by Nikki Albert

Created on: November 01, 2010   Last Updated: November 02, 2010

To be a human being to Kierkegaard is to write a story of oneself. Calling existence a story is very apt because a story also has a beginning, a middle and an end and because a story is also subjective. We use our imagination to realize out own story and the story helps us find our ground in reality. Imagination thus enables us to get out of our ‘thereness’ and lets us look at ourselves and make ourselves. Like Sartre Kierkegaard believes that we are free to create ourselves. The ‘self’ is a constant flow of self-interpretation that we organize into a story that is not a factual autobiography. The problem is that people get caught up in mis-telling their story or get too involved in other people’s story. Kierkegaard wants to move away from abstraction and objectification is subjectivity. For to be able to get at what it is to be human is more useful to look at it subjectively:

“Either he can do his utmost to forget that he is an existing individual, by which be becomes a comic figure, since existence has the remarkable trait of compelling an existing individual to exist whether he wills it or not (202)… or he can concentrate his entire energy upon the fact that he is an existing individual.(203).

Objectification has the tendency to lull us into conformity, examples of which are school and religion. Abstractions take us away from living life and is the primary focus of science (and, yes, at times philosophy itself can be drowned in abstractions). So Kierkegaard aims to throw the reader of balance, in order to cause the reader to think for themselves. Kierkegaard creates stages of existence which are by no means solid or factual as a means to examine some of the ways we exist in the world:

Aesthetic Immediate

We are beings-in-the-world we Dasien thereness. Thinking which can be thought of as ‘for-itself’ rises off ‘being-in-the-world’ which can be seen as the ‘in-itself’. This thinking creates a splitting which increases the more objective thought and subjective being-in-the-world becomes more defined. As subjective beings we are always in ‘mood’; and no matter how objective we claim to be we are still in a mood. Mood creates ‘Dis-positions’, attitudes for things and perspectives which again are always to affect our thinking. Mood gives us desires for food, items and people and although utterly non-rational we are grounded in mood. It is a fundamental

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