Some may find some answers here. The above thread in a broader context. (Main Forum)

by Oh Yet We Trust, Brisbane, Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 09:32 (1208 days ago) @ PeterR
edited by Oh Yet We Trust, Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 11:43

Or, applying the thought in the above thread in the context of the following:

Hi all. I have cut and pasted three articles on the same topic - they vary in depth and scholarship - but so many of the topics and questions being brought up in this thread are covered well in one of my favoured philosophers, Kierkegaard, who has the wonderful ability to synthesise philosophy, theology and psychology. If you're up to it there is more surrounding these articles: The first one would have particular interest for those into Buddhist thought.

I offer them here for anyone who might derive some benefit from the articles especially in regards to the topic/s being discussed.

Personally, I don't have much more to say except that I have yet to find anyone more satisfying in explaining, well, my life's meaning and choices any way. By the way, if you substitute the word "sin" with "missing the mark" and the concept of salvation with "knowing we can't do it all - live a perfect life, find total happiness and love - on our own steam" then such culturally/negatively value laden terms may not grate on you and get in the way of the deeper truths.

I am still not content that all three writers have explained/described the 'religious stage' especially the second part of it, adequately. In short, while the religiousness phase can incorporate even atheism and certainly any world religion, what is at the heart of this phase is choice; the choice to take the leap of faith into insecure future; insecure because we have relinquished our desire to totally control something we cannot ultimately control anyway - and as such, we are living in truth.

In short what he is on about is the personalisation through choice using all the historical/mythological stories of the human quest for truth and meaning and that ultimately we cannot live any other way except in faith if we want these ultimates to become more of a reality in our lived experience. As a 'personally chosen/metanoiaed' Christian, he also saw this as happening ultimately within the context of a deep and real relationship with God and in our acknowledgement of our 'imperfection' and therefore, dependence on God for completion (salvation/redemption).

Hmmm, pretty simple when you think about it.

Hope someone gets something out of the articles.

Stephen

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As there are too many words if I keep it all in one I will separate the third article (the more in-depth one) below.

Here is the first one:

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Kierkegaard's Stages

After Kierkegaard rejected Hegelianism, and based his subsequent life on experiences and events discussed earlier, he developed his own philosophy of individual human existence as consisting of three stages: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The first two stages are characterized by a distinct set of beliefs and behavior that is easily identifiable, whereas the last stage, the religious, is characterized by a highly personal, subjective, and non-rational "leap of faith" (Dunning 182-183).

The first stage is the aesthetic. This stage is characterized by an indulgence in the pleasurable and beautiful that life has to offer. The aesthetic stage is a necessary one on the road to authentic religious awareness but one marked with pitfalls and illusory promises of contentment. Also, the person trapped in an aesthetic existence will usually be immature, both physically and spiritually. One emerges from the aesthetic stage by simply growing older and becoming more serious about life. One is not so easily led by his/her emotions and passions as he/she once was. Actually, one's passionate, physical, and aesthetic desires are what leads one, eventually, to the awareness that his/her existence is profoundly lacking in fulfillment and meaning. Kierkegaard has described his own existence in the aesthetic realm as a vain search for anchorage on a "boundless sea of pleasure" (Lowrie, 27). He claims he had "tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge...but the pleasure did not outlast the moment." Such is one who is stuck in the aesthetic existence. It is an existence characterized by one fleeting pleasure after another, none giving any lasting satisfaction. This leads one to seek for meaning in a higher realm. Kierkegaard himself relates how all of his earlier pseudonymous works, up until and including the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, were designed to instill within the reader a dissatisfaction for the aesthetic and its ability to bring about any kind of authentic religious awareness. In short, he was trying to show how the aesthetic stage cannot ever lead to becoming a Christian.

Kierkegaard started his literary career as an aesthetic writer for a reason. He had to start in the aesthetic realm because that is where his readers were. In the Point Of View For My Work As An Author, Kierkegaard explains that Christianity during his time was a "prodigious illusion" that needed to be dispelled. However, a direct attack on this illusion would only make matters worse. It would only serve to further Christendom's illusion that all are Christians.

Consequently, Kierkegaard develops his famous method of "indirect communication." He goes on to explain that in order to dispel an illusion, one must remove it through indirect means. As he puts it in the Point Of View, "One must approach from behind a person who is under an illusion" (24). This he sought to do by writing works that were aesthetic in nature. Kierkegaard describes all of his writings up until Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is the transitional work between the stages, as aesthetic works. Kierkegaard described himself as an aesthetic and religious author at the same time. He wanted to write aesthetic works and be able to win the attention of those under the illusion so as to bring forth the religious. He wanted, as a religious person, to make people in the aesthetic realm take notice so as to win their attention. He always had this goal in mind--to bring to the fore the necessity of the religious stage, and by way of contrast, to cause a dissatisfaction in the hearts of the people of Denmark and a yearning for the religious. In doing this, Kierkegaard felt the awareness of those under the illusion would be awakened, or enlightened, to be able to see their illusion for what it is: selfishness and pride at having been a "Christian" in a Christian nation. For this, according to Kierkegaard himself, was his primary and ultimate concern--to bring about the religious stage, to awaken one out of an aesthetic existence into a higher and better one, to become a true Christian. Reflecting on his literary career, Kierkegaard states clearly in the Point Of View, "So then the religious writer, whose all-absorbing thought is how one is to become a Christian, starts off rightly in Christendom as an aesthetic writer" (30).

