Who is Kierkegaard's knight of faith?

Question

I have hardship to understand who the knight of faith is after reading an exerpt from Fear and Trembling:

"The tragic hero assures himself that the ethical obligation is totally present in him by transforming it into a wish. Agamemnon, for example, can say: To me the proof that I am not violating my fatherly duty is that my duty is my one and only wish. Consequently we have wish and duty face to face with each other. Happy is the life in which they coincide, in which my wish is my duty and the reverse, and for most men the task in life is simply to adhere to their duty and to transform it by their enthusiasm into their wish. The tragic hero gives up his wish in order to fulfill his duty. For the knight of faith, wish and duty are also identical, but he is required to give up both. If he wants to relinquish by giving up his wish, he finds no rest, for it is indeed his duty. If he wants to adhere to the duty and to his wish, he does not become the knight of faith, for the absolute duty specifically demanded that he should give it up. The tragic hero found a higher expression of duty but not an absolute duty.

I understand somebody who gives up his desires in order to realize his duty like Agamemnon, but I don't understand the difference Kierkegaard makes with Abraham. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia's article, Abraham became a knight of faith because he was willing to do what God asked of him, that is to say by actually lifting the knife with the intention of carrying out his mission. In short, he acted. Here the intention was more important than the result. He had faith and had to go no further to please God. So was Abraham different from Agamemnon only because the last one said a few words before: saying it was his duty as a father to follow his duty as his only desire ?

I do not see the scope of the text either. To what extent is it important that we still look at it as an important text? It looks like masochism.

Can you explain it as if I was a high-school student ?

Answer 1

The passage is a bit difficult to follow and if memory serves there's quite a bit of literature out there trying to figure out exactly what the distinction between a knight of faith and knight of infinite resignation is.

For de Silentio (who also claims to not understand faith), the crucial distinction is that the knight of infinite resignation gets to be a hero in a way that is comprehensible to his culture even if he has to give something up. In other words, while he does sacrifice and demonstrate his superiority over the inveterate, he gets something back in return -- the status of hero before the people.

In other words, he does the hard fulfillment of the values the culture espouses.

So the basic claim is that while Agamemnon loses his daughter in order to enable the Helenes to fight, this is a comprehensible trade where he's getting something for his people. Thus, he serves as a hero to them in that he resigns the personal to gain the social. He is a knight of infinite resignation because he's willing to give up everything, but he has no faith that he will get anything back.

In an American context, for instance, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird espouses an ideal of defending justice even though his immediate environment does not want the defendant to get a fair trial. So, he suffers, but he suffers because he's a just man (defending the idea that everyone deserves a good defense) living in an unjust world.

In contrast, on de Silentio's reading, Abraham sacrifices Isaac (or is willing to sacrifice him) out of radical obedience to God, and this obedience to God is not compatible with the social -- it is antithetical to it. A major part of FT is trying to "pump up the price of faith" (FT 121) by pointing out how Danes would have responded to an Abraham-like figure if not inured by familiarity with what happens in the story. He is also a knight of infinite resignation because he's willing to give up everything, but he is a knight of faith because he believes God will give it back to him.

Not everyone accepts the difference, but that is at least as I read it the difference de Silentio has in mind: would your choice be comprehensible to people in your culture as an act of excellence or is it something they would never accept?

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Contra Jon Stewart, this is a major area where Kierkegaard (at least through a pseudonym) is objecting to a key piece of Hegel's theory of religion: for Hegel, religion is good to the extent that it espouses what reason demands within a culture. This is Hegel's objection to faith. For Kierkegaard, faith is counter-cultural: it asks the individual to do something the culture cannot and will not understand.

Resources

• John J. Davenport Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia T. 64, Fasc. 2/4, Horizontes Existenciários da Filosofia / Søren Kierkegaard and Philosophy Today (Apr. - Dec., 2008), pp. 879-908

• C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2006)

• International Kierkegaard Commentary: Fear and Trembling and Repetition edited by Robert Perkins

• Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Edited by C. Stephen Evans, Sylvia Walsh https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511809712

• Andrew Komasinski, "Faith, Recognition, and Community: Abraham and “Faith-In” in Hegel and Kierkegaard" in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Volume 92, Issue 3, Pages 445-464 DOI: https://10.5840/acpq2018510153

• Philip Quinn, "AGAMEMNON AND ABRAHAM: THE TRAGIC DILEMMA OF KIERKEGAARD'S KNIGHT OF FAITH" in Literature and Theology, Volume 4, Issue 2, July 1990, Pages 181–193, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/4.2.181

• Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith (Eerdmans, 2014) 284pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780802868060.

Scholars who Disagree

• Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Theory and History of Literature 61 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)

Answer 2

The knight of faith exists in a pure state of relationship with God, in which he is absolutely obedient to God AND he believes that whatever God wills is the best possible thing. It is important that faith, as understood here, is not mere belief in God, or even obedience on its own, but rather trust in God, which Kierkegaard sees as much more difficult.

The knight of faith is able to participate fully in ordinary life because he does not, as does the knight of infinite resignation, experience his relationship with God as sacrificial but rather as fulfilling. He has gone beyond duty or obligation, his obedience is neither reasoned nor conditioned, but immediate.

Kierkegaard presents the knight of faith as a paradoxical ideal, one which he freely admits he does not understand. In (and only in) the context of the connection to God, the knight of faith is not bound by law or morals, or customs, traditions or expectations. Agamemnon acts according to a moral standard comprehensible and justifiable to human beings. He is absolutely obedient to it, even to the point of self-sacrifice, which he experience as gain, because of his love of duty. But Abraham acts according to a standard that is not and cannot be made comprehensible to human beings, and although he is willing to sacrifice all, he does not actually have to sacrifice anything (because service to God is gain, not sacrifice).