"Fear and Trembling"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the work of Soren Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling". Kierkegaard writes about different stages in life, stages he calls "existence spheres." He describes three such spheres, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, and he suggests that each individual must discover these spheres for him or herself. The author illustrates how for Kierkegaard, the human mind awakens itself to self-awareness in a series of stages leading ultimately to universal consciousness.

From the Paper:

"When Kierkegaard writes of the quest for self-awareness, he shows how it is an individual process each person pursues in his or her own time, as when he writes, However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect, every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter hasn't shirked its task and deceived itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself."

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