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There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human being who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is, but it does not exist, for when it exists it does so in the esthetic in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is, it is the abstraction from or a something prior to the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The esthetic sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway-which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all-just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical. No wonder, then, that one fear it, for if one gives it a finger it takes the whole hand. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of its investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed. This impulse signifies precisely the difference between the esthetic and the religious as the difference between the external and the internal.
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Stages On Life's Way, 1845, Hong p. 476-477

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

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What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do in on her own account. A girl may submit to a man in many things, but not in the ethical; and it is unethical for her and for me to sorrow jointly in this way. Taking this path, how will she ever come to sorrow religiously when she must leave undecided an ethical issue such as my behavior toward her, when it is indeed over its result that she wishes to sorrow. Would that I might be a woman for half a year so that I could learn how she is dissimilar to man. I fully realize that there are examples of women who have conducted themselves in this way. Psychologically I have them right at hand, but in my opinion they are all wasted individualities. My view of life is meaningless if I must personally experience that one individual is being squandered upon another, and squandered she is if it goes this way. As soon as she begins to venture along the narrow way to a religious movement, she is lost to me. A woman can have passion as strong or perhaps stronger than a man, but contradiction in passion is not a task for her, such as the task of simultaneously giving up and preserving the wish. If she works purely religiously to give up the wish, she is transformed; if the moment for its fulfillment ever did come, she would no longer understand it. The religious movement of infinity may not be natural to her individuality. Her pride may not be sufficiently energetic to save her in an intensification of temporality. If she had been thoroughly proud, this would have happened, humanly speaking. This, too, may be why the religious does not take effect with the turning of the infinite. The religious eternity very likely does not become the eternal decision but a spacing out of the temporal. So eternity has paused at her side, consoled her, just as in Homer the god or the goddess hurries to the aid of the hero. She believed it was the decision of eternity, she believed it was her death, she believed all was lost, but see, because she was not so much awakened to this eternal decision as weary from futile wishing and weary of the futile act of renunciation, she gently slumbered on into eternity; then time passed, and she woke up and belonged to life once again. Thus there was even a possibility of a new alliance, a new falling in love. This was indeed what I wanted; then she is really free.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: — When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I shall suggest in a few words the danger that faces a person in the moment of despair, the reef on which he can be stranded and utterly shipwrecked. The Bible says: For what would it profit a person if he gained the whole world but damaged his own soul; what would he have in return? Scripture does not state the antithesis to this, but it is implicit in the sentence. The antitheses would read something like this: What damage would there be to a person if he lost the whole world and yet did not damage his soul; what would he need in return? There are expressions that in themselves seem simple and yet fill the soul with a strange anxiety, because they almost become more obscure the more one thinks about them. In the religious sphere, the phrase “sin against the Holy Spirit” is such an expression. I do not know whether theologians are able to give a definite explanation of it, but then I am only a layman. But the phrase “to damage one’s soul” is an esthetic expression, and the person who thinks he has an ethical life-view must also think he is able to explain it. We often hear the words used, and yet anyone who wants to understand them must have experienced the deep movements of his soul-indeed, he must have despaired, for it is actually the movements of despair that are described here: on the one side the whole world, on the other side one’s own soul. You will readily perceive, if we pursue this expression, that we arrive at the same abstract definition of “soul” at which we arrived earlier in the definition of the word “self” in the psychological consideration of wishing, without, however, wanting to become someone else. In other words, if I can gain the whole world and yet damage my soul, the phrase “the whole world” must include all the finite things that I possess in my immediacy. Then my soul proves to be indifferent to these things. If I can lose the whole world without damaging my soul, the phrase “the whole world” again includes all the finite qualifications that I possess in my immediacy, and yet if my soul is undamaged it is consequently indifferent toward them. I can lose my wealth, my honor in the eyes of others, my intellectual capacity; and yet not damage my soul: I can gain it all and yet be damaged. What, then, is my soul? What is this innermost being of mine that is undismayed by this loss and suffers damage by this gain?

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The ethical thesis that every human being has a calling expresses that there is a rational order of things, in which every human being, if he so wills, fills his place in such a way that he simultaneously expresses the universally human and the individual. As soon as talent is not regarded as a calling-and if it is regarded as a calling ever human being has a calling-the talent is absolutely egotistic. Therefore, everyone who bases his life on a talent establishes to the best of his ability a robber existence. He has no higher expression for the talent than that it is a talent. Consequently, this talent want to advance in all its difference. Therefore, every talent has a tendency to make itself central; every condition must be present to promote it, because only in this wild onrushing is there the genuinely esthetic enjoyment of the talent. If there is a concurrent talent going in another direction, they clash in a life-and-death struggle, since they have no concentricity, no higher shared expression. So our hero has found what he was looking for, a work from which he can live; he has also found a more significant expression for the relation of this work to his personality: it is his calling-consequently, the carrying out of it is bound up with a satisfaction for his whole personality. He has also found a more significant expression for his relation of his work to other people, inasmuch as his work is his calling, he is thereby placed essentially on the same level as all other human beings. Hence through his work he is doing the same as everyone else-he is carrying out his calling. He insists on this acknowledgment; he does not insist on more, for this is the absolute. “If my calling is a humble one,” he says, “I can nevertheless be faithful to my calling, and then according to what is essential I am as great as the greatest. If my calling is humble, I can nevertheless, be unfaithful to it, and if I am, I am committing just as great a sin as the greatest. I shall not be so foolish as to want to forget the differences or to believe that my unfaithfulness would have just as corrupting consequences for the whole as the unfaithfulness of the greatest-to do so would be of no benefit to me; I myself would be the one who would lose the most.” The ethical view, then, that every human being has a calling, has two advantages over the esthetic theory of talent. First, it does not account for anything accidental in existence but for the universal; second, it shows the universal in its true beauty. In other words, the talent is not beautiful until it is transfigured into a calling, and existence is not beautiful until every person has a calling. (…)When a person has a calling he generally has a norm outside himself, which, without making him a slave, nevertheless gives him some indication of what he has to do, maps out his time for him, often provides him with the occasion to begin. If at some time he fails in his task, he hopes to do it better the next time, and this next time is not so very far away. Our hero has found a more beautiful expression for the relation of his work to the work of other men-that it is a calling. So he has been acknowledged, has received his credentials. But now when he carries out his calling-yes, then he finds his satisfaction in it, but he also insists on an expression of the relation of this activity to other people; he insists on accomplishing something. At this point he may again go astray. The esthete will explain to him that the satisfaction of the talent is the highest, and whether he accomplishes something or does not accomplish anything is entirely beside the point. He may encounter a practical narrow-mindedness that in its bungling zeal thinks it is accomplishing everything, or an esthetic snobbery that thinks that accomplishing something in the world falls to the lot of a chosen few, that there are a few very talented individuals who accomplish something, that the rest of the people are ciphers, superfluities in life, extravagances of the creator. But none of these explanations helps our hero.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

 

Jurgen Habermas‎