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

0:08 Seth: Oh God.

0:10 Mark: Yes.

0:11 Seth: Oh, you know, you come up on halftime, your 5 year old's like, you coming to bed, Daddy? No. You get chips then.

0:19 Mark: Chips?

0:20 Seth: No, not those chips. Not spicy. I don't want those. I don't want to just going through that. Okay. I'm jonesing for a gluten free brownie right now. Or a blondie. I'd take that.

0:31 Wes: Hook a brother up.

0:32 Mark: I feel like this should be on the record.

0:35 Wes: I know. We're doing.

0:37 Mark: Hey, we're already in progress. You're joining Partially Examined Life Episode 330 on Kierkegaard's Either/Or already a project.

0:47 Wes: And we're tired, God damn it.

0:50 Mark: And whimsical tired.

0:52 Seth: And we want gluten free sweets.

0:54 Mark: Gluten free sweets are boring.

0:56 Wes: We want things that we can't really satisfy us in the end.

1:00 Seth: Yeah, no, I mean I. I would regret eating a gluten free blondie right now, but I'm also regretting that I don't have one to eat.

1:13 Mark: Whether we've been infected by this reading or it really does actually in slack. It sent a song that I wrote at age 18 that was very much like the overcoming and the getting really into something and then getting over it. That's just. It's all too familiar. It's just repetitive and it's all kind of boring. I want to be on this constant self improvement or self overcoming or something. But even that, you know, you want to overcome that cycle. Boredom is a trap.

1:42 Seth: The boredom thing. I'm feeling like I want to go on a personal slash biographical tangent here, but I will not indulge myself if you all are not on board with it.

1:56 Mark: If it'll get us eventually back, I think this is a great episode to do that.

2:00 Seth: Okay, well, so a couple of things about. My wife asked, what's the episode on tonight? So the last time she asked me that question, I said, irony. And then we spent, you know, I don't know, 20 minutes googling definitions of irony. Because I was like, I don't know that I could define it for you. I don't exactly know the difference between irony and sarcasm. And she said, well, Google says, or Wikipedia says, there's Socratic irony and tragic irony and comic irony and all these different kinds of irony.

2:30 Mark: Did I tell you that when I wrote my Philosophy for Teens book, they insisted that I put the word irony in the glossary in the back. And the definitions had to be really short. So I think I just said, like, something saying what you don't mean, like, that's all I could say.

2:45 Seth: The definition of irony itself does not make sense. Like, it's like saying the opposite of what you mean. Like, no, that's not irony. That could be any number of things. Anyway, side point, she was asking me what this episode was about. I was like, I'm not entirely sure. I said, you know, but the writer Kierkegaard, he's one of the bigs. I mean, let's face it, Kierkegaard is.

3:08 Mark: I don't know, Seth is making air quotes.

3:11 Seth: Sorry, making like air. Not air scare quotes, but more like he's one of the big boys. He belongs in the canon. Like Kierkegaard, he's one of the K's, right? He comes up with, you know, Kant and Hegel and continue the list of K's, Kropotkin. And my point being is he's big and important.

3:35 Mark: So we've been told.

3:37 Seth: So we've been told. And I've always struggled with how to get access to him. My impression was he was always the Christian guy. He was always the one who reconciled everything and Christianity and God and that, that was not my jam. And even in the few little aphorisms where he's like, oh, the Jews, they mix the coins, you know, they take a little sheathing off of the top, cheat God, you know, like, doesn't endear me to him anymore. That being said, Louis Mackey, of course, was Wes. I know I heard you saying you didn't know that much about him. He was a big towering figure on my side of the fence while we were at UT and slouching towards Bethlehem. I don't know if it was. Mackey wrote an essay called Slouching towards Bethlehem, and then Joan Didion had her essay about that and it's somehow all related.

4:27 Wes: Like, I got the sense from a Yeats. Yeah. Originally from a Yeats poem.

4:31 Seth: Yeah, I got the sense of the second coming. But yeah, Kierkegaard has got. If you're on the inside, Kierkegaard's like your boy. You know what I mean? Like, somehow if you're in the know, he's got some kind of slack.

4:42 Mark: And that's not true of like half the continental people. Like, if you really know, then you'll. You'll get the point of Hegel. You'll get Derrida. You just don't. Oh, Deleuze, he's. He's the guy.

4:52 Seth: No, no, it's an interesting point, Mark. You're right. Like, nobody ever was like, oh, if you're in the know, you'll get Hegel. Like, Hegel was never cool. Hegel is just Hegel. Kierkegaard was somehow subversive. Hegel was never subversive. Hegel can't be subversive. But Kierkegaard somehow could be. And I remember Mackie also really liked. You know, he had a thing about. He respected Spinoza. Anyway, the side point being that I have struggled wanting to read Kierkegaard, not understanding him, not knowing how to approach his writing in his text, being somewhat fearful of his Christianity.

