Curt Jaimungal explores Søren Kierkegaard’s three stages of life — aesthetic, ethical, and religious — as a framework for understanding why modern people feel trapped by freedom and choice, and why Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” is not blind irrationality but a necessary, groundless act of commitment that reason alone cannot justify.
Kierkegaard’s Core Position on Faith
Kierkegaard advocates a faith that is “faith despite” rather than “faith because” — it is not rational assent to evidence but a commitment made in the absence of rational grounding.
He insists that truth “catches you” rather than being something you catch; you cannot possess it without being possessed by it.
Problems and their solutions must be suffered through to be genuinely earned; a solution given to someone who hasn’t suffered for it is no real solution.
You must choose between faith and reason, but the act of choosing itself cannot be rationalized — you are groundless in making it, yet you are always already making it.
Choosing both — trying to synthesize faith and reason — is itself the aesthetic life, a form of intellectual hedonism.
The Three Stages of Life
The Aesthetic Stage: Characterized by the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, and expediency. This is the default human condition — not exactly sin, but the natural state of being “born into the flesh.” It includes intellectual and creative pleasure-seeking, which is still a form of hedonism.
The Ethical Stage: Defined by commitment, responsibility, and social duty. This is where one chooses to become something rather than merely gaze upon it. A person who wants not just to admire beauty but to become beautiful has moved from aesthetic to ethical.
The Religious Stage: An absolute relation (lowercase “a”) to the Absolute (uppercase “A”) — God. This transcends ethical universality. Abraham is the paradigmatic example: he obeyed God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, which violated ethical norms. This stage cannot be reached through reason alone.
Why Moving Between Stages Is Non-Rational
Progression between stages is extra-rational because if it were rational, it would already be implied by the axioms of your existing value system.
Analogous to mathematical logic: a theory is the set of all closed sentences implied by its axioms and rules of inference. Anything outside that theory must come from outside the system — it is, from within the system, irrational.
Kierkegaard does not say reason is worthless, only that its domain is not totalizing.
Anti-Hegelianism
Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a direct reaction against Hegel’s system, which claimed to have comprehensively reconciled reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, into a totalizing synthesis.
He hated the “smug certainty” and “megalomaniacal comprehensiveness” of Hegel’s rationalism, and especially the “Greek Promethean” element — the idea that reason can master everything.
For Kierkegaard, there is no synthesis: you must choose one or the other. Refusing to choose means you remain in the aesthetic stage.
The Aesthetic Man’s Misery
The aesthetic life is “distracted from distraction by distraction” (a line Curt attributes to T.S. Eliot’s hollow men).
The real evil of the aesthetic life is boredom, which Kierkegaard calls “the root of all evil” — more dangerous than money, because the desire for sensation drives enormous amounts of harm.
People pursue pleasure and novelty to avoid confronting the vacuum of their existence.
Critique of Modern “Authenticity”
Much of what passes for authenticity today is semaphore — signaling where you land, how you want to be seen — and has become a brand.
When “authenticity” has a target demographic (e.g., expressing oneself through Disney merchandise), something is deeply wrong.
Authenticity as commonly used may presume a “true essence” to match, which conflicts with anti-essentialist views held by many of its proponents.
Curt suggests abandoning the word rather than redefining it in ways most people don’t intend, similar to how Jordan Peterson’s use of “God” diverges from common understanding.
”Know Thyself” as Spiritual Branding
Curt argues against the modern valorization of “Know Thyself,” which he sees as a route to self-absorption and a dignified-sounding excuse for endless self-analysis.
It functions as a form of spiritual virtue signaling — “look how refined I am” — and can worsen mental states by brooding over self-examination while neglecting difficult external work.
In Buddhism, the actual order is ethics, then concentration, then wisdom — ethics comes first. The Western appropriation inverts this, imagining one can meditate one’s way to right action.
For Kierkegaard, the correct form of self-knowledge means seeing oneself as called to “love one’s neighbor” and as responsible before God. It is awareness of one’s guilt and duties, not one’s specialness, that breaks narcissistic self-preoccupation.
Earnestness Over Authenticity
Though Kierkegaard is often seen as a forefather of the authenticity movement, he values earnestness more than authenticity — a commitment to duty and responsibility before God rather than self-expression.
The Religious Stage as the Only Escape
The ethical life eventually realizes it cannot become beautiful on its own — this realization drives the transition to the religious stage.
God is essential to Kierkegaard’s framework: awareness of one’s sinful nature before God is what kills the narcissistic version of self-knowledge.
The leap of faith is not irrational but trans-rational — it operates in a domain where reason has legitimate but limited authority.
