds this moment within an idealized, stubborn recollection that now “gives up” the finite -- after, that is, a moment in time has become eternally defining. One holds this temporal moment of openness in eternal resignation, “without faith” in its possibility:

The dialectic of faith is the finest and the most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can make the mighty trampoline leap whereby I cross over into infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer's, twisted in my childhood, and therefore it is easy for me. One, two, three -- I can walk upside down in existence but I cannot make the next movement, for the marvelous I cannot do -- I can only be amazed at it. (36)

Faith is a “double movement”: after “giving up” the finite one makes the other movement of accepting it back. This our de Silentio can not do on his own:

The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all. The act of resignation does not require faith. (48)

De Silentio offers the moving analogy of ballet dancers to underscore the double movements of faith: giving up and getting back, resignation and faith:

The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them in the instant they touch and have touched the earth -- and then one recognizes them. (41)

Knights of resignation become “aliens” to the finite on their own, but the next movement requires faith — indeed, by virtue of the absurd:

It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce -- it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac. (49)

Here, de Silentio avers, "I pay attention only to the movements" (p. 38). The second movement “blinds” and “paralyzes” him: “Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetics emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence" (p. 47).

Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however; then I am shattered. I am constantly aware of the prodigious paradox that is the content of Abraham's life, I am constantly repelled, and, despite all its passion, my thought cannot penetrate it, cannot get ahead by a hairsbreadth. I stretch every muscle to get a perspective, and at the very same instant I become paralyzed. (33)

How does one move from resignation to faith, de Silentio ponders: "[F]or it is great to give up one's desire, but it is greater to hold fast to it after having given it up; it is great to lay hold of the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up" (18). Of course, we are moving, in fear and trembling, to the “conclusion of thought” (i.e. here thought ends and faith begins): you, father Abraham, "had to draw the knife before you kept Isaac" (23). Abraham is great, the “only true marvel,” because, "No doubt he was surprised at the outcome, but through a double-movement he had attained his first condition, and therefore he received Isaac more joyfully than the first time." (36). De Silentio confesses:

If I am thrown out into the water, I presumably do swim (for I do not belong to the waders), but I make different movements, the movements of infinity, whereas faith makes the opposite movements: after having made the movements of infinity, it makes the movements of finitude." (38)

In one of the most moving passages in Kierkegaard’s works, de Silentio describes faith as a lucid recognition of “the sword above the head of beloved”:

And yet it must be wonderful to get the princess, and the knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir to the finite, while the knight of resignation is a stranger and an alien. To get the princess this way, to live happily with her day after day (for it is also conceivable that the knight of resignation could get the princess, but his soul had full insight into the impossibility of their future happiness), to live happily every moment this way by virtue of the absurd, every moment to see the sword hanging over the beloved's head, and yet not to find rest in the pain of resignation but to find joy by virtue of the absurd -- this is wonderful. The person who does this is great, the only great one; the thought of it stirs my soul, which never was stingy in admiring the great." (50)

However suggestive, such vague characterizations of a defining relation do not clarify how such a relation differs from aesthetic or ethical relations. In a defining relation, the interpretation of desire (aesthetic) and the determination of duty (ethical) are no longer “absolute.” The qualitative distinctions between, respectively, enjoyment/tedium and autonomy/dependence are “suspended” by another: namely, being or not being the lover of the princess. One appreciates that the prudential management of desires and the rational determination of duty are important aspects of life, but they do not define who one is. One presumably negotiates tedium and enjoyment, responsibility and irresponsibility, on the basis of a more primary sense of self. Of course, such erotic and rational dimensions of situations make their demands, but one’s security rests elsewhere: namely, in one’s hold upon the princess. It’s important to appreciate that desire and duty make substantial demands upon one’s conduct of life: what one may or may not want, and how one must and must not act, are determined, respectively, by empirical and rational conditions of existence. Yes, in some sense the interpretation of what I desire (aesthetic self-realization) and the determination of how I must act (ethical self-determination) rest upon, and are now open to, my hold upon another, but they are by no means infinitely flexible. On the contrary, desires and duties make strong demands upon one. Nevertheless, one’s identity as defined by another who provides the perspective from which they are seen as only relatively important.