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     Kierkegaard's literary style creates a spiritual space in
which the reader makes him/herself at home. Cf. the Stoics'
notion of Oikeiosis.

     1. Aesthetic theory is most persuasive to me when it is
gleaned immediately from the work of art itself as distinct from
being developed independently. The aesthetics of music from the
Goldberg Variations, the aesthetics of painting from Aristotle
contemplating a bust of Homer, the aesthetics of tragedy, from
Antigone, and Kierkegaard's aesthetic theory as implicit in
Either-Or, as implicit in Fear and Trembling, and so forth.

     2. Art is both spiritual and political in nature. The
creation of art is obviously a function of the culture from which
it arises.  Kierkegaard's work expresses not only the genius of
one man, but also a remarkable cultural renaissance in mid 19th
century Copenhagen.  The preservation and transmission of art is
a cultural function.  What is preserved and cherished as opposed
to what is neglected and forgotten is a consequence of the
receptivity of society as well as of the quality of the work.
Kierkegaard was ignored for years after his death.  Consider the
haphazard fate of J.S. Bach's manuscripts, of Schopenhauer's Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung.  The book publishers understand this:
they have to make money, and that is why new books are advertised
and marketed like spiritual toiletry.

     3. I see an implicit contradiction: morality (from Latin
mores) and ethics (from Greek ethos) are each of them public,
social virtues, while Jesus  - and Kierkegaard after him teach
that holiness is inward, that the kingdom of God is within us,
that subjectivity is truth.  Certainly Kierkegaard's writings
must be construed as an expression of this paradox, and to the
degree that they are aesthetically persuasive, its resolution.

     4. Kierkegaard must have deemed it his obligation to devote
his life and his inherited wealth to the creation and
preservation of his great art. Others, not so sure of themselves,
or not so passionate, might delegate the responsibility of
dissemination to their critics, accepting the publishers'
rejection letters as the verdict of history, content to let their
work languish unread on the Internet, until someday the magnetic
media that store it are erased.

     The question has been asked: Why is an artwork that seems to
be completely alien to morality still moral?

     5. Because the outside is not the inside. The term moral
appears in its Janus-like duality. "alien to morality" refers to
public standards, "still moral" might be the conclusion of the
God who searches the heart.

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