fear and trembling

A detailed Summary of fear and trembling

In "Fear and Trembling" I write this essay. Perhaps that is part of the point, that I not write this essay in comfort, in simple regurgitation of class discussion, or by simply rewording the notes I might have taken. From reading the two passages from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, I found a profound similarity, which, at first I could not put into words. Simply struggling with what they could both mean. Is perhaps Nietzsche's "poorest fisherman...rowing with golden oars"(pg269) similar to Kierkegaard's knight of faith? Are they both trying to tell the reader that we are all blindly living our lives? What is this "historical sense" Nietzsche speaks of? From here maybe I can begin to put to words the implications which these ideas hold for our very existence and where these assumptions come from in the first place. These are but a few questions, and perhaps by working through these questions I may be able to end this discomfort, and then again, perhaps not. Let us begin with Nietzsche.

The "humaneness of the future", what does this mean? Here Nietzsche is beginning to explain his vision of the future, of our existence, of the way we will live in the future. He begins by looking at how we in the present seem to live using this dist

In conclusion, we must not simply live with what is historically correct, nor should we live with total unawareness. We must become as children, yet maintain the wisdom of an old mind. Herein lays the happiness I believe both men search for. This new awareness which comes out of having faith, or madness, is not an end. Yet a constant becoming, a way to live life and a way in which to perceive life. One man when looking through a window sees everything, and sees it as beauty, another man looks out a window and sees nothing but a tree that needs to be cut down. Let us all become the perceiver of all. Let us become enlightened.

inctive "historical sense", which is really just this way of living using already acquired knowledge, almost in a habitual fashion. By this I mean, right now I may be in university, but the only reason I am even here is because I have been trained by the past generations that higher education is a needed thing, it goes all the way back to the Greeks. I am not here at university because it popped into my head out of nowhere. I did not say "Hey I should go pay lots of money so I can be a conversation piece at cafe's". No, I did it because the previous generation brought me up with the need to go, and their generation did the same, all leading back to the Greeks and the first schools of thought to Socrates himself! It is almost as if I had no choice in the matter, that I am living my life because, "historically", it is the correct thing to do. It is on this point that my existence comes into question. Am I simply a product of my ancestors? Am I but a legacy of some distant father? This is where the knowing stops. Are any of the ideas I hold so strong even my own? If I only lived by the past I believe this would be true; however, once we step into the present and truly live in the 'now' we leave behind all training, and we become something different. However here is where things can get lost, because if I truly only lived in the present, I would be no different than an animal. Yet we cannot simply negate the present, for we could become as "a melancholy invalid who wants to forget his present condition and therefore writes the history of his youth". Perhaps if we simply embrace the future, we could live in happiness, yet here too a problem lay's, because one cannot live simply in the future. If that were true, the future would never come. To achieve something in the future we must accomplish actions in the present. Yet we must not negate the future or, we will inevitably have to experience the consequences of this negation in the future. So one must, for Niezsche, embrace both the present, future, and past to fully live! This is so b

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Approximate Word count = 1803
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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