The Comic and the Existencespheres

Abstract

In the previous chapter we saw something of the relationship Climacus holds to exist between the comic and the ‘stages’ or spheres of existence. We now turn to look at this in more detail. Though the so-called ‘theory of the stages’ — the aesthetic, ethical, religious, and their various subdivisions — is one of the best-known aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought, the following Climacean claim is rarely noted:

On the whole, the comic is present everywhere, and every existence can at once be defined and assigned to its particular sphere by knowing how it is related to the comic … the more competently a person exists, the more he will discover the comic. (CUP 462)

With this extraordinary claim in mind, this chapter will investigate several figures: the individuals of ‘immediacy’ and ‘finite common sense’; the ironist; the ethicist who uses irony as his ‘incognito’; the humorist; the religious individual who uses humour as his ‘incognito’; and the person occupying the ‘religiousness of hidden inwardness’, all of whom are ‘lower’ in Climacus’s hierarchy of inwardness than is the individual of ‘Religiousness B’ or Christianity. Thus we shall expand on Chapter 4's brief account of the comic’s relation to the ‘stages’, since although we introduced there the idea of irony and humour as ‘border territories’, just as important is their role as ‘incognitos’.