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4. If you do not return to past commitments, your personal identity changes.
5. Commitment occurs in subjective truth, in a passionately subjective appropriation of an objective uncertainty.
6. Objective certainty is impersonal. It is incapable of creating personal identity.
7. Though Kierkegaard viewed himself as an apologist for Christianity and not as a philosophy, his analysis of what it is to be a person is the best in the history of philosophy.
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AESTHETIC MAN
We start out living anonymously by borrowed beliefs, inauthentically in a crowd, mass or group.
Life’s road then consists of three types of personal identity: aesthetic, ethical, and religious.
Aesthetic man revolts against the crowd, the parents, seeking fulfillment by an endless string of momentary experiences. These experiences may be aesthetic, musical, sexual, alcoholic, drug-induced, or generally hedonistic. He ends in despair, dissipation and dispersion. No center or meaning to his life.
Not everyone has to go literally through the aesthetic stage. You may go through it in imaginations by observing others.
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ETHICAL MAN
Aesthetic man overcomes despair by converting to ethical man, who seeks fulfillment by belonging to institutions like marriage, a profession, citizenship, and participation in world history. Hegel illustrates ethical man.
Aesthetic man is committed only to himself, but ethical man is committed to others. Aesthetic man believes that obligation detracts from experience, ethical man lives out of obligation.
But ethical man, too, ends in despair when he realizes the impossibility of living up to moral obligations like the categorical imperative.
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RELIGIOUS MAN
The moral law is not optional to ethical man. Awareness of the inability to live up to an inescapable ideal of moral perfection causes is the awareness of sin, a new form of despair.
Ethical man resolves this despair by a leap of faith, throwing himself into the hands of the the lord.
Ethical man stills reason in him and commits himself to doing whatever God commands, even to the point of breaking the moral law.
Religious man is Christian, but renounces Christendom and the Christian church as idols.
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5. The church is a finite human institution. God, the infinite, utterly transcends anything finite. To be a Christian is not to be born into Christendom or to be a member of a church. It is to go through life’s road and to be converted to accepting salvation from sin through Christ. There are very few Christians.
6. Since Christians must be reason asleep, and since reason is natural to man, Christian faith is never certain, but is a constant struggle with doubt. The Christian is never sure he believes, since he is asked to believe that the infinite became finite in Jesus, that the eternal became temporal. All this is not just beyond reason, it is against reason.
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7. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac illustrates the difference between religious and ethical man.
8. Kiekegaard is at the origin of the neo-Orthodox movment in Protestant theology in the 20th century: Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr. This movement stressed the reality of sin in human affairs.
9. The most common criticism of Kierkegaard is that it is a form of irrationalism. If a blind leap of faith into Christianity is possible, why not into Nazi ideology or Islamic fundamentalism?