Ep. 331: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Ethical Life (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 331 is something like what is choice? And we read an essay by Soren Kierkegaard called the Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality from volume two of either or, published in 1843. For more information about this book and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, more married man than philosopher in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:39 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, straining at gnats in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, hovering above myself and still not sure whether to choose hairdresser or bank teller in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:56 Mark: All right, all right. So we're in the or volume two. We've, we've done the Romanticist, the Romantic part. So this essay is very long. It's like 170 pages. And so we only got through the first half of it a little less than the first half. And it was mostly the negative part. Apparently he, I, I read he wrote this before he wrote volume one. He wrote these volume two essays. So he was really excoriating, you know, this is his direct scolding ethical critique of those same Romantics. This is actually aimed at, it's by supposedly a different author.

You know, you could just call him B or Judge William. I don't know if that's actually said in the text anywhere, but that came up in the secondary literature. But he is talking to apparently a, the author of the first volume and just saying, wow, what a shallow person you are. Get with it. Skimming ahead. By the end of the 170 pages, he gets to something that mirrors what looks to me like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Like, here's a section on friendship. Here's a section on working for a living. Here's a section on marriage. Here's a section on, you know, the absolute duty as an absolute imperative, things like that.

But in this part, we saw certainly nothing that resembled Kant and not much that resembled Aristotle. It's just mostly negative. It's mostly, you need to really make a choice. You think you're making choices. You asked eat, but you are not.

2:21 Wes: You know, he's addressing a. The esthete. And some of it actually gets quite attacking as it goes on, but for the most part, it's a critical but avuncular kindly lecture to a young man is what it sounds like. And you wonder about their relationship. It turns out, you know, as we read on, that A has been to Judge Williams House and they've had interactions, but for the most part, their relationship is kind of a mystery. Except that the judge feels entitled to deliver this kind of lecture. And a lot of it, as Mark mentioned, is just negative. It's characterizing the aesthetic position in a very negative light.

And one of the reasons why I talked about not knowing what I want to be when I grow up is because some of this involves the sort of career indecision and lack of commitment that's part of. That's one of the many critiques. But eventually we do get into what he calls my either or. So there is a little bit of the positive in this, in the sense that he's going to contrast A's conception of either or, which is remembering from the first part. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. You do it, you're going to regret it. If you don't do it, you're going to regret it.

The judge is going to recast. He's going to talk about his either or as sort of a decision between. Not between the aesthetic and the ethical per se. Yes, in a sense, yes. But in a broader sense between making a choice and not making a choice at all. He's going to cast the aesthetic as just a kind of indecisiveness, as a failure to make any sort of decision, not as some sort of positive engagement with pleasure, with desire, or anything else that you might think it is.

4:17 Dylan: Part of that is basically accusing the aesthete of having being sort of a sham. Their self understanding is a sham. That they think that they're open to the world and engaged fully with the world. And his critique is that actually they're sort of profoundly unengaged because of the fact that they're not making choices that move their life along. They're not invested in who they are because of their aesthetic disposition.

4:46 Seth: I think my read was pretty well aligned with what Wes was saying. What made it easier for me was to just substitute the word act or acting for choose or choosing. That made it read much more coherently for me. Just because the choice, no pun intended, of the word choose suggests that. I mean, the key point here is that the aesthete is not an active participant in world and life. And that's the important thing, regardless of what nomenclature we're using.

5:18 Wes: I think it's a good substitution.

5:21 Mark: We guessed a lot of the negative stuff when we were reading last time, because we're sort of reading it through an ironic lens. It was harder for me to say in this part, well, what is the limitation in this view, you know, such that the religious view is going to be the next one up. In fact, he mentions God a lot. This is not, I was expecting just Kantianism. I thought this was going to be some sort of very stern, emotionless, you know, something that we could then say. You know, actually the aesthete had some things over this second view. This just looks like Kierkegaard as author thinks that this wins.

