Kierkegaard's Concept of the Aesthetic: A Semantic Leap from Baumgarten

Abstract

In Describing Kierkegaard as 'the Christian in love with aesthetics,' Thomas Mann indulged in a contradiction in terms. How could a Christian, a true Christian in Kierkegaard's fullest sense of a person radically engaged in a life of religious resignation, suffering, guilt, repentance, and faith, be enamoured of aesthetics, a branch of philosophy focused upon beauty and the beautiful, especially as they become manifest in poetry and the fine arts? It is not to be denied that aesthetics, the aesthetic, and the aesthete persist as central categories in Kierkegaard's philosophical-theological vocabulary throughout his career as an author—in both his pseudonymous and his non-pseudonymous published works, as well as his private journals and papers. But it would be wrong to suppose that Kierkegaard ever reconciled fully his aesthetic preoccupations with his Christian faith and devotion. On the one hand, Kierkegaard's initial turn toward aesthetics represented a turn away from Christianity. It is generally accepted that he took up his pursuit of aesthetic interests in the mid-1830s in reaction against his strict ethical and religious upbringing by his father. The young Kierkegaard then indulged for a time in an aesthetic view of life before achieving clarity regarding the implications of that view.2 During that period he was attracted to such quintessentially aesthetic figures as Faust, Don Juan, and Ahasuerus, whom he considered as representatives of a negative stance toward Chris tianity. Intellectually, he orbited away from his earlier theological studies, and toward independent scrutiny of scientific scholarship, beginning with the aesthetic-literary—a development that accounts for his (evidently aban doned) sketch dated 1842 or 1843 for a series of lectures on poetics and aesthetics.3