Seduction, moral virtue and faith as "qualitative jump" in Kierkegaard: the existent singular between possibility, reality and absolute

Abstract

By characterizing existence as a process of choice and decision that converges towards the constitution of the subject as such, Kierkegaard attributes to existence the condition of a project in a construction that encloses three fundamental existential possibilities, namely, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious . Thus, the article points out that, constituting a dimension in which the search for meaning or the quest for the absolute is limited to immanence, the existential aesthetic mode is characterized as the fruition of subjectivity with itself through the instant of pleasure sensual in a movement that implies seduction as an effort to conquer oneself that, however, escapes its power in a relationship that converges to despair, since the indefinite renewal of the original condition of love is exhausted in generalization. And if the ethical stage ends integration into the social community through the institutionalization of repetition as a way of life based on objectivity and rationality, the conformation of the subject to the modus vivendi and the modus essendi of the general implies the harmonization of his subjectivity with the generality of good and evil through a process that becomes incapable of resolving the question of its existential disorder. Thus the article shows that if the moral virtue that the ethical imposes converges on the impossibility of overcoming the despair that characterizes the search for the absolute in immanence, the religious attitude, abdicating reality in its finite totality in function of the absolute relation with the Absolute, demands the teleological suspension of the ethical and tends to establish the existential authenticity through a movement that maintains correspondence with the faith as the “leap” that implies self-consciousness in its singularity and individual spirituality.