Higher Immediacy Contrasted with Ethical and Aesthetic

Question: Explain higher immediacy by contrasting it with the ethical and the

aesthetic.

Higher immediacy or religious faith is the most important achievement made by

a person because only faith offers an individual to have a chance to become a

"true self". Self is what is done throughout life which God judges for

infinity. Consequently, humans have a huge responsibility because those

decided choices in life constitute the eternal salvation or damnation. With

the religious faith, the ethical and aesthetic are needed to form it, that is

why they can not be the same. "Faith itself cannot be mediated into the

universal, for it would thereby be destroyed." (p.69) To arrive in the

position of religious faith, the ethical must first be accepted, and a

commitment must be made to choose the ethical and step away from the

aesthetic. The ethical, the universal, is what decides what is good and what

is evil. These traits are not decided upon by society, however. They are

dependent of God and God decides what is good and evil and His definition

would outrank any human definition, so humans are constantly in sin. There

has to be a recognition of a duty to a higher being, not to just social

norms. For example, in the case of Abraham, his actions could have been very

irrational and wrong if there was no belief in the religious faith. It is

something that must be decided on by the individual, to believe that Abraham

was legitimate in obeying God or not. That is was what must be decided as a

matter of religious faith. Abraham's "ethical relation is reduced to a

relative position contrast with the absolute relation to God." (p. 69). If

Abraham's actions were ethically analyzed, it would seem he hated Isaac

because he killed him. But since faith