You know, as far as I can tell that the way that he presented the aesthete was in such a self undermining. Even the aesthete himself knew that he was miserable. But here there's a big thing on. Well, you can, as a more experienced person, having gone through the aesthetic phase, you can see how the despair that the aesthete is flirting with can actually be a moment of transfiguration to this higher sort of human being, one that not just, you know, I'm going to choose a job and things like that. I mean, that is involved. I'm going to actually commit to getting married, something like this.

And putting the stuff we were saying that the aesthete is too up in the clouds, won't actually commit to doing anything. But somehow grasping yourself in your eternity is a way of hooking on to the divine. It's a way of hooking on. It really looks like this supposedly ethical view is a religious view. And so there's no room or need for a third position to act as a synthesis between them.

7:01 Wes: You know, you're spot on. It's so intelligently and powerfully argued that it would be easy to conclude that this is Kierkegaard's considered view. You also mentioned despair. I guess if you're thinking about it in relation to what seem like some of the religious elements of this essay. But I think it's worth pointing out that despair is how he characterizes what he calls the final stage of the aesthetic worldview or life view. And the stages up to that point, they include despair, but the despair is unconscious, right? So people are thinking, well, if I could just have everything I wanted, if I could just have the person I love, if I could just have money and success and whatever it is you might think it is, then I would be fulfilled.

And he ends up concluding, you know, and then, so if the person doesn't get what they want, then they despair. And the judge will say, actually they were despairing all along. They were despairing before they wanted those things. And the component, the despair is a component of that sort of aesthetic desire. They just didn't know that they were despairing. So, Mark, I think you're right at the point where you reach this final stage of the aesthetic life which Kierkegaard calls despair itself. You're conscious of the despair and that. I think it sounds like it can be a bridge.

Now. He's still very critical at this point. This is the point, you know, in the stage of despair where he's saying that you hate activity in life. You have all this short term energy to do things, but you have no stamina. You don't complete anything. You know, you're deceiving yourself with the disjunctive power of dialectic. You have no memory of your own life. All that sort of stuff that comes up in this despair section. So it sounds actually pretty despairing. It doesn't sound like it might be a bridge. But I think ultimately the critical thing there is that it's conscious instead of unconscious.

9:00 Seth: That puts me in mind, Wes, of what we talked about last time about opposition and the aphorism about, you know, maybe it's the person who goes, I can't even remember the names. Maybe it's the dissolute one who is the most moral. And it speaks to the necessity of the aesthetic phase. The aesthete's not simply kind of one modality amongst many. Like we were talking about Hannah Arendt and all the various types of men that she describes. But maybe the aesthetic progression is necessary because in order to have a launching point for the next phase, without getting into it, you need to reach a certain level of disengagement and functionally despair about your position in the world. And maybe, much like Hegel, we don't know that this is actually something he thought of as developmental or progressive, but rather it's a construct to explain the development of the self.

10:00 Mark: You mean Beauvoir, not Arendt? Right. The Serious Man.

10:05 Seth: Yes. I'm sorry.

10:06 Dylan: Yes, yes.

10:07 Seth: Thank you.

10:07 Mark: Right, so we had been criticizing the Serious Man. And then the next stage was the adventurer, which is seems exactly what has been described as the aesthete here. Someone can very fervently, doesn't have to necessarily just be floating along. Whatever man can really get into something. But it's temporary. It doesn't actually. It's not a committing of the person's whole soul. In some way, or it's.

10:32 Wes: Yeah, the whole section where the judge describes to A, you know, the propensity to say, I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to be a pastor, and then study really hard and go through all the motions of becoming a pastor, and then get disenchanted with it and not go through with it and then try something else.

10:53 Mark: Being an actor.

10:55 Wes: Being an actor. Being a hairdresser is actually one of the choices.

10:59 Dylan: Yeah. Hairdresser and lawyer.

11:01 Wes: What is the other one?

11:02 Dylan: Bank teller. Bank teller.

11:03 Wes: Bank teller or hairdresser. Should we back up and look at what Kierkegaard's conception of choice is because it is kind of unique, or do we want to stay at this higher level?

