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Erich Ludendorff

Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (9 April 1865 – 20 December 1937) was a German military officer and politician who contributed significantly to the Nazis' rise to power. He achieved fame during World War I for his central role in the German victories at Liège and Tannenberg in 1914. After his appointment as First Quartermaster General of the Army General Staff in 1916, he became the chief policymaker in a de facto military dictatorship until Germany's defeat. During the Weimar Republic, he took part in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch and Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Erich Ludendorff came from a family of minor nobility in Kruszewnia, in the Prussian Province of Posen. After completing his education as a cadet, he was commissioned a junior officer in 1885. In 1893, he was admitted to the prestigious German War Academy, and only a year later was recommended by its commandant to the General Staff Corps. By 1904, he had rapidly risen in rank to become a member of the Army's Great General Staff, where he oversaw the development of the Schlieffen Plan.

Despite being removed from the Great General Staff for meddling in politics, Ludendorff restored his standing in the army through his success as a commander in World War I. In August 1914, he led the successful German assault on Liège, earning him the Pour le Mérite. On the Eastern Front under the command of General Paul von Hindenburg, Ludendorff was instrumental in inflicting a series of crushing defeats against the Russians, including at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.

By August 1916, he had successfully lobbied for Hindenburg's appointment as Supreme Commander as well as his own promotion to First Quartermaster General. Once he and Hindenburg had established a de facto military dictatorship, Ludendorff directed Germany's entire military strategy and war effort until the end of the conflict. In this capacity, he secured Russia's defeat in the east and launched a new wave of offensives on the Western Front resulting in advances not seen since the war's outbreak. However, by late 1918, all improvements in Germany's fortunes were reversed after its forces' decisive defeat in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Allies' Hundred Days Offensive. Faced with the war effort's collapse and a growing popular revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Ludendorff to resign.

After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader and a promoter of the stab-in-the-back myth, which posited that Germany's defeat and the settlement reached at Versailles were the result of a treasonous conspiracy by Marxists, Freemasons and Jews. He also took part in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch and 1923 Beer Hall Putsch before unsuccessfully standing in the 1925 election for president against Hindenburg, his wartime superior. Thereafter, he retired from politics and devoted his final years to the study of military theory. His most famous work in this field was The Total War, where he argued that a nation's entire physical and moral resources should remain forever poised for mobilization because peace was merely an interval in a never-ending chain of wars. Following his death from liver cancer in Munich in 1937, Ludendorff was given—against his explicit wishes—a state funeral organized and attended by Hitler.

Early life
Ludendorff was born on 9 April 1865 in Ludendorff near Posen, in the Province of Posen and Kingdom of Prussia (now Kruszewnia, Poznań County, Poland), the third of six children of August Wilhelm Ludendorff (1833–1905). His father was descended from Pomeranian merchants who had been raised to the status of a Junker.

Erich's mother, Klara Jeanette Henriette von Tempelhoff (1840–1914), was the daughter of the noble but impoverished Friedrich August Napoleon von Tempelhoff (1804–1868) and his wife Jeannette Wilhelmine von Dziembowska (1816–1854), who came from a Germanized Polish landed family on the side of her father Stephan von Dziembowski (1779–1859). Through Dziembowski's wife Johanna Wilhelmine von Unruh (1793–1862), Erich was a remote descendant of the Counts of Dönhoff, the Dukes of Liegnitz and Brieg and the Margraves and Electors of Brandenburg.

Ludendorff had a stable and comfortable childhood, growing up on a small family farm. He received his early schooling from a maternal aunt and had a gift for mathematics, as did his younger brother Hans, who became a distinguished astronomer. Upon passing the entrance exam for the Cadet School at Plön with distinction, he was put in a class two years ahead of his age group, and thereafter he was consistently first in his class. The famous World War II General Heinz Guderian attended the same Cadet School, which produced many well-trained German officers. Ludendorff's education continued at the Hauptkadettenschule at Groß-Lichterfelde near Berlin through to 1882.

Pre-war military career

In 1885, Ludendorff was commissioned as a subaltern into the 57th Infantry Regiment, then at Wesel. Over the next eight years, he was promoted to lieutenant and saw further service in the 2nd Marine Battalion, based at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, and in the 8th Grenadier Guards at Frankfurt on the Oder. His service reports reveal the highest praise, with frequent commendations. In 1893, he entered the War Academy, where the commandant, General Meckel, recommended him to the General Staff, to which he was appointed in 1894. He rose rapidly and was a senior staff officer at the headquarters of V Corps from 1902 to 1904.

Next he joined the Great General Staff in Berlin, which was commanded by Alfred von Schlieffen, Ludendorff directed the Second or Mobilization Section from 1904 to 1913. Soon he was joined by Max Bauer, a brilliant artillery officer, who became a close friend.

In 1910 at age 45 "the 'old sinner', as he liked to hear himself called" married the daughter of a wealthy factory owner, Margarethe Schmidt (1875–1936). They met in a rainstorm when he offered his umbrella. She divorced to marry him, bringing three stepsons and a stepdaughter. Their marriage pleased both families and he was devoted to his stepchildren.

By 1911, Ludendorff was a full colonel. His section was responsible for writing the mass of detailed orders needed to bring the mobilized troops into position to implement the Schlieffen Plan. For this they covertly surveyed frontier fortifications in Russia, France and Belgium. For instance, in 1911 Ludendorff visited the key Belgian fortress city of Liège. Before the war, he was an Oberst in General Staff who studied the march route of the army in case of war.

Deputies of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which became the largest party in the Reichstag after the German federal elections of 1912, seldom gave priority to army expenditures, whether to build up its reserves or to fund advanced weaponry such as Krupp's siege cannons. Instead, they preferred to concentrate military spending on the Imperial German Navy. Ludendorff's calculations showed that to properly implement the Schlieffen Plan the Army lacked six corps.

Members of the General Staff were instructed to keep out of politics and the public eye, but Ludendorff shrugged off such restrictions. With a retired general, August Keim, and the head of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Class, he vigorously lobbied the Reichstag for the additional men. In 1913 funding was approved for four additional corps but Ludendorff was transferred to regimental duties as commander of the 39th (Lower Rhine) Fusiliers, stationed at Düsseldorf. "I attributed the change partly for my having pressed for those three additional army corps."

Barbara Tuchman characterizes Ludendorff in her book The Guns of August as Schlieffen's devoted disciple who was a glutton for work and a man of granite character but who was deliberately friendless and forbidding and therefore remained little known or liked. It is true that as his wife testified, "Anyone who knows Ludendorff knows that he has not a spark of humor...". He was voluble nonetheless, although he shunned small talk. John Lee, states that while Ludendorff was with his Fusiliers, "he became the perfect regimental commander ... the younger officers came to adore him." His adjutant, Wilhelm Breucker, became a devoted lifelong friend.

Battle of Liège
At the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 Ludendorff was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to the German Second Army under General Karl von Bülow. His assignment was largely due to his previous work investigating defenses of Liège, Belgium. At the beginning of the Battle of Liège, Ludendorff was an observer with the 14th Brigade, which was to infiltrate the city at night and secure the bridges before they could be destroyed. The brigade commander was killed on 5 August, so Ludendorff led the successful assault to occupy the city and its citadel. In the following days, two of the forts guarding the city were taken by desperate frontal infantry attacks, while the remaining forts were smashed by huge Krupp 42-cm and Austro-Hungarian Škoda 30.5-cm howitzers. By 16 August, all the forts around Liège had fallen, allowing the German First Army to advance. As the victor of Liège, Ludendorff was awarded Germany's highest military decoration for gallantry, the Pour le Mérite, presented by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself on 22 August.

Command in the East
German mobilization earmarked a single army, the Eighth, to defend their eastern frontier. When two Russian armies invaded East Prussia earlier than expected the command of the Eighth Army, Maximilian von Prittwitz with Georg von Waldersee as Chief of Staff, performed subpar and reportedly panicked. They accordingly were dismissed from command by the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), the German Supreme Army Command. The War Cabinet chose a retired general, Paul von Hindenburg, as commander, while the OHL assigned Ludendorff as his new chief of staff. Hindenburg and Ludendorff first met on their private train heading east. They agreed that they must annihilate the nearest Russian army before they tackled the second. On arrival, they discovered that Max Hoffmann had already shifted much of the 8th Army by rail to the south to do just that, in an amazing feat of logistical planning. Nine days later the Eighth Army surrounded most of a Russian army at Tannenberg, taking 92,000 prisoners in one of the great victories in German history. Twice during the battle Ludendorff wanted to break off, fearing that the second Russian army was about to strike their rear, but Hindenburg held firm.

The Germans turned on the second invading army in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes; it fled with heavy losses to escape encirclement. During the rest of 1914, commanding an Army Group, Hindenburg and Ludendorff staved off the projected invasion of German Silesia by dexterously moving their outnumbered forces into Russian Poland, fighting the battle of the Vistula River, which ended with a brilliantly executed withdrawal during which they destroyed the Polish railway lines and bridges needed for an invasion. When the Russians had repaired most of the damage the Germans struck their flank in the battle of Łódź, where they almost surrounded another Russian army. Masters of surprise and deft maneuver, the pair argued that if properly reinforced they could trap the entire Russian army in Poland. During the winter of 1914–15 they lobbied passionately for this strategy, but were rebuffed by the OHL.

