Can A Teleological Suspension Of The Ethical Ever Be Justified?

In this essay, after summarising Kierkegaard's use of the narrative about Abraham's call to sacrifice his son Isaac, in which the material in Fear and Trembling is anchored, I would like to examine the following lines of thought with respect to the above title:

1. To explore what ethics Kierkegaard has in mind when he considers the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical? 2. To further clarify what Kierkegaard means by a "teleological suspension of the ethical" by way of contrasts with instances of "the tragic hero" theme in literature, Kohlberg's stage six of moral development and 'crazy wisdom' traditions in religion (e.g. some forms of Buddhism and eccentric examples from Church History). 3. To examine what canons of discernment there are to help us tell the difference between Abraham and a madman? 4. Finally, in light of the above, to respond to the title question itself as to whether a teleological suspension of the ethical can ever be justified.

Background The narrative of Abraham's journey to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac to God has core value for the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. It is also the centrepiece for Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, written under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio.

The use of the pseudonym in Kierkegaard's writings provides a dialectic framework for expressing his own views while contrasting them with other perspectives. In this instance the author writes from the standpoint of what Kierkegaard describes more fully elsewhere (e.g. Either/Or, etc) as the ethical life. This is the life that finds its fulfilment in duty and freely chosen moral action. (Moore: p xxii) The contrasting view, presumably Kierkegaard's own, is that of the religious life in which the individual's absolute duty and relationship to God takes precedence over every other obligation.

The central problem for the author concerns the nature of Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac as a sacrifice in response to God's command. Can someone commit an act that is against a universal set of ethics because these have been suspended in the context of an individual's immediate relationship to God, a relationship that takes precedence over the ethical? Is faith to be found in the immediacy of one's relationship to God or is it a matter of one's submission to a form of life defined by the boundaries of what the community has agreed to call 'ethics'. Johannes di Silentio would say that if the latter is the case, then Abraham is done for and faith does not exist precisely because it has always existed, i.e. as something mediated by ethics. But he talks about the former possibility with a sense of wonder that reduces him to virtual speechlessness. He is totally nonplussed.

'But when I have to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated. I am all the time aware of the monstrous paradox that is the content of Abraham's life, I am constantly repulsed, and my thought, for all its passion, is unable to enter into it, cannot come one hairbreadth further. I strain every muscle to catch sight of it, but the same instant I become paralysed.' (Kierkegaard: pp 62ff)

Abraham too is reduced to silence. It is not that he does not speak: he cannot speak. Such is the solitude of faith. There is nothing that he can say that would make his action comprehensible to either his peers or to Johannes di Silentio. Perhaps the source of the pseudonymous author's name owes as much to this theme of silence that separates the man who acts out of an absolute relationship to the absolute from his contemporaries as to Hanney's suggestion that its inspiration may derive from the faithful servant in Grimms fairy tale with its parallels to the story of Abraham. (Hanney in Kierkegaard: p 10) Ethics When the question is broached in the text regarding the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical (Kierkegaard: pp 83ff) what sort of ethics does the author have in mind?

The dominant system of ethics in Kierkegaard's day would have derived from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Gardiner describes the Hegelian school of thought as brooding 'like an all pervasive presence over much of Kierkegaard's work.' (Gardiner: p 28) The eponymous author refers to it simply as "the system". (Hanney in Kierkegaard: p 42ff) Hegel sought through his system of philosophy to sum up all phenomena and philosophy, including religion, within one explanatory framework.

For Hegel the ethical life was to be realised by the individual only through her identification with the totality of social life. The individual as such is in a state of alienation and estrangement from their ultimate telos and can only find this telos or fulfilment of their essential humanity through this identity and universal expression of humanity and world consciousness. According to Hegel, it was through this world consciousness that God, as 'Absolute Idea' was attaining self-consciousness through the agency of human rationality. Hegel had effectively recast the Christian story as a philosophy of history. (Vardy: p. 25ff)

