More of My Thoughts on Kierkegaard, Marx and Balzac (Long and Prententious Gallatin-esque Title!)

Just a few words to clairify what I was trying to get at in our last class:

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard seeks to defend Abraham's decision to sacrifice Issac against critics who claim that any child sacrifice is morally reprehensable and thus condemn Abraham to the same level as any other filicides (such as Jephthah). To Kierkegaard, since Abraham receives a direct command from God (unlike Jephthah, who invokes God with no reply) our attempts to empathize with Abraham, and thus to understand him are futile. Importantly, this creates a system of morality where there are two types of value between which there can be no exchange. For instance, child sacrifice is not (for instance) a certain factor more acceptable when God demands it: it changes from the most reprehensible act to one that is absolutely required.

This paradigm stands to contrast Marx's idea of the cash nexus. In my understanding, the cash nexus is the distinct attribute of modernity wherein all objects become commodities; where cash can become any object worth having. Perhaps Kierkegaard shows one way, spirituality, in which some things can exist in a system skewed to the cash nexus.

Balzac shows us another: love. While Grandet conceives things only in terms of the cash nexus (he focuses on the cash itself, at the consequence of distancing himself from the other characters), Eugenie can give a set of valuable gold coins to her beloved cousin, even though there is no "just" recompense (just being linked to the cash nexus). In this way, the major conflict between the two characters appears: neither can be forced to understand the other's system of valuation--they cannot be reconciled with one another.