Summary

In Problema III, de Silentio examines the question of whether it is ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his actions from Sarah and Isaac. He does this primarily through the concepts of hiddenness and disclosure, where the former is associated with the religious (the knight of faith) and the latter with the ethical (the tragic hero). The ethical involves disclosure because it demands reasons, necessitates clear explanation, and, most importantly, it asks that one translate oneself into the terms of the universal (113). By contrast, because the single individual is superior to the ethical and because the single individual’s interiority is incommensurate with the universal, the knight of faith operates on the basis an incommunicable hiddenness. The author spends the majority of this section exploring a variety of stories that elucidate the dynamics between hiddenness and disclosure, including Euripides’ account of Agamemnon and...