Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling
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Introduction
In Fear and Trembling, the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious are presented as the highest stages in life. Johannes de Silentio is a reflective aesthete, who gains delight from engineering the possibility of seduction rather than engaging in the actual act of seduction. His objective is to manipulate people in ways which generate interesting reflections in his mind. Although this type of aestheticism is criticized for being escapist and self-serving, it led to the idea that ethics and aesthetics can be annulled and preserved when synthesized at the religious stage. This implies that the religious stage preserves a sense of infinite possibility that can be achieved through imagination. This paper examines how Johannes’s typology of aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of existence functions as concepts of persuasion in Fears and Trembling.
Persuasion in Fear and Trembling
Fear and Trembling functions as a work of persuasion by failing to attach specific meanings to the terms aesthetics, ethics, and religious life. Regardless, all the three terms are related because aesthetic is first and gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious. The relationship between these three terms is similar to how people nurture faith. For instance, in the case of ethics, an individual can either be at a stage that is below a higher religious life or be in state where some aspect of his life is retained within the religious life. In the case where ethics is below the religious life, Fear and Trembling functions as a work of persuasion by indicating that ethics reflect universal truths or popular social norms. Popular social norms are used to justify any action within the community. As a result, when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, the community understands because it is required by the gods.
The main goal of every person in life, is to morph up into one’s authentic representation or identity and not embrace a rather shady persona. The life of a person is tied around the process of becoming something or someone else. Such stature is usually well grounded in one’s belief in his ability as well as the subsequent aspects of personality and impression. It is therefore up to an individual to find out and move towards that direction that his or her destiny calls, without having to be interrupted along the way by useless distractions that might look like ultimate destinations.
The human process of becoming , is quite indeed a process. It is a long and tedious process that incorporates all the challenges that one experiences in the struggle between good and bad, sin and faith. The achievement of the win against bad and sin is normally placed along the same line with the assumption of the self being naturally existing; hence necessary. Therefore, such a tug of war also reveals another tussle’ that which pits possibility against necessity. The protreptic aspects of Kierkegaard's literary works therefore, stems from this tussle, and specifically from the realization by him, that possibility usually offers human beings the great platform to learn.
Possibility grants the individual an ability to be onese...