Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith

Jeffrey Hanson is Research Associate in the Program for Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is editor of Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment and (with Michael R. Kelly) of Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought.

• Introduction1. Titular Matters2. A Philosophical Preface3. A Narrative Approach4. A Rhetorical Rehearsal5. Beginning from the Heart6. Teleological Suspensions7. Absolute Duty8. Silence and SpeechConclusionNotesIndex

"A thorough, considered, and provocative treatment of what justifiably remains Kierkegaard's most famous book."—Marginalia"Jeffrey Hanson persuasively demonstrates that Fear and Trembling contains a variety of different styles, each of which colors the content being conveyed, and to the extent that we draw the connection between style and content, we gain an even stronger impression of the various arguments in Kierkegaard's best known book."—Mark A. Tietjen, author of Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue"Hanson gives a nuanced and deeply informed reading of Kierkegaard's pictures of religious faith as they are articulated in Fear and Trembling, perhaps the most arresting and complex work in the Dane's authorship. Faith is linked to love and to gracefully weathering catastrophe, perhaps invisibly. There are only four or five books in English that dare focus entirely on this early masterpiece, and Hanson makes his mark as one of the best. Uniquely, he gives great attention to the second half of Fear and Trembling where Kierkegaard, or his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, links faith to the tale of Agnes falling in love with the merman – a brilliant counterpoint to the notorious story of Abraham and Isaac. Best of all, Hanson pries faith free from dogma of any kind, and shows it to straddle the ethical and the aesthetic."—Edward F. Mooney, Professor Emeritus,Departments of Religion and Philosophy, Syracuse University"This book successfully challenges many recent approaches to Fear and Trembling, both for tending to treat that book in isolation from the rest of the Kierkegaardian canon and also for often focusing on an apparently intractable conflict between religion and ethics. Instead, drawing from Kierkegaardian remarks in The Concept of Anxiety, Hanson demonstrates how these books form two halves of a single argument, not only in terms of what The Concept of Anxiety calls a "second ethics," but also in terms of a "second aesthetics."  Hanson's interpretation thereby thrusts Fear and Trembling out from the sidelines and into the center of current debates about Kierkegaard's authorship and helps it to illumine a wide range of other Kierkegaardian writings in new and unexpected ways."—Andrew Burgess, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of New Mexico