Early in 1915 Hindenburg and Ludendorff surprised the Russian army that still held a toehold in East Prussia by attacking in a snowstorm and surrounding it in the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. The OHL then transferred Ludendorff, but Hindenburg's personal plea to the Kaiser reunited them. Erich von Falkenhayn, supreme commander at the OHL, came east to attack the flank of the Russian army that was pushing through the Carpathian passes towards Hungary. Employing overwhelming artillery, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians broke through the line between Gorlice and Tarnów and kept pushing until the Russians were driven out of most of Galicia, in Austro-Hungarian Poland. During this advance Falkenhayn rejected schemes to try to cut off the Russians in Poland, preferring direct frontal attacks like Bug–Narew Offensive. Outgunned, during the summer of 1915 the Russian commander Grand Duke Nicholas shortened his lines by withdrawing from most of Poland, destroying railroads, bridges, and many buildings while driving 743,000 Poles, 350,000 Jews, 300,000 Lithuanians and 250,000 Latvians into Russia.

During the winter of 1915–16 Ludendorff's headquarters was in Kaunas. The Germans occupied present-day Lithuania, western Latvia, and north eastern Poland, an area almost the size of France. Ludendorff demanded Germanization of the conquered territories and far-ranging annexations, offering land to German settlers; see Drang nach Osten. Far-reaching plans envisioned Courland and Lithuania turned into border states ruled by German military governors answerable only to the Kaiser. He proposed massive annexations and colonization in Eastern Europe in the event of the victory of the German Reich, and was one of the main supporters of the Polish Border Strip. Ludendorff planned to combine German settlement and Germanisation in conquered areas with expulsions of native populations; and envisioned an eastern German empire whose resources would be used in future war with Great Britain and the United States Ludendorff's plans went as far as making Crimea a German colony. As to the various nations and ethnic groups in conquered territories, Ludendorff believed they were "incapable of producing real culture"

On 16 March 1916, the Russians, now with adequate supplies of cannons and shells, attacked parts of the new German defenses, intending to penetrate at two points and then to pocket the defenders. They attacked almost daily until the end of the month, but the Lake Naroch Offensive failed, "choked in swamp and blood".

The Russians did better attacking the Austro-Hungarians in the south; the Brusilov Offensive cracked their lines with a well-prepared surprise wide-front attack led by well-schooled assault troops. The breakthrough was finally stemmed by Austro-Hungarian troops recalled from Italy stiffened with German advisers and reserves. In July, Russian attacks on the Germans in the north were beaten back. On 27 July 1916, Hindenburg was given command of all troops on the Eastern Front from the Baltic to Brody in the Ukraine. Ludendorff and Hindenburg visited their new command on a special train, and then set up headquarters in Brest-Litovsk. By August 1916 their front was holding everywhere.

Promotion to First Quartermaster-General
In the West in 1916 the Germans attacked unsuccessfully at Verdun and soon were reeling under British and French blows along the Somme. Ludendorff's friends at the OHL, led by Max Bauer, lobbied for him relentlessly. The balance was tipped when Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente, thrusting into Hungary. Falkenhayn was replaced as Chief of the General Staff by Hindenburg on 29 August 1916. Ludendorff was again his chief of staff as first Quartermaster general, with the stipulation that he would have joint responsibility. He was promoted to General of the Infantry. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg warned the War Cabinet: "You don't know Ludendorff, who is only great at a time of success. If things go badly he loses his nerve." Their first concern was the sizable Romanian Army, so troops sent from the Western Front checked Romanian and Russian incursions into Hungary. Then Romania was invaded from the south by German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman troops commanded by August von Mackensen and from the north by a German and Austro-Hungarian army commanded by Falkenhayn. Bucharest fell in December 1916. According to Mackensen, Ludendorff's distant management consisted of "floods of telegrams, as superfluous as they were offensive."

When sure that the Romanians would be defeated the OHL moved west, retaining the previous staff except for the operations officer, blamed for Verdun. They toured the Western Front meeting—and evaluating—commanders, learning about their problems and soliciting their opinions. At each meeting Ludendorff did most of talking for Hindenburg. There would be no further attacks at Verdun and the Somme would be defended by revised tactics that exposed fewer men to British shells. A new backup defensive line would be built, like the one they had constructed in the east. The Allies would call the new fortifications the Hindenburg Line. The German goal was victory, which they defined as a Germany with extended borders that could be more easily defended in the next war.

Hindenburg was given titular command over all of the forces of the Central Powers. Ludendorff's hand was everywhere. Every day he was on the telephone with the staffs of their armies and the Army was deluged with "Ludendorff's paper barrage" of orders, instructions and demands for information. His finger extended into every aspect of the German war effort. He issued the two daily communiques, and often met with the newspaper and newsreel reporters. Before long the public idolized him as the German Army's brain.

The Home Front
Ludendorff had a goal: "One thing was certain—the power must be in my hands." As stipulated by the Constitution of the German Empire the government was run by civil servants appointed by the Kaiser. Confident that army officers were superior to civilians, the OHL volunteered to oversee the economy: procurement, raw materials, labor, and food. Max Bauer, with his industrialist friends, began by setting overambitious targets for military production in what they called the Hindenburg Program. Ludendorff enthusiastically participated in meetings on economic policy—loudly, sometimes pummeling the table with his fists. Implementation of the Program was assigned to General Groener, a staff officer who had directed the Field Railway Service effectively. His office was in the (civilian) War Ministry, not in the OHL as Ludendorff had wanted. Therefore, he assigned staff officers to most government ministries, so he knew what was going on and could press his demands.

War industry's major problem was the scarcity of skilled workers, therefore 125,000 men were released from the armed forces and trained workers were no longer conscripted. The OHL wanted to enroll most German men and women into national service, but the Reichstag legislated that only males 17–60 were subject to "patriotic service" and refused to bind war workers to their jobs. Groener realized that they needed the support of the workers, so he insisted that union representatives be included on industrial dispute boards. He also advocated an excess profits tax. The industrialists were incensed. On 16 August 1917, Ludendorff telegraphed an order reassigning Groener to command the 33rd Infantry Division. Overall, "unable to control labour and unwilling to control industry, the army failed miserably". To the public it seemed that Ludendorff was running the nation as well as the war. According to Ludendorff, "the authorities ... represented me as a dictator". He would not become Chancellor because the demands for running the war were too great. The historian Frank Tipton argues that while not technically a dictator, Ludendorff was "unquestionably the most powerful man in Germany" in 1917–18.

The OHL did nothing to mitigate the crisis of growing food shortages in Germany. Despite the Allied blockade, everyone could have been fed adequately, but supplies were not managed effectively or fairly. In spring 1918, half of all the meat, eggs, and fruit consumed in Berlin were sold on the black market.

In government
The Navy advocated unrestricted submarine warfare, which would surely bring the United States into the war. At the Kaiser's request, his commanders met with his friend, the eminent chemist Walther Nernst, who knew America well, and who warned against the idea. Ludendorff promptly ended the meeting; it was "incompetent nonsense with which a civilian was wasting his time." Unrestricted submarine warfare began in February 1917, with the OHL’s strong support. This fatal mistake reflected poor military judgment in uncritically accepting the Navy’s contention that there were no effective potential countermeasures, like convoying, and confidence that the American armed forces were too feeble to fight effectively. By the end of the war, Germany would be at war with 27 nations.

Ludendorff, with the Kaiser's blessing, helped Lenin and other 30 or so revolutionaries in exile return to Russia. Ludendorff agreed to send the Bolsheviks in Switzerland by train through Germany from where they would then travel to Russia via Sweden. Lenin, however, still took some convincing, insisting that he be sent on a sealed train. Lenin ultimately agreed on 31 March, and would depart Switzerland on 8 April.

In the spring of 1917 the Reichstag passed a resolution for peace without annexations or indemnities. They would be content with the successful defensive war undertaken in 1914. The OHL was unable to defeat the resolution or to have it substantially watered down. The commanders despised Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg as weak, so they forced his resignation by repeatedly threatening to resign themselves, despite the Kaiser's admonition that this was not their business. Bethmann Hollweg was replaced by a minor functionary, Georg Michaelis, the food minister, who announced that he would deal with the resolution as "in his own fashion". Despite this put-down, the Reichstag voted the financial credits needed for continuing the war.

Following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the new Russian government launched the Kerensky Offensive in July 1917, attacking the Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia. After minor successes the Russians were driven back and many of their soldiers refused to fight. The counterattack was halted only after the line was pushed 240 km eastwards. The Germans capped the year in the East by capturing the strong Russian fortress of Riga in September 1917, starting with a brief, overwhelming artillery barrage using many gas shells then followed by infiltrating infantry. The Bolsheviks seized power and soon were at the peace table.

Ludendorff insisted on the huge territorial losses forced on Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, even though this required that a million German soldiers remain in the east. During the peace negotiations with Russia, his representative kept demanding the economic concessions coveted by German industrialists. The commanders kept blocking attempts to frame a plausible peace offer to the western powers by insisting on borders expanded for future defense. Ludendorff regarded the Germans as the "master race" and after victory planned to settle ex-soldiers in the Baltic states and in Alsace-Lorraine, where they would take over property seized from Balts and the French. One after another the OHL toppled government ministers they regarded as weak.

Western Front (1916–1917)
In contrast to the OHL's questionable interventions in politics and diplomacy, their armies continued to excel. The commanders would agree on what was to be done and then Ludendorff and the OHL staff produced the mass of orders specifying exactly what was to be accomplished. On the western front they stopped packing defenders in the front line, which reduced losses to enemy artillery. They issued a directive on elastic defense, in which attackers who penetrated a lightly held front line entered a battle zone in which they were punished by artillery and counterattacks. It remained German Army doctrine through World War II; schools taught the new tactics to all ranks. Its effectiveness is illustrated by comparing the first half of 1916 in which 77 German soldiers died or went missing for every 100 British to the second half when 55 Germans were lost for every 100 British.