And when I say fearful, just meaning, like, if that's how you're going to solve the problems, then I don't need to read you. But there is a. Stylistically, he's a gadfly. He really doesn't make it easy. And he's not a systematizer, he's not a Nietzsche by any stretch of the imagination. But he's challenging. I mean, like, I'm beginning to get a sense of why he's attractive to people who have sense, you know, who are looking for a subversive element. I guess I should say I was

6:03 Mark: mostly reading him as, like, I understand this is supposed to be kind of the stand up comedy of his time, but like, no, I don't actually find this entertaining, but I'm warming to it and there's at least some. Can I just read one? Here are we. Can we turn back to the text.

6:18 Seth: Sure. No, never turn back to the text.

6:21 Mark: I've been looking at page 32 here. There are a few things on here. The one in the middle. What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads a sign in a secondhand shop saying pressing done here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, it would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale. So at least that is thought provoking to me. That philosophy is not actually even in trying to describe real life. It's like it's not even just quoting something, it's referring to something, it's referring to a quote that would be useful elsewhere. Right. So it's definitely not using, but it's not even mentioning the mention is out of context. I read this as two layers of irony.

7:03 Wes: It says, you know, get your reality here, get your reality inside, and then you find out you're just buying the sign. So you are caught in the realm of reflection and words. And don't get at the reference, don't get at the substance, the thing that those words are supposed to get you to. You know, it's a kind of ordinary criticism of philosophy, but put in a very subtle, interesting way.

7:29 Mark: Right. And for Romanticism in particular, I think we were kind of saying that there's a lot of Romantics telling you to seize the day, Romantics saying a lot of stuff, but actually doing those things is maybe a. They might even be self defeating, self contradictory ideals. If you actually follow them to the letter like that, you would not actually find it. It's more fun to say seize the day than to actually seize the day.

7:57 Wes: He's pointing in general to this gulf between the practical and the theoretical. As I said before, and this is a big theme beginning with Kant and all through the German idealists and the Romantics. Right. One of the big innovations of the German idealists is to say the practical is going to be prior to the theoretical. It has priority, the theoretical, which is to say the world of determinism and rationality and scientific causality is a threat to the practical because it's a threat to our freedom. Without freedom, there is no such thing as morality.

So we're going to do another little Copernican revolution and we're going to make everything revolve around the concept of the practical. We're going to make the world safe for practicality. And if that means it's all in your head, then it's all okay. That's a terrible caricature. Of idealism, but that means that the ego produces everything in the world, then so be it, because we got to make the line up, we got to make sure that we can actually be free in the world, even if that means that we have to create it ourselves. So, but yeah, so I mean, I think in general Kierkegaard is very sensitive to this idea that the reduction, I, I've said it once before, and I don't want to keep beating a dead horse, but that the reduction of practicality and action to rational autonomy and reflection is, is actually missing something, that philosophy can't actually get us there.

And obviously it's gonna, I think it's gonna be faith, right? That will. And you know, and again, the big rejection to Hegel and Kant is this kind of reduction of religion to morality. And religion has got to be its own thing and in a way it's gotta be prior to morality and it's gotta be irrational, right?

9:37 Mark: It's going to be a sort of romantic take on faith, that the leap of faith is very much unlike the well grounded rational faith or even the Kantian. There is room for faith in my architectonic system that I've worked out. Faith is forced upon me by practical reason, something like that, right.

9:53 Wes: Kant's famous dictum was that he, he had to critique reason and curtail reason in order to make room for faith, because faith was threatened. Just as, you know, you could do proofs for the existence of God, those proofs don't work. So reason is actually, if you want to be a rational person and you think that theoretical rationality applies to this world of noumena, applies to these theological entities or metaphysical entities, then all the contradictions you run into are going to destroy your faith. So you got to keep theoretical reason out of that realm and make room for faith.

And then he has a complex way of relating that to practical reason. But what it looks like is that, you know, everything is deflationary, right? So the Bible is interpreted purely allegorically for both Kant and Hegel. It sort of sucks the magic out of religion in the end and aligns it to this very super rational approach to things. So I think he, you know, oddly, even though we're getting this aesthetic position, and maybe it looks a bit like the romantic position, and he's saying things that, you know, I think that we're also meant to see Kierkegaard as critiquing, but I think there's something Kierkegaard embraces about this aesthetic position, which is that we need more than reason.

That morality. There's something lacking in morality. And even though the aesthetic, you know, A doesn't see himself, as far as I can tell, as consciously reacting against morality, it's not that reflective. I think B will see. Will be a much more conscious reaction to the aesthetic position. But it's implicit. That suspicion is implicit in all of this stuff. So it's like. And if that's intentional on Kierkegaard's part, it's brilliant because it's someone who's not exactly conscious of the argument that they're making, but it's there in the subtext of all of this.

