Ep. 330: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Aesthetic Life (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 330 is something like, what is it to live the artistic life? We read selections from the first half of Soren Kierkegaard's either or from 1843. More information about this book in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, practicing the art of arbitrariness in Madison, Wisconsin, or let's say the Hoover Dam.

0:37 Seth: What?

0:38 Mark: I was being arbitrary about my location.

0:41 Seth: Oh, this is Seth Paskin being immediately what I am in Austin, Texas.

0:48 Wes: This is Wes Alwan playing shuttlecock with Existence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:53 Mark: And what are you immediately, Seth? Are you the romantic hero?

0:57 Seth: Romantic, no. Hero? Eh, maybe.

1:01 Wes: I have to take issue with the title of the episode, but I think that's also just a good segue for getting us into.

1:08 Seth: What issue would you take meaning of?

1:11 Wes: Well, because living an artistic life is a question of what that means. So am I being an artist? Am I turning my life into art?

1:20 Seth: Should he have said living an aesthetic life?

1:24 Wes: Sure, but I understand why Mark didn't want to do that. He's trying not to get too.

1:28 Mark: He said poetic. I just wanted to generalize, you know, update that. Because poetry was taken as the quintessential art. And sort of being that kind of person, being the Romantic would be whether you're an actual poet, whether you're an actual artist or not, you can still live your life. This is not a point of congratulations.

1:48 Seth: Right?

1:48 Mark: This is not actually a good thing for Kierkegaard. So, you know, last time we talked about irony, and here we have a whole book that is ironic because it is written in the guise of characters that are going to have views that are different from Kierkegaard's, and they're not purely critical. It's just if you have the background assumptions that these characters do, here's the kind of things that you might say, here's the kind of troubles that you might be pulled into. So then, ironically, you know, we, knowing Kierkegaard's views that, yes, religion is going to be the answer in some way can say, oh, I see.

Okay, so this person is only driven to despair and to boredom and all this stuff because they have no fundamental values. But, you know, there's nothing in this book that actually spells out what those alternatives are. It's just this half, the either half is from the point of view of somebody who is in the aesthetic frame of mind, who does not have the ethical or the religious to serve as a bedrock. And so we get something that looks a heck of a lot like Camus. You know, he's definitely critiquing the Romantics. This Lewis Mackey article we were reading was saying he's actually just critiquing the average person of his day.

This is like kids today. This is, you know, the Allan Bloom of his time. Except, I guess, he's criticizing his peers, not his students here.

3:11 Wes: Yeah. I think it's worth pointing out that what we call the aesthetic way of life is something that we should take very broadly. It's not just people living a bohemian artistic life. But it is, as Mackey points out, it has, in a way, two possible meanings. One is the aesthetic in the sense of having to do with sense experience, and one is the aesthetic, as in having to do with art. And I think for Kierkegaard, it means both. So you could talk about the aesthetic person as someone who lives for their desires, someone who lives in their own direct, immediate experience, let's say, lives in the world of sensation and feeling and is not all that reflective.

Or you could think about the artist's solution to the kind of dialectical problems that arise with respect to that position. So at least according to Mackey, he's A's aesthetic position in this really reflects both of those things. So the structure of it, as Mark was pointing out, is just Kierkegaard, instead of giving us a straightforward treatise on his position on these things, is writing a book in true, ironic style, where he's going to have different characters argue from inside their positions. And this first half will. I mean, I don't even know if it's an argument.

It just gives you a glimpse into the mind of someone in this aesthetic position. And the second half, half, which we'll do some of next time, will give us the opposing ethical point of view. And then, of course, hovering all over this is the third position, that of religious faith and the embrace of the absurdity of religious faith. But I think here in this first part, we get, in a way, a rumination of someone trying to work out how to live but from within this limited position.

5:04 Seth: So the question I have, and this is completely I come innocently to this, is the structure of the aesthetic. What are the three parts of the Kierkegaardian aesthetic?

