The Life of Kierkegaard’s Life & The Leap Of Faith

A Conversation With Alexander Jech

This article presents the full transcript of my conversation with Alexander Jack. Alex is a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame and the translator of a new insightful edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Our conversation charts Alexander’s own surprising and serendipitous journey to becoming a Kierkegaard scholar. We then get into the heart of Kierkegaard’s thought exploring how his tormented personal life especially his relationships with his father and Regina Olsen became the raw material for his philosophy. The discussion navigates his complex relationship with Hegel and Romanticism the nature of indirect communication and the different spheres of existence.

A central focus of our dialogue is the dense and often misunderstood classic Fear and Trembling. Alexander clarifies the true nature of Abraham’s paradox the teleological suspension of the ethical and the nuanced concept of the leap of faith. Finally we connect these profound ideas to contemporary life discussing how the Kierkegaardian leap serves as a powerful model for understanding identity transformation overcoming addiction and the role of love and the sacred in creating new possibilities for the self.

The following text provides a cleaned-up version of our dialogue preserving the depth and nuances of the conversation while removing minor repetitions and filler words for readability.

Tiago (Host): Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Anagoge Podcast. Just before we start, a quick plug: I launched a book called In Search for the Infinite. I’ll put some details in the description if you want to check it out. But today, I’m very honored to have a new guest on the show, Alexander Jack. He published a translation on Kierkegaard somewhat recently. I’ve been thinking more and more about Kierkegaard lately; he has been a big influence on my thought. When I saw his name pop up, I invited him for the podcast to see if he could explore some themes that I think are so fascinating about Kierkegaard. He was very kind to accept. Welcome, Alex, it’s a real pleasure to have you here.

Alexander (Guest): Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. From what I’ve seen, you’ve got a very interesting podcast. I love the inspiration for the name. I think this is the kind of stuff that the intellectual life needs more of: people talking about these topics. You really can’t limit it to an academic setting, a classroom, or something like that. I’m just really pleased to be here and to have this chance to talk.

T: Amazing, I agree. Before we kick off, maybe you could give a quick intro about yourself and what your background is like, and then we’ll dive into it.

A: I’m originally from Seattle, Washington. I’m now at the University of Notre Dame, in the middle of America near Lake Michigan, if you need a large landmark.

I got started as a philosopher when I was in high school, which is not the norm, but I was very fortunate. I had this teacher named Shawn Mint who had a PhD in philosophy, but he was the calculus teacher at this school. He was an incredible calculus teacher. We were not great mathematicians, and he got so many of us to get great scores. My senior year, he got special permission to teach a class on anything he wanted, and he taught a class on philosophy.

For about three years, I tried to resist becoming a philosopher because I thought it was very impractical, there’s no money in it, there’s no future in being a philosopher. But at the same time, it was possibly literally the only thing I actually was doing or cared about. It took me until the end of my junior year in college to actually become a philosophy major. Since that time, I have not looked back and I’ve just gone after it. Plato was my first philosophical love. Kierkegaard is my mature philosophical partner now, the one I spend the most time thinking with and learning from.

T: Thank you. A good place to start, I think, is what exactly drew you to Kierkegaard? Philosophy is very extensive, and there are a lot of people to pick from to study. What exactly drew you to it? Was it the topics? Did you have anything before that hinted at Kierkegaard’s work, were you thinking maybe I should read this thinker compared to someone else? How did this get started?

A: It was through a series of random, unintelligible events. Initially, as I said, I started off with Plato, which is a love-hate relationship. I remember sitting reading the Republic and thinking all of these ideas are so terrible. I just wrote in my notebook all the reasons why Plato was wrong, and then had this revelation that Plato was winning because now I was actively engaged in dialectic and I was thinking philosophically. He didn’t care about this dang city; the city’s never going to be. But here I am, philosophizing.

I pursued various other angles after that, but honestly, I found Kierkegaard completely incomprehensible. I could not get into him. I still remember trying to read Fear and Trembling and just not knowing what was going on. Then foolishly, I picked up The Concept of Anxiety and I thought maybe it would help, but I did not realize yet that that was maybe the most difficult and most unapproachable of Kierkegaardian texts. I just got nowhere with that and I set it aside. Honestly, I was really into Hegel at that time. There’s a long story there, but I spent about three years trying to understand Hegel, maybe it was three and a half. Finally, I just had this moment where a senior adviser was talking about his own path and he said, “One time I was a grad student and I had this realization that either I could study Hegel or I could do anything else with my life because Hegel’s just all or nothing.” And I said, “Well, no more Hegel.” I was not going to understand Hegel. There was always this elusive thing I couldn’t quite get anywhere. I could get somewhere, but it was like nowhere. If you’ve read a lot of Hegel, you know what I mean. You sort of go and then you don’t know where you ended up and you don’t know what you’re thinking and what he’s thinking.

But honestly, Kierkegaard still did not appear for me until a complete — I mean, this is a very Kierkegaardian explanation. One summer, my summer class did not fill. I had zero students in this class. It was just an ethics class, but I didn’t have any students. So I was wondering what I was going to do. I went to the administrative assistant and I said, “Is there any way we could get students into this class? Is there anything I could do?” It was six weeks away, which seemed very unlikely. And she said, “Well, we could try to put up posters, but it’s not likely to work in the summer. But there’s this other class. You see, there’s a guy who’s teaching a class on existentialism, but he’s leaving for a job somewhere else. So we need an instructor for his class. Could you teach it?” And in my head, what I said was, “Just take it and figure it out later.” And what I said to her was, “Sure.”

So I took the class, and in six weeks, I said I’m going to have to pick up some stuff. I picked up Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. I already knew Dostoevsky pretty well, and I knew Nietzsche somewhat, but I didn’t really know Kierkegaard at all. I said, “Well, I’m going to learn.” That was just the external occasion. Internally, I was also in a very disturbed emotional state. There were a lot of things in my life that didn’t seem like they were going the way that they ought to. Maybe that was true of all of the aspects, it was closer to all than a few. To then read Kierkegaard at that moment, in those circumstances, all of a sudden by the end of that summer, I was now a Kierkegaard scholar.

It seems so improbable, and yet it seems exactly like the kind of thing that Kierkegaard would say is how this ought to go. I went out, learned Danish, read lots of Kierkegaard, teach him in many different ways. It’s a lot of fun, usually, except in one case. Teaching Kierkegaard is a great experience. I got to work translating Fear and Trembling, mostly because of my experiences as a teacher, which I can expand on if you want. A lot of what I’ve done in this realm is a response to student needs. Part of it was a personal need, but as I got into it, he made me very sensitive to student needs and what they needed for their spiritual, moral, emotional development, crises they were going through. That really guided how I proceeded.

T: That’s an amazing story of how you got into it, and it’s just hilarious how you end up specializing when you went to a class on existentialism. You have the whole canon, and the one that you like the least or that you know the least, you now have to study him to get the general gist of it, and then you become completely enthralled by it. That’s just hilarious. But let’s dive a little bit into the student issue that you mentioned. I found that very interesting. What exactly do you think that the students need, and how do you think Kierkegaard can help with that? Also, I’m curious about how your translation came about. What were previous translations missing? What did you try to do differently? Just the whole thought process behind it.

A: This is something that in some ways I’ve thought about so much, I’m trying to think of the right starting point. When I teach Kierkegaard, usually what I really want is what he wants, which is I want them to have a sort of inward experience where they work through questions about who they are, what they care about, what it means to live up to what they care about. There’s all these things that he naturally helps you to do, to think about who you are before God, who you are in your relationships, how those function.

I’ve often taught, for example, by pairing Kierkegaard with a series of operas and ballets. At Notre Dame, we have an interdisciplinary class called the College Seminar, and it should be divided between three different disciplines, and it also has a focus on oral presentation so students need to learn how to talk about these things. I frame it to them this way: “It’s really difficult to talk about love without sounding like an idiot. It’s also difficult to talk about music without sounding like a fool, and talking about dance, nobody even says anything. It’s just there.” I say, “In this class, we’re going to learn how to speak about these things and not feel ashamed of ourselves.” That’s how we get started, and Kierkegaard is the author who’s always guiding us into this understanding of how to think about the human heart and what is going on with it.

It’s a very slow-paced course. We really only read Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and a tiny bit of Works of Love or Sickness unto Death or something like that, because we’re taking time. We’re watching Don Giovanni, we’re watching Swan Lake, and between those, we have a whole series of other operas and ballets that we might watch depending on my sense of my mood and their mood and what they’re into. People will take different paths. I’ve had multiple students read Diary of a Seducer and think, “Oh my gosh, that’s who I am.” For many of them, that’s a disturbing realization. They want to be something else. Others really identify with Judge Wilhelm and they say, “This is it, this is exactly what love is.” And there are those who are very troubled and they of course naturally move into the Fear and Trembling circle of people who have some sort of impossible love or impossible passion and they don’t know what to do with it or how to relate to the world at this point. They are looking for a way to think through that.

For these students, I’m giving them the opportunity to think through what they’re doing with their lives and they get a whole sense of all these different things. Oftentimes, they’ll make meetings with me and they’ll say, “I feel a bit like this and I feel a bit like that.” Kierkegaard’s got these three spheres that everybody talks about: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. And they’ll say, “I feel like I’m in all of them.” And I say, “Yeah, that’s right. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are only one sphere at a time. Actual existing human beings are always all of them. We’re not pure types. That’s how you should feel.” They want to work through that. They end up places, and that’s the environment I try to create.

