Abstract

The aesthetic life for Kierkegaard can mean either the life of self-indulgence or the life of imagination. The former is not informed by any unifying principle which could give it consistent character. The latter avoids the problems and responsibilities of existence by escaping into a dream world. The aesthetic life does not solve the problem of man: to give existence ideal significance and to impart reality to the ideal, by effecting a concrete unity of the two in human life. The ethical life attempts to solve this problem. ;The categories of the ethical life are: The presupposition of the ethical life is passion. Its objective is the unification of the individual's actuality and his ideal. Its organ is freedom. The medium of the ethical life is the individual's existence, the potential subjective synthesis of time and eternity, real and ideal. The reality of the ethical life is defined by Kierkegaard by means of several concepts: subjective truth, reduplication, persistent striving. ;For Kierkegaard the mode of ethical action is the constant movement of passion from resolution to achievement, from self-projection to realization. This scheme is the universal formula of the nature of authentic existence. ;The idea of God adds to the ethical life the dimension of transcendence. The ethico-religious individual has the task of relating himself absolutely to God--resignation of the finite world. This attempt to achieve eternal blessedness autonomously ends in the despair of self-annihilation, total guilt and impotent repentence. To him who will believe the absurdity of the God-man and relinquish his autonomy for grace, Christianity promises salvation in the sense of a meaningful life in the finite world. The denial of autonomy is the teleological suspension of the ethical. ;Conclusions. Kierkegaard correctly draws the consequences of belief in a transcendent God. But he does not adequately show the subjective necessity for such belief nor for Christian faith. For he never abandons his belief in autonomy. And he has made a valuable contribution to humanistic ethics by correcting the formalism of Kant