5:19 Wes: The ethical and the religious, the aesthetic,

5:22 Seth: the ethical and religious. Is this a framework, kind of like the dialectic that was imposed, that somebody interpreted and was brought by later readers onto the Kierkegaardian text. Because it doesn't present itself that way. It's not obvious without context that in the first part of either or we are in the aesthetic Persona, if you will, a capital A. And I'm not trying to make anything of this. I'm just curious. Is it something that it took people time to work out in order to be able to understand? Or was it clear that Kierkegaard, did he somehow put this framework forward while he was alive, explaining, like, this is how I'm doing things to people.

6:07 Mark: I wish I would remember more clearly from the preface. So the preface is by another character, this Victor Eremita, who is the editor, who is someone who stumbled across these manuscripts. And he doesn't know who wrote them. That's why he just calls them A and B. And in fact, doesn't present one as like, maybe B is responding to A, but he really wants to just put them side by side. Just consider these two. It's not necessarily that the editor is presenting them as B is the next dialectical step which in turn must be overcome to get to the religious.

But yeah, it's so universal, this interpretation. I gotta think. I mean, had we read more of the various notes and the letters that he wrote about this book, I think it's totally uncontroversial. Okay, so there are many essays making up this book. What we looked at primarily was the first one, which is not an essay. It's a set of aphorisms. Refrains, he calls them. The Greek word is diapsalmata. I know it means refrains, but it's sort of a warmup. I thought maybe this was going to be a direct satire. Comment on the kind of aphorisms that Schlegel the Romantic and the other people, his brother and the others doing his newspaper would be doing.

That seemed a little more personal to me than that. It seemed more like some of Nietzsche's stuff where it's sort of reflecting on his own personality as opposed to, like, putting forward, you know, the schlegel that we read was kind of actively arguing for some sort of political position, Some sort of here's what romantic art should be. Whereas there just seemed to be much less philosophy in here, but it is just the appetizer. So we tried to get a sense of what was going on in the rest of the book. And this very short Lewis mackey article from 1972.

Lewis Mackey was one of our professors at the University of Texas. Some versions of the aesthete Kierkegaard's either or is the name of the article. Did a great job sort of quickly summarizing what many of the essays were about and how they fit together. The most famous part of it is this diary of the Seducer at the end of the. Which is like 130 pages by itself. Which is a manuscript by a friend who's actually named Johannes of.

8:28 Wes: But probably is A it turns out. Or that. Sure, the editor speculates that he's A and there's evidence that Johannes and A are the same person. But yeah.

8:37 Mark: Yes. We only ended up reading the introduction into that by A himself talking about basically stealing this manuscript. You know, he knows the Seducer and he knows the person Cordelia, who he seduced. And he's sort of shocked by the whole thing. Which is very strange given that in one of the earlier essays he's praising Don Juan, the musical Don Giovanni by Mozart as being like. Just. It seems like this should be the kind of thing that he'd be way into. But this maybe is telling us something about. At least Mackey was. Was surmising. I think that about living the romantic life in this way is more about thought than action.

That actually doing it is kind of way more resolute than the Romantic who, as we described in our last episode is ruled by his whims and you know, just won't commit to anything. And so like actually putting yourself all in to seduce somebody like that at least might not be the central core of what it is to be this kind of romantic figure. It's more ineffectual than that.

9:33 Wes: The essay by Mackey is great. Like it's really excellent. And I had no idea when I was at the University of Texas. He was so kick ass. No idea.

9:42 Seth: Oh really?

9:43 Wes: Yeah. I don't know that I ever looked at anything or took a class by him or.

9:47 Seth: No, he was kind of like the Svengali of the continental side of the house.

9:51 Wes: Yeah, I just, you know, I didn't know enough and I probably just hated everyone. And I was the truly in the aesthetic position and. And I guess that actually is a good segue because part of the aesthetic position as it's described, you know, in this part and particularly in the Diapsalmata. It's moody and depressed, basically. It's not just someone who's living for pleasure or not just someone who. I don't even know that we know this person is an artist or that we could conceive of them as making their own lives, their own life a work of art, the way the Diapsalmata begins.

If I were to sum up some of what the Diapsalmata is reflecting about, you know, it has something to do with thinking about. So there's a section that I, you know, I broke it up into sections. There's one, I think, on aspiration and the paradoxical nature of aspiration. There's one on sorrow. It's kind of the flip side of laughter. There's. There's reflections on the perils of the ethical, is the way I put it, and the way in which reflection actually makes us less free. These are, you know, in the context. The other thing I would recommend people read is a short introduction to Kierkegaard, which is excellent.