What annoyed me was having to correct the text in class because I’d say, “That’s not really what he’s saying” or “That’s not a good way of expressing this.” Sometimes there are references that just didn’t make sense to them or to anyone, and the note in the text wasn’t very helpful, or sometimes the note in the text was really anti-helpful. You can see then eventually I was led to this point where I said, “I’ll just translate Fear and Trembling myself, and then I won’t have to do that for my students anymore.” That was very optimistic on my part to think I wouldn’t later have things I wanted to change, which I already do. It was published in September and there are things I would change in the translation. Someday there’ll be a second edition, and I will change it.

But that’s how I got a lot of what is in there. The way I translated it, the explanatory notes that I put in, a lot of them are either based in questions that students had or things that I just sensed that they didn’t understand. I wrote those notes thinking about what those students in my class need to know. What would help them to read this and not to dismiss something and say, “I have no idea what that’s about.” That’s really what guided me in doing it.

There’s also that immense glossary, which if you buy this edition, it has a 200-page glossary, which is frankly insane. But in some ways, it was the most difficult and for some people it might be the best feature. The glossary… we should just separate that discussion, you could ask me about that later. It’s a whole thing and it was a monster to deal with. But the glossary as an idea came later. That’s how I got into the translation business.

T: First of all, I completely love the class setup that you’ve described. That sounds lovely, and it sounds true to what education should be about in the deepest possible sense, so that’s super cool to hear. It’s also funny that I put two questions on you, not thinking that they would be necessarily related, but then it was exactly logical from one place to the other. Before we dive a little bit into Kierkegaard’s thought more specifically, maybe if you could just expand a little bit on the background. What was the cultural and philosophical context that Kierkegaard was in while he was writing? Who was he responding to? What was the tradition behind him of Hegel and Kant and all these other thinkers? What placed him historically so that we can understand his thought better?

A: That is an excellent question. The first way I’ll answer it will be very true but not very helpful, and then I’ll try for one that’s more helpful but also more limited in how much I cover. The first thing would be the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition. One way of looking at it is that Kierkegaard is very well aware of the Greeks, of everything that’s been going on in modern philosophy. He’s very aware of the traditions of Christian thought that have led up to his moment in time in 19th-century Denmark. There’s a sense in which you can feel these influences all over the place. He’s so widely read and he incorporates everything into this kind of stew of his mind that’s just cooking there. The flavors, sometimes of things that aren’t even there, I still sense there’s like a hint of Aristotle here or something. He doesn’t mention it, but I feel like there’s just a little taste. That’s less helpful, but I think that’s true and it’s a good way to think about how immensely… I had a student who once said his brain is just so big. That’s one way to think about it.

But in terms of his immediate context, 19th-century Denmark, the way I try to explain it as a first pass to students is I say, “Think about Victorian England.” If you’re talking to English-speaking students, they probably know some Victorian stuff, and that gives you some ideas about an environment that’s very educated but also very tight-laced, very straight-laced. These people are repressing their emotions and they are very carefully guarded in certain ways. They are very optimistic. They have a sort of religiosity, but you don’t know how deep it goes. That is similar to 19th-century Denmark in his time. It’s not quite the same world, but in many ways that gives you the feel of that world.

You also need to shrink it down a bit because you’re not part of the largest empire on earth, the British Empire, you’re part of a very small nation, although it once, not that long ago for them, had some wider influence and more power than it did in Kierkegaard’s time. It’s right next door to this gigantic philosophical powerhouse, Germany, where you’ve got Kant, you’ve got Hegel, you got German Romanticism. All of those influences are just bleeding over into Denmark one after another. In particular at this time, Hegel on the one hand and the Romantics on the other are both giant influences.

Hegel believes that you can understand everything, or at least he can, and everything can be brought together into one philosophical system. Everything can be brought under reason. God can be brought under reason. There are no mysteries that will escape. The Romantics are the opposite. They’re like, “Man, mystery is everywhere, and reason just doesn’t even get to the bottom of anything.” In terms of the things that reason can understand, they’re all boring. In terms of the things that are interesting, reason is really limited and it’s not going to help you with any of the things that matter most to us. Those are both caricatures, but I think they help if you don’t know what those things are to get into them.

Both of those things are going on in Kierkegaard’s mind, and they’re shaping him, shaping his education as he grows up. It’s always obvious his opposition to Hegel is very obvious because he brings it up constantly. His relationship to Romanticism is a little bit more complicated. Sometimes he seems like he’s in that world, but really he doesn’t belong to them either because they tend to glorify imagination and feeling in a way that he would distrust. He would say they’re getting lost in fantasies and things like that. They really are, in some ways, models for his aesthetes. His aesthetes are much better Romantics than he is, and they have some advantages over the Hegelians, but the Hegelians probably make better citizens, more like Judge Wilhelm. That’s a plus in their column.

In terms of the environment, you could see that he’s pushing back against both of these: against Hegel for thinking reason can do so much, against the Romantics for getting lost in their feelings and imagination so much. He’s really bothered by the official religiosity which is only skin deep. I think that’s a sense that he had probably from a very young age, that most people’s religion is a matter of words and going to church on certain days, but it doesn’t fundamentally shape their lives. Those social influences are the ones I would highlight.

T: Thank you for that. That was a great breakdown, and I really like the comparison to the Victorian era as well. Even though I’m sure there are differences, I know nothing about the more Danish-specific cultural context that he was on. I never read directly on it, so that actually helps me a fair bit to try to get a sense of how that was. You also mentioned how he was influenced by this cheap religiosity. Something that always made me so fascinated with Kierkegaard was precisely that. Maybe there are some other thinkers that just aren’t occurring to me right now, but I think Kierkegaard is probably the philosopher that is the most interesting to read about his personal life and then seeing his personal life reflected in his philosophy. I just think that’s absolutely fascinating. In your opinion, what do you think is the biggest link between the personal Kierkegaard — how he experienced life, the troubles he went through, his personal suffering — and how that came about in his philosophical works and his philosophical system, even though it’s not a system in the Hegelian sense, but in the worldview that he tried to present?

A: Those are giant questions. You could do a whole semester answering that. I have taught it that way. To break that down into something a little smaller, you’re right, it’s not usually the case that the personal life and the work are so intertwined. Kierkegaard himself notes this when he has to sum up his authorship, and he says it’s this weird fact that Providence takes what is personal for him, and when he works through the things that are personal, they become universal. He says this is also the way it was for Socrates. Socrates also really just had personal intellectual problems, but then it turns out it’s the birth of Western philosophy. Socrates’ personal problems, the fact that he just can’t figure out if he knows anything, somehow generates so much.

But for Kierkegaard, they are in some ways much more personal, and I would always go to three things.

Number one, his relationship with his father. There are some biographies that really make this the one thing. I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can take any one of these factors and treat it that way. But his relationship with his father was very difficult, and yet you can’t sum it up as either a negative or a positive relationship. His father was a serf who, in his teenage years, was taken into the city and went pure rags to riches. He was a serf, he had nothing, and he was minding the animals in a remote area of Jutland with nothing, and utterly depressed about his life. Then he became a millionaire, one of the most successful businessmen in Copenhagen, and he retired at 40.

You might wonder what he’s doing when he retires at 40. He’s taking a very active hand in raising his children, which has its good and its bad side, because this guy’s got this very dark religious mentality, the kind of mentality that is very influenced by the sense of the weight of sin, the weight of guilt, and is doing everything he can to help his children, and yet in helping them, actually passing on this deep weight of sin and taking away from them in many ways the sense of childhood. Kierkegaard was the seventh child and the last, and he said he suffered greatly from the fact that essentially he never was young. Even when he was eight, he was treated as if he was in some ways an adult and had this adult way of relating to all of these things which was impossible for a child to have. He said that’s one of the things that really cursed his life in some ways.

His father was so gung-ho on this. You can see what you would get from this. The father being so involved, they were all well educated, they went to these great schools. It’s almost like you’re going to the elite prep school and you’re being homeschooled at the same time. You’re getting so much. There’s this little bit too where apparently the clothes that he wore… I don’t know if you have this in Europe, but there are definite stereotypes about what homeschoolers dress like. They’re not really totally true, but they are based on a certain era of this idea that people who are keeping their kids home and teaching them themselves are also dressing them in traditional, almost 19th-century garments. Well, that’s what his father was doing, except it was 18th-century garments, and he’s going to school in them and getting made fun of for the weird, out-of-fashion clothes he has.

There’s a lot going on there, and the father’s oppressive… I say oppressive, but there’s something odd about it because Kierkegaard honors him, because he’s always trying to do the right thing, but it’s just way too much. It’s way too much weight for them to bear. That’s the first factor, and there’s so much in there. You can see too Kierkegaard’s sense of the depth of his father’s religious feeling versus what he sees outside. You can see there that he’s already going to be very aware that most people do not take religion as seriously as his father does. For a while, he’s going to be one of the people who doesn’t. When he’s in his 20s, he’s going to say, “I’d rather not be religious. That seems like an easier way.”

The second factor is what ends this period of rebellion. I think honestly his rebellion period is pretty… somebody should make a sitcom out of Kierkegaard in his 20s. I think it would be really funny. He does a lot of crazy things in his 20s when he’s rebelling against his father, but he’s doing so in an overintellectual way. Maybe it would be like Seinfeld or something. What ends that is of course his relationship with Regina Olsen, this girl he meets at a party. He falls deeply in love with her. The way he puts it is that he allowed his existence to become ever more entwined with hers, although he never let on to her that this was what was happening because he had become an expert, partly through his father, partly through other factors, in dissembling. He never presented his genuine self in public. He only presented a wisecracking polemicist. He was known. If you had him at a party, you knew he would be very entertaining, but you hoped you wouldn’t be the target of his jibes and attacks. He had become, as he remarks in his journals more than once, a real expert at just not letting anybody know what he thought or what he felt. He presented a version that did all these things.

