me and kierkegaard, down by the school yard

So. I am at my parents house tonight. It is 10:30. They have gone to bed. I spent some time looking at old notebooks from art history, mainly for the pictures i drew that cover the margins and, sometimes, the notes. anyway.
Kierkegaard. Pretty cool. He kind of started existentialism, thinking about "stuff" in terms of each individual. This is a big shift from the concept of everything boiling down to universals, or forms. What's more important than the personal choices that one makes, conscious participation in life and the living of it? He says what's the point of all these general problems when in the end it's just you, needing to make a decision, regardless of what you know?
"The most poignant moments in life are personal, where one becomes aware of oneself as a subject." Not what do we have in common, but what makes me unique. It feels good to think like that, and that's probably why I like it.
"Truth is made."
"What is 'out there' is 'an objective uncertainty' - 'the highest truth attainable for an individual is simply an objective uncertainty held fast in the most passionate personal experience'"
Basically, the "truth" is something you can't prove, just something that you think (or believe) is right. Feeeelings, nothing more than feeelingsss...
Next is Kierkegaard explaining how we live, moving from our essential being to the existential condition. A person starts to get a move on when they sense that they are not what they ought to be, which, as we know, causes anxiety (a little bit). The individual tries to 'do something' to alleviate this, but, kierky says, the only thing worth doing is to try and relate oneself to God. The anxiety is caused by the awareness of our alienation from our essential self in God, and the drive to be returned to that. To get back to this, there are 3 stages, each coming about by a personal commitment. Yep, actualization of one's self by making choices.
The first stage is the aesthetic self, living by impulse and emotion, whose chief motivation is pleasure. In this a person still exists in that they choose to live as an aesthetic person, and in addition they are made aware that there is more - "that life consists, or ought to consist, of more than emotive and sense experiences."This awareness of these two possibilities is what triggers the movement into the next stage, that life is not fully actualized at this level and I need to choose to do something more than just do whatever I want all day. I am thinking it might take a very long time to realize that.
This brings on the Ethical Stage - accepting that there are, in fact, some things you shouldn't do, based on a moral understanding. It's a self imposed limitation, and brings with it the feeling that the bad things you do are caused either by ignorance or a lack of will (mostly a lack of will, from my experience). But what happens now is the individual who tries to do good finds out that they are incapable of doing it, that in fact they deliberately don't do the right thing (on occasion). What's this all about? If you cant do what you know youre supposed to do, you can either a) keep trying or b) respond to your new awareness that you are insufficient at living by yourself. You cant just think it, you have to do it - make a commitment (choice) - hey God who i'm estranged from, i'd like to not be, so much.
The final step he called the religious stage. The trouble here is that it is subjective - as individuals our relationship with God is unique, and "there is no way, prior to the actual relationship, to get any knowledge about it." There is no rational or conceptual or objective knowledge about one's relationship to God. An act of faith is the only assurance. That we must find our self-fulfillment in God comes about from our trying and failing to find it elsewhere. "The existence of God is suggested to us in our awareness of our self-alienation", that we aren't exactly who we think we should be. We can and do exist at all levels, and only through living at each do we realize that we aren't quite there yet. Kierk-a says that relating to God is the way.
So, we haven't proven anything. What goes on inside me is what goes on inside me, nowhere else, and it's the same for you. I just know there is someone who's going to say "wait, cant there be universals and personal uniqueness, together?" Sometimes I flip ahead in my 'Socrates to Sartre' book, which is why i'm at kierkegaard now, instead of aristotle. The self is important, because it's all i know. It's not that I learned something new from this, just that it was said in ways that made more sense than i had heard before. But how can you trust yourself if you are very much aware that you are inadequate at living a perfect life? What is the perfect life for the individual - to be completely actualized? to be happy? knowing that you did what you were supposed to do? The most important thing that's happened to me so far as that now when i say "that's something i should think about." i dont just say it, but i actually do it.