Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death

Introduction

Fear and Trembling, published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, meditates again and again on the story in Genesis of Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Ethically, Abraham is a man about to kill his son; religiously, he is 'the father of faith'. Faith, Kierkegaard argues, is not something reason can understand; it demands that the individual make a 'leap of faith' beyond the universality of ethics and stand alone before God, a paradox that inspires fear and trembling. The Sickness unto Death, published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, names despair as that sickness: man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, and when he will not be himself, or in despair wills to be himself, he falls into despair; only in faith can the self rest transparently in God. This volume contains these two founding works of existentialism.