The Stages of Desire | Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or

All of us have felt desire in some way, but we usually dismiss it without much thought. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard broke down this emotion into three stages in his book Either/Or. These stages are not independent of one another but are rather more akin to a metamorphoses. The past stages do not die with a new one, but rather, the new stages are “disclosed”. Stage one of desire is without a specific object of desire, but it’s after something general. Kierkegaard’s example is the character of the page from Mozart’s opera Figaro. The page had this “sleeping” desire for womanliness. It’s something that doesn’t exactly have an object for the page to specifically desire yet. After that is stage two, which has a specific object of desire. This is the kind of desire we’re probably most familiar with. We see a dessert we want on the menu and we wanna eat it, or maybe there’s a specific person who we are attracted to and we’d like to date them. Finally, there is stage three, embodied through Kierkegaard’s example of Don Giovanni. This stage is a unity of the last two stages, having both a desire for the general and the specific. Don Giovanni was a seducer, pursuing multiple women. In this sense, he was pursuing the general (seduction, intimacy, etc.) through specific people. #philosophy #existentialism #kierkegaard Instagram: philosophytoonsyt kofi: https://ko-fi.com/philosophytoons Business Email: [email protected] Music by: Lakey Inspired