Spheres of Existence

Paper Summary:

This paper shows that Kierkegaard's individualistic morality is the culmination of reviewing and discarding various ways of living. He depicts a few different ways of life, and it is clear that his intention is to make each way of living a specific stage in a person's life and that each stage evolves to the next. The paper shows that, in this regard, Kierkegaard is expressing his antagonistic intellectual relationship with Hegel and his theory of dialectics. However, compared with the Hegelian shaping of conflicts into a new and higher meaning, there seems to be too much of a willful leap in Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence" from one level of living to the next level. There are problems with the notion of willed beliefs; making the "leap of faith" a questionable move.

From the Paper:

"When Kierkegaard calls this mode of living the "aesthetic sphere of existence," this is "aesthetic" in the sense of the immediate and the sensory. The first volume of Either/Or represents this aesthetic level, and the essays dwell on figures like Don Juan and Mozart's Don Giovanni. Because the aesthete makes no commitments, there are no risks, so there is the avoidance of any possibility of disappointment. Yet there is the need to keep oneself amused. "Boredom is the root of all evil," (281) so it is even possible to avoid commitment methodically ("The Rotation Method") in order to keep life interesting, while avoiding obligations. It is also possible to make this lack of commitment into an elaborately staged art form, as described in the celebrated "Diary of the Seducer." But there is no self-content, no balance, and no continuity. In this manner of existence, whatever one does has no consequence in the final analysis."

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