The second stage along life's way is the ethical. This is a stage characterized by one's adherence to duty and obligation. This is the moral life, living by standards and codes of conduct that have been set up by society, the State, Christendom, and even oneself. This stage is mostly a transitory stage, in that one does not really stay within this realm in any consistent manner. It is an elusive category, one Kierkegaard himself does not elaborate on in depth. The best example of this stage is found in Fear And Trembling, where Kierkegaard describes Abraham as fighting within himself to transcend the ethical and "suspend" it in order to enter into a personal relationship with the Infinite God. The ethical stage is a mode of existence one lives in that allows for the religious to come about. The ethical stands in direct opposition to the religious. The ethical is safe, secure, understandable. In other words, it is dutiful. And the individual, as well as the crowd, can measure his/her adherence, or non-adherence, to the ethical norms laid down by society by his/her performance of these duties and responsibilities. The ethical person is one who has matured to be able to see the fallacy of the aesthetic and is settling down in certainty to perform the prescribed conduct. But this is not the last stage of existence. There remains the religious awakening that transcends all previous stages. The ethical is never completely left behind. It does not disappear when one "leaps" into the religious stage, but it is only "suspended." This leads to the point that all of the three stages cannot be thought of as hard and fast categories with no overlap. On the contrary, Kierkegaard himself says that he never really left the first two. They are always there and one moves in and out and through all three. There remains to be discussed the final stage--the religious.

To pass into the religious stage one must "leap." But once an individual has leaped into the religious, it is as though one can never really stay there in a fixed and static sense. The religious awakening is an Infinite and terrible experience, terrible because it has no recourse to the normal conventions that usually govern one's life: reason, rational inquiry, and objective analysis. None of these faculties that work so well in the first two stages has any meaning in the final stage. One has entered a higher realm of existence, the highest attainable on earth as a human being but one that is marked by paradox. The paradoxical nature of the religious experience is seen in the way in which it can be communicated. It cannot be discussed rationally and logically analyzed, but it is the most profound event in one's life and full of meaning. Thus, one enters the realm of subjective truth. To be in a state of subjective truth is to truly be an individual. It is a highly personal mode of existence. A religious person, according to Kierkegaard, is only truly an existing individual when the religious stage is attained. The religious person becomes aware of his own individuality in a way that is impossible while he is still in the ethical stage. It is as if the blinders are removed from one's eyes and one is able to see oneself in a completely new way. Consequently, one sees everyone else as an individual as well. Like Socrates, Kierkegaard is suggesting that to really know oneself is to know oneself as an individual. To be an individual is to be a subject and not an object. To exist subjectively means to not objectify others. Therefore, like Kant says, one treats others as ends and not as means. To be religious is to be ethical. One in the religious stage takes the ethical with him/her.

http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/johnson-experience.shtml

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Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Themes, Arguments, and Ideas

The Problems of Boredom, Anxiety, and Despair

Boredom, anxiety, and despair are the human psyche’s major problems, and Kierkegaard spends most of his writing diagnosing these three ills. People are bored when they are not being stimulated, either physically or mentally. Relief from boredom can only be fleeting. Passion, a good play, Bach, or a stimulating conversation might provide momentary relief from boredom, but the relief doesn’t last. Boredom is not merely a nuisance: a psychologically healthy human must find some way to avert boredom. Conflicts between one’s ethical duty and one’s religious duty cause anxiety. Social systems of ethics often lead one to make choices that are detrimental to one’s spiritual health, and vice versa. The tension between these conflicting duties causes anxiety, and like boredom, anxiety must be escaped for a person to be happy. Finally, despair is a result of the tension between the finite and the infinite. Humans are frightened of dying, but they are also frightened of existing forever. Kierkegaard believed that everyone would die but also that everyone had an immortal self, or soul, that would go on forever. Boredom and anxiety can be alleviated in various ways, but the only way to escape despair is to have total faith in God. Having total faith in God, however, was more than simply attending church regularly and behaving obediently. Faith required intense personal commitment and a dedication to unending self-analysis. Kierkegaard thought that having total faith in God, and thus escaping despair, was extremely difficult as well as extremely important.

The Aesthetic as the First Stage on Life’s Way

Kierkegaard proposed that the individual passed through three stages on the way to becoming a true self: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each of these “stages on life’s way” represents competing views on life and as such potentially conflicts with one another. Kierkegaard takes the unusual step of having each stage of life described and represented by a different pseudonymous character. Thus, it becomes too difficult to ascertain which propositions Kierkegaard himself upholds. This fits with Kierkegaard’s characteristic tendency to avoid dictating answers. He preferred that readers reach their own conclusions.