By February 1917 the OHL was sure that the new French commander, General Robert Nivelle, would attack, and correctly foresaw that he would try to pinch off the German salient between Arras and Noyon. So the OHL withdrew German forces to the segment of the Hindenburg line across the base of the salient in Operation Alberich, leaving the ground they gave up as a depopulated waste land. The Nivelle Offensive in April 1917 was blunted by mobile defense in depth. Many French units mutinied, though the OHL never grasped the extent of the disarray.

The British supported their allies with a successful attack near Arras and had another success in June 1917 at Messines Ridge in Flanders. Then at the end of July 1917, the British attacked Passchendaele Ridge. At first the defense was directed by General von Lossberg, a pioneer in defense in depth, but when the British adjusted their tactics, Ludendorff took over day-to-day control. The British eventually took Passchendaele Ridge at great cost.

Ludendorff worried about declining morale, so in July 1917 OHL established a propaganda unit. In October 1917 they began mandatory patriotic lectures to the troops, who were assured that if the war was lost they would "become slaves of international capital". The lecturers were to "ensure that a fight is kept up against all agitators, croakers, and weaklings". To bolster the wobbling Austro-Hungarian government, the Germans provided some troops and led a joint attack in Italy in October. They sliced through the Italian lines in the mountains at Caporetto. Two hundred and fifty thousand Italians were captured and the rest of Italian Army was forced to retreat to the Grappa-Piave defensive line.

On 20 November 1917, the British achieved a total surprise by attacking at Cambrai. A short, intense bombardment preceded an attack by tanks, which led the infantry through the German wire. It was Ludendorff's 52nd birthday, but he was too upset to attend the celebratory dinner. The British were not organized to exploit their breakthrough, and German reserves counterattacked, in some places driving the British back beyond their starting lines.

At the beginning of 1918 almost a million munition workers struck; one demand was peace without annexations. OHL ordered that all strikers fit to bear arms' be sent to the front, thereby degrading military service."

Western Front (1918)
With Russia out of the war, the Germans outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front. After extensive consultations, OHL planned a series of attacks to drive the British out of the war. During the winter all ranks were schooled in the innovative tactics proven at Caporetto and Riga. The first attack, Operation Michael, was on 21 March 1918 near Cambrai. After an effective hurricane bombardment coordinated by Colonel Bruchmüller, they slashed through the British lines, surmounting the obstacles that had thwarted their enemies for three years. On the first day they occupied as large an area as the Allies had won on the Somme after 140 days. The Allies were aghast, but it was not the triumph OHL had hoped for: they had planned another Tannenberg by surrounding tens of thousands of British troops in the Cambrai salient, but had been thwarted by stout defense and fighting withdrawal. They lost as many men as the defenders—the first day was the bloodiest of the war. Among the dead was Ludendorff’s oldest stepson; a younger had been killed earlier. The Germans were unable to cut any vital railway. When Ludendorff motored near the front he was displeased by seeing how: "The numerous slightly wounded made things difficult by the stupid and displeasing way in which they hurried to the rear." The Americans doubled the number of troops being sent to France.

Their next attack was in Flanders. Again they broke through, advancing 30 km, and forcing the British to give back all of the ground that they had won the preceding year after weeks of battle. But the Germans were stopped short of the rail junction that was their goal. Next, to draw French reserves south, they struck along the Chemin des Dames. In their most successful attack yet they advanced 12 km on the first day, crossing the Marne but stopping 56 km from Paris. However each German triumph weakened their army and its morale. From 20 March 1918 to 25 June the German front lengthened from 390 km to 510 km.

Then the Germans struck near Reims, to seize additional railway lines for use in the salient, but were foiled by brilliant French elastic tactics. Undeterred, on 18 July 1918 Ludendorff, still "aggressive and confident", traveled to Flanders to confer about the next attack there. A telephone call reported that the French and Americans, led by a mass of tanks, had smashed through the right flank of their salient pointing toward Paris, on the opening day of the Battle of Soissons. Everyone present realized that surely they had lost the war. Ludendorff was shattered.

OHL began to withdraw step by step to new defensive lines, first evacuating all of their wounded and supplies. Ludendorff's communiques, which hitherto had been largely factual, now distorted the news, for instance claiming that American troops had to be herded onto troop ships by special police.

On 8 August 1918, the Germans were completely surprised at Amiens when British tanks broke through the defenses and intact German formations surrendered. To Ludendorff it was the "black day in the history of the German Army". The German retreats continued, pressed by Allied attacks. OHL still vigorously opposed offering to give up the territory they desired in France and Belgium, so the German government was unable to make a plausible peace proposal.

Ludendorff became increasingly cantankerous, railing at his staff without cause, publicly accusing Hindenburg of talking nonsense, and sometimes bursting into tears. Bauer wanted him replaced, but instead a doctor, Oberstabarzt Hochheimer, was brought to OHL. He had worked closely with Ludendorff in Poland during the winter of 1915–16 on plans to bring in German colonists. Before the war he had a practice in nervous diseases. Hochheimer "spoke as a friend and he listened as a friend", convincing Ludendorff that he could not work effectively with one hour of sleep a night and that he must relearn how to relax. After a month away from headquarters Ludendorff had recovered from the severest symptoms of battle fatigue.

Downfall
On 29 September 1918, Ludendorff and Hindenburg suddenly told an incredulous Kaiser that they could not guarantee the integrity of the Western front "for two hours" and they must have an immediate armistice. A new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, approached President Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson's terms were unacceptable to the German leadership, and so the German army fought on. The chancellor told the Kaiser that he and his cabinet would resign unless Ludendorff was removed, but that Hindenburg must remain to hold the army together. The Kaiser called his commanders in, curtly accepting Ludendorff's resignation and then rejecting Hindenburg's. Fuming, Ludendorff would not accompany the field marshal back to headquarters: "I refused to ride with you because you have treated me so shabbily".

Ludendorff had assiduously sought all of the credit; now he was rewarded with all of the blame. Widely despised, and with revolution breaking out, he was hidden by his brother and a network of friends until he slipped out of Germany disguised in blue spectacles and a false beard and fake Finnish passport, settling in a Swedish admirer's country home until the Swedish government asked him to leave in February 1919. Within seven months, he wrote two volumes of detailed memoirs. Friends, led by Breucker, provided him with documents and negotiated with publishers. Groener (who is not mentioned in the book) characterized it as a showcase of his "caesar-mania". He was a brilliant general, according to John Wheeler-Bennett, stating that he was "certainly one of the greatest routine military organizers that the world has ever seen", but he also said he was a ruinous political meddler. The influential military analyst Hans Delbrück concluded that "The Empire was built by Moltke and Bismarck, destroyed by Tirpitz and Ludendorff."

After the Great War
In exile, Ludendorff wrote numerous books and articles about the German military's conduct of the war while forming the foundation for the Dolchstosslegende, the "stab-in-the-back theory," for which he is considered largely responsible, insisting that a domestic crisis had sparked Germany's surrender while the military situation held firm, ignoring that he himself had pressed the politicians for an armistice on military grounds. Ludendorff was convinced that Germany had fought a defensive war and, in his opinion, that Kaiser Wilhelm II had failed to organize a proper counter-propaganda campaign or provide efficient leadership.

Ludendorff was extremely suspicious of the Social Democrats and leftists, whom he blamed for the humiliation of Germany through the Versailles Treaty. Ludendorff claimed that he paid close attention to the business element (especially the Jews), and saw them turn their backs on the war effort by—as he saw it—letting profit, rather than patriotism, dictate production and financing.

Again focusing on the left, Ludendorff was appalled by the strikes that took place towards the end of the war and the way that the home front collapsed before the military front did, with the former poisoning the morale of soldiers on temporary leave. Most importantly, Ludendorff felt that the German people as a whole had underestimated what was at stake in the war; he was convinced that the Entente had started the war and was determined to dismantle Germany completely.

Ludendorff wrote: "By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution."

Political career in the Republic

Ludendorff returned to Berlin in February 1919. Staying at the Adlon Hotel, he talked with another resident, Sir Neill Malcolm, the head of the British Military Mission. After Ludendorff presented his excuses for the German defeat Malcolm said, "You mean that you were stabbed in the back?" — coining a key catchphrase for the German right wing.

On 12 March 1920, 5,000 Freikorps troops under the command of Walther von Lüttwitz marched on the Chancellery, forcing the government led by Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Bauer to flee the city. The putschists proclaimed a new government with a right-wing politician, Wolfgang Kapp as the new "chancellor". Ludendorff and Max Bauer were part of the putsch. The Kapp Putsch was soon defeated by a general strike that brought Berlin to a standstill. The leaders fled, Ludendorff to Bavaria, where a right-wing coup had succeeded. He published two volumes of annotated—and in a few instances pruned—documents and commentaries documenting his war service. He reconciled with Hindenburg, who began to visit every year.

In May 1923 Ludendorff had an agreeable first meeting with Adolf Hitler, and soon he had regular contacts with Nazis. On 8 November 1923, the Bavarian Staatskommissar Gustav von Kahr was addressing a jammed meeting in a large beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller. Hitler, waving a pistol, jumped onto the stage, announcing that the national revolution was underway. The hall was occupied by armed men who covered the audience with a machine gun, the first move in the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler announced that he would lead the Reich Government and Ludendorff would command the army. He addressed the now enthusiastically supportive audience and then spent the night in the War Ministry, unsuccessfully trying to obtain the army's backing.

