g to clarify what it means to be a Christian, Kierkegaard invents a useful characterization of the stages or developments in a person’s life. These stages, or spheres as he often refers to them, characterize how an individual appropriates truths about his or her world. The first and most basic is the aesthetic sphere, in which individuals acknowledge only sensory truths and live life according to hedonistic pleasure/pain principles. This progresses into the ethical sphere, which is achieved by recognizing the importance of making decisions, universalization, and the community. The ethical sphere is logical and involves the justification to others of decision-making. This is in distinct contrast to the final sphere, the religious. The religious sphere for Kierkegaard transcends logic and is intimately subjective (read: personal, not arbitrary), involving a one-on-one relationship with God. Since language is public and shared, it lies in the realm of the universal ethical sphere, and hence has no relevance in the religious sphere. Hence those who are religious cannot communicate their knowledge of religious matters. No explanation of or justification for the religious sphere can exist, since it would take place in language, which is not available as an option. Further application of the limit of thought for Kierkegaard includes the notion of subjective truth. Subjective truth deals with how one apprehends ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, which is in the realm of objective truth. According to him, objective truth is by its nature public, verifiable, and hence uninteresting and unimportant. We can all agree what color a given chair is, or any other objective fact of science. Even if there were a contention among people as to a fact, facts about the world are not what matter to individuals – it is how one personally apprehends them that matter. As an example, Kierkegaard praises Socrates for vehemently questioning the exi...