So when he fell in love, it was the same way. He did not tell her initially anything about this, so that she had no real knowledge of whether he cared about her or not. In fact, for a long time, I think you would say that she didn’t believe that he did. Later on, he always kept out the possibility. He just never fully revealed. Maybe he didn’t know how to. That relationship, of course, became very unhappy as soon as it became happy.

What happens is one day, he’s finished off his dissertation finally. His father has died. In fact, he said when his father died, it became harder for him to put off his studies because he had taken almost 10 years to finish a degree that he could have finished in five. Essentially, as long as his father was there, he could always give his father excuses. When his father was dead, he said, “There’s nobody except myself.” He switched gears for that reason and others. He finished his dissertation and then he goes to see her. He finds her coming back from some lesson to her house, and he asks her to play the piano. She gets out the music, and he grabs the music book and he throws it and he says, “No, it’s only you that I care about.” He proposes to her in this very weird way and she’s just completely dumbfounded. Where is this coming from? Because she didn’t know that this is where he was, and she’s dating this other guy. He’s like, “Ah, that guy sucks, forget about him.”

Ultimately, she agrees, her father agrees, they’re going to get married. And then Kierkegaard realizes this is a terrible idea because he is a terrible person. In particular, it’s due to his relationship with his father as the major reason. He’s acquired this whole thing of presenting a fake version of himself. He has this deep unhappiness, this self-tormenting depression. He’s like, “Oh my gosh, if I marry her, she’s going to have to deal with that all the time and I can’t just hide it.” Because that’s what he’s been doing. He doesn’t engage with her and show her himself. He shows her this very entertaining version of himself. He’s like, “Well, that’s not what marriage is like. You’re married, you’re actually around them all the time.”

In his mind, there are two options. Either lie to her and continue to deceive her, and he says, “I would rather murder her than lie to her like that.” You’re like, “Well, that’s a little strongly put, Kierkegaard, but okay.” Or reveal everything and crush her. That’s what he adds in his mind. In his mind, revealing everything about who he really is is just going to crush her and ruin her life if she has to live with that on a day-in, day-out basis. It might be romantic to imagine having this sudden moment of him telling her everything and then she’d be like, “Oh, poor Søren.” I don’t know whether she was the kind of person who patted somebody’s back and said, “Oh,” but he was like, “Yeah, but once that becomes something that goes on and on for years, it’s not so romantic.” He thinks it’ll ruin her life.

The third factor, which is already really been woven through here, is the fact that he does everything indirectly. That was the skill he learned of dissembling and hiding himself, providing a false self. Whereas before he really just did this as a mode of self-protection, after this moment where he realizes that the most likely result of his engagement to Regina is going to be ruining her life, his indirection becomes outwardly directed. Now he’s focused on how he could get her out of this relationship as undamaged as possible. He’s thinking, “What would help her to just forget about me and move on with her life and be capable of happiness with another person?”

He comes up with this elaborate scheme where he’s going to slowly make her feel that he’s becoming distant. He’s going to make himself seem to be a much worse person than he is. He’s going to say these terrible things to her to make it sound like he’s just this unfeeling, selfish person. He’s doing it because he wants her to think he’s a terrible person and that she got off lucky not marrying him. He’s got to do this and be a scoundrel.

At one point, he tells his brother Peter… as a sidebar, of the seven children, only two made it past 33, and it’s not because of infant mortality, which is what we’re used to. These are wealthy people. Their father was a serf, but he’s a millionaire now. He certainly has all the care they need. They’re not dying in infancy. They die through a series of… some of them make more sense. The girls tend to die in childbirth or after, through complications from childbirth. They make it to their 20s and they die. The brothers die in a variety of ways. One of them dies in New Jersey, which really doesn’t seem to make sense. You’re like, “What happened? Did he run into the mafia?” No, he did have a hard time. Just got sick and died there. Again, a bad relationship with the father was part of that. His final letter back was where he talks about his love for his mother, not for his father, and then that brother dies. So Søren and Peter are the only ones left now. They all universally believe that they’re about to die at any moment. That’s another thing they’ve inherited, this sense that that’s going on. At one point, Peter… Kirkegaard is worried that he’s going to tell Regina and her family that he’s lying to them, that he’s not really like this. He tells his brother that if he reveals the deception, he’ll shoot him. I don’t think he actually would, but he certainly felt that way.

This indirection is also what goes into writing Either/Or, his first great book, in which supposedly there’s this guy named Victor Eremita who finds these manuscripts in a desk in a hidden drawer and he publishes them. There’s all these different people. There’s this aesthete, there’s his friend Johannes the Seducer, who has this diary which is really awful. There’s this friend of the aesthete, the judge, Judge Wilhelm, who’s writing to the aesthete and saying, “Shape up, you know, get a job, get married, be a productive citizen.” And there’s a sermon by the judge’s friend who is a priest out in the hinterlands, preaching to farmers and cows. They’re all in here, all these things, and you’ll notice… where’s the authorial voice? What’s the perspective I’m supposed to have? He just leaves everybody hanging. That’s itself a very complicated story to work out, but that’s an example of the indirection that he is using.

I’m only going to talk about one part, and this will finally get to your second part of your question about how his personal life influenced his authorship. One thing he wanted to do with Either/Or was to utterly repel Regina through the Seducer’s Diary in particular. By depicting this guy as this terrible, cunning seducer who is utterly devoid almost of a self. He’s spent so much time deceiving people and simulating selves that it’s not even clear he has a self left, or at least not one that he knows behind it all. He works into this diary little details too that recall or are very similar to events in his courtship of Regina. He depicts and describes himself during this period as essentially going down to hell to find the devil’s own secrets in order to write this thing. What really gives him the motivation to do this is he’s got to go and persuade Regina that he’s absolutely appalling. Because even though this is published pseudonymously, under the name Victor Eremita, how quickly did people know it was him? Some people suspected, other people had other ideas. There was a big tradition in Denmark of publishing this way. People would publish anonymously or under pseudonyms. They’d do all kinds of things like that. It’s a fun practice if you get into it.

But there’s one person who definitely knew, and it was Regina. Regina knew, and it must have been very disturbing for her, or at least that’s what he hoped. This would repel her. You see what’s going on here is that somehow his desire to help her, even though it’s misguided, is now being channeled through his constant hiding. He needs to reveal and hide at the same time. He’s not thinking about himself. He’s now thinking about another person, this individual that he wants to reach and have a specific effect upon. He does all of this, he produces it all. The result is actually she’s not deceived at all. Not only does she know who wrote it, but when he sees her in church, not intentionally, but he does, she gives him this look from which he comes to realize it was all wasted. She totally sees through what I’m doing. She understands I’m just trying to drive her away. It’s all out of self-torment. She knows I’m this… anyway, it was a waste. He’s not helping her at all because she’s not as easily deceived as he thought. But after that, that’s always the drive, that’s always the impetus, that’s always the way his genius works. It’s this needing to work through his problems in this indirect way. That’s part of what makes him so fun, so frustrating, and endlessly interesting. There’s the sense also sometimes that maybe there’s a path through all these mazes he creates, and sometimes you wonder if even he knows the way through them. It’s a terrible amount of fun to do that. I imagine that if you were Regina, it’s not so fun. You’re just probably moved with pity by the suffering that he must be subjecting himself to. But for us, we learn a lot without having to have that personal degree of connection to it. That’s my short version of an answer to that question.

T: Amazing, that was a great answer and just beautiful. I think you captured a lot of what’s so interesting about him. Something that to me personally I found utterly captivating about Kierkegaard was also that I saw a lot of things reflected in my own life, which I think is the very point of Kierkegaard. One of the things specifically was number one, this awareness of your limitation towards the ideal, the weight of your shortcomings. And then also this idea that you need something to get out of it, which faith is one way to put it that he talks about.

One thing that I found very interesting was I also saw, just like he did, this problem of feeling awful about yourself, about limitations, in the context of being in a relationship with another person. Because if you’re such an awful person, then how can you possibly justify being with another person? You’re going to ruin her life, basically, or his life. That was exactly Kierkegaard’s dilemma, and that was exactly my dilemma as well. I literally thought about this every day in the context of a long-term relationship. So when I read Kierkegaard, I was like, “Holy crap, this is me,” the exact same thing as a lot of your students mentioned.

But then what saved me a little bit outside the relationship was the fact of this aspect of having faith that my limitations are justifiable, that they’re forgiven in one sense. Obviously, there’s a lot of Christian theology, but let’s not go into it. It’s just a faith that my existence is justified and that I can move forward. If that’s the case, then I can also apply that to my relationship. It’s like, I don’t see how I can justify this, but I’m going to have faith that it does somehow.

What I find so weird about Kierkegaard was precisely that he was involved in all of this, he talked so much about this faith, about this leap towards the overcoming of your limitations, but then he didn’t do that in the area that mattered the most. It’s like he had this huge problem that applies to all areas of life, and then he said, “Here’s a solution,” but then he didn’t apply it himself. Does he ever unpack this contradiction in his work at all?

A: I think that’s a really good question and a really nice setup because I think the more honest we are with ourselves, the closer we get to that realization that you’re talking about. Once you get there, how do you get out? I personally think it’s very hard to take our limitations and flaws too seriously until you see them impacting somebody that you love. There’s something about that that really does… when you’re just dwelling on yourself in a lonely way, that’s awful, but that’s not the same as loving somebody and wanting the best for them and then seeing that you’re undermining that for them. It’s just very different.