The very short introduction where you get a large part of it is devoted to the Hegelian and Kantian background of this, because part of what Kierkegaard is objecting to is the reduction of religion to morality. And I think part of that is the conception of the ethical as purely rational and reflective, when in fact, there are costs to that position. So, for instance, you know, he talks about feeling at one point like. Feeling like a chess move, a chess piece that can't be moved, which is a really great image of the way in which rationality can be something binding rather than a grounds for autonomy.

Now, granted, this is from the perspective of the aesthetic person, right, this objection to too much rationality. But. And it's something, I think, that Kierkegaard wants to transcend, but I also do think it's part of Kierkegaard's position. So in any case, the other reflections here on desire and what I think is the word, the repression of desire. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in here. I, you know, at least a few of these I want to dig into a little bit, if we have time.

12:19 Mark: For sure, for sure.

12:20 Seth: So the Mackey thesis is that Kierkegaard's aesthetic man, or aesthetic person, he's not talking about aesthetic in the sense of appreciation of art or beauty, but rather that somehow, etymologically, it's associated with the idea of immediacy. So he connects the notion of the aesthetic man with sense perception. The idea that you're something pre reflective. Let's just call it pre reflective consciousness, pre reflective experience. In other words, it's the aesthetic man is the one who's at the same level as animals or the beasts, I think he says.

But he points out Kierkegaard, this is again, Mackie's interpretation. But the idea that you can't actually be there or get there. We can't unburden ourselves with consciousness to become this pre reflective, purely sensory beings. So there's this weird irony of taking on the immediacy of experience without reflecting on it, but at the same time doing so from the perspective of a reflective consciousness. So it's almost like not exercising your reflective consciousness. So when you see what Kierkegaard's talking about or what he's writing about, he's writing about somebody who is trying.

I'm going to try to find a way to say this without using the word authentic, because I'm trying to avoid the jargon of authenticity.

13:50 Wes: I mean, I think you're on to something important, which is that, as Mackey points out, we can't experience being in nature, our prelapsarian origin, as he calls it. We can't experience being an animal again, purely unreflectively. And when we think about that position, we are always doing it from the standpoint of reflection. We are alienated from immediacy. This is all very. These are all very Hegelian themes, but we still go after it. And not in the sense of, I'm just going to eat pizza all day and sit on the couch. That's how I'm going to get back in touch with my immediacy and my animal naturalness.

We try to get back to it through art. So this one version of the aesthetic merges into the other, or one dialectically. You get a higher level of the aesthetic out of the more basic one. So it does lead to aesthetic in the broadly artistic sense. Seth, I know you were trying to get at something about authenticity. I thought that maybe you're pointing to that ladder or something like that.

14:54 Seth: Yeah, exactly. That's where I was trying to get to, was the notion that if we circle back to the previous episode on irony, that what Kierkegaard's pointing out is that there's a way of experiencing, ultimately, he wants to, as we talked about in that last episode, subjectivity is ironic, but he's ultimately not going to be satisfied with that. He can't live with the idea that subjectivity is ironic. So as part of this edifice or this ladder, you're going to have. The aesthetic person has at their core a subjectivity that is ironic. Not in a Socratic sense, like we talked about last episode, but rather in the sense of a desire for this immediacy.

A desire to have this immediacy, the inability to grasp it, the inability to actually access that immediacy. And then in a sense, having to bring these faculties into play to do so. But at the same time, there's a price to pay to maintain the ironic distance that you would. That you would otherwise have. Which is this notion he talks about, about valuing nothing and everything. You know, this either or like getting into the idea that all experiences are equal. It's about being able to enjoy and take pleasure in all of these experiences, regardless of what they are.

16:18 Wes: Well, you see, it becomes, according to Mackey's interpretation, right. Preoccupied with fantasy. So it's not realistic to be a Don Juan. The whole idea of 1003 lovers in Spain would be laughed out of the theater, according to Kierkegaard. So the kind of immediacy we're after can't actually be experienced in life. So we try to experience it in fantasy, which is what a does. His admiration of Don Juan. So really he's actually disenchanted, you know, with the merely pleasure seeking way of life. He's disenchanted with that. What he wants is to admire the fantasy of that.

