Summary of Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, written as a meditation on the stories of the Biblical figures Abraham and Job. The book focuses on the concepts of faith, the knight of faith, and the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is divided into three parts: “The Problem of Abraham,” “The Knight of Faith,” and “The Misunderstanding of the Religious.” In the book, Kierkegaard argues that faith requires a leap of faith, an irrational move of dedication to God that goes beyond the ethical and rational. He further argues that the ethical and rational cannot be suspended by any human power, but only by God. By exploring the stories of Abraham and Job, Kierkegaard attempts to illustrate the paradoxical nature of faith: one must have faith in order to make sense of it, but one must already have faith in order to see the point of having faith.