Kierkegaard: The Stages of Existence

Seven dialogues up through the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious

A course on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard.

What you will learn

  • Understand the aesthetic sphere: living in immediacy, for enjoyment and the interesting, by mood — and its highest art, the 'rotation of crops' (arbitrary variation to outrun boredom).
  • See through the Seducer's Diary what the aesthete really wants — not the girl but the interesting, the poetic construction itself — and the coldness beneath the charm.
  • Grasp why the aesthetic life necessarily ends in despair: the aesthete has no self, no continuity, nothing chosen — he is dispersed in moods and moments.
  • Distinguish anxiety (*Angest*) from fear: fear has a definite object; anxiety has no object, or its object is 'nothing' — it is the reaction of freedom to its own possibility.
  • Grasp 'anxiety is the dizziness of freedom': when spirit glimpses the boundless 'I can,' it is gripped by a vertigo that both shrinks from and is drawn toward possibility.
  • See anxiety as the mark of spirit and an educator — not a defect to be cured but the index of freedom, which faith alone finally disarms.
  • Understand Judge William's 'Either/Or': the decisive matter is THAT one chooses, with passion, between living aesthetically and living ethically — not merely which pleasure one prefers.
  • Grasp 'choosing oneself': not inventing a self from nothing (the aesthete's fantasy) but receiving the concrete self one already is and taking responsibility for it — becoming continuous and transparent.

Course outline

  1. The Aesthetic Life — The first sphere — living for the interesting moment — through the papers of the aesthete "A": the rotation of crops, the Seducer's Diary, and the despair waiting underneath the elegance.
  2. Anxiety: The Dizziness of Freedom — Through Vigilius Haufniensis and The Concept of Anxiety — what we dread when nothing threatens us, and why anxiety is the mark of spirit and the presupposition of the leap.
  3. Either/Or: Choosing Yourself — The leap to the ethical, through Judge William — why it matters THAT you choose more than what you choose, what 'choosing oneself' means, and despair as the door from the aesthetic to the ethical.
  4. Fear and Trembling: Abraham on Moriah — Through Johannes de Silentio — the teleological suspension of the ethical, faith 'by virtue of the absurd,' and the knight of faith who looks exactly like a shopkeeper.
  5. The Leap: Truth Is Subjectivity — Through Johannes Climacus — the war on the System, 'truth is subjectivity,' the leap across the gap reason cannot close, and the Absolute Paradox of the eternal God in time.
  6. The Sickness Unto Death — Through Anti-Climacus — the self as 'a relation that relates itself to itself,' despair as the universal misrelation, its forms, and the cure: the self resting transparently in God.
  7. The Single Individual — Kierkegaard at last in his own name — 'the crowd is untruth,' the present age and leveling, commanded love in Works of Love, the attack on Christendom, and why the whole authorship had to be indirect.

Works read in this course

  • Either/Or — Kierkegaard's 1843 breakthrough, published under a pseudonym in two volumes: Volume I gives the aesthetic life (it contains 'The Seducer's Diary'), Volume II the ethical — and no narrator tells you who is right, so the choice is forced onto you.
  • The Seducer's Diary — The notorious centrepiece of Either/Or, Volume I — the aesthete 'Johannes' coldly engineering a young woman's seduction, the aesthetic life pushed to its calculating, reflective extreme.
  • Repetition — An 1843 experimental book on whether one can recover the past: 'repetition' is the forward movement the ethical and religious life demands, set against the aesthete's backward-looking recollection.
  • Fear and Trembling — Kierkegaard's 1843 meditation (as Johannes de Silentio) on Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac — faith as a 'teleological suspension of the ethical' that reason can neither follow nor justify.
  • The Concept of Anxiety — An 1844 psychological study (as Vigilius Haufniensis) of anxiety as the 'dizziness of freedom' — the mood in which the self first faces its own possibility.
  • Stages on Life's Way — An 1845 sequel to Either/Or that maps the three spheres of existence — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious — the spine of this whole course.
  • Philosophical Fragments — An 1844 thought-experiment (as Johannes Climacus) asking whether an eternal truth can be learned in time — the 'paradox' of the god in time, against Socratic recollection.
  • Concluding Unscientific Postscript — Kierkegaard's 1846 magnum opus (as Climacus): 'truth is subjectivity', the leap of faith, and why an existing individual can never be captured by a system.
  • The Sickness unto Death — An 1849 work (as Anti-Climacus) anatomising despair as the self's failure to be itself before God — the 'sickness unto death' is despair, not dying.
  • Works of Love — An 1847 set of Christian deliberations on love as a commandment — 'you shall love' — distinguishing self-giving Christian love from mere preference and friendship.
  • The Point of View for My Work as an Author — Kierkegaard's own retrospective account of his authorship, explaining the pseudonyms and 'indirect communication' as a deliberate religious strategy.

Terms introduced

Angest, Fortvivlelse, den Enkelte, Spring, Gjentagelsen, Øieblikket

Part of the Simposeum course library.