Problema I — Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?

Problema I establishes the terrain with precision. The ethical, on the Hegelian account, is the universal — it holds at every moment for everyone, and the single individual's task is to annul his singularity in order to express himself in it. As soon as the individual wishes to assert himself over against the universal, he sins. Hegel is right about this, and Kierkegaard acknowledges it. He also acknowledges Hegel's corollary: that the stage of individual conscience — where a person acts on a private sense of duty rather than the universal — is what Hegel calls "a moral form of evil." If that is right, Abraham is evil.

The tragic heroes are introduced as contrast. Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia for the fleet; Jephthah sacrifices his daughter for the vow that bought victory; Brutus condemns his sons for the law. Each of these is painful. Each is also intelligible within the ethical universal — each acts for a higher expression of the ethical, and each can be explained to anyone who understands what the community requires. The tragic hero weeps as he acts; but his weeping is itself part of his greatness, because it shows he knows what the universal demands and has paid its price. Abraham cannot do any of this. His act has no relation to the universal, serves no community, fulfills no social obligation. It is, as Johannes de Silentio says, purely private.

The Problema closes with the only two available verdicts. Either there is a standpoint higher than the ethical — the religious, in which the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute — and Abraham occupies it, in which case he is the father of faith and the knife on Moriah is the most important gesture in the history of religion. Or there is no such standpoint, and Abraham is a murderer, and the church that has called him the father of faith for two millennia has been wrong. Kierkegaard does not resolve this for the reader. He names the category — the teleological suspension of the ethical — and leaves the question of whether it exists to the reader who is honest enough to take it seriously.