The Kierkegaardian single. A synthesis in the making

Abstract

The thought of Kierkegaard hinges upon what he calls my category, the individual. Arising in reaction to the system of idealism, the kierkegaardian category reproposes a vision of the world, aristotelian in origin, in which the only existing beings are individuals. As a result of Kierkegaard’s exclusively ethical and religious interest, the only real existence, for the Danish thinker, is ethical existence, in which the individual rediscovers himself as a free self, in becoming, founded on the Absolute. Freedom, as the fulcrum of ethical existence, is identified with dependence upon the Absolute. The loss of the self’s foundation upon the power that constitutes it — God — leads the individual to despair. The self’s self-constitution, upon the Absolute, by way of the ethical choice of oneself, is a free process. In this process the self must leave the immediacy of the aesthetical stage and arrive at the religious stage, which is the domain of faith. The kierkegaardian individual offers material for reflection to those who wish to found the existential primacy of freedom.