Moral moments: Soren Kierkegaard and Christian aesthetics

This dissertation examines Soren Kierkegaard's aesthetic, which includes the aesthetic stage and a critique of art. As his thought is not systematic, to understand his aesthetic requires first engaging his theological anthropology in which a self develops through die imagination and passion. Each self must become true through the imitation of Christ, the paradoxical truth of being revealed by God through the Bible. Such selfhood requires the imaginative and passionate imitation of Christ within existence. All actions are moral moments, as they each play a part in self-formation. True selfhood is thus an art.;Contemporary scholarship interprets Kierkegaard's aesthetic in various ways: as an existence stage, an aesthetic critique, a method of authorship and a tool for self-formation. I argue that these accounts are reductionistic and miss a common thread amongst the interpretations: the self. His concern is not the aesthetic, per se, but rather how a self becomes a true being. Further, Kierkegaard interacted with the aesthetic intellectual traditions developed by Kant and Hegel as well as German Romanticism and Idealism. Through these traditions, he understood self-formation as the highest aesthetic project, with art, including poetry, music and visual art, providing one method of moving towards selfhood. But art must never be independent of a self's movement.;As the basis for movement, the imagination and passion must be examined in order to best understand Kierkegaard's aesthetic. The imagination thinks, creates and holds images about how to live. Passion moves a self towards such images with the will choosing the image. Art presents a challenge for the self's imagination and passion, two capacities that have aesthetic dimensions, as these capacities can be drawn to the artwork rather than towards true selfhood.