16:59 Mark: Perhaps the climax of the refrain. I'm not going to keep using the Greek words, the refrains is a little section called either or an ecstatic discourse which is all about the choices that you have are going to be all equally meaningless. Or in this case, all equally things that you will regret. Right. Nothing ends up being satisfactory when you actually put yourself in situations. The solution, therefore, is going to be some sort of detachment that, you know, you do want to throw yourself into things, but like, always be ready to jump out. So there's a certain kind of safety. And we then also looked at a.

17:36 Wes: You should read that.

17:37 Mark: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, let's definitely do that. That put us in good position for one of the longer essays, which was pretty short as this went. The second to last one, right before the Seducer's diary, sort of based on Mackie's recommendation. There's this one called Rotation of Crops that we all read, which was about. Given that everything sucks, given that everything is boring. It's a little more of a extended meditation on how to try to live in that situation.

18:04 Seth: Yeah.

18:04 Mark: Wes, do you want to jump right into the either or part?

18:07 Wes: Yeah. So this is on page 3839 somewhere. Yep, 38 and all right. I think it's a great place to start because it's really funny. Although I think a lot of the. A lot of this is actually quite humorous. But anyway, marry and you will regret it. Do not marry and you will Also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world and you will regret it. Weep over them and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way.

18:48 Mark: Why is this fourth one in there? That's just a slight wording variation. How is that? Is this a satire of some sort of syllogistic kind of talk?

18:58 Wes: Well, you. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it looks like a synthesis, right? You're. It's like you're laying out the premises and then coming to a conclusion, even though it's not a real syllogism. But I think rhetorically, just in the repetition, there's something to be said for the. For the repetition. It's almost like a prayer or a catechism or Hang yourself and you'll regret it. I'm skipping a little. Do not hang yourself and you will also regret it. And then if we go down a little bit, we're going to skip. He does that with a lot of things. This gentleman, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.

It is not merely in isolated moments that I, as Spinoza says, view everything aeterno modo and the mode of eternity. But I am continually in the mode of eternity. Many believe they too are this when after doing one thing or another, they unite or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding. For the true eternity does not lie behind either or. But before it.

19:54 Mark: We were trying to figure out last time what the difference between these. This internal infinity versus the external infinity was. And clearly, if you're trying to be authentic, but there is no authentic you, because you insist on remaining pure possibility, then there's a problem with that. And so that's what he's saying here is it's. Before you make the choice, you have infinity. You are infinity.

20:18 Wes: Well, let's say what the choice is, marrying or not marrying. But what's the significance of those two positions? I think one of them represents freedom and freedom from responsibility and from social ties and demands. And the other one, just look, just looking at marriage here, represents giving into that and becoming a social creature and having responsibilities, basically. So it's about ethical responsibility versus complete freedom, and you can't win either way. You'll regret it. Is that right?

20:56 Mark: In the rotation of crops, he flat out like, don't get married, keep your freedom. You know, you want that eternal possibility. You want to be able to. I forget what example he uses. You want to, you know, get your shoes blacked whenever you want.

21:09 Wes: What.

21:09 Mark: What is. There's some particular thing, you know, you want to be able to go to

21:12 Wes: the movies, go out riding. You want to be able to go out riding and all that shit. Do the man stuff, go hunting, right?

21:19 Mark: And so there. I don't think he's being ambivalent there, although he is being hyperbolic and the character himself is being clearly ironic in that speech. But I think, you know, if you view yourself as pure possibility, you're just always going to be changing your mind. You're going to be whimsically so, yes, if you miss out on this experience of entering into true love, entering into marriage, then you're definitely going to regret that, obviously. Even though you would totally regret it if you're in it as well, because you're just not a stable individual you can't commit to.

Maybe the thesis is that nobody, that we are fundamentally right, this is an existentialist text. We cannot tie ourselves down. Even if we say, I'm going to love eternally, right. He says in the rotation of crops, like, to declare that is to, you know, it's ridiculous. He said, if you're being done with time, right? I say I'm for eternity. Like, it would be more sensible to say, I will love you at least until next May, like, and then we'll kind of evaluate from there. That would be the more realistic.

