Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith : The Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in Fear and Trembling

Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is one of the most widely read works of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight and attention to all three of Kierkegaard’s "problems," dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaard's production and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis of the Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful, well-informed, and fresh manner, Hanson’s claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground.

"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