11:14 Mark: I'm fine backing up. I mean, the first place I saw.

11:16 Wes: Because despair is the very end of the issue.

11:18 Mark: Right, right. Yeah, for sure. On page 159, he directly addresses the either or section in the Diapsalmata that we talked about last time that you say you will regret both choices, but this just means you have a flabby soul, a debilitated spirit, blah, blah, blah. Anything about the judge's analysis of A's position that is worth highlighting specifically? Does it add to our insight on that earlier section? Or is it just probably how we read it and described it last time?

11:52 Wes: Early on in the essay, what he's building up to describing is the importance of what he calls the personality. And that turns out to be important because part of what's at stake in a choice, or the most important thing that is at stake, is the personality, oddly enough. So, in other words, it's not just about making the right choice. We'll say this repeatedly. It's about how the choice itself shapes us or the lack of a choice. So we can't become ourselves without making choices. And in that sense, we can't become ethical creatures, because this idea of becoming oneself is very closely related to the ethical.

So here's a good example on 160. Basically says, you know, the midnight hour comes when everyone wants to unmask. You can't just trifle with life forever. If you do trifling with life in the sense of not making a choice, you lose. Quote, what is the most inward and holy in a human being? The binding power of the personality.

13:02 Mark: Yeah, it's funny to want to read this from a psychological point of view on the one hand, but then he throws in the spiritual language. I mean, you could say integrity of the personality. It's what's Holy in us it is, transcends us and makes us into a new type of creature.

13:20 Dylan: That.

13:20 Mark: That is not the language of a psychologist.

13:23 Wes: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. He's mixing up, you know, the spiritual slash religious and the metaphysical talk about free will and free choice in that sense. And then what we think of as psychological freedom, that comes from psychological integration, which he'll even directly describe psychological integration.

13:42 Dylan: He's putting those all together, but he wouldn't say that he's conflating them because he would say that that's what he means by personality, all those things together. The religious part is clearly integrated for him, even with all of his discussion about the ethical. You know, as Mark pointed out, there's the amount of discussion of God and how you're pointed outward from yourself, even though it's inward, it's your inward activation. Right. And this is manifest as your personality. And it also resonates with psychology. I just don't think he would be willing to separate the topics in the way that we would separate them.

14:24 Wes: Let's say a little bit more about what personality means, because when I hear personality, the first association I have is to Aristotle and character and hexis, right? These stable dispositions that certain types of thinking and feeling and behavior habits. And again, that's why it's important when you make a choice, you're not just in here now, oh, do I go down this route or this route? And what if I choose the wrong route and things don't go well? There's something larger at stake than your actual project or enterprise. What's at stake is your personality in the sense of character.

What enduring dispositions are you going to create in yourself by engaging in this sort of. Of activity? I think that's what he's saying and what's really interesting about it, right. In Sartre and other existentialists, character arises as one of the components of essence because we think of character in terms of what's happened in the past, in terms of our childhood or all the things that have habituated us to having propensities to behave in one way or another, including all our bad habits. So that falls within the category of essence, not existence.

For existentialist, character is one of the constraining things. But if we think about our choices as being the things that construct character, we get a new way of looking at the essence side of things, the deterministic, which is to say aesthetic side of things. We can put the practical prior to the aesthetic, prior to the empirical, prior to essence.

15:53 Dylan: Yeah. And in that way, he's holding out. And it's why the act of choosing, the act of acting is primary importance. And not so much what you're acting, what you're choosing, it's the act of choosing that's more important, because it's the soul in action. And even though he's obviously going to point to making better choices than others, the soul, the personality isn't something so much discovered as made. And that's, I think the order that you're talking about, Wes, is that if you have this hexis of, you know, this is the kind of person I am, because this is what I was formed.

This is my gold soul, or this is my silver soul or whatever, or, you know, I am a warrior or I am a politician, or I am a hairdresser. And that the process of being a human being, if to the extent that you're confused, it would be one of discovering who. Who you are. And he doesn't use that language. The choosing going on has to do with actually the activity of forging your soul, which is overwrought way to say it, but it seems fitting for Kierkegaard's seriousness about it.

