Kierkegaard's philosophic essay "Fear and Trembling" in the context of discourse paradox

The article is the study of narrative and discourse strategies in the philosophic essay of Seren Aabye Kierkegaard. The first part of the article presents different types of narrative modes and discourse strategies in the novels and essays of Kierkegaard. Many voices and tones in the narrative, in our mind, are connected with the individual style of the author. His strategy can be compared with modernistic representation (for example, H. Hesse, V. Nabokov, F. Kafka). In contrast to Kant or Hegel, Kierkegaard's narration is not confined to the formation of a complex worldview system: his heroes (or conceptual characters) represent opinions, judgments, but not the truth in the absolute meaning. The plot in his essay shows that the truth and the obvious are determined by linguistic consciousness. So, his existentialism is connected with philosophy and language that gives a skeptic focus to the dogmatic meaning. We can apply methods of narratology as the analytics of narration discourse for reconstruction of Kierkegaard's intentions. Most Kierkegaard's essays are closely connected with the post romantic type of the aesthetic worldview. His philosophic dissertation is beginning of this way: here we can see different types of irony (as different discourse strategies) or narration modes that will be used in his original papers. The main part of the article is devoted to the analysis of discourse strategies in the "Fear and Trembling". Kierkegaard's narration presents the structure of an episode (fabula) as a plot (story-telling). This presentation deletes the absolute epic distance: Abraham and Isaak stay vulgar humans, not culture and sacral symbols. One of the main motifs in the "Fear and Trembling" is dilettantism and linguistic incompetence: "He did not know Hebrew, if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham". All situations repeated in the essay represent a closed worldview, where association and random compliance play the main role. It also becomes obvious that the mask of a dilettante is not true. The wide range of texts, big specter of motifs and themes present a high degree of reflection. The author constructs a big adaptive net: that is a metaphor of the bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The sacrifice of Abrahaam is absurd, but it is connected with a new type of worldview - the one we can see in the New Testament. The emphatic rejection of dogmatic knowledge and bringing the sacred situation to the profane one allows considering the philosophical essay of Kierkegaard as an intellectual provocation anticipating similar experiments of Feyerabend, Derrida, et al.

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