The Pain of the Knight of faith

During this weeks reading on Kierkegaard I found the section on the characteristics of the night of Faith very interesting. As we learned in class last Tuesday, the night of faith is of the world of the singular. He experiences a noumenon and therefore cannot express himself to those around him (those of the world of the universal). In the story of Abraham, we see an example of the singular (Abraham) experiencing an event, to which the universal would be, and is completely averse. Therefore since it is an experience that only Abraham can understand and experience, it is a singular event.

One of the questions that I had from last class , that I didn’t get a chance to bring up, was that if a person were a knight of faith, how would he know? For instance, even if a person experienced a singular even, does that make them a knight of faith? Even if it technically does, make him a knight of faith, how does the knight of faith, at what point does the knight recognize it? Even if I experienced, a singular event I don’t know that I would know that it applied to me, and If I did recognize it as singular, how do I know that I am no longer part of the universal?

The answer for Kierkegaard is a rather odd one. I thought that it might be the Knight’s estrangement from the group of the universal, or his lack of being able to communicate to those of the universal, but instead Kierkegaard says that what forces him to recognize his own identity as a knight of faith is pain. Kierkegaard says on pg.80 of Fear and trembling, “He [the knight of faith] feels the pain of being unable to make himself understandable to others… The pain is his assurance.”

It is this pain of being unable to communicate his experience to those of the realm of the universal that causes the knight of faith to recognize his position of an absolute singular. And this inner pain of being unable to communicate with the universal, but only with the absolute is what allows the knight of faith to personally understand the separation of his being with those beings that are attributed to the universal. It is through his own personal experience once again that the knight of faith sees himself as separate from the universal, and only able to communicate with the absolute.