11:43 Seth: Yeah. It's not. The Kierkegaardian characterization would be unease. It's not a Hegelian self awareness of, like, being distanced or being in this kind of relationship with the self or the other. It's just like. And Mark, maybe this is ultimately what leads us to the discussion of boredom. Like, what is the state of being where in the Hegelian system, right. There would be an awareness of a lack in an attempt to consume that lack and bring it internal and yada di, blah, blah, blah? What is the state of being where there's an awareness and simultaneously a kind of disinterest in.

Or an indifference to trying to reconcile those things. Like, in a certain way, the Kierkegaardian aesthete is. It's somebody who's caught in the Hegelian dialectic. It's caught in the Hegelian struggle, but doesn't have the motivation to actually try and reconcile the opposites, to do the synthesis. And Kierkegaard captures that in this concept of boredom. Boredom is simultaneously the indifference, the awareness of. And indifference to the set of circumstances that are creating the unease or the disease. I want to say disease. Like I'm some kind of German.

Like, put a hyphen in there.

13:13 Mark: Yes.

13:13 Seth: But you guys get what I'm saying, that it's really only the aesthete that can experience boredom, which is the recognition that something is off and that needs to be reconciled and not having the will to actually do anything about.

13:29 Wes: Sounds like you're moving us to crop rotation.

13:34 Mark: Yeah, we should.

13:35 Wes: We want to make that move.

13:36 Mark: Let's spend some time with that.

13:38 Wes: There are a lot of beautiful nuggets.

13:41 Mark: Yeah.

13:42 Wes: The ipsumata. So I think it's worth. Seth, like. So this is. We're on page because the page numbers aren't. Yeah, 285. So, yeah, it's. It's worth just looking at the very beginning because. So he'll say two interesting things about boredom. He wants to make boredom the replacement for two very common ideas. One is that, okay, so boredom is a replacement for rationality. It's not that the essence of being a human being is to be a rational animal, it's to be a boring animal. The basic principle that all people are boring is the way he puts it. And then the other replacement he wants to make is he wants to replace it for idleness. Idleness is not the root of all evil. Boredom is the root of all evil. So those are, those are two interesting ways that he's going to use the concept, right?

14:28 Mark: And wants to distinguish between people who are boring and people who are bored, that it's the masses who are boring. They're maybe well employed, they have a purpose, but it's the elites who have disentangled themselves, who live ironically, they're the one who find everybody else boring. And ironically enough, those people tend to be the most entertaining to be around, even though they themselves are bored. I'm not sure that this is. You can think of examples or construct them where this would be true, but I tend to feel like boredom is kind of contagious. Is it really the case that when these elites get together in their coffee shops and smoke, are they entertaining each other or are they merely groveling together and, you know, making each other feel even more bored and disgusted? I think disgust would be a good companion thing here.

15:22 Wes: He's making boredom out to be sort of the antithesis of the aesthetic. That's why he says that children, when you hire a nanny, you can't just worry about finding someone who's going to be nice to your kids and take good care of them and care about their well being. You need someone who's entertaining. So hiring a nanny is actually an aesthetic project. You have to include aesthetic considerations. And so the aesthetic, in a way, is about avoiding boredom, about forestalling, preventing boredom. Those two things stand in opposition to each other.

And he ironically, amusingly marvels at the fact that people are willing to take that into consideration when they hire their nannies, but not when it comes to divorce or politics or journalism. We don't get rid of a king because they're boring. We don't. We're not allowed to divorce someone because they're boring. But really the aesthetic according to this should be a more elevated consideration in our decisions in the world. So again, it comes into contrast, again, into opposition with the ethical right. Normally we would think of something like divorce as a ethical decision.

Is this the right person for me or did they do something wrong? Were they unfaithful? Blah, blah, blah. But to think of it in terms of this person bored me. So I'm gonna get. I'm no longer gonna be in this relationship. That's the aesthetic approach.

16:47 Mark: I think the nice way of putting it is we didn't have as many interests in common as I would have liked. I'm sure they found what they were doing to be plenty interesting, but they weren't interested in talking philosophy and music and whatever I wanted to talk about. And so.

17:00 Seth: Well, he says that what you just described, Mark, is the facile description of friendship. Sharing interest in common, like that's what he says.

17:11 Wes: Yeah.

17:11 Seth: Does not make somebody not boring. That just sharing interest in common isn't. Isn't the issue. What Wes is bringing up is something more profound, which is boredom as a rubric, as a yardstick, as a measure. You know, like, okay, let's talk about the marriage example. You can get a divorce because somebody was unfaithful. What does that mean? Means they had sex outside of wedlock. What does that mean? Why is that a big deal? Because there's a law, there's an edict or some sort of thing. You can get divorced because somebody is not meeting the accepted standards for, you know, like, spousal contribution.