This is also a domain that many commentators have talked about, this aspect of Kierkegaard. Somehow, a sort of false story has gradually taken hold that is simpler than the real story, and the real story is just more thorny. The too-easy story is that the moment when he realizes that Regina is not fooled, he writes Fear and Trembling right after that, in one of these genius storms. This is what happens to all great geniuses. They have these moments sometimes where suddenly the creative power goes to 11 and all of a sudden they just produce something, maybe their greatest work, in a very brief amount of time. Not only does he write this, he also writes Repetition, which is another book about a failed relationship. Both are prompted by this realization that he hasn’t spared her anything, that what he’s done has not helped. In his journal, what he writes is, “I lacked faith in my relationship with Regina.” He’s like, “Thank God that I see this now.”

I lay that out because the story that developed looks a little bit too closely at Fear and Trembling and applies it backwards in a way that doesn’t quite actually fit what happened. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard is concerned with the example of Abraham. Everybody knows some version of the story of Abraham. As he says, Abraham’s so famous that the real problem is everybody thinks they know stuff about Abraham and you need to peel it away to get at the core of what is really happening.

But the story of Abraham is briefly, you know, he’s living in a city, he gets called out. It says, “And God said to Abram” — he wasn’t Abraham yet, he was just Abram — “go out from here and go to a land I’ll show you. And I’ll make you a mighty nation there.” Of course, there are all these things that are making this sound like an insane project. Number one, his wife is barren. How is he going to have children? But he just goes with her, he goes with Sarah. He’s going to a place where he has no friends, he has no network of relations. This is a time where that is where your whole support network comes from. It comes from your kin group. He’s going to go out into the middle of nowhere where he doesn’t know anybody. How is he going to make this work? Well, the idea is that’s the beginning of faith. He has many little adventures and problems along the way. Sometimes he comes off very well in these episodes, sometimes he looks like he’s doubting and he comes off rather poorly.

But at the end, the promise has finally been fulfilled. They have the child, Isaac, in their old age. Then at some point later, it doesn’t say how long, this is the final episode in Abraham’s life. God says to Abraham once more, he comes to him and says, “Go take your son, your only son whom you love, up to the mountain where I will show you and offer him to me as a burnt offering.” It looks like God’s just reversing everything. He’s saying, “Okay, I promised you this child, but I’m taking the child away.” Not only that, “I promised that you would have all these descendants through this child,” and this has been a big thing for Abraham. There was always this thing like, “Well, what if I just had a child with my wife’s handmaid or something?” or “What if I just adopted a child?” And God says, “No, you will have a son through Sarah, it’s gonna be that one, and it’s only that one. It’s only Isaac. That’s it.” Here he is. It makes Abraham’s life look like the whole thing is pointless. This is what Fear and Trembling is driving at.

And yet what happens is Abraham believes. As he says, some translations say he had faith. I think that’s really… it’s one of many little changes that I really didn’t like. I think it’s better to say Abraham believed. That’s the way he’s had it, because it’s an active thing, he’s actively doing it. Abraham believes. What he believes is not always clear, but Abraham does it all. In some sense, he always believes it’s going to work out. He’s going to take the knife. He’s there, he’s on Mount Moriah, he’s got Isaac there bound, he raises the knife, and he still believes. He believes what? He believes that somehow it’s all going to work out. Then God provides a ram for the sacrifice and he sacrifices the ram instead and they all go back.

In Fear and Trembling, he’s got this pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence, or Silent John is what I like to say in class sometimes. He’s telling us a story, but what a paradox that is. Silent John. But this is a paradox too. Why didn’t Abraham go crazy? How did he not lose his mind in this episode? He’s devoted his entire life to this. He loves this son more than anything, and now he’s going to sacrifice the son, but he still believes it’ll work out. And it does work out, and Abraham’s fine.

What people have then said is that, okay, so at the heart of this, you can say here’s this weird thing. It looks like Abraham’s going to murder an innocent child. That looks bad. This is one of the central problems of Fear and Trembling, it gets called the teleological suspension of the ethical. But the main thing is, is it the case that when you’re following God, normal rules don’t apply? Can you… is that okay if God says, “Go murder your son,” and you’re like, “All right, okay God, that’s fine.” Is that the way it works? I said it jokingly because that’s easier than to talk about it earnestly.

But then people apply this and they say, “Ah, so Kierkegaard, what he did is he broke his engagement with Regina, and that was him sacrificing Isaac. He’s writing Fear and Trembling to try to justify himself. He’s saying because he had a higher project, it was to become an author.” People also tell stories about people like Gauguin. That story is also wrong. People get attached to this story too, where he became a great artist. He abandoned his family and became a great artist in Polynesia and now we justify him because he became a great artist. That story is also not really quite like that. He had a lot of problems in his family life before he ever went.

But in the case of Kierkegaard, it’s not really the case that he viewed himself as having faith like Abraham and therefore he sacrifices his relationship with Regina. That’s really backwards. But this idea has taken hold and over the last century is almost the dominant way that people think about it. It seems weird because breaking an engagement doesn’t seem a lot like raising a knife to a child, but in 19th-century social mores, that really wasn’t done. Breaking an engagement was very frowned upon. You were essentially violating an oath. It wasn’t quite like that because essentially you’d made a promise to make an oath, but a promise to make an oath is also kind of like an oath, and if you break the promise to make an oath, then really where’s society going? It’s scandalous that he did this.

This false story is, “Ah, but he is like Abraham, he’s fulfilling his mission to God.” You have to see that the actual way he’s thinking about it is the opposite. He’s not like Abraham. If he had been like Abraham, he would have married her. That’s what he says in his journals. If he’d had faith, he would have married her because he was tormented by this sense that he would destroy her. To him, marrying her is sort of raising the knife, and if he’d had faith, he would have believed that somehow God would have blessed this because he did genuinely love her. Somehow it would have… who knows? He doesn’t know how. That’s the thing. When you have faith, you really don’t know how this is going to work. That’s central to it. Otherwise, it would just be reason or probability or “this always happens.” But it’s not, and he really would have no idea how that could happen. As far as he can tell, anybody being married to him should suffer a lot.

This is where it’s like for commentators, it’s this tightrope. It’s so easy to just fall off. One famous author, Martin Buber, has this thing about how for Kierkegaard, God and Regina are like rivals. So it’s God or it’s Regina. There’s a sense in which you could see why he said that, because it is by breaking with Regina that he became close to God, but it wasn’t because there was an either/or. It was because he realized in breaking with Regina how far he was from faith. Essentially, everything he’s doing is in some sense an outgrowth of what he now knows he should have known but he did not know.

Then there’s a sad story about why they didn’t end up getting married. In some sense, I think he still, at the time he wrote Fear and Trembling, thought that was a possibility. By the time it was published, he knew that it wasn’t, because that boyfriend that he told her to forget about, she was now engaged to him. It’s even the case that she thought she had his blessing for this, because the dangers of indirect communication are that sometimes communication miscarries. They had this little exchange in the church with nods, and there were like three nods or something. He thought he knew what she was saying, but she had advertised that she was now engaged to this other guy. She was doing the nod, she was trying to see, “Do you want to cancel your claim?” is what she was asking him. “Do you want to cancel that claim and I’ll marry him, but if you still want me to wait…” she’s trying to nod this way. Kierkegaard thinks it’s some other thing and he nods and he does all this stuff. Then she goes and gets married to this other guy who has the amazing name of Schlegel, which I’ve got to say, Hegel is already a rough name. I feel like Schlegel is the most unaesthetic name I know of.

T: I actually didn’t know that he kind of reflected back on the situation like that, which I think to me that’s actually quite beautiful because that actually, that level of self-awareness, the fact that even if it took a while to sink in, to me that actually justifies or exemplifies his philosophy of saying this is how life is. This is the fact that sometimes you have to make this jump, and I failed to do it, but now you need to do it. That’s how I think it’s the best way to see it, and I see it somewhat confirmed, I suppose to some degree, based on what you said.

It’s also funny that you mentioned Abraham because I wanted to mention that as well in terms of the teleological suspension of the ethical. In regards to that concept, it’s a bit weird to me because every time I look into it, I often vacillate between two opinions. One of them is this makes absolute sense, Kierkegaard is a genius, this is like the most accurate description of reality humanly possible. Then the other one is, actually no, this doesn’t make sense, and my brain just switches between on and off.

I’ll tell you how I see it to some degree, and then try to maybe correct me on where I think I’m misinterpreting Kierkegaard. One of the ways that I think is really useful is that there’s a call of the ultimate, of God, of the divine, that instructs you to do a certain type of behavior. Because it’s God, you need to do it. It has maximum normativity humanly possible. But then the specific behavior that you’re supposed to do is immortal. You’re not supposed to kill, which is the commandment that God told, that is now violating the last thing that God told you. There’s this contradiction. To some degree, Kierkegaard’s answer is you need to follow the theological command above the ethical commands. To some degree, in a typical religious context, and I think especially within a modern interpretation of Christianity, that makes a lot of sense because God is this powerful being that is just sending orders down to earth or whatever. In that sense, it’s like you can’t disobey an order from this super being.

That’s one way to view it. Another way is that the reason why you need to… maybe let me put it another way. One possible criticism against this interpretation, especially from new atheists, can be, “Okay, even if it’s God that’s instructing you to do that, then you shouldn’t do it, even if it’s God, because it’s immoral.” Obviously, this has all kinds of philosophical history of people arguing stuff like that. But then the problem is that if you go far enough back, that doesn’t make any sense because God is almost by definition the ultimate good. You can’t just say that God is going against the good. That’s just incomprehensible, I think, at least in my perspective, if you go deep enough.

To me, that’s kind of what solves the paradox somewhat, which is you trust that you can go against the ethic because in one sense you’re following the ultimate ethic. It’s just a matter of perspective. You just can’t see behind the trajectory that you’re going. That is what justifies his behavior, knowing that he’s following the ultimate good. Now, the problem is that where I get sometimes confused is that where I then think actually it doesn’t make sense is because if that’s the case, if you justify the theological by being the ultimate good, which ultimately ties to ethics, then you end up blending the ethical and the theological, and then this hierarchy doesn’t exist anymore. Then I feel like my brain just falls into mush and I’m not sure what to think about anymore. So help me, please.