The next morning 3,000 armed Nazis formed outside of the Bürgerbräukeller and marched into central Munich, the leaders just behind the flag bearers. They were blocked by a cordon of police, and firing broke out for less than a minute. Several of the Nazis in front were hit or dropped to the ground. Ludendorff and his adjutant Major Streck marched to the police line where they pushed aside the rifle barrels. He was respectfully arrested. He was indignant when he was sent home while the other leaders remained in custody. Four police officers and 15 Nazis had been killed, including Ludendorff's servant, Kurt Neubauer.

They were tried in early 1924. Ludendorff was acquitted, but Heinz Pernet, Ludendorff's stepson, was convicted of "aiding and abetting treason," given a fifteen-month sentence. Hitler went to prison but was released after nine months. Ludendorff's 60th birthday was celebrated by massed bands and a large torchlight parade. In 1924, he was elected to the Reichstag as a representative of the NSFB (a coalition of the German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) and members of the Nazi Party), serving until 1928. In 1925, he founded the Tannenbergbund, a German nationalist organization which was both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, and published literature espousing conspiracy theories involving Jews, Catholics—especially Jesuits—and Freemasons.

As his views became more extreme under the influence of his wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz, Ludendorff gradually began to part company with Hitler, who was surreptitiously working to undermine the reputation of his one serious rival for the leadership of the extreme right in Germany. Nonetheless, Ludendorff was persuaded to run for President of the Republic in the March 1925 election as the DVFP candidate, in alliance with the Nazis, but received only 1.1 per cent of the vote; there is some evidence that Hitler himself persuaded Ludendorff to run, knowing that the results would be humiliating.

No one had a majority in the initial round of the election, so a second round was needed; Hindenburg entered the race and was narrowly elected. Ludendorff was so humiliated by what he saw as a betrayal by his old friend that he broke off relations with Hindenburg, and in 1927 refused to even stand beside the field marshal at the dedication of the Tannenberg memorial. He attacked Hindenburg abusively for not having acted in a "nationalistic soldier-like fashion". The Berlin-based liberal newspaper Vossische Zeitung states in its article "Ludendorff's hate tirades against Hindenburg—Poisonous gas from Hitler's camp" that Ludendorff was, as of 29 March 1930, deeply grounded in Nazi ideology.

Tipton notes that Ludendorff was a social Darwinist who believed that war was the "foundation of human society", and that military dictatorship was the normal form of government in a society in which every resource must be mobilized. The historian Margaret L. Anderson notes that after the war, Ludendorff wanted Germany to go to war against all of Europe, and that he became a pagan worshipper of the Nordic god Wotan (Odin); he detested not only Judaism, but also Christianity, which he regarded as a weakening force.

Retirement and death
In 1926, Ludendorff divorced Margarethe Schmidt and married his second wife Mathilde von Kemnitz (1877–1966). They published books and essays claiming that the world's problems were the result of Christianity, especially the Jesuits and Catholics, but also conspiracies by Jews and the Freemasons. They founded the Bund für Gotteserkenntnis (Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society of theists that survives to this day. He launched several abusive attacks on his former superior Hindenburg for not having acted in a "nationalistic soldier-like fashion".

By the time Hitler came to power, Ludendorff was no longer sympathetic to him. The Nazis distanced themselves from Ludendorff because of his eccentric conspiracy theories.

On 30 January 1933, the occasion of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor by President Hindenburg, Ludendorff allegedly sent the following telegram to Hindenburg:

"I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done."

Some historians consider this text to be a forgery. In an attempt to regain Ludendorff's favor, Hitler arrived unannounced at Ludendorff's home on his 70th birthday in 1935 to promote him to field marshal. Infuriated, Ludendorff allegedly rebuffed Hitler by telling him: "An officer is named General Field-Marshal on the battlefield! Not at a birthday tea-party in the midst of peace." He wrote two further books on military themes.

Ludendorff died of liver cancer in the private clinic Josephinum in Munich, on 20 December 1937 at the age of 72. He was given—against his explicit wishes—a state funeral organized and attended by Hitler, who declined to speak at his eulogy. He was buried in the Neuer Friedhof in Tutzing in Bavaria.

Decorations and awards
He received the following honours:
 * Knight of the Military Order of Max Joseph (Bavaria)
 * Grand Commander's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern, with Star (Prussia)
 * Pour le Mérite (military), 8 August 1914; with Oak Leaves, 23 February 1915 (Prussia)
 * Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, 24 March 1918 (Prussia)
 * Iron Cross (1914) 1st and 2nd Classes
 * Commander of the Order of the Zähringer Lion, 2nd Class (Baden)
 * Knight of the Military Order of St. Henry (Saxony)
 * Knight of the Military Merit Order (Württemberg)
 * Knight Grand Cross of the House and Merit Order of Peter Frederick Louis, with Swords and Laurels (Oldenburg)
 * Military Merit Cross, 2nd class (Mecklenburg-Schwerin)
 * Military Merit Cross, 1st Class, with War Decoration (Austria-Hungary)
 * Commander of the Imperial Austrian Order of Franz Joseph, with Star, 1913 (Austria-Hungary)
 * Grand Cross of the Austrian Imperial Order of Leopold, 1917 (Austria-Hungary)
 * Gold Military Merit Medal (Signum Laudis, Austria-Hungary)
 * Cross for Merit in War (Saxe-Meiningen)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Liberty, with Swords (Finland)

Books (selection)

 * 1919: Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918. Berlin: Mittler & Sohn (republished 1936), translated into English as My War Memoirs 1914-1918
 * 1920: The General Staff and its Problems
 * 1933: Mein militärischer Werdegang. Blätter der Erinnerung an unser stolzes Heer. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1937: with Mitarbeitern: Mathilde Ludendorff – ihr Werk und Wirken. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1937: Auf dem Weg zur Feldherrnhalle. Lebenserinnerungen an die Zeit des 9. November 1923. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1939: with Mathilde Ludendorff: Die Judenmacht, ihr Wesen und Ende. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag

Smaller publications

 * 1926: Die Revolution von oben. Das Kriegsende und die Vorgänge beim Waffenstillstand. Zwei Vorträge. Lorch: Karl Rohm
 * 1932: Schändliche Geheimnisse der Hochgrade. Ludendorffs Verlag, Munchen
 * 1934: Wie der Weltkrieg 1914 „gemacht“ wurde. Munich: Völkischer Verlag
 * 1934: Das Marne-Drama. Der Fall Moltke-Hentsch. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1934: "Tannenberg". Zum 20. Jahrestag der Schlacht. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1934: Die politischen Hintergründe des 9. November 1923. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1935: Über Unbotmäßigkeit im Kriege. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1935: Französische Fälschung meiner Denkschrift von 1912 über den drohenden Krieg. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1938–40: Feldherrnworte. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag
 * 1939: Tannenberg. Geschichtliche Wahrheit über die Schlacht. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag

As publisher

 * 1929–1933 (banned): Ludendorffs Volkswarte ("Ludendorff's Peoples' Viewpoint"; weekly) Munich

Related articles

 * Dioscuri (World War I)

title: Erich Ludendorff


text:
Tom Kenny

Thomas James Kenny (born July 13, 1962) is an American actor and comedian. Since 1999, he has voiced the titular character in SpongeBob SquarePants and associated media. Kenny has voiced many other characters, including Heffer Wolfe in Rocko's Modern Life, the Ice King in Adventure Time and its spinoff Fionna and Cake, the Narrator and Mayor in The Powerpuff Girls, Carl Chryniszzswics in Johnny Bravo, Dog in CatDog, Hank and Jeremy in Talking Tom and Friends, The Penguin in various animated media based on DC Comics, and Spyro from the Spyro video game series. His live action work includes the comedy variety shows The Edge and Mr. Show. Kenny's accolades include two Daytime Emmy Awards and two Annie Awards for his voice work as SpongeBob SquarePants and the Ice King. He is married to fellow voice artist Jill Talley, who plays Karen on SpongeBob SquarePants, with two children.

Early life and stand-up comedy
Thomas James Kenny was born in Syracuse, New York, on July 13, 1962, and raised there. His parents were Theresa (née Donigan) and Paul Kenny. As a young child, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, he loved drawing and collecting record albums. Kenny met Bobcat Goldthwait in first grade and they became lifelong friends. In their mid-teens, they saw an ad for an open-mic night at Skaneateles that featured comedian Barry Crimmins with the moniker "Bear Cat". He and Goldthwait went to the event, and performed under the monikers Tomcat and Bobcat, respectively, as a tribute to Crimmins, after which Goldthwait used Bobcat as his stage name. Describing Kenny's stand-up routines, Goldthwait said, "Tom would get up there and talk about his therapist and he didn't even have a therapist, he just loved Woody Allen."

Kenny went to Bishop Grimes Junior/Senior High School, a Catholic high school. After college, he performed stand-up comedy around the country for about eight years before he moved on to other venues.

Television and film career
Kenny has acted in many films and TV shows, debuting in How I Got into College (1989) and later appeared in films such as Shakes the Clown (1991) and Comic Book: The Movie (2004). On television, he would host the "Music News" segments of Friday Night Videos in the early 1990s. He appeared in sketch comedy shows The Edge which aired on Fox from 1992 to 1993, and Mr. Show which aired on HBO from 1995 to 1998, both roles in the show were as a regular cast member. He appears in the live-action segments of SpongeBob SquarePants as Patchy the Pirate, appeared on R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series on the season four episode, "Uncle Howee" as Uncle Howee, a high-energy kids' show host with strange powers.

