SKC Workshop Autumn 2024

Hannah Lang

(Aarhus Universitet, Denmark)

"Birth & Beginning in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling"

In this workshop, I present some thoughts from my ongoing PhD Project investigating birth as a topic of existential philosophy with Søren Kierkegaard. Although mentioning Kierkegaard and birth in the same sentence is untraditional, I explore how Kierkegaard can help us understand or articulate the existential significance of birth. More specifically, I will focus on how Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) concerns the problem of beginning and how it relates to the beginning of life in this pseudonymous work. In the chapter “Attunement” (Stemning), we are presented with four different versions of the biblical story of how Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah and how he gets Isaac back from God “by virtue of the absurd”. What looks like the end turns out to be a new beginning. Following the descriptions of Abraham and Isaac are four descriptions of a mother weaning her child and their occurrence has been largely overlooked within Kierkegaard research as well as a source of great confusion. What does sacrificing your child have to do with creating new life? What do death and endings have to do with birth and beginnings? These are the questions I wish to engage with in the seminar and I will suggest that Kierkegaard can show us a relation between letting go and giving birth.