I don't know, whatever that might be. What Kierkegaard's doing here is trying to introduce another horizon on which you could make a judgment about a relationship. Well, they're just boring. This is boring Now. The sex is good now. You know, they cook and clean and whatever. But I'm bored again. Self referential, solipsistic in some respect. Egotistical, for sure. But it points to this aesthetic judgment. Like the aesthete can convince themselves that a spouse could be. And, you know, this will ultimately lead to that Seducer's diary conversation, which we probably won't get to tonight.

But it's a rubric by which you can judge a relationship. Except that it's not some kind of religious or moral dimension or law or rule that's being deployed. It's the aesthetic dimension.

19:04 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because the part, you know, where Mark pointed to, where he says the plebeians are the boring ones because they are the busy ones, Right? They are the workers. He associates work and busyness with being boring and the nobility in their idleness can be entertaining. But he starts that section like he starts the essay. But this idea that all human beings are boring, and I think ultimately the meaning of that is That I think, because of this association with work, what it means is that human beings are boring just by virtue of being real, of not simply existing in the realm of fantasy.

And that's what work means, right? We work. We have to sustain ourselves. And work is just one example of a broader phenomenon of having to survive and to be material beings and eat and do all the rest of the stuff that is part of life and do laundry. So he'll say that indefatigable activity makes us animals. It's not spiritual. And that's what makes busyness boring. Idleness is actually the divine thing. Idleness is the entertaining thing. And idleness is the divine thing. So I think this mode of valuation set that you're talking about, this aesthetic mode, in a way, is hostile to, paradoxically, even though it's supposed to be focused on the immediate.

And you would think. And the sensuous, and you would think the material, in a way, it's hostile to it. It has to elevate it into the realm of fantasy to find it interesting. And so similarly, right, he talks about, you know, he makes an allusion to orgasm verging on death.

20:44 Seth: Right.

20:44 Wes: The consummation in the realm of the flesh. And the material realm always opens up immediately a sense of dissatisfaction that it doesn't really fill in the spiritual, you know, the lack, as Beauvoir would put it. It doesn't actually get us where we want. So I don't know. Is that making sense?

21:04 Seth: Yeah.

21:04 Mark: I appreciate you bringing in some sort of psychoanalytic language here about fantasy, because I was reading this as straight Camus before Camus, that to say everything is boring is to say everything is absurd. Why is the Work a day world boring is because it's ultimately pointless. Okay? We're doing it to survive. Well, what is the point of surviving, right? Unless you have some sort of transcendent

21:26 Wes: principle, you gotta survive so you can work, Mark.

21:28 Mark: Right, Right. Unless you have some sort of transcendent principle that Kierkegaard is ultimately pointing to. It's like, well, because God said so, or, cause there's a moral law or, you know, something that you can be the serious man with relation to. If you are the fundamentally unserious man, then everything is going to be boring. Everything is going to be absurd. And, you know, according to Camus, you should actually admit that and embrace that and sort of come up with strategies for living with that. And I was reading. Kierkegaard is basically saying the same thing here in this crop rotation essay.

We have ways of don't just change the location of your crops. In other words, like, physically, I'm going to spend some time in the country until I'm bored of that. I'm going to spend some time in the city till I'm bored of that. I'm going to keep going back and forth that. That is a boring way to be. But you could change yourself sort of that inner infinity, again, impressing upon, you know, that you can experience things in different ways. And I like the point that he makes about the external infinity. We have too many possibilities. And that's partly why we're bored, is because there's just too many things we could do if we were restricted.

And he talks about kids trapped in a classroom with a boring teacher that then find, like looking at the pattern of the sunlight on the wall, that becomes endlessly fascinating. Like, we have the inner resources to find beauty, to find something interesting. And it's actually kind of easier to do that when we don't have a million choices, you know, so here we had a Kierkegaard against the Internet episode. Here's. Here's another one. You know that the openness that is the Internet, always just something else to click over to, like, that is not going to actually solve your boredom.

That is going to exacerbate it.

23:06 Seth: So Kierkegaard is very clear here that chasing novelty is not crop rotation. It's not just trying to find the next new thing. That's not what this.

23:16 Wes: He talks about the travel cure. Right. It's not just, I'm going to move to the city, I'm going to move to the country. I'm going to move abroad.

23:22 Seth: Oh, you know, I moved from the country to the city, the city to another country, from Europe to America. Like, you can keep chasing that. That's not what it's about. And Mark, what you pointed to is. He's alluding to. He's like, do you remember what it was like to be a child? And you trap a spider under a. I'll use a more modern reference, like, you know, like a mason jar or something like that. And then you just watch it move around. You're endlessly fascinated by it. It's like what you're trying to do is not find novel experiences in actuality, but rather find a renewed sense of experiencing things as new, as novel in yourself.