17:08 Mark: Right. Mere self discovery might be, you know, finding yourself might be finding what is your telos. But that's the thing about necessity. That's about, like, what is your potential and how do your talents lie. And so you might want to realistically assess yourself into what kind of person you think you can grow into and do that. But all that is is not, strangely enough, what he's talking about, that all that lies within still the aesthetic realm. And he wants you to leap in some more radical way. And it's very frustrating this part, that he doesn't give more information about it.

Toward the end of at least how far I got, I have. On page 232, he talks about if you want to grasp yourself in your freedom, the very moment he chooses himself, he is in motion. So that I think that's important. I mean, he says in this earlier part that you are choosing to be a choosing creature. You're choosing your freedom. That's really what it comes down to. But that seems very empty and abstract. And so eventually in this essay, he sort of tries to fill that out of what that means. It can't mean just like I am going to be, you know, the problem with the I'm going to train to be a pastor and throw myself into it, but then eventually whimsically throw it aside, is he is sensitive to this charge about being the serious man, for instance, even though obviously Beauvoir is later, you as a choosing free creature are constantly in motion.

You're constantly re choosing all the time. So if you just say, well, that's what I am. I'm a pastor. Well, that's actually the bad kind. That's like, well, I'm a pastorish kind of person. Maybe I should just be a pastor. And then you make yourself a pastor. That's still failing the existential challenge.

18:52 Wes: That's what Sartre would say. I'm not sure what Kierkegaard would say, but go ahead, Dylan.

18:56 Dylan: So you brought up the word necessity, which is good to bring up. And I think you're right that Kierkegaard is characterizing that phrase. I'm going to go find myself. He would object to because in a qualification along the ways you described that whatever you were finding out would have to do with your boundaries and what kinds of things. You can't necessarily the hard rocks of the facts about things. But there's still a ton of room. In fact, it's where the rub is in how you're. What you're doing with the freedom that you have left over. And that activity is something that. Where you're engaged in a fundamentally creative act from his perspective. And so if you're going to choose to be a pastor, that is a set of activities that you do. It's not in a. It's in a funny way, maybe not so funny way. It's not an accomplishment. Yeah, it's a way of being a

19:55 Seth: key point there, Dylan, is that the idea of creativity or creation, there's a part and I, I didn't write it down, but essentially chastises the aesthete a as inert. Not making a choice is essentially stasis. You can't move forward. You can't move. There's almost like there's no future for this person. But really what it means is there's no creativity because you're not in the act of creating yourself. You're not in the act of moving from forward in any direction, whatever direction that might be, and being formative of yourself. So there's definitely this active component to things which is a creative act.

20:36 Wes: Let's get into that in more detail in the text.

20:39 Dylan: Can we also pull on this thread a little bit? Because I think we're saying the words that Kierkegaard would say or the judge would say. But one thing about the aesthetic position is a kind of deep receptivity. Right. Which he's Going to criticize, like, you know, just being receptive means you're not choosing and stuff like that. But is his criticism completely fair of someone who is deeply receptive to different kinds of experience in the world and in fact, walking towards them? I'm a little skeptical.

21:14 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it depends, I guess, on your interpretation of what we read in a. Is he being fairly characterized as kind of a depressed nihilist, which is what it sounds like the judge is characterizing him as, you know, so that. Yes, kind of. Yeah. I wanted to dig in on your points, you know, the points you've all made about the sense in which choice is important because it's formative. So on page 163, I think this is where we really start to get this stuff. He'll say in the middle of that page, the choice itself is crucial for the content of the personality.

Through the choice, the personality submerges itself in that which is being chosen. And when it does not choose, it withers away in atrophy. You'll basically say there's kind of an inertia or a velocity to the way we are, such that you can't just stay in the position of deliberation for as long as you like. You kind of inertially just continue down a path and. And refraining from choice basically puts you on a path. And the way he says it, you know, because others have chosen for him or because he has lost himself, he ends up going down this path.