The aesthetic is the realm of sensory experience and pleasures. The aesthetic life is defined by pleasures, and to live the aesthetic life to the fullest one must seek to maximize those pleasures. Increasing one’s aesthetic pleasures is one way to combat boredom, and Kierkegaard described many methods of doing so. He proposes that the anticipation of an event often exceeds the pleasure of the event itself, and so he suggests ways of drawing out anticipation. One suggestion is to leave all of your mail for three days before opening it. Unplanned events can, at times, lead to pleasures as great as anticipation, but the pleasure of planned events is almost entirely in the anticipation.

The importance of the aesthetic is acknowledged, but it is also presented as an immature stage. The aesthete is only concerned with his or her personal enjoyment, and because aesthetic pleasure is so fleeting, an aesthete has no solid framework from which to make coherent, consistent choices. Eventually, the pleasures of the aesthetic wear thin, and one must begin seeking the ethical pleasures instead. The ethical life actually offers certain pleasures the aesthetic life cannot. An aesthete can never do something solely for the good of someone else, but we all know that doing things for others without personal motives can actually be incredibly enjoyable.

The Ethical as the Second Stage on Life’s Way

Ethics are the social rules that govern how a person ought to act. Ethics are not always in opposition to aesthetics, but they must take precedence when the two conflict. The aesthetic life must be subordinated to the ethical life, as the ethical life is based on a consistent, coherent set of rules established for the good of society. A person can still experience pleasure while living the ethical life. The ethical life serves the purpose of allowing diverse people to coexist in harmony and causes individuals to act for the good of society. The ethical person considers the effect his or her actions will have on others and gives more weight to promoting social welfare than to achieving personal gain. The ethical life also affords pleasures that the aesthetic does not. Aesthetics steers one away from consistency, since repetition can lead to boredom. An ethical person doesn’t simply enjoy things because they’re novel but makes ethical choices because those choices evoke a higher set of principles. Kierkegaard uses marriage as an example of an ethical life choice. In marriage, the excitement of passion can quickly fade, leading to boredom and a diminishing of aesthetic pleasure. However, by consistently acting for the good of one’s spouse, one learns that there are enjoyments beyond excitement. Still, the ethical life does little to nurture one’s spiritual self. The ethical life diverts one from self-exploration since it requires an individual to follow a set of socially accepted norms and regulations. According to Kierkegaard, self-exploration is necessary for faith, the key requirement for a properly religious life.

The Religious as Third Stage on Life’s Way

Kierkegaard considers the religious life to be the highest plane of existence. He also believes that almost no one lives a truly religious life. He is concerned with how to be “a Christian in Christendom”—in other words, how to lead an authentically religious life while surrounded by people who are falsely religious. For Kierkegaard, the relationship with God is exclusively personal, and he believed the large-scale religion of the church (i.e., Christendom) distracts people from that personal relationship. Kierkegaard passionately criticized the Christian Church for what he saw as its interference in the personal spiritual quest each true Christian must undertake.

In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious life, one is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly free, and this causes boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe in things that we can prove, but we can only have faith in things that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in gravity: we feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of gravity’s existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in gravity, since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity would fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There’s no rational evidence for God, but this is exactly what allows people to have faith in him.

The Pleasures of Repetition and Recollection

Repetition and recollection are two contrasting ways of trying to maximize enjoyment. Repetition serves multiple purposes for Kierkegaard. First, it has an important aesthetic function. People want to repeat particularly enjoyable experiences, but the original pleasure is often lost in the repeating. This is due to the expectation that things will be just the same the second time as the first time. The pleasure of expectation clouds the fact that the original experience wasn’t undertaken with a specific idea of the joy it would cause. Repetition can produce powerful feelings but usually only when the experience occurs unplanned. In this case, the pleasure might even be magnified at the sudden resurgence of happy memories—in other words, the recollection. There is pleasure in planned repetition, but it is a comfortable pleasure, not an exciting one. While repetition offers the joy of anticipation—joy that seldom materializes in the actual event—recollection offers the joy of remembering a particularly happy event. Recollection can be cultivated along with the imagination to increase one’s day-to-day aesthetic pleasure. Often, recalling a pleasant occurrence is more enjoyable than repeating the same event: remembering the Christmases of your childhood is often more pleasant than Christmas is in adulthood. Indeed, much of the pleasure of Christmas, for an older person, can come from nostalgia. The pleasures of recollection, which are best enjoyed alone, are well suited to the aesthetic life. Unplanned repetition is a truly aesthetic pleasure as well, while planned repletion, such as that represented by marriage, affords more ethical pleasures than aesthetic ones.

http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/kierkegaard/themes.html

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill