Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”

You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.

It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.

UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:

There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]