Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

into our consciousness, causing us to become weak and insignificant. Kierkegaard explains the false view that the crowd is the ultimate reality to which we should bend our wills, sacrifice our individuality and become absorbed. In Kierkegaard’s writing entitled On the Dedications to That Single Individual , he discusses the concept of the crowd as a state of unconsciousness for the individual, not necessarily corresponding to a particular group of people. It is the automatic inclination to view yourself and your life only in terms of others: a family member, an employee, a member of a religion, and so on. When you view yourself only as a member of a social group, you implicitly deny your unique human distinctness. In doing so, you surrender your autonomy, permitting the crowd to make decisions for you, enabling you to temporarily escape from your personal responsibility for your choices. Kierkegaard believes that surrendering ourselves to the crowd is inauthentic and the height of immorality. Moral action begins with respecting what it means to be human and concludes with acting on the truth everyone can be the one. The crowd is always vulnerable to the untruths because they play on people’s emotions and appeal to their innate desires. Kierkegaard believed that there is hope every time a person insists on being a single individual which is the ethical ideal to which every person should aspire. The dehumanizing domination of the crowd in which people look outward to political and religious leaders, as well as popular culture to tell them who to be, reflects what he calls the abstract principle of leveling. The abstract principle of leveling involves the annihilation of individuality, where people are reduced to abstractions, labels, and categories defined by age, race, marital status, career, socioeconomic status, nationality, educational level, and gender. The net effect of removing the unique and rich qualities from each individual is to place all people on the same abstract level which he called true alienation and described it in his writing entitled The Present Age and believed it was immortal. Per Kierkegaard, he believed to really exist is a lifelong challenge and evolutionary process. He identifies Three Stages of Life’s Way through which every person must pass to become an authentic individual and really exists: • Aesthetic stage: This is the stage in life in which people are absorbed in pursuing the beautiful and pleasurable dimensions of life, living for the moment led by emotions and sensuous passions. Although powerfully seductive, a life devoted to simply pursuing pleasurable experience after pleasurable experience is ultimately dissatisfying and is ultimately filled with emptiness and dread. • Ethical stage: Dissatisfaction with the excess of the aesthetic stage typically motivates people to seek a life guided by moral standards and ethical values. Moral codes provide people with a structure that was lacking in the aesthetic stage. Such codes provide with a clear listing of dos and don’ts of values to live by, of virtuous people to aspire to. Kierkegaard believes that too often people look outside themselves for moral guidance and define themselves in terms of the values of others the crowd. The ethical stage is a necessary but transitional stage in an individual’s quest for ultimate meaning an authentic existence that can only be realized by the religious stage. The important thing in this stage is not what you think may be right or wrong what matters is that you choose to have an opinion at all on what is right or wrong.

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