Johannes de Silentio retells the story four times, each version imagining how Abraham might have failed — by deceiving Isaac, by losing faith even as he obeyed. What he cannot understand is the real Abraham, who went to Moriah believing both that he would sacrifice Isaac and that God would give him back — “by virtue of the absurd”.
The three problems: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? Is there an absolute duty to God? Was Abraham ethically defensible in keeping silent? If ethics is the highest (as for Hegel), Abraham is lost.
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related by shared connectionsDayānanda Sarasvatī
The Gujarati ascetic (1824–1883) who founded the Ārya Samāj with the cry “Back to the Vedas!” — rejecting idol-worship, caste by birth, and the Purāṇas, and calling for a rational Vedic religion, education for women and the reconversion of those who had left Hinduism.
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s second Critique — the moral law is a fact of reason, and through it we know we are free.
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre’s 1945 public lecture — the most popular statement of existentialism — existence precedes essence, man is condemned to be free.
Īśā Upaniṣad
The shortest of the principal Upaniṣads — eighteen verses that begin “All this is pervaded by the Lord” and reconcile renunciation with action, knowledge with works, and the one with the many.
Summa Theologiae
Aquinas’s unfinished masterpiece — a systematic theology in some 3,000 articles, each a model of fair argument, synthesizing Aristotle and Christian revelation.
Meursault
Camus’s “stranger” — a clerk in Algiers who will not say more than he feels, kills a man on a beach, and goes to the guillotine opening himself to “the gentle indifference of the world”.