The Paradoxical Nature of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Humor: the Religious-Educational Implications of Art and Morality

Kierkegaard defines human existence as the three stages of aesthetic, ethical, religious. He dedicates irony and humor as an opportunity to implement them. However, it needs to be clarified how the concept of humor, a comical term that evokes laughter, can leap from ethical existence to religious existence. The difficulty about the concept of humor is further amplified in that aesthetic or ethical existence is connected with religious existence. Kierkegaard sees humor as a paradoxical state that enables confrontation and harmony between universality and individuality, self and world. Humor is the borderline where contradictions collide. It awakens consciousness of boundaries and limits. With it, we become aware that there is not an exclusive confrontation between a finite individual and an infinite being, but a state in which the power of an infinite being is revealed in a finite individual and made aware of itself. Humor is an individual’s acting as a finite person facing the infinite being and negating herself. However, the subject of the negating power does not vanish but rather manifests itself in the status quo with a new creature. Therefore, the paradox of Kierkegaard’s concept of humor has a clue to understanding the significance of religious-educational insights in art or morality. The typical example of aesthetic existence reflecting humor can be discovered in Schiller’s term, ‘Aesthetica’. And the typical example of ethical existence reflecting humor can be discovered in Lee Hwang’s Neo-Confucian philosophy. So Kierkegaard’s human three existential degrees are not an one-time process, but a series of disciplines in that mind-heart–personality cultivation continues cyclically throughout a whole human’s life.