Essay Sample on Kierkegaards Way of Life
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Ultimately nothing can resolve on the ethical level because peoples beliefs and ways they choose to live are different. According to Kierkegaard, there are three stages of life ways that are aesthetic, ethical, and religious way of living. First, the aesthetic stage the person is in search of pleasure, crafty, seductive, and energetic in his or her efforts to find meaning in appealing experience. It is a way of life that cultivates easy, uncommitted enjoyment, focused on here and now, a life full of whim and caprice while its enemy is boredom, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Thus, making it hard to resolve anything because an aesthetic person only lives for himself. Second, the ethical stages is a way of life that involves making a commitment to norms, principles, and custom of society. The ethical person either choosing a moral or amoral life thus giving the man to be the arbiter of good and evil while has God the final say. Third, in the religious stage, everything pivots on the human judgment which always subjects to doubt. No matter how people think or analyze they can never be sure that they are right thus, their ethics are continuously being challenged and revised by individuals.
To get beyond it, to get somewhere, we must make a leap of faith. According to Kierkegaard, it is necessary to leap towards the religion and specifically towards God for a person to escape the despair of the crowd life, aesthetic life and ethical life. It is because a religion helps a person to identify himself with God thus, strengthening a person faith. He described leap of faith as controversial theologically and philosophically involving because it does a tricky double movement, a paradox and what Kierkegaard calls the teleological suspension of the ethical. Therefore, leap of faith guides and helps people to make decisions as per their religion without considering what the universe calls ethical. For example, if Abraham was an ethical man who he would not have sacrificed his only son because he would have concluded that God does not command people to murder. Therefore, the leap of faith is essential because it eliminates doubts thus helps a person to get somewhere and beyond.
We must move beyond the merely ethical stages to get to the religious stage. Like, Abraham, did we must believe that we have received a message from God to violate what we believe is fundamental and universal moral principle. Abraham actions had no relation to the universe but were purely private understanding to his God. Consequently, he became a hero for reasons of moral virtue because he did it for God sake. Thus, to get into religious stage, we should be determined to obey and trust God in all our trials and temptations so as to be conquer them. We should be ready and willing to sacrifice all we have no matter the reparations or what the society believe is right. God required evidence of faith and Abraham did it to furnish the proof. Leap of faith is essential because it will help us in making decision because it will eliminate doubts. To move beyond the ethical stage, we should give up the universe to grasp something which is higher. Therefore, we should become higher than the universal and follow the narrow way of faith. Also, we should be able to make choices when in our paradoxical state of tension.
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