ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard’s understanding of childhood presupposes a traditional subdivision of life into four stages: child, youth, adult, and old age: “The first is the stage in which the child has not separated himself from his surroundings (‘me’). The I is not given, but [there is] the possibility of it.”2 At this stage, the child has a fleeting and fragmented perception of the world. It cannot differentiate the manifold impressions from each other and cannot differentiate itself from its surroundings. The child’s I-consciousness is yet to be developed, and the child can be said to be one with the rest of the world. Indeed, childhood is characterized by a striving to become an “I.” In the child’s fragmented perception of life, the I
Childhood is dominated by coincidence and unpredictability as the child “is immediate and explains nothing…not even to other children, because every child is itself only in an immediate way.”4 Childhood is immediacy and in this immediacy, the child is capable of reflecting neither on itself, nor its surroundings. Childhood as a phenomenon lacks a guiding rational principle. But after the chaos of childhood “comes a peace, an idyllic well-being. It is the youth’s satisfaction in family and school (church and state); this is the second stage.”5 So the child stage is followed by the youth stage, and the transition from one to the other is marked by the youth’s commencement in school.