But perhaps Kant also deserves mention here. At different stages in Hegel being in vogue or otherwise with philosophers over the past couple of centuries, he has often been accused of reverting to pre-Kantian metaphysics, especially on a particular reading of his Phenomenology of Spirit. However, there is reason for regarding Hegel as a post Kantian philosopher in a more than chronological sense. If with Paul Redding, we accept that the more metaphysical reading of Hegel that tended to bring him into disfavour with, among others, the analytic school, is flawed and that he was less guilty than suspected of 'implausible metaphysical-theological views', we can then regard him as carrying forward Kant's programme for critiquing dogmatic metaphysics, while seeking to elaborate his own system from a logical and rational starting point. (Redding: pp 4ff)

Kant saw ethics as rooted in human rationality and would define an ethical action as one that could be willed as a universal maxim. 'I should not act in such a way that I could not also will that my maxim should be a universal law.The common reason of mankind in its practical judgements is in perfect agreement with this.' (Kant: p 18) Of course, Kant may have overstated what human beings could agree to as a universally binding maxim.

Kierkegaard, via his pseudonym, challenges the assumptions above in tendering the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical. Firstly, he would take issue with the view that an individual's telos or goal lay in surrendering their individuality to the higher form of consciousness of the universal, i.e., the social reality that is for Hegel the highest form of being. (Kierkegaard: pp 83ff). Where, for Hegel, the particular individual is in a state of alienation unless they surrender their particularity to the universal, for Kierkegaard, it is the single individual in their particularity, standing in direct relationship to the absolute that is higher than the universal.

'Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but as superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that it is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes the individual who, as the particular, stands in absolute relation to the absolute.' (Kierkegaard: pp 84ff)

Unless this is how we understand faith, Abraham is finished! He is no more than a murderer who ought to be brought to book in a court of law and exposed for what he is!

Abraham, the Tragic Hero and "Crazy Wisdom"

Also, to make clear the radical nature of faith, the writer compares Abraham to examples of the tragic hero in both classical and biblical literature.

John di Silentio cites three instances of the tragic hero, Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus. (Kierkegaard: pp. 87ff) One of these examples will suffice here. Agamemnon is torn between two competing ethical demands: his duty to his countrymen and his duty to his daughter. The gods have not commanded Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter but informed him that unless he does there will be no favourable wind to expedite his journey to Troy. He can make a choice; he is not compelled to take one or the other course of action. In either case he incurs a heavy cost. Even in his final choice to sacrifice his own daughter, an odious act, Agamemnon remains within the ethical and can offer justification for his choice, which his peers can understand. They can sympathise with the dilemma in which he found himself and perhaps even offer some consolation. Whereas a tragic hero like Agamemnon can talk about his action and can even 'weep and wail with Clytemestra and Iphigenia' , though there may also be instances when the tragic hero chooses silence, Abraham cannot talk. (The difference between chooses and cannot here is crucial.) There is no way of making himself understood. There is a terrible solitude here of which the tragic hero knows nothing. (Kierkegaard: pp 137ff)

Similarly, the distinctiveness of Abraham is seen when we consider contemporary approaches to thinking about ethics as in the case of Lawrence Kohlberg's work on stages of moral development. (Crain: pp 118-136) For example, we can see the difference between Abraham and an individual committing an act of civil disobedience (e.g., Martin Luther King and his followers during the 1960s). The act of civil disobedience, in the case of Dr. King, would be a matter of regarding the principle of justice for all people regardless of race above the duty of a citizen to maintain civil order. Perhaps the case of the Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his role in the plot to kill another human being, Adolf Hitler, is a more appropriate contrast. Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and his followers all remain with the field of the ethical and have chosen to abide by principles deemed higher within a hierarchy of moral values. Justice has been chosen over the duty to maintain public order in one case and the prohibition against murder in the other.

Similarly, though with less gravity, can we compare the case of Abraham to religious figures operating out of what in Tibetan Buddhism is referred to as a "Crazy Wisdom Tradition". Here the eccentric behaviour of a teacher, sometimes scandalous in its character, becomes a didactic device calling the student up short and freeing them from small mindedness and limitations of consciousness. (Peter Conradi: pp 100ff). In this respect one also recalls a home-grown albeit ancient, if little known, Christian "crazy wisdom" tradition according to which women, referred to as "sub-introductae", would engage in the practice of sleeping with male companions without sexual intercourse as an effort to polarize the senses and hone the spiritual energies. One can imagine the experiment often ending in failure! Eventually the practice was forbidden by the Synod of Elvira (AD 305) and, later, the Council of Nicea (AD 325). (Williams: pp 18ff) Even with the sub-introductae and the "crazy wisdom" gurus an affirmation of an ethical principle was being attempted in however a risky and scandalous fashion.