Voice acting
Kenny said that he voices "a lot of sweet yellow characters for some reason." He described SpongeBob's voice as in between that of a child and an adult, stating "Think a Stan Laurel, Jerry Lewis kind of child-man. Kind of like a Munchkin but not quite, kind of like a kid, but not in a Charlie Brown child's voice on the TV shows."

Joe Murray auditioned Kenny for voice acting roles for Rocko's Modern Life in a casting call in Los Angeles, California. On one occasion, the producers required Kenny to fill the role of Charlie Adler, who was absent. He voices Cupid for the Nickelodeon show The Fairly OddParents.

Joe Murray chose Kenny for several roles on another of his projects, Camp Lazlo as Scoutmaster Lumpus and Slinkman, because Murray, after seeing Kenny's previous work for Rocko's Modern Life, felt that Kenny "adds writing to his roles" and "brings so much".

He voiced Dog in CatDog, as well as the voice of Cliff. He voices many characters in The Powerpuff Girls, including the Mayor, the Narrator, Mitch Mitchelson, Snake and Little Arturo from the Gangreen Gang, Rainbow the Clown, etc. He voiced Eduardo and various other characters in Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, Dr. Two-Brains in the PBS Kids show, WordGirl, and the villains Knightbrace, the Common Cold and Mr. Wink in Codename: Kids Next Door.

Kenny is the Penguin in the 2004 TV series The Batman.

He voiced the character Squanchy on Rick and Morty.

He plays a number of roles in the Transformers Animated TV show. A few of the characters he voices in this series are Starscream and his clones, Isaac Sumdac and Waspinator. Kenny also voiced several characters on the animated show Xiaolin Showdown, as well as the Autobots Skids and Wheelie in the live-action Transformers film series. On Dilbert, Kenny voiced Ratbert, Asok, Dilbert's shower, and some minor characters. He played Mr. Hal Gibson in the animated kids show Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force GO!.

In 2009, Kenny became a regular cast voice in the Fox comedy series Sit Down, Shut Up. He voices Muhammad Sabeeh "Happy" Fa-ach Nuabar, the secretive custodian who is plotting a terrorist attack, as well as Happy's interpreter. The series premiered on April 19, 2009. Kenan Thompson, Kristin Chenoweth, Jason Bateman, Nick Kroll, Cheri Oteri, Henry Winkler, Will Arnett, and Will Forte are the other main cast members.

He plays the Ice King and Magic Man on Adventure Time. In 2011, Kenny took over the role of Rabbit from Ken Sansom in Winnie the Pooh. From 2012 to 2014, Kenny voiced Woody Johnson on Comedy Central's Brickleberry. He voiced various characters in the Cartoon Network programme Mixels, Sumo in the Cartoon Network programme Clarence, Daddo in Henry Hugglemonster, Dr. Otto Octavius on The Ultimate Spider-Man, and Leo Callisto in Miles from Tomorrowland.

He has also provided voices in television advertisements for Best Buy (as an elf for a Christmas spot), Experian (as a talking modem alongside DC Douglas), and Talking Hank in the YouTube web series Talking Tom and Friends.

In video games, Kenny is best known as the voice of Spyro the Dragon, having replaced previous voice actor Carlos Alazraqui. He first voiced Spyro in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, and continued to voice the character up until Spyro: A Hero's Tail, where he was replaced by Jess Harnell. He also voiced another character in the series, Sgt. James Byrd, in Spyro: Year of the Dragon. He reprised both roles in Spyro Reignited Trilogy, a collection of modern remakes of the original Spyro trilogy. He also voiced Crash Bandicoot live at E3 1997, switching out performances with Carlos Alazraqui.

Kenny was a guest star on HarmonQuest as both himself and his "in-game character" Legnahcra the maître d' of Virtuous Harmony.

He also voiced Fethry Duck in the 2017 version of DuckTales. In 2022, he voiced Benito Mussolini and other characters in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.

Kenny reprised his role as Ice King in the 2023 spinoff series Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake.

SpongeBob SquarePants
While working on the animated series Rocko's Modern Life, Kenny met marine biologist and animator Stephen Hillenburg. After the cancellation of Rocko's Modern Life in 1996, Hillenburg began developing his own concept for an ocean-themed series, building off of his background in marine science. Hillenburg said that he wanted to base the show on his favorite animal, the sea sponge, "because it's a funny animal, a strange one." To voice this character, Hillenburg approached Kenny in 1997.

The series, titled SpongeBob SquarePants, premiered on Nickelodeon on May 1, 1999. It soon became a commercial success. Kenny plays various other characters on the show, including the live-action character Patchy the Pirate and the voices of Gary the Snail, the French Narrator (a parody of Jacques Cousteau), and SpongeBob's father (Harold SquarePants). In 2010, Kenny received the Annie Award for "Voice Acting in a Television Production" for his role as SpongeBob in SpongeBob's Truth or Square (season 6, episode 23–24). He also voiced SpongeBob in the sequel film released on February 6, 2015. In 2018 and 2020, he received the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program.

The television show celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2019. In celebration, a television special was aired, titled "SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout". A notable scene includes each of the show's main characters' voice actors portraying live-action versions of their characters. Although this was not the first Spongebob Squarepants episode that blended animated sequences with live-action characters, it was indeed the first time that the characters' voice actors have all played a live-action scene all together. The airing was recognized as honoring the show's creator Stephen Hillenburg, who had passed away one year earlier.

Later in 2019, he was featured in the live recording of the Broadway musical SpongeBob SquarePants playing the role of Patchy the Pirate.

Super Bowl LVIII, which took place in 2024, was broadcast on CBS; the network's parent company Paramount also owns Nickelodeon, the network that airs Spongebob Squarepants. As part of a plan to maximize the use of its broadcasting rights partnership with the NFL, Paramount decided to air an "alternative" Super Bowl telecast on Nickelodeon that was aimed to be more family-friendly. The channel's website claimed that the broadcast was intended for "kids of all ages, from 2 to 102". The broadcast on Nickelodeon was hosted by Nate Burleson and Noah Eagle in live-action, and accompanying them were Spongebob and Patrick. Tom Kenny and Patrick's voice actor Bill Fagerbakke voiced the characters in real-time, improvising their own jokes in-character, and also utilized motion capture. Kenny commented that the Nickelodeon airing allowed viewers who weren't football fans to still engage with the game.

Personal life
Kenny first met his wife Jill Talley in 1992 while working on The Edge. The two have collaborated on many productions together, including SpongeBob SquarePants (in which Talley voices Karen Plankton). They also both appeared in the music video for "Tonight, Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins. They have two children, Mack (b. 1997) and Nora (b. 2003). The Kennys live in Studio City, California.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Tom Kenny


text:
Horizon effect

The horizon effect, also known as the horizon problem, is a problem in artificial intelligence whereby, in many games, the number of possible states or positions is immense and computers can only feasibly search a small portion of them, typically a few plies down the game tree. Thus, for a computer searching only a fixed number of plies, there is a possibility that it will make a detrimental move, but the effect is not visible because the computer does not search to the depth at which its evaluation function reveals the true evaluation of the line (i.e., beyond its "horizon").

When evaluating a large game tree using techniques such as minimax with alpha-beta pruning, search depth is limited for feasibility reasons. However, evaluating a partial tree may give a misleading result. When a significant change exists just over the horizon of the search depth, the computational device falls victim to the horizon effect.

In 1973 Hans Berliner named this phenomenon, which he and other researchers had observed, the "Horizon Effect." He split the effect into two: the Negative Horizon Effect "results in creating diversions which ineffectively delay an unavoidable consequence or make an unachievable one appear achievable." For the "largely overlooked" Positive Horizon Effect, "the program grabs much too soon at a consequence that can be imposed on an opponent at leisure, frequently in a more effective form."

Greedy algorithms tend to suffer from the horizon effect.

The horizon effect can be mitigated by extending the search algorithm with a quiescence search. This gives the search algorithm ability to look beyond its horizon for a certain class of moves of major importance to the game state, such as captures in chess.

Rewriting the evaluation function for leaf nodes and/or analyzing more nodes will solve many horizon effect problems.

Example
For example, in chess, assume a situation where the computer only searches the game tree to six plies and from the current position determines that the queen is lost in the sixth ply; and suppose there is a move in the search depth where it may sacrifice a rook, and the loss of the queen is pushed to the eighth ply. This is, of course, a worse move than sacrificing the queen because it leads to losing both a queen and a rook. However, because the loss of the queen was pushed over the horizon of search, it is not discovered and evaluated by the search. Losing the rook seems to be better than losing the queen, so the sacrifice is returned as the best option whereas delaying the sacrifice of the queen has in fact additionally weakened the computer's position.

title: Horizon effect


text:
Talk:Factor analysis

Bass-Ackwards analysis
There is a form of factor analysis that has not been mentioned in this article which is useful.

 * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656606000134
 * https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/a-general-method-for-computing-hierarchical-component-structures-
 * https://www.infona.pl/resource/bwmeta1.element.elsevier-101f4492-b753-35d3-898f-f6efcda2d8f3
 * Possible Utility https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216419/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.136.243.17 (talk) 11:06, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Independence v.s. Orthogonality
In section "Mathematical model of the same example" the text says:

The errors are assumed to be independent of the factors:

$$\sum_i F_{pi}\varepsilon_{ai}=0 $$

I don't understand how this is an assumption. The equation seems as if factors and errors were orthogonal by construction. As an assumption I would have expected an expected value on the left hand side. Matze-pigon (talk) 18:39, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Factor analysis


text:
Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (Latin for John of the Silence). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, which says to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." The Philippians verse is sometimes thought to reference Psalm 55:5, which says, "Fear and trembling came upon me."

Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham during the Binding of Isaac.

Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to refuse to comply with God's orders. He resigned himself to the three-and-a-half-day journey and to the loss of his son. "He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eliezer. Who, after all, could understand him, for did not the nature of temptation extract from him a pledge of silence? He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife." Because he kept everything to himself and chose not to reveal his feelings he "isolated himself as higher than the universal." Kierkegaard envisions two types of people in Fear and Trembling and Repetition. One lives in hope, Abraham, the other lives in memory, The Young Man and Constantin Constantius. He discussed them beforehand in Lectures delivered before the Symparanekromenoi and The Unhappiest Man. One hopes for happiness from something "out there" while the other finds happiness from something in themself. This he brought out in his upbuilding discourse, published on the same date.

Kierkegaard says, "Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith." He spoke about this kind of consciousness in an earlier book. "There comes a moment in a person's life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit. As immediate spirit, a person is bound up with all the earthly life, and now spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, so to speak, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then depression sets in." Once Abraham became conscious of his eternal validity he arrived at the door of faith and acted according to his faith. In this action he became a knight of faith. In other words, one must give up all his or her earthly possessions in infinite resignation and must also be willing to give up whatever it is that he or she loves more than God.

Kierkegaard used the ethical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the aesthetic stories of Agnes and the merman, Iphigenia at Aulis and others to help the reader understand the difference between the inner world of the spirit and the outer world of ethics and aesthetics.

Several authorities consider the work autobiographical. It can be explained as Kierkegaard's way of working himself through the loss of his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Abraham becomes Kierkegaard and Isaac becomes Regine in this interpretation.

Structure
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works begin with a preface by Johannes de Silentio. His Upbuilding Discourses begin with a dedication to the single individual, who has become Abraham in this work.

Next is his Exordium. It begins like this, "Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard that beautiful story of how God tempted Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the temptation, kept the faith, and, contrary to expectation, got a son a second time." And ends like this, "That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would have easily understood the story of Abraham."

The Exordium is followed by the Eulogy on Abraham. How did Abraham become the father of faith? Kierkegaard says, "No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. "One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone was great wholly in proportion to the magnitude of that with which he struggled. For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but he who struggled with God became greatest of all."

Now he presents his Problemata (problems): "Abraham has gained a prescriptive right to be a great man, so that what he does is great and when another does the same thing it is a sin. (...) The ethical expression of what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac, the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac – but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet, without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is." He asked how a murderer can be revered as the father of faith.

 * Problema 1: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?
 * Problema 2: Is there an absolute duty to God?
 * Problema 3: Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, and from Isaac?

Kierkegaard's method
Kierkegaard says that everyone has a choice in life. Freedom consists in using that choice. We each have the right to speak or not to speak and the right to act or not to act. Kierkegaard's Either/Or is God or the world. He says,

Teleological suspension of the ethical

What is the ethical? Kierkegaard steers the reader to Hegel's book Elements of the Philosophy of Right especially the chapter on "The Good and Conscience" where he writes, "It is the right of the subjective will that it should regard as good what it recognizes as authoritative. It is the individual's right, too, that an act, as outer realization of an end, should be counted right or wrong, good or evil, lawful or unlawful, according to his knowledge of the worth it has when objectively realized. (...) Right of insight into the good is different from right of insight with regard to action as such. The right of objectivity means that the act must be a change in the actual world, be recognized there, and in general be adequate to what has validity there. Whoso will act in this actual world has thereby submitted to its laws, and recognized the right of objectivity. Similarly in the state, which is the objectivity of the conception of reason, legal responsibility does not adapt itself to what any one person holds to be reasonable or unreasonable. It does not adhere to subjective insight into right or wrong, good or evil, or to the claims which an individual makes for the satisfaction of his conviction. In this objective field the right of insight is reckoned as insight into what is legal or illegal, or the actual law. It limits itself to its simplest meaning, namely, knowledge of or acquaintance with what is lawful and binding. Through the publicity of the laws and through general customs the state removes from the right of insight that which is for the subject its formal side. It removes also the element of chance, which at our present standpoint still clings to it."

Abraham didn't follow this theory. Kierkegaard says Hegel was wrong because he didn't protest against Abraham as the father of faith and call him a murderer. He had suspended the ethical and failed to follow the universal.

Kierkegaard has a different theory about the difference between right and wrong and he stated it in the little discourse at the end of Either/Or. He wrote, "If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act than when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are? Then we have only the choice between being nothing in relation to God or having to begin all over again every moment in eternal torment, yet without being able to begin, for if we can decide definitely with regard to the previous moment, and so further and further back. Doubt is again set in motion, care again aroused; let us try to calm it by deliberating on: The Upbuilding That Lies In The Thought That In Relation To God We Are Always In The Wrong."

Kierkegaard says, "Hegelian philosophy culminates in the thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer." Hegel wrote, "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly the means for realizing it, i.e., the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life movement, and activity. We then recognized the state as the moral whole and the reality of freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Abraham had to choose between the ethical requirements of his surroundings and what he regarded as his absolute duty to God.

Hegel says, "When I am conscious of my freedom as inner substantive reality, I do not act; yet if I do act and seek principles, I must try to obtain definite characters. The demand is then made that this definite context shall be deduced from the conception of free will. Hence, if it is right to absorb right and duty into subjectivity, it is on the other hand wrong if this abstract basis of action is not again evolved. Only in times when reality is a hollow, unspiritual, and shadowy existence, can a retreat be permitted out of the actual into an inner life."

Absolute duty to God
Johannes de Silentio speaks of the difference between the method Descartes found for himself and the system that Hegel wants to build. He says, "I throw myself down in the deepest submission before every systematic ransacker: This [book] is not the system; it has not the least thing to do with the system. I invoke everything good for the system and for the Danish shareholders in this omnibus, for it will hardly become a tower. I wish them all, each and every one, success and good fortune." Respectfully, Johannes De Silentio Kierkegaard chooses to "work out his own salvation in fear and trembling". Johannes Climacus, another pseudonymous author, wrote in 1846 that Kierkegaard isn't interested in creating yet another system. He says, "The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is in a poetic and refined way a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes."

Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the paradox and the leap in Fear and Trembling. He says, "'The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all. The act of resignation does not require faith, but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox.'" He explains himself in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where he writes, "In that book [Fear and Trembling] I had perceived how the leap, according to the author, as the decision par excellence becomes specifically decisive for what is Christian and for every dogmatic category. This can be achieved neither through Schelling's intellectual intuition nor through what Hegel, flouting Schelling's idea, wants to put in its place, the inverse operation of the method. All Christianity is rooted in paradox, according to Fear and Trembling-yes, it is rooted in fear and trembling (which are specifically the desperate categories of Christianity and the leap)-whether one accepts it (that is, is a believer) or rejects it (for the very reason that it is the paradox)."

Abraham concealing his undertaking
The world of ethics demands disclosure and punishes hiddenness but aesthetics rewards hiddenness according to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard says, "Greek tragedy is blind. A son murders his father, but not until later does he learn that it was his father. A sister is going to sacrifice her brother but realizes it at the crucial moment."

Abraham hid everything he did. He kept everything from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. But Abraham's 'inability to become open is terror" to him. He keeps absolute silence about the whole affair. A single individual like Abraham might be "able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, but, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him." Abraham was experiencing what Kierkegaard called "reflective grief" but not just grief but joy also because he was beginning a new association with an unknown power. Grief and joy can both keep an individual quiet in inward reflection, perhaps it is a mixture of both that Abraham felt.

Kierkegaard says, "If Agamemnon himself, not Calchas, should have drawn the knife to kill Iphigenia, he would only have demeaned himself if in the very last moment he had said a few words, for the meaning of his deed was, after all, obvious to everybody, the process of reverence, sympathy, emotion, and tears was completed, and then, too, his life had no relation to spirit-that is, he was not a teacher or a witness of the spirit."

He says of Abraham, "If the task had been different, if the Lord had commanded Abraham to bring Isaac up to Mount Moriah so that he could have his lightning strike Isaac and take him as a sacrifice in that way, then Abraham plainly would have been justified in speaking as enigmatically as he did, for then he himself could not have known what was going to happen. But given the task as assigned to Abraham, he himself has to act; consequently, he has to know in the crucial moment what he himself will do, and consequently, he has to know that Isaac is going to be sacrificed." Kierkegaard puts it this way in another book, "We shall not say with the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 4:10), 'Woe to him who is alone; if he falls, there is no one else to raise him up,' for God is indeed still the one who both raises up and casts down, for the one who lives in association with people and the solitary one; we shall not cry, 'Woe to him,' but surely an 'Ah, that he might not go astray,' because he is indeed alone in testing himself to see whether it is God's call he is following or a voice of temptation, whether defiance and anger are not mixed embitteringly in his endeavor."

