Wan-I Yang Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #342.2

Wan-I Yang is a Taiwanese professor at the Institute of Philosophy, National Sun Yat-sen University.

Abraham and duty^14

From the description of Abraham in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, beyond discovering that Abraham is a “person” steeped in “love,” we cannot ignore that he also takes duty seriously. After climbing Mount Moriah alone, Abraham bows to pray that God forgive him for having agreed to consecrate his son Isaac as a sacrifice, thereby forgetting[^15] his duty as a father.^16 Here we see Abraham’s attentiveness to duty, such that he specifically prays that God forgive his neglect of paternal duty. As Abraham’s immanent love — a love toward his son and toward God — if paternal love appears in the form of a duty that may be neglected because of love for God, does this mean that Abraham’s love — as one of God’s people — for God (the father in heaven) is higher than a father’s love for his son arising from blood kinship? Abraham’s duty toward Isaac designates the human being’s love for himself[^17] or for another; because of his love for God, Abraham forgets “love for oneself” or “love for another” in the person interpreted through duty. But is this forgetting not itself a form of concealment? Does Abraham’s forgetting not signify his concealment of “love for oneself” or “love for another”? Yet does concealment not also express a possibility of appearance? Once the conflict between the two loves disappears, Abraham’s own human love will make him feel pain over his former resolve.[^18]

“He prepared the burnt offering in silence and bound Isaac. In silence, he drew the knife. Then a ram appeared that God had provided. He sacrificed it and returned home.”[^19] Abraham had already resolved to consecrate his son; although he did not, in the end, kill Isaac, Kierkegaard’s account tells us that from that day Abraham begins to age further, and he can never forget what God had entrusted him to do.^20 Abraham suffers because of his duty (his love for his son) and because of the conflict within his immanence (the conflict between love for his son and love for God); he is not only solitary but also in pain. Because of his duty toward his son, he cannot forget God’s former decree; in the pain caused by duty, Abraham continues to endure God.

II [sic]. IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

Abraham’s doubt

In Søren Kierkegaard’s text, beyond revealing Abraham’s solitude and suffering, he also shows us Abraham’s doubt. Abraham and Isaac arrive together at Mount Moriah; Abraham calmly prepares the offering of the sacrifice. When Abraham turns to draw the knife, Isaac sees his father’s left hand clench tightly in despair, yet Abraham draws the knife anyway, his body trembling. After returning home, Isaac loses his faith; people never discuss this fact, Isaac never tells anyone what he saw, and as for Abraham, he does not think that people can discover any of it.[^21] Although Abraham obeyed God’s word in bringing Isaac to the mountain to offer the sacrifice, Kierkegaard’s account presents Abraham’s doubt. Abraham’s doubt is never “known”; Isaac does not “understand” his father’s doubt through logos — Isaac directly senses his father’s interiority, and it is upon perceiving his father’s doubt that Isaac loses his faith. As a transcendental mode, logos can only lead the human being to detach from himself (immanence) in order to advance, in hope, toward his goal; logos cannot reveal the truth of one’s interiority — perhaps this is why Isaac never speaks of this matter to anyone.

Kierkegaard here presents an Abraham in doubt (he does not believe), in contrast with the earlier passage in which Abraham, in order to produce Isaac’s “belief,” mystifies him with words to lead him to fabricate a false “understanding” of him. There is a strange contrast: on one hand, Abraham hopes to bring about Isaac’s transcendence (belief) through his words; on the other, Abraham is inwardly in doubt (he does not believe). Yet for Isaac, who has already said, “God of Heaven, have mercy on me! God of Abraham, have mercy on me; be my father, for I have no other on earth!,” Kierkegaard clarifies in another passage that Isaac lost his faith after returning home (even though people never discuss it). Kierkegaard presents the doubt (unbelief) within Abraham’s interiority to signify that the relationship between Abraham and God is not a transcendental mode — belief — deployed through speech, but an immanence that “continues to endure God within its suffering.” Abraham faces his God with his immanence; Isaac, who had already contacted God through the transcendental mode (belief), loses his belief upon sensing Abraham’s immanence. For Isaac, who presents his belief through his words, his interiority reacts beneath the representation of transcendence. Following Kierkegaard’s development, we discover that Isaac is not transcendent, but immanent.

The relationship between immanence and transcendence — the example of Abraham

Kierkegaard describes, in various ways, the story of Abraham bringing Isaac to the mountain to offer the sacrifice to God; he approaches the account from different angles to recount Abraham’s contradiction, showing us the inner conflict of the human being through diverse facets. The relationship between Abraham — who takes love as the core of his existence — and God is immanent; why, then, does someone who experiences God through pain, as he does, nonetheless attempt to construct Isaac’s belief in God through logos? If Isaac has never (or cannot) experience God, then Abraham cannot “transmit” this kind of inner experience to Isaac through logos. Consequently, as a father’s love reaching toward his son, it perhaps serves as an explanation to relieve Isaac’s pain by way of “understanding” this action. “Understanding” here is a cure, not a possession of truth. Abraham intends to conceal, through the transcendental mode (the virtuality of logos), the unbearable fact that Isaac will be killed by his own father.

The construction, through the virtuosity of logos, of Isaac’s heavenly father appears as the idea of a father transcending Isaac’s real father, Abraham; this idea of the father transforms into the “father” of believers in his universality. Abraham invites Isaac’s gaze to turn from the despair of reality toward heaven,[^22] with belief in the God of heaven; the gaze turns toward the God whom Abraham — who presents himself as an idolater — points toward. After this, Abraham whispers, repeating to himself: “God of Heaven, I thank you; better that he believe me a monster than that he lose faith in You.”[^23] Abraham wants his son to regard him as a wicked man rather than as his father; he wants his son to believe in the father beyond life — is this so that his son might enjoy paternal love within the virtuality of transcendence, escaping the pain of being killed by his own father?