A: He does talk about where he has the pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, saying thought is paralyzed when it gets into this. I think if I’ve got it right, the word he uses, and I now I cannot remember the Danish word, but it’s cognate with the English word “lame” in the older meaning. For example, a horse could go lame if it’s running and then it incurs some sort of injury so it cannot run anymore. I thought that captured the sense that you’re pressing thought as hard as you can and then it just breaks. It’s not just that it’s paralyzed. Maybe it was an effect of some Pokémon you’re fighting and the Pokémon has a paralyzing effect. No, this is something more like the horse that’s straining and then something broke, something snapped, and you don’t have the ability now because of something to grasp what is going on here.

This gets me into why I translated the way I translated and some very particular issues. I don’t think there’s no way to just snap your fingers and dissolve the difficulty of what’s going on in Fear and Trembling in Problemata 1 in particular. I think there is no way to do that. I think if anybody comes in and says, “Ah, I’ve got this way, it just explains away the paradox,” then something’s wrong. I do think that you can try to understand the paradox correctly, and eventually you may be able to get to the point where you could understand it the way that Abraham did. If you can get to that point, then maybe you can live with it.

The key little bit, and this has just bugged me now for years, was in Problemata 1. Every single English translation with the exception of the very first sort of made a mistake in the setup of the problem. Let me bring this up. Here’s how Problemata 1 begins in the Hong translation, and I will say, of course, all honor to the Hongs. I’m here at the Hong Kierkegaard Library. There are busts of both of them, of Howard and Edna Hong, who together brought us every single thing that Kierkegaard wrote in English. Because English is so widely used, this is the edition that is used around the world by people who do not have a specific version, which means most people. The Germans are very good at translating things very systematically, and beyond the Germans, I’m not sure if anybody’s totally done it. The Italians, there’s a guy named Cornelio Fabro who was deeply upset during World War II. Imagine being an Italian and not being into fascism. Apparently, what he did is he read a lot of Kierkegaard and then he translated Kierkegaard, so he was a one-man Kierkegaard translator.

The Hongs are so important. I start with their translation of this, and for the most part, it’s very good, but I’ll get to the problem. Here’s how it starts: “The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its1 telos but is itself the telos for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it does not go further.” He’s saying the ethical is this thing that just applies to everybody at all times. That’s the simple version. There’s not some higher point, like you do what the ethical says so that you can get brownie points or something. You don’t do ethics so that… no, the point is it’s about what’s good and bad and right and wrong, and that’s just the end of the story. There’s not another story. That’s the perspective of ethics. That’s fine. It’s no problem here.

Then he starts to talk about the individual and the individual’s task. He says, “As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal.” You have this business about every time the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal. The idea is that, okay, here’s what we’re supposed to do: don’t murder. But I’m just going to do it. In any other case, you just have no reason. The idea would be you have no reason. You’re not saying something like, “Here’s a rule, don’t lie,” but then you said, “But what if Nazis are knocking on the door? Do you lie because your Jewish neighbor is hiding in the attic?” The idea is here, actually, that could be fine. You have an ethical reason here for violating an ethical rule. We can debate it, but fundamentally you’re saying, “I have an ethical duty to save this person’s life, and I have an ethical duty to tell the truth, but I’m going to lie and I’m going to try to do this other ethical thing.” You might say, “Oh, that’s all fine.” This person’s not asserting themselves in their individuality. They’re saying this is what anybody should do. They think this is just what everybody ought to do. They’re still talking in terms of the ethical universal. But if you just lie to people because you want to, you’re asserting yourself in your singularity or particularity. This is one of the things that there’s no easy solution to, whether you want to translate that word as particularity, singularity, individuality. It gets tricky, but it doesn’t matter too much.

The key one is when they say, “when the individual asserts himself,” because there’s actually a word that’s missing, this little Danish word vil. Later translators said, “We don’t like missing this, so we want to bring that word back in.” So you have, here’s what Alistair Hannay says: “as soon as the individual wants to assert himself in his particularity.” And Sylvia Walsh does it the same way: “as soon as the single individual wants to assert himself in his particularity.” Bruce Kirmmse also does it this way: “whenever the individual wants to assert himself in his particularity.” I did a little search while I was here of different translations. I found that the French translations seem to make the same issue. They go straight into assertion. The Catalan… I do not know Catalan at all. My Catalan is even worse than my French, but I was able to use Google Translate. As far as I can tell, the Catalan translation also has this issue.

The real problem is this: now you’ve set it up as want. But here’s a really basic fact: Abraham doesn’t want to sacrifice Isaac. You have this problem here because you say, “as soon as the individual asserts himself in his singularity… murder.” But Abraham doesn’t commit murder. He never actually murders Isaac. Isaac doesn’t die. And he doesn’t want to, either. He loves Isaac. He doesn’t want him to die. So what is going on here? It looks like actually he’s off the hook by this definition because he doesn’t ever actually do it, and he doesn’t want to do it.

A little bit further down, there’s a definition of temptation: temptation is experiencing the desire to do the wrong thing. But now in these translations, if wanting to sin is how we sin, then temptation and sin are the same thing. If you have a felt desire to do the wrong thing, that’s temptation, but wanting to do the wrong thing is also just sin. This is impossible. This is so muddled. They’re attempting to correct something that was not very clear, but it’s actually now less clear.

The way I solved it was to translate that little word as intend. On the basis of everything I’ve done and everybody I’ve talked to, that’s exactly… I don’t know why everybody went with want. It is what, if you were a Dane buying a dictionary at the airport, it would tell you to do to translate that. It’s similar to our English word “will,” like “I will do this,” except it really means more like you are willing it, which we just don’t say in English anymore. The first Kierkegaard translation tended to avoid this by using the locution of “he meant to” do it or something, but that’s weird. Or “he would do it,” which is actually much worse. It’s correct in an older form of English, but in contemporary English to say that Abraham would do it is just confusing.

What I went with is, “as soon as the individual intends to assert himself in his singularity, he sins.” That’s how you get Abraham, because Abraham does intend to do the act. He never actually does the act. He doesn’t want to do the act, but he is intending it. That’s something that we do normally think of as a crime. Attempted murder, intending to murder somebody, is a crime, just as much as murdering somebody is.

That’s an example of the translation issue that you’ve got to get clear, because otherwise you don’t get Abraham’s situation clearly. You have this whole series of things. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t wish to either. If we’re following, say, Aristotle, he distinguishes between different reasons for action, and wish is something that you regard as your good on earth. Kierkegaard consistently uses wish in that way, and he describes Isaac as Abraham’s wish. For Abraham, that’s what the good life would be: to have Isaac and to have him be healthy and flourishing and living. That’s his wish for his life, his greatest wish. What he wants is to love Isaac. He doesn’t have any felt desire. Kierkegaard is very careful to say Abraham is not Cain. Cain is the first murderer, and he kills Abel because he’s just jealous and pissed. But that’s not the issue. Abraham’s not here, he’s not so rage-filled. It’s none of these things. And yet, he still intends to do it. He still intends to.

That’s then, I think, you have to say, and this is where it gets to what you were talking about before. Suppose that you’re in this relationship with somebody and you believe that my limitations are very harmful and I don’t want to harm them, I don’t wish to harm them, and yet I am going to remain in this relationship. Somebody might say, “Well, isn’t that going to harm them?” I think we could spend a really long time on this, but I think it’ll get really… at some point I’ll just end up confusing myself. I’ve got a paper on it so it’s about to come out in the International Journal for Kierkegaard Research, and it’ll explain all the little curlicues.

But I think the idea is you have to see the paradox revolves around the fact that, as you were bringing up, Abraham in this telling is absolutely intending to perform this action which ought to result in him losing his wish, not getting anything that he wants, just destroying all the meaning of his life. He’s going to do it, but he also believes. What he believes is that nonetheless, it’ll all be fine, or better than fine. He believes that God is going to make this work. He does not know how God will make it work, and it doesn’t matter to him. God will do it. And God does. But it’s not so easy in the middle to think that way. Looking back, it’s like, “Oh, and God did it.” You’re like, “Yay!” Because the whole sermon took 30 minutes, and now guess what, it’s all fixed. It’s not that hard to wait 30 minutes for divine providence to swoop in. It’s really hard and it stretches out across your life and you need to believe it.

The way that I am now thinking about it is that what is so hard is that the whole way we think about practical reasons, and by we I mean I think something like all human beings… sometimes people say, “He’s really just taking aim at Enlightenment absolutizing of reason or something.” I was like, “I don’t really think it’s just Enlightenment absolutizing of reason.” I think what is actually tripping up every person who reads Problemata 1 is that we think that when we deliberate about action, we have to think about our actions in terms of what they are likely to affect in the world. As Aristotle says, practical reason is about what’s up to us, and the way we figure it out is by understanding the kind of causal connections that normally exist in the world. If I want to go and I want to get an Uber and get a ride, then I’m going to go download the app onto my phone, I’m going to be somewhere where I have a signal, I’m going to connect, I’m going to do… because each of these things has an expected outcome. Sometimes it doesn’t work, because it’s only probable. For example, if I get on my phone at 4:00 a.m. and I call an Uber and I’m not in a big city, it’s very likely I will not get anything. Sometimes it just might not happen because of some other reason, who knows, some weird thing could happen, but it’s very probable. In terms of raising knives and stabbing people with them, that pretty much usually kills them. Of course, it’s always possible that it won’t.

