The Dialectic of Moods

Abstract

In examining the four critical moods of the aesthetic life, if we have found Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms abstract, we have perhaps been even more so. For we have abstracted the moods from the writings in general and from specific treatises. We have seen both that the moods are underlying structures which, after their initial manifestation, can lie dormant, and that the moods are crises in the growth of the personality. The moods well up from subliminal structures of the psyche to confront the individual with the prospect of higher self-understanding to be effected by willingly passing through the mood and thus beyond it.