964 SØRENKIERKEGAARD
Kierkegaard spent the rest of his short life as a writer, publishing a number of
books including Either/Or(1843),Fear and Trembling(1843),Philosophical
Fragments(1844),Stages on Life’s Way(1845),Concluding Unscientific Postscript
(1846),The Sickness unto Death(1849),Training in Christianity(1850), and The
Attack upon “Christendom”(1854–1855). All but the last of these works were writ-
ten under various pseudonyms, and virtually all of them included attacks on the
prevailing Hegelian philosophy of his time. In 1855, while returning from the bank
with the last of his considerable inheritance, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street and
died soon thereafter.
Kierkegaard’s biography is reflected in his philosophical quest to establish what it
means to be an individual. In works such as Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way,and
Fear and Trembling,he describes a process of self-actualization through three
stages in life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. At the aesthetic stage, an
individual’s life centers on either hedonistic pleasure or abstract philosophical
speculation. The hedonist lives for the immediate pleasures of the moment with-
out concern for the future. The abstract intellectual (Hegel being the prime exam-
ple) lives in a theoretical world removed from concrete existence. The hedonist
reduces existence to immediate pleasure, whereas the abstract speculator reduces
existence to thought; but in both cases, the aesthete has avoided the either/or deci-
sions of real life, and authentic selfhood has not been achieved. The result, says
Kierkegaard, is a life of boredom—and the pointless pursuit of diversions to
alleviate such boredom. This was the life Kierkegaard himself lived in his early
years at the university.
Those who move beyond the aesthetic to the ethical level choose to accept
moral standards and attempt to do their duty. By choosing decisively and accepting
responsibility for that choice, an individual’s life becomes centralized and unified.
For example, the seducing man operates on the aesthetic level where every woman
he meets is merely a general source of momentary pleasure. He has no past, no
future, only the present desire for fulfillment. He is not really a complete person
because he is living life as a series of disconnected “nows.” On the other hand, the
man who has chosen to fulfill the duties of a faithful husband operates on the
ethical level. He has a memory of the past and a hope for the future based on his
commitments, which give an integrated wholeness to his present.
But even though universal moral standards can become personal when chosen
by an individual, the ethical stage is not sufficient to bring a person to complete
self-actualization. The ethical stage leads to a point at which one realizes that one
cannot entirely fulfill the moral law, that one is sinful in the presence of God. Only
in the religious stage, where one “leaps” to passionate commitment to God, is one
totally free from meaninglessness and dread. In the religious stage, a person must
be willing to give up everything—even abstract ethical universals—to God. In the
selection reprinted here from Fear and Trembling,in the Howard and Edna Hong
translation, Kierkegaard illustrates this movement from the ethical to the religious
stage by contrasting the stories of Agamemnon and Abraham. Although both were
called upon by a divinity to sacrifice a child, Agamemnon’s sacrifice would serve
a higher ethical purpose whereas Abraham’s would not. In fact, Abraham was in
the odd position of being temptedto do the ethical: to not murder/sacrifice Isaac.
