Abstract

The focus on this article is to analyze the concept of beauty in Kierkegaard’s thought, starting from some questions that I try to answer in these pages: How does Kierkegaard understand beauty? What role does beauty play in the inner constitutive process? All this to argue that, as regards beauty, Kierkegaard recovers the Greek concept of kalokagathia to give it a modern interpretation; thus, distancing himself from the modern understanding of beauty as a mere object of study of aesthetics or the mere contemplation of an ideal; beauty is defined as the telos of the inner self and is related to freedom and choice. It is, therefore, as I will argue, an ethical beauty, rather than an aesthetic one.