The Ethical Responsibility of Time in Søren Kierkegaard as an Ethics of Becoming: Existential Principle of Solidarity

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to argue that the ethical task of becoming oneself, in the thought of Kierkegaard, implies an specific responsibility over the temporal dimension of existence; which is grounded in the relation of trust and love with the temporality of other persons. This relation will constitute solidarity, because it provoques, simultaneously, that the individual become able to choose himself in time and could receive and reduplicate the conditions of becoming of the other. This means, in ethical terms, as is exposed in The Balance between the esthetic and the ethical in the development of the personality, that when the person is before the earnestness of choosing himself, in the moment of choosing himself he receives the infinitude of the eternal power of personality. Then, the ethical task is to be able to believe that is possible to live in the freedom that opens time to a future becoming. In this way solidarity will permit us to be in a constant beginning in the expectancy of the revelation of the truth.