2024 Volume 98 Issue 2 Pages 55-80
This paper discusses the internal relationship between faith and evil, with reference to various interpretations in contemporary philosophy of religion regarding Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843). Kierkegaard suggested the possibility that faith can cancel ethics under the concept of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Buber and Levinas sought to invalidate this concept, and to find a way for faith and ethics to coincide. Derrida, on the other hand, offered an interpretation that for the sake of an ethical relationship to one other, one must sacrifice an ethical relationship with different others. While this interpretation is meaningful, it has the disadvantage of flattening the relationship to the other. De Vries, on the other hand, notes that Kierkegaard speaks of the demonic alongside the divine and adds a non-ethical aspect to the other. Following this interpretation, a faith (or belief in general) can have an internal contact with the unethical at the same time it tries to be ethical.
