In the choice of himself as an absolute, one leaves the aesthetic stage. Kierkegaard calls the new sphere, into which freedom has introduced man, the ethical. As soon as a person takes possession of himself and becomes free there arises an absolute distinction between good and evil. For the speculative attitude (which is included in the aesthetic, because of its lack of commitment), this distinction is only relative: good and evil can be integrated in a single system. The distinction becomes absolute when we make it so by a personal commitment. This means that good and evil are absolute only insofar as we will them. Such a statement does not reduce them to mere subjective determinations – they are objective and universal in themselves – but they become themselves only in the free decision of absolute choice. Nothing but a conscious, personal acceptance can make objective standard into absolute values.
Even in their subjective acceptance, however, the objective ethical standards are a limitation of the spirit….The absolute of the ethical man is expressed as an existence which is extremely limited and, as such, relative. Although the synthesis of the ethical personality is more balanced than the aesthetic, which refuses to bind itself to the finite, the question remains whether the ethical man will ever be conscious of the absolute as such, which is the primary condition for becoming spirit. The very self-assurance of the ethical man makes his whole attitude somewhat suspect. “He feels no want of the eternal, for it is with him in time.”
Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 45-46.
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