Kierkegaard, Music, and Its Relation to the Performing Arts

Abstract

Kierkegaard's conceptualization of his aesthetic stage of existence is lacking even with a very unstinted acknowledgment of his undeniably profound and brilliant insights. For Kierkegaard the aesthetic stage is based only on the immediacy of feeling, thus a transitoriness that ultimately leads to boredom and despair. This presentation agrees with Adorno's triadic understanding of what the aesthetic means in Kierkegaard's aesthetic writings as opposed to his religious ones. It is argued in this presentation that Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage or sphere of existence is a good deal more than passion at the sensuous level. There are too many great artists who struggled and made their lives ethically, spiritually, or religiously meaningful in blatant contradiction of Kierkegaard's demeaning of the aesthetic stage of existence. Many artists would not accept Kierkegaard's a priori assumption that sensual immediacy is the basic state of the aesthetic individual. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's profound insights into the aesthetic sense of live music performance are an invaluable result of his informed intuition and other aesthetic writings; i.e., he asserts in some writings that the aesthetic derives only from immediacy, yet there are other writings (e.g., on music and acting) from which one can infer a broader sense of the aesthetic. It is also possible to formulate a practical realization of Kierkegaard's aesthetic philosophy by way of his profound observations on dramatic acting and applying these uncannily insightful concepts to music performance.