Fear and Trembling

One cannot pass twice through the same stream.( . Plato’s Cratyllus, § 402.) Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not stop with that, he went further and added, “One cannot do it even once."( Cf. Tenneman, Geschichte der Philosphie, I, p. 220,) Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple! By this amendment the thesis of Heraclitus was so improved that it became an Eleatic thesis which denies movement, and yet that disciple desired only to be a disciple of Heraclitus. . .and to go further — not back to the position Heraclitus had abandoned.

Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, the genuinely humane no generation learns from the foregoing.

The tragic hero does at last get to the end of the story.

Now Abraham is able to say the most beautiful things any language can express about how he loves Isaac. But it is not this he has at heart to say, it is the profounder thought that he would sacrifice him because it is a trial.

Either the individual as the individual is able to stand in an absolute relation to the absolute (and then the ethical is not the highest) / or Abraham is lost — he is neither a tragic hero, nor an aesthetic hero.

He keeps silent and sacrifices himself/or he talks with the consciousness that he desires to confound everything.

So from the start the genius is disoriented in relation to the universal and is brought into relation with the paradox — whether it be that in despair at his limitation (which in his eyes transforms his omnipotence into impotence) he seeks a demoniacal reassurance and therefore will not admit such limitation either before God or men, or else he reassures himself religiously by love to the Deity

What humility before the face of another person! What faith in God to believe that the next instant she would not hate the husband to whom she owed everything!

Fortunately existence is in this instance more kindly and more faithful than the wise maintain, for it excludes no man not even the lowliest, it fools no one, for in the world of spirit only he is fooled who fools himself.

fools no one, for in the world of spirit only he is fooled who fools himself.