Ethical and Religious

Calvin O. Schrag helpfully clarifies what Kierkegaard means by the “teleological suspension of the ethical” ( Ethics , 70, 1959). It’s essential to distinguish between the “ethical” as a mode of existence and the ethical as universal moral requirements. When Kierkegaard uses the category in the former sense, he is contrasting it with the aesthetic; the aesthetic mode of existence is the state of indecision (the lover who cannot bring himself to commit); by making a decision and shouldering that commitment, one moves to the ethical as a mode of existence, through the “act of passionate choice.” In this sense, Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Isaac was “a most emphatic expression of the ethical as a mode of existence” since it “involved a decision made in passionate earnestness, and inwardness.” This act illustrates Kierkegaard’s point elsewhere that “the religious sphere lies so close to the ethical that they are in constant communication.”

Shrag then asks, “What is suspended in Abraham’s leap of faith.” What is left behind is “a moral requirement which functions as a universal and subordinates the individual to the general moral sanction.” In acts of faith, one does not stand “in relation to the universal,” which would make him no more than a tragic hero of resignation, but instead “in an indelibly personal and unique relationship to the Absolute or God.” As Kierkegaard says, “The Individual as the Individual is superior to the universal and as the Individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute – or else there has never been faith.” Thus, the suspension of the ethical is the suspension of the ethical “as a universal moral requirement.”

But the universal-ethical is suspended “only to return in a new immediacy and find expression in the context of an individuals relation to God.” This expresses the superiority of the individual to the universal, which is “the marrow of his existentialism” and the “insight which lies at the root of his critique of Hegel.” However impressive Hegel’s system, it “neglected the concretely existing individual.” In actuality, as opposed to though, the individual is alone real. Universals still function in thought, but they must be “appropriated concretely.”

And this turns the ethical/religious on its head: “the ethical must ultimately be rooted in the religious,” and “it is only through the religious that it receives its valid and authentic expression.” The ethical thus receives a new expression within the sphere of religion: “in his intended act of sacrifice Abraham ‘loses’ Isaac by suspending the universal ethical requirement that a father should not murder his son, but the paradoxical character of the act of faith lies precisely in that he again ‘receives’ Isaac and thus gives a new expression to the universal-ethical.”