Issac needs a better Gaard: An entry of conceptual co-dependency and impracticality

In these first looks at Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, valid investigation lies within the contingent yet necessarily differential nature of relationships between rationality and faith.

Johannes de silentio’s most religiously neutral example is between the role of the hero and the poet. This relationship is direct but also hierarchical; poet’s skills are useless without those of the hero to actualize the record and the hero’s fame robbed of immortality without any way to reminisce them. Memories serve as a way for heroic acts to become examples attainable greatness and a way to maintain an exemplary template to measure those deeds upon forthcoming generations. Through their sustainability, these acts become ideals or an activation of understanding. If faith is the talk at hand, the implementation of an ideal comes with the New Testament with Jesus Christ. However, Johannes de silentio remains in the Old Testament for his example of faith in God because for initially two clear reasons. Firstly, that the Old Testament is an example of ideals transcending text into reasons for action metaphorically, and secondly, that it is precisely to act that is important to his key example, the faith physically within the biblical patriarch Abraham.

Johannes gives multiple scenarios of instances where Abraham’s faith in God could have been altered by doubt motivated by reason. We rely on Johannes de silentio to preserve the necessity for faith-based philosophy that is dependant on the scripture recounting Abraham’s deeds. Furthermore, the legitimacy of such and its permeability through time is dependant on Abraham’s initial sincerity of faith (and lack of rationality) as simultaneously the roots of Christian civilization. This epic flow of events whittles down to the spark: the perseverance of God to have always fulfilled that faith.

Kierkegaard has become a figurehead for both his role in the existentialist movement and his specifically faith based philosophy -- two fields dependant on a search for meaning. While the attempt to relieve human kind of the dogmatic nature of Christian doctrine initiated a wave of at times nihilistic doubt, Kierkegaard’s need for passion re-implements grounds for fanaticism averted Kantian reason. We rely, through Johanne’s recount, precisely that – recounted revealed reasons to spur forth a faith within us that harks of a priori reason insofar as it is motivating us before we are to know instances in which it is to show itself.

Despite the disheartening and at times seemingly futile effort of finding a base in reasoning (as in Kant), without striving for a type of absolute knowledge through reason our the time of this text, of the Hegelian system and the Kierkegaardian faith, by allowing elements of passion and feeling to become forces bound on a quest to meaning that dilute their sustainability with motivation by weaker sources. The classic battle of faith against reason within Pascal’s wager seems like the closest middle ground between faith and reason, a mediation that remains as disheartening as any Kantian argument.