But Abraham is no tragic hero, nor is he operating at a "stage six" in some framework of moral development. (And he is certainly no "crazy wisdom guru!") Agamemnon, Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer can make their case to their peers within an ethical universe of discourse, whether or not one accepts their moral reasoning. He is alone in the solitude of his relationship to the absolute with no way of making his situation understood by others.

What Differentiates Abraham from a Mad Man?

But even if it is clear how the case of Abraham differs from the tragic hero, or someone acting out of Kohlberg's stage 6 of moral development or a religious "crazy wisdom" practitioner, all whom operate within the realm of the ethical, one question remains: what distinguishes Abraham from a mad man?

Johannes di Silentio too is concerned about the question of how one distinguishes such a knight of faith from its counterfeit. One hint is given in his treatment of the passage from Luke 14.26 in which Jesus teaches about our absolute duty to God, expressed in the difficult paradoxical terms of hating father, mother, wife, children, sisters and one's own life if one wished to be a disciple. It is the summons to absolute love, by contrast to which any other devotion is like hatred. For example, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, in its ethical expression, looks like hatred. Yet if he actually hates Isaac, he can be certain that he is in no ways acting in obedience to God. 'The absolute duty can then lead to what ethics would forbid, but it can by no means make the knight of faith done with loving.' (Kierkegaard: p 101)

One canon of discernment implied above, that distinguishes Abraham from the madman, is that Abraham acts out of love, even though on the face of it looks like hatred or even madness. This canon is broadened and reiterated, I think, in Jung H. Lee's reading of Fear and Trembling which views the essential character of Abraham's relationship with the Absolute as flavoured by a 'theocentric ethic of care'. It is theocentric in the sense that '..it locates its ultimate.. centre of value in the transcendent One for whom alone there is an ultimate good, and "caring" in the sense that it begins with connection, lived in webs of relationships, and is governed by mutual trust, responsive action, and engaged concern.' (Lee: p 379)

There is therefore something in the loving character and quality of relationships to the rest of creation, rooted in the absolute relation to the absolute, that serve to distinguish an Abraham from a mad man.

J. Kellenberger explores the criteria for distinguishing Abraham from the likes of men like Charles Manson and the fictional character Charles Wringham, highlighting in the end similar lines for differentiation. Whereas Manson and Wringham beliefs bring them to the conclusion that they must kill, 'the object Abaham's faith is not that he must kill Isaac; it is that Isaac will not be lost to him, that God will not let Isaac be lost to him.' (Kellenberger: p 31) But such is only the beginning of the difference. It is the ethos of love that, as above, distinguishes Abraham from these two madmen. 'As long as Abraham acts in accordance with his faith relationship to God he cannot hate but must love.' (Kellenberger: p 31)

Can a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical be Justified?

From the above it can be seen that 'an absolute relationship to the absolute' in which a person's direct duty to God takes precedence over their duty to conform to some form of ethics, is by definition inarticulate and does not admit to any kind of justification, at least not in any public sense. Abraham remains silent precisely because he cannot do otherwise. There is nothing that can make his situation comprehensible to anyone else. Even Kellenberger's two-tiered understanding of ethics1 - universal ethics - and ethics2 - duties binding on those who have them - cannot come to Abraham's rescue here. (Kellenberger: pp 20ff)

It seems to me that Kellenberger, in attempting to make sense of the word 'duty' outside a context of some system of ethics, as in the phrase "duty to God" is also trying to make intelligible a concept whose very unintelligibility is of its essence, viz. 'a teleological suspension of the ethical in the individual's absolute relationship to the absolute. Outside the solitude of one's own subjectivity, there can be no meaningful justification offered for a teleological suspension of the ethical. However, given the canons of love that differentiate a 'knight of faith' from its counterfeit, as implied within the text of Fear and Trembling one may, negatively, recognise the absence of the phenomenon.