What does Kierkegaard wish to express through these unfolding scenes? Is it the solitude of immanence that Abraham cannot transmit through logos? Or Abraham’s pain in experiencing God through his immanence? Or, perhaps, the relief that Abraham attempts to offer, through the transcendental mode (the virtuosity of logos), to those who cannot (or never) experience God through immanence and who suffer unjust treatment in their lives? In Kierkegaard, the image of Abraham is described as solitude — he is a “human being” who suffers pain in experiencing God and is incapable of transmitting that pain, yet who still feels sorrow for the suffering of others and tries to bring them consolation through the transcendental mode.

We sense a neo-Platonic atmosphere in Kierkegaard’s description of Abraham, unlike Plato’s account, which takes transcendence as the foundation of immanence. For Abraham, as described by Kierkegaard — “the human being” who possesses immanent experience — transcendence and immanence are not simply opposed to one another; rather, it is the “Good” in Abraham that secures the truth of transcendence, it is his immanence that makes his truth capable of advancing toward the transcendental mode, and it is also “the human being” (Abraham) who enables “the human being” (Isaac) to be able to stand before the God of heaven.

Brief conclusion

Abraham cannot escape the duty he owes Isaac because of his love for Isaac; Abraham assumes this duty toward Isaac throughout his life — a duty not simply reducible to his own immanence. In the solitude of an ineffable love, because of the persistence of his duty toward Isaac, he cannot forget that he once conceived the idea of killing his son to offer him as a sacrifice to God, and this plunges him into sorrow. Yet in Kierkegaard’s book, although Abraham falls into solitude and pain through immanent experience, he feels sorrow for the suffering of another (Isaac); transcendence is concretely realized upon Abraham’s immanent love, which is able to feel another’s (Isaac’s) pain and to feel sorrow for it.

But in the end, Isaac did not advance along the path of belief; rather, he lost his belief upon sensing Abraham’s doubt. Abraham, who experiences God in immanence, cannot remain in contact with God in a transcendental mode (which is why he does not believe, and is in doubt). For Isaac, who has never experienced God through immanence, once the belief indicated by Abraham departs from Abraham, it loses the immanent power that sustains that transcendence. Isaac’s belief can therefore only appear in the moment sustained by Abraham’s immanent power.[^24] If Plato metaphorizes truth through the mode of light, the objective truth indicated by Abraham in the transcendental mode of logos will differ from light in its eternal mode; it will instead appear as an instantaneous flash.[^25] The transcendence of the human being is therefore not the eternal reason that leaves the body[^26] (as with Socrates, who releases his soul from his body), but a thought grounded in the body. The fact that the origin of thought is immanence also signifies that the arkhē of the transcendence achieved through the mode of logos is immanence.

Notes: 

[^15]: Ibid., p. 49.

[^17]: As Abraham’s son, Isaac can be regarded as Abraham’s “Self” — the extension of Abraham’s own blood.

[^18]: “Former resolve” signifies killing Isaac.

[^19]: Ibid., p. 48.

[^21]: Ibid., p. 50.

[^22]: “The gaze rising toward heaven then encounters the untouchable: the sacred. (The untouchable is the name of an impossibility before being that of a prohibition.) The distance thus crossed by the gaze is transcendence. The gaze is not a scaling but a deference; it is thus wonder and worship. There is astonishment before the extraordinary rupture of height within a space closed to movement. Height thus takes on the dignity of the superior and becomes divine. From this spatial transcendence, crossed by vision, idolatry is born.” E. Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, Paris, Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1993, p. 191.

[^23]: Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated from the Danish and introduced by Charles Le Blanc, Paris, Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000, p. 48.

[^24]: Is this not precisely the neo-Platonist view that it is the immanent world that brings us back onto the path of truth, and that it is the image of God (that is, the human being) that places us before God?

[^25]: In traditional philosophy, philosophers construct the mode of universal truth through reason, attempting to lead the human being to transcend emotional troubles in order to advance toward an eternal realm; but unless, like Socrates, one sacrifices one’s life in exchange for eternal transcendence, the human being can never leave the real of existence. In reality, the transcendence “belonging to the human being” does not belong to the category of eternity but is realized in a certain instantaneous moment of existence. This kind of transcendence does not deny the real of existence; it differs from the meaning of a transcendence that separates reason from existence — this transcendence, belonging to the human being, presents the real state of existence. Levinas has already shown the appearance of thought as it arises in the world of existence through the flickering of light in the night; the relationship between thought and existence is like a spot briefly flickering in the night — the darkness of the irrational path abandoned by Parmenides. In Levinas’s philosophy, this darkness is demonstrated in the real of existence, metaphorized by night. The real of existence does not adhere to the eternal truth unveiled by a “persistent” luminous image, but falls back into an unknown ignorance immediately after this instantaneous moment of understanding. The transcendence realized in the obscurity of existence is a fleeting appearance; it is also a thought interpreted through the mode of flickering light. This mode of thought belonging to the human being signifies not only that the foundation of thought is an unknown of existence set against the night as background, but also that thought is nothing but the fleeting clarification that transcends the obscurity of existence. Levinas regards thought as a knowledge of location; he clarifies the immanent relationship between thought and existence — the transcendence belonging to the human being cannot occur except on the basis of existence. Transcendence achieved by attempting to free itself from the domain of existence, and thought that attempts to express itself independently of existence, are nothing but a mirage, however dazzling their beauty.