Kierkegaard: The Stages of Existence

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

A course on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard.

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.

Part of the Symposium course library.