22:21 Seth: The point is that the aesthete can't have any encumbrances, relationships, friends, jobs, spouses, children, because it's an impingement on their freedom, their freedom to do or not do all these things, to make the choice between A and B, to make the choice of regret. If you're not free to choose one path or the other, then you're not able to live this life of an aesthete. And so, you know, this is the Oscar Wilde position in this text.

22:53 Wes: It's a. Yeah, but I. I think this either OR section complicates it because it's not like the aesthete or A is comparing the ethical position to the aesthetic position and say, oh, look at my side, it's so great. Come over to my side. This is the way to live. Don't have any responsibilities. And maybe it's a bit more like that in the crop rotation piece, but in other parts of this, especially in the Diapsalmata. It suggests that he knows in a way that the aesthete can't really ever be fully satisfied with where they are. And it's not that that means that they're going to become ethical or religious, it's just that there's an element of nihilism in it. You can see the ways in which he tries to work out the position, but it seems to always come back to something like melancholy and depression and death and these things which you might not immediately associate with the aesthetic position.

23:49 Seth: Absolutely. And this is my point of asking the question at the very beginning of the podcast is if you're reading this without any context, you don't know, you don't have a sense that he's positioning. This is one character in a play that involves at least two other characters, and that this is one point of view. And it gets me into that. You know what I was saying last time about, or at least maybe it was the nightcap mark, where I was saying, I don't like dialogues. I don't like where people take on philosophers, take on Personas, you know, and because again, now that I have the context, I'm like, okay, this is like, you know, Philonous or whatever.

The guys from Dialogues on Natural Religions, it's like. Or Hylas or whatever. It's like this is one perspective and he's trying, he's taking it to the nth degree, trying to characterize it and to, in some sense, shock is a little bit of a shock value, but also to draw upon sympathies to, to get you out there and then to say, like, this is the natural conclusion. If you're going to take this position, if you're going to be this kind of person, if you're going to hold to these kinds of values, this is what you're committed to and that's okay. But understanding that this is not ultimately what he's arguing for, if such a thing can be said about Kierkegaard, is extremely helpful.

Otherwise it's. It's very confusing.

25:09 Mark: If he does it well, then it should be just motivating in itself. If this is a strawman, it'd be really hard to write a strawman for 700 pages. Like, why would you want to waste your time on a strawman like that? But hopefully he's living in this character. He's recognizing, you know, that this was him as a slightly younger person, that this is something that he has sympathy for, that this is a character that can be very self reflective. As we've said, and critique some of the aspects of even romantic views, but maybe not in a very consistent way.

There's, there's a lot of reference here. And maybe I'm again reading some of the things he directly says about Romanticism in the irony book. So that was my way into this. I really saw this. I was actually very disappointed in these aphorisms that like, oh, these are merely illustrations of what he just said. What we just read of somebody that cannot control themselves. They might become really religious, but they'll just do it for a day or whatever. You know, it won't have any real hold on them and that. Yeah, so you could be very reflective and critical from this point of view.

It's not merely a one dimensional character, but still there are traps that you will fall into, I think, according to this. And he wants to demonstrate these traps.

26:24 Wes: Yeah, it's certainly not a straw man because I think, you know, the way to think about this is he probably. These are a bunch of separate pieces that he wrote. I mean, this is my impression of it. I don't know the, the history of it, but it's like you're going back. Okay, let's scrape my hard drive for a bunch of stuff when I. That I wrote when I was younger. Not that, you know, I mean, Kierkegaard didn't actually live very long, but. But in any case, and I'm gonna put. Make a book and I'm gonna look at the stuff thematically that makes me look like the esthete.

None of it is like the perfect fit. Yeah, Kierkegaard. Some of this is obviously diary entries or it's, you know, an essay he wrote here or there. And I. It doesn't look perfectly fit, this Persona. In other words, this person is reflecting on the subject and is actually trying to reflect. So if you look at the first. What do you. What are we calling them? Aphorism and Diapsalmata. You know, he asks what is a poet? And you know, if you're a philosopher, that's where you like rub your hands together. All right, let's. We're going to get into the nitty gritty now to tell me what a poet is.

