Kierkegaard and the 3 Stages of a Full and Happy Life
What an Old Danish Philosopher Can Teach Us About Cultivating a Richer Existence
There are many ways to conceive of this huge block of time and movement that we call “life”. But one of the big problems with capturing what it’s all about is reconciling the two conceptions of life: the inner one and the outer one.
What I mean is that each of us lives both internally and externally. There is a way that our life seems to those looking at it from outside, and a way that things look and feel to us from the inside. The difference between the two is a difference of lived experience vs. observed experience. It’s the difference between subjective and objective — between science and (for lack of a better word) spirit.
In the 19th century, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified 3 possible stages that a person can move through in their lifetime: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. Most people only go through the first step, and mostly through the second step (though many fall short even of that one).
