Abraham and Isaac

Kierkegaard's three stages

Kierkegaard described three modes of existence. The aesthetic stage is organized around personal pleasure and self-expression. The ethical stage is organized around universal moral duties: obligations to others, social norms, the demands of conscience. The religious stage is organized around an absolute relationship to God that cannot be explained or justified in ethical terms.

Abraham, on Kierkegaard's reading, has passed through the ethical stage and left it behind. He understands the moral law. He knows that killing his son is murder. And he proceeds anyway, not because he has abandoned ethics, but because he has staked everything on a direct relationship with God that exists outside the ethical.

The teleological suspension of the ethical

Kierkegaard called Abraham's act the teleological suspension of the ethical: a temporary setting aside of universal moral norms in service of a higher, particular, absolute duty. The word "teleological" here means that ethics is suspended for an end, a purpose, rather than abandoned altogether.

This is not a comfortable category. Kierkegaard was not endorsing Abraham's act or recommending it. He was identifying something he thought the story genuinely required: a mode of religious faith that cannot be translated into ethical justification. If Abraham could justify his action to others, it would not be faith. Faith, by definition, operates where justification runs out.

The knight of faith, Kierkegaard's term for someone in Abraham's position, is indistinguishable from the outside. He goes through ordinary life, does ordinary things, and lives with an absolute private commitment that no one else can verify or assess.

The problem this raises

The most direct objection is that the religious stage and sincere psychosis are indistinguishable from the outside. Abraham proceeds to kill his son because he hears a voice he believes is God's. A person suffering from delusion does exactly the same thing. How do you tell them apart?

Kierkegaard does not resolve this. He thinks it cannot be resolved from the outside. This is partly the point: faith is not a publicly verifiable state. But critics, including many religious thinkers, argue that a God who issues commands that override ethics is a morally monstrous God, and that any voice commanding murder should be presumed to be not God's on ethical grounds alone.

The euthyphro dilemma hovers over the whole case. If God's commands are good because God commands them, then divine command theory applies and Abraham is right to obey. If God commands things because they are good, then Abraham should know this command is not from God. Kierkegaard accepted the first horn. Most contemporary religious ethicists do not.