And then finally he tells the story of the lasting effects of such choices. And he gives an example of kind of fairy tale in which, if you have a spell put on you by a mermaid, the only way you can get out of it is to be able to play the music backwards. Whatever music they play to put a spell on you, you have to be able to play it backwards, which gives you an idea of how difficult it is to. You know, you absorb certain errors of choice into your personality, and they have to be rooted out, but rooting them out is a really, really difficult thing.

That's in 165 where he's talking about the. Or 64 to 65, where he gets into the mermaids and stuff to avoid

23:06 Mark: re quoting Rush about the yes, you choose not to decide. You still made a choice. I will quote John Lennon, and I'm sure this is not original to him, just as the Rush quote is not original to them, but life was what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. If you're not choosing, then these things are happening to you, people are choosing for you. Essentially, you're being pushed along.

23:28 Wes: It's odd because in a way, the aesthetic does conceive of themselves as making aesthetic choices. In the near term, he is choosing between different career paths or he's choosing, you know, he's very involved in his studies and sounds like he's involved with women. He's doing all kinds of shit, he's living life, he's working hard and he's playing hard. So it seems odd to say that he's not involved in choices. But on 166, the judge will say aesthetic choices aren't really choices. So I think this is the way we have to think about that. We can't just think of the word choice in some ordinary way.

The judge wants us to think of him as in this state of indecision, even though he's a very active person. So we'll say your choice is an aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice is no choice. On the whole, to choose is an intrinsic and stringent term for the ethical. It's an absolute. So the judge will start talking about this absolute either or. As opposed to the aesthetic either or. Where you damned if you do, you damned if you don't.

24:31 Dylan: I did find this kind of thing a little bit confusing. Is it just that the choices that the aesthete is making, yes, they're choices, but they're not the one of real import. And so they're kind of the milquetoast choices, they're momentary.

24:47 Wes: So in 167, he'll say the self determining aspect of the choice has not been ethically stressed. So the choice is not made with respect to its effects on one's personality, which is repeated over and over. It's as if it's only in the moment. Like, I make this choice, it's about what's gonna happen right now. I'm not thinking about its lasting effects on me. And that's the essence of the aesthetic choice. It simply brackets out these lasting effects.

25:13 Seth: And that goes back to what I was saying about it being a creative. An aesthetic choice doesn't consider the past and anticipate the future with respect to building anything and connecting the two together, which is what we're aiming for. It's really simply purely in the present or purely for present reasons. Namely. Think about it. The aesthetic is. It's a sensual, it's a consumptive position. You hear something now, you see something now. It's all consumed in the present modality. And in a sense, it's not just the judges criticizing the aesthete for being kind of like a nihilist dandy, but also for being ahistorical.

25:56 Wes: I want to read this quote on 167 Because I think it's so important where again, the emphasis is on choosing the personality, not just this particular momentary thing, choosing oneself what one is, what one will become. So he'll say towards the last full paragraph, therefore, the ethical choice is in a certain sense, much easier, much simpler, but in another sense it is infinitely more difficult. The person who wants to decide his life task ethically does not ordinarily have such a wide range. The act of choosing, however, is much more meaningful to him.

Now, if you were to understand me properly, I may very well say that what is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right thing, as this is very important. You don't have to get it right. As the energy, the earnestness and the pathos with which one chooses in the choosing, the personality declares itself in its inner infinity, and in turn the personality is thereby consolidated. Therefore, even though a person chose the wrong thing, he nevertheless, by virtue of the energy with which he chose, will discover that he chose the wrong thing.

In other words, since the choice has been made with all the inwardness of his personality, his inner being is purified and he himself is brought into an immediate relationship with the eternal power. This is what I thought of when Mark was talking about his mention of God. Immediate relationship with the eternal power that omnipresently pervades all existence. So I think this gives us quite a little picture of what it is that Kierkegaard means by choice. This idea of choosing the personality and not even having to get the content of the choice right.