In a sense, trying to become childlike. And there's again, I'm going to try to avoid using the term authenticity, but there's. When you look at the life of the aesthete in the first part in this either or one, there's nothing childlike again, that ironic detachment which Kierkegaard sees as part of adult subjectivity. Irony is just antithetical to this, like, childlike innocence, this ability to reconnect and see the world anew. It prevents you from having that revelatory experience. And so I don't know what either or part two is going to bring.

And I don't know how we're going to get to the religious through the. The ethical and then to the religious from here.

24:56 Wes: I don't think we're going to get there.

24:57 Mark: Well, certainly through another book.

25:01 Seth: Yeah. No, no, I'm just saying there is this sense in which what he's trying to point to is not chasing down something external to ourselves, that we're somehow not having the experiences we should be having. Instead, it's about the way in which we experience and characterize and emotionally react to the experiences that we do have.

25:27 Wes: Well, I think this is a good segue to this section of Crop rotation on forgetting and remembering.

25:33 Mark: Speaking of experience, very much addressing this issue with time.

25:38 Wes: Yeah. So page 293. He makes the point, right, that we desire to forget unpleasant things. Although this, in a way depends on how we remember things, which depends on how we experience things, whether we hope is integrated into that experience. So people who are hopeful when they remember things, they recollect in a way that they can't forget. I think the point is that the recollection is more bitter in a way. It's the recollection itself becomes unpleasant. So that poetic memory is the memory that easily forgets and is an expression of forgetting.

And then he says it's basically a way of. Poetic memory is a way of having one's cake and eating it too. And it's at this point that he says, you know, if you perfect this art of forgetting and recollecting, which we can explain in a much better way than I just did know what that means. But you can play shuttlecock with existence, which. It sounds a lot like a ironic position. If you have the power of forgetting, you're more resilient. Not just because you're not remembering unpleasant things, like something is being repressed, but you forget the pleasant as well.

Because part of the problem. There's an inherent problem in pleasant things, which is that once they're done, we feel a sense of loss. And so there has to be some element of forgetting with respect to the pleasant as well. He calls forgetting the scissor that you use to Snip away what you can't use under maximal supervision of recollection.

27:16 Mark: Right. It has to be reinterpretation because it can't. You can't literally make yourself forget. But you could, if it's a horrible thing, just by talking about it, you know, go to your therapist, go through it a bunch of times, process it. You know, if you just try to snip it out completely, it's gonna just come back at an inopportune time, full force. You have to dull it of its power. That makes sense. And I guess there's also a way of not feeling, you know, I have good memories of my. Someone who's now dead. What are ways of processing that so that it's not merely unpleasant for me to look back on that person?

Especially, you know, you have a dead kid or something like, you know, it's just a real tragedy where it might be just. Yeah. In our family, we just don't talk about the sibling who. One of the kids who died because, like, it's just a touchy subject. And it would be way better to be able to do something, have fond recollections that involves actually, in the same way, undoing. I guess I'm kind of conflating the tragedy of losing the person, which is a bad thing, with the pleasant. You were just saying, Wes, the fact that it was pleasant and is now gone.

There doesn't have to be a tragedy. That in itself is unpleasant.

28:32 Wes: Yeah, I think. But I think your example is a very good point, you know, in talking about more loss and mourning and death is a good point. But I think you're also right that it could be more minor. Any pleasant thing, because it's temporal, because it's going to pass away. It's almost like, you know, sitting down to a cheeseburger and being really excited about what you're eating and about. About to eat and eating, but then thinking, well, then I'm after that, I'm not going to be hungry anymore. I'm not going to be enjoying the cheeseburger. What then?

What am I going to do then? What hole am I going to fill? But any, any, any case. Yeah, if you have a great experience, whatever it is, if you go, you know, whatever wonderful experience you've had in life, once it's over, it's over and it's turned into a memory. And it can be a pleasant memory, but it's also something that you no longer have, that's gone. And I think the upshot of this whole section, it leads into the Relationship section. And the part that Seth mentioned about guarding against real friendship. Right. That's the part where he talks about, well, let's redefine friendship not as being closely connected to someone, but the sharing likes and dislikes and mutual assistance and counsel and action and money, like lending people money.

Just like a very materialistic, transactional conception of friendship. And the point of that is to. It sounds like this art of recollecting and forgetting is inherently part of that detachment from others. I think what this is is you proactively don't get too attached to anything so that when you lose it, you're not that disappointed. I think that's really what this whole thing about forgetting and recollecting is about.