And then it turns out to be a bit of a parody. It's like one of the comparisons he makes is to this bronze bull in which people were put and slowly tortured over a fire. But I guess the apertures of the bull were fashioned in such a way that their screams would be turned into beautiful music. And that's what it's like to be a poet. You're anguished, right? You're tortured. And then when you cry, just the shape of your lips makes it so that all. It comes out so beautiful. This is like a parody of sublimation. It's a parody of a. Of one conception of what it means to be an artist.

And then he will say at the end of that, that I think he says right directly that this is a misunderstanding of the poet. And that the critic, which I think now he's attributing this theory to, is like the poet in every way, except that he not only does he not have the anguish and the personal pain, he doesn't have the music either. He has neither of those things otherwise. Exactly like a poet. And then worries and then says, I would rather be a swineherd out on Amager. I don't know the reference and be understood by swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people.

So pretty brilliant. You know, in the second. What does a baby want? The answer is Dada. And yet we deny hereditary sin, original sin. Yet whom does the child have to thank for his first thrashings? Whom else but his parents? There's a lot of meat in that, actually. It looks like a little throwaway. Funny thing, but I think it should make us immediate. You know, if you're a psychoanalyst, you immediately think of Freud and something called Fort Da. But you also think of Lacan and the name of the father, which is to say, what does the baby want?

The baby wants the name of the father. The baby wants the law. The baby wants morality. It wants to be given rules, rules for life. So this is an expression. And here a is suggesting that we inherently want punishment and we want moral prohibitions. And when we cry out as well, you know, at this point, they're using the word for daddy. But that in some sense, you know, our infantile urges are actually seeking out the moral realm or they're searching for conscience. And that's a fascinating idea. And it's also not just something that a strawman aesthete would say.

29:53 Mark: What about the bottom of the page? How unreasonable people are. They never use the freedoms they have, but demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech. Like, this just seems like. This doesn't seem like the romantic point of view. This just seems like kind of an asshole. Like, I'm not really sure. I guess I see the point of. Oh, you. You want to go and protest, but you, you know, just taking this. This Very literally, you're not using the, the power of your mind. But of course, freedom of speech is still important for all the reasons that we've gone into on other episodes. So what really is the point of this, of saying this?

30:28 Wes: I was reminded a little bit of the Brothers K, where the idea that we are thrown into this position of need and Christ doesn't create a socialist utopia for us means that we are bound not to be able to use the freedom that we have been given by God. That in a way it is self canceling. So this paradox of people having freedom of thought and yet not using it, but demanding freedom of speech, this again has something to do with rationality. In the previous aphorism he talks about, you know, you look at a child and you, you have hope for them when you know one day they're going to be rational.

But then you look at human beings and rationality is a big turn off. They're big, you know, like a really rational person is a nerd and they're robotic or they're obsessional or however you want to put it. And you say, good Lord. So rationality is something we desire prospectively. It's like an ideal. And this is where, you know, the free speech thing comes in. Free speech is another ideal. We desire it in the abstract, we desire it as an, as an ideal. But when it touches reality, when it touches the concrete, it leeches the vitality out of it and we don't like it.

It seems to cancel out the desiring, the concrete, the immediacy part of things. The thing that the aesthete is at least trying to get to or trying to hold on to or in search of. So we mourn the loss of that. You know, we don't. We look at a child misbehaving and being irrational and we're like, okay, one hope they grow up and mature, but then adults, that vitality of the child is no longer there.

32:04 Mark: So I guess the freedom of thought versus freedom of speech thing I could see as championing again the internal infinity, right? That is freedom of thought versus the external infinity, which does, I think translate into I don't want to actually get a job or get married or do anything specific because I want to be able to, you know, it's this wish fulfillment. I want to be able to, you know, be a genie. I want to be able to, to go everywhere and do everything. You know, this desire for unlimited power really is going to be, of course,

32:35 Wes: self defeating and freedom without responsibility.

32:37 Mark: So that's what freedom of speech in its ultimate, you know, the reason of speech would be prohibited is because it is in fact dangerous to someone. Or, you know, it's. It's interfering with the social order. So be a philosopher instead. So this might be something that Kierkegaard agrees with, even though it's coming out of the mouth of this character.

