100 Introduction Most scholars agree that you need to know a little Hegel before you can really appreciate the full aim and scope of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project. This seems especially true in the case of Fear and Trembling, where a slew of recent and not-so-recent commentators have argued that Fear and Trembling’s account of ethics is uniquely ‘Hegelian,’ and that this has important implications for how we interpret what de silentio 1 means by ‘going beyond ethics.’ If ethics is understood in a ‘Kantian’ sense, then de silentio recommends a faith that is strongly absurd; he requires the would-be Abraham to transgress moral commands that are universally valid. Luckily, as these interpreters see it, Fear and Trembling’s account of ethics is ‘Hegelian.’ This means that ethical norms are relative to particular historical communities, which means that Abraham is not invited to transgress universal moral norms, which means he is not so extreme after all (cf. Evans 2006; Stern 2012; and Westphal 1998). Disaster averted! 2 In one respect, these interpreters (I refer to them respectfully as Local Norm Interpreters and shortly as LNI-ers) are obviously right: Hegel is uncontroversially the historical model for Fear and Trembling’s account of the ethical. Not only do references to the ‘system’ adorn the work’s preface, de silentio thinks of philosophy’s task in uniquely Hegelian terms: to render ‘the whole content of faith into conceptual form’ (FT, 7/SKS 4, 103). Additionally, when de silentio poses the question of the teleological suspension of the ethical, he writes, ‘For if the ethical, i.e. the ethical life [ det Sædelige], is the highest and nothing incommensurable remains in a human being in any way other than that incommensurability constituting evil . . . then one needs no other categories than what the Greek philosophers had. . . . Hegel should not have concealed this’ (Kierkegaard 2006: 49/SKS 4, 149). 3 Here de silentio explicitly invokes Hegel’s notion of the ethical when he modifies ‘ethical’ [ Ethiske] with ‘ethical life’ [ det Sædelige]. ‘Det Sædelige’ is the Danish equivalent of the German ‘die Sittlichkeit,’ the term of art Hegel uses to refer to his own account of ethics, an account that – as I explain below – emphasizes the role of concrete social and institutional norms. 8 DID NAPOLEON TELEOLOGICALLY SUSPEND THE ETHICAL? A DILEMMA FOR SOME ‘HEGELIAN’ READINGS OF FEAR AND TREMBLING Ryan S. Kemp 15031-2604d-1Pass.indd 100 3/15/2019 6:29:12 PM