30:20 Mark: This friendship section is deeply cynical. Two friends form a close alliance in order to be everything to each other, even though no human being can be anything for another human being except to be in his way. This is like no exit. Sartre's no exit. You know, that hell is other people again. I think Kierkegaard is dangling over head that there is something, you know, the family that prays together stays together, or some other law like union. I don't know what the ethical version of marriage is going to be. We'll have to see if he talks about marriage again there.

Because it can't just be, you know, a hollow. The law says that we're together now. Like that can't be the positive case for marriage. That sounds like more criticism of marriage. But I would think that if somehow you are properly reconciled to actuality, then everybody's not just going to be in your way. You can actually engage with them in a real human back and forth interaction that somehow maybe Kierkegaard is going to say that unless I can love the God in you and you can love the God in me, or something like that. We need a lubricant. We need a divine lubricant to not just be existentially separate from each other.

31:29 Seth: Yeah.

31:29 Wes: Truly gross.

31:30 Seth: Yeah.

31:30 Wes: He gives all these prohibitions, almost like commandments about don't have any friends, don't do any. Doesn't mean you can't have contact with people. Sure. Just give yourself your alone time. What he sounds like he's saying, just make sure you always have a way of detaching and running away and the relationship will have a different significance to you because of that. That's where he starts getting into this whole idea of crop rotation. I think crop rotation, correct me if I'm wrong, has something to do with rotating between people. Or rotating in and out of, you know, regulating time with people or one's relationships to others, the way one conceives of other people, you know, it's intimately connected to guarding against contracting a relationship, as he puts it. Even friendship is dangerous.

32:19 Seth: Right. But there's also the remembering and forgetting is about mastery again, you know, it's about the aesthete, making choices, consciously deciding what to entertain and how to react to it. The ability to have control over remembering and forgetting is not just about mastery of present experience. Sorry, not just about mastery of the past, but it's about mastery of the present. And it's about having some kind of freedom from the anticipation of the future. If what is coming to you in memory is unbidden unwanted, then it can overwhelm you and it can make you fearful and anxious about a recurrence in the future.

And if you're searching or grasping for something in the past and you cannot retrieve it, in other words, it's a forgetfulness over which you can't, you know, over which you have no control, then it can create anxiety for the future about what you might lose or forget or how that might impact your future. So this was the part that resonated in the most Heideggerian sense about this notion of past, present and future. He's essentially saying that mastery, the aesthete is not beholden to time in the same way that the rest of us are, because the aesthete can choose to forget, can choose to remember, and then more importantly, can control how they react and respond to those things.

Meaning that there's nothing that can come in the future that could potentially be trauma inducing or surprising or what have you.

34:11 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a great point because he says the hopeful person recollects in a way that they can't forget. So you can't master your recollection until your relationship to the future does not involve these big aspirations, these big hopes. You know, you marvel at nothing.

34:28 Mark: Yeah, I mentioned how he was praising childhood later just in terms of. As an example of having limited resources and sort of making the most of it, making your inner infinity. Being Seth was characterized as you're alive in a certain way that you're not once you become a reasonable person and, you know, you get a job and stuff. But here he seems to be, you know, being a child, you're marveling at everything. This openness makes you very vulnerable. And so it's actually not a very good way to have mental control over yourself. So it seems like he's actually advocating stoicism, this extreme mental control. And kind of take everything at an ironic distance or at a distance. You don't just react to things. It's very weird for a romantic to be saying that. Because a romantic seems like he should purely be praising the childhood, praising the immediate. But by saying.

35:23 Wes: Well, it's kind of the paradox, right, of the Don Juan or, you know, the womanizer who is, in one sense getting a lot of experience, a lot of sensual experience in the world of immediacy and desire. But to be doing that has to be detached from people at the level of relationships. And maybe detached from even some of the central aspects of the experience. I don't know.

35:47 Mark: Yeah, interesting. I mean, in our intro to the Don Juan that we read. The specific thing in the Seducer's diary is not clearly a Don Juan character. It's one affair. And he just is describing this in a way that a. The narrator here, who.

36:02 Wes: Yeah, I wasn't referring to the Seducer, by the way. I was referring to.

36:05 Mark: Oh, okay.

36:06 Wes: A's idealization of Don Giovanni. Of Don Juan. But sure. Because, yeah, the Seducer is a bit different.

36:12 Mark: Yes. That. It just has to do with the one relationship that is not you like. I guess there is asexual occurrence. I was very much being reminded of all these period dramas that I see periodically where, you know, people don't just hook up. Like, if you hook up with somebody and don't actually go ahead and marry them, you've ruined them. This is what. The kind of situation that's being, I think, described here. It's not just that the Seducer has lied to Cordelia. The person who's. He's seducing, you know, that he's made her into a fellow aesthete.