It's more about the style or the commitment and what that that means for the personality. And the way he describes it, the personality declaring itself in its inner infinity, consolidating itself, the choices have been made. With all the inwardness of his personality, his inner being is purified. It sounds a lot like authenticity and just engaging, you know, and sincerity is Earnestness, as the judge puts it, is something that comes up a lot in this. Just willing to be seriously, earnestly, authentically engaged with a choice that in itself has these lasting ethical effects on you.

28:11 Mark: Yeah, so this gets more subtle as it goes on. I mean, it sounds like earnestness is important, but you could still be aesthetically earnest. Like first we were saying not making a choice. But the aesthete can make all sorts of choices. Well, you're not making the choice Earnestly. Well, maybe your earnestness is just an aesthetic earnestness, and it's not real earnestness, it's not ethical earnestness. So I found this quote on 225, 50 pages forward from what we're looking at. When an individual considers himself aesthetically, he becomes conscious of this self as a complex concretion, intrinsically qualified in many ways, but despite all the internal variety, all these together are nevertheless his nature have equal right to emerge, equal right to demand satisfaction.

His soul is like soil out of which grows all sorts of herbs, all with equal claim to flourish. His self consists in this multiplicity, and he has no self that is higher than this. Now, if he has what you so often speak of, aesthetic earnestness and a little common sense about life, he will perceive that it is impossible for everything to flourish equally. Then he will choose. And that which determines him is a more and less, which is a relative difference. So that's pulling. This is a little out of context, but I just wanted to throw out that it can't just be an arbitrary choice.

I'm a little at a loss here. Right. You're not just looking at. Here's what my telos seems to be. Let me just choose that thing that I seem to be turning towards already and become more fully who I am. That's how I've always interpreted Nietzsche's find yourself versus create yourself is you're trying to get back to your instincts. You're trying to get rid of the extra reflection that's, you know, makes you scattered and all over the place. You're trying to get back to something basic, something real, and act according to sort of the plan that you find within yourself.

According to this. If you're merely aesthetic, you're not going to find that plan organized in any particular way. It's just going to be like, oh, you've got this little shoot growing out here. This little shoot growing out here. There's still that completely under determines. This sounds very much like Sartre. It under determines what kind of person you should grow into. So I guess the earnestness can't just be. I'm earnestly going to latch on this one part of me that seems like it wants to be a pastor, but it has to be something deeper.

30:20 Wes: And the judge, right, the way he talks is like, marriage is the big example. A married man. Being married is good. Being married is great. You should get married, get married, young man, get married. It'll be great. You know, it sounds like what the judge is advocating is that a embrace. Typical, ordinary Social roles in the society, get a real job, get a wife, get married. It sounds very traditional and Hegelian in that sense. This embrace of social roles, which is part of that there's like scholarly dispute. Okay, is that Kierkegaard's point of view or is this just the judge's point of view that you ought to do this?

This may be a point where the Kierkegaard and the judge come apart a little bit. And Kierkegaard obviously himself did not get married and even got engaged and then broke this woman's heart. But Mark, I was just speaking to your point about what kinds of choices are we making? And is this actually giving us any guidance on how to do that? Is it really just saying, okay, you should get married and all these other things, or is it. Is it more granular than that?

31:24 Seth: So I kind of want to go a slightly different way with this. There's a section where Kierkegaard compares philosophers to basically unmarried. He equivocates philosophers and unmarried people.

31:36 Wes: Yeah, this starts. This whole philosophy section starts on page 169.

31:42 Seth: 169? Yeah, somewhere around there seven, actually.

31:46 Wes: There's a whole beautiful section against philosophy.