The task God gave to Abraham was so horrifying that he could tell no one about it because no one would understand him. Ethics forbade it as well as aesthetics. Abraham became a knight of faith because he was willing to do what God asked of him. "He didn't trouble anyone with his suffering." We read: And God tested Abraham, and he said to him: Abraham, and Abraham answered: Here I am. We ought to note in particular the trusting and God-devoted disposition, the bold confidence in confronting the test, in freely and undauntedly answering: Here I am. Is it like that with us, or are we not rather eager to evade the severe trials when we see them coming, wish for a remote corner of the world in which to hide, wish that the mountains would conceal us, or impatiently try to roll the burden off our shoulders and onto others; or even those who do not try to flee — how slowly, how reluctantly they drag their feet. Not so with Abraham, he answers undauntedly: Here I am. He does not trouble anyone with his suffering, neither Sarah, who he knew very well would be grief-stricken over losing Isaac, nor Eliezer, the faithful servant in his house, with whom, if with anyone, he certainly might have sought consolation. We read: He rose early in the morning. He hurried as if to a jubilant festival, and by daybreak he was at Moria, the place designated by the Lord. And he cut the wood for the fire, and he bound Isaac, and he lighted the fire, and he drew the knife. My listener, there was many a father in Israel who believed that to lose his child was to lose everything that was dear to him, to be robbed of every hope for the future, but there was no one who was the child of promise in the sense Isaac was to Abraham. There was many a father who had had that loss, but since it was always, after all, God's almighty and inscrutable governance, since it was God who personally obliterated, as it were, the promise given, he was obliged to say with Job: The Lord gave, the Lord took away. Not so with Abraham — he was commanded to do it with his own hand. The fate of Isaac was laid in Abraham's hand together with the knife. And here he stood on the mountain early in the morning, the old man with his one and only hope. But he did not doubt; he looked neither to the right nor to the left; he did not challenge heaven with his complaints. He knew it was the weightiest sacrifice God could ask, but he also knew that nothing was too great for God. Of course, we all know the outcome of the story. Perhaps it does not amaze us anymore, because we have known it from our earliest childhood, but then the fault does not really lie in the truth, in the story, but in ourselves, because we are too lukewarm genuinely to feel with Abraham and to suffer with him. He went home happy, confident, trusting in God, for he had not wavered, he had nothing for which to reproach himself. Suppose we imagine that Abraham, by anxiously and desperately looking around, discovered the ram that would save his son. Would he not then have gone home in disgrace, without confidence in the future, without the self-assurance that he was prepared to bring to God any sacrifice whatsoever, without the divine voice from heaven in his heart that proclaimed to him God's grace and love. Nor did Abraham say: Now I have become an old man, my youth is gone, my dream has not been fulfilled; I became a man and what I yearned for you denied me, and now that I am an old man you wonderfully fulfilled everything. Grant me now a quiet evening; do not summon me to new battles; let me rejoice in what you gave me, in the consolation of my old age. Journals of Søren Kierkegaard IIIC 4 1840-1841} Abraham was wrong as far as ethics is concerned but right as far the Absolute is concerned. Kierkegaard says, "wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence, it is upbuilding always to be in the wrong-because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!" What could Abraham do most in his relationship with God? Remain faithful to his commitment to God. He accomplished that by actually lifting the knife to carry out his mission. In short, he acted. Here the intention was more important than the result. He had faith and had to go no further to please God.

Regine
Kierkegaard says, "By my own strength I cannot get the least little thing that belongs to finitude, for I continually use my strength to resign everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain, but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd. But this movement I cannot make. As soon as I want to begin, everything reverses itself, and I take refuge in the pain of resignation. I am able to swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical hovering."

The story of the princess and of Agnes and the merman can be interpreted autobiographically. Here Kierkegaard is using the story of Abraham to help himself understand his relationship with Regine Olsen. She was his only love as far as "finitude" is concerned and he gave her up. Kierkegaard says the young man who was in love with the princess learned 'the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself. He is no longer finitely concerned about what the princess does, and precisely this proves that he has made the movement [of faith] infinitely."

In his Journals, Kierkegaard also mentioned Agnes and the Merman: "I have thought of adapting [the legend of] Agnes and the Merman from an angle that has not occurred to any poet. The Merman is a seducer, but when he has won Agnes' love he is so moved by it that he wants to belong to her entirely. — But this, you see, he cannot do, since he must initiate her into his whole tragic existence, that he is a monster at certain times, etc., that the Church cannot give its blessing to them. He despairs and in his despair plunges to the bottom of the sea and remains there, but Agnes imagines that he only wanted to deceive her. But this is poetry, not that wretched, miserable trash in which everything revolves around ridiculousness and nonsense. Such a complication can be resolved only by the religious (which has its name because it resolves all witchcraft); if the Merman could believe, his faith perhaps could transform him into a human being."

Kierkegaard tasted his first love in Regine and he said it was "beautiful and healthy, but not perfect." Regine, his first love was his second love; it was an infinite love. But he resigned it in order to serve God. He couldn't explain to Regine how it happened that he changed anymore than Cordelia could explain what happened between her and the seducer in The Seducer's Diary. "She could not confide in anyone, for she had nothing definite to confide. When one has a dream he can tell it, it was real, and yet when she wished to speak of it and relieve her troubled mind, there was nothing to tell. She felt it very keenly. No one could know about it except herself, and yet it rested upon her with an alarming weight." Abraham couldn't confide in Sarah or Eliezer either.

Criticism
Some have praised the book as one of the lynchpins of the existentialist movement. It was reviewed in Kierkegaard's own time and his response to the review is in Kierkegaard's Journals.

Hans Martensen, a contemporary of Kierkegaard's, had this to say about his ideas,

""Existence," "the individual," "will," "subjectivity," "unmitigated selfishness," "the paradox," "faith," "scandal," "happy and unhappy love," — by these and kindred categories of existence Kierkegaard appears intoxicated, nay, thrown as it were into a state of ecstasy. Therefore he declares war against all speculation, and also against such persons as seek to speculate on faith and strive after an insight into the truths of revelation: for all speculation is loss of time, leads away from the subjective into the objective, from the actual to the ideal, is a dangerous distraction; and all mediation betrays existence, leads treacherously away from the decided in actual life, is a falsifying of faith by the help of idea. Although he himself is amply endowed with imagination, yet the course of his individuality, throughout the various stages of its development, may be described as a continued dying to the ideal in order to reach the actual, which to him is the true, and which receives its value from the ideal glories, which must be cast aside in order to attain it. Kierkegaard's deepest passion is not merely the ethical, not merely the ethical-religious, but the ethical-religious paradox; it is Christianity itself, — such as this exhibits itself to his apprehension. Christianity is to him the divinely absurd (Credo quia absurdum), not merely the relative paradox, — namely, in relation to the natural man, ensnared in sin and worldliness, which has been the doctrine of Scripture and of the Church from the beginning, — but the absolute paradox, which must be believed in defiance of all reason, because every ideal, every thought of wisdom, is excluded there from, and in every case is absolutely inaccessible to man. Faith is to him the highest actual passion, which, thrilled by the consciousness of sin and guilt, appropriates to itself the paradox in defiance of the understanding, and from which all comprehension, all contemplation are excluded, as it is purely practical, a mere act of the will."

An article from the Encyclopedia of religion and ethics has the following quote, "in writing B's Papers [Kierkegaard] had personally attained to a deeper grasp of Christianity, and had come to feel that there was a stage of life higher than the ethico-religious standpoint of B. It was now, probably, that he became more fully cognizant of his plan, and of what was necessary to its development. The higher and more distinctively Christian form of religion is set forth in 'Fear and Trembling, the message of which is illustrated by the fact that Abraham was commanded to do what was ethically wrong, i.e., to kill Isaac, and obeyed in virtue or a personal relation to God; he had faith—he staked the earthly, and yet believed that he should possess it still. Such faith is no common or easy thing, but is a relation to the Absolute which Defies reason, and can be won and held only in an infinite passion."

In 1921 David F. Swenson wrote, "Fear and Trembling uses the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son. Abraham is not a tragic hero, for he cannot claim, like Jephtah or the Roman consul, a higher ethical justification for his deed. His intention to sacrifice his son has a purely personal motivation, and one which no social ethic can acknowledge; for the highest ethical obligation that his life or the situation reveals is the father's duty of loving his son. Abraham is therefore either a murderer, or a hero of Faith. The detailed exposition elucidates Abraham's situation dialectically and lyrically, bringing out as problemata the teleological suspension of the ethical, the assumption of an absolute duty toward God, and the purely private character of Abraham's procedure; thus showing the paradoxical and transcendent character of a relation in which the individual, contrary to all rule, is precisely as an individual, higher than the community." Scandinavian Studies and Notes Volume VI, No. 7 August 1921 David F. Swenson: Søren Kierkegaard p. 21

In 1923 Lee Hollander wrote the following in his introduction to Fear and Trembling: "Abraham chooses to be "the exception" and set aside the general law, as well as does the aesthetic individual; but, note well: "in fear and trembling," and at the express command of God! He is a "knight of faith." But because this direct relation to the divinity necessarily can be certain only to Abraham's self, his action is altogether incomprehensible to others. Reason recoils before the absolute paradox of the individual who chooses to rise superior to the general law."

Jean-Paul Sartre took up Kierkegaard's ideas in his 1948 book, Existentialism and Humanism like this:

In 1949 Helmut Kuhn wrote of the dread of following God. "The decisive act through which everything is won or lost is called choice a conception formulated by Kierkegaard and faithfully upheld by the majority of Existentialists. Choice, as the term is generally understood, is the act of giving preference to one among several possibilities or of deciding in favor of one or two alternatives. And since every choice has, at least potentially, a moral significance, the primary alternative, which underlies all other alternatives, will be that of good and evil. Choice, according to this common-sense view, lies between good and evil. Kierkegaard and his modern followers entertain an altogether different idea of choice. In the first place, the act under consideration, they insist, is not to be confused with those insignificant decisions with which in every minute of our waking existence we carry on our lives. Each one of these "little choices will reveal itself under analysis as the choice of a means towards a predetermined end. They give effect to a prior determination which underlies and guides them. Not with that merely executive activity are we chiefly concerned as moralists and philosophers. We must rather focus on those cardinal acts on which our whole existence hinges the moments which place us at the parting of roads, and as we then choose, our choice, the dread Either /Or, will either save or ruin us. It is this Great Choice which, as the organizing principle, animates the little choices of our daily lives."

