Fear and Trembling

⚖The case for it

Four retellings of Abraham walking Isaac up the mountain open the book, the same three days from four angles, and readers who arrived skeptical about the religious material say that is where they stopped being skeptical. “Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off” is the line people carry out. The knight of faith stays usable years later, secular or not, something one reader says has “worked itself into my psyche” and become “an automatic philosophical reference point.” Johannes de Silentio narrates as a man who admires faith and openly says he does not have it, so the critique is built in. It runs under a hundred and fifty pages, closer to prose-poem than treatise in stretches.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Three Problema sections restate the same question, and readers say the book could shed a third of itself, since “if the core concept is understood, further restatements won't help.” Some finish in a sitting; others stall inside Problema II, left “bemused and dumbfound,” and never come back. Without Hegel's ethical-as-universal in your head you are watching an argument with an opponent who never appears. The moral objection is real and readers voice it plainly: a book that defends a man prepared to kill his son on instruction sits badly, whatever the pseudonym. The style fans call poetic others call circling, and companion guides exist because the text alone often is not enough.

— the honest librarian

3h

honest hours

4

sittings