32:56 Seth: No, I like that characterization of freedom without responsibility. It again harkens back to the notion of Socratic irony. The negativity that Kierkegaarda says that Socrates, Socrates's daimon brings into play. This is just freedom without responsibility is this notion of free play that ultimately has no accountability to an ideal. When he was talking about Socrates, he was talking about the notion of an idea as opposed to the concrete. He's talking about as opposed to the concrete laws of the state. But it's an abstract idea with no content.

Right. As opposed to a set of ideals that ultimately would come along. And I think you're right, Wes, to characterize in the aesthetic position. We're still talking about Socratic irony. We're still talking about subjectivity that has an ironic position, which is freedom. But it's an unanchored freedom. It's a negative, you know, it's an unanchored freedom that produces nothing positive. It's still negativity. And that's because it's ultimately solely reflected upon itself. The aesthete enjoys the experience of life, whether it's what we would consider to be positive or negative.

The aesthete doesn't associate, doesn't say, oh, this is happening to me because or doesn't associate any kind of value judgments to the experiences. It's just simply and doesn't seek out one type of experience over another. It's just. It's literally like a non decision, a negative position that simply reacts to whatever comes its way with a bemused, self referential kind of experience that turns everything into. It filters everything, I should say, through this lens of ironic detachment.

34:55 Wes: I think the aesthete has trouble enjoying life actually. And part of that is every attempt at enjoyment actually creates ties and obligations. So if you try to in real life be a Don Juan and enjoy complete sexual freedom, let's say you're constantly dealing with the problem of other subjectivities and relationships with people and actual demands and obligations. You can't shake yourself of those things, which is why you want to do it in, you know, which is why it appeals to people often more in fantasy than it does in actual real life. So, you know, this next paragraph, I think is very revealing where he says, I don't feel like doing anything.

Some of this sounds like, you know, what it'd be like to date a Kardashian or something, like a really spoiled person. I don't want to do anything. I don't feel like that. So he gives a lot of examples. And the different reasons for not wanting to do anything is because it would either activate him, stimulate him, or it might tire him out, or it might make him stay the same or make him change. He doesn't want to stay the same and he doesn't want to change. And desire, you know, the satisfaction of desire is in a way implicated in both of those things because, you know, desire moves you to do something and to satisfy the desire.

And then once you've satisfied it, you get put back into a position of stasis. And that whole dynamic of going back and forth is actually the thing that the aesthete is trying to transcend. They're not trying to live in that world of the person who's just devoted to desire in that sense. They're trying to transcend it. And they're doing that through the other form of the aesthetic, through the poetic form.

36:49 Mark: Right. Page 29. Most people rush after pleasure so fast, they rush right past it. And he has several comments in here about how there's a disorder with relation to time. We've sort of already referred to this of both in what this character is criticizing, and clearly this character still has. You know, there might be even something ill formed about the way that he's criticizing this. Because sometimes it sounds like Nietzsche that if you just embrace eternity, then you're a despiser of life. You have to embrace the temporal. And I think that, yeah, if you embrace the eternal, you end up erasing.

Erasing the temporal as well. Right. Or something. Again, I'm thinking about that marriage example of I will love you forever. Well, when you take that position, then you're putting such a high. Maybe when you have such a high goal to aim at, then you're not going to do your due diligence for the things that would be falling short of that goal. Right. It seems like having a goal is a good thing, but if it's a goal that is out of your reach, then you're just going to get frustrated and you're not going to do anything with it at all. I don't know if that's exactly on point to the.

What's wrong with the chronology issue.

38:00 Wes: Well, you're making me think of this next bit on aspiration, on 20. I don't know if it's directly relevant, but generally speaking, the imperfection everything human is that its aspirations are achieved only by way of their opposites. He talks about the melancholy having the best sense of the comic, the dissolute, the best sense of the moral, and gaining salvation through sin. I don't know if that speaks directly to what you were just saying, Mark.

38:23 Mark: The overall motto is a damned if you do, damned if you don't. It comes to this either or thing that if you embrace the eternal, there's something wrong with that. If you reject the eternal strictly in favor of the temporal, there's something wrong with that as well. And this one is pointing out part of the dynamic of that is like, yeah, you have some sort of ideal, some sort of goal that you set before you, but the only way that you can realize that is to realize its opposite. Sort of at the same time, it's self defeating. So the alternative is to, you know, do neither of those things. But then you're just enervated, then you're just a slug and you're not actually doing anything, and that's obviously no good.

