ABSTRACT
In the case of the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic life, I argued in chapter two that Judge Vilhelm's critique offers clear, comprehensible reasons for one and against the other. It is thus his claim that if an agent fully reflects on what it would be to choose the aesthetic life, he would discover any wholehearted choice in that direction to be impossible. What reasons, then, can be adduced for choosing the religious life over the ethical?1 In order to answer this question, I shall examine the single work in the Kierkegaardian corpus that poses the choice between ethics and religion in its sharpest form: Johannes de silentio's Fear and Trembling. If there are good reasons for choosing the religious life over the ethical, they ought surely to be contained in this text. Moreover, if religion does supersede ethics as ethics was argued to supersede aestheticism, then I take it such reasons will be of great relevance to the Nietzschean/aesthetic self: for as will be seen, an anti-religious critique lies at the core of Nietzsche's writings.