Here’s the problem that Silentio, the pseudonym, brings up. He says, “Okay, when Jesus was faced by the devil and was given the three temptations, one of them was the devil took him up to the pinnacle of the temple and said, ‘Hey, throw yourself from the pinnacle of the temple because you know his angels will come and save you. It’ll be this dramatic thing and everybody will know you’re the Messiah. Look, you threw yourself from the temple, you were saved by the angels.’” And Jesus says, “It is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” Meaning you don’t go and put yourself in situations where God has to act. That’s trying to force God to come to act on your behalf.

In Silentio’s mind, he doesn’t understand the difference between what Abraham did and what Jesus rejected. Because Abraham’s saying, “I’m going to raise the knife, but I’m trusting that you, God, will somehow… it’s still going to work.” Practical reason, we always assume that our actions have their typical effects, and it’s going to go the way it does. I raise the knife, I kill the child, and then that’s what happens. The child is dead, there’s nothing else. But apparently, that’s not the way that Abraham is thinking. Abraham believes in God so much that God will fulfill the promise. He’s just there and he’s completely trusting. I don’t know, this is where you have to start filling it in. You have to figure out for Abraham what exactly he thinks. Is he just trusting it will happen?

T: But I think, like focusing on the causes, maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, but when you speak about this issue of causes, I think that might be twisting the story slightly. I don’t have Kierkegaard super fresh on my mind, so I might also be misremembering, because I think also even Kierkegaard does this at some point, which is that part of the justification of Abraham would be to know that it would work out, like that eventually something is going to happen, like you said. I think, I mean obviously this is a bit subjective, but the way that I think is more straightforward to interpret the story is precisely this fight between these two normative judgments upon the self, and precisely the fact that you don’t know if it’s going to save the child. Because the fact that you’re willing to act out this decision is precisely the problem. So if you think, “Oh, but maybe it will work out, maybe God will do some trickery,” that’s kind of violating the initial problem. The problem is I’m going to do the unethical because I’m following this higher authority. Does that make sense or no?

A: Let me throw you an example and see what you think about it. This was my attempt to come up with an example that was very similar but different, so you can sort of, if you think through the different one, sometimes you can see, you can try to articulate what’s going on in the Abrahamic situation. I think it was probably inspired by watching House or something. The example is, suppose that you’re the parent of a child that has some problem, and it’s a pretty acute health problem. For the doctor to treat it, they’re going to have to induce clinical death. They’re going to stop the child’s heart, so there won’t be circulation, there won’t be breathing. But only if they do that, they can perform the operation and then revive the child. It’s not 100%, but you have the doctor there and the doctor has all this expertise and they say, “Look, the child’s going to die if I don’t do it. If I do do it, there’s still a chance the child will die, but there’s this very high chance.” Here you can just set it wherever you want. I’m making up the example, it doesn’t have to follow whatever happened on House, and I don’t remember what the percentage was or if they ever discussed it. But you could say, suppose that the odds of it working out are like 85%. The chance of dying without it is over 99%. If you’re the parent, you could say, “Oh my gosh, I’m allowing you to kill my child.” But you also feel… I can imagine actually some parents just saying no, but I think a lot of parents would ultimately say yes. I think the reasons why illustrate what we think is going on with Abraham, because somehow Abraham’s situation is different, and the question is what is different. So what do you think?

T: I would say the difference is that one of them is quantifiable and somewhat reliable, or at least the highest reliability that you can possibly get in human terms. But then with Abraham, it’s like there’s no possible way to make a balance of the decisions except by the fact that one is the highest decision by definition. But then again comes the problem, which is what you’re weighing is the theological versus the ethical. You say the theological is higher. Then again, this whole problem that I struggle with is kind of… but the theological is almost the ethical by definition.

A: It’s about to take over and replace it. Once it comes in, it really is the new ethical when it shows up. No, I think something like that’s got to be it. You said, in the doctor’s situation, you can quantify it in terms of these percentages and it’s all human, it’s knowable. In Abraham’s situation, it’s just a one-off. It’s not like this is something that God does every time. This is where Kant goes with it too. Kant on miracles is actually really interesting because he says this is why practical reason never… he’s like, you can believe that God will act, but you cannot predict when. If you could, it would just be a natural law. We know that God basically endorses the natural laws that govern the universe, and if he wants to upset them, well then he can, but there is no way we know. He says, except we know that he basically does the normal things, and only every once in a while, if ever, does he violate the normal way. We also know that he doesn’t violate moral norms, which is why Kant’s very down on Abraham and he says he should have viewed it as a hallucination or a devil tempting him, something like that. He’s like, “Those are the things that we know.” God could do something we can’t predict. The way practical reason works is it always relies on this.

I’m not going to go into Kant and the categorical imperative, but he thinks you have to govern your actions that way or you’re just… imagine this, the worst-case scenario. “Oh, I’ve got it, I’m like Abraham.” Then you say, “I’m gonna go… I need to go to…” Okay, so here’s an example from another author, Elizabeth Anscombe. I love this one. In her book Intention, she’s talking about somebody’s going upstairs to get the camera and you tell them, “The camera is down in the basement, it’s not upstairs.” And they’re like, “Yeah, I know, I’m going upstairs to get it.” So I’m like, “Well, there’s no way to get it from upstairs, right? There’s not like some special connecting stair or something, there’s not like a fireman’s pole that goes from upstairs down to the basement where you can get the camera. There’s just no way.” And they’re like, “Yeah, nonetheless, I’m going upstairs to get the camera.” She says this is an example of when somebody becomes unintelligible to us. I do not know whether she had Kierkegaard in mind when she wrote that, but she did read him and she loved him. She didn’t teach him or write about him. She didn’t know how to do it without ruining him. But I think that in some ways that person is an example of how Abraham seems to us. You’re like, “That doesn’t…” The difference is there, nothing matters here. Who cares if he gets the camera? But instead, it’s Abraham saying, “Yeah, I’m going to bless Isaac.” How?

T: But am I understanding correctly that you’re highlighting the incomprehensibility aspect of it, or did I misunderstand that?

A: So I went back. This is me going back toward my direction of we don’t see the link. You’re highlighting there are two norms, and I think what I’m thinking, at least today — who knows, maybe in five years I’ll have a different… these things tend to percolate — is that in my view, if you could make out the link, it’d become like the doctor situation, and then it’s not murder anymore. You’re like, “Oh, it’s a medical procedure here.” But we don’t have it. There’s just nothing like that there, and so it just remains what it is. Maybe a better way of explaining it would be if we could discern the link, it would change the character of the act, but we can’t. We can’t see how this is connected to blessing Isaac or this is connected to anything that would change its character as an act of attempted murder or something. That’s what locks us into Fear and Trembling.

T: I’ll give you maybe another example of how I usually interpret the story, and maybe you can tell me what you think of it. When I’m presented with Abraham’s situation, usually what comes the most vivid to me in my mind is the role of… this gets a little bit into utilitarianism, but that’s not quite where I want to go. It’s just a rough sketch. It’s the role of a revolutionary, where you need to commit some act that is horrible for a greater good. Obviously, one way to view that is unjustifiable, which is 99% of the history. But let’s say that to some degree, you can kind of argue for it. Let’s say it’s one murder and it just saves all humanity in some way. If that’s the case, then you’re again presented with these things. You have the ethical, you have the normal rule book, whatever it may be. But then there’s the higher good, which is the ultimate. This is tricky to think about, but the way that I think about it is that that act of saving, if it’s justified, that is the ultimate good announcing itself, that this needs to be followed. It’s a notion of eschatology. It’s like this is the direction that it needs to go if you go the highest that you can possibly go, but you need to circumvent this normal law. That’s usually the way that I think about it, which is precisely the dilemma. To some degree, it is quantifiable. It does have numbers to some degree, which reminds me of your example of House because you can ask how many people are you going to save, how many people are you going to kill? It starts looking the same, but on the other hand, it kind of doesn’t because there’s no answer of what the right number is. You just need to think, do I follow the ethic or do I follow the ultimate good that I can possibly think of? Does that click or do you think it’s misguided?

A: I mean, it makes sense. It’s not how I tend to do it. I’ve thought a lot about that at a different time in my life, the two theories of revolution. There’s the Robespierrian one. It’s this weird fact that Robespierre was against capital punishment except during a revolution. We all associate him with the Terror, but he also has this great, beautiful essay on how we shouldn’t practice capital punishment. But the twist is he’s like, “Except during revolutionary conditions,” because under revolutionary conditions so much is at stake. In his mind, it’s something like the fundamental grounding of all the other rules is now at stake. In this moment when the earth itself is shaking, you don’t talk about the foundation of the building. You need to make the earth stop and stand still, and until you do that, you don’t even talk about foundations of buildings. In this case, about laws. Laws are going to come later when we establish the republic or something. I think that certainly makes sense, but I think the closest I get to the way you’re doing it is that there’s something special about killing, that even if Abraham thinks it’ll turn out okay, there’s something about killing the innocent that should be treated as an absolute.

It’s so absolute you just can’t risk it that way. You can’t say, “I think it’ll come out okay.” That’s just not… it’s so absolute that you should not harm the innocent. It’s such an absolute thing that this idea of going in there… but that’s part of what it is to have that rule, “Do not murder.” It’s like, “Do not murder” means don’t do stuff that’s kind of murdery. Don’t do stuff that’s close to murder. Don’t do something that might just kill somebody if you turn out to be wrong. It’s not a defense if I go out and I drive without the headlights on at night and I hit somebody and I say, “I didn’t think I was going to, I didn’t think anybody was out, I thought I’d be fine.” It’s no defense, and it’s really terrible because you ought to take… it’s such an absolute that you just, in particular you might say because it’s an absolute that way, you just don’t perform act types that involve killing the innocent, for any reason. You just don’t insert that act type into your practical reasoning. I think there’s a lot to be said for that mentality that you just shouldn’t do that. You should not for any end throw that in there. Then you’re saying, “I’m going to think it’ll be okay.” You’re like, “Well, you just shouldn’t do that. It doesn’t matter if you think it’ll be okay. You just shouldn’t do that.”

