Shawn asked:

Explain Soren Kierkegaard's theory of "The Stages of Life, Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious".

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The aesthetic stage is a life in which the person lives for sense pleasure, wine women and song. It is
life geared to comfort, leisure, leading if the person is not careful (and what's to stop him?) to
voluptuousness and hedonism. This is the 'good life' in the sense of lapping up the goods of the
world.

The ethical stage is the moral life. It is dutiful life — the Kantian life. It is a life that adheres to reason
rather than pleasure. This was also Kierkegaard's stage, as he admits. The religious life is therefore
speculative from Kierkegaard's point of view. Abraham was a type of it, also St. Paul. The religious
stage is one in which the person has placed themself into the hands of the living God (cf. Hebrews
10: 31). This means something beyond reason, but which is not irrational. It means one has become
a 'redemptive' personality, one takes the evil doing of others as if it were one's own and tries to atone
for it. All this is best seen in Dostoyevsky, who I think, without knowing Kierkegaard, knows what is
meant by these stages and knows more than K does about them in fact. Crime and Punishment
depicts the difficulty and discontinuity of these Stages. Their discontinuity is their most interesting
aspect and what lends them to philosophy rather than psychology. Sonia in Crime and Punishmentis
at the Religious Stage, her person has become redemptive.

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com

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