Kierkegaard’s improbable-leap reading of Abraham directly shaped Camus’s absurdism.

Evidence

The main influence on Camus here was not Heidegger but Kierkegaard, especially in the 1843 essay Fear and Trembling. This too used a story to illuminate the ‘absurd’: Kierkegaard chose the Bible tale in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac rather than the more usual goat or sheep. Rather to God’s surprise, it seems, Abraham travels to the sacrifice site with Isaac, making no complaint. At the last moment, God lets him off, and Abraham and Isaac go home. What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before. They have been forced to depart entirely from the realm of ordinary humanity and fatherly protection, yet somehow Abraham is still confident in his love for his son. For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue with life after its flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’. This was what Camus thought his modern readers needed to do, but in his case without any involvement of God. Here, too, one can see connections to life in Occupied France. Everything has been compromised, everything lost — yet there it all still seems to be. It is the sense that has gone. How do you live without sense? The answer offered by both Camus and Kierkegaard amounted to something like the motto in the British morale-boosting poster: Keep Calm and Carry On. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 487

Categorization

• XREF: Kierkegaard’s ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ parallels the reader’s earlier material on sacrifice (sati, Dido, ritual killing) — divine exception vs. absurd leap.
• ADDENDUM: The Abraham-Isaac ‘impossible leap’ is a companion to the sacrifice article — a non-ritual, theological version of sacrifice as life-affirming rather than death-dealing.
• SEED: An essay bridge: how Occupied France’s ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ desperation maps onto Kierkegaard’s absurd leap — the psychology of living without sense.