The thing that Silentio comes back to is it’s amazing that Abraham comes back and he’s just okay. He’s okay when it’s over. There is a French movie, Danton, which is about this final showdown between Robespierre and Danton near the end of the French Revolution. Eventually, of course, it leads to Danton getting killed. Sorry to give away the ending, but it’s a French film, so it’s always gonna be sad. But at the end, you see Robespierre is just sort of lying there and he’s sick. He has a fever, but it’s clear that’s not really why he’s suffering. He’s suffering because he’s willing to do anything to establish the republic, and yet the cost is so high and he doesn’t even know if it’ll happen. You sense this on his face. He just seems like he is in misery because what he’s willing to do is so costly and yet the end is so uncertain. I think in that you see, well, why isn’t Abraham like that? Imagine it all worked out. I think you’d still, if you were Robespierre, you’d be really messed up. A lot of people died. You sent a lot of people to their death. Even if it didn’t… suppose that it turned out everything worked out, Danton didn’t need to be killed, your old partner. I think the fact that you were willing to kill him would wreck your relationship.

T: Yeah, but I think part of the problem, and this is actually not… I think part of what justifies what you’re saying is precisely the context that it’s funny because to some degree what justifies that act of the ultimate sin of killing the innocent is precisely that it comes from God. So it’s already the ultimate good, so you have to trust it. Although it’s weird because then it also feels like… because something I also struggled with is that to some degree I feel like the only way to get out of this is to then branch off into epistemology, which is like, okay, is it truly from God? Like really, you should double check. You should try to think about it. Is God really telling you to kill your son? But at the same time, if you branch that off, then I also feel like that’s pulling away from the story in a way. I feel like there’s some tension there.

But anyway, I appreciate you going back and forth about this because it just helps me flesh out different interpretations of the story and all this, so it was very interesting and very helpful. I don’t want to get boggled down more into it. We’ve been over for quite a while. I just wanted to get one last topic in, if that’s all right with you and if you’re not pressed for time.

A: Sweet.

T: So I’m currently, I just joined a PhD in philosophy and I’m working on my dissertation. My dissertation is about psychedelics and its role in religion and how that ties into the loss of meaning in modernity and how psychedelics open up this sense of the sacred. This connects to Kierkegaard in one way, but I need to give some background context first.

A long time ago, I was a coach and a personal trainer, so I helped people get fitter, stronger, and whatnot. A lot of that is habit-based. It’s like you just need to eat better, you just need to go to the gym, you need to be active, you need to go for walks and whatnot. To some degree, the standard advice is that you put small habits, small increments based on the person’s current lifestyle so that they get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. To some degree, that works fantastic. A lot of people get in shape precisely like that.

But I’ve also run into people that I worked with where that didn’t work because the step was so small that it didn’t justify itself. People are like, “I don’t really need to go this time for the gym, I can go tomorrow.” There’s this issue that every time that I try to implement this progression, it didn’t work. I got this notion that for a lot of these people, what they need is not an incremental step but a transformation of identity. Like, “I’m going to become the type of person that now exercises or that eats healthy or that doesn’t do this and that.” That’s a very different thing. It’s almost the exact opposite.

That reminded me of Kierkegaard a lot because it’s this notion of the leap. It’s like you have to leap. You can’t just have this middle ground, these in-between steps. You have to leap. You don’t know if you’re going to do it. Who knows what type of person you can become? It’s also a very weird thing because it’s like you’re going to become a different type of person, but you’re not that person. How are you going to do that?

The reason why this connects to psychedelics as well is because first of all, they have this transformative aspect. People are severely depressed and whatnot, and then they suddenly have this notion of sacredness and it just kind of, they turn their lives around. It’s also, I also find it very interesting because one of the shining examples of psychedelic treatment in the context of therapy, one is depression, but the other one is addiction. Addiction has this notion that it’s a restriction of possibility. It’s almost like a demon is constraining you further and further where you don’t have agency. They know it’s bad for them, so you can’t tell an addict that heroin is awful for you, just quit. It’s not, just like Kierkegaard said, a notion of knowledge. It’s not a Socratic thing. It’s like you need to change who you are, you need to take a leap, but people can’t take that leap.

Then somehow in psychedelics, something happens, whatever it is, and people sometimes do make that leap. I plan to try to use this notion of Kierkegaard to try to explain this aspect that happens in psychedelic therapy where you have all the knowledge but you just can’t take it, and so there’s an act of faith that you eventually just jump into it. I know this is a bit messy because I’m still working all this out in my head, but I just wanted to get the opportunity since I’m with a Kierkegaard scholar to either critique if you think there are some aspects that just don’t match, so I avoid some pitfalls, or maybe some other related aspects that you think might be useful to explore this line of thought.

A: I haven’t thought too deeply about psychedelics except in the context of Philip K. Dick, but that’s not a happy story about it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with much of his later writing. Most people, if they know things, they know the ones that are made into movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall. There’s a million of these things. Strangely, it’s actually his less effective stories that get made into the best movies. His best novels, you almost feel like they couldn’t possibly be movies because they’re very much tied up in the nature of perception of reality. There’s always an ongoing problem about discerning what’s real, and there’s often an issue of somebody having to figure out whether some unusual experience is revelatory or madness or something else.

T: Just before you go on, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to make sure that we still… because I recognize that psychedelics is a niche topic, so obviously not everyone has explored that a lot. But I think this can apply beyond psychedelics. I actually have a book here. For example, because I think you can replace psychedelics with transformative experiences in general. L.A. Paul has this great book, Transformative Experience. You can also just think about mystical experiences in general. Even though I’m interested in psychedelics because it’s something that you can induce to help people and it’s a treatment, you can also make the same argument if people just somehow had a spontaneous mystical experience or religious experience.

A: No, so I was just throwing that out there because it’s really the only time I’ve really thought about it. The thing is, he actually did have, he only had one experience in which he took a psychedelic and he had this amazing, intense experience of God coming to him. He believes that it was Jesus telling him essentially that his sins were forgiven, and it just completely blew his mind. Unfortunately, he had a lot of problems in his life and it didn’t seem to lead to a correction, but it did lead to a major change in him.

I don’t think that helps me to get to what you’re talking about, so I’ll talk about the leap because I think that’s right. There’s a sense in which for Kierkegaard people, we always talk about the leap of faith, but that’s one kind of leap. There are lots of leaps. There’s the leap into addiction. He would say, and I think he thinks that all sin is sort of like this, that there’s a freedom at the beginning. You leap in, but once you leap into the identity, you realize you can’t leap out. The leap out would be the leap of faith, and you need some extra resource to make that possible. It’s not easy to see how.

You do need some total change. He’s very interested in that dynamic you’re talking about too, about sometimes the iterative thing is what you need, and other times you need that change in your sense of your whole self. You need to see that self that goes to the gym as a real possibility. Or, you know, in my case, the self who uses the treadmill. I only just started in January because I had some friends who were doing the Murph challenge, which if you’re not familiar with it, is this thing where you run one mile, you do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and then you run another mile. As it happens, I ended up getting injured and then I recovered, and then I had another problem at the end, so I never made it all the way. But I simply went into it and I said, “You know what, I’m middle-aged, and I just want to live a longer, healthier life. I want to be this other kind of person.” I was able to actually, and I was sort of shocked. All of a sudden, I was like, “I can run a mile, where did this come from?”

A lot of that was, in the past, I tried to fool myself into it, like, “If I give myself something very entertaining to do, then I’ll do it.” Well, then really what I’m doing is I’m still just trying to entertain myself or something, and it’s basically laziness, and that’s not going to lead to actually exercising.

That’s a long way of saying I think you’re right in casting it that way. I think that’s how Kierkegaard sees it. You need the leap. But I don’t know how to say anything helpful about the way a specific experience feeds into it, except that I think that’s got to be right, that a specific experience could be the thing that shifts your sense of what’s possible for you to be. Sometimes it’s a normal experience and sometimes it could be something completely different.

But I’ll add this one thing: you might think that Kierkegaard would have something to say about mystical experiences, but actually he really doesn’t. He seemed not to have had one himself, and so he didn’t, I think, want to talk much about it. There’s a kind of lacuna there, that it seems as if he ought to have a room for how that would work, but I don’t think he ever filled in that hole. If you wanted to work on that, it would be sort of filling in. You could use his resources, but I think there’s nothing that speaks directly to it because he was not… he just never had a mystical experience of that kind.

T: Another area that I was thinking that might provide an easier link is, even if you discount mystical experience, another way to think about it is this is who you are, this is who you can be, this is who you know you should be, but you just can’t bridge it. Like the addict doesn’t want to be an addict. Through the experience, you have a sense of the sacred, and that is somehow embedded in your ability to make that leap of faith. I think you can still have that framework but take the experience out, because I think part of the problem with modernity is the fact that precisely that the sacred isn’t mystical, but often requires a mystical experience to recognize the sacred just because culture is so secular that the very notion of sacredness doesn’t make sense. But I don’t think that the mystical experience is where the thing is. The sacred is in the world, it is reality, you just need to look at it. So I view psychedelics and mystical experience as just a door that just pops out to you that then you can go through. But the sacred is what’s important, and then you can see that in Kierkegaard as well, because it’s the exact same problem. It’s like, this is who I am, I’m stuck in the finite, let’s say. I could be somewhere else, there’s possibility, I have the knowledge, but I can’t take the leap of faith. My leap of faith relies on God, the sacred. It’s the exact same thing.

