7 May 2013

Two modes of existence


An additional note for chapter 13:

page 204: two states of...trying to live utterly in the moment, and...trying to live in memory of reflection. Julian Baggini points out that Søren Kierkegaard articulated something like this:
Human beings are caught...between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both,but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.
(Earlier notes here and here)

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