He's corrupted her. So she very willingly did this where she was sort of integrated into the social order and ready to do, you know, what is it? The expected thing. And now she's become this ruined rebel who. He's then detached. He won't. It would be fine if. Then, like, we're rebels together and they became a couple. But he's detached himself. So that's like. Once he got the sex out of it, then, like, he was done with it. He was rotating his crops. This is exactly what is being recommended by this essay.

37:18 Wes: Yeah. I mean, in the case of the Seducer. Right. Mackie's point is that it's not sexual, but it's rather. It's a conquest of spirit rather than flesh. He conquers her mind and That's a product of Johannes being. He's too intellectual to have to be a regular Don Juan. And he does it in this very. He seduces her in this very indirect way. It's so indirect that she wonders if she seduced him. He just makes himself interesting. He makes himself the most interesting man in the world in proximity to her

37:49 Mark: over a period of months. I was thinking more like in Groundhog Day. That seduction of I will get to know you so well and push all your buttons and.

37:59 Wes: Exactly. And you're never going to get to 1003 at that rate. So not a normal Don Juan type of situation. As Mackie puts it. The aesthetic component to this is he's not interested in the real person. In a way, he's interested in Cordelia as an idea idea and has made a pact with that. That's what the commitment is to. In a sense, not to a particular person, but to something very abstract. So on a personal level it's completely faithless. But as a matter of a creed for the. The aesthetic. It's a consistent faithfulness to a certain way of life which inherently involves detachment from actual individual human beings.

38:40 Mark: We haven't mentioned arbitrariness, which comes up at the end of rotational crops. The thing that I gave my introduction using. He says arbitrariness is the whole secret. It is popular believe that there's no art to being arbitrary. Yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not himself run wild in it, but himself has pleasure from it. One does not enjoy the immediate object, but something else that one arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play, one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended. One enjoys something totally accidental. One considers the whole of existence from this standpoint and lets its reality run aground on this. And he gives an example.

39:19 Wes: Perspiration Mark. Perspiration.

39:21 Mark: There was a man whose chatter I was obliged to listen to because of the circumstances. On every occasion he was ready with a little philosophical lecture that was extremely boring. On the verge of despair, I suddenly discovered that the man perspired exceptionally much when he spoke. This perspiration now absorbed my attention. I watched how the pearls of perspiration collected on his forehead, united in a rivulet, slid down his nose. Etc. He's then delighted in this person and spending time with him.

39:47 Wes: It's like the little boys with the fly. And you just learn to do that with everything. And instead of paying Attention to the substance of your interactions. You, you treat everyone as a curiosity and something to be looked at under a mason jar.

40:01 Mark: But I like that like the third part of a play that's not the same thing as like, I mean is that you would only enjoy the third part of the play because you would be paying attention to the weird experience of being thrown in media res to something that you don't understand. And you could marvel at the surface level stylistic aspects that you don't have to know the context to get. Is that the idea? What is it about those other examples?

40:25 Wes: I mean, it's a lack of commitment to the whole thing. Right. And I don't know, I'd have to think about it. When I read that section, I thought, well, I do sometimes try to read things backwards. Like I'll read the last paragraph first and then go backwards through a text paragraph by paragraph. But generally that's just because I want the conclusion first and I'm not sure I want to read the whole thing. So it's a very non committal way of approaching things, I think. I don't know if there's more significance.

40:49 Mark: If you do that in a newspaper, then you're getting the least important detail for.

40:54 Wes: Right? The triangle thing in the newspaper. They're rigging it for the aesthete.

41:00 Seth: I initially thought notion. I tied the notion of arbitrariness with authorial intent. So, you know, we've had this conversation a hundred thousand times before on this podcast about.

41:11 Mark: So boring, so boring.

41:15 Seth: Again, it's convention. It's not following the laws of the state, as it were. The author who writes the novel wants you to start on page one and end up on page 765 or whatever it is. And if you say fuck that, I'm just going to drop in, airdrop in here on chapter 12 and do the thing. You're subverting the order of things. And in a certain sense that's an exercise of freedom. I don't mind it in this context, the way he characterizes it. I'm in favor of that kind of a violation. It's okay to be arbitrary if what it means is you're just basically not observing conventional norms.

It does not mean the same thing as being random. Arbitrary is not random in the sense of being like completely unhinged and like, oh, I'm going to read one page of this book and then I'm going to get up and throw a rock out onto the street and then I'm going to set something on fire. And then I'm going to go take a bath. And then, like, that's not what I think.

42:18 Mark: That seems pretty whimsical. That seems.

42:20 Wes: He uses the word accidental, by which he means contingent. And I think your point about the author is spot on, Seth, because what makes it accidental to enjoy the perspiration of someone who's giving a speech as opposed to the actual speech, is you're not paying attention to design and intent or essence, ultimately paying attention to something that's purely contingent and accidental and getting pleasure out of that. And why is that important? It's important because getting pleasure out of someone else's mind or their designs or their intentions or is, I think, a form of being more connected and more committed than he wants.