A: So let me see if I’ve got this right. When you’re describing it, it sounds like the way you’re describing it is that really there’s something that’s just there all the time, and you could come to recognize it in different ways, but the key thing is coming to recognize that it is there, the sacred.

T: I would say that’s somewhat basic theology. God is in the world, you just need to have a relationship, however you want to put it. It doesn’t require a mystical experience, like no other theologian has thought that.

A: No, so I’m just trying to figure out, so the way that the mystical experience or the psychedelic experience comes in is to induce the recognition.

T: To make it like a real possibility for… the typical context is a new atheist, the world is just a place of objects, and they have… “Actually no, there’s something to this notion of sacredness, even though I can’t quite pin it.” That makes it real, and then that affords all kinds of possibilities that include transformation.

A: Here’s a… the thing that comes to mind to me is Mike Tyson, who, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his story. When he, who’s a great boxer, the heavyweight champion of the world, he famously had a showdown with A.J. Ayer at one point, which is sort of funny because it’s hard to imagine A.J. being brave enough to stand up to Mike Tyson. But when Tyson went to prison, he had an experience there, but then he also had a psychedelic experience, and they had the same import for him, which was that he was an egomaniac. He was a complete monster. He realized that his whole life was just feeding his ego, that he was a terrible person. Essentially, the psychedelic experience just helped him to recognize this about himself and that it was possible not to be ego-driven. That’s a reason why Mike Tyson after all of this is just not the same person. He was this person who before, he would say in his whole mentality, all he wanted to do is destroy people. That made him a great boxer and a terrible person. But both prison and the psychedelic experience taught him it’s not all about your ego, there’s more out there.

I think that’s an interesting side. The idea is that there’s something that’s just there but you don’t see it, you don’t recognize it. Certainly people had told him, “You’re not the only person, it’s not all about you,” but it made no difference to him. He’s like, “Well, I’m just going to go and I’m just going to…” I don’t know what his mental… did he want to punch the world? What did he want to do? He wanted to make the world submit somehow. Then he realized, “I don’t have to do that, I don’t have to live like that, I could do something else.”

I don’t think I have anything deep, but I think that gets into… there’s at least two sides to it. Because if you think about it like, normally Kierkegaard thinks we make progress by, for example, becoming more self-aware of our despair. That can involve… sometimes you really need a new experience to see how… to get that deeper perspective to realize, “Oh my God, the way I’m pursuing my life is just fundamentally wrong,” and to see that, and then to see the true possibility finally as something valuable and good can require something to happen to you, something to give you a new perception.

I’m just trying to think my way through The Concept of Anxiety, where he talks about the leap. The way he does it there, though, he always seems to portray it as this diminishing returns kind of business. You have the most freedom at the beginning, and then your freedom is just… as you leap, you leap into narrower and narrower spots. Of course, part of that has to do with some weird way that The Concept of Anxiety is set up, because it’s meant to leave you in a very anxious state in which you’re very unsure, “Well, how do I ever get out of it now that I screwed it up?” The answer is the leap of faith. Faith is the only thing that can conquer this, but he doesn’t dwell on the conditions when that could actually happen.

T: So what would be the Kierkegaard answer? Let’s say an addict doesn’t want to be an addict, he has all the knowledge he wants, he just can’t… and Kierkegaard can even say, let’s say a conversation between Kierkegaard and the addict, and then Kierkegaard says, “You have to make the leap of faith,” and then the addict says, “How can I do that?” What would be Kierkegaard’s answer?

A: I think number one would be something like, “Yeah, you can’t. You can’t.”

I’m going to go to one of his very latest writings, on an upbuilding discourse. I think it’s the second time he comes back to this figure who’s unnamed in the Bible except as “the woman who is a sinner.” She shows up, Jesus is at this dinner with the Pharisees, and she shows up and she’s just crying and upset. She comes to him, and the Pharisee who’s there is like, “This guy’s no prophet, this woman’s a famous sinner and he’s letting her hang all over him.” And Jesus does this thing about, “If one person had a small debt forgiven and another person had a greater debt forgiven, who do you think would love more?” And the Pharisees says, “The one who had the greater debt.” And he’s like, “Yeah, exactly.” And he says, “Daughter, your sins are forgiven.”

That figure, I think, is Kierkegaard’s model. He says it’s actually really important that she doesn’t get named because she’s actually a model for every person. If she had a name, we would treat it as specific to her, but she’s actually… that is the ground level that that person needs to be at. What is it that she does? She’s not there making herself righteous, but she is simply out of a sense of… this is where it gets into this complicated thing. Is it because she feels that Jesus would love her? Is it because… does she love him because she thinks he would love her, and then he does love her, and then she loves him more? It’s something like… what she does is this movement of being willing to come out into the open in order to be loved. The outlet is iffy. Yep, so I’m switching over to the phone.

T: No worries, no worries. You were talking about, if I understood correctly, what made the woman approach Jesus. I suppose maybe one way to think about it is what prompted this initial encounter, I suppose.

A: Yeah, that’s right. In terms of escaping out of something, because I think she too would feel that her whole life was just… she’d lost control and she had no other identity that she felt she could get to. Yet there was this sense in which the experience of being loved gave her the capacity to love, which led to her experiencing greater love, which also gave… there’s some sort of chain reaction there which is really a movement through that.

But now that I say that, I’m not sure whether or not this is… I haven’t thought about this enough to be able to spell it out. I think that where you started is right in terms of possibility. For Kierkegaard, that is the key thing. If you can recognize something as a possible self, then you can leap toward that self if you have that real sense that it’s possible. In her case, what she needed was the sense that she was capable of being loved or something like that. She just believed that it wasn’t even possible for somebody like her to be loved, and yet she was, and that transformed her.

I think Kierkegaard thinks that ought to be the ground level of how people can be transformed. If they don’t have the sense that they are lovable in some sense… maybe lovable despite not being lovable. There’s something paradoxical about it. She doesn’t think that she’s anything great, but she knows that she is loved, and that itself makes her embark on this leap, take this risk. I think that those are the two sides of it. Philosophically, possibility is what you need, but I think also to recover yourself after losing yourself in the sense of believing that you’re worthless, you need the experience of being loved.

T: Does Kierkegaard ever make this explicit connection of love and the leap of faith, or are you just hypothesizing about it?

A: He might, but the problem is that I’ve never read that thing carefully. It only came to mind because I do think that he means her to be… he says she’s the prototype for every Christian. That’s not theoretical, but since I haven’t ever read through it carefully, I’m not that sure how it fits in.

T: I think this is quite interesting because it does connect a lot to the framework that I typically use. I think what allows transformation… I think in a lot of times, very Platonic and Neoplatonic terms, but what allows that transformation is being in contact with the good. The good transforms you, God transforms… that’s almost the entire pinnacle of Western philosophy and theology. That makes total sense in the story of Jesus, of the woman, of the sinner. Through the contact with the ultimate good, she’s transformed. I think that’s exactly what happens in a psychedelic experience as well, which is people do have a sense that there is such a thing as the ultimate good, that the world isn’t just a nihilistic place of random atoms in some way, even if they can’t comprehend it. That is somehow tied to this notion of possibility. But it’s not… I know we’re moving in very theological terms, but I’m not sure if I can quite make the explicit connection of why the ultimate good has that transformative power. Let’s leave it at that. There are other things, but this is getting very illogical. I don’t want to make the conversation super long.

A: And I think there’s something mysterious about that. Maybe that’s… I think it may even be the case that if you are Kierkegaard, you’re going to say, “Yeah, it is mysterious. It will be mysterious.” Because you’re not good. If we were in the state in which we’d already been transformed fully, maybe we would understand the effect of the good on us. But I think there’s something in us that responds to it. It’s the same thing that gives us the capacity to love others, and yet we just don’t understand it. We don’t understand how it functions. That’s again why it’s a leap of faith. How could the person who’s not good understand the good more than a little? I think that mystery is just going to be left there. That’s what it is. If you can get that sense, you can make that leap, although you could also refuse. Somebody could refuse to do it, and that’s always a very sad thing to see somebody on the edge of getting out and then maybe they say, “But I prefer to remain an addict.” They probably don’t say it that way, but if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. There’s a sense in which somebody can come right up to the edge.

T: That’s true. I want to wrap this up, even though I could go for this for hours and hours, but I want to respect your time. This was super fascinating. I loved it. I think Kierkegaard is truly one of the most… it’s not only like a very powerful thinker in terms of intellect, but I think it’s also one of the few thinkers where I feel there’s the heavy philosophy plus the beautiful plus the very pragmatic, practical things that you need to just run your life. Kierkegaard is just managing all these things all at once, and so it’s just fascinating. I think your comments and your interpretations were super useful, very fascinating. It was just truly a pleasure, and I’m very thankful that you wanted to come.

A: No, I am so glad that you invited me. I love chatting about Kierkegaard and about any random thing. I try not to indulge my own random interests too frequently. But let me bring in one last bit of wisdom, this time from Mike Tyson. He did have this little saying too about… and I think it’s very Kierkegaardian. I think initially when he gave this advice, he meant it literally, but later he meant it figuratively. He said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I think it’s really true. That’s the transformative experience. It punches you in the face.

T: True, true. Thank you once again. It was a pleasure, and have a great day.

Thank you for reading. If you like my writing, subscribe to my Substack. You may also want to check my recent book, “In Search of the Infinite — A Psychedelic Memoir”, available on Amazon. I have an article on Medium that explains what the book is about. I also post a lot of the books I’m reading on my Instagram: @tiagobooks.