39:01 Wes: So he'll say in the midst of his joy, depression beckons. He's basically in love with his depression. It's the most faithful mistress he has ever known. So it's a way of being connected to something that he doesn't have to hope for. They can't disappoint him, that there are no obligations to and and all the rest. It sounds like an argument for giving up in a way that if you

39:23 Seth: stay within the framework of having to make choices, then yes, the argument, it is an argument in favor of giving up. Although he does say at some point, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Right.

39:34 Wes: And also it'll be boring and you won't like it. You'll regret it.

39:37 Seth: You'll regret it. Exactly.

39:39 Mark: I regret buying that Rush album.

39:41 Seth: Well,

39:44 Wes: but you would have regretted not

39:46 Seth: buying it's not possible to regret Loving Life.

39:49 Wes: Buy it or not buy it. You would have.

39:53 Seth: This is where, like again, given the context, you see, he's kind of pounding this into you as if ultimately you're locking into this structure of choice and you believe that one choice is better than another, you are ultimately going to experience regret. He's trying to get you to the point of realizing that the structure itself is flawed. The choosing to A or to not A, to B or to not B, all of these things. Ultimately choice is regret. There is no way to achieve the sense of fulfillment and satisfaction by virtue of making choices about your actuality. You know, that's ultimately what he's trying to say here. And that's going to set the stage for something else.

40:38 Wes: I think, you know, at the same time, choice itself becomes problematic because it implicates rationality or some sort of reasoned decision making. And I think his argument is that that approach to the ethical quickly degrades into the theoretical. I think that's what. So when I say the theoretical into something that doesn't actually end up producing action. And I think that's the point of his little Aladdin aphorism on 22. So he'll say, Aladdin is so very refreshing because this piece has the audacity of the child of the genius and the wildest wishes. I don't know if he's just talking about the. Is it from A Thousand and One Nights or whatever it's called anyway, I don't know. Or if he's talking. He's probably talking about.

41:26 Mark: He's talking about the Robin Williams version, right?

41:29 Wes: He's talking about the Robin Williams version. So, audacity of a child genius, the wildest wishes. And then he goes on to talk about this idea that how many are there who, inspired by what is talked about so much in our age, that man is created in God's image, have the authentic voice of command? All right, the typical we're created in God's image idea is that we are created as free and we are created as reflective and self conscious and rational and all that stuff that goes along with it in this tradition. And here Kierkegaard is seizing on a different quality of God, this authentic voice of command and saying, well, do we really have that?

Are we really in God's image if we don't have that? And then he goes on to say, or do we not at all stand like Dreaden, bowing and scraping, worrying about asking too much or too little? Or is not every magnificent demanding eventually diminished to morbid reflecting? All right, so this is a great example of the way in which this relationship between practical reason and theoretical reason, magnificent, demanding in the image of God with the authentic voice of command as something at some practical level motivates us to do Something I think self directed can degrade into kind of navel gazing, which is a variation on our theoretical use of reason, where we say, well, why am I like this?

Do I want this? Do I not want this? Am I depressed today? Am I, you know, a lot of the quality of the stuff that we're reading here. So when we talk about choice we have to say, well, what is choice? Kierkegaard I think is going to have a different conception of choice and he's going to be critical of traditional rationalistic. I don't know if that's the right word. Conceptions.

43:19 Mark: Well, it sounds like his character should be partially examined rather than thoroughly, you know, poisoning their life with. With reflection that enervates their voice of command, their will to power, their desires, etc.

43:33 Wes: Okay, I wasn't going making. Fully making the association to will to power but yeah, that sounds like a

43:39 Mark: good place to end part one. We have much more to talk about. We can. We can do hope. We can do friendship. Why might they. You should not have friends. A little more about that. What friends do to us. Many other fun topics for part two. If you're a supporter, you can get that in your feed right now. If you want that sooner rather than later, go to partialexaminelife.com support Sign up there. If you support us through Apple, it will show up in your feed next week. But it'll be the wonderful ad free version and you'll have our love later.

44:11 Wes: Bye bye.