31:50 Seth: Right. But what I took away from that actually was that it wasn't about marriage, it was about being childless. And what he says is if you had children, philosophers would not ask the questions they do. They would not be the people they are. They would not live the lives they live if they had children. And my read on it was that he was again connecting the notion of. Because he talks about a legacy of contemplation, like what would it mean to just pass on contemplation from generation to generation where there was no action. And the notion of future legacy, building something for subsequent generations is again an integral part of this, what I call creative activity, of making conscious choices to become the person, you know, but in the process, not just become the person, but build a world or build relationships which have some kind of lasting significance.

32:48 Wes: Yeah. Do we want to look at this philosophy section here, starting at 170, just

32:53 Mark: maybe as a way to orient us in this section? Do you think that he would see Aristotle's ethics as romantic and childish and merely empirical? Let's say that. Because I think that's sort of uncontroversial, that contra Plato, who seemed to think that we have some pre birth connection to ethical, I don't want to say norms, ideals for Aristotle, we just sort of look at different cases and see what we think about stuff. So it's almost like we're aesthetically judging, you know, is that person being too brave or not brave enough? We're making judgments that are rooted in tastes, and that's going to be just something that's fundamentally repellent to Kierkegaard's point of view here.

33:37 Dylan: Yeah. So you're making me think about all the kinds of choices aesthetic that say, for instance, any kind of judgment is choosing, choosing the thing that's the most beautiful. Right. And maybe that's outside the realm of what Kierkegaard is talking about, where his notion of choices of direction and activities and one's life, it doesn't seem so different than what he's talking about. And so that's why I wanted to understand the quote that Wes read about it. Almost like the fact of choosing and the way of choosing more than what you're choosing is the importance.

And so then the way you choose ends up getting all this importance. So what is the sign that you are choosing in the right way? There's these adjectives like you choose with earnest. You're invested. Also, what's the sign that you haven't chosen well? Is it just that you flit from one thing to the other so your choice never sticks? I find myself confused about, is it more than, oh, well, when you do this right, you actually have a solid soul, and therefore you have all the characteristics of a solid soul. You sort of are strong and you are resolute in the right amount and you bend in the right amount and the integrity of who you.

I mean, all of these other things that sort of characterize abstractly what such a state of being is. So then I'm just left to, well, what's the sign of it? Maybe this is the Nero section. Like Nero's dissoluteness ends up being an example of this. Maybe that's what it is.

35:07 Wes: Nero's an example of. It's a rare example of the aesthetically oriented person who has unlimited resources at their disposal. So it's a limiting case. It's a litmus test for the viability of the aesthetic position. Because most people, even if they want to live a life devoted to their desires, don't have the resources to do that. They have to work for a living, and so on and so forth. So you take someone like an emperor who has unlimited resources, and then you see, well, how did that work out for you? Not so well. You're pretty fucking miserable anyway, even though nominally you had everything you wanted. By the way, it's a brilliant psychological portrait we should go over a little bit the concept of the imperial smile and all that.

35:53 Dylan: But I think that's getting to the sign of this failure. Him saying it's the way you choose that makes the difference isn't exactly illuminating.

36:03 Mark: I want to jump just for a second to the last thing I read for today. Wes skimmed ahead and he found it in the 250s page numbers. You know, 100 pages after we started here, he found a good section at the very end of that page, 257. It says, how can you tell if somebody has chosen merely aesthetically the wrong way, or someone has chosen actually ethically? Since the ethical lies so deep in the soul, it is not always visible. And the person who lives ethically may do exactly the same as one who lives aesthetically. And thus it may deceive for a long time, but eventually there comes a moment when it becomes manifest that the person who lives ethically has a boundary that the other does not know.

The individual rests with confident security in the assurance that his life is ethically structured, and therefore he does not torment himself and others with quibbling anxiety about this or that. And I know Seth read this far. You mentioned the straining after gnats. That's how you tell if someone's merely aesthetic is that they strain after gnats. They get worked up about all this little bullshit. Whereas if you're ethical, this sounds like a stoic.

37:07 Wes: Maybe that's one of the signs. You look very neurotic. If you're the aesthetic. Yeah.