Bernard Martin asked, "Was the revelation to the biblical Abraham of the divine command to sacrifice his son, we may ask (following Kierkegaard), demonic possession or ecstasy? And even if it be allowed that "the ethical and logical norms of ordinary reason" constitute clear-cut and easily applicable criteria, how does ecstatic reason in revelation basically differ from ordinary reason, aside from an emotional "shaking," seeing that it merely affirms and elevates the principles of ordinary reason? However, for Kierkegaard the "emotional shaking" is an external event, which could signify nothing or everything.

Josiah Thompson wrote a biography of Kierkegaard's life, and in it he said, ""Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale," Johannes de Silentio begins in Fear and Trembling. A hundred pages later he ends on a similarly commercial note: "One time in Holland when the market was rather dull for spices, the merchants had several cargoes dumped into the sea to peg up prices." This frame of commercial metaphors around the book is not accidental but a device intended to suggest an essential polarity. On the one side is the world of commerce and sanity-the commercial men with their dollar calculi and the academics who, according to Johannes Silentio: "live secure in existence (...) with a solid pension and sure prospects in a well ordered state; they have centuries and even millennia between them and the concussions of existence." On the other side are those single individuals-Mary, Mother of Jesus; the Apostles; above all, Abraham-who in their own lives have suffered such concussions. These special individuals, their psyches stretched on the rack of ambiguity, have become febrile. Minds inflamed with absurdity, their lives burn with an unearthly glow."

Mark C. Taylor, of Fordham University writes, "The Abrahamic God is the all-powerful Lord and Master who demands nothing less than the total obedience of his faithful servants. The transcendent otherness of God creates a possibility of a collision between religious commitment and the individual's personal desire and moral duty. Should such a conflict develop, the faithful self must follow Abraham in forgoing desire and suspending duty-even if this means sacrificing one's own son or forsaking one's beloved. (...) The Absolute Paradox occasions an absolute decision by posing the absolute either-or. Either believe or be offended. From the Christian perspective, this crucial decision is of eternal significance.

Another scholar writes, "By writing about Abraham, Kierkegaard can perform a pantomime of walking along the patriarch's path, but he will remain incapable of the leap of faith that was necessary to accomplish the sacrifice. The poet can attain to the movement of infinite resignation, performed by tragic heroes such as Agamemnon who sacrificed his daughter to placate the gods, but this gesture will forever remain only a surrogate of Abraham's absolute faith. Abraham believed by virtue of the absurd, whereby the impossible will happen and all human calculation is abandoned. The commentator strains to approximate the knight's gesture of the absurd, yet lacking faith, he is forbidden to effectuate the transcendent leap. In his necessary reliance on the mediation of concepts to tell the story, the exegete cannot aspire to the uniqueness of Abraham's condition. Versions two and four of Kierkegaard's account state explicitly that, in contradistinction to the biblical model, the imagined Abraham returns home. The patriarch from the Book of Genesis does not even glimpse back towards home but moves on to live in a foreign land. When he settles in Beersheba and buys a burial plot there, he avows: "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you". (Genesis 23.4) He renounces all of his possessions, his family and neighbours, and, sustained by faith, he never mourns his loss. As Kierkegaard remarks, were he merely human, he would weep and long for what he had left behind."

One critic says, "the relationship to Regine is played through with full orchestra by Johannes de Silentio, in the little book Fear and Trembling, which came out October 16, 1843, the same year as Either/Or. It begins with a paraphrase repeated four times, on the story of Abraham's journey to Mount Moriah to offer Isaac. The eulogy on Abraham continues this as "the father of faith" who believed by virtue of the absurd. The double meaning is clear: Abraham is the father who brings his son as an offering, and Kierkegaard who offers Regine."

Julie Watkin explained more about Kierkegaard's relation to Regine Olsen in her book, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard's Philosophy. She says, Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition as a way to get over Regine.

John Stewart's review of the book removes Hegel from the whole structure of the book, He wrote, in 2007, "...nothing stands in the way of a commentator who wants to find a substantive philosophical discussion in these allusions to Hegel, and certainly there is no reason to think that Hegel's and Kierkegaard's views on philosophy of religion or political theory are the same or are consistent with each other. But this abstract comparison of their views does not explain what is at issue in the text. The main point of the references to Hegel here is to criticize Heiberg and Martensen and not any particular doctrine in Hegel's philosophy." He says this becomes more clear when Fear and Trembling is compared to 'The Concept of Irony'.

In 1838 Kierkegaard wrote,

A famous dispute arose in France when Emmanuel Levinas criticized Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida defended him. The argument centered upon the text of Fear and Trembling, and whether or not a practitioner of faith could be considered ethical.

Walter Kaufmann addressed faith and ethics: "If it really were axiomatic that God could never contravene our conscience and our reason - if we could be sure that he must share our moral judgments - would not God become superfluous as far as ethics is concerned? A mere redundancy? If God is really to make a moral difference in our lives, Kierkegaard insists, we must admit that he might go against our reason and our conscience, and that he should still be obeyed. Walter Kaufmann 1962, Introduction to The Present Age by Soren Kierkegaard 1846"

title: Fear and Trembling


text:
Progressive chess

Progressive chess is a chess variant in which players, rather than just making one move per turn, play progressively longer series of moves. The game starts with White making one move, then Black makes two consecutive moves, White replies with three, Black makes four and so on. Progressive chess can be combined with other variants; for example, when Circe chess is played as a game, it is usually progressively. Progressive chess is considered particularly apt for playing correspondence chess using mail or some other slow medium, because of the relatively small number of moves in a typical game.

Rules
There are two main varieties of progressive chess: Italian progressive chess and Scottish progressive chess (otherwise known as Scotch chess). The two have the following rules in common:

 * A check must be escaped from on the first move of a series—if this cannot be done, it is checkmate and the game is lost.
 * En passant captures of pawns are allowed if the pawn in question moved two squares in one move, but no further, at some point during the last turn, but the capture must be made on the first move of a series.
 * If 10 consecutive turns are played with no captures and no pawn moves, then the game is declared a draw unless one of the players can force a checkmate (this is the progressive chess equivalent of the fifty-move rule in orthodox chess).
 * If, during their turn, a player has no legal moves but is not in check, the game is a draw by progressive stalemate. (In particular it is possible to save a draw by stalemating oneself.)

Italian and Scottish progressive chess are distinguished by rules on when a player is allowed to give check:

 * Scottish progressive chess: check may be given on any move of a series, but a check ends the series—all further moves that would otherwise be allowed are forfeited. This has no effect on the next series: the other player will receive the normal number of moves. (For example, if Black on move six checks immediately, then the second through sixth moves are forfeited; but White will still be able to play seven moves on the next turn.)
 * Italian progressive chess: a check may only be given on the last move of a full series (for example, on move six, a check can only be given on the sixth move)—giving a check at any other point in a series is illegal. In particular, if the only way to escape a check is to give check on the first move of the series, then the game is lost by the player in check by "progressive checkmate".

In practice, the difference between the Scottish and Italian rules is not often relevant. John Beasley examined 416 mating positions that either occurred or could have occurred in games played by the Italian rules; of them 158 were such "progressive checkmates" (Beasley calls them "Italian mates"). In all but two cases (Cassano–Dipilato 1986 and Boniface– Archer 1993), there would have been a mate next turn under the Scottish rules as well; and in Boniface–Archer 1993, White could have given a Scottish mate on his last turn rather than an Italian mate, leaving only one case where the difference in rules would actually have affected the result. (And even in Cassano–Dipilato 1986, Black did not see that he could have given an Italian mate, and the play that followed – ending in a draw – was the best available under Scottish rules, according to Beasley.)

Progressive chess, like orthodox chess, is notated with algebraic notation. However, the numbering of moves is handled slightly differently. Rather than one White and one Black move being given under each move number (leading to notation in orthodox chess like 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6), each turn by each player is given its own move number (leading to notation in progressive chess like 1.e4 2.e5 Nf6 3.Bc4 Qh5 Qxf7#). In this way, the move number is equal to the number of moves in a series available to a player on that turn.

Other variations
There is another form of progressive chess, English progressive chess, which makes quite a significant change to the rules: within each turn, no piece may be moved twice until every other piece which has a legal move has moved once; no piece may move three times until every other piece which can has moved twice; and so on. These restrictions do not carry over from one turn to the next—so the opening 1.e4 2.e6 f6 3.e5 Nf3 Bc4 is legal (White's e-pawn may move again because its moves are on different turns), but the sequence 1.e4 2.e6 f6 3.e5 Ba6 Bxb7 is not (the bishop has made two moves, but there are many other white pieces which have not moved on that turn). There is no en passant capture under English rules, and rules on checks follow the Scottish rules.

Progressive Take-All uses the same rules as Progressive chess, but involves capturing all pieces of your opponent's instead of checkmate. Pawns can also be promoted to Kings.

In Logical progressive chess (by Paul Byway, Variant Chess 18, automne 1995) there's no castling or pawn two advance (hence no en-passant capture) since these rules were added to speed up the game, which is not relevant in progressive form.

title: Progressive chess