And it's really interesting because on the whole, Kierkegaard is kind of a champion of contingency. So again, this is another one of these situations when I'm not sure that Kierkegaard is entirely critical of this, maybe in this forum, but there's a seed of truth in this, I think, you know, one of the things he doesn't like about Hegel is Hegel, in a way, reduces everything to essence over and against existence. Right. Thinking of existentialism, everything is just a part of world history, and we're all determined by it. And religion ultimately reflects the highest level of consciousness for this inevitable historical process of the world spirit and blah, blah, blah.

And Kierkegaard wants to say, no, this is about individual commitment and this is about historical contingency that's not just simply a function of some unfolding higher process of the world spirit. He wants to emphasize the individual and he wants to emphasize contingency. So I'm just bookmarking that in case we figure out how. If we get to. In the. In the second part of this book, and then later on if we do more about faith, you could think about why is it that the aesthete is celebrating a certain form of contingency here, and how is that related ultimately to Kierkegaard's interest in contingency?

44:22 Mark: Any other sort of closings for the moment before we put the either aside and embrace the or of the author?

44:30 Wes: B.

44:31 Mark: Next time we're. The essay in particular is called the Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical and the Development of the Personality. And it explicitly talks about either or about moral choice in that context. So there's. There's only a couple essays. And so I'm not even sure if we can get through all of this one essay, but we're at Least going to. We're going to read it until it hurts a little bit.

44:55 Wes: That's our new reading assignment in general. Start on page one and read it until it hurts page two.

45:02 Seth: The books are long, but he's not hard to read. He's not unpleasant to read. He's a very good writer.

45:09 Mark: Yeah, I could see reading some of these essays on my own time just for the heck of it and was kind of even wondering, should we do the Seducer's Diary just like we're reading a novel or is that just too much Kierkegaard?

45:18 Wes: I'd rather not, but yeah, it's just,

45:20 Seth: it's just a question of investment of time. I mean we just not all of us have that. But I have to say, like, it's nice to read. He's in the vein of Nietzsche in terms of stylist. Yep, Beautiful use of language, very clear, no ambiguity, no witty, a little heavy handed in parts. But I'm enjoying the experience of reading him as part of this project in a way that I didn't anticipate, that I didn't expect that I would. And having a little less trepidation, a little less anxiety about approaching some of his texts again now that I have some context.

And it's like, okay, because you can get lost, you can get lost in something like this and feel like you're drowning, feel like there's some profundity happening around you that you cannot quite grasp. Only to realize, you know, that oh, like, oh, this is a personality. Oh, this is a particular position that's intended to be set up in contradistinction to a different position. Like when you have that context, you don't feel so alone, you know. And just like in many respects you read Hegel, it's nice to have the footnotes so you know who he's referring to that he's not referring to.

And in Nietzsche it's a similar sort of thing. Nietzsche is much more explicit about referring to people, but having context. It just strikes me as Kierkegaard is one of those guys that it's useful to have footnotes, it's useful to have context. For this is not an analytic text, it's not an argument in abstraction that's intended to put out a point or is referring only to some very thin tradition of articles that make sense. It's much deeper and richer and it's interesting that he chose to do it this way.

47:12 Wes: I think he's a great writer. I think in many ways he's a better writer and more versatile than Nietzsche. Which sounds like a weird thing to say. I think Nietzsche is much more enjoyable to read and much more exciting. But, you know, if you compare Thus Spake Zarathustra as an attempt at allegory, it's not as refined as what Kierkegaard can do as a. As a literati, let's say. But philosophic. I mean, I would choose Nietzsche, though, over Kierkegaard any day of the week, just for pure entertainment value. I can't say that I, like, hugely look forward to reading Kierkegaard, despite how great a writer he is.

I think part of that, Seth, is, you know, you mentioned about the religion thing. I'm just not as interested in working out the thing about God anymore. And yeah, it doesn't excite me. And the other aspect of this is just what does excite me is going back and doing the second reading and taking notes and thinking about it. And then I start getting excited. Like it's really weird. I actually get more interested in the second go over. Maybe I should just be a more active reader in the first reading and then I would be more. More engaged. But I do have to admit, getting through these readings, it's not that I.

That I hate it when I'm reading. I just don't incredibly look forward to it.

48:27 Mark: Well, we hope you incredibly look forward to our next discussion. Thanks, everybody, for listening. That's kind of a.

48:33 Wes: That's kind of a weird way to end that. Maybe we should cut that out. You know, maybe again, I've been infected with the boredom of the aesthete or something like that. Let's just put it at that. But, yeah. Good night, everybody. Night.

48:50 Seth: Good night. Foreign.