37:11 Seth: Or you're completely indifferent to shit, you should care about the aesthetic position. You treat everything. It's all just happenings that you consume aesthetically. So none of it has any particular worth or value or merit or concern to you. You can do it both ways. You can be completely indifferent to stuff you shouldn't be, or you can get worked up about stuff you shouldn't.

37:33 Wes: Yeah. I think it's really about whether or not you have posited a meaningful framework or worldview. This is what comes out of 168, where the judge is saying my either or, as opposed to your indifferent either or. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's not about a contrast between good and evil per se. It's about positing a meaningful framework or worldview, which means that has to include good and evil. Right. It's the positing of good and evil as a pair. But more importantly, they're posited secondarily to a meaningful framework, and that is in opposition to the indifferent so in other words, he'll say directly, it's not that the aesthetic is the evil or something like that, it's the indifferent. And it's the realm in which there's not really a choice being made, there's indifference and there's not any meaning in life.

38:26 Mark: I really like to think of Kierkegaard as in dialogue with Nietzsche, even though he was not. But yes, this could be the beyond, beyond good and evil, or back to good and evil or something. Because the aesthete thinks I'm so beyond those traditional mores, the ways of breaking things down. Well, that's just because you're not taking things seriously. You have to transfigure yourself through the act of choosing. And that actually creates for you a real choice between good and evil, which actually the latter choice. Kierkegaard says, I think he follows Plato, like people are naturally going to do what they find to be good.

It's not actually a huge choice. It's actually focusing that this is a choice between good and evil. Like the way that you get evil is you slouch, you drift into evil, because you don't actually focus on the fact that there is a choice between good and evil. You don't take it seriously.

39:22 Wes: Yeah, this is not like contemporary analytic ethics, trolley car problem ethics. Oh, do I put the train over the five people or the one person or whatever it is? This is like real life. Did I end up on the couch eating Doritos all day or did I do something productive? Am I living my life meaningfully or am I just a slacker? It's much more down to earth and practical as far as I'm concerned.

39:46 Mark: But I like thinking about. Because what are the circumstances in which you are, you know, making this trolley problem? Like Kierkegaard is saying, you're much more likely, instead of moving the tracks or self consciously let not moving the tracks, you're going to be reading your magazine instead of paying attention, doing your job, and pay attention to the trolley and what's going on with it.

40:04 Wes: So it's not whether you direct. It's not whether you direct it over the five people or the one person. It's how you direct.

40:13 Mark: It's that you direct it at all or how you.

40:16 Wes: You don't pull the lever. It's the pizzazz that you put into that. But anyway, 168. The aesthetic is not the evil, but the indifferent. And the ethical is a matter of just choosing to will at all, which means choosing to say that there are such things as good and evil that. Not that things aren't just indifferent. It's not just. Eh, Damned if I do, damned if I don't. It doesn't make a difference anyway. Whatever. No, you gotta take things seriously.

40:43 Mark: Those that don't do that, they have not actually rejected the ethical and therefore they're not sinning, except insofar as it is a sin to be neither one thing nor the other. 169.

40:53 Dylan: Yeah, this whole language, Right. The way in which he uses a variety of terms in ways that I don't understand completely. So sinning is one of them in this context. Right. Another one is despair or despair. The way he uses despairing. Especially when he's saying that people who despair don't know that they're despairing. That kind of thing. Same thing with depression, which is the

41:17 Wes: greatest sin of all is depression.

41:19 Dylan: Yeah. So then they get together.

41:22 Wes: No, depression is more like unconscious despair.

41:24 Mark: Yeah. If it were truly unconscious, it wouldn't be a sin. But is your fault that you do you're depressed? We're going to have to get into this stuff in part two. This is a huge topic.

41:35 Wes: Maybe next though, we should hit the. I mean, we don't have to go in order, but I want to hit this section on philosophy a little bit.

41:41 Mark: Yeah, for sure. Well, glad we found as much to talk about this part so far. Please come back, listen to more of this discussion. Unless you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, a citizen through our website or Patreon, then you should be able to find part two right now. Otherwise, come back next week. See you later. Foreign.